David Drake - The Fortress of Glass

She smiled. "We knew that before we came, I suppose, didn't we?" she added.

"Could you say a spell yourself and learn, ma'am?" Cashel asked. He kept his face half toward the women, but he made sure he could watch Cervoran out of the corner of his eye.

The water in the cup was bubbling, which it shouldn't've been without the bone charring-which wasn't happening. No man Cashel knew could've kept holding the cup like that close above a charcoal fire. No matter how brave you were, there was a time that the heat was too much and your fingers gave way. Cervoran's seemed to be sweating yellow fat.

"Perhaps I could," Tenoctris said, her eyes on the other wizard, "but I think I'm better off seeing what my colleague is doing. If I concentrate on my art, I'd be likely to miss things. I'm also concerned that-"

She met Cashel's eyes. "I'm afraid that if I sent my mind down to that light," she said, "either I wouldn't be able to get back or I'd bring something back with me. Cervoran may not be our friend, but I'm quite sure that the thing he's fighting, the Green Woman, is our enemy and mankind's enemy."

"Kriphi phiae eu!" Cervoran shouted. The sea was suddenly glazed with red light. The ship jolted upward. When the light faded, the surface had frozen to ice the hue of the wizard's topaz crown.

The rowers shouted in terror and jumped from their benches. TheHeron trembled as the floor of an inn would when men were struggling on it, but it didn't heel and pitch: the hull was set solidly in the ice.

Cervoran dropped the skullcap. Still chanting, he lifted himself over the railing and slid down the bow's outward curve to the ram. He landed like a sack of oats, but he got up immediately and stepped onto the ice.

"Iao obra phrene…," he chanted as he walked stiffly toward where the smoke had risen.

The light in the depths shone through, despite the thickness of the ice.

While Ilna watched the former corpse stumping across the yellow ice, her fingers knotted lengths of twine and her mind danced along the vast temple of connections that her patternmeant. People thought that things stood apart from each other: a rock here, a tree here, a squalling baby here.

They were wrong. Everything was part of everything else. A push at this place meant a movementthere, unimaginably far away; without anyone knowing that the one caused the other.

Ilna knew. She saw the connections only as shadow tracings stretching farther than her mind or any mind could travel, but sheknew . And she knew that the pattern of action and response centered on this point-on Cervoran, on the thing beneath the sea, and on Ilna os-Kenset-was greater and more terrible than she could have imagined before this moment

Cervoran stood in the near distance with his hands raised; the jewel on his brow pulsed brighter than the pale sun hanging at zenith. The rhythm of his chant whispered over the ice like the belly scales of a crawling viper.

The frightened oarsmen shouted angrily. Ilna could see the men brandishing swords they'd taken from beneath their benches. One fellow jumped out of the ship and began hacking at the ice. He'd have done as much good to chop at a granite wall; the ice was thicker than theHeron was long. The oarsmen couldn't tell that, but Ilna knew.

Chalcus spoke to calm his crew, then asked Tenoctris a question with a flourish of his hand. She answered and Cashel said something as well, calm and solid and ready for whatever came.

Ilna's ears took in the sounds, but her mind was focused outside the ship, outside even the universe. She saw the shadows merge and link. The light in the depths swelled and wove its own pattern across the cosmos. She understood what Cervoran was doing, and she understood that he would fail because what he faced was more powerful than he knew or could know.

Ilna understood. Cervoran was a part of the pattern created by the light and the thing within the light. Very soon it would be complete.

She couldn't block the play of forces any more than Cashel could stand between two mountains and push them apart. She and her brother were powerful in their own ways, but the present battle was on a titanic scale. All Ilna could do was protect herself, wall herself off from the struggle.

She raised the pattern her fingers had knotted, holding it before her eyes. Then A flash of blue wizardlight penetrated the sea and sky, clinging to and filling all matter. Motion ceased, and the universe was silent except for the voice of Cervoran shrilling, "Iao obra phrene…"

He was trapped in his own spell, weaving the noose to hang him and hang all the universe with him. Everything was connected…

Ilna tucked the cords into her sleeve and climbed over the railing. The pattern was fixed in her mind, now. She no longer needed the physical object, and she didn't have time to pick out the knots.

The oarsmen stood like a jumble of statues, frozen by the spell and counterspell. Ilna hung on the outside of the railing for a moment to pick a spot to fall. She dropped to the outrigger between a man caught shouting desperately to Chalcus and one praying to the image of the Lady he held in his hands. She touched stepped down to the ice.

"Akri krithi phreneu…," Cervoran said.

Ilna walked toward him, taking short paces on the slick footing. The ice humped and cracked the way the millpond in Barca's Hamlet did during a hard winter.

"Ae obra euphrene…," Cervoran said.

The ice groaned in an undertone that blended with the wizard's voice. He'd been a fool to match himself against the thing beneath, but Ilna had been a fool herself many times in the past… and perhaps now. She loathed fools. All fools.

As the light flooding up through the ice grew brighter, the sky blurred gray and the scattered clouds lost definition. Ilna wasn't sure whether the spell had formed a cyst in time around Cervoran and those with him, or if the whole world was being changed by the pattern woven in words of power.

"Euphri litho kira…," cried Cervoran or at least Cervoran's lips.

Ilna was wearing suede-soled slippers because city custom, court custom, demanded that she not be barefoot. Nobody could've ordered her to wear shoes, but people might have laughed if she hadn't.

Part of Ilna would've said that she didn't care what other people thought, but that wasn't really true. The truth was that she'd do what she thought right no matter what anyone said or thought; but it was true also that if it was simply a matter of wearing shoes needlessly or being laughed at, she'd wear shoes.

That was a fortunate choice now. She'd walked barefoot on ice in the past when she had to, but the layer of suede was less uncomfortable. She hadn't dressed for deep winter this morning.

The light beneath the sea throbbed in the rhythm of a beating heart. As the syllables fell from Cervoran's lips it glowed brighter, faded, and grew brighter yet.

"…rali thonu omene…"

Ilna reached the chanting wizard. She was a weaver, not a wizard. She could do things with fabric impossible for anyone else she'd met, perhaps impossible for anyone else who'd ever lived. But any bumpkin in the borough could slash across one of Ilna's subtle patterns, destroying it and its effect completely.

Ilna grasped the golden wire and twisted the topaz diadem off Cervoran's head.

The wizard shrieked like a circling marsh hawk. His hands fell and his body went limp. She caught him as he slumped, then pulled his arms over her shoulders and turned, dragging him with her toward the ship. Cervoran was silent and a dead weight, but she'd done this before.

Breaking the spell had freed the crew of theHeron. Ilna heard the men shouting and praying, all at the top of their lungs for the joy of being able to speak again. Someone called her name, but she saved her breath for what shehad to do.