I stepped out into the open night. The palace of iron and stone stood quietly on the border of the forest and the hills, showing no light. Everyone was all asleep, shut tight, tonight, in their iron rooms.
Safe and secure. Yet something had drawn me from my bed this night, brought me from my sparse but serviceable room to the balcony. The moon was a few days past full, and as I turned to look at it the cliff jutting from the rocky hills was illuminated. As I watched something moved, not an animal but a man. A man whose gait I thought I recognized—but it was too far to tell.
This just got a little interesting. The vestiges of sleep were rapidly vanishing from my mind and I stood straighter, watching the figure on the cliff-top. He was carrying a sword, and as I watched he pulled his scabbard from his belt and held the two before him. Slowly, almost ceremonially, he lifted the sword and slid it into the scabbard. The line of his arm and the scabbard cut a straight line through the moon.
And for an instant, I saw, or thought I saw, a hole, a gap through which the evil could pour. Pursuing us from world to world, it had found this land at last.
And then it was gone. But I knew that it wasn't just a trick of the night. It was a vision.
I leapt lightly over the railing of the balcony, glad for the pack of daggers already strapped to my belt, now wincing as my legs absorbed the shock of impact. Damn, I thought, I'm getting too old for this. I spared one last glance at the cliff-top as I headed into the forest.
Not surprisingly, the figure had vanished.
I hadn't gotten too far into the forest before I felt a hand on my shoulder. I spun around, automatically pulling a dagger from its sheath.
"Reond, take it easy. It's me."
The voice came and I relaxed. It was Shyeh, one of our original ten. Even though we had hardly seen each other since we had arrived here, I trusted him with my life.
Of course, you trusted Rybda with your life too...
I shoved the thought away. Now was not the time to brood on past mistakes. "You felt it too, Shyeh?"
Shyeh nodded, his eyes catlike in the night. I walked a little slower, trusting in the greater strength of two and in Shyeh's more experienced judgment concerning sorcery.
For that was what we were dealing with this night. The flame between worlds had been cut down of late, thanks to Shyeh's influence on the court and Jwan's less subtle warding of the forest itself. But apparently it hadn't been enough to keep the evil one away.
Either he had somehow learned to confine himself to our transport method, or he had found another way to travel between worlds. I felt reasonably confident that the second was, if not impossible, at least something that the enemy wouldn't be able to figure out on his own.
Shyeh fell behind me and I turned to look at him. He blinked, the action barely visible in the dark curtain of the forest night. "The others are coming as well."
I stopped walking altogether. "What do they expect us to do?" I asked, knowing that of course Shyeh's knowledge of the group's activities did not extend to this. He simply shrugged and turned, facing outwards.
It was only then I realized that we had stopped in the middle of a lightning strike. The trees bordering the clearing had obviously been burned, and some, probably already dead, stood precariously on less than half of the original trunk's girth. Despite the tense nature of tonight's...convention? confrontation?...I could still feel the strength filling my every bone, letting me relax. It didn't take Shyeh's level of intimacy with sorcery to feel the power of nature, and accept it.
There had been ten of us originally, a band of warriors in our own world pledged to defend the land from evil. The crown's elite. For years we had driven off all manner of mild scourges, and had deluded ourselves into thinking pure evil was gone from the world.
And in a manner of speaking, it was. The assault came from outside, first in the form of twisted monsteres, then in more devious plagues and natural attacks. It was Rybda who had first noticed the change.
Someone else was approaching. Shyeh and I moved to stand back to back before I felt Shyeh relax. A minute later, Sümr stepped into the clearing, with an uneasy look on his face. Dispensing with pleasantries, he slapped Shyeh's shoulder lightly and nodded to me. "The others?"
"They're coming," I answered, my voice sounding loud, dead sound in the stillness.
It struck me how unexpected this was. After almost a year of living here, preparing our defenses, yes, but also considering staying here forever, the seven of us were finally coming back together. In one way it made me irrationally proud. In another it made me deeply sad; perhaps we were fated never to have a normal life. Thinking about some of the people we were protecting, it was quite a misappropriation.
Maric and Jitz arrived together. Maric's brooding face was quite familiar, and I winced, knowing that there was an imminent conflict between us.
Sure enough, he came to stand right in front of me. "What's going on, Reond?" he asked, careful to keep his voice to little more than a whisper. It was enough, though.
"I don't think I know any more than you," I said carefully, and proceeded to outline the vision I had had. Maric's mouth became a grim line.
"So why aren't we up there right now," he said with a grimace, and would have started walking towards the hills if Jitz hadn't caught his arm.
"Wait for the others, Maric." Anyone else would have had to put more argument into it, but Jitz's very bearing gave him the charisma he needed. Maric stopped, then shook his head and waited.
Jitz's real name was Yohan Ristari the Third; he was the only one of us who was originally part of the royal family. As the crown princess's cousin, he had been given free rein in a lot of things, eventually including joining our group. Rybda's group. He was much too modest to insist on his full name or title, but his status and slight age seniority gave him enough power to act as arbitrator within the group and negotiator outside it. When necessary.
That made five. Assuming Jwan and Sehern had gotten the message too, they should be here any minute. Well, perhaps Sehern had an excuse for being late; he periodically was sent on government inspections in his guise as a traveling minstrel.
Shyeh turned towards me, his eyes alert. "Change of plans," he said, "Jwan's not coming."
"What?" I said, "Why not?" The others were listening now, too.
Shyeh turned outward a little. "The wards," he said, and paused. "They're being tested." I heard someone draw in a breath. Maybe it was me.
"They're not under assault, not yet," Shyeh continued.
"Small comfort," muttered Maric. Anyone else would have taken this for cynicism, but despite our conflicts, I knew Maric was simply being a realist. He had lost more than most of us in the last war.
"In any case," Shyeh finished uneasily, "Jwan thinks it would be best to stay and guard the wards. If something gets through there, you know we're lost."
There was silence. I knew what Shyeh said was true; the wards had originally been a backup plan but tonight they might be necessary. Still, I wished we had Jwan with us. Shyeh was a capable sorcerer but with nowhere near the same level of arcane knowledge.
Just then Sehern stumbled into the clearing. Even though he was about as fit as the rest of us, he was breathing heavily, and his eyes were wide. He looked up at Maric. "They're already here."
Maric spun around to face him fully. "What?" Sümr stopped pacing as well and looked over. And I knew I too was hanging onto Sehern's next words.
"I encountered two of them." Sehern shuddered and wiped his arm across his brow. "They're just anima, not curselings, so far. As far as I can tell they're animated paper." He held up a piece of aged wood-pulp paper with a sharp tear across its otherwise neat folds, and I noticed that his dagger pouch was one blade short.
"Then they should be vulnerable to fire," Jitz deduced. "Though it would help a lot more if anyone had tinder."
Shyeh tapped his chest. "Some of us can conjure fire." He looked around, realizing how condescending it had sounded, and amended the statement. "The rest of us can probably call up light, at least, to make them think twice."
"If they think at all," put in Sümr. "We don't know how much sorcery is actually in these creatures." Sehern nodded in agreement.
"What do we do now?" Jitz asked.
"We have to get this to the queen," I said declaratively.
"There's no time," Maric responded angrily, "There's no way you can convince the court to come on alert, and then by the time any defenses are up the castle will already be overrun."
"We don't know how many of them there are," I pointed out defensively, "and Sehern established that they're only anima so far." I didn't want to mention that we were only six—seven counting Jwan.
"And is this going to be another Andromeda?" Maric demanded.
There it was. My biggest failure in this group of ten, though it had been over six years ago. The one that had perhaps led to the loss of Rybda.
Jitz put a hand on Maric's shoulder and Maric took a deep breath. I gritted my teeth, then sighed. "Orion and Pegasus, Maric. It's a law of sorcery that if you draw too much from nature, you won't be able to use sorcery again." Judging from Sümr and Sehern's eyes, Maric wasn't the only one unsure of where I was going with this. "Similarly, if we act on our own here, not only will the palace not have gained any defenses, but the queen might even take offense for running loose in her woods."
Maric sighed as well. "I'm sorry, Reond. That was uncalled for. But if we simply return to the palace and try to establish defenses there, it will be too late." The dangerous look had faded, to be replaced by a hint of desperation.
Jitz looked at me. "Then let's split up," he suggested carefully. I stared for a moment, then nodded.
"Can you make do without a sorcerer?" I asked Maric. He hesitated, then nodded. "All right," I continued, "Sümr, Shyeh with me. Back to the palace." I gave Maric a more significant look. "We'll be back to join you as soon as possible."
"It may already be too late," he said darkly. Being Maric, he couldn't resist one parting shot. "You may think the queen and court rule here. The question is, rule what?"
I checked that my daggers were firmly in their pouch and accessible for an emergency, then looked back at him. "We can only ask."
As we rushed back through the forest, my mind drifted to those we had lost from the original ten. Strange how these things arise during the most important times, the most tense times.
Joed, the only real knight among us, had been the first to fall. He had had the misfortune to encounter the evil one alone, and actually came very close to defeating him when he was still new and relatively weak. But there had been a death curse, and by the time we had arrived, it was too late. He had been transfigured into a curseling, with terrible long ears and nasty, pointy teeth. We had had to destroy him ourselves, and allowed the evil one to escape.
It came as a shock, then, when the following night Edon had been found with a dagger wound in his chest. Caught without even his chain mail on. Three days later, the kingdom fell.
But the song of yesterday was growing fainter. We reached the palace.
I have to give credit where it is due; the court assembled extremely quickly for it being past midnight. Some of the clan lords were absent but we had no time to worry about it. We took our case directly to the queen, Rysti, of the well-respected Pine clan. She had been reasonably receptive when we had first arrived, and agreed to our requests—provided we helped protect the nation from its own threats, and shared some of our knowledge of sorcery. I had gotten the impression at the time, however, that she didn't truly grasp the magnitude of the enemy's power.
Now I felt more assured than ever in that assessment, and that depressed me. She refused to see the "paper warriors", as she called them, as a threat. "If they're vulnerable to fire, we can simply arm our warriors with torches."
She was right, in a way. The weakness to fire was our greatest advantage—as long as it was only anima we were facing, and not curselings. But if two anima had managed to get Sehern out of breath, there was a good chance that in force they would be more than enough for the palace's peacetime militia. I hoped Sehern, Jitz, and Maric were all right.
"But you had assured us that by keeping our world's flame small, we could prevent such evils from crossing over," the head sorcerer said in a nasal whine.
Yes, that was what we had thought. Our method of moving between worlds depended on the flame that each world cast on the etheric plane. Apparently he had found another connection between worlds.
The sorcerer frowned. "That doesn't make sense with the theories you've given us, nor with what we have learned of sorcery ourselves." He sniffed. "Just because you have deeper knowledge of some areas of sorcery doesn't mean you can treat us like fools."
Shyeh looked shocked, so I took over. "We don't mean to sound condescending. We don't entirely understand it ourselves."
"Excuse me." The queen's voice was sharp. "Discussions of magic should involve me as well." There was noted discomfort in the room.
"Of course, Your Majesty," the head sorcerer finally said.
"After all," Queen Rysti continued, "I should have seen this in the moon."
"In the moon?" I echoed before I could stop myself. Sümr shot me a stricken look.
"Yes." The queen looked directly at me, her gaze sharp. "How else would I stay abreast of all the goings-on in my domain?"
It took all of Shyeh's concentration to keep his face straight, and so his normally strong telepathic walls broke down and I could feel his frustration. And I sympathized. For months we had instructed the head sorcerer on the construction of the magical defenses, without the slightest hint that the queen herself could handle a level of magic as great as scrying. And although nothing would happen in isolation, the scrying might react unfavorably with our defenses. Or...perhaps something worse.
"Your Grace," I said cautiously, "Have you noticed any unusual activities of late?"
The question seemed to catch her off guard. "The challenge is to find the one who can keep me young," she murmured.
"What was that?" I asked, knowing I was overstepping the bounds of etiquette. I could imagine Sümr nearly glaring at me but I didn't look in his direction.
However, the queen had more honor than I would have expected. Despite my intentional faux pas, she recognized that the danger was not imaginary. "There has been a figure of a noble lord," she said brittlely. "I was not able to identify his precise location or activities, but that had merely intrigued me. I had not acted on this." She frowned suspiciously. "Or so I had thought."
The mighty warrior sheathed his sword...
Shyeh stepped in again. "It's not your fault, Your Majesty. As far as we know nothing happened until tonight, when the stars were in alignment."
"But there was no way. I would have seen it in the sunset..." she protested.
"It faded to grey," Shyeh said impatiently, "and you missed it. Your Grace."
And it all dropped into place. Astral projection was a much-derided branch of sorcery, known to be mostly fakery and highly unreliable even in the mind of an honest sorcerer. But it required precise alignment of the stars, moon, and sun, which would explain why the attack had only come now.
Except...if the queen truly could scry the entire realm, or most of it, she should have felt the stars connecting. The study of sorcery here was sufficiently advanced that the side effects of scrying under a connected sky should have been known.
I knew if the queen scryed again tonight, the evil one would be able to cut all through the moon and emerge here, probably less stable than ever. Yet if I simply warned her, I knew she would ignore my recommendation. Our fate was sealed.
"Forget prevention," I said harshly. Sümr and Shyeh stared at me. "We need to mobilize the defenses. Now."
"Now you're being ridiculous," the head sorcerer said chastisingly. "We can continue to minimize the fire and then nothing will get across."
I shook my head. "Fine. And thank you for the audience, Your Majesty." The head sorcerer looked affronted and moved to the corner of the room, pensive.
"Hold," ordered the queen. "If what you say is true, we will need defenses, here." But I could tell that whatever chance we had had had now slipped away. Still, maybe should would see her mistakes.
"There are three others who need our aid," I replied, but hesitated and looked at Shyeh. He nodded and stepped to the side. "We've all got to gather, all of thus who can still fight."
"But there are only six of you." The queen shook her head. "And you have no special weapons, and no wards...how are you supposed to stop an army, or this great evil of yours?"
I looked at Shyeh and couldn't help a grin. He returned it and looked at the queen. "The Infinite Beyond has no care for what you lack."
"Do you really think they'll be able to set up a defense in time?" Sümr asked, as the two of us headed back into the open night.
"Truthfully? No," I said, feeling the weight of that proclamation on my shoulders. "The queen sits on her throne, and doesn't feel the stars connecting. Until she can, how is she supposed to see her mistakes?"
"She was standing..." Sümr put in.
"You know what I mean." Annoyed, I slapped a branch out of our way. "And the pensive court sorcerer...Shyeh taught him too well. All he can agree to do is minimize the fire between worlds, and when he sees the other worlds fade he thinks he's found the right path."
"You're no sorcery expert either." Sümr grimaced.
I sighed. "Damn it, I know. I just hope Maric and the others are all right."
Something dropped out of the trees just ahead of us and Sümr came to a halt. I pulled a dagger from my pouch and stood behind him, waiting. Neither of us knew the capabilities of what we were facing, and so we were being extra cautious.
Even so, its speed caught me off-guard. Within a few seconds it had rushed past in a blur and as I twisted away I felt a stinging pain in my side. Nothing serious, and yet...
I turned and saw a small point of light on its body. The creature opened its mouth in a silent scream as the flame grew. Apparently it hadn't been too fast for Sümr. Within seconds it had turned only to ash and smoke.
"At least he's still just using anima—" Sümr began, when suddenly something swung over my head and knocked him directly in the temple with enough force to send him flying. He landed on the ground a meter away, his arm twisted awkwardly behind his head. I spun around—and saw the enemy, stepping out of the forest.
"It's been a long time, Reond," Rybda said as he lowered his massive mace. His beard had gotten wilder since I had last encountered him in person over a year ago, but the burns on the left side of his face were still clearly visible.
"Would that it be longer," I replied inanely. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Sümr stir and heaved an internal sigh of relief. If only Maric and the others were here!
But Rybda seemed to anticipate that thought. "I think the others should be dealing with my paper warriors right about now. There's no help coming." He laughed and involuntarily I shrunk back. There was something sickening about his laugh now, nothing like the bold happy sound it had been when he had been one of us.
The phrase "paper warriors" echoed in my mind and I cursed Queen Rysti for her obstinence. Obviously the connection between her and Rybda was stronger than she realized.
Rybda was speaking again. "Why did you have to abandon me?" His voice was almost plaintive.
I looked up, surprised. For a minute, the night hid enough of his features that I could see the proud warrior he had once been.
And then the moment passed as he continued to speak. "Leaving me with all the angry voices in my head, just make them stop!" He finished with an animal growl that I swear made the ground shake.
"Step into the silence," I answered, almost surprised to find that my voice was not quavering at all.
"How?" The old Rybda again, but tired. The voice of someone who had found the emptiness of slumber.
"'There is a place, 'cross the hills over yonder,'" I quoted. A death rite. Rybda's face darkened and he held up a fist.
"No, that will never happen now." He clenched his hand, and suddenly, inexplicably, I felt the force on my neck. I tried to pull a dagger from my belt but my arm wouldn't obey my commands.
"This is where it ends, Reond," Rybda intoned. "Feel the night enclosing you in its iciness—"
This was impossible. Rybda hadn't been a sorcerer when he was one of us. But now he was effecting sorcery beyond what any of us had ever seen. I suddenly hoped Jwan was still alive. I knew Rysti was doomed. But—
—making your mind wonder how and why—
Step into the silence, you evil one.
Maybe you can wash it away.
Feel the stars connecting, you pretty one.
Maybe you will see your mistakes.
Minimize the fire, you pensive one.
Just to make you think that you've found the right path.
Now let's all gather, you fighting ones.
The infinite beyond has no care for what you lack...
I sit upright in my room, still gasping for air. I go to the balcony and throw open the curtains, the door.
I step out into the open night. The palace of iron and stone stands quietly on the border of the forest and the hills, showing no light. Everyone is all asleep, shut tight, tonight, in their iron rooms.
From the cliff in the hills, a solitary wisp of smoke curls away into the darkness.