Nylan tried not to recoil from the directness of the question.
After a moment, he said slowly, “I tried to save as many as I could.” By killing as many of the invaders as I could, he added to himself.
“They weren’t Mother.” Niera’s dark eyes bored into Nylan. “They weren’t Mother. The angel let the other mothers stay in the tower.”
“Did your mother wish to stay in the tower?”
“No. You and the angel should have made her stay!”
Nylan had no ready answer for that, not a totally honest one, but he continued to meet the girl’s eyes. Then he said, “Perhaps we should have, but I cannot change what should have been.”
At that, Niera turned and looked at the cairns, and her thin frame shook. Nylan stepped up beside her, and lightly touched her shoulder. Without looking, she pushed his hand away. So he just stood there while she silently sobbed.
CXIV
A stiff and cool breeze, foreshadowing fall, swept from the sunlit meadows and fields through the open and newly hung doors of the smithy. With the air came the scent of cut grass, of dust raised by the passing horses, and of recently sawn fir timbers. Inside, the air smelled of hot metal, forge coals, and sweat-of burned impurities, scalded quench steam, and oil.
Nylan brought the hammer down on the faintly red alloy, scattering sparklets of oxides. The anvil-a real anvil, heavy as ice two on a gas giant, if battered around the edges-and the hammer rang. Nylan couldn’t help smiling.
“Is it good?” asked Ayrlyn. “I’ve been looking for one all summer. I got this from a widow not far from Gnotos.”
“It’s good. Very good. It feels good.”
“You look happy when you work here, when you build or make things, and I can almost feel the order you put in them.”
“You two,” said Huldran, easing more charcoal into the forge. “You talk about feeling. It’s as though you feel what you do more than you see it.”
“He does,” said Ayrlyn. “He can sense the grain of the metal.”
Nylan grinned at the healer. “She can sense sickness in the body.”
Huldran shook her head, and the short blond hair flared away from her face. “I’ve always thought that. I don’t think I really wanted to know. With the laser, I figured that was because it was like the engineer’s powernet … Is all the magic in this place like that, something that has to be felt, that can’t really be seen?”
“In a way you can see it,” responded Ayrlyn, brushing theflame-red hair back over her ear. “It’s a flow. If it’s good, it’s smooth, like a dark current in a river.”
“I don’t know that it’s really magic,” mused Nylan, looking at the cooling metal and then taking the tongs to slip it back into the forge. As the lander alloy reheated, his eyes flicked to the iron that had come from a broken blade. It waited by the forge for the next step of his blade-making when he would have to flatten the two and then start hammer-folding them together and drawing them out-only to refold and draw, refold and draw. If only the smithing weren’t for blades … He licked his lips and then he continued. “You can feet-”
“You can. I can’t,” pointed out Huldran.
“You may be better off that you can’t in some ways,” replied Ayrlyn.
“You can feel,” Nylan repeated, “flows of two kinds of energies. Apparently, the ones I can use are the black ones, or at least they say I’m a black wizard, and you can build and heal, or they help build and heal. The stuff the wizard that came with Gerlich had, and Relyn thinks he was the same one that was in the first attack, is white, and it feels ugly, and tinged with red. It’s almost like the chaotic element in a powernet, the fluxes that aren’t that can still tear a net apart. Well, that’s what the firebolts he was throwing felt like.”
“Like a powernet chaos flux?” asked Ayrlyn with a slight wince.
“Worse, in some ways.” Nylan looked at the alloy on the coals, barely red, but that was as hot as it was going to get. Initially, working with it was a cross between hot and cold forging, and slow as a glacier on Heaven. “I’ve got to get back to this. With all these recruits showing up, the marshal wants more blades, and Saryn wants more arrowheads.”
“You know, ser,” pointed out Huldran. “I could use the old anvil to make arrowheads or whatever, and we could bring in some help with the tongs and bellows.”
Nylan nodded, ruefully. “I should have thought of that.”
“Does this mean we really need another anvil?” asked Ayrlyn.
“Well …” began Nylan. “Since you asked …”
“I search and search and finally get you an anvil, and now you want two.” Ayrlyn gave an overdramatic sigh. “Nothing’s ever enough, is it?”
“No. But no one pays any attention when I say it. We make hundreds of arrowheads, arrowheads that really ought to be cast, and Saryn and Fierral just want more. Ryba wants more blades.” Nylan gave back an equally overdramatic sigh and pulled the metal from the coals and eased it onto the anvil. “And it’s time to work on this blade.” He looked at Huldran. “I can handle this alone. You go find an assistant. One, to begin with.”
“I thought …” began the blond guard.
“Rule three hundred of obscure leadership. If it’s your idea, you get to implement it.”
Ayrlyn laughed. After a moment, so did Huldran.
Nylan lifted the hammer.
The cooling wind swept into the smithy, bringing with it the sound of the sheep on the hillside, the shouted instructions, and the clatter of wooden wands from the space outside the tower. The hammer fell on the alloy that would be the heart of yet another blade for the guards of Westwind.
Ayrlyn looked at the hammer, the anvil, and the face of the engineer-smith and shivered. Neither Nylan nor Huldran saw the shiver or the darkness behind her eyes.
CXV
SILLEK STEPS INTO the small upper tower room after a preemptory knock.
The mists in the glass vanish, and Terek stands. Despite the heat in the room and the lack of wind from the two open and narrow windows, the white wizard appears cool.
Sillek blots the dampness from his forehead, but remains standing.
“I have but a few moments, Ser Wizard, but since we last talked,” asks Sillek, “what have you discovered about the angel women on the Roof of the World?”
“Discovering matters through a glass is slow and difficult. One sees but dimly.”
“Dimly or not, you must have discovered something.”
“Hissl was correct in one particular,” Terek admits slowly. “The angel women have no thunder-throwers remaining.”
“What else have you discovered?” asks Sillek.
“He underestimated the talents of the black mage.”
“We knew that. Anything else?”
“The black mage is a smith, and even without his fires from Heaven he can forge those devil blades that seem able to slice through plate and chain mail. He and his assistant are also forging arrowheads.”
“Forging? That is odd.”
Terek shrugs. “It is slow, but the arrowheads are like the blades, much stronger, and they can cut some mail.”
“Can you tell how many of these angels there are?”
“There are more than twoscore, perhaps threescore, women on the Roof of the World. A dozen or so remain of the original angels, and only the one man.”
Sillek nods. “Then we should have less trouble than my sire.”
“I would not be that certain,” offers Terek. “Those who remain seem very good, and they are spending much time training the newcomers. I am not an armsman, but it seems to me that they are very good at teaching our women, or those who were our women before they fled Lornth. Some of the women who fled to the angels killed quite a few of Hissl’s armsmen.”
Sillek purses his lips. “That would mean that the longer we wait, the better the forces they will have?”