“Are they really?” Gar asked, hope sparking in his eyes. “They are,” Ranulf assured him. “There’s a sense growing in them that the lords are actually living wrongly.”
“Could they ever have thought anything else?” Alea cried.
“Oh, yes,” Mira said. “The lords are just part of the world, just the way things are.”
Blaize nodded. “Rabbits are timid, wolves are ravenous, and lords are cruel. That’s the way things have always been and the way they’ll always be.”
“And there’s nothing you can do about it,” Gar said grimly. Blaize nodded. “You can suffer it, or you can die fighting back.”
“And people are beginning to think of fighting back?” Alea asked.
“I haven’t heard anything like that yet,” Gar protested. “You’re right,” Conn said, “but thinking the magicians are wrong is the first step toward thinking they’re evil, and that means they’re way out of harmony with the Way.”
“Which means they should put themselves back in touch with it!” Gar slapped his knee in triumph. “The people are beginning to think the magicians should change!”
“That’s how it begins,” Alea said, glowing, “by thinking change is possible.”
“Yes, and the lords are aware of it, too,” Ranulf said. “Your villagers haven’t been keeping the Way a secret, you see. They’ve been telling the neighboring villagers about it whenever they go to trade or to help. It’s all over the district now—villages in five lords’ demesnes.”
“They’ve been talking about the marvelous sages who have been teaching them, too,” Conn said. “A dozen villages know your names and look toward this mountain for some trace of you…”
Gar stiffened. “How long before the lords send their soldiers to get rid of us?”
“Right after they punish the villagers,” Ranulf said. “They’ve sent guards in serfs’ garb to throw magical powder into the village ovens. They think one good round of vomiting and stomach cramps will make the serfs remember their places again.” Gar leaped to his feet. “We have to stop them!”
“Yes, we have to!” Alea jumped up, too. “But how? We can run down to our nearest village and tell them not to bake, but what about the other villages?”
“Conn and Ranulf can tell them,” Gar said, then turned to the two ghosts. “No, wait you said a dozen villages, and there’s only two of you. Can you recruit some other friendly phantoms?”
“We’ve a score standing by itching for some action,” Conn said with a grin. “More excitement they’ve ever seen this side of the grave.”
“Send them to scare the serfs into keeping the grain out of the oven, would you?”
“Gladly, O Sage! Come on, Ranulf, we’re heralds now!” The two ghosts vanished. Gar turned to the younger members. “Smother the fire and come running! We’re going to need to knock on every door, and quickly!” He set off downslope with Alea beside him.
Blaize stared after him, on fire with jealousy. Here he’d been studying ghost leading for five years, and Gar came from nowhere and in five weeks could talk the specters into doing anything he wanted! Well, maybe the big man would teach what he had learned, and in any event, the people had to be warned.
The campfire burst into a ball of steam that hissed like a thousand snakes. Blaize turned to see Mira holding a bucket mouth-down over the drowned coals. “Quickly!” she told him.
“Aye.” Blaize caught up the thick sheet of bark they used for a hearth-shovel and gouged up dirt to smother what had already drowned. Then he and Mira set off downhill after their teachers.
They knew they were too late as soon as they reached the village. Smoke from the oven fire lay like a pall over the common instead of spiraling up as it usually did. People were on their knees doubled over in that haze, retching miserably—men, women, children, old folk. Only Gar and Alea stood upright, but they stood in the midst of the people, the smoke had cleared around them, and two by two the serfs’ heaving slackened, then ceased.
Blaize skidded to a stop. “What can we do here?”
“Aid those whose spasms have stopped! They are sorely weakened!” Mira dashed out to help one old woman who was trying to climb back to her feet.
But some sixth sense, or perhaps the touch of a ghost’s warning, held Blaize to the spot, his mind seeking. He felt doom hover and, from what Gar had told him, the apprehension might not be his. He wished fervently that he could read minds as Gar and Alea could, but since he couldn’t, he used what gifts he had. “Unseen ones! Ancestors of these folk! Seek, I pray you, and find the enemies who descend upon us!”
He stood stiffly, every sense alert, feeling as though he were a vibrating string on a minstrel’s lute. Finally the wind came to make him thrum, a breathy voice that sighed by his ear, “They advance down the northern slope, five magicians and their guards.”
“Sixty-five in all! I shall alert our own magicians!” Blaize sent all the emotion he could behind his words. “I pray you, for your descendants’ sakes, slow the enemy if you can!”
“They move, they come,” the ghost warned him. A sound like a breeze told Blaize it had left, hopefully to harry the magicians.
He ran to Gar and Alea, pointing toward the northern slope, “The enemy comes!”
Gar turned to see the magicians striding down the slope, blue robes fluttering, each with his dozen guards behind him. He looked down at Alea, who nodded. They turned toward their enemies and the smoke from the common streamed away toward the magicians and their soldiers. In seconds, the common was clear.
The magicians halted so suddenly that their guards bumped into them. Then they turned, plowing through their troops upslope, away from the smoke—but the wind moved faster and the cloud engulfed them, settling over magicians and guards alike. Still some blundered uphill, no doubt holding their breaths, but most sank to their knees, bent over and retching. A minute later the fugitives had to breathe, too, and fell as the cloud enfolded them.
But two downslope magicians and their guards struggled to their feet and staggered farther down out of the cloud. There they drew great lungfuls of fresh air. “Onward!” one magician croaked, pointing at Gar and Alea. A fat electrical spark burst from his fingertip and sailed toward them—but winked out halfway there. Nonetheless, he staggered toward them, and his guards pulled themselves together and followed at an unsteady gait. The other magician straightened as much as he could and came after.
It was Pilochin.
Something snapped inside Blaize. He ran toward the woozy throng, crying, “Vengeance! Vengeance for a dishonorable battle, for a kindly lord dead though a dastardly trick!”
Pilochin looked up, startled, then narrowed his eyes and panted, “You had better … learn from … his example … boy, and … flee while you can.”
“Justice!” Blaize pointed straight-armed at Pilochin. “O spirits of this village, ancestors of those beset, give me justice for a good lord slain through treachery!”
Banshees howled, and the air suddenly filled with a score of ghosts, whirling like a tornado, their funnel narrowing to aim at Pilochin. The magician stumbled backward, crying out in alarm. Then the tornado struck and he shouted in pain and surprise as he fell backward sprawling on the ground. He scrambled to his feet and turned to flee in a ragged run. His guards stared at him, looked back at the host of ghosts, then threw down their weapons and followed their lord.
“Drive him mad if you can!” Blaize howled. “Chase him off the edge of a precipice!”
The ghosts might indeed manage that, he realized, for they closed in upon the magician and his guards on three sides, herding them with cries and moans and dreadful shrieks. In panic the men fled up the mountainside, tottering and gasping, weak from the retching. Some fell but kept on, crawling upslope away from the furies that followed.