Lesson of the Fire (56 page)

“Thank you for your patience, Weard Staute,”
Robert said sweetly. “I must say that the terms of surrender you
have offered us are quite attractive, but you will excuse me if I
cannot accept them. So here are my terms.”

Ari turned away as Robert began his
Will-Breaker. He knew that in the prison Robert had made for Sven’s
family, Erika and Asa would soon be weeping. Ari found himself
missing his mother.

* * *

Eda Stormgul chose a wide, flat expanse of
Flasten’s marshes surrounded by deep pools in key locations. The
damnens would not be able to sneak up on the Mar here, but nor
would they have an easy time reaching their prey. The thousand
wizards with her stood in rough lines just barely within recon
range of the southernmost prisoners.

The magocrats had cast aside the drab garb
of the Teleport War and donned the bright colors for which Mar
wizards were known. There were more greens than any other single
color of cloak, but there was also an abundance of auburn, blue and
amber. Here and there, cyan and lavender cloaks marked the most
powerful wizards — magocrats who could crush a dozen greens at once
in magical combat. Against damnens, though, they were only slightly
better than their skill with javelin, spear and marsord.

Across the field, the damnens gathered,
their tall, muscular bodies looking like the shadows of monsters
instead of the monsters themselves. The Drakes carried no weapons,
for their claws and teeth had served them well enough. Their hides,
Eda had learned, were far from impenetrable, but they were immune
to magic. That alone made every wizard fear damnens. Eda could
almost hear all the Mar behind her silently counting the damnens as
they appeared in front of them.

Hundreds. We have killed
several score in a span. No wonder they wanted to meet us like
this,
Eda thought. A nagging doubt crept
in.
Unless this isn’t all of them, of
course.

Weard Klarein appeared abruptly next to Eda.
“Weard Stormgul.”

“Fight or flight?” she asked without turning
her attention away from the army of damnens.

What answer do I really
want to hear?
she asked herself.

“Fight. There are less than a hundred
guarding the prisoners. Our attack will be swift and deadly, and
our withdrawal will be silent and untraceable.”

Eda nodded slightly and turned to face the
wizards behind her.

“We stay and fight.”

There were nervous murmurs and a few grim
laughs but no cheers. Odveig Spitz summoned Power and raised
himself off the ground so everyone could see him.

“Hear me, my fellow Mar,” he said, and his
voice carried farther than was possible without magic. “Our
ancestors believed that the gods answered no prayer without
sacrifice. These were not the painless libations of alien lands — a
wasting of food without fear that it might bring starvation. No,
their sacrifices were of a sort that might mean dying for their
faith — whether it meant destroying food they could not spare or
giving the last of their food to a stranger.

“Thousands of years ago, the mapmakers of
the Affe Expeditionary Force prayed to Marrish for deliverance from
the Drakes that threatened to wipe out the Mar. Instead of risking
starvation, those brave mapmakers performed daring reconnaissance
missions in Drake lands. In those dark times, the Drakes ruled all
of Marrishland except for Domus Palus, and so for every mapmaker
who returned from such a mission, nine others did not. The Affe
Expeditionary Force faced every mission unflinchingly.

“Now it is our turn to stand on the altar,
resolved to pay whatever price the gods demand of us. We pray that
they will accept this offering and restore the Duxy of Flasten to
even greater glory. We pray that they will accept this offering and
bring an end to the war between Domus and Flasten. The people who
bleed together are truly one people, and we are Mar!”

There were cheers this time, and Weard Spitz
lowered himself. He turned to Weard Klarein.

“Return to the Mar and tell them that we
will fight the damnens — not as Flasten magocrats and Domus
magocrats but as Mar. Any further violence between our duxies — or
any duxies — is an abomination in the sight of the gods and all the
heroes who have bled for the Mar.”

“I want to stay and fight with you.”

Odveig placed a hand on the green’s
shoulder. “Allow us this one conceit, Weard Klarein. Live today.
Tell our story. Die in another tale.”

Oysten Klarein raised his right hand in
salute. “By the Oathbinder and by Fraemauna, my patron, I will do
as you command, and the epics Mar will write of you will place you
among the stars.”

To the north, the damnens approached the Mar
army. Nonagons of magocrats flickered in and out in flanking
maneuvers.

“Go,” Eda told him.

Oysten obeyed, flickering away in a flurry
of green cloth. As she watched him leave, she knew that her part in
the story had come to an end.

* * *

“We should go to the Protectorates and bring
back the Mardux,” Weard Kiarr Bukaltar said.

“The Protectorates’re big,” Bui reminded
him. “An’ we’ve got insero comin’. They’ll have ravits with them,
an’ that means poison darts an’ fallin’ rocks.”

“We still have Blosin gloves, including
morutdyjiton,” Rig Marspur said.

Bui examined the recon stone. The insero and
ravits were not as numerous as the other Drakes in the Mass — a few
thousand all told — but they had apparently already been warned
about the morutdyjinon, for they kept their distance from each
other. Morutmanon might knock down two or three at a time, if it
was well-aimed enough. Worse, they were carefully avoiding the
front of the army, creeping around on either flank.

“Guard the flanks, an’ be ready for them to
attack our rear,” Bui told them. “We’ll need mobile roofs and Power
‘depts to keep the darts off our heads.”

Bui thanked Her that the priests never
thought to question him. By the time the insero reached the Lapis
Amnis, the army of adepts was as ready as they could be. After
that, there was little he could do except watch the recon stone and
adjust tactics as needed.

The ravits and insero rained poisonous darts
and large stones on the adepts. The Mar retaliated with
morutdyjinon, reducing insero and ravits to floating dust. When
they had sustained a hundred casualties, the Drakes broke off the
aerial assault and flew north to regroup.

At that moment, thousands of jabber and
stinger guer pressed across the Lapis Amnis to engage the Mar
there, and the adepts — distracted as they were by the presence of
insero — barely repulsed them before they gained a beachhead.

“Get those gloves to the back ranks!” Bui
called to the priests without looking up from the recon stone.

The insero surprised them by flying south
toward Domus Palus. Meanwhile, the guer continued pressing the
assault on the river. A hundred striped guer risked another
crossing, and in the confusion, the Mar failed to stop them.
Stinger guer flooded onto the south bank in half a dozen places.
Bui called his draxi to him and sent them to break the
assaults.

“What are the insero doing?” Rig asked.

“They’re cutting our supply lines, such as
they are. They know the lan’s out here’re dead, an’ think if we
don’t take back Domus Palus soon, we’ll be, too. They’re not wron’,
either. We need to get Domus back or die tryin’. The Drakes likely
don’t know the wizards there’ve decided they’re our enemies.”

“They intend to split our loyalties,”
Guthrun Snelfus noted. “They might also think the adepts are
actually wizards and expect to face less resistance from the city’s
defenders.”

“Even worse,” Bui murmured, still looking at
the recon stone. “They inten’ to surroun’ us. Look.”

On the recon stone, three more groups of a
thousand insero and ravits moved into sight — one directly to the
north and one on each flank. Bui knew the adepts were about to lose
control of the river and started considering how to minimize
casualties.

* * *

Domin deflected Sven’s marsord with a casual
movement of his hand.

“Whatever Guardian you think you are, surely
you do not think you can defeat a god.”

“I can, and I will!” Sven snarled, hurling
the deity backward with a wave of Power.

He spun around to strike Dinah with the
shorter of the two blades. The steel struck the mud on her skin.
Sparks flew as the attack glanced off.

“You think steel can strike the goddess of
the earth? What I made I can unmake.”

The marsord rusted rapidly, aging centuries
in mere moments. Sven tossed it aside, and it burst into a small
cloud of red dust before sinking in the mud. He called Energy and
Power, knocking the Bald Goddess backward with a bolt of lightning
just as Domin’s black hand reached forward to touch his face.

If he touches me, I’m dead.

He took a hasty step backward and flung up a
wall of Power.

Dinah stood up, patches of her muddy skin
blackened by Sven’s attack. “You cannot fight us forever, Sven
Takraf. You are mortal, and we are gods. Our Mass walks the land.
Soon, Her will set on the Mar for the last time.”

He tried to take another step backward, but
the mud had grabbed his boot, rooting him to the earth.

“You, too, are my creation. Who else could
have given us free reign to destroy Marrishland as you have?”

He felt himself beginning to sink.

“And now that your usefulness has ended,”
Domin said as he reached out to touch Sven’s face, “we will destroy
you.”

“Divine patrons, my life is yours,” he
whispered. “Without you, I am nothing.”

“They cannot hear you, Mardux,” Dinah
snarled. “I have silenced your voice to their ears.”

Domin’s fatal fingers brushed against the
left side of his face. Death crept into his flesh.

Seruvus, I know you can hear me. I am ashes
in the hearth. Preserve the fire.

Chapter 46

“
Uesdyn (mysterious magic dynamics) is a
catch-all category for the study of things that affect Mar magic
but are neither myst nor tor. The clearest example is the kalysut,
the tree from which both torutsen and morutsen are made. Another is
the Tempest, an inhospitable darkness accessed only during
teleportation. Some uesdyn topics have passed into mysdyn and
tordyn, however. The Kaliheron never discovered how to use
Elements, Knowledge, Wisdom and Presence, which they regarded as
shadows or echoes of Energy, Mobility, Power and Vitality.”

— Weard Oda Kalidus,

The Origin of Nothing

Horsa sat on a small bench in Flasten
Palus’s walled garden, which had been one of the few places in the
city the two sieges had not touched. All around him, the flowers of
summer were beginning to fade, but they were still more colorful
than any place on the marshes of the Duxy of Flasten. It was said
the magocrats who first built the city, weary of the drab browns
and greens that surrounded them, had collected flowers and
flowering trees from across Marrishland to plant here, creating a
refuge of vivid color amid the marshes.

It was also one of the few places in Flasten
that did not reek of decaying Mar and damnen corpses. Horsa had set
the army to work burning the dead, but it was a slow task, both
because there were so many dead and because of the damnens still
prowling the city, killing any stragglers they found. The Mar were
gradually rooting out the Drakes, but even three spans after the
magocrats had taken back Flasten Palus, no one dared travel in
groups smaller than a company.

He stared down at the marsord in his hands —
Eda’s marsord. The steel shone in the sun now, but when Weard
Oysten Klarein had found it among the dead on the battlefield, so
he said, it was covered in the blood of a hundred damnens.

“Eda Stormgul lived her chosen name,” the
green had assured him. “Odveig Spitz brought Flasten and Domus
together and bound their wizards together with his own blood. Three
hundred damnens died on Mar spears and marsords. The Mar of
Stormgul’s legion fought to the end, and while they sacrificed
themselves, the rest of us stole the entire population of Flasten
Palus from the damnens. By the time we reached the place where
Stormgul’s legion had been, the damnens had fled the field without
leaving so much as one grisly totem of Mar corpses. We spent the
day erecting a great pyre of the dead. That night, a thousand new
stars shot across the sky, and I thought I saw two new stars in the
sky — one in the Guardian and one in the Slave.”

Horsa blinked away the tears. Eda had lived
and died bravely, but he couldn’t help but remember the playmate he
had teased since they were both children — his first love. And now
she was gone from him forever.

Watch over me, my friend. By your sacrifice,
I am warmed. By your sacrifice, I can see. By your sacrifice, I
live on.

“Weard Verifien, we have recovered the dux’s
marsord.”

Horsa looked up from his reverie. The
lavender held the blade out to him.

“Forgive me, good weard. I seem to have
forgotten your name.”

“We have not been introduced. I am Olvir
Bedaulich. I was with Weard Stormgul in the south.”

Horsa accepted the marsord numbly.

I have too many marsords and not enough
hands to wield them.

“Do you come from Domus or Flasten?”

“I am loyal to you as I was to her,” Olvir
said fiercely.

Horsa suddenly recalled a time when Eda had
played a prank on Katla and arranged for him to take the blame. He
laughed softly and wiped his eyes.

“Have I said something funny, Weard
Verifien?”

“Of course not. Forgive me, Weard Bedaulich.
Eda was an old friend, but I suppose everyone has lost someone dear
to them.”