Katharine Kerr - The Silver Mage

Since Rori had flown all day, he needed immediate rest. He found a place on the outer wall where the stonework looked as if it could support his weight. He landed cautiously, wings akimbo, ready to leap skyward should the wall crumble under him, then settled when it held. From his perch he could see down the slopes to the hazy landscape below, a thing of patchy grass and tumbled rock where once had lain fertile terraces.

In his mind, however, his dragon mind with its long link into the past, he could see much further. He found himself remembering the long slope of another hill, covered with brush and boulders, choked with dust in the late summer heat. That hill was far to the north, he thought, farther even than I realized at the time, not that the distance mattered, in the end.

The Greggyn astrologers tell us that the end of a thing lies curled in its beginning like a tree inside an acorn.

The Secret Book of Cadwallon the Druid

‘You should leave me,’ Gerontos said. ‘Just leave me here and save yourselves.’

‘Never!’ Rhodorix laid a blood-stained hand on his brother’s shoulder, then glanced at the druid, standing nearby. ‘Think your god will intervene and save us?’

Galerinos merely shook his head, too exhausted to speak, and leaned, as bent as an old man, onto his heavy staff. Rhodorix considered his cousin’s wounds, slight if Galerinos had been a warrior, but grave enough for a softer man. The young priest’s arms, bare in his linen tunic, bled from a hundred scratches, the work of the thorny bushes and low-growing trees of this stretch of countryside. Blood stained the hem of his tunic as well from the cuts and scratches on his bare thighs.

All that hot autumn day the three of them had been scrambling through the underbrush in the rocky hills, trying to find a hiding place, taking turns supporting Gerontos, whose broken leg could bear no weight.

‘No use in you dying with me, Rhoddo,’ Gerontos said. ‘Either of you.’

Rhodorix helped his brother sit down among the boulders. Gerontos’s leg, snapped below the knee by a savage axe, had turned purplish-black; blood oozed from under the bandages Rhodorix had improvised from strips of their tunics. He helped Gerontos settle himself, then got up and looked down the long slope of the hill to the valley below. Somewhere among the tall grass and the patches of forest waited their clan and safety, somewhere too far to see. Unfortunately, he could all too clearly see a small mob of their enemies, still some distance below them, but coming inexorably up the hill.

Just after dawn that morning, Rhodorix, eldest son of the Dragon clan, and his warband had been guarding Galerinos as he dowsed for water. Instead of a spring they’d discovered a trap set by the white savages. All fourteen of his men lay dead down in the valley; only he himself, his brother Gerontos, and the druid had survived the attack. Unhorsed, desperate, they had taken too many wrong paths during their attempt to escape.

I made too many bad decisions, not anyone else but me , Rhodorix thought. ‘The shame’s mine,’ he said aloud. ‘Better I just die with you here. Even if we got back, what am I going to tell the vergobretes?’

Neither Galerinos nor his brother could look him in the face. Neither said a word.

‘But Gallo, you can hide or suchlike,’ Rhoddo went on. ‘Get away after they kill us.’

‘If Great Bel wants me to die, then die I will,’ Galerinos said. ‘There’s no use in running.’

‘Well, how by the hells do you know what he wants? You keep praying, and we keep getting more and more lost.’

‘That’s why I think he wants us to die. If he’d only led us to water right away –’

A cry drifted up on the hot and dusty air, a shriek of triumph, an answering howl from a band of men.

‘They’ve spotted us,’ Rhodorix said. ‘Naught else matters now.’

‘Help me up!’ Gerontos said. ‘Cursed if I’ll die sitting down.’

Between them Rhodorix and Galerinos hauled him up and helped him prop himself against a boulder. Gerro’s face had gone pale under the smears of dust. Sweat plastered his dark hair to his forehead. Had his leg been sound, Rhodorix knew, the two of them could have scored some kills before the superior numbers against them brought them down. As it was, they could no longer fight back to back. Not long now , he thought. Soon we’ll all be drinking in the Otherlands.

Twelve men were making their way uphill through the rocks and the underbrush, twelve savages with manes of dark hair and milk-white skin, scored with the black lines and dots of tattoos. Ten of them carried spears; the others bore the heavy war-axes that had so efficiently shattered the Devetians’ wooden shields that morning. Some hundred yards downhill they paused to argue among themselves, pushing each other in their eagerness to be the first to attack.

‘Gallo, run!’ Rhodorix snarled. ‘Get out of here now!’

‘I won’t.’ The young priest stepped forward and raised his staff to the sky. ‘I’ll beg Bel’s help and try to curse them.’

‘A load of horseshit would do us more good than that.’

Galerinos ignored him and took another step forward. He stared straight at the enemy and began to chant, a low rumble of sound at first, then louder and louder. His words came punctuated with deep breaths, and every breath seemed to draw power from the very air around him. Each curse vibrated like a swarm of angry wasps as it streamed toward the enemy below. Rhodorix had never heard such a sound out of any man’s mouth. He felt himself turn cold as the chant rose and fell. More to the point, their enemies seemed as transfixed as he. They stood and listened, weapons slack in their hands as Galerinos cursed them, their women, their offspring, their clans, their future offspring, their crops, their herds, and anything else they might touch or cherish.

With one last bellow of sound, Galerinos cried out, ‘Begone!’ and swung his staff down to point straight at them. All of the ill luck of the curse sprang out at them – and a good deal more. With a hiss and crackle like lightning from a clear sky, blue fire leapt from the staff in a long sizzling bolt and struck among them. They screamed, began to back away, screamed again as a further shower of blue flames burst out of the staff and struck. One man fell backward, writhing and foaming at the mouth. Two others grabbed him, but he continued to twitch and foam. All at once the enemy band broke. They ran this way and that, for a brief moment hysterical and leaderless, then turned and began to race downhill, howling as they ran. A last bolt of blue fire followed them.

Galerinos stood staring, his mouth half-open, his eyes stunned.

‘What did you do?’ Rhodorix grabbed him by the shoulders. ‘How did you do that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What – you have to know!’

‘The curse never worked like that before! Back in the homeland, I mean.’ Galerinos paused to gasp for breath. ‘You heard me. I asked the god to send ill-luck down upon them, and from the look of things, I’d say he did.’

Laughter sounded behind them, an odd laugh, more like the plucking of a cithara’s strings than a sound made by a throat. Rhodorix spun around. The strangest man he’d ever seen stood leaning against a tree trunk and smiling at them. A slender fellow, he had yellow hair as bright as the paint on a Rhwmani standard, and his lips were a paint-pot red as well, while his eyes gleamed sky blue. His ears, however, were the strangest feature of all, long and furled like lily buds.

‘I doubt if your god had anything to do with those bolts of fire,’ the fellow said. ‘You know sorcery, don’t you?’