Laella was sitting alone in the gloom of the commons when the door creaked open. She leaped from her chair, barked a shin against the table leg, and ran to the sound. It was Gregor. From what she could see in the light of dusk, he was dusty from the road, but no worse for the day.
They embraced as the dog pranced around them. She pulled him to the table and made him sit beside her. The dog settled its head upon his thigh, and he tousled it with a murmur of affectionate praise.
“What did Semmech want of you?”
He was silent for a long time before he said, “He disapproves of my choice of companions.”
She’d feared as much. Though the baron had issued no decree of ostracism, he’d made his preferences plain. Anam had turned its back on the virgin mothers with a uniformity that could not have been bettered by any command.
Gregor was the first man who’d dared speak to her since her own scourging. Despite his quality, her readiness to bind herself to him had surprised her. She hadn’t known how desperate she’d become for a scrap of human warmth, how thin was the rag of hope she’d clutched to ward her from Anam’s cold.
Chance had brought him to her, and he had blessed her beyond all chance. She would not surrender him without a fight, neither to the baron nor to the wastes.
“Did he command you to leave?”
He smiled. “No. Be at peace, love. A traveler becomes used to these examinations. A lord who doesn’t watch his borders and those who pass over them doesn’t remain a lord for long.”
She studied his face in the gloom. He appeared untroubled.
“Have you eaten?”
He nodded. “Is there anything undone?”
“No.” A shudder broke through her self-command. “I was worried, Gregor.”
His hands rose to cup her face. He stroked her cheeks with his thumbs, and she felt the last of her fears dissolve.
“Is there any hot water left?” he said.
She nodded. “Go to our room. I’ll bring it.”
When she returned, he had already undressed. He reached for the basin and towels she carried, but she stopped him and nodded toward their bed.
“Lie down.”
He complied. She set the basin down beside their pallet, dampened a towel in it, and swabbed the sweat and dust from his body with long, tender strokes.
It was a week later that the troubles began.
In the space of three days, four women of the central village were mauled by their own dogs. Two survived. They told strange tales: that the animals that had assaulted them, old family retainers who had always been faithful, had swelled in size and taken on a demonic aspect before they struck. The dogs were put down. Even though the stories were discounted as a forgivable hysteria in the wake of a terrible event, they spread unease through Anam.
On the western outskirts, a farm wife claimed that the ground had opened beneath her husband as he harrowed. The fissure welled with a bubbling black fluid that swiftly sucked the screaming farmer into the bowels of the earth. A moment later the crevice had closed over him, leaving no trace that it had ever been.
A peculiar strain of ivy sprouted from the rocky ground around Semmech’s castle: more blue than green, with long, narrow leaves that resembled clutching fingers. It grew at an unnatural speed. In three days it challenged the castle’s eaves and curled over the top of the walls. Even on days without wind, the fingers seemed to flex and grope with unknowable purpose.
When a shoot of the plant caught one of Semmech’s patrols by the ankle and pulled him off the parapet to die on the cobbles below, the baron had Gregor brought to him once more.
“You are a sorcerer.” The baron’s eyes were full of doubt.
Gregor nodded.
“You know nothing of these events?”
“My lord,” Gregor said, “am I the only sorcerer in Anam?”
Semmech’s mouth tightened. “The only admitted one.”
“Is there some way I could have gained from these deaths? For I confess I cannot imagine one.”
Semmech’s men at arms murmured. The baron stared into Gregor’s eyes for a long moment, then settled onto his throne.
“I am,” he said, “a military man. I am proficient with weapons. I know soldiers and combat, and little else. I watch the borders and prohibit violence, and no more. My subjects endure my rule because I claim no powers beyond my scope. If I were to try to order their lives in detail, they would be right to depose me, for I have not the wisdom for it. But I keep to my sphere, and they tolerate me.” He smiled grimly. “Sometimes I think they even approve of me.”
It was an admission Gregor had heard from no other ruler. The candor and humility of it awakened his sympathies, moved him to offer what he could to this man who, like himself, stood alone by necessity and long habit.
“My lord,” Gregor said, “do you remember my geas?”
Semmech’s eyes returned to Gregor’s. He nodded once, slowly.
Gregor considered for a moment, weighing his words and pondering how much to say.
“Then I will tell you two things about your rule. First, be aware that the people of Anam consider you a good and capable master, even those you have punished for a thing that was in no way their fault.” The retainers murmured again, and Semmech’s eyes narrowed in heightened concentration. “Second, though you have in all good intention tried only to ward Anam from danger by prohibiting the practice of sorcery, the ban works to the opposite effect.”
Semmech’s men surged forward and enveloped Gregor, buzzing with anger. The baron held up a hand and glared them back.
“Explain yourself, sorcerer.”
Gregor nodded and strained to remember his lessons.
“In Urel, alongside the Scholium Arcanum and allied with it, there is a college of record-keepers. The savants there pore over the writings we have from before the Fall, studying the history of the world and sorcery’s role in it. I spent a term among them.
“The scholars have come to believe that the stuff called mana, the earth power that fuels sorcery, is intertwined with all life. Without mana, life fails. Where life is plentiful, mana is created anew.
“But mana does not lie still, no more than life itself. It has its own kinesis; it swirls and flows under the skin of the world, in patterns the Ureli scholars have pondered for centuries. In the wastes, the net flow of mana is outward, which eventually rendered life impossible. Vales such as Anam are oases, pools of mana where life can flourish and generate new life, and new mana to sustain it.
“Now and again, the life of a place will generate mana faster than it can be used or dispersed by the subterranean flows. Though not as immediately fatal as the depletion of mana, this is no less lethal. Mana accumulated beyond a certain amount is no longer a support to life, but a poison. It reaches out of the earth to make wonders and terrors such as those that have troubled Anam these weeks past.
“I believe that this is what has happened to your realm, my lord. Anam resides over an immense pool of mana from which there is little or no outflow. I sensed it before I descended the eastern slopes. Your people are fecund and industrious, and thus add to the pool, but they do no sorcery, and so the mana is not used, but congeals in the earth to become a menace to you all.”
Silence descended upon the hall. The retainers neither moved nor spoke. Semmech held so still that he seemed encased in an invisible crystal.
Gregor’s message had contained little to please the nobleman, though he’d couched it in the softest words he could find. In light of what he’d said, there were several ways to interpret his arrival in Anam, not all of them to his credit. Presently the baron voiced one.
“Did you come here,” Semmech said, “to exploit this resource?”
“No, my lord.” Before the baron could pose another question, Gregor added, “My arrival here was pure chance. I knew nothing of your realm.”
He prayed that it would be enough to forestall deeper inquiry into his wandering, but it was not to be.
“You say the wastes will not tolerate life,” Semmech said. “But you yourself give the lie to that, by coming thence to us.”
Gregor shook his head. “I could not have remained there, my lord. There is no food, little water, and almost no shelter.”
“Where did you reside before that?”
Gregor swallowed. “A town called Beluz.”
“A town like Anam?”
“Yes, my lord. Much like Anam, though smaller.”
Semmech’s eyes were merciless upon him. “And why did you set forth?”
Gregor’s geas tightened irresistibly. It denied him all evasion, all concealment.
“Beluz is no more, my lord. The town suffered a plague of shapeshifters.” His eyes closed against the memory. “Children and animals were overcome by madness, transformed into beasts beyond imagination, and laid waste to all around them until they were put down.” He struggled for calm. “As here, I was the only acknowledged sorcerer in the district, so the townsfolk fastened upon me as the agent of their sorrows. They came for me and seized me while I slept, and would have put me to death, except that in my desperation I summoned the lightning against them.”
Semmech vaulted from his seat before his men could move or speak. He swept a hand over their heads and shouted “Leave us,” then beckoned to Gregor to follow him down the short, dark corridor behind the throne.
Laella could hardly believe it when Gregor stepped through the cottage door. No one had expected him to return unharmed from Semmech’s second summons. Before he could take three steps, she ran to him and wrapped her arms firmly around him, hid her swollen eyes against his chest. He stroked her hair and murmured meaningless soothing phrases.
Luisa, Marti and Karine tumbled through the back door and stood dumbstruck, tools clutched in their hands.
“All is yet well, ladies. He did me no harm.”
They settled around the table by the hearth, and he told them of the audience. Laella held tight to his hand the whole time. The shadows were lengthening toward evening when he was done.
“He means to protect Anam,” Gregor concluded. “He will allow me to create a balance against the accumulations of mana, but nothing else. I have agreed.”
Marti glared at him from eyes lit by outrage. “He means to protect his realm,” she said. “He means to protect his power. Why do you think he forbade sorcery from the first?”
The muscles in Gregor’s neck rippled. “There are dangers in it, Marti. An untrained sorcerer can lay waste to an oasis without meaning to.”
“No doubt,” Marti said. The heat of anger was strong in her. “But a trained sorcerer with the use of Anam’s mana could free us from the grip of a man who would lash a defenseless girl bloody for bearing a child.” She rose and glared down at him. “Do you know what became of our babies, Gregor? Did my lord the baron tell you?”
Gregor said nothing. Laella cringed as the memories surged back.
“He killed them, Gregor. He had his retainers mince them to bits as soon as they were free of our wombs, and then he had the bits burned, and the ashes thrown to the wind. He said he would have no witch-children in his vale, and bade us thank him for not visiting the fate of the children upon the mothers.” She pulled Karine to her feet, whirled her around, and yanked up her shift to expose the scars from her scourging, not yet fully healed.
“He bade us thank him,” she whispered, “for this.”
The room became silent.
After a long interval, Gregor said, “It will not happen again, Marti. Once I have created the balance, there will be no more virgin births in Anam. I cannot undo the past, but I can foretell this much of the future: it will not happen again.”
“Gregor,” Laella murmured, “are you certain?”
His eyes locked with hers, and he began to tremble. The tremor became a quaking that shook the bench on which they sat and rattled his boots against the packed clay of the floor. When he had mastered himself, he spoke a single word.
“No.”
Gregor surveyed the moonlit garden, with Laella snug against his side. The night was cool and bright. A light breeze stroked their faces and stirred the leaves of the vegetables.
“Do you know of forests?” he said.
“No.”
“There were pictures of them, in a book in Urel.” He caressed her shoulder. “Their trees were very tall, with many branches and leaves as broad as a hand. Some gave nuts, and others gave sweet fruit. They cooled the earth and kept the water in the ground when the rain failed. Sometimes men would build their homes among the trees, for shade and a shield against the wind.”
“They sound very beautiful.”
He nodded. “Before the Dieback, they covered most of the world.”
She looked up at him. “What is a dieback?”
He started to explain, then smiled and said, “It produced the wastes.”
Her mouth tightened, and she looked out over the moonlit landscape. They stood in silence for a long time.
“He will not let you stay, Gregor.”
He did not dispute it.
“Where will you go from here?”
“West, until I reach another oasis or the coast of the continent.”
“And then?”
He strained to remain expressionless. “That will depend on what I find, and on what I bring.”
“Bring? Other than food for the journey—”
“Perhaps I should have said ‘whom.’”
Her eyes went wide. They turned to face one another squarely, and he took her hands. “Are you asking me to accompany you?”
He nodded.
“The others—”
He grinned. “What of them?”
“I am a child of Anam, Gregor.”
“And I,” he said, “am a child of Serebal, two hundred leagues to the east. Yet I am here. The next oasis is no more than seven days’ travel. If you will do as I say, I can get us there unharmed.”
“Can you?” she said. “I have seen no sorcery yet.”
He exerted himself briefly. A sparkling nimbus swirled around them like a carousel made of stars. Two soft streams of light pulsed and knotted around their joined hands.
“Aral the Skeptic, Grand Master of the Arcana in the East,” he said, “has charged me with charting the oases and the flows of mana along the southern reach of this continent, as far west as it is possible to travel. On the far coast is the enclave of Pontreval, where what I learn will be joined with the findings of other travelers and used to draw a map. The greatest sorcerers in the world will work from that map to undo the wastes, restore them to life, so that men may wander the world freely once more. I may have a part of that work, if I arrive in time and am deemed equal to its rigors.” He squeezed her hands, and the cords of light that bound them flamed to brilliance. “Will you come with me, Laella? Be my home and my comfort in the wastes between the oases, where no life abides and no home can stand?”
She stared up at him in a transport of wonder, face glowing with starlight, hands tight upon his own.
“I will.”
Semmech peered at the western range. The morning sun glowed on its peaks. Underfoot the ground was dry, almost devoid of grass. The nearest huts were more than a mile to the east. “Why here?”
Gregor smiled. “Practical considerations, my lord. Should I fail, there will be no damage to life or property. Should I succeed, the balance will disturb no one, and few will be tempted to come close.”
The baron smirked. “You underestimate the curiosity of my subjects.” He indicated Laella and her household, all of whom had begged to witness the event.
Laella’s hand clutched Gregor’s. He essayed a shallow bow. “But I do not mistake your capacity to command them, Baron.”
The noble nodded. “Very well. Proceed.”
Gregor released Laella’s hand, laid his pack and staff aside and walked toward the foothills of the western range. Before him, a shallow, gravel-floored pass cut through the mountains at an altitude only a third as high as the peaks that flanked it. It would be his egress from Anam. He halted at the grass’s edge, pulled his arms to his chest, and closed his eyes.
The call of the teeming pool of mana beneath the vale became painfully intense. He opened his etheric senses wide and drove his consciousness into the earth, seeking full communion with the subterranean lake of power. What he learned of its breadth and depth would have made his body gasp, were it able.
Already, enough energy was stored beneath Anam for a Master Sorcerer to blast its protective mountain ranges to dust. Even Gregor, only a journeyman, could have used it to lift Semmech’s castle from its foundations and hurl it into the wastes. The pool filled as he watched, as more mana trickled in from the enterprise and vitality of Anam’s thousand folk.
Streamers of force leaped from the pool and scraped at the crust beneath the living lands. Life’s natural resistance to manipulation had created a buffer zone, a partial barrier to the plumes from that inchoate furnace, but as the tendrils of energy licked at it, it grew ever thinner. The places where the mana had broken through were open wounds in the oasis, where the undirected power had brought destruction and grief.
He probed the limn of the pool and found a thick layer of the one substance known to block the flow of mana: iron. Anam’s denizens lived over a giant iron bowl that caught their life-energies and contained them. No outflow was possible.
He quieted his mind, wrapped it around the pool, and reached out for working substance.
With an accelerating rumble, rocks, gravel and dust slid down the nearby slopes toward where Gregor stood. He halted them a few yards away, shaped them into a great inverted cone, and caused them to spin.
The rumble became a whoosh of rotating debris. He put metaphorical arms to the giant top and spun it faster, watching the level of the mana pool as he adjusted the speed.
Faster... Faster... a little slower, now... There.
He opened his eyes and stepped back.
Before him was a perfect sixty-foot-high cone of stone and dust, spinning faster than any whirlpool, whistling a shrill song of power. Though the air currents from its motion buffeted him almost strongly enough to knock him down, the cone itself was stable.
He turned to Semmech and spread his arms in triumph.
The baron stared at the whirligig as if it were an enemy come to spill his blood. His retainers watched him uncertainly.
While the soldiers and their lord stood frozen, Gregor beckoned the four women to him, gathered them close around him.
Semmech broke from his trance. He looked at his troops and jerked one hand violently at Gregor and his companions. The soldiers drew their swords and advanced.
Gregor exerted himself once more.
A second cone rose from the earth to girdle him and his companions: a blue-white forest of lightning bolts. They crackled with a hungry energy that mocked the blades of Semmech’s men. One decided to test the shield. The blast slammed him to the earth, clutching a sword melted down to the hilt.
“As little as it becomes a common man,” Gregor said, “to break his given word, Baron, it becomes a ruler still less.”
Semmech glared at him. He put his hand to the hilt of his own sword.
“Tell your men to sheathe their blades, my lord. Else I shall collapse the whirligig upon them, and Anam will be once more without a balance.”
The baron’s eyes lit with understanding. His hand retreated from his sword. “Practical considerations, sorcerer?”
“Just so.”
“Will you take my realm from me, then?”
“I will not,” Gregor said. “I leave upon the instant. My word, you see, is good.”
Semmech’s jaw clenched. He raised a hand, and his men returned their swords to their scabbards. Gregor quelled the curtain of lightning, then took up his pack and his staff.
“You have your balance, Baron. It will sense the flows into the mana pool and adjust to any changes. Leave it to its work, and there will be no more terrors in Anam. Your people will have peace.”
Semmech nodded and gestured his men back to the castle. As he turned to go, Luisa, Marti and Karine broke away and sprinted toward him. A kitchen knife gleamed in Karine’s hand.
Marti and Luisa knocked Semmech onto his face in the thin grass. Each woman pinned one of his arms beneath her as Karine struck.
The blade pierced the noble’s neck, releasing a jet of arterial blood. Karine ripped crosswise, opening his throat and more blood vessels. Semmech’s body spasmed, throwing Marti and Luisa to the side. He convulsed in silent agony, all four limbs hammering the earth as his life spurted into the air.
“Gregor.” Laella tugged at his arm. Her face was a stony mask. “We must go.”
Gregor stood transfixed, unable to speak.
“Gregor!” Laella’s hiss penetrated the horror that girdled his brain. “They have chosen. It is done. We must go!”
The three women rose shrieking with vengeance fulfilled, only a moment before Semmech’s retainers closed upon them with drawn swords. The blades rose and fell, twice, thrice, and the shrieking ceased. Three new fountains of blood rose to dance to the song of the whirligig, as Laella pulled him away from the carnage, toward the pass that would deliver them from the warmth of Anam into the chill wastes to the west.
They embraced as the dog pranced around them. She pulled him to the table and made him sit beside her. The dog settled its head upon his thigh, and he tousled it with a murmur of affectionate praise.
“What did Semmech want of you?”
He was silent for a long time before he said, “He disapproves of my choice of companions.”
She’d feared as much. Though the baron had issued no decree of ostracism, he’d made his preferences plain. Anam had turned its back on the virgin mothers with a uniformity that could not have been bettered by any command.
Gregor was the first man who’d dared speak to her since her own scourging. Despite his quality, her readiness to bind herself to him had surprised her. She hadn’t known how desperate she’d become for a scrap of human warmth, how thin was the rag of hope she’d clutched to ward her from Anam’s cold.
Chance had brought him to her, and he had blessed her beyond all chance. She would not surrender him without a fight, neither to the baron nor to the wastes.
“Did he command you to leave?”
He smiled. “No. Be at peace, love. A traveler becomes used to these examinations. A lord who doesn’t watch his borders and those who pass over them doesn’t remain a lord for long.”
She studied his face in the gloom. He appeared untroubled.
“Have you eaten?”
He nodded. “Is there anything undone?”
“No.” A shudder broke through her self-command. “I was worried, Gregor.”
His hands rose to cup her face. He stroked her cheeks with his thumbs, and she felt the last of her fears dissolve.
“Is there any hot water left?” he said.
She nodded. “Go to our room. I’ll bring it.”
When she returned, he had already undressed. He reached for the basin and towels she carried, but she stopped him and nodded toward their bed.
“Lie down.”
He complied. She set the basin down beside their pallet, dampened a towel in it, and swabbed the sweat and dust from his body with long, tender strokes.
* * *
It was a week later that the troubles began.
In the space of three days, four women of the central village were mauled by their own dogs. Two survived. They told strange tales: that the animals that had assaulted them, old family retainers who had always been faithful, had swelled in size and taken on a demonic aspect before they struck. The dogs were put down. Even though the stories were discounted as a forgivable hysteria in the wake of a terrible event, they spread unease through Anam.
On the western outskirts, a farm wife claimed that the ground had opened beneath her husband as he harrowed. The fissure welled with a bubbling black fluid that swiftly sucked the screaming farmer into the bowels of the earth. A moment later the crevice had closed over him, leaving no trace that it had ever been.
A peculiar strain of ivy sprouted from the rocky ground around Semmech’s castle: more blue than green, with long, narrow leaves that resembled clutching fingers. It grew at an unnatural speed. In three days it challenged the castle’s eaves and curled over the top of the walls. Even on days without wind, the fingers seemed to flex and grope with unknowable purpose.
When a shoot of the plant caught one of Semmech’s patrols by the ankle and pulled him off the parapet to die on the cobbles below, the baron had Gregor brought to him once more.
* * *
“You are a sorcerer.” The baron’s eyes were full of doubt.
Gregor nodded.
“You know nothing of these events?”
“My lord,” Gregor said, “am I the only sorcerer in Anam?”
Semmech’s mouth tightened. “The only admitted one.”
“Is there some way I could have gained from these deaths? For I confess I cannot imagine one.”
Semmech’s men at arms murmured. The baron stared into Gregor’s eyes for a long moment, then settled onto his throne.
“I am,” he said, “a military man. I am proficient with weapons. I know soldiers and combat, and little else. I watch the borders and prohibit violence, and no more. My subjects endure my rule because I claim no powers beyond my scope. If I were to try to order their lives in detail, they would be right to depose me, for I have not the wisdom for it. But I keep to my sphere, and they tolerate me.” He smiled grimly. “Sometimes I think they even approve of me.”
It was an admission Gregor had heard from no other ruler. The candor and humility of it awakened his sympathies, moved him to offer what he could to this man who, like himself, stood alone by necessity and long habit.
“My lord,” Gregor said, “do you remember my geas?”
Semmech’s eyes returned to Gregor’s. He nodded once, slowly.
Gregor considered for a moment, weighing his words and pondering how much to say.
“Then I will tell you two things about your rule. First, be aware that the people of Anam consider you a good and capable master, even those you have punished for a thing that was in no way their fault.” The retainers murmured again, and Semmech’s eyes narrowed in heightened concentration. “Second, though you have in all good intention tried only to ward Anam from danger by prohibiting the practice of sorcery, the ban works to the opposite effect.”
Semmech’s men surged forward and enveloped Gregor, buzzing with anger. The baron held up a hand and glared them back.
“Explain yourself, sorcerer.”
Gregor nodded and strained to remember his lessons.
“In Urel, alongside the Scholium Arcanum and allied with it, there is a college of record-keepers. The savants there pore over the writings we have from before the Fall, studying the history of the world and sorcery’s role in it. I spent a term among them.
“The scholars have come to believe that the stuff called mana, the earth power that fuels sorcery, is intertwined with all life. Without mana, life fails. Where life is plentiful, mana is created anew.
“But mana does not lie still, no more than life itself. It has its own kinesis; it swirls and flows under the skin of the world, in patterns the Ureli scholars have pondered for centuries. In the wastes, the net flow of mana is outward, which eventually rendered life impossible. Vales such as Anam are oases, pools of mana where life can flourish and generate new life, and new mana to sustain it.
“Now and again, the life of a place will generate mana faster than it can be used or dispersed by the subterranean flows. Though not as immediately fatal as the depletion of mana, this is no less lethal. Mana accumulated beyond a certain amount is no longer a support to life, but a poison. It reaches out of the earth to make wonders and terrors such as those that have troubled Anam these weeks past.
“I believe that this is what has happened to your realm, my lord. Anam resides over an immense pool of mana from which there is little or no outflow. I sensed it before I descended the eastern slopes. Your people are fecund and industrious, and thus add to the pool, but they do no sorcery, and so the mana is not used, but congeals in the earth to become a menace to you all.”
Silence descended upon the hall. The retainers neither moved nor spoke. Semmech held so still that he seemed encased in an invisible crystal.
Gregor’s message had contained little to please the nobleman, though he’d couched it in the softest words he could find. In light of what he’d said, there were several ways to interpret his arrival in Anam, not all of them to his credit. Presently the baron voiced one.
“Did you come here,” Semmech said, “to exploit this resource?”
“No, my lord.” Before the baron could pose another question, Gregor added, “My arrival here was pure chance. I knew nothing of your realm.”
He prayed that it would be enough to forestall deeper inquiry into his wandering, but it was not to be.
“You say the wastes will not tolerate life,” Semmech said. “But you yourself give the lie to that, by coming thence to us.”
Gregor shook his head. “I could not have remained there, my lord. There is no food, little water, and almost no shelter.”
“Where did you reside before that?”
Gregor swallowed. “A town called Beluz.”
“A town like Anam?”
“Yes, my lord. Much like Anam, though smaller.”
Semmech’s eyes were merciless upon him. “And why did you set forth?”
Gregor’s geas tightened irresistibly. It denied him all evasion, all concealment.
“Beluz is no more, my lord. The town suffered a plague of shapeshifters.” His eyes closed against the memory. “Children and animals were overcome by madness, transformed into beasts beyond imagination, and laid waste to all around them until they were put down.” He struggled for calm. “As here, I was the only acknowledged sorcerer in the district, so the townsfolk fastened upon me as the agent of their sorrows. They came for me and seized me while I slept, and would have put me to death, except that in my desperation I summoned the lightning against them.”
Semmech vaulted from his seat before his men could move or speak. He swept a hand over their heads and shouted “Leave us,” then beckoned to Gregor to follow him down the short, dark corridor behind the throne.
* * *
Laella could hardly believe it when Gregor stepped through the cottage door. No one had expected him to return unharmed from Semmech’s second summons. Before he could take three steps, she ran to him and wrapped her arms firmly around him, hid her swollen eyes against his chest. He stroked her hair and murmured meaningless soothing phrases.
Luisa, Marti and Karine tumbled through the back door and stood dumbstruck, tools clutched in their hands.
“All is yet well, ladies. He did me no harm.”
They settled around the table by the hearth, and he told them of the audience. Laella held tight to his hand the whole time. The shadows were lengthening toward evening when he was done.
“He means to protect Anam,” Gregor concluded. “He will allow me to create a balance against the accumulations of mana, but nothing else. I have agreed.”
Marti glared at him from eyes lit by outrage. “He means to protect his realm,” she said. “He means to protect his power. Why do you think he forbade sorcery from the first?”
The muscles in Gregor’s neck rippled. “There are dangers in it, Marti. An untrained sorcerer can lay waste to an oasis without meaning to.”
“No doubt,” Marti said. The heat of anger was strong in her. “But a trained sorcerer with the use of Anam’s mana could free us from the grip of a man who would lash a defenseless girl bloody for bearing a child.” She rose and glared down at him. “Do you know what became of our babies, Gregor? Did my lord the baron tell you?”
Gregor said nothing. Laella cringed as the memories surged back.
“He killed them, Gregor. He had his retainers mince them to bits as soon as they were free of our wombs, and then he had the bits burned, and the ashes thrown to the wind. He said he would have no witch-children in his vale, and bade us thank him for not visiting the fate of the children upon the mothers.” She pulled Karine to her feet, whirled her around, and yanked up her shift to expose the scars from her scourging, not yet fully healed.
“He bade us thank him,” she whispered, “for this.”
The room became silent.
After a long interval, Gregor said, “It will not happen again, Marti. Once I have created the balance, there will be no more virgin births in Anam. I cannot undo the past, but I can foretell this much of the future: it will not happen again.”
“Gregor,” Laella murmured, “are you certain?”
His eyes locked with hers, and he began to tremble. The tremor became a quaking that shook the bench on which they sat and rattled his boots against the packed clay of the floor. When he had mastered himself, he spoke a single word.
“No.”
* * *
Gregor surveyed the moonlit garden, with Laella snug against his side. The night was cool and bright. A light breeze stroked their faces and stirred the leaves of the vegetables.
“Do you know of forests?” he said.
“No.”
“There were pictures of them, in a book in Urel.” He caressed her shoulder. “Their trees were very tall, with many branches and leaves as broad as a hand. Some gave nuts, and others gave sweet fruit. They cooled the earth and kept the water in the ground when the rain failed. Sometimes men would build their homes among the trees, for shade and a shield against the wind.”
“They sound very beautiful.”
He nodded. “Before the Dieback, they covered most of the world.”
She looked up at him. “What is a dieback?”
He started to explain, then smiled and said, “It produced the wastes.”
Her mouth tightened, and she looked out over the moonlit landscape. They stood in silence for a long time.
“He will not let you stay, Gregor.”
He did not dispute it.
“Where will you go from here?”
“West, until I reach another oasis or the coast of the continent.”
“And then?”
He strained to remain expressionless. “That will depend on what I find, and on what I bring.”
“Bring? Other than food for the journey—”
“Perhaps I should have said ‘whom.’”
Her eyes went wide. They turned to face one another squarely, and he took her hands. “Are you asking me to accompany you?”
He nodded.
“The others—”
He grinned. “What of them?”
“I am a child of Anam, Gregor.”
“And I,” he said, “am a child of Serebal, two hundred leagues to the east. Yet I am here. The next oasis is no more than seven days’ travel. If you will do as I say, I can get us there unharmed.”
“Can you?” she said. “I have seen no sorcery yet.”
He exerted himself briefly. A sparkling nimbus swirled around them like a carousel made of stars. Two soft streams of light pulsed and knotted around their joined hands.
“Aral the Skeptic, Grand Master of the Arcana in the East,” he said, “has charged me with charting the oases and the flows of mana along the southern reach of this continent, as far west as it is possible to travel. On the far coast is the enclave of Pontreval, where what I learn will be joined with the findings of other travelers and used to draw a map. The greatest sorcerers in the world will work from that map to undo the wastes, restore them to life, so that men may wander the world freely once more. I may have a part of that work, if I arrive in time and am deemed equal to its rigors.” He squeezed her hands, and the cords of light that bound them flamed to brilliance. “Will you come with me, Laella? Be my home and my comfort in the wastes between the oases, where no life abides and no home can stand?”
She stared up at him in a transport of wonder, face glowing with starlight, hands tight upon his own.
“I will.”
* * *
Semmech peered at the western range. The morning sun glowed on its peaks. Underfoot the ground was dry, almost devoid of grass. The nearest huts were more than a mile to the east. “Why here?”
Gregor smiled. “Practical considerations, my lord. Should I fail, there will be no damage to life or property. Should I succeed, the balance will disturb no one, and few will be tempted to come close.”
The baron smirked. “You underestimate the curiosity of my subjects.” He indicated Laella and her household, all of whom had begged to witness the event.
Laella’s hand clutched Gregor’s. He essayed a shallow bow. “But I do not mistake your capacity to command them, Baron.”
The noble nodded. “Very well. Proceed.”
Gregor released Laella’s hand, laid his pack and staff aside and walked toward the foothills of the western range. Before him, a shallow, gravel-floored pass cut through the mountains at an altitude only a third as high as the peaks that flanked it. It would be his egress from Anam. He halted at the grass’s edge, pulled his arms to his chest, and closed his eyes.
The call of the teeming pool of mana beneath the vale became painfully intense. He opened his etheric senses wide and drove his consciousness into the earth, seeking full communion with the subterranean lake of power. What he learned of its breadth and depth would have made his body gasp, were it able.
Already, enough energy was stored beneath Anam for a Master Sorcerer to blast its protective mountain ranges to dust. Even Gregor, only a journeyman, could have used it to lift Semmech’s castle from its foundations and hurl it into the wastes. The pool filled as he watched, as more mana trickled in from the enterprise and vitality of Anam’s thousand folk.
Streamers of force leaped from the pool and scraped at the crust beneath the living lands. Life’s natural resistance to manipulation had created a buffer zone, a partial barrier to the plumes from that inchoate furnace, but as the tendrils of energy licked at it, it grew ever thinner. The places where the mana had broken through were open wounds in the oasis, where the undirected power had brought destruction and grief.
He probed the limn of the pool and found a thick layer of the one substance known to block the flow of mana: iron. Anam’s denizens lived over a giant iron bowl that caught their life-energies and contained them. No outflow was possible.
He quieted his mind, wrapped it around the pool, and reached out for working substance.
With an accelerating rumble, rocks, gravel and dust slid down the nearby slopes toward where Gregor stood. He halted them a few yards away, shaped them into a great inverted cone, and caused them to spin.
The rumble became a whoosh of rotating debris. He put metaphorical arms to the giant top and spun it faster, watching the level of the mana pool as he adjusted the speed.
Faster... Faster... a little slower, now... There.
He opened his eyes and stepped back.
Before him was a perfect sixty-foot-high cone of stone and dust, spinning faster than any whirlpool, whistling a shrill song of power. Though the air currents from its motion buffeted him almost strongly enough to knock him down, the cone itself was stable.
He turned to Semmech and spread his arms in triumph.
The baron stared at the whirligig as if it were an enemy come to spill his blood. His retainers watched him uncertainly.
While the soldiers and their lord stood frozen, Gregor beckoned the four women to him, gathered them close around him.
Semmech broke from his trance. He looked at his troops and jerked one hand violently at Gregor and his companions. The soldiers drew their swords and advanced.
Gregor exerted himself once more.
A second cone rose from the earth to girdle him and his companions: a blue-white forest of lightning bolts. They crackled with a hungry energy that mocked the blades of Semmech’s men. One decided to test the shield. The blast slammed him to the earth, clutching a sword melted down to the hilt.
“As little as it becomes a common man,” Gregor said, “to break his given word, Baron, it becomes a ruler still less.”
Semmech glared at him. He put his hand to the hilt of his own sword.
“Tell your men to sheathe their blades, my lord. Else I shall collapse the whirligig upon them, and Anam will be once more without a balance.”
The baron’s eyes lit with understanding. His hand retreated from his sword. “Practical considerations, sorcerer?”
“Just so.”
“Will you take my realm from me, then?”
“I will not,” Gregor said. “I leave upon the instant. My word, you see, is good.”
Semmech’s jaw clenched. He raised a hand, and his men returned their swords to their scabbards. Gregor quelled the curtain of lightning, then took up his pack and his staff.
“You have your balance, Baron. It will sense the flows into the mana pool and adjust to any changes. Leave it to its work, and there will be no more terrors in Anam. Your people will have peace.”
Semmech nodded and gestured his men back to the castle. As he turned to go, Luisa, Marti and Karine broke away and sprinted toward him. A kitchen knife gleamed in Karine’s hand.
Marti and Luisa knocked Semmech onto his face in the thin grass. Each woman pinned one of his arms beneath her as Karine struck.
The blade pierced the noble’s neck, releasing a jet of arterial blood. Karine ripped crosswise, opening his throat and more blood vessels. Semmech’s body spasmed, throwing Marti and Luisa to the side. He convulsed in silent agony, all four limbs hammering the earth as his life spurted into the air.
“Gregor.” Laella tugged at his arm. Her face was a stony mask. “We must go.”
Gregor stood transfixed, unable to speak.
“Gregor!” Laella’s hiss penetrated the horror that girdled his brain. “They have chosen. It is done. We must go!”
The three women rose shrieking with vengeance fulfilled, only a moment before Semmech’s retainers closed upon them with drawn swords. The blades rose and fell, twice, thrice, and the shrieking ceased. Three new fountains of blood rose to dance to the song of the whirligig, as Laella pulled him away from the carnage, toward the pass that would deliver them from the warmth of Anam into the chill wastes to the west.
==<O>==
