Land of the Burning Sands (38 page)

“Extrapolating from this trend… and in the clear understanding that trends usually do not continue indefinitely… nevertheless, I calculate that these overflights probably began to cross over Tashen four or five days ago.”

“Yes,” murmured Beguchren.

“That is a concern, my lord, because…” Amnachudran hesitated. “It might be better to show you…”

“Please tell me,” Beguchren said quietly.

Amnachudran opened his hands, a gesture of concession. “At first it was only red dust,” he said. “And sand, and a hot wind. That wind still blows every morning. Or not this morning, did it?” He glanced at his wife for confirmation, and she nodded. He went on. “But for the past several days. It comes off the mountains, so it should be a cool wind, but… and it’s not merely a hot wind, it’s a wind allied to fire, as Beremnan Anweierchen describes in his
Countries Near and Far
. Are you familiar—?”

“Yes, I understand. And after the dust?”

Emre Tanshan leaned forward anxiously, her hands clasped in her lap. “We sent word south, Lord Beguchren. So they would have warning. First came the red dust, carried on a hot wind. And the sun began to come up… different. Fiercer. Then…” her voice trailed off.

“We sent men upriver and down,” Amnachudran said, picking up the tale once more. “After our stream failed. It’s not only our stream and our pond. The river, the upper Teschanken, where it comes down out of the mountains, it’s run dry. Not merely low. The men who went upriver tell me that the desert has cut across the river’s channel and claimed all the mountains along there—” His wave indicated the general extent of the desert, north and much too far to the east. “Now, you may know, my lord, that Gestechan Wanastich describes finding, in his history of Meridanium, an immense lake high in the mountains. A lake that feeds the Teschanken and, so Wanastich had it, the Nerintsan River as well. I always wanted to follow the river north and find that lake,” he added tangentially, his didactic tone going wistful on this thought. “It must be a splendid sight: a lake as great as a sea, cupped in the mountains between earth and sky… Well.” He recollected himself. “But whether the lake itself has been encompassed by the desert and has actually gone dry, and what an immense undertaking it must be to destroy so great a lake—but, that is to say, whether the griffins have destroyed the lake or merely cut across the Teschanken south of the lake, we’ve no way of knowing.”

There was a little silence. Gereint thought about the Teschanken and Nerintsan Rivers, which not only linked north to south but also watered all of Meridanium and the whole eastern half of Casmantium. If the whole lower Teschanken ran dry—not merely low, but dry, as Amnachudran said—he said in a low voice, “Casmantium can’t exist without the river.”

“Not as it is presently constituted, no,” agreed Emre Tanshan.

“Without the rivers, a good part of the north will turn to desert,” put in her husband. “Not necessarily to a country of fire, but to a country where men cannot easily live. Our rain rides the cool winds off the mountains: If the griffin’s lay their desert across those mountains, none of our northern towns will survive. Tashen, Metichteran, Pamnarichtan—and over in Meridanium, Alend and Taub, Manich and Streitgan and Raichboden—everyone will have to flee south, as the people of Melentser did.”

“Dislocation enough to have the folk of Melentser displaced. But if the whole north empties, we will have nowhere to go,” Lady Emre said in a low voice.

“The river sustains Dachsichten as well,” murmured Gereint, not really speaking
to
anyone, but merely speaking aloud because his mind had leaped ahead and presented him with images too grim to contain in silence. “And Breidechboden. Geierand will do well enough, and Wanenboden, and Abreichan. Or they would, if not for northern refugees. But there will be so many refugees.” He could imagine, far too vividly, the flood of desperate folk from north to south, hopelessly in excess of the numbers the south could sustain.

Peaceful towns like Geierand would simply be overrun and destroyed, as surely as though a plague of locusts had come down on the land, and far more thoroughly. But Breidechboden and Abreichan—he knew that the great cities of the south would arm against the mass of northern refugees—they would have no choice—he tried not to imagine soldiers in their shining ranks drawn up against the ragged multitude of refugees, but the images were vividly compelling and he could not put them out of his mind. He said, his tone hushed with horror, “Casmantium will be destroyed. It can’t sustain this blow. Something will survive, but… I think it won’t be a country any of us will recognize. It will be something small and poor and weak and well practiced in brutality…”

Beguchren settled back in his chair, tented his hands, and gazed at Gereint over the tips of his fingers. “Destroying Casmantium is, I believe, the griffins’ whole intention,” he agreed.

“How can they dare? However strong they are—however few cold mages we have—how many griffins can there
be
? A few thousand? They must know we will spend however many men and mages we have to stop this—”

“Due to a slight miscalculation on our part, and a tremendous stroke of good fortune on theirs, the griffins at this time possess an immense advantage that we may not, in fact, be able to overcome.” Beguchren’s quiet, uninflected voice concealed, barely, a horror that, Gereint was beginning to suspect, equaled his own.

Everyone gazed at the frost-haired mage, waiting. For a moment, Gereint thought he was not going to answer their unspoken question. But he said eventually, “I should think you had word of the, ah, the broad outline of events in Feierabiand.”

“Well, yes, an outline, at least,” Lady Emre said sympathetically. “I was very sorry to hear of your loss, Beguchren.”

“Yes,” the mage said, and paused. For the first time, Gereint wondered exactly how many cold mages had died in Feierabiand: all of them, he knew, except Beguchren. Half a dozen? A dozen? And how many of those mages had been Beguchren’s personal friends? He had understood the tactical problems that arose from the lack of cold mages—or at least, he had understood that tactical problems did arise from that lack—but now, for the first time, he flinched from the question of how it would feel to be the only surviving mage.

“But you—” began Amnachudran, but stopped.

“But, Beguchren,” protested Lady Emre, bolder than her husband, “you’re only one man, after all, however powerful—”

“I can effectively oppose fire. I am alone, but so is the remaining griffin mage, I believe.” Beguchren’s voice had gone taut. “He is very powerful, but I can challenge him. If it were only he and I, I would challenge him and win. But there is now a fire mage in the high desert who was born human, whose nature is not quite the nature of a griffin. Had you heard so? Well, it is true. She lends the griffins an advantage I—we—cannot well answer.

“We hadn’t thought the griffins bent on our destruction. They seemed otherwise inclined, and we didn’t understand that they might use Melentser as a bridgehead to support an attack on all of Casmantium. Or, as you might guess, we would have tried much harder to prevent them taking Melentser. But we failed of imagination, to our great cost. Now, with that human fire mage to support them, a few thousand griffins may well match all the men and mages we can possibly bring to this… conflict.” He did not quite say “war.”

“But…” Gereint protested, but then, under Beguchren’s level gaze, did not know what to say and fell silent once more.

“I have one method in mind that may hold some promise.” Beguchren turned his gaze toward Eben Amnachudran. “I will wish to see the desert. I also wish my associate Gereint Enseichen to see the desert.”

Gereint kept his expression placid, refusing to be drawn.

Beguchren finished quietly, “Then I will need a day or two to arrange… certain matters. I will have instructions for you, I believe. And then… we shall see what can be done.”

“If you believe anything can be done, my lord,” Eben Amnachudran said fervently, “I assure you, my household and all my resources are entirely at your service.”

Beguchren inclined his head in courteous, unsurprised acceptance of this offer. But his glance at Gereint questioned whether Gereint too might be willing to place everything he owned and all his resources at his service.

“I understand why you want me to see this,” Gereint said to him a little later, as they made ready to ride up into the hills and look at the desert that, they were assured, lay hardly any distance from the estate. “But I’ve seen it before. It hardly seems necessary to ride out to the desert on my account. What if there are griffins there? Their mage, the one you say opposes you, what if he is there now, today, waiting for you?”

“He is not. He is the last of the great griffin mages; he will be too wise to risk himself against me when he has no need. He will not face me directly unless I can manage to force a confrontation.”

“Can you?”

Beguchren lifted an ironic eyebrow. “The griffin mage thinks not, I suspect. He is mistaken. I will force him to face me, Gereint, but not today, and not until I have arranged circumstances to my liking.”

Gereint shrugged noncommittal acceptance of this assurance, took the reins of both the horses a hostler had led out for them—not the black mares, which had been turned out to rest, but a pair of Amnachudran’s horses that he had loaned them for the afternoon—and without comment turned to assist Beguchren to mount. Equally without comment, the small mage set his foot in the cupped hands Gereint offered. Straightening, Gereint tossed him up into his saddle without effort. He said, “An easy ride up into the hills, an easy ride back in time for supper: That’s the idea, is it?”

Beguchren gathered up his reins, gazing down at Gereint with a wry look in his pale eyes. “Just so.”

“We don’t intend to do anything more than look at the desert this afternoon.”

“Just so,” Beguchren repeated.

Gereint shook his head, asked rhetorically, “Why do I doubt that assurance?”

“You needn’t. It’s quite true.”

“I’ve seen the griffin’s desert before,” Gereint repeated.

“Then this afternoon you can see it again. Or will you balk?”

“Now? No. Maybe later. Now, it’s either too late to shy away, or too early.” Gereint swung up into the saddle of the other horse, a sturdy bay gelding with the height to carry a man his size, and gave Beguchren an ironic little nod.

The mage didn’t flinch from that irony, but only led the way out of the courtyard and through the near orchard without hesitation, heading straight north as though he knew exactly where he was going.

He probably did, Gereint reflected. Probably he could feel the precise border where the country of earth gave way to the country of fire; probably it was like an ordinary man watching a storm approach across the southern plains, or the line of a swift brush fire pass through a woodland. Something obvious, powerful, and potentially dangerous.

There was no red dust riding a hot wind today; Beguchren’s doing, Gereint suspected. But the orchards showed the effects of the past few days: The leaves of the apple trees had gone dry and brown around the edges, and the green was leaching away to browns and yellows as though the season had already turned. Ripe and near-ripe fruit had been picked, but the unripe apples still on the trees were shriveling on the branches.

They passed the empty pond and rode up along the dry bed of the stream that should have fed it, topped the hill and headed up again at an angle along the slope of the next hill. Then they crested that hill and looked down across the slope that fell away from them toward the next, higher, rank of hills, leading to the mountains beyond.

The edge of the desert lay directly over the crest of the hill less than a mile to the west from Eben Amnachudran’s estate. Gereint had expected to find the border close at hand, but never so close as this. He drew his horse to a halt, staring, appalled, at that boundary. “How can it have come this far?” he whispered. “They’ve brought their desert all the way across the river. How can they have done this?”

“When we gave them Melentser, we gave them a hold they have used to claw their way across all this country,” Beguchren answered. “Let us go down to it.” Gereint could read no expression in the mage’s fine-boned face.

Gereint had forgotten the strange, terrible, profoundly foreign power of the griffins’ desert. He had forgotten the ferocity of its sun, the hard metallic glint of its sky, the savage knife-edged red cliffs that sliced the hot wind into ribbons. Flames flickered among the red sands, dying away again like water ebbing on a beach, leaping up without tinder and burning without fuel. No griffins were in sight; not riding the fiery wind nor lounging upon the red cliffs. But near at hand, two of the scimitar-horned fire deer flung up their heads in alarm at the glimpse of men and horses and fled across the desert in long low bounds, flames leaping up where they disturbed the sand.

Gereint feared that Beguchren might cross the intangible boundary between earth and fire and set foot on the red sand, under that fierce sun. He did not know what he expected might happen then—a hundred griffin’s coming down, outraged, out of that empty sky? The griffin’s own mage pouring himself out of the burning wind? Or that other mage who had once been human flickering out of the hot wind to meet the cold mage, perhaps. But Beguchren drew his horse to a halt a little on the earth side of the border and merely gazed into the country of fire, his gray eyes impenetrably remote.