Our minds touched, and there I sat, in a calm, empty mountain glade, like the ones in Ilianath. The sky above was alive with stars. Gena stood a few feet away, gazing up at them.
“You called me,” she said with soft amazement.
“Yes,” I said. It seemed only polite to give her a moment to get her bearings, though she already seemed to have adjusted well. She regarded her new surroundings with a cool appreciation.
“What is this?” she asked.
“The Communion. I called you to this place—not quite my mind or my realm, but a place where we can both be. Magister Akabu Ai taught me.”
“Not so different…” she began, trailing off as she took a seat in the grass.
“From the city of Bliss? Maybe, maybe not. How similar is a bucket of water to an ocean?”
Gena smiled at me. She looked a bit sad. “So.”
“So,” I said.
“Have you found Hester?” she asked. “What will you two do?”
“I have. We’re going to recover the tome.”
Gena sighed. “I have the tome now. But Howe, don’t you think I’ve been thinking about this too? Maybe I could recover and return the tome.”
“But you haven’t,” I said.
“I haven’t.”
“Might I know why?”
“The people here need it. They’ll be crushed without it. Dead, every man, woman, and child, for rebellion against the king. I’ve done a great deal of praying, Howe. It’s not how I would have gone about this, but…”
“Well, I happen to agree.”
“You do?”
“I do.”
“And you still wish to recover the tome?”
“Yes.”
“Why should I allow you, then?”
“I have a plan.”
“Do tell.”
I told her.
“How soon can you do it?” I finished.
“Right now,” she said.
“No, I mean…”
“Right now,” she said, smiling.
“Seriously?”
“I have done a great deal of praying.”
I awoke. Only a few minutes had passed.
“Aliyah,” I said, straining to get my limbs—the three of them, anyway—limbered up and ready to move. “Tell the general to get everyone inside, on the ground level. Right now. Take me to the south side of town. There is a tower there, no?”
“Yes. What is the meaning of this?”
A low, distant rumble of thunder shook Aliyah, Utba, and Amenem out of their suspicious glares.
“I’m doing what I promised. Aliyah, get me to that tower.”
“Why?”
“I’m going to save us all from divine wrath. Please, Aliyah!”
Aliyah hauled me to my feet and out the door of the little gatehouse in one swift motion, and we emerged onto the walls and into total commotion. Amenem was shouting orders to his little band of soldiers, who were plucking up any supplies within arm’s reach and trying not to stumble over each other over to the stairs and down ladders. Outside, the flashing of metal showed that the inquisition soldiery had broken ranks and were hustling to shelter by the wall, seemingly under orders of their officers.
Behind them, a titanic mass of onyx storm clouds was rushing over the western horizon.
The crenelations rose to obscure them from view as Aliyah and I lurched down the stairs and barely managed to avoid face-planting at the bottom. We turned up the main street, and just a few paces after we left the cluster of buildings huddled up against the wall, the wind began to tug at our clothes and the sky above us grew dark and cold.
We reached the square by the river as the first drops of rain began to fall. Little wet spots began to dot the dusty mosaic beneath our feet.
By the time we threaded through the last of the buildings to the south of the square to reach the tower, we couldn’t see across the street through the sheets of rain, and we had to shout at each other over the howling wind.
The building creaked and swayed beneath us as we made it to the first set of stairs, the second set of stairs, the third. My arms were burning with the effort, and Aliyah’s shoulders were hard and tense as she strained to push me ever faster upward.
“Get to safety,” I yelled over the groaning building. We were at the door to the highest balcony. “I can do it from here.”
Aliyah shook her head and pushed on, holding me up under my left shoulder as she had been the whole way. We were instantly submerged in the driving rain.
I glanced about to regain my sense of direction. We were facing east, out over the riverbed as it ran into the city through an opening in the walls. Two large black chains drawn across the river leapt and clattered against their anchors and each other, completely inaudible beneath the roar of the storm.
I cleared my mind. I looked north, and then south. I visualized the stars, a mental astrolabe overlaid on the roiling clouds. A gust of wind nearly took me off the balcony, but Aliyah held on tight. I wanted to ask Aliyah if she was sure about this, about risking her neck for me, but it was too late for that. All that was left to do was to do right by her. By Utba. By Hester and Gena.
I thought back to the veld, to the steady, swift winds: winds that bore wings and brought life. I thought back to the man who had taught me to call them, and I wondered if he knew, or if he had ever dreamed, of what I might do with that knowledge. I pushed that out of my mind.
And then I called to the storm.
The plan was simple. It was so, so simple. We had been thinking of the Doctrina Tempestas as one of Ae’s great weapons. But it’s so much more than a weapon. It is a law. It is command over the wind and rain. Forget, for a moment, crushing your foe’s army with the mighty wind and rain. You need wind and rain to build a kingdom that can raise an army in the first place.
So Lady Iltara wanted a weapon to overthrow the king with. But what she needed, I thought, was a city full of life and vigor. A people with water to drink and a river to sail.
“So we cause the river to jump its banks, back onto its original course,” Gena had said. I had been able to sense her sadness thawing, her excitement kindling, even in the ethereal Communion.
“Right. Just once,” I had said. “It’s a risk. Perhaps the king diverts the flow again. We can figure that out when we get there, though.”
“There’s a more immediate problem,” Gena had pointed out. “I don’t know this desert very well. I can command a storm, but how shall I know how and where to place it? I don’t know if I can get away with lying to Iltara about what I’m doing in order to study the river.”
“Leave that to me,” I had said.
Gena was able to summon the entire might of the spellbook’s most famous spell in an unbelievably short amount of time. “I’ve done a great deal of praying,” indeed. She had help, I would learn later. Even so, her part of the plan was the hard part. She had to channel the power. It was her mind that had to unfurl the knowledge and her will that had to bear the weight of the understanding.
All I had to do was call the wind as the duuchin had. The eye of the storm needed to be south-by-southeast of here—a little canyon rendered in gold leaf and ultramarine in my memory—and the winds needed to be northerly.
So I did, breathing a simple request into the mighty tempest and hearing its titanic howl change, ever so slightly, in response.
I held on tight to Aliyah, wiped water from my eyes, and watched. The building gave an alarming groan beneath us as the winds shifted, but then it held still.
As the winds settled on their new bearing, subsiding in their violence, I shuffled slowly and carefully, pivoting around Aliyah until I, too, was at the balcony railing she was holding, gripping it tight with my other hand. Aliyah and I looked down.
And there it was: a stream growing in the riverbed.