Now there were Kapperim inside the walls, a Kappra Shaman watching everyone. The women and children and old folks were held at risk, guaranteeing the tempers of the men and older boys who were sent out day after day to bring back fish for the army. Norits rode the lead boats in each village fleet; a captive merman who wore charmed metal neck and wrist rings swam ahead of the boats locating the schools so the fishers wouldn’t come back scant. Day after day they went out, and most days nothing was sent to the villages. One boat in each fleet, one day in five, was permitted to take its catch to the women and children so the families wouldn’t starve. The fishers worked hard, not much choice about that, but they were sullen, their tempers smoldering, especially the younger men. The older men kept watch and stopped revolts before they started, but the norits wouldn’t have lasted a day in spite of their powers if it weren’t for the hostage families.
The Intii Vann was looser than the others. He was used by the norits to ferry them up and down the coast; though a noris could pop across space by the potency of his WORDS and gathered power, the norits were limited to more ordinary means of travel. They had a choice between taking a boat or riding the Highroad where they’d have to face snow-blocked passes and attacks by outcasts. The boats were faster and more comfortable and a lot safer. To ensure their safety, the norits he ferried made the Intii handle his boat by himself, helping him (and themselves) by controlling the wind and water as much as they could.
The Intii had a tenuous association with Coperic going back a number of years, doing a little smuggling for him, carrying the men and women of his web up and down the coast and occasionally across Sutireh Sea. When the trouble began at the Moongather and the Intii found himself chosen as ferryman by the norits, Coperic and he wasted little time working out their own methods for passing messages south and handling other small items. At Sankoy, Vann gave these messages to men or women he knew from times past, who relayed them on to the Biserica, a slow route but the only sure one. The norits suspected nothing of this; they didn’t understand people at all well, they’d had too much power too long, they were too insulated from the accommodations ordinary folk had to make to understand how they managed to slide around a lot of the pressures in their lives. In their eyes, a powerless man could never be a danger to them.
Vann took up the roll. “If the army moves south, what do you do?”
Coperic sat back, his face sinking into shadow. “I move with them, me and my companions. We hit them how and where we can, we stay alive long as we can.”
Vann scratched at his beard. “I would come with you, my old friend, but I’ve got a wife and sons and a stinking Kappra Shaman with a knife at their throats.”
“You better figure a way to change that. If the battle goes bad for Floarin, well, you’re dead, your folk are dead.”
“I know.” Vann reached over, pinched out the wick. In the thick rich-smelling darkness, he said. “Take care going back. Norits see in the dark.”
III. The Spiral Dance-Moving Toward The Meeting
Kingfisher
The light bounded along before them through the winding wormhole in the mountain, leading them once more to the Mirror. The way to the mirror-chamber changed each time they went there as if the room they slept in were a bubble drifting through the stone. Or perhaps it was the mirror chamber that moved about. Or did everything here move, bubbles blown before the Changer’s whims? However many times Serroi followed their will o’ the wisp guide to meals, to meet Coyote in one of his many guises, to walk beside the oval lake in the ancient volcano’s crater, she never managed to gain any sense of the ordering of Coyote-Changer’s home. If it had rules, they were written according to a logic too strange or complex for her to understand.
After a dozen more twists and turns they stepped into the huge domed chamber that held the mirror.
Coyote’s Mirror. An oval bubble like a gossamer egg balanced on its large end, large enough to hold a four-master under full sail. Color flickered through the glimmer, a web of light threading through its eerie nothingness. A long low divan was pulled up about three bodylengths from it, absurdly bright and jaunty with its black velvet cover embroidered with spangles and gold thread, its piles of silken pillows, the gaudiest of greens, reds, blues, yellows and purples. In that vast gloom with its naked stone, sweating damp, its shifting shadows and creeping drafts, the divan was a giggle that briefly lifted Serroi’s spirits each time she came into that chamber and warmed her briefly toward Coyote.
He wasn’t there. That rather surprised her. She’d expected him to be titupping about, hair on end, his impatience red in his long narrow eyes, tossing an ultimatum at Hern. She began to relax.
Hern looked about, shrugged and walked to the divan. He settled himself among the pillows, leaned forward, hands planted on his knees, waiting for the show to begin. Serroi hesitated, then perched beside him, her hands clasped loosely in her lap, her feet supported by an extravagantly purple pillow. The Mirror whispered at them, shapeless sounds to match the unsteady shapes flowing through it.
“Begin.” It was a staccato bark, loud enough to reverberate through the great chamber. As it died in pieces about them, Serroi twisted around, trying to locate the speaker, but it was as if the rock itself had spoken, aping and magnifying Coyote’s squeak.
When she turned back to the Mirror, there were excited voices coming from it, a great green dragon leaped at them, mouth wide, fire whooshing at them, then the dragon went round the curve of the Mirror and vanished-but not before she saw the dark-clad rider perched between the delicate powerful wings. More of the dragons whipped past, all of them ridden, all of them spouting gouts of fire at something Serroi couldn’t see. They were intensely serious about what they were doing, those riders and the beasts they rode, but Serroi couldn’t make out what it was they fought. She looked at Hern.
He was frowning thoughtfully at the beasts, but when he felt her eyes on him, he smiled at her and shook his head. “No,” he told the Mirror. To Serroi he said, “Think about those infesting our skies. The sky is one place the mijlockers don’t need to watch for death. We’ve got nothing here that would keep beasts that size from breeding until they ate the world bare.”
Serroi sighed. “But they were such marvelous creatures. I wish…”
“I know.”
The gossamer egg turned to black glass with a sprinkle of glitterdust thrown in a shining trail through it. Silvery splinters darted about in eerie silence eerily quick, spitting fire at each other. They were odd and rather interesting, but so tiny she couldn’t see why the Mirror or Coyote had bothered with them-until the image changed and she saw a world turning under them, a moon swimming past, then one of the slivers, riding emptiness like a sailing ship rode ocean water, came toward them, came closer and closer until only a piece of it was visible in the oval and she knew that the thing was huge; through dozens of glassy blisters on the thing’s side she saw men and women sitting or moving about like parasites in its gut. As she watched, it sailed on, began spitting fire at the world below, charring whole cities, turning the oceans to steam. Power beyond any conception of power she’d had before. She looked at Herm
“No,” he said. “Ay-maiden, no.”
The Mirror flickered, the black turned green and blue, a green velvet field, a blue and cloudless sky. Small pavilions in bright primary stripes, triangular pennants fluttering at each end of a long low barrier woven with silken streamers running parallel to the churned brown dirt. Beneath the pennants, gleaming metal figures mounted on noble beasts with long elegant heads, flaring nostrils, short alert ears with a single curve on the outside, a double curve on the inside, a twisty horn long as a man’s forearm between large liquid eyes, long slender legs that seemed too delicate to carry their weight and that on their backs. A horn blared a short tantara. The metal riders spurred their mounts into a ponderous gallop, lowering the unwieldy poles they’d been holding erect, and charged toward each other, each on his own side of the barrier. Loud thumps of the digging hooves, cries from unseen spectators, huffing from the beasts, creaks and rattles from the riders, a general background hum. They charged at each other, feather plumes on the headpieces fluttering, the long poles held with impossible dexterity, tips wavering in very small circles. Pole crashed against shield. One pole shattered. One pole slipped off the shield. One rider was swaying precariously though still in the saddle, the other had been pushed off his beast and lay invisible until the viewpoint changed and they saw him on his back, rocking and flinging arms and legs about as he struggled to get back on his feet.