The Spellsong War: The Second Book of the Spellsong Cycle (56 page)

“Now . . . for a ride. Let’s see what that gorge really looks like. . . . if it’s like I remember . . .”

She frowned. Could she dam the river? Well . . . Brill and everyone else had said spells either worked or they didn’t. She hoped she could find the right location . . . and the right spell. A dam was a lot bigger than a bridge.
But not as big as turning a valley into a volcano. . . .

Somehow that didn’t comfort her a lot. She paused.

What could happen? The Falche could just grow behind the dam she wasn’t sure she could create and fill up all the low canyons feeding into the Chasm behind the dam, maybe flood a few of the lowest fields in a year or two. Some day, it would flow over the spillway, and return to being the water source for Dumar. In the meantime, the Sturinnese might take over Dumar, and she and Jecks would have to decide whether a war in Dumar was worth it.

On the other hand, after a few weeks of dryness, Ehara
might
reconsider.

She shook her head. If Ehara were like all the other lords she’d run across . . . Yet . . . what else could she do?
If she invaded Dumar and blasted everyone with sorcery, without trying other alternatives, then her own lords, and lords or rulers elsewhere, would all be laying for her. They would anyway, but she had to make it harder on them . . . and give the innocents in Dumar a
chance,
long shot though it might be.

In the end, she reminded herself, she still might have to rely on force and emotion to devastate Dumar and prevent a worse mess later, or be reasonable and wait for an invasion or worse in a year or two, when Ehara was in the midst of a worse civil war and Konsstin was bringing sorcerers and armies into Neserea.

Wonderful options . . . but she knew she had to try the dam. A long shot . . . yes . . . but she had to live with herself as well as with the lords of the Thirty-three.

F
arinelli’s hoofs raised puffs of dust from the gray dirt of the trail. Anna glanced to her right, downhill through a gap in the mixed broadleaf trees and evergreens. The gap had been created, it appeared, when a section of the granite-like rock had peeled away and carried the trees at the edge with it. Beyond the gap was the gorge or the Great Chasm, and she could make out the steep gray cliffs of the far side for a moment. They seemed as solid as she recalled.

Ahead rode Birke and Rickel, while Birfels rode beside Anna to her right, with leeks and Fhurgen behind. A full squad of armsmen trailed, back twenty yards or so, there at Hanfor’s insistence.

The lutar was strapped over near-empty saddlebags, also at Hanfor’s suggestion. Anna couldn’t really fault her
arms commander’s caution, not after the ambush by Sargol and the earlier attempt by the Dark Monks.

“Here!” Birke reined up his chestnut on a raised hillock that slanted downward to the west, one where the trees and brush had been cut back to afford a view. The clearing had not been recent, since there were waist-high saplings and bushy evergreens.

Farinelli
whuffed
as Anna reined the gelding in beside Birke—well short of the overlook’s drop-off.

“This is the place where the Chasm is the narrowest,” Birke announced. “To the south, the cliffs are higher, but the Chasm is much wider, always over a dek, sometimes as much as five.”

“At least several,” murmured Birfels.

Anna smiled. Mario had been like Birke, always overstating in his enthusiasm. She pushed away the thoughts of her son, knowing she couldn’t afford to dwell on them. Hoping as always that Mario was well, she turned in the saddle to take in the view.

The scene resembled the one that the reflecting pool had revealed, if from a lower vantage point. The river was constrained by gray cliffs which rose at least two hundred yards from the floor of the gorge. Unlike the comparatively narrow stream that flowed past Falcor, between the rains and the drainage from the Synor and tributary streams, the Falche was on its way to becoming a mighty river. Below the cliffs, the river was fifty yards wide, but still filled less than half the riverbed.

Anna half nodded to herself. It would take years to fill a dam even halfway up those cliffs, considering how many deks to the north the valley stretched.

“That is the most water we have seen in many years,” offered Birfels. “Once when I was young Birke’s age, the water filled the gorge from side to side, so deep there was not even a ripple.”

Anna could sense Birke’s doubt, but the young man kept a pleasant smile on his face.

“In time,” suggested Jecks, “that will again happen. The rains have returned.”

“And not a season too early,” answered Birfels.

Birke nodded, but his eyes rested speculatively on Anna.

Anna glanced northward, upstream. They had ridden for more than two glasses, a good six to eight deks, almost due south from Abenfel, and the river had flowed through cliffs the entire distance, though the cliffs west of Abenfel had been lower, perhaps only fifty yards high.

The gorge had enough space so that, if she dammed the Falche, there would be a deep lake, not inundated farmland. That was important. Of course, once the water reached the top of the dam, or the spillway, the river would flow again, but that would be several years away, and at least part of the Sea-Priests’ fleet would be grounded in the meantime, and Ehara and the Sea-Priests might just get the message to leave Defalk alone—without Anna having to slaughter innocents.

Her eyes went back to the cliffs. They
looked
solid. Her sorcery had indicated that there was no better site. Still . . . would such a spell work? Could it work?

She couldn’t know that until or unless she tried. She nodded to herself once more.

S
he has withdrawn her forces from Stromwer to Abenfel. That is where the messenger found her,” Ehara announces, setting aside the scroll and leaning back in the chair behind his writing desk. “So much for your plans to have her attack.”

“She must be the one to attack,” says the Sea-Marshal.

“You say that,” answers Ehara. “Yet those who have attacked her have perished. So have those who have waited for her attack. So, if you would be so kind, can you tell me how to ensure that she attacks
where
we would prefer and without turning our forces into cinders?”

“Can you send messages into Defalk?” jerRestin asks. “Scrolls, rumors . . .”

“What will rumors and speculations do?” Ehara sits up, and his sudden motion causes the flames from the five-branched candelabra on his writing table to flicker.

“Incite her to anger. Anger precludes true thought and planning.”

“For her? She is from the mist worlds. She has ice in her veins.” Ehara offers a sardonic short laugh.

“Even ice boils if heated long and fiercely enough.”

“What rumors do you wish planted?”

“That you have decided to adopt the Sturinnese custom of decorative chains for consorts.” JerRestin pauses. “Or that you have pledged full allegiance to the Maitre. Or that Sturinn has pledged to send as many ships and armsmen as necessary to bring the sorceress down. . . .”

“I prefer the latter,” says Ehara. “My own folk would drown me in the Falche if I pledged to any lord outside Dumar, and the chains business . . . well, I see why you find it expedient, and why it would incite her. . . . Perhaps we could add something that said I had rejected that . . . for now . . . unless the Matriarchy becomes too restive.” The Lord of Dumar laughs. “The bitches to the east won’t act on rumors; they never have, and they never will. It could help provoke the sorceress. . . .” His fingers touch the full black beard. “Now, my friend Sea-Priest, would you kindly explain—before I extend my neck further—just how you expect to defeat the sorceress.”

“By devious enchantment.” Sea-Marshal jerRestin smiles. “She is not the sole sorcerer in Liedwahr. She is perchance the most powerful, but she is new to Erde. We lure her into a situation where she does not expect and
cannot defend herself against sorcery. Without her, Defalk is powerless. Now.”

“Correct me, if I am mistaken, but was that not what Lord Sargol attempted?”

“Bah! He set his trap so that a female child could see it. The sorceress cannot defend what she does not see.”

“And how can she not see it? She scrys everything, you have said.”

“Simply put—if there is no enchantment until the moment before the trap is sprung.” The Sea-Marshal smiles more widely. “She cannot detect a trap that does not exist—until it does, and then it will be too late.”

O
utside the unshuttered window, a bird twittered, one that Anna had not heard before in Erde, something like a finch. A puff of warm air brushed over her as she sat at the conference table in the room once used by another sorceress.

Anna pushed away the pile of spell-noted papers and put her head in her hands. She just couldn’t use Brill’s spells. The tunes were essentially monophonic, and even if she varied the melody she sang, there just wouldn’t be enough harmony and varied textures to support the heavy sorcery she had in mind. She didn’t have the theory background to compose a polyphonic spell, not one where the separate melodies meshed strongly enough.

She shook her head. Her eyes burned from trying to force her way through the awkward phrases and spellings Brill had used—awkward to her, but probably normal for Erde, she reminded herself.

The finch twittered again.

Is it right to do this? Is it right not to? Do you want to risk the chance that the Sea-Priests will put the women of an entire country in chains . . . and then all of Liedwahr? . . . But they might not. . . . And who will stop them?

The arguments and counterarguments battled back and forth across her mind until she wanted to scream.

Shaking her head again, she pulled out the crude orchestration she’d done for Daffyd based on “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” If she had to fight another pitched battle, the players could use it. In the meantime, could she write another set of words? One designed to build a dam?

With a long sigh, she reached for the marker and a fresh sheet of the rough brown paper. After a time, she wrote. Then she rewrote. Then she rewrote that. Finally, she murmured the first lines aloud.

“My words must start the damming of the river here below,

with a building of the strongest stones from where the waters flow . . .

Let the base be solid as the granite with no single flaw . . .”

Anna scratched out the next words, and glanced to the window, rubbing her forehead. She was no poet, no composer, and words didn’t come that easily. What rhymed with “flaw” that would fit the note values?

After a time of staring at the paper and then at the window, she reached for the goblet of orderspelled water.

Could she use the modified chorus? After slowly, carefully dipping the quill in the inkwell, she wrote out the lines.

“Glory, glory, halleluia; glory, glory, halleluia;

glory, glory, halleluia, these stones will last and last!”

The middle lines were too rough, and she needed a second verse.
Still using strophic spells
. “What else can you do? You’re not a composer.”

One finch twittered, then another, as if in argument—like the damned lords of the Thirty-three.

Anna stood. Time to find Liende, now that she knew it could be done . . . somehow. She still probably needed to refine her sketch of the dam as well, to ensure supports went well into the cliff walls and well below the sand and mud of the canyon floor.

As she walked toward the door to the corridor, carrying the music, she glanced at the smaller writing desk in the bedchamber where another pile of scrolls lay. Earlier she’d read through close to a dozen. She heard from Lady Gatrune of Pamr that her sister Herene was on her way to Suhl to take on the guardianship and tutoring of Dinfan and her brothers, and .that was one piece of good news. The rivermen had petitioned again, and that wasn’t. Lord Tybel had requested that, since Hryding had died and since Anientta was Tybel’s daughter and since Arien and Synope adjoined, that the two domains be temporarily joined under his oversight. Tybel had also requested that Anna keep that request in confidence, which meant that he probably hadn’t. So she had another problem on her hands, another lord who either couldn’t stand a woman running the lands, or worse in this case, a woman in Anientta who couldn’t run the lands.

She took a deep breath before opening the door.

“Lady Anna,” offered Lejun.

“Lady Anna.” Jecks stood in the hallway, where he had been talking to Rickel, the broad-shouldered blond guard, and one of the two on duty outside Anna’s door.

“I’m going to find Liende.”

“The players’ quarters are up a level and at the end of the long narrow hall.” Jecks gestured toward the staircase at the front of the keep.

“How are their quarters?” Anna asked, feeling guilty that she didn’t know personally.

“They are good. I looked.”

“Thank you. Sometimes . . . I just feel like I can’t keep track of everything.”

“Barjim and Alasia felt that way, and there were two of them,” Jecks said reasonably.

“I could get the chief player,” offered Lejun.

“Thank you.” Anna hadn’t really felt like running after Liende, but she also hadn’t wanted to ask someone directly. She found she had to ask too much as it was, and she’d never liked asking or ordering people around.
And now you’re in a position where you have to. . . . How God or the harmonies have a sense of humor. . . .

“I’ll remain,” said Jecks with a smile, “so that she has two guards.”

Anna doubted she needed even one guard at Abenfel, but she hadn’t thought she’d needed any riding the grounds at Loiseau, and that had almost killed her when the Dark Monks had spitted her with a war arrow.

“What have you been doing?”

“Thinking. That is hard for an old warhorse like me.” Jecks laughed. “It is much easier to run one’s lands or fight battles. Even to discipline a grandchild.”