Changer’s Moon

20

Serroi stepped from the dragon’s side onto the granite. Lines were worn smooth where Ser Noris had paced the years away gazing down on what he could not possess, only destroy. She saw the janja sitting with massive silence beside a gameboard that was a sudden eruption of color in all the muted grays and browns of the mountainside. Acknowledging the old woman with a small, sketchy gesture, she turned to face Ser Noris.

He was thinner than she remembered, his face worn and tired. The ruby was gone; she missed that bit of flamboyance, a tiny weakness that made him somehow more human, more approachable; with it had gone most of the color and vigor in his face. His black eyes were opaque, he was arming himself against her. “Ser Noris,” she said.

“Serroi.

“Is anything worth all that?” She indicated the valley, the wall, the army, and ended with a flick of the hand that included the Plain beyond the mountains. “All that death?” She hit the last word hard, brought her hand around as if she would touch him but dared not. “Or what it’s done to you? Do you know how you’ve changed, my father, my teacher?” She seemed resigned to no answer. “The waste, teacher, the waste.”

His face stony, he said, “Is a leaf wasted because it falls from a tree?”

“People aren’t leaves.”

He brushed that aside. “We can’t talk. We don’t speak the same language anymore.”

“We never did.” She’d forgotten how impervious he had always been, how little he’d listened to her, how cut off from every other source of life he was.

“Why are you here, daughter?”

“To stop you, father.”

“How?”

The cold wind whipped at her face. “Hern asked me that.”

“I don’t want to hear about him.” She heard the anger in that wonderful seductive voice. She was so tired, so empty, that she felt disarmed before the struggle began. He smiled at her. “Come home, Serroi.”

“No…” She looked vaguely about, seeing nothing, feeling adrift. She stared helplessly at the janja, wondering if the old woman or the Dweller-within could-or would-help her. Reiki’s face was an eroded stone mask, her eyes clouded. Nothing there for her. She looked back at Ser Noris, her eyes fixing on the chalky, twisted hand she’d touched. She remembered the sense of wrongness that had triggered her healing impulse, but the great inflow that had salvaged Hern and healed the rest of the vuurvis victims seemed to have destroyed that reflex. Or had temporarily exhausted it. It was a mistake to come up here before I was rested. She shut her eyes. The waste, the terrible waste-all to feed his hunger for control. She groped blindly with hands and mind for something anything… And power flowed into her, earthfire strong and warm and oddly gentle, lapping up and up, washing away weariness and despair. She was Biserica, she was valley, she was mountain and plain, she was mijloc…

Sadnaji lay quiet, empty; the shrine was cleansed, filled with power, power that flowed into her when she touched it.

Sel-ma-Carth itched with unrest. Carthise were slipping into the shrine to clean it, but there was no Keeper chosen yet, the power there was smothered, leashed-until she touched it. Outside, hidden from the walls in an icy gulley, Roveda Gesda looked up from the vach-carcass he was bargaining over, eyes opening wide, at the sudden eerie touch, then shrugged and went on bargaining.

She dipped into a score of village shrines scattered across the Cimpia Plain, taking from them. They were empty, but humming with a new song, filled with the presence of the Keepers though they were all down below in the valley with their folk, helping to defend the Biserica in any way they could.

The Kulaan mourned their linas and gathered in their winter halls to sing their burning hatred of Floarin and her works, sending south their prayers that the hands of their men be quick and strong in vengeance. She touched them and flinched away from that corrosive rage.

The Kulaan raiders unfolded the clothing they’d taken from the Ogogehians they’d harvested from the army. Each kual had marked and stalked a mercenary approximately his size and coloring and used a strangling cord to kill him so there’d be no blood on his clothing or leathers, no cuts in them. Now they dressed in those tunics, buckled on the war leathers, and practiced walking until they were satisfied that they looked enough like the Ogogehians to fool any observers. Then they left their concealment and began winding through the brush, a small band indistinguishable from any other mercenary squad, walking with calm purpose toward the hill where Nekaz Kole waited for the gates to burn through.

The fisher villages waited, cleansed of Kapperim (some very bloodily, losing half their own folk, or more, in the savage battle to reclaim their homes), the dead mourned, the Kapra corpses cast out to feed the fish. The Intii Vann stood on the spear-walk of his village, gazing down into the tapata, his beard fresh-braided, slick with fine oil, contentment softening the hardwood of his face. A chunky, gray-haired woman shifted impatiently about on the planks. She looked up, startled, as she felt the touch; her face altered, flat nose pushing out, ears lifting, pointing. With an effort of will she stopped the, change and scowled down at a line of boats beached on the mud below them. “It’s time I went back,” she said.

Vann shook his head. “Oras will be a rat-pit, healwoman.”

“Midwife.”

He ignored the acerbity in her voice. “Wait. It be time to move when we know who won there.” He jerked a long thumb south and east.

“My people need me. Who else gives a spit in a rainstorm for them.” She looked into the unyielding face. “I could always walk.”

“Snow shut the passes.”

She set her back against the wall and glared south. “You get busy and finish it,” she told Serroi. “I got work to do.”

“What?”

“Not you, Intii. Her.” That was all the explanation she would give though he questioned her several times before the boats arrived from the south.

In their palisaded winter camps the Bakuur gathered, drank the hot and heady brews, melded being to being, house to house, camp to camp, until the river bottom throbbed with their song, the clicking of the spirit sticks, the bumping of the drums, the beat of the dance, the wordless chant that gathered past and future, dead and unborn and all the living. When she touched the meld, it gave her its zo’hava’ta, gave without stint or question, a hot and heady flow of joy and generosity and endless endurance.

And all through the mijloc the Others-creasta shurin, shapechangers, wood sprites, the strangely gifted who hid in human form among the unseeing mijlockers-these gave what they could when she touched them. The despised and dispossessed, the poor and sick and deformed, beggar and thief and those who turned a hand to whatever would keep them alive, they felt her touch and melded with her, giving without stint and without exception what she asked of them.

She took a step toward Ser Noris.

“No.” He lifted his good hand. “No closer.”

“I’m going to stop you,” she said.

“Serroi.” He sounded desperate. “Don’t make me destroy you.” His breathing was harsh, and he lost his glacial beauty but gained a warmth and humanity that she found far harder to fight.

She trembled. “What can I do? Stop this. Please stop. There are so many… there’s so much… you can’t touch what’s down there-” a curve of her hand encompassed the valley-“you can only destroy it. Where’s the profit in that?” She paused, “Can’t you understand? You don’t need to destroy the Biserica. It doesn’t threaten you.”

“You’re the one who doesn’t understand. That-” he indicated the valley-“diminishes me because it denies me. I will not permit that.”

Anguish ran in Serroi’s veins. “All or nothing.” She thrust her greenglass hands toward him. “Sick. It’s sick.” She took another step toward him.

He spoke a WORD and wind buffeted at her, threatened to sweep her off her feet. The glow about her brightened and the wind split about her; it couldn’t touch her. She took another step.

He backed away, spoke another WORD. The stone cracked beneath her feet, a mouth opened to swallow her. She took a fourth step undisturbed, her bare feet treading air as easily as stone.

He began to circle around behind the janja, spoke a WORD. Fire hotter than vuurvis surged about her. And was quenched by her earthfire which was hotter still.

Reiki janja sat without moving, a carven figure, massive legs crossed, large shapely hands resting on her knees, fingers curled loosely about nothing, so still she seemed a part of the mountain, a boulder roughly shaped to human form.

The janja between them, he cried out, “Serroi, yield to me. You don’t know…”

“I know what will happen if I don’t stop you.”

“Serroi…” He gave it up, spoke a PHRASE, gathering to himself all his power, taking his combat form, the smoky giant as tall as the cliff, the form she’d seen when she was a child and witnessed the challenge duel with the last of the Nor who came close to matching his power, the duel she barely survived, caught like a bug in the fringe of those deadly exchanges. She matched him, calling to herself the earthfire, the aggregate strength of the little ones, the waiting shrines, rising with him until she faced him as a figure of light shimmering against his darkness.

He spoke a WORD, his huge voice booming out over the land.

Her form shivered and went vague about the edges, but solidified immediately as she absorbed his power and added it to her own.

The battle changed to a stately pavanne among the mountain peaks, a dance on a crumbling floor, the land churned by the WORDS flung at Serroi and shunted aside. Fire fell into the valley, scorched an orchard and half a set of vines, burned one pasture clean. Air buffeted the watchers inside the wall and out, erratic winds that struck like hammers. The earth rumbled uneasily beneath their feet, its deep grumble rolling continually across the valley.

And the immense dance went on, Serroi advancing, the Nor retreating, circling, avoiding the touch of her fingers.