Some had. Most had not. Gar and Alea had many more recruits the next day.
Mira plunged through the mob of cheering, dancing ghosts and threw herself on Blaize, winding a length of cloth around the gash in his thigh. “You’re wounded? They’ve hurt you!”
“They only sliced meat.” Blaize sat up and caught her hand, grinning. “There isn’t enough blood to be dangerous. I probably won’t even limp a month from now.”
Mira stared at him, transfixed, then threw her arms around him with a glad cry.
All over the battlefield, barbarians were tending wounded soldiers. Longshanks looked on, puzzled. “Those barbarians were real! There were more than ghosts here, and there are twenty times as many of them as there are Corbies!”
“You did have a little more help than you realized.”
The barbarian looked up at the ghost towering over him. Beside him, Alea said slowly, “Longshanks, may I introduce you to a friend of ours—Conn.”
“And a friend of mine.” Conn gestured as a lithe, well-muscled man with a pocked face came up. “This is Hengst, war leader of the Ansax Clan of Cumber City, here with warriors from all its six clans!”
Longshanks stared for a moment, then stepped forward, palm raised. “Thank you for kind rescue!”
“Our pleasure.” Hengst pressed his palm against Longshanks’s. “Conn here came to us a month ago and started teaching us about the Tao.”
“I wondered where you’d gone,” Alea said to Conn. He grinned in return.
“When a friend of Conn’s sent word through a chain of ghosts that the magicians were marching against you, we realized that all the cities are connected, in the magicians’ minds if in no other way, and that what they would do to you, they would do to us all—so we came to help out.”
“I’m very glad you did,” Longshanks said fervently.
“You seem to have really taken to the idea of sending messages through a chain of ghosts,” Alea said to Conn.
“Your friend Gar started more that he knew, when he invented that ghost-to-ghost hookup,” Conn said. He turned to Longshanks. “I have other friends. Here’s one.”
Ranulf’s ghost came drifting up, followed by a wiry barbarian woman almost as tall as Longshanks with hair roached high and colored blue.
“Longshanks and Hengst, this is my friend Ranulf,” Conn said.
“And this is my friend Dramout.” Ranulf gestured to the barbarian. “She’s the war leader of the clan of Brandy from Vetarna City.”
“Two other cities come to help us!” Longshanks said, awed, as he pressed palms with Dramout.
“We’re all caught in the web of the Tao,” Dramout said, “so we might as well stand up for one another.”
“We shall, if ever you are attacked,” Longshanks promised. Gar came up behind Alea. She smiled at him. “Things seem to have worked out even better than you planned.”
“Yes, except for the people who died.” Gar’s face was set in grim lines.
Alea sighed. “People would have died in the magicians’ battles if you hadn’t come here. Women and children would have died from famine or the lords’ punishments. Now, though, the cities will spread the Way throughout the countryside, and the magicians will have to agree to a code of ethics or be drowned by sheer numbers. Every warrior who died here today has saved at lest a thousand lives in the future.”
“I wish I could be sure of that,” Gar said, his face haunted. “I wish I could be sure they thought it worth their lives.”
“Ask them.” Alea nodded toward a cluster of glowing forms—warriors’ spirits rising from their dead bodies, looking about them dazed and disbelieving at the loud welcomes of the ancestral ghosts who crowded around them.
“If you have any doubts, ask them,” Alea said again. “This is the one planet where you can, after all.”
The surviving lords, chastened by the example of the battle, signed a treaty and marched their soldiers out of the city, well aware that their movements would be monitored by a chain of ghosts reporting their deeds. The city clans bound up their wounded, buried their dead, then held a banquet for their new allies, who stayed a day or two to agree on ways to stay in touch in the future, even to begin work toward an intercity council. Then they, too, went home, and the next morning, Alea and Gar came out atop the tallest building with Mira and Blaize, who stood arm in arm, still dazed and delighted by what had happened between them.
“It’s up to you two now,” Gar said quietly. “This is only a beginning, you know.”
“Yes, we do,” Mira said, large-eyed. “All the cities have to learn the Way and join together. Then we can start to pressure the magicians to stop exploiting their serfs—but it will take a long time.”
“A life’s work,” Blaize agreed.
“Is it worth your lives?” Alea asked.
The two smiled into one another’s eyes and nodded. “As long as you’re with me,” Mira said.
“And you won’t mind if I’m a magician?” Blaize teased. “Can you be a good magician?” Mira challenged.
“As long as you’re with me,” Blaize answered.
“Don’t try to make the clans accept you as leaders,” Gar cautioned. “It’s enough to be their friends and teach the Way. Wait for them to come to you for advice.”
Mira nodded. “We’ll just be sages.”
“We’ll lead by example,” Blaize promised.
“Good enough, then.” Gar smiled, pressing their hands. “Good-bye and good luck.”
“Good-bye?” Mira stared. “How can you say good-bye on top of a tower?”
“Here comes our chariot.” Alea pointed upward. “Stand against the elevator motorhouse and don’t be afraid.”
Mira and Blaize retreated to the shelter of the blockhouse that stood in the middle of the building’s flat roof, then watched, spellbound and disbelieving, as the great golden ship swung lower and lower, hovered, then extended legs to the rooftop and lowered a ramp. Alea and Gar climbed it, stopped at the top, and turned to wave.
Mira and Blaize waved back, watching wide-eyed as their friends went on up into their ship. Then Mira pointed. “Look! What is that strange creature that follows them?”
Blaize frowned. “What strange creature? I saw nothing.”
“Saw nothing?” Mira stared up at him. “What should you have seen?”
“I… I don’t know,” Blaize said slowly. “I thought I knew, but I don’t.”
Mira nodded. “I thought I remembered something, but it must have been a ghost of the mind.”
“Well, there are enough of them here.” Baize smiled and kissed her, then said, “Come, let’s go down to join our friends. It’s cold up here.”
“As soon as they leave.” Mira turned to watch the great golden ship as it rose, hovered over the building, then shot upward, rising higher and higher until it was only a speck in the dawn sky, then gone. Her head was tilted back, eyes filled with brand-new sunlight. She smiled up at Blaize. “All right. We can go back now.”
“Not quite yet,” Blaize said, and kissed her.
Aboard the ship, Alea came out of her suite in a soft white robe, towel wound about her head like a long tailed turban, and collapsed into an automatic chair with a sigh. She let it adjust to her contours, enjoying the sensation as she remembered that only two years before, that same feeling had scared the daylights out of her. She stretched out a hand to the tall glass beside her, sipped the drink, then set it back and smiled at Gar, who sat across from her, similarly scrubbed and robed. “That seems to have worked out well after all,” Alea said.
“Yes, it does,” Gar agreed. “Care to try again?”
“Yes, I think so,” Alea said, “but not right away.” She frowned. “Do you really think those ghosts were real?”