And none of it mattered. These were all small prices to pay for the damage done to the stranger. Considering the magnitude of the task, it was one of Shoogar’s less expensive efforts and we were proud of him.
Then why was the scene so utterly silent?
I looked to my left and saw Purple standing on the crest of the hill.
He stood there with his devices floating behind. Every eye was on him. His hands were on his hips as he looked thoughtfully down at his nest. How long had he been standing there?
“Fascinating,” he said. And he started briskly down the slope. His devices followed.
The nest sat like a great egg in the middle of the river. Water backed up behind it, flowed in great torrents past its bulging flank, splashed angrily up and over the trampled shore. Angry mud creatures clambered over its dull black surface, scratching determinedly at the spell designs. Gobbets of mud and bloody fur streaked its sides, but still the spells of Shoogar were visible, almost etched into its surface. It stood perfectly, almost arrogantly upright.
That made me uneasy. My eyes searched for the dents in the stranger’s ruined nest, the dents surely put there by the horns of the rams. I couldn’t find them.
Purple strode straight down the slope and into the water. Not a droplet of mud stuck to those peculiar boots of his — in contrast to Shoogar’s legs and mine, which were mud to the hip. A pair of mud-skunks attacked the magician as he entered the water. Purple ignored them; and they couldn’t seem to get a grip on his boots.
He stood under the bulge of the nest, and we waited for his scream of fury.
Carefully, with a small edged tool, he began scraping off bits of Shoogar’s curse signs and putting them into small transparent containers. His mindless speakerspell continued to translate his ramblings. “Fascinating … the power of these fluids-secreted-for-the-control-of-bodily-functions is like nothing I’ve ever seen before … I wonder if these effects could be produced artificially?”
Twice he sniffed at what he had scraped off, and twice muttered a word the speakerspell did not translate. When he finished, he dipped his hands in the river to wash them, incidentally offending Filfo-mar, the usually gentle river god.
Purple turned to the egg-shaped door of his nest; it was flush with the curved wall, but outlined in orange to make it visible. He punched at a square pattern of bumps on the nest. The door slid open and Purple disappeared inside.
We waited. Would he continue to occupy his nest, living in the middle of our defiled river?
The flying nest hummed and rose twenty feet into the air.
I screamed with the rest, a wordless scream of rage. The nest turned in an instant from black to silver; and it must have become terribly slippery, for every particle of mud and blood and potion from Shoogar’s spell slid down the sides, formed a glob at the bottom of the nest and dropped in a lump into the river.
The nest turned black. It moved horizontally across the land and dropped gently to the ground — just a few yards west of where it had stood an hour ago. Only now it rested at the edge of a region of churned mud where the rams and mud creatures had fought to destroy it.
I could see Shoogar sag where he stood. And I feared for my village, and for Shoogar’s sanity and my own. If Shoogar could not defend us from the mad magician, then we were all doomed.
There was an angry rumble from the villagers as Purple emerged from his nest. Purple frowned and said, “I wish I knew what’s gotten you people so angry.”
Somebody threw a spear at him.
I couldn’t blame the lad. No sound, no pattern of mere words could properly have answered the magician. But the young man, enraged beyond sanity, had hurled his bone spear at the stranger’s back — without a blessing!
It struck Purple hard in the back and bounced off to the side without penetrating. Purple toppled, not like a man, but like a statue. I had the irrational conviction that for a single instant Purple had become as hard as stone.
But the instant was over. Immediately he was climbing to his feet. The spear, of course, had done no harm at all. One cannot attack a magician with an unblessed spear. The boy would have to be brought before the Guild of Advisors.
If the village survived that long.
The suns rose together, the blue sun silhouetted off-center within the other’s great fuzzy-edged and crimson disk.
I woke at noon. The evacuation was already well under way. My wives and spratlings had already done a good deal of the packing, though the fear of disturbing my sleep had slowed them somewhat. With my supervision, however, and the necessary discipline, the packing progressed quickly. Even so, we were very nearly the last family to leave the village. The lower rim of the red sun was already near the mountains when I dropped behind the procession of my wives to tarry at Shoogar’s nest.
Shoogar looked tired, but curiously determined. His eyes were alive and dancing, and his fingers moved with a life of their own, weaving spell knots into a leather strap. I knew better than to speak to him while he was in the midst of a duel.
For though no formal declaration had yet been made by Purple, this was a duel. Perhaps Purple thought that so long as no duel was declared, Shoogar would sit peacefully by and allow him to continue with his duel-mongering actions.
But I knew Shoogar better than that. The fierce glow burning in his eyes confirmed what I — and all of the rest of the villagers — already knew: that Shoogar would not rest until there was one less magician in the village.
I hurried on after my wives. Burdened as we were, we would be traveling well into the night. I had even removed the hobbles from my women so that they could travel faster; it would not do to underestimate the seriousness of the situation..
By the time the moons were overhead, we had reached our destination. Most of the families of the village were settled on the steppes to the north, a series of long sloping rises that overlooked the river and the cluster of housetrees that marked our village.
The encampment was a sprawling place of lean-tos and tents, smoky campfires and shrill women, milling groups of men and boys. Already scavengers were rooting busily underfoot; even before we had selected a campsite, many of my own spratlings had melted away into the bustle.
Although it was well into the night, few slept. The eerie glow of the moons gave us a twilight neither red nor blue, but ghostly gray — a strange half-real quality for the waiting time before the next step of the duel. An almost festive air pervaded the settlement.
From somewhere in the bachelor’s section came the brawling chant of a game of rolling bones, and an occasional cry of triumph as one of the players scored a particularly difficult pass. It does not take much to please the lower classes.
An unpleasant surprise awaited us in the morning.
Hinc and I were standing at the edge of the encampment, looking down the slope toward the village, discussing the forthcoming duel, when we heard a dull distant slam, like a Single cough from Elcin’s throat.
We looked down to see a tremendous plume of black smoke wafting through the village treetops.
“Look,” said Hinc. “Shoogar has started already.”
“No,” I shook my head. “I think he is only warming up. That looked like a preparation spell more than anything else. Something to get the attention of the gods.”
“Pretty fierce attention-getter,” noted Hinc.
I nodded, “It’s going to be a pretty fierce duel. I wonder if we should move again ? Farther back.”
“If we are not out of range already, Lant, we haven’t time to get out of range,” said Hinc. “Even at a dead run. And even if you are right, you could never persuade the others. They are too tired.”