Stormqueen!

  “I thought I stood and watched my best-loved die again,” he said. “In my ears was the curse of a sorceress I hanged from these walls thirteen years gone by, jeering at me that a day would come when I would cry out to the gods in grief that I had not died childless.” Then he seemed to start awake and shake himself like a mantling hawk on the block. “Well, she is dead and her malice with her.”

  He pondered for a time.

  “We must attack,” he said. “They can wear us down quickly, if we must be alert night and day for that kind of attack, and we cannot be ever on the defense. Somehow we must send them howling. We have only one weapon strong enough to rout them.”

  “I did not know that we had any such weapon,” Allart said. “Of what do you speak, my lord?”

  Dom Mikhail said, “I speak of Dorilys. She commands the lightning. She must strike them with storm, and utterly destroy their camp.”

  Allart looked at him in consternation.

  “My lord Aldaran, you must be mad!”

  “Kinsman,” Aldaran said, his eyes flaring displeasure, “I think you forget yourself!”

  “If I have angered you, sir, I beg your pardon. Let my love for your foster-son—yes, and for your daughter, too—be my excuse. Dorilys is only a child, and the lady Renata—yes— and my wife also have done their utmost to teach her to master and control her gift, never to use it unworthily. If you ask her now to direct it in rage and destruction on the armies below us, can you not see, my lord, you wipe out all we have done? As a young child, twice, she killed, striking with a child’s uncontrolled anger. Can you not see, if you use her this way—” Allart stopped, trembling with apprehension.

  Dom Mikhail said, “We must use such weapons as we have to hand, Allart.” He raised his head and said, “You did not complain when she struck down the evil bird your brother sent against you! Nor did you hesitate to ask her to use her gift to move the storm which had you trapped in the snow! And she struck down the air-cars which would have spread enough clingfire here to burn Castle Aldaran into a smoking ruin!”

  “All this is true,” Allart said, shaking with earnestness, “but in all this she was defending herself or others against the violence of another. Can you not see the difference between defense and attack, sir?”

  “No,” Aldaran said, “for it seems to me that in this case attack is the only defense, or we may be struck down at any moment by some weapon even more frightful than those they have loosed on us already.”

  Sighing, Allart made his last plea.

  “Lord Aldaran, she has not yet even recovered from her threshold sickness. I saw, when we were at the fire station, how over use of her laran left her sick and weak, and then she was not yet come to the threshold of maturity this way. I am really afraid of what may happen if you put further strain on her powers just now. Will you wait, at least, until we truly have no other choice? A few days, even a few hours—”

  The father’s face contracted with fear, and Allart knew that for the moment, at least, he had won his victory.

  “Cassandra and I will go again to the watchtower and keep vigil so they will not take us unaware again. No matter how many leroni they have down there, they must have exhausted themselves with that spell of terror. I think they must rest before they try anything more like that, or worse.”

  Allart’s prediction proved true, for all during that day and night, only a few flights of arrows flew against the walls of the castle. But at dawn the next morning, Allart, who had snatched a few hours of sleep, leaving Cassandra on watch in the tower room, was wakened by ominous rumbling far away. Confused, trying to flood away sleep by splashing cold water on his face, he tried to identify the sound. Cannon? Thunder? Was Dorilys angered or frightened again? Had Aldaran broken his pledge not to use her except in extremity? Or was it something else?

  He hurried up the stairs to the watchtower, but as he went, the stairs seemed to sway under his feet and he had to clutch at the handrail, his laran suddenly envisioning the cracks spreading in the tower walls, the tower splitting and crumbling, falling.

  He burst into the tower room, his face white, and Cassandra, seated before the matrix, looked up at him in sudden terror, picking up his dread.

  “Come down,” he said quickly. “Come out of here, at once, my wife.” As she hurried down the stairs he saw again the great cracks widening in the staircase, the rumbling… They fled down the stairs, hand in hand, Cassandra stumbling on her lame knee, and at last Allart turned back, caught her up in his arms and carried her down the last few steps, not stopping even to breathe, hurrying along the hall. Out of breath, he set her on her feet and stood clinging to a doorframe in the corridor, her arms around him. Then the floor beneath their feet swayed and rumbled, there was a great sound like the splitting asunder of the world, and the floor of the tower they had just left heaved and buckled upward. The stairs broke away from the wall, stones fell outward, crumbling, and then the whole tower split and fell, crashing in heavy thunder down upon the roofs of the keep, stones cascading into the courtyards, falling into the valley below, touching off rockfalls and landslides. … Cassandra buried her face in Allart’s chest and clung to him, shaking with dread. Allart felt his knees buckling and they slid together to the floor, as it swayed and shook under them. Finally the noise died away, leaving only silence and strange, ominous grumbles and crunching sounds from the ground under them.

  Slowly they clambered to their feet. Cassandra had injured her lame knee freshly in their fall; she had to cling to Allart to stand. They stared up at the great gap and thick foggy dawn where once a tall tower had risen, by a near-miracle of matrix engineering, three flights of stairs toward the sun. Now there was nothing but a great pile of stone and rubble and plaster fallen inward, and a huge gap through which the morning rain was drizzling in.

  “What, in the name of all the gods was that?” Cassandra finally inquired, stunned. “An earthquake?”

  “Worse, I fear,” Allart said. “I do not know what kind of leroni they have down there, or what they are using against us, but I am afraid it is something worse than even Coryn would invent.”

  Cassandra scoffed, “No matrix known could do that!”

  “No single matrix, no,” Allart said, “and no technician. But if they have one of the great matrix screens, they could explode this planet to its core, if they dared.” His mind clamored, Would even Damon-Rafael risk laying waste this land he seeks to rule? But his mind provided him with a grim answer.

  Damon-Rafael would not be at all averse to showing his power over a part of the world for which he had no immediate need and which he considered expendable. And after this, no one would dare to challenge him.

  Scathfell might be malicious and eager to rule in his brother’s shoes, but Damon-Rafael was the culprit this time. Scathfell wished to rule in Castle Aldaran, not to destroy it.

  Now they became aware, through the gap in the castle walls, of cries and commotion below, and Allart recalled himself to duty.

  “I must go and see if anyone has been hurt by falling stones, and how it fares with Donal, my sworn brother,” he said, and hurried away. But even as he went he felt the castle trembling again beneath him, and wondered what new devilry was afoot. Well, Cassandra could warn the women without his help. He hurried down into the courtyard, where he found chaos unbelievable. One of the outbuildings had been buried entirely beneath the falling stones of the tower, and a dozen men and four times as many animals were dead in the ruins; others had been crushed by falling debris.

  Dom Mikhail was there, leaning heavily on Donal’s arm. He was still in his furred bed-gown, his face gray and fallen in; Allart thought he looked twenty years older in a single night. He clung to his foster-son as he moved carefully among the ruin in his courtyard. As he saw Allart his thin mouth stretched in a travesty of a smile.

  “Cousin, the gods be thanked, I feared that you and your lady had fallen with the tower and been killed. Is the lady Cassandra safe? What, in the name of all Za
ndru’s demons, have they done to us now? It will take us half a year to clear away this chaos! Half the dairy animals have been killed; the children will go wanting milk this winter…”

  “I am not certain,” Allart said soberly, “but I must have every man or woman in this stronghold who is able to use a matrix, and organize our defenses against it. We are but ill prepared, I fear, for this kind of warfare.”

  “Are you sure of that, my brother?” Donal asked. “Surely earthquakes have been known in the mountains before this!”

  “It was no earthquake! I am as sure of that as if Damon-Rafael stood before me laughing at what he had done!”

  Dom Mikhail knelt beside the body of a fallen man, only crushed legs protruding from a block of fallen stone larger than a man. “Poor fellow,” he said. “At least his death must have been swift. I fear that those buried in the stables had a death more fearful. Donal, leave the guardsmen to bury the dead: Allart has more need of you now. I will send everyone with laran to you, so that you can see what has been sent us.”

  “We cannot meet in the tower now,” Allart said grimly. “We must have a room somewhat isolated from the grief and fright of those who are clearing away the ruin, Lord Aldaran.”

  “Take the women’s conservatory; perhaps the peace of the flowering plants there will create an atmosphere you can use.”

  As Donal and Allart entered the castle once again, Allart could feel, through the soles of his feet, a renewed faint tremor. Again he wondered what happened. He felt a spasm of dread, remembering how near Cassandra had come to being trapped in the falling tower.

  Donal said, “I wish that our friends in Tramontana were here. They would know how to deal with this!”

  “I am glad that they are not,” Allart replied. “I would not have the Towers drawn into the wars in this land!”

  The sun was just coming through the clouds as they entered the conservatory, and the calm brilliance of the sun light, the solar collectors spreading light, the faint, pleasant damp smell of herbs and flowering leaves, felt strangely at odds with the dread and fear Allart could feel from the men and women who were joining him there. Not only Cassandra, Renata, Margali, and Dorilys, but two or three of the women he had not seen before, and half a dozen of the men. Each one bore a matrix, though Allart sensed that more than half of these had only minimal talent and could do little more than open a matrix-lock or operate some such toy as the gliders. After a time Dom Mikhail, too, came in.

  Allart glanced at Cassandra. She had been in a Tower longer than he, she was, perhaps, better trained, and he was willing to allow her to conduct this search, but she shook her head.

  “You are Nevarsin-taught; you are less subject to fear and confusion than I.”

  Allart was not so sure, but he accepted her decision and looked around the circle of men and women.

  “I have no time to test you one by one and assess the level of your training; I must trust you,” he said. “Renata, you were four years a monitor. You must set a guard around us, for we expose ourselves to those who are trying to destroy this castle and all those in it, and we are vulnerable. I must find what they are using against us, and if there is any defense against it. You must lend us your strength, and our lives are in all of your hands.”

  He looked around the room, at the men and women who shared with him a spark of this gift of the great families. Did they all have some trace of the far-off kin to the gods; were they all somehow descended via the breeding program from the blood of Hastur and Cassilda? Or did all men, in truth, have some trace, more or less, of these powers? Always before he had depended on his equals, his kinsmen; now he was in the hands of commoners, and it sobered him, and humbled him, too. He was afraid to trust them, but he had no choice.

  He linked his mind first with Cassandra, then with Donal; then, one by one, with the others in the circle, picking up traces of their emotion as he did so… fear, anger at what was being sent against them, disquiet at this unusual operation, strangeness… He felt Dorilys drop into the linkage, sensing her fury at the attackers who had dared to do this to her home… One by one, he picked up every man and woman in the circle, and sank into the joined consciousness, moved outward and outward, searching sifting…

  It seemed a very long time before he felt the link fall apart and Allart raised his head, looking sobered.

  “It is no natural matrix they are using against us,” he said, “but one constructed artificially within the Towers by a technician. With it, they are seeking to alter the natural vibration of the very rock of the mountain beneath us.” As he spoke, he put out a hand and he could feel jthrough the walls the very faint trembling of the walls which reflected the deeper trembling within the foundations and the veined metal and layers of old rock beneath.

  Dom Mikhail had not shaved; beneath the untidy stubble of grayish beard his face was deathly pale. “They will bring down the castle about our heads! Is there no defense, Allart?”

  “I do not know,” Allart said. “All of us together could hardly stand against a matrix that size.” Was there indeed any hope, or should Aldaran capitulate and surrender before his entire castle collapsed in ruin around bun? “We could try to put a binding-spell upon the rock of the mountain,” he said, hesitating. “I do not know if it would hold. Even with all of us, I am not sure it would hold. But it seems our only hope.”

  Dorilys sprang to her feet. She had come to the conservatory, with her matrix, not bothering to dress; she sat in her long-sleeved childish nightgown, her hair unbraided and falling about her shoulders like a cascade of new copper.

  “But I have a better idea,” she cried. “I can break their concentration; can I not, Father? Donal, come with me.”

  Allart watched, in consternation, as she hurried from the room. In a whisper, from the men and women, commoners, around the room, he heard again the name they had given her.

  “Stormqueen. Our little lady, our little sorceress, she can raise a storm and give those folk down there something else to think about, indeed!”

  Allart appealed to Dom Mikhail.

  “My lord—”

  Slowly, the old lord of Aldaran shook his head. “I see no other choice, cousin. It is that, or surrender at once.”

  Allart lowered his eyes, knowing that Dom Mikhail spoke no more than truth.

  Already, as he followed toward the high battlement where Dorilys stood with Donal, he could see the clouds thickening and gathering. Then he shrank from the open window as Dorilys raised her arms, crying out wordlessly. Power seemed to burst from her, so that she was no longer only a young woman in a nightgown, her hair falling about her shoulders; above their heads the storm burst like one of the explosive shells, with a great thunderbolt and a flare of lightning that seemed to split the sky asunder. Torrential rains poured down, wiping out eyesight below, but through the welter of noise, the crash upon crash of thunder and the glare that hurt his eyes and split the heavens apart, Allart sensed what was happening below.

  Floodwaters washing down on the camp at the foot of the mountain. Thunder, deafening and stampeding their riding-animals, spreading panic in human and nonhuman alike. Lightning ripping through the tent where the matrix workers sat over their great unnatural stone, searing them blind and deafened, some of them burned out or dead. Rain, pouring soaking rain, pounding and drumming, beating their camp into the ground, driving around every rock or tree where they might take shelter, reducing everything that had life in that camp to naked, soaked animal humiliation. Lightning again kindling fires to roar through their tents, searing, raging, beating everything to the ground.

  Never had Allart known such a storm. Cassandra clung to him, as it raged on and on over their heads, burying her head and sobbing in fear. Allart held himself tensed against the noise and devastation, as if it raged through his whole body. But Dom Mikhail’s face held a fierce exultation as he stood there, hour after hour, watching the storm wreak desolation and ruin in the camp of Scathfell and Damon-Rafael below them.
r />   At last, at long last, it began to subside. Small rollings and rumblings of thunder remained, dying away in shudders of sound on the distant hills, and the rain began to grow weaker. As the sky cleared to whitish shreds of cloud, Allart looked down into the valley. The valley lay stunned, quiet, a few fires still roaring out of control in the camp, side by side with flooding streams which had left their beds and raged over the countryside. There seemed no sign of life below.

  Dorilys swayed, her face very white, and fell against Donal in a faint. He picked her up tenderly and carried her inside.

  She has saved us, Allart thought, at least for now. But at what cost?

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  « ^ »

  It was high noon before there was any sign of life from the camp of Lord Scathfell below. There were still more rumbles and noise of ominous thunder high above them, crashing around the peaks, and Allart wondered if Dorilys, in her exhausted sleep, still dreamed of the dreadful battle, if these thunders reflected her nightmares.

  Renata said that Dorilys taps the magnetic potential of the planet, he reflected. I can well believe it! But with all that power flowing through her poor little body and brain, can she survive it undamaged?

  He wondered if Aldaran, in the long run, would not have done better to surrender. What kind of father love would expose a beloved child to that?

  But near midday the thunders died away, and Cassandra, who had been summoned to monitor Dorilys and care for her, reported that she had wakened and eaten and fallen into normal sleep. Still, Allart felt a dreadful unease, and it seemed to him that unending lightnings still played around the castle. Donal, too, looked deeply troubled, and although he had gone to supervise the men who were burying the dead and clearing rubble from the fallen tower, he kept returning, stealing up to the door of her room and standing there to listen to her breathing. Renata came to look at him, in dread and pleading, but he avoided her eyes.