Jo Clayton: Changer’s Moon

It couldn’t last. She pulled away from him. She wasn’t a baby and she couldn’t sustain the illusion that she was. Wind buffeted at her, shouts and screams came more dearly, Biel and the others were back, grinning at the success of their efforts. The tower was dark, only a ghost of the jewel glow left in the stone. Elsewhere along the wall the oil still burned and the massive wooden gates were beginning to char. The fire at the barrels leaped high, a thrusting, tongue of flame and smoke, geysering up and up, swaying, throwing out burning bits that kept everyone at a distance.

She watched it, weary and warming in the crook of Coperic’s arm. She felt empty, no hatred, no triumph, no anger left to prod her. A soft warmth brushed her calf, a coo fluttered through her head. She looked down. “Didi,” she whispered and bent forward a little, opening her arms, cooing her extravagant delight as Ildas leaped up and settled against her ribs. She straightened, stroking him into rapture, glanced up; her mouth dropped open, she pointed, gasped, “Look.”

Immense undulating serpentine shapes floated above the Biserica valley, dragons made of bending glass with waves of color rippling across their transparent scales like silent music. Tuli’s body throbbed to the beauty of those beings and the sinuous songs they were weaving. She held Ildas close, felt Coperic strong and steady behind her, watched the glass dragons invent their chorales and knew contentment so intense that every other emotion paled before it.

Hate coiled in a tainted mist through the army. The grinding sullen hate of the Sankoise that embraced the meien and the rest of the Biserica’s defenders, the norits that drove them at the wall again and again, drove them to slaughter, hate for Nekaz Kole, who jerked like a puppet at the twitching of the Nearga Nor and twitched the Sankoise in his turn, hate finally for all other Sankoise and a cold unrelenting hate of the Nor for the meien, the beasts (all men and women of lesser powers were beasts to the norim) that were somehow reaching through the veil of Nor-power and killing them, stripping away their certainty of their invulnerability. It should not be happening. It had to be chance. It couldn’t be skill. The beasts had no such skill. But, somehow, two-thirds of their number were dead. Doubt crept in and mixed with fear and as the holes gaped larger in their certainty, their hatred intensified, feeding on that doubt and fear the way vuurvis fire fed on flesh.

Where the Ogogehians were, the miasma stank more of anger than of hate, a spreading subterranean rage at Nekaz Kole for getting them into this morass. They were mercenaries and death was a built-in risk, but a dead man’s wages were of no use to him. Because Nekaz Kole had been a prudent, capable and occasionally brilliant commander who’d bought them loot and glory with a minimum of casualties, they’d followed him with confidence, making scurrilous but affectionate jokes about his appetites and idiosyncrasies. He’d gone from success to success until he was a serious threat to the power back home of the older generals, but now he was losing men and reputation equally. If he went down here, he was dead, no matter how long he lived. Five hundred defeating five thousand. He knew only too well the sneers and contempt, the stink of failure that would follow him the rest of his days, corroding all he touched.

Nekaz Kole sat his rambut above the catapults still hurling vuurvis at the massive gates, lobbing some high so it splashed into the openway between the inner and outer gates. An easy victory, Floarin said. Lean on them a little and they’ll cave. Easy money. He leaned forward, patted his rambut’s neck, looked down the slope at his disaffected army. The Norim had echoed her words. An easy victory. Just the wall. Once you take that, it’s over. They can’t have more than five hundred or so meien, only women, some of them too old to be worth much. He discounted their assurances and listened to their numbers and succumbed to temptation. Even then he knew it was probably a mistake; experience had taught him long ago that luck’s fair face concealed a poisoned barb; it had also taught him that his employers were generally ignorant and always concealed something no matter how forthright they seemed. Not for the first time he wondered what it was the Nor weren’t telling him. He seldom asked for reasons when the covenants were signed, only for what result his employer desired. The reasons they hired him meant nothing to him and he’d early grown weary of listening to them justify themselves. The rhetoric bubbling out from Floarin and scarcely less abundantly from the Nor around her had been so familiar and so boring he hadn’t bothered to listen, but spent the time planning the best ways of spending that gold, daydreaming instead of picking through the rubbish for clues to the barb that had to be there, luck’s unlovely face. He shook off vain regrets; he’d signed the thing, there was no escaping from that; breaking the covenants would sink him more thoroughly than this miserably botched campaign. He scowled at the gates. The vuurvis was eating slowly into them, held back a little by those triply cursed witches, but only a little. He glanced at the gray blur that marked the position of the sun. Dawn would see the gates so weakened that a few stones lobbed at them would shatter them. Have to wait till the vuurvis burned out. It wasn’t going to be neat or fancy, just pushing enough men through the gap to roll over that puny force inside. By tomorrow afternoon he was going to be in the Biserica’s Heart. He thought briefly about what was going to happen to the women and girls when the Biserica fell, but shrugged off vague regrets; his men needed something to take the edge off their anger. He straightened his back and contemplated the mountains stretching beyond the east end of the wall. The last of the Sleykynin were somewhere in those and in the mountains on the west side of the valley, circling round to come on the Biserica from the rear-if they hadn’t decided the whole operation was a loss and abandoned it. They were better at saving their skins than manning assaults, couldn’t be beat if you wanted an enemy cut down, but in a head-on clash they were too undisciplined, too inclined to fight as individuals rather than melding into an effective team. Probably he could count on their fanatical hatred of the meien to bring them into the valley, but he wasn’t going to depend on them. Any distraction they provided would be a help, though Hag only knew what Hern and Yael-mri were hoarding to use against him if he got past the wall-when he got past the wall. He watched the gates burning and smiled. There was no stopping him now. One way or another he was in.

He heard screes of alarm from the traxim and looked up. Immense glass dragons undulated above the valley. One of them coiled about a trax and began squeezing. The trax vanished like a punctured soap bubble. The remaining traxim fled. Kole ground his teeth together, raging at the chance that had robbed him of his ability to see what the defenders were doing. He glanced at the Nor beside him, his face carefully masked to hide the flare of loathing he felt for the sorcerers who’d sucked him into this debacle with their promises of powerful aid and who’d proved so feeble since. He forced himself to relax. “What are those? What do they mean?”

The Nor was staring at them and for a moment he didn’t answer. When he did, he spoke slowly, searching for words to explain what he didn’t understand. “They’re… other. Magic, but nothing She… or we… no one can command them. Third force. Do what they want where. Won’t touch us, we can’t touch them. She called, they came. I don’t know why.” He cleared his throat. “Won’t hurt, can’t help. Us or the Biserica.”