The Silver Mage - Katharine Kerr [191]
“It gripes my soul,” Rori said, “to think of those white savages taking over the town.”
“Mine, too,” Arzosah said. “You know, we can’t stop them from taking it, but we don’t have to let them keep it.”
“What? We could summon every dragon in the Northlands, and we still wouldn’t have the strength to drive these hairy rats out of their hole.”
“Quite true. But I can turn the place into an oven and bake them. Don’t you remember what I told Dallandra, all those years ago when you’d been stabbed?”
“The fire mountain!”
“Exactly that! Cerr Cawnen’s lake is fed by springs deep, deep under the land. What heats the springs? An ancient fire mountain, worn down by its own erupting, but still alive, deep inside the earth. It’s a sullen creature, that fire mountain, hateful and ready to snarl and spit hot earth-blood from its crumbling mouth.” Arzosah raised her head and stared at the starry horizon. Her eyes gleamed in the faint light. “I’ll teach you the insults and curses that will wake it again, and together we’ll call forth its fire.”
Rori found himself remembering the day he’d met her, when she’d looked much the same, grand and dweomer-proud. He realized that consorting with him had diminished her, made her petty and demanding.
“You need to be free of me,” he said, “as much as I need to be free of this body.”
She turned toward him with a clack of fangs, as if she were about to argue, but she hesitated, then sighed.
“True spoken,” she said. “I hate to admit it, but true spoken.”
They looked out at the town in silence while the moon rose, a few nights past its full, but still bright in the sky. The silver light lay over the silent houses and gleamed on a chimney there, a glass window here. At its final mooring the council barge bobbed by a rickety wooden pier over on the northern shore.
“If we burn the town,” Rori said eventually, “I don’t want the fire spreading. Can you keep it within the walls?
“I can’t, but the water meadows will. The ground all round here was a swamp years and years ago. The Rhiddaer folk drained it a few stretches at a time. But once the fire comes, and the walls tumble down, then the water will burst free.”
With the first light of dawn they woke. Arzosah announced that she had preparations to make and sent Rori off to scout the Horsekin column. He found it breaking camp where they’d left it, some ten miles away. Even though he glided far above it, he could see the thousand glints of dawn on metal that meant the warriors were arming. Apparently, they’d sent out no scouts of their own to discover that the townsfolk had fled.
Despite the desertions over the Alshandra sighting, the army still presented a formidable enemy. Horse warriors, of course, a thousand of those left, he estimated, along with about five hundred spearmen, and archers, more archers than he’d ever seen with one of their armies, maybe a hundred in all. They must have stripped their cities of their best soldiers for this attack. Scurrying around, packing supplies, saddling horses, and the like were menservants—slaves, he supposed, and he pitied them, but only briefly.
Before they could notice him, Rori soared up high. The wind that day was blowing steadily from the south. He tacked into it as if he were sailing a little boat in Aberwyn’s harbor, all those years before when he’d been a boy. Never a hatchling, he thought. Maybe that’s why I can’t be happy like this. With his decision made, he felt oddly calm, at peace despite the war brewing beneath him.
When he returned to Cerr Cawnen, Arzosah flew up to greet him. She led him off to the west and a hillside several miles from the town, where they could settle and wait.
“Will they invest the town today?” Arzosah said.
“Toward sunset,” Rori said.
“Good. Then they won’t be marching out again right away. We’ll work the spell in the dark of night, when the tide of Earth is flowing. Now listen carefully.”
Since Dallandra had spent her entire life traveling with the Westfolk flocks and herds, the disorder