David Drake - The Fortress of Glass

The hump of smothering vegetable matter vanished under the insects' jaws, individually tiny but working in uncountable numbers. The hellplants had slowed their advance, but fresh threads swept up on a rising breeze. Locusts curved to intercept them, snatching the strands from the air like falcons stooping on doves.

"Benchuch bachuch chuch…," chanted Double. His puffy, waxen face showed strain, but a look of triumph suffused it as well. "Ousiri agi ousiri!"

The film of silver lifted again to catch the risen sun. For a moment the swarming locusts distorted it, but they hopped and flew out of the obstructing pile that had devoured the linked threads. White light glared on a hellplant, ripping it instantly apart. The claw of light shifted and destroyed the next plant in line.

Lord Waldron spoke to his signallers; horns and trumpets blew Retreat. Troops began thankfully leaving the earthworks even before their own unit signallers passed on the command. When Double's wizardry was ascendant, all humans could do was to get in the way.

"Lady, thank you for Your support," Sharina whispered. "Lady, I will build a temple here for the salvation You have worked for the kingdom and for mankind."

The wind died, dropping the threads which it'd lifted from the sea. The locusts continued to circle in swirls and clusters.

The sea's surface danced with foam. Birds rose from it, sweeping toward the ridge of the hills.

Not birds, fish! Fish flying!

They curled out of the water and flew low over the fields, leaving faint ruby trails in the dense fog. At the base of the hills they swooped upward, silvery bodies writhing and pectoral fins stretched out like sword blades. Their slender bodies reminded Sharina of mackerel, but their heads were things out of nightmare or the deep abysses: the eyes bulged, and the jaws hinged down into open throat sacks like those of pelicans.

When Sharina was a child, an earthquake had shaken the Inner Sea. Barca's Hamlet was protected by a granite sea wall built during the Old Kingdom. The shock had slammed great waves into it, kicking spume a hundred feet in the air. The next day the tide brought in fish with heads like these, their bodies burst when they were sucked up to the surface.

A fish dived toward Sharina, its open mouth fringed with ragged teeth. Sharina stepped in front of Tenoctris and brought her knife around in a quick stroke. The fish wasn't attacking. Rather, it'd swept through the cloud of locusts, gulping down a mass of them and then cocking up its rigid fins to bank away.

Sharina's blade sheared off half the right fin and the tail besides. The fish tumbled out of the air and slapped the hard soil, its body trembling as its mouth opened and shut. Wizardlight dusted the air around it scarlet, then vanished as the creature died.

Fish slashed and curvetted through the mirror. The silver film reformed after each impact like water pelted by raindrops, but the ripples robbed its surface of the perfect focus which alone could concentrate the light into a sword. The hellplants resumed their march.

"Tacharchen!" Double shouted, pointing his athame toward the sea; his film of silver collapsed again into the soil. Double turned and stalked back to his case of paraphernalia.

"Oh, my goodness…," Tenoctris said. Sharina glanced at her; the old wizard was staring raptly at what seemed empty sky.

Tenoctris was aware of-perhaps 'saw' wasn't the correct word-the play of forces with which all wizards worked. Sharina suspected from past experience that Tenoctris actually understood those forces better than did wizards who had greater ability to affect them.

"What's-" Sharina said, but she fell silent because her coming question-what's going on, what do you see?-was idle curiosity and Tenoctris was clearly busy with important things.

Using Sharina's arm as a brace, the old wizard seated herself on the ground and pulled out a bamboo split. She quickly drew a pentagram in the thin soil. As she concentrated, she muttered, "Don't let anyone disturb me, if you please."

"Captain Ascor!" Sharina ordered, much more sharply than she'd intended. "Put a ring of men around Lady Tenoctris. Don't let anyone or anything close to her, any one!"

A squad Blood Eagles shuffled about the old wizard, facing outward and lifting their shields as much by instinct as for cause. Sharina, glancing between the men's legs, saw Tenoctris scoop a shallow depression in the center of her pentagram. She filled it with what seemed to be water from an agate bottle with a stopper of cork.

Double took a spray of black feathers from his case. He crossed them on the ground into a six-pointed star, then began chanting. Sharina couldn't hear the high-pitched words over the whistle the fish made as their fins cut the air.

Tenoctris bent toward her image, mumbling words of power. If the guards heard her chanting, they kept that awareness out of their stolid faces.

Fish swooped and sailed, gulping down locusts but paying no attention to the assembled troops. Some soldiers batted at them with swords or spear shafts. They were harder to hit than they seemed, banking and curving more easily than such stiff-bodied creatures should've been capable of.

When a fish was knocked down, it flopped brokenly for a few moments, then died in a haze of escaping wizardlight. It didn't matter: there were thousands more flying, and a roiling sea from which any number could lift if the Green Woman found it necessary.

"Anoch anoch…," Double shouted, raising his athame like the staff of a banner. "Katembreimo!"

Though fog thick as a storm cloud darkened the basin of the hills, the sky overhead was blue and promised a hot day when the sun rose higher. Flecks speckled it suddenly: growing, diving; screeching like steel on stone. Each speck was a bird with a feathered serpent tail and its toothed beak open. They screamed as they tore into the fish. The birds had come from a clear sky and they continued to come, as many as raindrops in a summer storm.

The birds struck their prey with beaks, talons, and sometimes the hooked claws projecting from the angle of their stubby wings. They knocked the fish down with gaping wounds and flew on to kill more, never pausing to devour past victims. Sometimes locusts, freed from the torn bellies of falling fish, fluttered off dazedly.

Double was chanting again, his words barely audible through the chorus of his terrible birds. Familiarity made the spell ring in Sharina's mind, though: "…benchuch bachuch chuch…"

The mirror rose, catching the full sun and sending its blazing radiance onto the plain again. Light carved through the mist, spinning pale whorls to either side and striking a plant that was mounting the abandoned breastworks. It fell apart.

The birds dived and screamed and killed. Friends-allies, at least-though the creatures were, Sharina kept her knife ready in case one flew too close. Seemingly the birds avoided humans in their circuits, but they fouled the air with the stench of a snake den.

The sea was silent, almost glassy smooth, while the mirror licked another hellplant and the next. The plants moved sluggishly, lacking the inexorable certainty with which they'd begun their assault.

Double was chanting. The skin over his white forehead was tight but his lips were twisted in a grin and he stood as firm as a tree with deep-driven roots. Sharina knew how physically demanding wizardry was. She had no trust or affection for Double, but as Tenoctris had said from the beginning: his strength was remarkable.

The thought made Sharina glance at Tenoctris, who continued to mouth words of power. Though her bamboo wand tapped out the syllables, no flicker of wizardlight brightened the air above her figure. The water in her bowl shivered.

The ground trembled faintly but unmistakably. Sharina felt as though she were standing on the back of an ox, feeling the beat of its great heart through the soles of her feet. She turned to Tenoctris, but the old wizard's concentration was so fierce that Sharina didn't even start to ask the frightened question that instinct had brought to the tip of her tongue.