Mira stared at Blaize in astonishment. He stood rigid, fists clenched, face distorted with anger.
The cloud of poisoned smoke drifted on up the mountainside, enfolding Pilochin and his men, though it was thinning rapidly. They began to retch again, but they kept staggering away from the village.
The other three magicians knelt gasping for air; so did their guards. One magician, though, managed to summon the strength to turn toward the village, raising an arm in command, then snapping it down as though hurling something—and half a dozen two-foot-long dragons sprang from the branches of the trees around the village.
Screaming, the wyverns plunged at Gar and Alea, talons extended.
11
Gar and Alea looked up at the screams. So did Mira—and her blood ran cold, for a wyvern-master had come to confer with her magician-lord Roketh once, and these were the sort of little monsters he had used to terrorize his serfs into submission. No one could fight even one such creature, let alone half a dozen!
But Alea didn’t know that. She glared at the wyverns, glared harder, the tendons in her neck standing out with the strain of concentration, then shook a fist in frustration.
One wyvern swerved to follow that gesture. Three others suddenly plummeted ten feet straight down, then flapped their wings frantically to regain altitude—but the other two still stooped upon their targets. Ten feet away from Gar and Alea, they suddenly shot three-foot tongues of flame from their mouths. Attacking her friends! Imperiling the kind protectors who had saved her! Something snapped inside Mira. She dashed out in front of her two mentors, slashing the air to wave aside the two aerial flamethrowers, screaming in rage. “Away! Leave us! Go back and pounce upon him who sent you!”
The two wyverns swerved aside, then circled high, arrowing back toward their magician. He stared, dumbfounded.
So did Mira. They had obeyed her!
Then the magician recovered and pointed at his wyverns with menace. They sheered off, circling high again, and shot back toward Gar and Alea.
They had listened to her once—they might again. “Go away! Go far from here! Go home!”
Obediently, the wyverns turned as one and glided toward the east.
“Come back!” the magician shouted. “Attack!”
The wyverns turned again, beginning to look confused. “They don’t fly as well when the air sinks beneath their wings,” Gar said.
Suddenly the flock plummeted straight down, screeching in surprise and distress, and this time Mira saw grass and leaves shooting outward in a circle beneath them. But there was no time to wonder—the wyverns were flapping mightily, trying to regain altitude, clawing their way back into the air.
“Tell them to roost and sleep,” Gar said helpfully.
Mira didn’t stop to protest that the little dragons wouldn’t listen to her, only threw her hands up, crying, “Sleep! Let slumber shield you from confusion! Each seek a perch! Roost! Sleep!”
The wyverns managed to catch enough air beneath their wings to start gliding again. For a minute, they milled about in the air, uncertain what to do.
“Attack!” the magician screamed. “Fall upon them!”
“Sleep!” Mira cried.
The wyverns churned in a wobbly globe, completely confused now.
“Sleep untangles the knot of confusion!” Mira called. “Sleep sends you peace! Sleep frees you from the commands of the tyrant!”
The flock turned and shot off toward the trees.
Mira lowered her arms, staring after them. Had she really done that? What? And how? There their master stood, howling at them and waving his arms, but they paid him not the slightest heed! Had she freed the wyverns from his spell? Impossible!
Livid, the magician pointed at her. “It is you who have done this, unnatural wench! Men of mine! Set upon her!”
His guardsmen looked up in trepidation, then struggled to their feet, still green-faced and stumbling—but stumbling toward Mira.
“Well now, we can’t have that,” Gar said.
“Indeed not,” Alea agreed. “But what can we do? Smoke was all I could handle yet, and I was surprised I could do that.”
“It would seem you are telekinetic after all, but it will take a while before you can trip a dozen men like these.”
“Why not?” Alea asked practically. “They’re nearly falling as it is.”
“A good point,” Gar said. “Try twisting the back foot as it comes forward, so the toe catches on the heel of the front foot—like this.” He pointed at the man on the right-hand end of the line, who promptly tripped and fell.
“Like that, is it? Well, now, let me see.” Alea’s face went tense with concentration again, and another man stumbled.
“Very good,” Gar said. “Let me demonstrate again.” The man on the left end tripped and went sprawling. “Oh-lead foot, you mean!” Alea glowered again at the man who had stumbled. This time, he tripped and fell.
“Very good!” Gar cried with delight. “You’ve learned the trick of it! Again, now?” He pointed at the left-hand end of the line once more and the next man tripped and fell.
Alea nodded and glared. The third man on the right went face-first in the grass. Then, in rapid succession, the other seven stretched their lengths on the greensward. Some of them looked up, glancing around apprehensively, but most didn’t even do that. They had been fairly felled and felt no obligation to stand up and put themselves in the path of magic again.
“Up, you cowards!” their master screamed, turning purple. “Up, whoresons! Up, or face the whip!”
“I can’t trip him,” Alea said, her voice strained with effort. “He’s not moving.”
“Yes, but he’s not all that steady on his feet, either,” Gar pointed out. “His stomach might start twisting again.”
The magician suddenly clapped his hands to his midriff, bending forward, face turning from purple to green.
“Then once he’s off balance, it doesn’t take much of a push to knock him down,” Gar explained.
The magician tottered and fell. He clawed his way back to his feet, still bent over and holding his belly, then turned and stumbled away toward the eastern road.
One of his soldiers saw him and croaked, “We must follow and ward our lord!” He pushed himself to his feet and staggered after the magician. Faces lighting with hope, the others clambered up and followed, tottering.
Gar and Alea stood watching with satisfaction as the last of the magicians and soldiers beat a very undignified retreat. Mira and Blaize watched, too, in utter astonishment.
“Of course, they won’t be willing to let it go at that,” Alea told Gar.
“Indeed not,” Gar agreed. “They’ll be back with several more magicians and a much larger number of soldiers.”
“Then what will we do?” Blaize asked, suddenly realizing the enormity of what he had already done.
“Fight them,” Gar said simply, “or help them to fight themselves, which is pretty much what we did today.”
Blaize’s gaze drifted off as he reviewed the events of the last half-hour. “You’re right! We didn’t really attack them, did we? Just turned their own foul tricks back on them.”
“That’s how the Way defends you,” Alea said, smiling. “Restore harmony, restore the beginning state of things, and the ones who clash with it fall down.”
“After all,” Gar said, “you seem to have a far greater number of allies than you realized.”
“You mean the ghosts? Why … I simply thought that the ancestors of the village might want to defend their great-grandchildren,” Blaize said.
Gar nodded. “You thought. That’s the main thing. You seem to have acquired a much stronger knack of persuading phantoms.”