The absence of the beat snatched at everyone’s attention.
After the silence came the hoarse, bleating call of a sackbut.
A rider left the massed front of the Cadwal army. His armor burned with sunlight as if he were clad in gold.
At the end of his spear, he displayed a flag of truce.
“An emissary,” observed King Joyse. “The High King wants to speak to us. He means to offer us an opportunity to surrender.”
Growling through his moustache, Prince Kragen asked, “Why does he bother?”
“He hopes to see some evidence that we are frightened.”
“Will you meet him?”
“We will, my lord Prince,” the King said; his tone didn’t encourage discussion. “It may surprise you to hear this, but in all my years of warfare and contest, I have never had a chance to laugh in High King Festten’s face.”
Elega’s eyes shone at her father as if she were delighted.
The Cadwal emissary was stopped and held at Mordant’s front line, and a horseman brought to the King the message that High King Festten did indeed wish to speak to him and Prince Kragen. In reply, Joyse sent back word that he and Kragen were willing to meet Festten midway between the two armies as soon as the High King wished.
Mounted on sturdy chargers which had been trained for combat, King Joyse and Prince Kragen rode down the valley, accompanied only by Castellan Norge. Before them stretched the Cadwal army, as unbreachable as a cliff. And above them on the ramparts, the catapults watched and waited, apparently oblivious to several hundred men with ropes and four Masters who were already attempting to scale the walls at a number of different points.
At the front of their army, the King and the Prince waited until they saw High King Festten emerge from his own forces.
“Watch for treachery,” Norge warned, stifling a yawn.
“Treachery?” King Joyse chuckled grimly. “The High King only betrays those he fears. At the moment, I feel quite certain he does not fear us. That is his weakness.” At once, he amended, “One of his weaknesses.”
“My lord King,” Prince Kragen said like a salute, “I admire your confidence.”
King Joyse gave his ally a fierce grin. “You justify it, my lord Prince.”
When they saw the High King leave his guards behind, they rode out alone to meet him, crossing clean, white snow unmarked except by the emissary’s passage.
At the agreed spot – a long bowshot from both armies – the three men came together. No one offered to dismount; and High King Festten kept some distance between himself and his enemies, as if he expected them to do something desperate. The stamping of the horses raised gusts of dry snow around the riders.
He was a short man – too short, really, for all the power he wielded. He compensated for his shortness, however, by wearing a golden helmet topped with a long spike and an elaborate plume. Between the cheek plates of his helmet, his eyes were stark, as if he had outlined them with kohl to give them force. His beard as it curled against the gold breastplate of his armor was dark and lustrous, probably dyed; only the lines and wrinkles hidden under his whiskers betrayed that he was older than King Joyse – and dedicated to his pleasures.
Ignoring Prince Kragen, he said, “Well, Joyse,” as if he and the King were intimately familiar, despite the fact that they had never met, “after years of success you have come to a sorry end.”
“Do you think so?” King Joyse smiled a smile which held no innocence at all. “I am rather pleased with myself. At last I have a chance to deal with all my enemies at once. It was only with the greatest reluctance that I allowed the Alend Contender to persuade me to offer you this one last chance for surrender.”
If this remark surprised Prince Kragen, he didn’t show it.
“ ‘Surrender’?” spat the High King. Clearly, King Joyse had caught him off balance. “You wish me to surrender?”
King Joyse shrugged as if only his sense of humor kept him from losing interest in the conversation altogether. “Why not? You cannot win this war. The best you can hope for is the chance to save your life by throwing yourself on my mercy.
“You may be unaware,” he went on before High King Festten could sputter a retort, “that your Master Eremis has offered me an alliance against you – which I have accepted.”
“That is a lie!” the High King shouted, momentarily apoplectic. Quickly, however, he regained control of himself. In a colder voice, a tone unacquainted with pity, he said, “Master Eremis is mendacious, of course. But I have not trusted him blindly. Gart is with him. And he knows that I have commanded Gart to gut him at the slightest hint of treachery. Also he is aware that I no longer need him. I can crush you now” – he knotted his fist in the air – “without Imagery.
“You have no alliance with him. And the strength of Alend is as paltry as your own.
“No, Joyse, it is you who must surrender. And you must surrender now, or the chance will be lost. You have thwarted me for years, denied me for decades. The rule which is my right you have cut apart and dissipated and limited. You have opposed my will, killed my strength – you have denied me Imagery. There is no day of my life which you have not made less. If you do not capitulate to me here, I will exterminate you and all you have ever loved as easily as I exterminate rats!”
At that, King Joyse looked over at Prince Kragen. Mock-seriously, he said, “Come, my lord Prince. This discussion is pointless. The High King insists on jesting with us. In all the world, no one has ever succeeded at exterminating rats.”
Casually, he turned his horse away.
His dark eyes gleaming, Prince Kragen did the same.
Together they rode back to their troops. The High King was left so furious that he seemed to froth at the mouth.
That was Joyse’s way of laughing in his face.
Behind them, the sackbut blared again – and again. With a palpable thud, the war drums resumed their labor.
Around the valley rim, all the catapults began to cock their arms.
“Now,” said King Joyse to the Prince and Castellan Norge, “if Master Barsonage is ready, we are ready. I do not doubt that High King Festten and Master Eremis have a number of unpleasant surprises in store for us. For the present, however, we will stand or fall according to our success against those engines.”
Prince Kragen considered what could be seen of the men climbing the walls. Quite a few of them were out of sight, concealed among the complex rocks. That was a good sign: perhaps the men would also be hard to spot from above.
Grimly, the Prince reported, “Each catapult will be able to throw at least twice before it is threatened.”
King Joyse nodded. “Castellan, only the front lines are required for battle – say three thousand men. Unless Master Barsonage miscalculates. Instruct the rest of the men to watch the catapults and protect themselves as best they can.
“Oh, and ready the physicians,” he added before Norge could ride off. “Provide horses for litters. Tell them we will use Esmerel as our infirmary. It is unpleasant, but we have no other shelter to offer the injured.”
“Yes, my lord King.” Castellan Norge spurred away.
The King and Prince Kragen returned to the pennon, where Terisa, Geraden, and Elega waited, fretting.
The massed front of the Cadwal army was in motion, marching to the insistence of the war drums.
As that army approached the foot of the valley, it took on its attacking formation: a core of horsemen like the shaft and point of an arrow; flanks of foot soldiers on both sides to provide the cutting edges of the arrowhead.
The pulse of the drums quickened slightly. The army increased its pace. All the catapults were cocked; now they took on their loads. Apparently, High King Festten wanted to time his charge so that it coincided with the first throw of the engines.
King Joyse remained on his mount to improve his view down the valley. From horseback, he looked tall and sure, capable of anything. “Sound my call,” he said to his standard-b
earer, who stood guard at the pennon.
Putting his trumpet to his lips, the standard-bearer raised a blast like a shout into the morning.
The sackbut bleated in response: three hoarse bursts.
With their spears set, the Cadwal horsemen kicked their chargers into a controlled canter, an attacking stride.
The King’s forces braced themselves to receive the assault. Castellan Norge had gone to join them, so that his orders wouldn’t need to be relayed down the length of the valley.
“Now,” King Joyse commented to no one in particular, “we shall see if Master Barsonage is as good as his word.”
Terisa’s chest hurt as if she were holding her breath. Involuntarily, she clasped Geraden’s hand, gripped it hard. He tried to murmur something reassuring, but she didn’t hear him; she was focused on the drums and the horses, the coming thunder of hooves.
Over the heads of Mordant’s defenders, she saw the Cadwal horse charge into the valley.
At that moment, all the catapults threw.
The brutal sound they made as their arms hit the stops caught at her, jerked her head up.
Boulders this time: nine of them, imponderably graceful as they arced against the sky’s blue; stones as big as ponies, just to show what the engines could do.
A chaotic yell went up from the army – shouts of warning, cries of fear, urgent commands. Cadwal responded with a battle howl. The shock as the forces came together resounded from the walls, broke into bloodshed against the ramparts. Only the boulders seemed to make no sound as they hit the snow, scattering men in all directions, splashing white into the air – white streaked with red where the soldiers of Alend and the guards of Orison didn’t dodge well enough.
At once, the cocking of the catapults began again.
The King’s lines bent under the weight of the Cadwal charge. Men and horses recoiled, retreated, as if they could see Festten’s full strength coming at them and knew they had no hope. Spears thrust forward and either hit or failed. Swords flailed against each other, against shields, against armor; a metal clamor among the cries and whinnies of the beasts. Mounts reared, blundered, trampled. Bodies were buried in the snow, marking their own graves with their blood. The Cadwal battle howl took on a note of triumph.
Then the Congery struck.
Hiding themselves as well as they could in the jumbled rocks at the ends of the valley walls, the Masters had set two tall mirrors facing each other – exactly facing each other across the foot of the valley. The positioning of the mirrors to face each other exactly was a problem with which the Congery had wrestled for days; but it had been resolved by the simple – if imprecise – expedient of memorizing the Images as they appeared from every side, so that the mirrors could be held at angles which complemented each other. Their alignment across the intervening ground was more easily achieved: from their hiding places, under cover of darkness, the Masters had used lamps to orient themselves.
As the horsemen of Cadwal broke into the valley, they passed between two mirrors which showed the same Image – but the same Image seen from opposite sides, and from positions nearly a hundred yards apart.
The Image of an arid landscape under a hot sun, so dry that it seemed incapable of sustaining any kind of life, so hard-baked that the ground was split by a crack as deep as a chasm and wide enough to swallow men and horses.
Master Barsonage flashed his signal, a strip of blue silk which he waved from a place high among the rocks so that it could be seen over the heads of the charging troops. At once, the two Masters who had shaped the mirrors began their translation.
With a noise like a cataclysm and a violent heave that seemed to crack the bedrock of the valley, a chasm appeared under the hooves of the horses. The ground shook; tremors ran into the distance, pulling loose rock from the ramparts, knocking men and horses off their legs. The sound shocked the valley, stunned the air. Dust sifted from the cleft as if the sky itself had shattered.
Riders slammed headlong into the rent snow and dirt, toppled from the edge; horses dropped screaming with their legs shattered. And more of the charge plunged into the cleft until the Cadwals had time to halt, rear back. Even then, dozens of soldiers were forced over the lip by the uncontrolled press behind them. A few horsemen tried to leap the chasm: a few of those succeeded. The rest were swallowed by the riven ground.
The Cadwals who had already ridden into the valley were cut off from the support of their army.
Instantly, Castellan Norge gave up the appearance of retreat and rallied his forces. His riders parted to let foot soldiers in among their enemies. Three thousand of King Joyse’s men turned on scarcely a third that many Cadwals.
Outnumbered, trapped in confusion, with no escape possible except by a wild and unlikely leap across the chasm, High King Festten’s soldiers fell without doing much damage.
As if nothing unpropitious had happened, the catapults threw again.
Scattershot this time, for variety; hundreds of fist-sized stones launched into the valley with the force of crossbows.
Smaller stones were more effective than boulders. They were harder to see coming, harder to dodge. And most of the King’s army had involuntarily turned to watch the fighting – and the Imagery – at the valley foot. Alends and Mordants died because they weren’t watching the sky.
Master Barsonage saw a sudden pocket of carnage appear among the troops as he scrambled down the rocks. Another – another – he couldn’t look anymore. Reaching the young Master who held the mirror, he panted, “Hold the translation. As we agreed. If you stop and he” – the Imager at the other mirror – “does not, our own chasm will engulf us.”
The young Master nodded without lifting his head from his fixed concentration.
Thank the stars he was young. He would have stamina. The man at the other glass, however—
Urgently, Master Barsonage scrubbed the chilled sweat out of his eyebrows.
They were in a gap like a room hidden among the rocks – a gap in which three or four men could have hacked at each other, as long as they didn’t swing their swords too widely – with packed snow underfoot, ragged black boulders for concealment. The mirror was set between two rocks facing the opposite wall; another opening allowed the mediator to see across the valley. He and his companions were a good ten feet above the valley floor, however, and had more rock curving outward to protect them from above.
“Now the true danger begins, as you were warned,” he muttered, more to himself than to his companions – the young Imager and Master Harpool. “The High King will turn his attack against us. And we dare not release the chasm, or enough Cadwals will sweep inward to slaughter us, regardless of how we are defended. As matters stand, we can only be attacked over the rocks.” Stroking his glass, the flat mirror with the Image of Orison’s ballroom, he added, “I hope Artagel received the King’s message.”
“I saw him pick up the parchment,” muttered Master Harpool, not for the first time.
Master Barsonage ignored Harpool. He wasn’t talking because he wanted answers – or even reassurance. He was talking so that he wouldn’t dither.
He didn’t like danger. Philosophically, he didn’t approve of it. Imagery was for research and experiment, for understanding and knowledge, not for bloodshed. For that very reason, however, he approved passionately of the creation of the Congery. And the conflicts inherent in his own position had made him an indecisive mediator – a man, as someone had once observed, who couldn’t keep his feet out of the shit on either side because he couldn’t get the fence post out of his ass.
Well, he had made decisions at last. He had brought the Congery here, into this mess, because he believed that was the right thing to do. But he still needed to keep talking.
“What I would most like to do at this moment,” he continued for no one’s benefit except his own, “is design a new couch. I am not altogether satisfied with the backrest of my last attempt.”
“Oh, shut up, Barsonage,” said Master Harpo
ol; but he obviously didn’t expect the mediator to heed him.
The valley had become strangely quiet. The sackbut had called back the Cadwal troops; the war drums were still. Undoubtedly, High King Festten was conferring with his captains. In the meantime, Castellan Norge had sent half a thousand foot soldiers to pitch the High King’s dead into the chasm; get the bodies out of the way. Weapons were collected; uninjured horses were appropriated; wounded men were unceremoniously clubbed senseless and taken to the infirmary. Everything else had to go.
“If you were the High King, Master Harpool,” Master Barsonage asked pointlessly, “how much time would you require to get five hundred men into the rocks above us?”
The two Imagers were old friends. “Oh, shut up, Barsonage,” Harpool repeated.
Most of the catapults were ready to throw again.
Master Barsonage had a painfully clear view of the engine nearest to him across the valley – a painfully clear view of Prince Kragen’s men as they were stripped from the wall by a shower of rocks. As far as he could see, none of them survived the fall.
In contrast, the next catapult – cocked ready to throw – abruptly twisted itself into a wreck and collapsed, as if some of its crucial lashings had been cut or burned away so that it was destroyed by its own force.
Consumed by vexation, the Cadwals around the wrecked engine hurled a number of bodies off the rampart. Master Barsonage distinctly saw a chasuble flutter to the valley floor.
“Vixix,” he muttered. “May the stars have mercy on you, Master Eremis, for I will not – if I ever get the chance.”
He did his best to tally the next throw, but he wasn’t sure of. the results: he thought he saw seven boulders thud into the army. One of them smashed a squad of injured Cadwals on its way to the infirmary (no great loss), killing at least one physician (a serious blow).
Seven. Had some of Prince Kragen’s climbers succeeded? They must have.
“The difficulty of backrests,” he said through his teeth, “is that they must suit such a variety of backs.”
The young Master at the mirror was beginning to breathe like a poorly trained runner. Sweat trickled from his beardless chin to the ground at his feet, where it grew slowly into ice. Shaded from the sun, the air in the gap was cold. One of his hands was clenched too tightly on the frame; the other rubbed the mimosa wood too hard, threatening the focus of the Image.