A Wizard in the Way

16

“Already?” the sergeant asked in a hollow voice.

“There’re more ghosts coming,” the barbarian explained.

The sergeant shuddered and looked around the clammy cellar. All of a sudden it seemed very cozy.

All over the city, similar groups of soldiers were imprisoned or penned up one way or another. None of them struggled terribly hard to free themselves.

When morning came and their guards told them to go, they came out blinking, dazed, and calling for their magicians. No one answered and each squadron of troopers searched until they found their lord—dead. The ghost handler’s face was a rictus of horror; he had met more terrible phantoms than his own. The fire-handler’s tank had clearly exploded. The master of wyverns had died with talons in his heart, and the earth-shaker lay buried under a pile of fallen masonry. The magician whose peasants had lived in fear of poisonous vapors and contaminated food lay twisted by internal agony.

Some silent and some openly rejoicing, the troops filed out of the city along the boulevard—most of them. One out of ten stayed behind. The sergeants later claimed they were missing in action, but they weren’t fooling anybody. The troopers all knew that a dead lord meant only that a neighboring magician would commandeer his land and serfs. They had preferred to take their chances with the outcasts of the city ruins.

“We have some new pupils,” Alea told Gar.

“I won’t teach anybody who doesn’t want to learn.” Gar frowned at the fifty troopers in different liveries who stood more or less at attention, watching him anxiously.

“Oh, we want to,” a sergeant assured him. “Anybody who can beat a magician so handily but find room to let the troopers live—well, whatever you’ve taught these city folk, we need to learn, too.”

“It was the clans who showed you mercy,” Alea pointed out. “The mercy that you taught them, lady! You’re not fooling anybody—everybody knows these city people used to spend most of their time fighting each other. Anybody who can convince them to stick together—well, maybe she knows something that can help the serfs.”

Alea looked up at Gar with a bright smile. Slowly, he nodded.

The new recruits had been training for two weeks when Alea asked, over the clan’s campfire one night, “What’s happened to Conn and Ranulf? I haven’t seen them for weeks.”

“Bored, I expect,” Gar said. “Their only reason for hanging around us was for amusement, after all.”

A maniacal laugh rang through the courtyard. Everyone leaped up, but it was only Corbin materializing in middance and crying, “Get a good night’s sleep and be up before the sun, people. You have another army coming.”

“Another?” Longshanks rose with a scowl. “Who this time?”

“Ten more magicians, each with fifty guards. Most of the soldiers are green, though—fresh from the plow and scarcely trained at all.”

“What we did to the last five hundred, we can do to five hundred more. Why do they march?”

“Oh, they’ve heard about you,” Corbin told them. “The ghosts who came with that last batch didn’t stick around, you know. They went back home and told the nearest magicians they could find. I gather some of them made it sound as though you’re planning an assault, and if the magicians wait too long, you’re going to explode out of your cities and conquer them a…”

“What nonsense!” Solutre said indignantly. “All we ask is to be left alone in our exile as we always have been!”

“Well, you can’t ask so little anymore,” Corbin told her. “The magicians grilled the soldiers who came back and found out that most of what the ghosts said was true—that your tribes have united, that you’re tougher fighters than any of the soldiers, and that every other one of you is a magician.”

“None of us is a magician!”

“By your standards, no,” Corbin acknowledged, “but by the standards of men who use the title to overawe the weak and ignorant, yes.”

“We can’t help what they call themselves,” Solutre retorted. “No, but we can show them up for what they are,” Longshanks said grimly, “ordinary men who happen to have an extra talent each.” He turned to the young folk. “Gawain, find that Hawk girl you’re sweet on and tell her what’s happening.”

Gawain blushed as the other youngsters set up catcalls and jibes.

“Stop,” Solutre said, not loudly, but they stopped. “There’s no time for that,” she explained.

“Axel, you go tell the Hounds,” Longshanks directed. “Manon, that Fox boy you’ve been eyeing…”

Manon leaped to her feet and turned away, not quite quickly enough to hide the reddening of her cheeks.

“Ander, you go to the Elks,” Longshanks directed. “Thall, you take the Badgers.”

The youngsters nodded and dashed away.

“All right, we’ll do as we did last time,” Longshanks told his people, “but we can’t use the same tricks—they’ll have heard about them and be ready. Any ideas?”

“If they’re coming with ghost-scouts, you’ll have to get the specters out of the way first,” Blaize said. “How about persuading the city ghosts to set up a clamor? When the soldiers start to charge toward it, their ghosts will speed ahead to see what it is, and your ancestors can hit them with a screaming match. That should scare the soldiers out of that street, and you can have decoys waiting.”

“Good thought.” Longshanks nodded. “What if they don’t scare?”

“Have wyverns waiting in the buildings on either side,” Mina suggested. “They can hit the soldiers so quickly that they won’t have time to shoot down the darlings.”

“Only a wyverneer could call her pets a darling,” Solutre said drily, “but it’s a good idea.”

“There’s that old foundation over on Third and Tenth that we covered up with boards,” a broad man said. “We could pile rubble on it, shoot at the soldiers from it, and when they charge us, yank away the boards.”

“Yes, and there’s that rotten pier down by the river!” a matronly woman said, eyes alight. “We can send a few canoes down to shoot at them, and when they crowd onto the pier to shoot back, they’ll end up in the water!”

Three others started to speak at once.

“I’m starting to feel left out,” Alea told Gar. “That’s just fine,” he replied, his face glowing. She eyed him askance. “What are you so happy abut?”

“It’s always a delight to see how well your students have learned,” Gar said.

The sentries were on watch all night, but they didn’t see anything until dawn.

“Three columns!” one called down from the highest building. Others on lower floors had to relay her cry down to street level. “They’re coming in on the Boulevard of the Elysian Fields, the Linden Tree Promenade, and the Broad Way!”

“Trying to cut three wedges off from one another,” Solutre grunted. “Don’t the fools realize they’ll have enemies to left and to right?”

“Probably do,” Longshanks answered. “Won’t do them much good, though. Bait the traps.”

The soldiers came marching down the boulevards with their magicians right behind them, watching for stragglers who might try to desert—a wise precaution, from the fearful looks the raw recruits cast about them (and some of the veterans, too). Each troop had assigned a lookout for the sky, watching for stones dropping and wyverns swooping. Even so, the soldiers marched with their shields over their heads; only the first rank held theirs in front.

Longshanks watched from the shadows of a second-story window. “We’ll do as we did last time—wait till they split up into search parties. Then we’ll start leading them into the traps.”

But these magicians had heard from the ghosts what had happened to their predecessors and kept their troops together: three magicians each on the Boulevard of the Elysian Fields and the Linden Tree Promenade, and four on the Broad Way, in the center. Their intermittent bickering showed their own nervousness—or perhaps only longstanding rivalries born of greed. When they did finally leave the boulevards, they left in a body.

“They’re not going to let you divide and conquer,” Alea said. “No, they’re not,” Solutre agreed. “At least we can leave the outer two to the other four clans. These, though, are our meat—ours and the Hounds’.”

On a terrace overlooking the Boulevard of the Elysian Fields, Gar stood beside Gyre, who led the Hawks as much as anyone did. “They’re looking for your village,” Gar told him.

“If you can call two floors of a building a village,” Gyre said with a dry smile. “Well, we’d better give them something to find. Leiora! Take five people and go light a bonfire on top of the Ocre Building!”

A young woman nodded, tagged two other women and three men, and headed for the stairs.

“My lord! There, smoke!” A sergeant pointed.

“A village on top of a tower—I suppose it makes sense,” Magician Lurby growled. “Well, if they can climb it, so can we!” When they found the building, though, the soldier stared up eighty stories, their stomachs sinking. “Did the ancients climb that high every day?” one asked.

“Not likely,” Lord Lurby growled. “They lived there, worked there, and probably only came out once a month or so. Still, when they came back, they had to climb. Find a door.”

They found a doorway closed by boards instead. “Tear them down!” the magician ordered.

The boards came down easily, revealing a double door of glass and metal, both panels sagging and partly open, though the glass was intact.

“They don’t guard their portal very well,” Lurby sneered. “In and up!”

The soldiers burst through the doors and found no one in the cavern except the bright mosaics and metal strips inlaid on the wails. They prowled about, past the strange recessed panels with rows of numbers above them, and finally found a stairway behind a deceptively modest door.

“Beware ambush,” the sergeant warned. “Only one at a time can file through there. Five men could hold it against an army.” But there were no enemies on the other side. In they went and started climbing, two hundred men two abreast, tense and wary, expecting a squadron of defenders around every turn—but they found none. They climbed.

And climbed. And climbed.

As they mounted on the north side of the building, Leiora and her five friends slipped down the stairway on the far side, leaving their bonfire burning atop the elevator shaft.

By the time the magicians and their forces reached the top, it was night and the fire only embers. When they found the roof floor empty, they were too tired to curse.

“Foolish notion, to go trying to climb a tower such as this!” Magician Stour barked at Lurby.

“Then why didn’t you say so before we started?” Lurby snarled.

“We came up because we thought they had a village here,” Korkand the wyverneer said, exasperated. “We were all keen for the hunt. Well, at least my wyverns can find us a way down. Still, I’d rather they do the climbing, not me.”

They were too weary to bicker further, but a good night’s sleep would remedy that.

The magicians Lurk, Goth, Vis, and Ghouri the Ghost-Caller marched down the Broad Way until they came to the first of the towers. There they split their force in two, one hundred to the west, one hundred to the east, not realizing that each half of the army was scouting the territory of a different barbarian band—Lurk and Goth to the Hounds’ territory, Ghouri and Vis to the Corbies’.

“They’re off the Broad Way!” Longshanks slapped the terrace rail in triumph. “Now to lead them astray!”

“Why bother leading them?” Alea asked. “Remember the Way and let them search, just pull your people back out of their way.”

“Yes, Longshanks,” Solutre said with a grin. “What flatlander can find his way among our towers, after all?”

Sure enough, they couldn’t. Ghouri even called up the neighborhood ghosts, who helpfully gave him directions that led him around in a four-hour circle. Finally tumbling to their ruse, he asked his own ghosts for guidance, but they had to search, and the city ancestors kept interrupting them with jibes and jeers, destroying their concentration and confusing them completely. Around and around they went through mazes of city streets until, weary and confused, Ghouri and Vis bade their men pitch camp in one of the city’s squares, where seeds had taken root between slabs of plasticrete and, by growing, broken them into rubble. Humus had piled up, giving them purchase for their tent stakes. They lit a campfire, put on a field kettle, and began to boil stew out of beef jerky and hardtack. Vis insisted they gather around to sing a martial song to bolster their spirits.

There they were sitting around the fire singing when Lurk and Goth, misled by a tip from a local ghost who claimed to hate his descendants, came slogging down an alley and saw before them the barbarian camp they’d been looking for all day. Lord Lurk came alive. “There they are! Fall upon them, men!”

The city folk felt absolutely no obligation to get in their way. Lurk’s and Goth’s men crashed into Ghouri’s and Vis’s, who shouted with fear and anger, retreated long enough to catch up their pikes, then waded in. It took only five minutes for Vis to realize who he was fighting. “Treachery! It’s all a ruse! Lurk and Goth have led us here to kill us! Fight for your lives!”

They did. The men fought with pikes against shields; Vis hurled fire at Lurk, who made the pavement tremble and crack beneath him. Goth sent his wyverns against Ghouri’s ghosts, but the ancestors trotted out a wyverneer of their own who sent the little monsters to hunt for rabbits—outside the city. Of course, Goth wasn’t afraid of ghosts, so he drew his sword and attacked Ghouri hand to hand—but Ghouri proved to be just as skilled as he. Finally Goth slipped, Ghouri’s sword slipped between his ribs, and a new ghost wavered in the air above the body, then took form. It shot up a thousand feet, took a look at what was happening, then plunged back at Ghouri, screaming, “You fool! They’ve misled us both, misled us into attacking one another!”

“Fool yourself.” cried the ghost of his sergeant. “If you two idiots hadn’t brought us here, we’d still be alive!”

“Mind your tongue when you talk to your master!” Vis barked.

“Oh?” the sergeant asked. “What are you going to do—kill me?”

The increasing number of ghosts behind him shouted angry agreement and descended on their former master.

Those still living froze, watching, then turned on their living master with howls of vengeance.

Ghouri fled, but stepped in a pothole, tripped, and fell. In minutes, his ghost joined the mob assailing Vis’s specter.

The troops of Magicians Borgen, Sechechs, and Espayic staggered into the large mall where Linden Tree Promenade met Centric Street. They pitched camp with the dragging steps and leaden arms of the exhausted, then collapsed on their blankets. For some of them, hunger was stronger than weariness, so a few cookfires blossomed in the dusk, though most managed to chew their beef jerky without benefit of boiling.

From an archway into a nearby courtyard, Longshanks watched with Solutre, Mira, Blaize, and Alea. “They won’t split up! They just won’t split up!”

“There has to be a way,” Alea said.

“There is,” Blaize said, face pale. “Assemble a hundred ghosts, tell them to make themselves look solid and only a little larger than normal, and have them charge the sleeping camp.”

“Yessss!” Longshanks lifted his head. “The soldiers will strike and their blades will go right through—to cut into one another!”

“Ingenious,” Alea agreed, “if we can trust the specters not to indulge in any of their usual haunting tricks.”

“I’ll have to lead the charge, of course,” Blaize said, his face pale and strained.

“No!” Mira cried. “All their blades will stab at you!”

“There’s no other way,” Blaize said doggedly.

“There has to be!” Mira seized the chest of his tunic in both fists and shook him. “I won’t let you turn into one more ghost! You have too much still to do here!”

“Do I?” Blaize asked, suddenly intense. “What?”

Mira stared into his eyes. Slowly, her hands relaxed, letting go of his tunic.

“Don’t ask loaded questions,” Alea snapped. “Mira, he’s going to have to lead the charge. If you don’t like it, set your pets to guard him.”

Life came back into Mira’s face, life and determination. “I will!”

Magician Sechechs looked up at the mass scream from the south side of the mall, then leaped to his feet shouting, “To arms! They’re coming!”

Come they did, seeming merely mortal, though very odd. There were some seven feet tall and skinny as a rail, some three feet wide and five feet high, white hair, orange hair, green hair, white skins, mahogany skins, golden skins, blood red skins. Some wore robes, some tunics, some guards’ uniforms; some bore staves, some bows, some strange pieces of pipe mounted in crossbow stocks, and they yelled in a shrill, ululating howl that froze the soldiers in their tracks.

Borgen and Espayic tumbled from their tents right behind most of their soldiers—just in time for the barbarians to slam into them. They seemed to be everywhere in the encampment, swinging swords and battle axes and shooting flame from nozzles. Soldiers who could, ran; the rest howled in panic and swung back with the strength of desperation. The felt their blades strike home, they heard shrieks of pain, but the barbarians confronting them only laughed.

Finally Borgen realized what was happening. “They’re ghosts!” he cried. “They can’t hurt you! You’re only striking each other!”

A few soldiers near him hesitated; none others could hear. “There has to be a ghost handler with them!” Borgen cried. “Find him and slay him! Then the ghosts will flee!”

“No, we won’t, fatso!” one of the barbarians spat. He was a middle-aged ghost with fiery eyes and sideburns that suddenly burst into flame. “This is our city and we’ll stay until you’re all out of it!”

The air shimmered by him and the ghost of an old woman appeared, eyes wide in alarm. “They’ve found the village! Quickly, go defend it.”

Lord Borgen laughed.

The old woman turned on him, snarling. “Villain! One of your ghosts found our descendants! You decoyed us here with your false encampment while fifty of your soldiers followed the specter to our village!”