Mercedes Lackey: The Price Of Command

Perhaps they had their own troubles to occupy them. Since the defeat of the Prophet there had been no more trouble from Karse; only rumors that the Temple was engaging in a war of intrigue within itself, and more rumors that the Chief Priest of the Sunlord was being challenged for his place by a woman. That was heresy enough, but further rumor had it that this woman affected the robes and false beard of a man, and styled herself the “True-born Son of the Sun.” If even half those rumors were true, small wonder Karse paid no attention to the army of her old enemy, when it was plainly going elsewhere.

But once across the border into Hardorn, Daren had been tempted to turn right around and take his chances with Valdemar and this mysterious “guardian” that drove mages mad. For from the border to a distance of three leagues within Hardorn, the land was blighted and empty.

Bad enough that entire villages lay empty and abandoned; worse came when his men poked cautiously through the tumbled-down buildings. The places had been looted, then demolished. But in the wreckage, Daren’s men found the remains of women and children—and only women and children, and only those younger than three, and (presumably) older than thirty.

Daren had thought at first that it might have been the work of bandits—but then they had encountered another village, smaller than the first, that had fared the same. Then another, and another.

After the fourth such discovery, Daren forbade his men to even go near the places. They had no priest with them, but the mages, Quenten in particular, had felt an odd uneasiness there, and the Healers had refused, in a hysterical body, to set foot inside the perimeters.

And the land itself looked drained and ill. The rank weeds that had taken over the fields were pale, with thin, weak stems. The leaves of the trees were discolored. The only birds to be seen were an occasional crow, and so far Daren hadn’t spotted so much as a rabbit moving. It had been getting worse since the first village, and now the countryside looked to his eyes like a beautiful woman lying ravaged by plague. He couldn’t imagine how his men could bear it—many of them were of farm stock, and intended to retire to little pension-farms of their own, and to see good land like this must be making them ill.

“What do you think happened here?” he asked Quenten, as they crossed a muddy, rust-colored stream. “Is it safe to be riding on this land, do you think?”

“It’s safe enough, m’lord,” Quenten said, but only after the mage gave him a peculiar look. “Why do you ask?”

Daren looked around at the withered limbs of the trees, at the yellow grass, at the diseased cankers spotting the leaves, and shuddered. “Because the place looks poisoned, that’s why. What happened at the villages was easy enough to read—that bastard conscripted the men, took the useful women and little ones and slaughtered the rest as an example—but I don’t understand this ... and I don’t see how the men can accept it as easily as they do.”

Quenten shook his head in wonder. “M’lord, they don’t see what you see. To them it looks perfectly ordinary, except that there’s not much in the way of birds and beasts.” He looked pointedly about them, at the men marching calmly up the road in front of them, and tilted his shaggy, dust-dulled head to one side, as if waiting for a response.

Daren cast a sharp glance at him, but the young mage’s expression was entirely sober. “A glamour? An illusion?”

Again the mage shook his head, but this time he stared into Daren’s face searchingly before replying. “I don’t think so, m’lord. Is there mage-blood in your family?”

“Some, not much,” he said after a moment of thought. “Of course Grandmother’s family’s been sprouting Healers every so often, and Mother’s line was supposed to be some kind of earth-priestess—”

“Ah,” Quenten said in satisfaction. “That would be it; you have the earth-sense. Many folk with the blood of the old earth-priestesses in them have it. What you’re seeing is the land revealed to you by the earth-sense, you see what lies under the surface everyone else sees with his outer eyes. This land is sick; there’s been blood-magic practiced here, too much of it for the land to absorb without harm. That was the real horror back at those villages; it wasn’t just the slaughter itself—it’s that it was done to invoke the powers of blood-magic and death-magic.”

Daren remembered all the rumors he’d heard about Ancar, and suddenly they began making sense. “Blood-magic to control the minds of the ones he took?” he asked shrewdly, “Blood-magic to create a reservoir of power he can feed off?” And Quenten’s eyes widened. “Blood-magic so that the land keeps him healthy and young, at its own expense?”

“There’s not one highborn in ten that would know that,” the mage whispered. “Keep it to yourself, m’lord. There’s some that would say that knowing is a short step away from wanting. I don’t hold by that, but even the mage-schools have their fanatics.” He resumed his normal tone. “Probably, m’lord, and it’s more than the land can bear. That’s why it looks sick to you. Trust your earth-sense, m’lord. If you learn to use it, it’ll tell you more than just this.”

It was Daren’s turn to shake his head. The land cried out to him in a way—and he couldn’t help it, any more than he could bring back those poor slaughtered innocents. He wanted to beg its pardon for not healing it—to beg theirs for not being there. It was foolish—but it was very real. He understood the Heralds of Valdemar far better than his brother did. He understood how it was to care for people, even if those people were not bound to you, personally, in any way. Faram would die for his people—but not those of Valdemar. He would feel badly about the slaughters here, but he would not feel them personally, the way Daren did.

And he also understood duty and pledges. “Right now all I care about is whether this land is safe to travel through—which you say it is—and whether or not Ancar has any mages likely to detect us here.”

“We’re working to prevent that, m’lord,” Quenten replied dryly. “And—” he looked up, sharply.

“What is it?” Daren said, reining in his horse as Quenten’s mount stopped dead.

The mage raised one hand to his forehead, his eyes focusing elsewhere. He looked for all the world as if he was listening to something. “Quenten?” Daren persisted. “Quenten?”

The mage’s eyes refocused on him. “Ancar has a reserve force just ahead,” he said vaguely. “Several mages, and three companies of cavalry. And—Daren, m’lord, they’re mostly from here, this barren zone.”

“Controlled, then. There’s no other way he could make fanners into cavalry that quickly” He caught the attention of his officers, who halted the march. “Quenten, how far ahead is ‘just ahead’?”

“Half a day’s march, maybe less. Not much less.” Quenten didn’t seem to notice Daren’ sigh of relief.

“What are they doing there?” he persisted. “We haven’t seen a sign of Ancar’s army. What are reserves doing out here?”

“I don’t—they’re—I need my bowl.” Without warning, the mage scrambled off his mare’s back to dig into her packs. He emerged with a completely black bowl, shiny, made of black glass, or something very like it. He poured water from his own water skin into the bottom of it, sat right down in the dust of the road, and stared into it.

Daren had been around enough mages to know when to keep his mouth shut. He waited, patiently, in sunlight too thin to even warm him. The army waited, just as patiently, glad for a chance to sit by the roadside and rest. Daren watched his men sprawling ungracefully against their packs, and wished he hadn’t had to push them so hard. They’d had a lot of time to make up, once they’d gotten down out of the hills. He had been weary at the end of the day, and he was riding. He hated to think what the foot soldiers felt like.