The company had assembled to perform a work of magic greater than Umara had ever witnessed or likely ever would again. It would be priestly magic, not arcane, and beholden to the forces of Light and Nature rather than those of those of the Pit, and thus, in no way her sort of power. But she meant to drink in the spectacle and learn all she could nonetheless.
The ceremony should commence soon. At the moment, everyone was waiting for Stedd to announce that, behind the wall of gray thunderheads to the east, the sun was rising.
Umara turned back to Anton. “You wanted to watch this, too, didn’t you? That’s why you haven’t already run away.”
The pirate drew back. “Wizard, you insult me. I gave my oath.”
He was only able to maintain his air of affronted dignity for a moment. Then a snort forced its way out, and she laughed with him.
“You’re right, of course,” he said. “Naturally, I want to see how this all works out. But once it’s over …” He gestured in the general direction of Hierophant’s Trail.
“I suspect Shadowmoon actually intended for you to flee.”
“Then she won’t be disappointed.”
“You don’t suppose the Assembly of Stars might actually pardon you?”
He grinned. “In their place, I wouldn’t.”
She took a breath. “Well, then, we’ll smuggle you back aboard the Octopus and safely out of Turmish.”
Anton hesitated. “If someone catches you helping me, we’re liable to end up facing the headsman together. Even if we don’t, you’ll still have forfeited any good will you may have generated on Thay’s behalf. And from what you told me, that’s the one prize you can offer your superiors to make up for not bringing home a Chosen.”
Umara made a spitting noise. “Please. You already saw me trick Shadowmoon herself with an illusion. I can fool any Turmishan if I put my mind to it. Druids and such have their talents, but Thayan magic is the most sophisticated in the world.”
Anton laughed. “Certainly, Thayan arrogance is the most egregious.”
“You do realize I’m offering to help you.”
“I know, and-” His head turned to the druidic spellcasters and their allies. “We can talk about this later. I think the ritual is starting.”
He was right.
Standing at the brink of the drop-off, closer to the hidden sunrise than anyone else, Stedd extended his hands to the eastern horizon, and they bloomed with gold and crimson light. He turned and thrust them at the ground. Lines, circles, triangles, and more complex figures spread outward from the spot he was indicating, writing themselves on the ground in light.
Standing to the west of her collaborators, Shadowmoon began a kind of slow, twisting, pirouetting dance in place. She made the contortions look as effortless as they were lithe. To the north, Shinthala looked upward and muttered; the clouds overhead rumbled and flickered as lightning stirred inside them. In the south, Ashenford stroked arpeggios from his harp.
Traceries of light flowed from the druids’ positions across the ground to interweave with the figures Lathander’s power was drawing. But the new designs were green instead of yellow or ruddy, and more freeform, their shapes hinting at the uniqueness of every leaf on every branch or every bend in the course of every stream rather than the perfect roundness of the sun or the flawless arc of its daily progress across the heavens.
Trained to construct every pentacle with geometric precision, Umara winced at a sloppiness that, had a Red Wizard committed it-perhaps because he was drunk-would have proved either futile or suicidal. But the Elder Circle’s figures smoldered with a power that, so far at least, they seemed fully able to contain.
A droning began. It sounded so much like a deep tone from the Thayan pump organ called the zulthoon that Umara might have mistaken it for one had she not known no such instrument was anywhere nearby. Eventually, she realized the treants were groaning out the hum as accompaniment to Ashenford’s harp.
One or two at a time, the other celebrants joined in, sometimes singing, sometimes chanting, sometimes contributing by other means. A barefoot, dirty, and nearly naked druid-a hermit, Umara suspected-beat out rhythms on a pair of femurs. Sprites hovered in a cloud to merge the whine of their wings into a piercing chord. A spindly horned man with enormous eyes and ears simply exploded into a run of eight ascending brassy notes, leaving not a speck of flesh nor a drop of blood behind.
By rights, it should have all combined into cacophony, but somehow, beauty emerged instead. What Umara chiefly noticed, though, was vibration resonating through her bones as mystical energy accumulated.
The glowing designs grew larger than the space taken up by those who created them. A straight line of rose-colored luminescence shot into Umara and Anton’s lean- to and out the back. Figures and sigils even wrote themselves on the surface of the pool, maintaining their forms thereafter despite the constant flow to the tops of the three waterfalls.
Then the storm clouds to which Shinthala had been muttering answered as clouds had never answered any mortal spellcaster before. The sky-the world-blazed white with so many lightning bolts that it was impossible to see the individual strikes or, in fact, anything but brightness. The accompanying crash was so loud that it scarcely registered as noise. Rather, it smashed sensation and thought into chaos. Even though Umara had had some notion of what to expect, for a moment, she feared that she was dying.
She wasn’t, though, and when her head resumed working, and she blinked the dazzle out of her eyes, she saw the rain beating down harder than it had in all her time on or near the Sea of Fallen Stars. The pounding drowned out whatever singing and chanting was still going on, and gray veils of falling water obscured objects only a few paces away.
The Great Rain had caused Turmishan crops to fail and produced privation around the Inner Sea. Thus, it had at first astonished Umara to hear that the Chosen’s solution to the famine involved bringing down even more of it.
But Stedd was certain that, contrary to appearances, the rain was neither a force of pure destruction nor a weapon forged by Umberlee to impose her creed on the region. It was how one part of the world was mending the damage inflicted by the Spellplague.
And if the Great Rain was fundamentally a kind of healing, then master healers should be able to nudge it to work faster and finish restoring the natural order in Turmish. With luck, that truly would raise the Emerald Enclave’s magic to its former potency, and then the druids would be strong enough to undertake another great work.
That was the plan, anyway. Lying on her side in a lean- to with the torrential rain blinding and deafening her, Umara couldn’t judge how well it was working. “I’m going outside,” she shouted.
“What a bad idea,” Anton replied. But when she crawled out, he followed.
The rain pummeled her, stinging her nose, cheeks, and chin. She tugged her hood farther down and looked around.
Standing in the open, she could see and hear better, albeit only somewhat. The patterns of light on the ground had stopped expanding, presumably because they were complete. Reduced to a vague silhouette by the downpour, Shadowmoon still danced, and at least some of the other celebrants were still intoning their incantations; a trace of their voices whispered through the rattle of the rain.
Umara drew breath to yell, then thought better of it. She offered Anton her hand, and he smiled and took it. She led him toward the drop-off.
As they made their way, the sky repeatedly flashed white, and booms and crashes shook the tableland. Umara realized the clouds were producing some of the most prodigious thunderbolts she’d ever seen. But they didn’t make her flinch, not after the supreme violence of the initial blast. They simply felt like one detail of a still greater power at work on every side.