Southern Fire

'All right.' Kheda nodded reluctantly. 'Risala, stay here, keep watch for us, please.'

She didn't object. Dev was already heading down to the village and Kheda had to hurry to catch him.

'What are we looking for?' he asked, drawing level with the northern mage.

'Give me the blade.' Taking it, Dev dug the broad, square tip into the soil. 'How much rain has this place had over the last run of the moons?'

Kheda rubbed earth dry as dust between his fingers. 'You'd think it was the end of the dry season.'

'One or other of them drew all the water out, as part of his spell casting. If you can call it spell casting,' Dev commented thoughtfully. 'Their magic is pure instinct.'

That meant nothing to Kheda so he moved to look more closely at the dead wizard, now a rotting sprawl of slack limbs beneath the crawling insects. The corpse looked as if it had lain unburied for days. 'How does magic do this?'

'Not sure. Effective, isn't it?' Hefting the blade, Dev cut deep into the meat of the corpse's thigh. The squelching sound and the stink made Kheda's gorge rise and he backed away.

Going pale enough to betray his barbarian blood, Dev nevertheless held his ground, prodding the dark slime oozing over the thirsty ground. 'There's no bone in here, just spongy fragments and bits of sinew.' Retreating, he studied the smears and nameless scraps sticking to the blade for a moment before stabbing it into the dusty soil to clean it as he stared across the water to the other beach. 'But that's not what he did to our friend in the wreath. His leg bones snapped, turned all brittle. How did he do that, I wonder? How did our friend in the leaves undo it?'

Kheda looked at the ground all around him, scattered with broken pots, discarded cloth, twisted lengths of wood. He frowned and bent to pick up a dagger. The blade was pitted and stained with rust, eaten clean through in places. 'Dev, what about this? This isn't just suffering from the rains.' He held the hilt in one hand and pressed on the tip of the blade with careful fingers. The metal twisted and crumbled.

'An Archipelagan would go bladeless before he'd carry something like that.' Dev looked around and retrieved one of the invader's stone-bladed axes. 'Obsidian,' he remarked.

'Why?' demanded Kheda. 'They could have gathered all manner of blades from Chazen by now. Why still use fire-hardened wood and stone shards?'

'Magic,' grinned Dev. 'If fire and water rust the blade in your hand, you're dead meat. If cold shatters a piece of stone, chances are you'll still be left with enough sharp edges to cut someone's throat. A wooden spear or a club will still gut someone or bash out their brains even if it's warped or split.'

'Oh,' said Kheda.

So however many swords Daish, Redigal and Ritsem can raise against these savages, they'll most likely be useless unless we can rid the invaders of their wizards.

'Have you seen what you needed to see?' he demanded savagely of Dev. 'Can you tell me how to fight these people or not?'

Dev strolled back to the contorted corpse of the savage mage. 'This is a strange magic, my oath on it. As near as I can make out, it leeches the essential strength from the natural elements around the wizard.'

'What happened to him?' Kheda gestured towards the foul remnants of the invading wizard.

'Our friend in the leaves has a natural power over water.' Dev sounded fascinated. 'Once this fool lost his concentration, or whatever was protecting him from the other man's magic, his lungs, his brain, every tissue in his body filled with fluid.'

'Will knowing this help us defeat them?' Kheda asked. 'Can you tell us how to fight them?'

'You can't,' Dev said bluntly. 'I told you that before and I'm even more certain now. You need magic to fight magic and you people have none, thanks to your age-old folly and prejudice. Didn't see this coming, did you, with all your fancy predictions?'

Kheda barely managed to stop himself hitting the barbarian wizard. He wheeled away instead and stared out across the water.

'Besides, it's not enough to know how to beat these people. A wizard would have to know how they lose, how not to lose himself.' Dev took one last look at the fallen wizard and began walking back towards the rise where Risala waited. 'They all seem very closely tied to their inborn element. That could be a weakness. Most can only use one or two elements and really struggle with what-ever's antithetical to their affinity. It's only the lads at the top of the pecking order who can use all four elements from what I've seen, the one wearing the lizard and that bastard in the dragon-hide cloak. That's not to say the others can't, of course, and I've no idea if they can manage blended magics, quintessential enchantment.'

Kheda let the wizard's meaningless words wash over him as he looked up at the sky, still cloudy but with no rain falling. 'We have to come up with something before the end of the rainy season.'

'Like I said, pal, you can't fight magic, not without magic' Dev laughed unpleasantly.

Kheda halted and seized the barbarian mage by the shoulders. 'Can you do it? You talked of testing your magic against these mages. Could you defeat them?'

Dev knocked Kheda's hands aside. 'Give me one good reason why I should.'

'You wanted payment.' Kheda struggled to keep the distaste out of his mouth, for this foul, venal man and for the unforeseen impulse that had driven him to ask for Dev's help.

'Truth often speaks through chance-heard words.' I hope you were right, my father. I hope I'm right. We talked of fighting fire with fire, back in Derasulla. I never thought it would come to this but now it has, can I step back, when I have seen the fate that waits for my people?

The libraries are full of dire warnings of wizards cutting down armies with their magic. These savages did as much. Are these wizards of the north stronger? Have I just wasted my efforts in seeking out this Dev, risking my future, even my life on a false omen?

'All the gems and pearls in the Archipelago won't do me much good if I'm not alive to trade them,' Dev was saying. 'Even if I live through a fight with these mages, if word gets out I'm as good as dead. I don't reckon much to my chances of fleeing the length of the Archipelago.'

'I could see you safely to the unbroken lands,' Kheda insisted tersely. 'I can send you on a fast trireme, with your body weight in pearls.'

And burn the ship to the waterline once you're off it.

'That's a handsome offer.' Dev laughed and waved an airy hand in the direction the leaf-crowned mage had taken. 'How do you hope to make good on it? Even supposing I come up with a means to fight these wizards -' he raised a warning hand to silence Kheda, '— besides provoking them into fighting each other, because I don't imagine that will work again, there are still hordes of these foot soldiers on every eyot and rock. Who's to say they won't spring another mage from somewhere, wherever they came from in the first place?'

'We will find some means of alerting Daish's allies to sail south as soon as the wizards are dead,' Kheda insisted stubbornly. 'Once they have no magic, we can kill the wild men and their blood on the tides can warn any they've left against sailing north.'

'That'll be a good trick if you can do it,' said Dev scornfully.

Kheda waited until they had rejoined Risala before speaking. 'I have something to tell you.' He hesitated.

'He wants me to fight these wild mages for him,' said Dev with spiteful pleasure.

Risala nodded slowly. 'I thought he might.'

'You did?' Kheda looked at her astonished.

'You have no choice, I can see that.' He saw his own desperation mirrored in her pale eyes. 'What else can we do? How can we fight this magic without magic? If we can stop this madness before it destroys the Archipelago, even if our lives are forfeit for it…' She fell silent.