Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [166]
As they walked their slow circuit of the walls, stopping now and then to peer out between the merlons, Jill let the two men fall a little ways behind. She opened up her etheric sight, turning the stone walls round her so black and dead that she felt as if they’d crawled into a cavern, and began a careful study of the enemy camp. Round the western side, right under the dun itself, she of course saw nothing new, and nor did she find any traces of magic up to the north, where the town looked out into the rising hills about a half mile beyond the enemy camp.
The eastern quarter brought her better hunting. Here the northern hills circled round, coming closer to the town in a couple of low fingers of land, and here stood the east gate, where Carra had tried to slip inside unobserved after her brief jaunt some weeks earlier. Out on one of those fingers of land, about some five hundred yards from the town, Jill saw a bubble of pale gold light, dotted at the cardinal points with glowing specks that, at some closer distance, would probably prove themselves magical seals. She refocused her sight to the physical and saw white shapes much like distant tents, and the occasional flutter of a red banner.
“There we are!” she called out, pointing. “Some rather eminent persons are camped in those tents, I’ll wager. Their cadvridoc, perhaps, and their mazrak.”
Gavry and Mallo hurried to a space between merlons and peered out, shading their eyes.
“Lord Gavry, when we get back, you’d best report this to his grace,” Jill went on. “Mallo, how well defended is this gate?”
“’Tisn’t a gate no longer, good sorcerer. We’ve sealed her up and good. This was always the weak point of the whole town, and some of the dwarven gentlemen, what are sieged here with us, I mean, they supplied these sacks of grayish stuff. Magic, I suppose it be, but when you mix it with water to a porridge, like, and ladle it round your gates, then it dries as hard as stone. We did seal the gates, and pile up loose gravel and bits of rock behind it, and slop a fair bit of that magic stone round and over the pile, and I doubt me if a god could break his way through the east gate now.”
“Splendid!” Jill said. “Now that’s the kind of magic we could use more of.”
The men laughed, but uneasily. Jill refocused her sight to the etheric and walked on, pausing every few steps to peer out at the enemy camp. In the quadrant that ran from the domed and sealed tents down to the south gate, she found more and more magical traces, glimmers of purplish light, streaks of pale red from some different sort of talisman. They were nearly to the south gate when Jill saw what seemed to be three shafts or slender towers of black light, unimaginable as that sounds, huge beams of light turned to perceptible darkness, glittering like obsidian from the fire mountains of the north and rising some thirty feet into the air. Down her back ran the ice touch of dweomer warning.
“I don’t like this,” she burst out. “Mallo, are the men on alert?”
“They are, my lady.” He patted a silver horn hanging at his belt. “All I have to do is signal, like.”
Jill walked on, a little faster. The dweomer traces out in the massed enemy camp grew brighter, more clustered. At the towers over the main gates, the southern pair, she found four of the gwerbret’s men, mailed and armed with hunting bows, leaning over the merlons and arguing among themselves about something they saw outside. Jill brought her sight down and stared with them. In the Horsekin camp some sort of activity was stirring up dust.
“Mallo!” Jill yelled. “Sound the alarum!”
Like birds the silver notes swooped over Cengarn. Down in the streets men shouted, town guards