I awoke to the edge of a blade pressed into my throat.
“Do not move,” Aliyah said.
I froze under the ice in her voice. I was desperate to meet her eyes but even more desperate not to die instantly.
“I won’t,” I said.
“You betrayed my trust, wizard Horwendell.”
I supposed I had, by the ordinary accounting of things. I said nothing.
“You will stay here, and you will return to sleep. I will not move from here, no matter how long it takes. If you but think to do otherwise, I will be very cross to be forced to explain to my queen why I was forced to bring her your corpse.”
I said nothing. Happily, I had fallen asleep looking directly at Hester, so I lay facing him now. He lay still but for steady, regular breathing. There was no mistaking it when I had cast the spell that anchored me to this realm: I had taken him with me. So Hester was putting on a very convincing show of being asleep right now.
“So, wizard?” Aliyah hissed.
I remained frozen. This was it. Even if the dutiful knight with her sword at my neck could be tricked into relenting, a fight was a doomed effort. Hester and myself, unarmed and having only three good legs between us, against a woman who was Hester’s peer in the art of the longsword? And however many comrades she might have at hand?
My world had shrunk. There was the dreaming city, within it the many shards of Lady Iltara’s will that would hunt me until I had been penned and tamed, and there was this dusty room on Mundus, this cot from which I may never stand. Every step I had taken on the journey east, my world had receded with me, not stopping to think about it until I had taken the final step into the queen’s perfect snare.
My plan was dust, another heap of detritus to stir aimlessly through the desert. I would have to resign myself to life here, somehow. Life alongside the thief-goddess. Perhaps a very short one. Hopefully I could find a way to keep Hester from getting killed.
“I…” I began to say.
The door burst open. I almost started, but I was held still by the icy grip of self-preservation.
The thin man with the moustache—I could hear but not see him. He was breathing hard and speaking urgently. Aliyah conversed with him, her voice hard above my right ear. The sword at my neck did not waver as she spoke1. He gave an order; she replied with annoyed obedience. They exchanged a few more words, and it was his turn to respond with frustration before he slammed the door. His boots pounded away on the dusty streets outside.
“We will speak more of this later, wizard Horwendell. I have orders, and you must come with me. Utba!”
“Yes?” Utba boomed. It was unnerving to think that a man so large could have been sitting in that room for so long without making a sound.
“Carry the wizard.” In one swift motion, her sword vanished from below my chin and I could hear it sliding into its leather scabbard. “We will go faster that way.”
I offered to walk with my crutch, but Utba, frowning, swept me up and hauled me onto his shoulders like a sack of hay. We were out the door before I could issue a complaint, hustling after Aliyah. I spared one last glance for Hester, carefully unmoving, on the way out. There was an ever-so-faint smile on his lips.
We hurried through the sandy alleyway. I bounced painfully atop Utba’s shoulders in his haste. We took a left back out onto the main street and then made directly into the gatehouse. Utba hauled me up the stairs, bounding three at a time even with my full weight upon his back (again, painfully), and then we emerged on the battlements.
I stopped breathing.
A band of soldiers stood in shouting distance from the gate. Sixty of them gleamed in the desert sun, arranged in two long ranks, armored in the old Ivian style—glinting copper scales worn beneath red tabards, long spears held erect in each left hand, each right hand resting on the pommel of a short sword. Each fifth spear was adorned with a pennant flapping militantly in the breeze.
Before them stood two apparent officers, wearing the same kit but with spotless white tabards. One bore a chin chiseled out of stone and eyebrows that could discipline an entire army without a second word. The other…
The other I recognized. He was huge—Utba-sized, but fairer of skin, the color of folk from the Hyng in the far west. And his beard was long and golden.
“What good fortune,” the hard-chined woman shouted over the distance. “Horwendell of Ilianath, right?”
Aliyah gave me a deadly look and nodded.
“Yes,” I shouted. “I don’t know…”
“On the behalf of the Fifty-Second Inquisition of the College of Apostles, I am here to bring you before the college. For answers.” That was the golden-bearded man. The man who Hester had knocked numb (and who I had helped tie up) as we sought the secret passages beneath the Hall of the League.
I took a deep, shaky breath, my first one in several seconds. When I had been rushed from the forge, I had thought Aliyah might have received the go-ahead to summarily behead me for being a useless pest. But it had somehow become even worse. I was going to be beheaded by the college and my mere existence would damn the people around me.
“Answers?” I managed.
“You know what this is about,” he replied. “And Theodric would, too, were he alive to tell of it. Now, would you be so good as to translate for us? It would be…”
“I understand you, knight of Ae,” Aliyah shouted.
“Even better.” That was the other inquisitor, now. I thought she seemed like she might be the commanding officer. “We have come to take Horwendell of Ilianath, Lord Hester of the House Eastmost, and Sister Gena, Apostle of the Third Degree for the College of Apostles back…”
“No.”
“… to Anteianum for questioning. And we demand the return of the relic known as the Liber Doctrina Tempestas.”
Aliyah laughed. And then she shouted “No” again.
“We are prepared to take this city by force,” the golden-bearded inquisitor shouted.
“An entire city? With sixty men?” Aliyah shouted.
“Ordinarily that would be unwise, yes,” he replied. “But you have a garrison of less than two dozen soldiers, no?”
Aliyah’s jaw tightened. She shot out something in Uri-Kedis. The thin man swore quietly.
“Your estimation is faulty. And every one of us who fights and falls will take ten with them. That is our promise to our queen.”
“Let us avoid a battle, then,” the commander shouted. “Who is in command?”
Aliyah translated and the thin man, who she introduced as General Amenem, stepped up to the parapet, and they began to discuss, with Aliyah serving as translator. I glanced up and down the battlement, leaning on Utba who had set me down on my own two feet only a little bit after mounting the wall. The inquisitor was right: the garrison was precisely sixteen soldiers, two of whom seemed nearly elderly. They stood with affected nonchalance between the merlons, but I could see them fidgeting at bowstrings and allowing their hands to drift to their quivers, searching out the fletching of their arrows. I knew that this was all of them because why else summon both Aliyah and Utba to the wall? They could just as easily have left one to watch over me.
What was sixteen ragged soldiers, a skeleton garrison for a ghost city, against a disciplined expedition of sixty-two? I caught snatches of the conversation. It was supposed to be a negotiation, but at best it was a piece of taxidermy. A long-dead negotiation that had been skinned and stuffed and posed as if it were a live negotiation. The inquisitor hurled, as best she could, carrots and sticks up the wall: that perhaps they might accept a formal delegation on the next month, that if any of us were charged with crimes against Lady Iltara that we could be returned to her custody after questioning, and so on. But Amenem wouldn’t have any of it. He was sure, it seemed, his skeleton garrison could hold these walls.
Walls were surely an advantage, I thought. But, according to military theory, physical obstacles are of sub-marginal value without effective overwatch. Or, put normally, a wall is useless if someone can climb it and throw down a rope when you’re looking the other way. Sixteen soldiers for the entire perimeter? It would take only one mistake for the entire defense to crumble. Sixty-two regulars…
… Regulars? I chewed on that thought as Amenem presented his own set of offers, also, inevitably, unappealing to the inquisition. How in the world did a small company of soldiers make such good pace east? They had originated in Anteianum, per their gear, and were presumably affiliated with the college itself. Would the college have detached a force like this weeks ago, when all that was known was that Theodric was dead? Perhaps they had used the Halls to catch up. But even so, how did they know about the city’s garrison?
Something didn’t add up.
But what did that mean for me? I looked around again. Ae’s soldiers out and below us were gleaming in their perfect ranks. Iltara’s soldiers were leaning uneasily on the parapets. Amenem continued to issue barely veiled barbs from his spot atop the gate. The golden-bearded man was beginning to fume; it was obvious even from here. Even Utba looked grim.
This was going to get bad. The arrows were going to start flying, the inquisition would look for an opportunity to breach the defenses, and I would be stuck in the middle of it with a broken damn leg. I needed an opportunity to…
“What will you do, wizard?” Utba asked, suddenly and quietly.
What would I do? I took a deep breath, gratitude for Utba’s simple question filling my heart and lungs. Just a few minutes ago, under Aliyah’s sword, I thought my final effort had been doomed. But the question served as a reminder that things had changed. My world was growing again. Great desert horizons and azure skies, to infinite depth in either direction. A slumbering city full of people just behind me. I had room to move.
But that room to move was thick with swords and spears.
Back to the plan: I needed to get to Gena. I had a way of getting to Gena, but I had to be alone.
I had my opportunity right here. I saw one way to seize it.
“Let me negotiate,” I said.
Aliyah was still translating some denial from Amenem, but Utba nodded. “You would?” he said. “It would be good if you did. If you could,” he said.
“Tell the general,” I said.
At the next opportunity, shortly after General Amenem had finished shouting something particularly acid down to the field, Utba mumbled something to Aliyah, whose eyes widened and then narrowed. She shot a “let me handle this” glance at the general and stomped over to me.
“What sort of nonsense is this, wizard?” she hissed.
“Let me negotiate,” I said, holding my chin up and meeting her eyes. Leaning awkwardly on Utba for help notwithstanding, I was not going to win this contest by looking or feeling puny.
“Do you take us for idiots? Do you take me for an idiot?”
“No,” I said. “Which is why you know you can’t hold a proper negotiation like this. You receive messages from Her Highness, of course—that’s how you knew I had fled. She can observe things in this world from her throne of dreams; I know that first-hand. But if she doesn’t happen to be watching right now, you can’t speak back to her. You can’t relay any of these terms to Her Highness. Not in a timely manner. Let me do that for you.”
Aliyah drew up. “We have simple orders. I intend to bring you to her.”
“There is no shame—there is no cost—in asking. You know I am to be a great boon to your people, no? I think I know how.”
“I have no trust for you, wizard. You made sure of that.”
“I know,” I said, wincing. “But you have to. Your other choices are so much worse.”
“What makes you think…”
“Aliyah,” Utba said in a deep, whispering bass. “We can’t die up here like this.”
Aliyah stopped.
“Look, sister. Sixty-two. Shall we slay sixty-two? Even if we could, half of us would die. Or more. Shall I bury you, or shall you bury me?”
Aliyah’s rage waxed, and then subsided. For a moment I thought she looked fit to break her own sword over her knees just to give vent. But instead, she closed her eyes, and then she opened them.
“Hayha Amenem, sut shyian was vizem Horwendell, thit ilaj,” she said, looking at me but speaking to her general.
“Fa?” was his reply, an utterance of total surprise.
Aliyah and Amenem conferred. And as the others gathered what was happening, I felt all eyes settling on me.
Amenem and the inquisitor exchanged the news via a a good deal more shouting. Aliyah told me the terms I would be carrying, and then I explained to Aliyah what I would need.
So it was that Utba and Aliyah lowered me onto the cool, smooth stone floor of the gatehouse while Amenem watched sourly on, an armored silhouette in the doorway. I sat, taking just a few seconds to make myself comfortable, I folded my hands in my lap, and I began the Communion.
The Communion is the signature work of the Wizards of the Seven Kingdoms, handed down to us by Ae herself. The Communion, properly speaking, is not just one spell, but is many spells and a great body of knowledge all supporting a comportment. A way of being. The wizardly way, if you don’t mind me saying. But the most important spells therein are the spells that unite minds and wills.
The one I was performing now was the most commonly used one: a spell that could briefly unite one wizard with any other wizard in existence.
Conceivably, I could have used this to bring the inquisitor’s terms to Lady Iltara: that the inquisitors be allowed to interview Gena, Hester, and I beyond the walls of the city, with a good faith promise that we would be returned to Lady Iltara if she would see to carrying out appropriate sentences.
That is not what I had in mind.
For better and for worse. ↩