Birds were startled into the air-a flock of geese gobbled their way overhead-and he could see the darting shapes of animals fleeing toward them to seek the high hills. Some were small and he had no concerns about them, but there were a few larger shapes bounding from hedge to bush to copse, instinct still telling them to utilize cover even though their lives may be about to end. What are they? Kosar wondered. They looked big. Most were probably cattle kept by the villagers of San, but maybe there were wolves in there, and perhaps a foxlion or two. His hand stole to his sword, but the sheer power of what they were witnessing soon wiped any threat from his mind.
This is the power of nature gone bad, he thought. And then he realized the truth and he knew that he was wrong. This was all-powerful, yes, but it was not nature, not as it should have been. Rivers in nature ran one way only.
“It’s turning,” he said to no one, but they all heard. “It’s flowing the opposite way. It’s like the land has tilted and the river’s changing direction.”
“It hurts,” Rafe muttered, and then he screamed: “It hurts!”
Kosar turned and saw that the boy had gone to his knees. Hope was there to hold him, talk to him, but there was no comfort to be had.
“It’s flooding the plains,” A’Meer said.
The tumult in the river had lessened somewhat, but now a wave formed and began its journey back upstream. It growled by the banks, scouring them clear of vegetation, picking up boulders and rolling them along, and the roar was like the land screaming as it was cleaved in two. The wave was way beyond the normal confines of the river now, stretching out across the plains a mile wide and still growing. It rumbled, and the land before it cried as if knowing what was to come.
“San,” he said, and he remembered the faces of some of the people he had met. They would be different now, mouths opened in terror and eyes wide, too shocked for tears.
“It won’t take long,” A’Meer said, as if that could make everything better.
There was a relentless inevitability about the wave. It rolled upstream and over the small village of San. From this far away Kosar could make out little detail of San’s destruction, and for that he was glad. A few buildings broke upward, timbers thrusting at the sky, forced up by the deluge. Some of the fishing boats rode the wave for a few seconds before tumbling and being smashed into flotsam, still topping the wave but now in pieces. A couple of the jetties-their posts cast down into the riverbed years before the land had even heard of the Mages-rolled over and over, ripped out and were sent tumbling upstream away from the village.
Of the people from the village of San, he saw nothing.
As if San had been the true target of its upheaval, the wave seemed to spread out and diminish after it passed by. It left little behind. Vague outlines of some of the larger buildings remained, shorn of their roofs and walls collapsed outward. The landscape, the village, the route of the river itself had taken on a uniform gray-brown color, silt coughed up from the bed now smothering everything. The water defied its previous confinement, settling into new shapes: lakes and ponds that bubbled and foamed from their unnatural and forceful births.
It took a few minutes for the waters to calm down.
Kosar and the others were silent but for Rafe’s quiet crying. He shed no actual tears, Kosar saw, as if not wishing to add to the flood. There was little to say so they simply watched. A large rainbow hung over the scene of devastation, its colors too pure to be welcome. The air was filled with swathes of mist, and the watchers soon found its cool touch coalescing on their skin, bringing with it the smell and taste of the disaster.
Eventually the noise subsided, the mists parted and the river ran upstream.
RAFE CRIED ONthe outside, and inside the magic still discovering itself howled. Like a sentient thing it mourned the death of its old existence, and though now resurrected it still felt the pain and betrayal at being misused by the Mages so many years ago. It mourned also the ongoing destruction their misuse had eventually caused. Rafe could not shut out the thoughts because he was not party to them; he was an observer-sympathetic, concerned and unequivocally entwined-but still separate from the power raging within. His fingertips prickled with its potential, his toes and other extremities warm and tingling with the force coursing through him. And in its blind rage and raging sorrow, he was not sure what he could see. Anger and hatred, hope and yearning, sorrow and vengefulness, he was not certain where the crying took root, nor what drove that fearsome energy he knew was building somewhere deep inside of him.
Rafe cried from the pain, the sorrow and the fear. But his tears were also for himself because he felt so hopeless.
He had no idea what would happen next.
“WELL, NOW IT’Smore than a river to cross,” A’Meer said quietly.
“We can ride up into the foothills,” Kosar said. He turned to look at Rafe, thinking that perhaps the boy could help them. But Rafe barely looked as though he could help himself. “Cross the river at its source.”
“Yes,” A’Meer said. She was still staring down into the shallow valley, stunned.
“Not its source any longer,” Trey said. “What do you think we’ll find if we go up into the Widow’s Peaks?” He stared at them, his thin face sad.
Kosar barked a bitter laugh. “We’re stupid,” he said to A’Meer. He pointed at the river, uprooted trees floating slowly from right to left. “Upriver. We’ll find only floods when we get there. How can a river flow the wrong way? For how long?”
“The water will gather in the hills and mountains, and within days or hours it’ll come back this way again,” Trey said. “Maybe within minutes.”
“More than just a river then,” Hope said. “It’ll be a lake rushing down this way. A sea. ”
“It’ll make this look like a splash in a pond.” Trey waved his hand to encompass the scene before them, and Kosar knew that he was right. Whatever unnatural cause, however wrong this was, the river could only flow uphill for so long before its tremendous energy would be unleashed once again. And then it would return the way it had come, faster, a million times more deadly.
“But why…?” Trey said, glancing down at Rafe as if expecting an answer.
“This is happening all over,” Hope said. “It’s the land wearing down and turning bad. Swallow holes, frozen air, flaming skies… and rivers running upstream. We’re just here at the wrong time. Bad luck. There’s plenty of bad luck in Noreela.”
“But the magic is back, in him. Isn’t it? Isn’t that why we’re all risking so much to protect him?”
“You’re giving magic a character,” Hope said. “It’s so much more alive than us, so much more meant to be, but that doesn’t mean it has thought. And why should it? Thinking like us, with our greed and avarice and disregard… that’s what made the Mages what they are. That’s why they did what they did, and magic tore itself from us after the Cataclysmic War. The effects of that are still being felt-we’ve just seen that-and we can only hope that if it does choose to return through Rafe, then it will make everything better again.”
“Or much, much worse,” Kosar said. The force he had just witnessed was nothing compared to what true magic could accomplish. The stories he had heard, the legends of machines spanning valleys, flying through the air, churning the ground…
“The Red Monks!” A’Meer said suddenly. “They may still be on the river, and now its flow is with them. We have to move! Now!”