Tuli parted the brush and stared as the wall began burning. Holding her breath she turned from the heavy greedy flames and glanced over the Ogogehians gathered about the barrels, then to the three Nor sitting their black demon macain, their backs to her, satisfaction in the lines of their bodies, tall, fit men clothed in power, the air shimmering about them. Gilded light she sensed rather than saw rayed out from them, weaving into a bright web that humped in a dome over the barrels and the men lounging beside them. Spun into her own web, she got to her knees, stuffed the weighted tinder in the pocket of her jacket and waited a few heartbeats longer, sneaking swift glances at the Nor, trying to judge the extent of their absorption.
The tower began to throb behind the vuurvis fire and the fire went out and the gray stone turned a glowing new-green, lovely as polished chrysoprase. The Nor went rigid, the web-barrier vanished. Tuli sucked in a breath, let Ildas lick the tinder into a small flame. Ajjin chini got to her feet and trotted to stand beside Tuli as she rose and began whirling the sling about her head. The throb from the tower deepened and reached out farther. The air stilled and turned thicker, almost like water. As she released the fireball, sending it shooting at the nearest barrel, the lightweb was suddenly sucked from about her, Ildas squeaked and vanished; the Nor turned dull as if they’d changed to stone. She was frozen an instant with shock and loss, then wheeled and raced away. She could hear the hoarse wild screams from the wall, the burned meien shrieking, and that prodded her into a panicky scramble to put solid earth between her and the vuurvis, her back crawling in anticipation of the heat flare:
It didn’t come. She reached the top of a slope, looked over her shoulder, stumbled to a stop and turned.
The glowing tower drew her eyes first, but after a few ragged breaths she looked away. The barrel she’d hit was burning, but it was a low sullen fire, not a leaping conflagration as before. She didn’t understand it; she scowled at the pitiful flames until the Ajjin bumped her legs, calling her back to where she was. She looked down. “Right.” Brooding on the change in the Nor, she walked with slow deliberation back to the ambush where the rest of the band were waiting, ready to cover her retreat if that proved necessary. Wanting to confirm what she suspected, she looked back again. Nothing had changed, no one had moved, not the men tending the barrels, not the great Nor on top their grassy knoll. And the air maintained its thick resistance to movement. Excitement rising in her, she pushed through the brush.
“Shoot them,” she said. “The Nor. Pero, they’re kankas without gas, their magic is being sucked out of them by something, I don’t know, but as long as that tower glows they can’t do nothing. Get ’em.”
“Biel, Rarno, Sosai, try it.” As the three best archers in the band moved to get a cleaner shot at the Nor, Coperic rubbed his hand across his mouth. “Bella, you and the rest might’s well take advantage a that.” He nodded at the tower. “Cut us out a rambut. We down to bone on the last. After that, I think hit the Sankoise. They about ready to quit, shouldn’t take much to bog them down and make them worthless.”
Tuli watched as the quarrels whistled through the thick unnatural air and socked home in the black forms. For several heartbeats nothing happened, as if the shafts were illusion not real. Then the three crumpled stiffly, toppled off the demon macain, fell onto the curve of the low hill and lay like discarded idols on the limp, bleached grass.
Then the glow faded. There was a confusion of shouts and curses as the stupor wore off the army and Nekaz Kole discovered the death of the three Nor. The air came loose with a rush of ice-breath and whipped Tuli’s hair about, crept down her tunic and slid around her ribs, ribs that had no flesh on them to keep out the cold. It whipped the fire high, flung it out to the other barrels, sending a blast of heat for several bodylengths on every side. Tuli shivered; in spite of that heat, she was icy with unassimilated grief. Ildas was gone and he’d taken all warmth from her.
Coperic saw the grief she was fighting to deny. He laid his arm across her shoulders, squeezed gently. “What’s wrong?”
“Ildas.” Her voice cracked. She licked her lips. “He’s gone.”
“What happened?”
“It took him just as it took the Nor-magic. I don’t know, maybe it… it swallowed him.” She leaned against Coperic, felt his wiry strength leaking into her, comforting her. “Like there was something there in the tower I mean that was sucking power out of everything…” Her voice trailed off; she wriggled around until her face was tucked into the hollow between his neck and shoulder; she clung to him, her eyes dry though she was shuddering as if she sobbed; for a moment she thrust aside everything that had happened to her and let herself be a baby again, let him hold her and comfort her.
It couldn’t last. She pulled away from him. She wasn’t a baby and she couldn’t sustain the illusion that she was. Wind buffeted at her, shouts and screams came more dearly, Biel and the others were back, grinning at the success of their efforts. The tower was dark, only a ghost of the jewel glow left in the stone. Elsewhere along the wall the oil still burned and the massive wooden gates were beginning to char. The fire at the barrels leaped high, a thrusting, tongue of flame and smoke, geysering up and up, swaying, throwing out burning bits that kept everyone at a distance.
She watched it, weary and warming in the crook of Coperic’s arm. She felt empty, no hatred, no triumph, no anger left to prod her. A soft warmth brushed her calf, a coo fluttered through her head. She looked down. “Didi,” she whispered and bent forward a little, opening her arms, cooing her extravagant delight as Ildas leaped up and settled against her ribs. She straightened, stroking him into rapture, glanced up; her mouth dropped open, she pointed, gasped, “Look.”
Immense undulating serpentine shapes floated above the Biserica valley, dragons made of bending glass with waves of color rippling across their transparent scales like silent music. Tuli’s body throbbed to the beauty of those beings and the sinuous songs they were weaving. She held Ildas close, felt Coperic strong and steady behind her, watched the glass dragons invent their chorales and knew contentment so intense that every other emotion paled before it.
16
Hate coiled in a tainted mist through the army. The grinding sullen hate of the Sankoise that embraced the meien and the rest of the Biserica’s defenders, the norits that drove them at the wall again and again, drove them to slaughter, hate for Nekaz Kole, who jerked like a puppet at the twitching of the Nearga Nor and twitched the Sankoise in his turn, hate finally for all other Sankoise and a cold unrelenting hate of the Nor for the meien, the beasts (all men and women of lesser powers were beasts to the norim) that were somehow reaching through the veil of Nor-power and killing them, stripping away their certainty of their invulnerability. It should not be happening. It had to be chance. It couldn’t be skill. The beasts had no such skill. But, somehow, two-thirds of their number were dead. Doubt crept in and mixed with fear and as the holes gaped larger in their certainty, their hatred intensified, feeding on that doubt and fear the way vuurvis fire fed on flesh.