A Wizard in the Way

17

Yes, and another fifty have run to join them while you’ve been attacking us here!” Borgen sneered. “Now we’ll see how flesh and blood can stand up to my soldiers.”

“For that you shall die!” the old woman spat.

“Die?” Borgen said, eyes mocking. “You’re phantoms! Specters! Shadows! You can’t hurt me!”

“Oh, yes, we can, my lord.”

Borgen spun to see half a dozen men in his own livery marching toward him with ragged bloody holes in their tunics. One carried his head under his arm.

“You led us to our deaths for your pride,” the bloody sergeant snarled. “We want revenge.” His sword flashed.

Lord Borgen shivered even as he laughed. “I felt a chill sweep through me, nothing more.”

“Indeed? All of you, now! Pierce him with your blades and hold them there!”

Borgen gasped in horror and pain as six separate chills seized his heart. He found himself staring into a face whose teeth grew into fangs and whose eyes turned to fire even as he watched. The nose and chin lengthened and he found himself staring into the blazing eyes of a man wolf. For the first time since his early apprenticeship, he felt fear—but fear that grew and grew, making his heart hammer in panic. “Away!” he croaked. “You’re only ghosts! Figments! Dreams! You can’t … hurt…”

Then his heart stopped beating.

Minutes later, his own dead soldiers chased him around the battlefield with gloating laughter and ghostly spears.

Lord Espayic saw him pass and gasped. He turned on Sechechs. “You had the watch! You should have prevented this!”

“How?” Sechechs asked with contempt. “We were here to lull them while the ghost led our men to their camp, remember! Quickly, we must join them and make sure of our victory!” Espayic started a hot retort, but Sechechs was already hurrying after his men, who were following a phantom, glad to be away from the mall and its ghosts. Espayic clamped his jaw shut, then called, “To me, men of mine!” and ran after Sechechs’s men. They burst into a plaza surrounded by tall buildings and centered by a circle of lawn with hoary old trees, several of which burned like giant torches. Beneath their leaves a desperate fight waged over the bodies of a dozen women and children. Borgen’s men stood toe to toe with a line of barbarians, shouting in anger and clashing spearshaft against spear. Now and then a spearhead flashed and someone died shrieking. More barbarians came running with every minute.

The raw recruits tried to shy away, but Espayic and Sechechs drove them on with curses and fireballs. They crashed into the line of barbarians, which bowed, nearly broke, but steadied as dozens more like them came running to plug the holes where men and women dropped. Slowly, then, the bulge flattened. Still the barbarians came running, more and more, but there were no more soldiers to join—they were all there already.

Lord Borgen’s ghost came surging to the fight with dozens of dead magicians behind him, but his own dead men fought him with relish, sliding in and out of their former masters, confusing them horribly while legions of city ancestors came flocking to clear them out of the air.

“We can’t win!” Espayic cried. “How did you think of this crazed idea?”

“I did my part!” Sechechs shouted. “I raised the alarm! What else would you have me do? I’m no ghost leader!” He stabbed a finger at Borgen’s shade. “There goes your ghost-handler! Blame him for your predicament?”

But Espayic saw something else. “Look! He’s pointing! Borgen’s pointing!”

Sechechs looked. “That knot of ghosts! They’re clustered around that young phantom!” He seized the nearest living soldier and pointed. “Throw your spear into that crowd of ghosts as hard as you can!”

The man didn’t think to object. He threw straight and true. Blaize cried out in pain and sank to his knees, trying to pull the spear from his thigh.

“He lives!” Sechechs shouted. “He’s the one who has brought these phantoms upon us. Slay him, men, slay him!”

A dozen soldiers started toward the knot of ghosts, their spears leveled—until a dozen wyverns struck, breathing fire that lighted the night, talons reaching for the soldiers’ faces.

“Away!” This Lord Sechechs could deal with. “Aroint thee! Begone!” He waved his hands to dispel the flock.

They let go of the soldiers, then rose ten feet—but Sechechs felt a mind warring with his, felt a tugging at the invisible strands that bound the wyverns to him. Suddenly a face seemed to glow over the battle, the face of a young woman, a yard high and burning with anger, beautiful in wrath. In sheer surprise Sechechs loosed his hold—and a wyvern plunged toward him with jaws open and claws out. He died with talons in his heart and teeth in his throat.

Espayic needed no second warning. “Away!” he cried. “Down the avenue! Retreat!”

He led the way. A score of soldiers broke free and followed him, but most of their comrades remained behind.

By the time Espayic passed out of the city and threw himself gasping on the grass of the fields outside, he had only half a dozen guards left. Looking back toward the ghost fires that played about the towers, he shuddered, amazed that so many could die.

Some had. Most had not. Gar and Alea had many more recruits the next day.

Mira plunged through the mob of cheering, dancing ghosts and threw herself on Blaize, winding a length of cloth around the gash in his thigh. “You’re wounded? They’ve hurt you!”

“They only sliced meat.” Blaize sat up and caught her hand, grinning. “There isn’t enough blood to be dangerous. I probably won’t even limp a month from now.”

Mira stared at him, transfixed, then threw her arms around him with a glad cry.

All over the battlefield, barbarians were tending wounded soldiers. Longshanks looked on, puzzled. “Those barbarians were real! There were more than ghosts here, and there are twenty times as many of them as there are Corbies!”

“You did have a little more help than you realized.”

The barbarian looked up at the ghost towering over him. Beside him, Alea said slowly, “Longshanks, may I introduce you to a friend of ours—Conn.”

“And a friend of mine.” Conn gestured as a lithe, well-muscled man with a pocked face came up. “This is Hengst, war leader of the Ansax Clan of Cumber City, here with warriors from all its six clans!”

Longshanks stared for a moment, then stepped forward, palm raised. “Thank you for kind rescue!”

“Our pleasure.” Hengst pressed his palm against Longshanks’s. “Conn here came to us a month ago and started teaching us about the Tao.”

“I wondered where you’d gone,” Alea said to Conn. He grinned in return.

“When a friend of Conn’s sent word through a chain of ghosts that the magicians were marching against you, we realized that all the cities are connected, in the magicians’ minds if in no other way, and that what they would do to you, they would do to us all—so we came to help out.”

“I’m very glad you did,” Longshanks said fervently.

“You seem to have really taken to the idea of sending messages through a chain of ghosts,” Alea said to Conn.

“Your friend Gar started more that he knew, when he invented that ghost-to-ghost hookup,” Conn said. He turned to Longshanks. “I have other friends. Here’s one.”

Ranulf’s ghost came drifting up, followed by a wiry barbarian woman almost as tall as Longshanks with hair roached high and colored blue.

“Longshanks and Hengst, this is my friend Ranulf,” Conn said.

“And this is my friend Dramout.” Ranulf gestured to the barbarian. “She’s the war leader of the clan of Brandy from Vetarna City.”

“Two other cities come to help us!” Longshanks said, awed, as he pressed palms with Dramout.

“We’re all caught in the web of the Tao,” Dramout said, “so we might as well stand up for one another.”

“We shall, if ever you are attacked,” Longshanks promised. Gar came up behind Alea. She smiled at him. “Things seem to have worked out even better than you planned.”

“Yes, except for the people who died.” Gar’s face was set in grim lines.

Alea sighed. “People would have died in the magicians’ battles if you hadn’t come here. Women and children would have died from famine or the lords’ punishments. Now, though, the cities will spread the Way throughout the countryside, and the magicians will have to agree to a code of ethics or be drowned by sheer numbers. Every warrior who died here today has saved at lest a thousand lives in the future.”

“I wish I could be sure of that,” Gar said, his face haunted. “I wish I could be sure they thought it worth their lives.”

“Ask them.” Alea nodded toward a cluster of glowing forms—warriors’ spirits rising from their dead bodies, looking about them dazed and disbelieving at the loud welcomes of the ancestral ghosts who crowded around them.

“If you have any doubts, ask them,” Alea said again. “This is the one planet where you can, after all.”

The surviving lords, chastened by the example of the battle, signed a treaty and marched their soldiers out of the city, well aware that their movements would be monitored by a chain of ghosts reporting their deeds. The city clans bound up their wounded, buried their dead, then held a banquet for their new allies, who stayed a day or two to agree on ways to stay in touch in the future, even to begin work toward an intercity council. Then they, too, went home, and the next morning, Alea and Gar came out atop the tallest building with Mira and Blaize, who stood arm in arm, still dazed and delighted by what had happened between them.

“It’s up to you two now,” Gar said quietly. “This is only a beginning, you know.”

“Yes, we do,” Mira said, large-eyed. “All the cities have to learn the Way and join together. Then we can start to pressure the magicians to stop exploiting their serfs—but it will take a long time.”

“A life’s work,” Blaize agreed.

“Is it worth your lives?” Alea asked.

The two smiled into one another’s eyes and nodded. “As long as you’re with me,” Mira said.

“And you won’t mind if I’m a magician?” Blaize teased. “Can you be a good magician?” Mira challenged.

“As long as you’re with me,” Blaize answered.

“Don’t try to make the clans accept you as leaders,” Gar cautioned. “It’s enough to be their friends and teach the Way. Wait for them to come to you for advice.”

Mira nodded. “We’ll just be sages.”

“We’ll lead by example,” Blaize promised.

“Good enough, then.” Gar smiled, pressing their hands. “Good-bye and good luck.”

“Good-bye?” Mira stared. “How can you say good-bye on top of a tower?”

“Here comes our chariot.” Alea pointed upward. “Stand against the elevator motorhouse and don’t be afraid.”

Mira and Blaize retreated to the shelter of the blockhouse that stood in the middle of the building’s flat roof, then watched, spellbound and disbelieving, as the great golden ship swung lower and lower, hovered, then extended legs to the rooftop and lowered a ramp. Alea and Gar climbed it, stopped at the top, and turned to wave.

Mira and Blaize waved back, watching wide-eyed as their friends went on up into their ship. Then Mira pointed. “Look! What is that strange creature that follows them?”

Blaize frowned. “What strange creature? I saw nothing.”

“Saw nothing?” Mira stared up at him. “What should you have seen?”

“I… I don’t know,” Blaize said slowly. “I thought I knew, but I don’t.”

Mira nodded. “I thought I remembered something, but it must have been a ghost of the mind.”

“Well, there are enough of them here.” Baize smiled and kissed her, then said, “Come, let’s go down to join our friends. It’s cold up here.”

“As soon as they leave.” Mira turned to watch the great golden ship as it rose, hovered over the building, then shot upward, rising higher and higher until it was only a speck in the dawn sky, then gone. Her head was tilted back, eyes filled with brand-new sunlight. She smiled up at Blaize. “All right. We can go back now.”

“Not quite yet,” Blaize said, and kissed her.

Aboard the ship, Alea came out of her suite in a soft white robe, towel wound about her head like a long tailed turban, and collapsed into an automatic chair with a sigh. She let it adjust to her contours, enjoying the sensation as she remembered that only two years before, that same feeling had scared the daylights out of her. She stretched out a hand to the tall glass beside her, sipped the drink, then set it back and smiled at Gar, who sat across from her, similarly scrubbed and robed. “That seems to have worked out well after all,” Alea said.

“Yes, it does,” Gar agreed. “Care to try again?”

“Yes, I think so,” Alea said, “but not right away.” She frowned. “Do you really think those ghosts were real?”

In the hold below her, a round-headed cat faced alien lifted her head, gazing up as though she could see through the deck to the woman above, then lowered her nose and tucked it into her tail. Evanescent sighed, pleased that she had only needed to nudge a little here and there during the final battle. That native woman had surprised her, though, there at the last—her mind reading had been much more acute than she’d shown before, actually glimpsing the alien climbing up the ship’s ramp, and Evanescent had needed to do a little quick memory erasing before she had gone into the ship.

Still, it was done, and well done. It had all been very amusing, strengthening telepaths and hindering ghosts—but it had been surprisingly wearying, too. Evanescent yawned and composed herself for a month or two of sleep.