Law of the Broken Earth (25 page)

In those years, and from time to time even now, it was Sipiike Kairaithin who brought Jos the odd tidbit of news from the human world. Certainly it had been Kairaithin who had explained how and why the Great Wall had been made, though never why he had bent his strength against his own people to help build it. The griffin had mentioned Bertaud now and again, however, and Jos understood, or thought he had understood, that Kairaithin stood as something of a friend to the man—as much as a griffin could befriend a man. He had envisioned a relationship something like the one he himself shared with the griffin:
ill-defined, perhaps, and awkward to explain, but a relationship nevertheless.

But what he saw in Bertaud, when the lord let his gaze cross the griffin’s, was something he did not recognize at all.

She has become wholly a creature of fire
, the lord had said. Jos looked at him for another moment and then answered slowly, “Well, lord, yes, I fear so. She has forgotten her past, or I expect she remembers it like a dream, maybe. She’s a mage now. The most powerful fire mage in the desert, I imagine—excepting Sipiike Kairaithin.” He gave Kairaithin a little nod.

“I see.” Bertaud was looking at Jos now. His tone had become almost painfully neutral.

Jos tried not to wince. He kept his own tone matter-of-fact. “Tastairiane Apailika is her
iskarianere
now. She’s listening to him, I guess, and she’s trying to break the Wall from the far side. And she will, too, eventually, if she keeps prying at those cracks.”

“Tastairiane,” said King Iaor. “That white griffin. The savage one.”

“Yes,” said Jos, not adding that all griffins were savage. Anyway, the king was, in every way that mattered, right about Tastairiane.

“Little Kes has become that one’s friend?”

“Friend” was not precisely correct, and though Kes was far from large, no one who met her now would say “little Kes” in anything like that tone. But Jos merely said, “Yes,” again, because this, too, was enough like the truth to serve. He added, “She and Tastairiane Apailika are alike in their ambition to see the desert grow, I think, and alike in their scorn for all the country of
earth. The Wall was well and wisely made”—and how he wished he’d been there himself to watch that spectacular making!—“but now it’s started cracking, it won’t hold long, not with fire magic striking through against the earth magic on the other side. Do we know what caused the cracks in the first place?”

King Iaor looked at Bertaud, who looked at Kairaithin. The griffin said nothing, only the feathers behind his head ruffled a little and then flattened again. Bertaud glanced uneasily away and said, “We’ve discussed this. We have an earth mage in our company, though under strict orders to keep hold of himself. But his first thought is to wonder whether the wild magic of these mountains, allied to ordinary earth magic but not of it, might possibly work against the magecraft set in that wall.” He cleared his throat and added to Kairaithin, “You might discuss this with him, if both of you can bear to, well, speak to one another.” He cleared his throat again, ducked his head a little, and finished, “We did send a message to Casmantium. To the Arobern, and his mages, and most particularly to Tehre Amnachudran Tanshan.”

Lady Tehre was the Casmantian maker who, along with the last remaining cold mages of Casmantium, had been responsible for raising the Wall. Jos had got a brief sketch of those events from Kairaithin, but only a rough one. From the significant glance Bertaud gave the griffin mage, Kairaithin might have left out a good many details.

Of course you have
, the griffin said, without any inflection in the smooth, dangerous voice that slid around the edges of their minds.
I will speak to the earth mage,
as he is here and perhaps may understand the southern side of the Wall. But if this making does not stand—
he meant the Great Wall, of course—
it is difficult to imagine what more Casmantian strength can do.

This was hard to argue, and for a long moment they all stood in silence.

“Well,” said King Iaor, glancing around at them all and then looking away, down toward the Great Wall and the rising billows of steam where the magic of earth met inimical fire, “at least we are here, where all these events are unrolling before us. We must be grateful for fair warning and a chance to prepare, or else we would all be standing in the south with no idea what might be coming down on us and no opportunity to influence events at all.” He looked at Kairaithin. “We are grateful for that. And for any other assistance you might see your way to offering.”

The griffin said nothing.

After an awkward moment, the king added to Jos, “If you would be so good, I think we would welcome a chance to speak further—of Kes, and Tastairiane Apailika”—he stumbled only a little over the name, awkward for a human tongue—“and of what you think might happen if that Wall breaks.”

“Yes,” said Jos, without enthusiasm. He had no idea what would happen if the Great Wall shattered, or what they would be able to do about it in the event. But he said, “I have little. But there is a fire, at least, and if Kairaithin would be good enough to take the shape of a man, we may all be able to fit under my roof.” If they could get the goat out from under the bed, they would also be more
comfortable, he did not add. And wondered whether he might be able to send a couple of the king’s men to find the scattered hens.

But even that thought was not quite enough to make him smile.

M
ienthe had been glad to see the queen and her little daughters heading out of Tiefenauer. She was relieved to know they would soon be safe in Sihannas. But she’d never for an instant intended to leave the town herself. She didn’t understand why anyone had supposed she would flee. Even if she wanted to—and she was willing to admit to herself that maybe she did—she couldn’t. How could she? She was sorry Bertaud would worry when he heard she had refused to leave Tiefenauer, but he would understand. She thought he would. She was fairly certain.

Anyway, by the time her cousin heard about Linularinum’s boldness, she hoped that Tan’s enemies would have learned that he had escaped them. Then the Linularinan force would go away again and she could send her cousin
that
word, which would be much better than having him just hear that Tiefenauer was under attack.

Anyway, Bertaud must be in the mountains now, as
hard as he and the king had intended to ride. He might be looking down at the Wall right now. Then he would have other things to worry about than herself or even the Delta.

As few as five days for the Wall to break, that’s what the griffin mage had said. Maybe as many as ten, but maybe as few as five. Four, now. Or even three, by the coming dawn. But maybe as many as seven, she reminded herself. And anyway, the Wall wasn’t
her
concern. Bertaud would fix the Wall. He would get his griffin friend to help him and put things right.

And after he did, she wanted him to find a message waiting for him that assured him she was safe and the Delta was safe and the Linularinan force had once more withdrawn to its proper side of the river.

She hoped she would be able to send him that message. She thought she would. Anyway, she doubted she was personally in any danger. No matter how enraged Tan’s enemies might be, they would undoubtedly think backward and forward before doing harm to the Lady of the Delta.

No. She was safe enough.
Tan
was the one who, Mienthe thought, might face pursuit and danger; Tan, who despite any other suggestions he might have made, was clearly the Linularinan objective. Or one objective, at least, for it did not seem reasonable that such an outrageous Linularinan action had
only
Tan in mind. Though, indeed, in recent days, Mienthe had lost confidence in caution or good sense or even clear sanity on the Linularinan side of the river.

Mienthe stood in the unlit solar, looking out across the gardens and the town but following Tan cross-country in
her mind. The road to Kames was rougher and narrower than the river road, deeply rutted by traffic in the muddy spring, despite all that makers had done to build the road properly. And the countryside was cut through by numberless streams and sloughs and even a small river or two. A man couldn’t ride fast on that road, never mind how skilled a rider he might be or how good the horse.

She wanted urgently to know Tan was safe—she even almost wished she’d gone to Kames with him. At least she wished she
could
have. She could have made sure he was welcomed by the staff at her father’s house. Sighing, she turned away from the windows, went out into the lantern-lit hallway. There were three guardsmen there, assigned to stay with her while this strange night played itself out. She wanted to ask them what was going on out in the town, but of course they would know no more than she. Less, since they hadn’t been gazing out the solar windows. Unless—“Has there been news?” she asked them.

They shook their heads. “We’d have sent any messages on to you anyway, my lady,” one of them said. “But there’s nothing. Only what we knew already. There’s fighting. But so far as we know, for all they caught us by surprise, we’re still holding them on the other side of the square.”

Mienthe nodded.

“We’ll send immediately if there’s any other word,” the guardsman promised her.

“Yes,” murmured Mienthe, and went back into the solar. She opened one of the windows and let in the chill of the night air and the distant sound of shouting and battle. Closer at hand there was almost no sound at
all: The few remaining servants were keeping close and quiet, as though if they were very still, danger might not find them. Though in fact there was another faint sound, like someone singing… Well, no, that was ridiculous; the sound was nothing like singing, but then Mienthe did not know how better to describe it.

The sound was getting louder, too, though it was still very faint. It might not be at all like a melody, but it was also not the sort of patternless sound the wind might make whistling past thin leaves or knife-edged grasses. It wound up and around, up and around, up and around.

Mienthe found that she was trying to follow the sound, only it turned and turned back on itself, wound itself higher and higher… She could not actually hear it; it had become too high and faint to be heard. Only she could
feel
it, turning and turning, and that was when she realized at last that she was somehow listening to some kind of mageworking. That she had been listening to it for some time, and that she’d somehow been wound up in it herself. She could no longer see the shine of lamplight against the glass of the windows, or the dim shapes of the town outside, or the stars above, or the sparks from the torches guardsmen carried out in the gardens. In fact, she could not see even her own hands, though she thought she lifted them and opened and closed them before her eyes. She might have been sitting in a chair, or standing, or lying in her own bed, dreaming. She could not tell. She could see nothing, hear nothing. There was only the dark, winding tight all about her, and the sound that was not exactly a sound and that she could no longer hear.

Young people who discovered the mage gift waking in them went to high Tiearanan to study, those who found
in themselves the necessary dedication. That was not all of them, not nearly. Mienthe had known one boy, a servant’s son. When the boy, whose name was Ges, had been about twelve or fourteen, his mother had shown Bertaud a kitchen spoon made of delicate, opalescent stone and nervously explained that it had been ordinary wood until her son had stirred soup with it, and now look! Bertaud had run his fingers over the spoon and asked the boy whether he had indeed changed it, and Ges had answered, even more nervously, that he didn’t know but he was afraid to touch anything else. He’d said that he thought he’d started to hear the voices of the earth and the rain—the earth spoke in a deep, grinding mutter, he said, and the myriad voices of the rain flashed in and out, glittering.

Mienthe had been jealous of the boy, not because of the spoon or even because he could hear the voices hidden in the rain, but because he’d gone to Tiearanan. Her cousin had given Ges money, and more to his mother, and sent a man of his with them, and though the man and the mother had returned to the Delta before the turning of the year, the boy had not. Mienthe supposed he was a mage now—or maybe still studying to be a mage, because his mother had said they studied for a long time and she didn’t know how any boy could have the patience for it, but that Ges had seemed to like it. But then, he’d always been a quiet, patient sort of boy, she’d added, with understandable pride.