War of Wizards (7 page)

Rouhani had pulled up his hood, and now let it drop. He fixed Darik with an admiring glance. “It is a lucky man who walks in the shadow of a powerful wizard.”

“I agree,” Darik said. “A fortunate man indeed. Now if only we had such a wizard.”

Ethan grinned and theatrically gestured for Darik to lead the way. The three men strode along the cobbled streets toward the Merchants Quarter and the Grand Bazaar. Darik wasn’t sure how long his spell would last, so he didn’t want to cast it yet, not until they reached the markets. Besides, his left hand was still stiff from the bit of magic he’d cast that morning. The longer he let it heal, the better.

How many hours ago had that been? Darik glanced at the sun and tried to tell the time of day from its position in the sky. It was still midafternoon, but dusk came sooner this time of year. There wasn’t much time left. An hour and a half, maybe? He picked up the pace, and the other two men hurried along with him.

They were three tall soldiers, armed with swords and visibly in a hurry, and people gave them a wide berth. When they were passing through the fine houses where the moneylenders lived, a finely dressed man in a turban threw open the shutters and leaned out to ask them if the city were already surrounded, or if he might have time to get his wife and sons out.

Rouhani turned with a hard gaze. “Where would you send them?” The man fell silent, and Rouhani added, “And why aren’t your sons at the city wall to defend it?”

“They’re only children! Not one of them could lift a sword.”

“Then give them kitchen knives,” Rouhani said. “A sharp stick if you can find nothing else.”

The alley was narrow, and the upper floors cantilevered over it to the point where only a thin shaft of light could penetrate. At the captain’s strong voice, other shutters opened, and more people looked out, worried.

“That goes for all of you,” Rouhani said. “Defend this city any way you can.”

“Will it matter?” Ethan muttered when they’d left the alley. “Can anyone fight these things?”

“A wight can fear,” Darik said. “And it can suffer pain. Hot iron, fire, even boiling water will touch them. Injure them, and they will flee in terror.” He considered. “But if we don’t find those wizards, it won’t matter. They will drive the wights against the city until the walls collapse, then send them screaming through the city, killing and burning. Nothing will stop them.”

The edge of the Grand Bazaar was nearly two miles from the palace gates, but Darik thought they arrived faster on foot than if they’d been riding. Closer to the center of the city, people were dragging carts, barrels, and furniture to form barricades. Entire neighborhoods had become miniature fortresses, mud and stone buildings all looking inward toward blocked alleys. Balsalom had already survived one brutal sack, and by now, word of the nature of the enemy had spread.

The three men picked their way over and around these barricades, until at last, they came to the Grand Bazaar. Here, they found a frenzy of merchants trying to gather their goods and flee the square, while desperate men and women bid up the price of any foodstuffs still for sale.

Half of the vast marketplace had disappeared, replaced by hastily constructed blocks of three-story buildings crowded with refugees. Some of the buildings were still unfinished, with no shutters, and ladders and scaffolding leading to upper levels, but even these unfinished rooms had clotheslines stretching between balconies, with residents peering out at the chaos below. An old man with a face sunken around missing teeth sat on a bedroll laid atop a plank connecting two pieces of scaffolding. His bare feet dangled over the edge, thirty feet above the ground, while he puffed at a hookah. Skin stretched like dried leather over his sharp cheekbones, and his eyes were sunken pits as he stared down at the bazaar. Nearby, a girl climbed a rickety ladder while carrying a pail of water.

“Stop here,” Darik told his companions. “Step beneath this arcade and into the shadows. Good. Now draw your hoods and conceal your hands and arms.”

“What about my sword?” Rouhani asked.

“It doesn’t matter if our weapons show. Only flesh needs to be hidden.”

Darik exposed his left hand long enough to cast the spell. The joints were finally loosening from the stiffness he’d carried since his encounter with the bandits that morning, and he had to breathe slowly with his eyes closed to distract himself from anticipating a fresh stab of pain. Markal had taught him this spell, and he’d turned it over in his mind many times, but he’d never cast it. There was fear that he’d lose the essence of it, and he had to clear this away too, before he could speak the incantation.

He needed to summon his will and believe, truly believe, in the rightness of his cause, or the magic would bleed away. He thought about Kallia, the young khalifa who had sacrificed so terribly for Balsalom. He thought about the injustice of the dark wizard attacking the city, brutally sacking it, and now returning to complete the slaughter. He thought about his friends: Daria first, of course, but Whelan, Markal, and even Sofiana, plus the two men beside him. Every one of them would give his or her life to defeat the enemy, to find King Toth in his citadel and destroy him. A righteous anger rose in Darik’s breast.

Suddenly, he knew he was ready. He held out his hand palm up and bowed his head.

“
Et abscondite nos a conspectu facultatum.”
 

Pain flared in his hand, but it was washed away by a warm glow that started in his toes, raced along his skin like the crackle of lightning to his fingertips, and then flooded his face and head until he felt as though he were floating. It was a rush of power unlike anything he’d ever felt.

I’m doing it. I’m calling real magic.

When he lifted his head, the world around them seemed to be glowing, and the three men stood within a deep and inky pool of blackness that seemed to suck the very sunlight from the sky. When Darik looked directly at the other two men, he could see them clearly, but when he looked away, they vanished. A few curious bystanders had been watching them, but now, they turned away, blinking and confused, as if remembering something elsewhere that needed their attention.

Rouhani stared at Darik, gaping. “By the Harvester be damned!”

“You
are
a wizard,” Ethan said. “Markal said, but I never believed it possible.”

Darik was as stunned as his companions. Markal had told him of this moment, when the devotion to one’s cause rose and consumed everything, when the magic would do your bidding, molded into something both wonderful and terrible. He’d never expected to capture it. He was more accustomed to giving himself goat legs. If only this moment had come while facing Chantmer the Tall on the edge of the Desolation.

“Speak quietly,” he said in a low voice. “Others will bend to avoid you, but it would be best to step aside when possible. Every encounter weakens the spell.”

Ethan knew where the builders had spotted the mysterious visitors who’d flown in as storks, and he led the way. The three men climbed a mud staircase to the second floor of the newest building, and walked a scaffolding that took them right past the old man smoking the hookah. They had to step over his dangling legs, but he didn’t notice them. Neither did any of the hundreds of people in the bazaar look up as the companions continued to a ladder that led to the roof.

Shortly, they were atop the building, high enough to see over the city walls, which lay perhaps a half mile away to the north. Darik’s eyesight seemed unusually sharp, and he could see distant objects with the clarity of a hawk hunting rabbits from high in the sky. Hundreds of armed men watched from the parapets of the walls, while others marched through the streets toward the gates. The sun was beginning its fiery descent to the west, into the blasted land of the Desolation of Toth. It cast the plain in a thin, waning light that washed over the approaching army. A cloud of dust enveloped it and hid its true size, but the force stretched for miles. It seemed like a single, flowing object, like a thick, rolling fog. Not an army, not people.

The wights seemed to be approaching the Great Gates, but Darik couldn’t see the other sides of the city, and so he wasn’t sure that other forces weren’t approaching the city from other angles. He imagined that riders and refugees were still coming and going and would do so until the last possible moment.

Ethan and Rouhani were still staring out beyond the city walls when Darik turned to study his surroundings. His other senses were heightened, too, and he immediately detected the scent of magic hanging in the air. It seemed almost spicy, like a pinch of cardamom powder held to the nose.

Darik walked across the roof to a partially constructed wall that would lead up to another floor above them when finished. He picked out a few pieces of straw from the drying mud and smelled them.

Ethan came up behind. “Did you find something?”

“Magic. The scent is stronger to the left.”

“Where? I don’t notice anything.”

“No? I’m surprised. It’s very strong.”

The main purpose of Darik’s spell had been to hide them from prying eyes, to conceal them from other magic intended to discover pursuit, but it had powerful side effects. But apparently only for Darik’s benefit. He felt
larger
, somehow, with a sense of power, as if he were greater than the men following him, wiser than the fools scrabbling like rats in the bazaar below or cowering in their homes throughout the city. It was an intoxicating, dangerous feeling.

The strongest residue of magic came from the far corner of the mud wall, and it was here that Darik found the marks that the vizier had mentioned, the prints of stork feet pressed into the soft mud and left to dry. He squatted and traced his fingers over the drier, harder mud at his feet. His fingertips tingled. He found the outlines of feet pressed into the ground.

“Bare feet walked this way,” he said. “They go back toward the ladder.”

“Are you sure?” Ethan asked. “I don’t see anything.”

“There are several distinct prints,” Darik added, hands still groping. “The builders spoke the truth. Someone came down from the wall and walked away.”

“Well, then,” Ethan said. He sounded mildly surprised. “Can you follow them?”

“Yes. In fact, it will be easier than I had supposed.”

“Let’s go then,” Rouhani urged. “It will be dark soon. We have to stop them before they send aid to the wights.”

The three men descended into the bazaar, and it didn’t take long for Darik to find the path again. He was like a hound with a scent in his nostrils now, and that scent was a clearly marked trail that cut straight through the heart of the great open market. There were other traces there—faint outlines of other bits of wizardry, some of it old, some of it left by minor conjurers of one sort or another, but it didn’t obscure the residue of stronger magic straight ahead.

Merchants pulled down tents and canopies, loading jars of olive oil, clay pots of tea, great bundles of khat, and barrels of wheat into wagons, tearing down the whole market in advance of the battle. Darik picked his way through a caravan of snorting, foul-tempered camels and their Kratian drivers. Rouhani and Ethan followed.

Darik momentarily lost the scent at the far end of the bazaar, where it was clear that one of the wizards had cast a spell to disguise their passage. He got himself turned about, and almost lost it entirely, but then he found it again: a slender thread leading into a dark and foul-smelling alley filthy with rags and bins of overflowing night soil. Once the companions came out the other side, Darik had the slightly altered magical scent in his nostrils again, and they picked up the pace.

He led them into the former Slaves Quarter, still filled with the poor and destitute. Many of the freed slaves had joined Balsalom’s armies. Others had either fled the city, stayed on to continue working for their former masters, or taken work on the many building projects strengthening the city’s defenses. But hundreds remained in their hovels, destitute and helpless to alter a course defined by a lifetime of forced servitude. They’d been joined by thousands of the poorest refugees from outside the city, and the quarter was a filthy, dangerous area.

They came upon one man being robbed and beaten by two men with sticks, and several other low exchanges after that. One man, Darik was convinced, was a Veyrian spy, passing money to a man with a thick, warty nose in exchange for a rolled parchment. Nobody spotted the three armed men, and so all of this was done openly. Rouhani started toward the supposed spy, reaching for weapon, but Darik grabbed his wrist to stop him. They needed to stay hidden, and that meant avoiding any contact with these people.

The trail led out of the quarter and to the city walls overlooking the Tombs of the Kings, not far from the Gate of the Dead, which was closed and barricaded with massive beams ringed in iron. Soldiers manned the guard towers, among them several dozen of Ethan’s own Eriscobans, armed with straight swords, heavy breastplates, and rounded helmets. Balsalomian archers lined the walls, and their posture was tense as they stared down at the plain beyond the city in the face of the falling sun.

The magical trail led up a stone staircase to the top of the walls. Darik, Ethan, and Rouhani waited until the staircase was clear, then hurried up to the parapet. They picked their way carefully along the wall walk behind the battlement. Darik was so focused on the magical trail, and on slipping carefully by the archers manning the wall, that he didn’t immediately glance down outside the city. But Rouhani gasped, and Darik drew short and followed his gaze.

It looked at first like a ghostly blue light, like a river flowing through the obelisks and mastabas of the Tombs of the Kings, but as he stared, individual figures came into focus, climbing over and around obstacles like an army of ants on the march, every one of them directed as if by an unseen hand. There were men on foot and ghostly horses, their faces blurred, their bodies seeming almost to stretch from one location to another instead of walking. Larger figures moved among them: giants, mammoths, snaking dragon-like creatures without wings.