Law of the Broken Earth (31 page)

But though the griffin mage was forced back, and back again, until he was pinned against the Wall himself, his blow had found its mark. There could be no mistake on that account, for even Jos and Bertaud, out of place as they were, felt the reverberation of power and loss and
destruction echo and reecho through the desert. It happened very swiftly, but there was a whirl of blinding sand and fire and an explosion of red dust, and then a single hard, savage cry of fury and anguish, and then, suddenly, stillness.

But it was not the same stillness that the king had imposed.

At first, even after the griffins drew back, Jos thought Kairaithin had after all managed to achieve his aim. He thought that Kes had been destroyed. Even though the woman he had known had ceased to exist years ago, grief rose up into his throat and choked him. He started to step forward, blindly, wanting at least to look down at her body, or at least at the ebbing fire and white sand and flecks of gold that she might have left if she had been too little human to leave a body.

As he had before, Bertaud stopped him. Jos started to knock the other man’s hand away, and then stopped, for he saw with astonishment that again, though he could not imagine how, Kairaithin had missed his mark. Kes was still alive. She was standing beside Opailikiita, her hand buried in the soft feathers of the slender griffin’s neck, staring at Kairaithin. Her expression was very odd.

It took Jos much longer than it should have to realize that the Lord of Fire and Air had taken Kairaithin’s blow in her place, and that in her place he had been destroyed. He understood this only when the red-and-gold griffin who had been the king’s mate, crouching low to the desert sand, gave another loud cry, of such despair and grief and fury that Jos was frozen speechless and motionless by it, as a mouse might be frozen among its tangled grasses by the scream of a stooping falcon.

Everyone seemed equally frozen, griffin and human alike. Kes was holding one hand out to where the king had been. Red dust sifted through her slender fingers. She looked stricken. Beside her, almost as close as Opailikiita, Tastairiane Apailika stood so still he might have been hammered out of white gold. His fiery blue eyes blazed and his immense wings were half spread, the feathers like the flame at the white-hot heart of a fire.

The red-and-gold griffin who had been the king’s mate—her name was Nehaistiane Esterikiu Anahaikuuanse—flung herself abruptly into the brilliant air and exploded violently into flaming wind and red sand, and was gone.

For a long, long moment, no one else moved.

At last, Tastairiane Apailika turned his savage, beautiful, white-feathered head and looked deliberately at Kairaithin.

All the lesser griffins fell back and away, as though at a signal. Kairaithin came a pace away from the looming Wall and stood, outwardly impassive but, to Jos’s practiced eye, looking weary and heartsick and very much alone. The black feathers of his neck and shoulders ruffled up and then smoothed down again. His great wings were nearly furled. He turned his head to look at Kes—no. At the place where the Lord of Fire and Air had died, where now nothing remained but drifting red dust and flickers of fire. He did not look at Kes herself. Nor did he look at the white griffin who stood near her.

But Tastairiane Apailika looked at him. The white griffin said in a smooth, deadly voice that sliced across their minds like a knife,
Kiibaile Esterire Airaikeliu is gone. Nehaistiane Esterikiu Anahaikuuanse is gone. Who will challenge me?

From the depth of silence that followed, it appeared no one would.

The shining white griffin continued to regard Kairaithin. He was poised with supreme grace and confidence, wings angled aggressively forward. The hot sunlight blazed off his terrible beak as though striking edged metal. He lifted one eagle’s foot clear of the sand, his talons glinting like silver knives.

In contrast, Kairaithin clearly did not want to fight. He still looked dangerous—nothing could stop his looking dangerous. Jos did not think he was exactly afraid, for fear was not something griffins understood. But he looked as though, if he were to challenge Tastairiane Apailika now, he would lose. And he looked as though he knew it.

The Lord of Fire and Air has gone into the fire and the air
, the white griffin said. His tone was not exactly triumphant, but it held pride and strength and something more, an awareness of his own strength, and a willingness to command. He said,
I am become the Lord of Fire and Air. Will any challenge me?

All the other griffins shifted, not exactly rushing to put themselves at Tastairiane Apailika’s back, but reorienting themselves around him. They accepted him as their lord, Jos saw, and he saw that even Kairaithin felt the new power and confidence in the white griffin, that he could not help but respond to it, for all he was unalterably opposed to the other.

Kes said, in her smooth, light voice that was so nearly the voice Jos remembered, “Lord of Fire and Air! What wind will you call us all to ride?”

Tastairiane Apailika turned to her and said,
Break the Wall.

“I will break it,” said Kes. She looked at Kairaithin. She was not laughing now. She reached out with great deliberation to set her palm against the burning stone, in a gesture that was very clearly a challenge, and a challenge that she very clearly knew her former teacher could not take up.

Come
, said the new Lord of Fire and Air, to Kairaithin. There was a new depth and power to his voice. Tastairiane Apailika had come fully into his strength. Something about declaring himself had done that for him, or else something in the recognition of the other griffins. He commanded Kairaithin again,
Come here.

Kairaithin seemed to shrink back and down—not very much, not even with any perceptible motion. But Jos saw very clearly that the griffin mage had nothing left with which to defy the new king of the griffins: neither strength nor pride nor even the certainty that recently had sustained him.

Then Bertaud, with a courage and presence of mind that astonished Jos, walked across to Kairaithin’s side. He turned there, setting one hand on the black-fathered neck, and regarded Tastairiane Apailika with an expression Jos could not read at all.

Well, man?
the white griffin asked him impatiently.

Bertaud began to answer him.

What answer the Feierabianden lord might have made, Jos could not guess, but he did not have a chance to speak. Before Bertaud could utter even a single word, Kairaithin, with more decisive speed than Jos had imagined he could yet command, swept him up, and Jos with him, and took them with him, away from the Wall and out of the desert entirely.

The world tilted and turned, and raked away behind and beyond them, and they were standing abruptly on solid stone. They stood now in the mountains, in a high, clear morning above Tihannad, with Niambe Lake shining beside the city.

The city lay below them, quiet and peaceful, with no sign of any impending peril. Here and there bright-coated skaters raced along the lake’s edge where the ice was still firm enough to be trusted, but little wavelets rippled across the middle of the lake. Mist rose from the lake into the cold air. Out in the town, threads of darker smoke made their way gently up into the sky.

It was almost impossible, in this place, to really believe in the desert, or in griffins, or in the Wall that had so briefly held fire from the country of earth and that was now so near failure.

Kairaithin had taken on human form again, perhaps because he had brought them to a place of men. He stood now with his head bowed and his eyes closed, as though he had used up the last of his strength in bringing them here. Perhaps he had, for when he took a step, he swayed. Catching his arm to steady him, Jos looked at Bertaud in alarm.

The Feierabianden lord was not looking at him, nor even at Kairaithin. He was staring down at Niambe Lake and at the city, his expression closed and forbidding, his mouth set hard. He said abruptly, “We will go down to the king’s house.”

Jos only nodded.

“Unless you have another suggestion to offer? Or to force upon us?” Bertaud said to Kairaithin, with a coldness that astonished Jos.

But the griffin mage did not respond in kind. He did not seem offended, or even surprised. He only nodded in weary acquiescence and gestured for Bertaud to lead the way down from the shoulder of the mountain to Niambe Lake, and thence to the king’s house in Tihannad.

T
he road through the mountains from Minas Ford in Feierabiand to the town of Ehre in Casmantium was the greatest road in the world. Mienthe had not seen every road in the world, but she was certain none could rival the one through the pass above Minas Ford. The very best Casmantian makers and builders and engineers—Mienthe was not quite certain of the proper bounds of any of those terms, in Casmantian usage—had been years in the building of this road, which even now was not quite completed.

In some places, Casmantian builders had cut the road back into the sides of the mountains; in others, they had swung it right out over wild precipices, supporting the great stones with ironwork and vaunting buttresses, rather as though they were building a massive palace. Sometimes bridges seemed to have been flung across from one high place to another just out of the builders’ exuberance. The longest gaps had been spanned by tremendous iron
arches from which were suspended the most amazing bridges, hung on iron chains. All her life, Mienthe had heard of the splendid skill of Casmantian makers and builders. Now she decided that she had never heard even half the truth.

With this new road, it was possible to ride straight through the pass without ever picking one’s way far down a mountainside into a steep valley and then laboriously climbing back up the other side, as the old road had required. It was even possible for a long train of heavy wagons to cross straight through the pass, with never a perilous turn around the narrow shoulder of some mountain where a cross-footed mule might drag an entire unfortunate team off some terrible cliff. It was not, unfortunately, always possible for a few travelers mounted on swift horses to swing wide around such a heavy train of wagons.

Mienthe stood up in her stirrups, trying to peer ahead over the long train of wagons making their slow, cautious descent around a long curving angle of a mountain. She was quite certain her horse could have taken that same descent at three times the speed and been up around this mountain and up the next rise as well, and across the bridge dimly visible far ahead, all before these wagons would reach the lowest turn of the road and begin the next ascent.

“There will be room at the bottom to get around them,” Tan said, his expressive mouth crooking with amusement.

Mienthe thought his unfailing good humor about the minor discomforts and irritations of their journey might eventually become unbearably provoking. There was
some irony in that, since Tan was the one who had argued against making this particular journey at all. After alert guardsmen had reported possible Linularinan agents in Kames, asking questions about the house and grounds, Tan had wanted to go straight north as fast as he could ride, drawing the most persistent and dangerous Linularinan agents away with him. But Mienthe had worried that his enemies might also have already got ahead of him, waiting for him to run north and right into their hands.

With a quite terrifying quirk of humor, Tan had been very much inclined to oblige them. “The day I can’t outwit and outrun an ordinary shaved-penny spy or two, Linularinan or otherwise, I’ll retire from the game and take up turnip farming,” he had said, with altogether too much complacency for his own good, in Mienthe’s opinion.

Mienthe had wondered aloud just how many of those shaved-penny spies might actually be Linularinan mages. That had blunted the edge of Tan’s amusement. Then she had asked him how many times he meant to put her to the trouble of rescuing him, and that had done for the rest.

“You should be glad to see me go north,” he had said. “I can get past anyone Istierinan has in my way, Mie, and then let him try the skill of his mages against the mages of Tihannad. I know you’re longing to get back to Tiefenauer. You should let me go.”

Mienthe hadn’t been convinced that any such flight would succeed. But she was afraid for Tan to stay in her father’s house in Kames, doubly afraid now that they were both certain Istierinan knew where he was. At the same time, she knew exactly which unexpected direction
they could take that would lead them straight to safe shelter.