But there are some among you who will have a greater burden than the others. Listen, and know. Isphet…
And the Soulenai did move among us, I could both feel and see them now. A glow surrounded Isphet, and I could only barely distinguish her form within it.
Isphet. You are so strong, so beautiful, and you have kept hope alive in a place of stone and death. We thank you for that, and we would charge you with a further duty. You travel back to your home. That is good. Speak with the Graces, seek their counsel. Isphet, you will become a Necromancer of great skill, and your task will be to illume a nation. You will have the chance given to few others.
We all felt her shock. Isphet had never thought herself worthy of aspiring to the highest level of Elemental magic, to become a Necromancer, but I was not surprised. She deserved this honour.
Your task will become clearer as the months and years go by, Isphet. Will you pledge to remain true to us and to your task…will you illume?
I do so pledge, she whispered, and we were honoured to witness for her.
Yaqob. Now the glow surrounded Yaqob, and tears of joy – and some of relief – sprang to my eyes.
Yaqob. We ask of you much the same as what we asked of Isphet. From the Graces you will learn the arts and skills of the Necromancer. Yaqob, you have suffered disappointments and maybe will suffer more. Use disap-pointment to create strength and forge compassion. You shall instruct, and your task shall become clearer as year passes into year.
And they asked of him the same pledge as they had of Isphet, and he gave it and we so witnessed.
Tirzah.
Such great beauty infused me that I cried out, but the love of all those about supported me and I accepted.
Tirzah. Learn with the others, yet what you learn will be incidental to the powers you already command. You will be a great Necromancer. Few shall surpass your power. Yet, like Yaqob, you shall suffer loss. Do not let it overwhelm you, Tirzah. Resolve to live through it. Do you pledge to remain true to us and to your task, Tirzah?
I do so pledge. I felt the Soulenai caress me, but it gave me little comfort. Loss? Loss?
Boaz, you are the fourth, and you already know much of your task but, again, as the weeks unfold it will become yet plainer. You will learn the skills of the Necromancer, and you will attain power that even your father could not have dreamed of. Even he, so given to adventuring, will fear the places you shall explore. Boaz, even more than Tirzah, you must learn the paths. Understand the Song of the Frogs, understand its implications. Do you pledge us this to do?
I do so pledge. I could feel Boaz’s emotion. With that pledge he cast off the remaining barriers the Magus had built. I do so pledge.
Then behold, Boaz…behold…
And that command extended to all of us. We had a brief glimpse of the Place Beyond – the briefest of glimpses – then I became aware of a man standing in the centre of the whirlpool.
He smiled at Boaz, and I saw that it was Avaldamon.
He was more substantial than when he’d appeared so briefly in Boaz’s residence, yet still wraith-like. An apparition only, not flesh.
He held out his hand, then took a step, then another, and he walked across the water to the boat.
He was breathtaking, not only in feature, but in the power and knowledge that shone from his eyes. He lifted a hand, caressed Boaz’s cheek, then pulled his son to him. For that fleeting moment of embrace, Avaldamon appeared to be fully fleshed, and Boaz later told me that he’d held a man in his arms, not a wraith.
Be blessed, Boaz. He turned from Boaz and swept an arm about the entire circle. Be blessed, all of you. And then he was gone.
The whirlpool died, and we sat down, but we made no attempt to move, or to touch the one next to us. We sat there for many hours, I think, until the sun blazed overhead and a curious Juit bird swept over Isphet’s head and woke her, and then us, from our trance.
Everyone, not just the four of us who had been singled out, had been altered by our experience.
We sat, blinked, and smiled. Hesitantly we touched the person next to us, then leaned over to embrace those in the next boat.
There was laughter, and soft, glad tears…and then a voice spoke.
I see you. I see you, and I know you.
We stilled, hearts thudding.
That voice had come from the north.
Nzame.
I hunger for you.
32
MINOR miracles were accomplished in five days. The lake had proved abundant; each day men and women sat on the riverbanks gutting and scaling fish, then leaving them on racks to dry. As it came closer to the day of our departure, more fish were either smoked overnight, or baked with grain to form nutritious fish cakes that could be eaten without need for further cooking.
Others wove tight reed panniers for the mules and camels, or to be carried on the backs of the strong. And most of us were strong. There were no children among us, nor pregnant women (save Neuf), for the slave camp had tolerated neither of those. The baskets were packed with the fish or grain, and what fruits, cheeses and herbs the estate could provide. Anything else we would have to forage for on our journey.
Isphet had told us that the Lagamaal Plain was arid, but not a desert. It would be hot during the day, cold at night. Sandals were repaired, and some new ones made. Few had clothes apart from the simple wraps allotted to slaves, so Zabrze ordered that the river boats be stripped of their drapes and banners, and these be used to provide everyone with flowing robes and cloths to wrap about our heads and necks to keep the sun from us. I smiled as I thought what Chad-Nezzar would think to see former slaves arrayed in such finery, but then the smile died as I remembered what Chad-Nezzar had become himself.
Nzame’s ability to see and speak to us so far to his south had appalled everyone. Zabrze, once told, paled and sent yet more scouts scurrying east and west with pleas for assistance. He sent none northwards.
Zabrze had debated whether we should start our journey a day or so earlier than he’d planned, but decided not to. Nzame might have the ability to see great distances, and he might have an army of stone men, but they may yet be busy in Setkoth, and Zabrze thought that few boats would be able to carry great numbers of them.
He decided we should begin our journey well prepared rather than flee into the night and starve within the fortnight.
Neuf had been very quiet, and Isphet was worried about her, for she was fading emotionally and physically. No-one, not even Zabrze, knew quite what to do. Neuf had been vibrant and healthy when she’d alighted from the boat after her journey from Setkoth to Threshold, but I felt that the shock of Consecration Day, together with her worry over her children’s fate, had sapped her will to live. She was not the unfeeling mother Zabrze had intimated.
She carried within her what was likely Zabrze’s only heir. Isphet told me the baby was healthy, but privately she worried about the birth.
“Neuf says the babe is not due for another five or six weeks. I pray that she is right, and I pray that we are not still on the trail when she goes into labour.”
We left early one morning as the Juit birds rose flame-like into the sky and the frogs croaked their dawn chorus. Zabrze had asked Memmon to come with us – many of the estate workers had decided to accompany us to safety – but Memmon had refused. He said he would stay and keep the estate in order for when either Boaz or Zabrze returned, and nothing would change his mind.
As we stepped onto the path east I turned and looked behind me. The house was so beautiful, and the river, lake and marshes even more so. I hoped that somehow Lake Juit would escape Nzame’s feeding frenzy. I tried to picture this beauty turned to stone, and my eyes blurred with tears.
“Come,” Boaz said. “Come on, Tirzah. Let us look to the future and not the past.”
“I was hoping that house would somehow be my future, Boaz. Will you bring me here to live if somehow we survive the next months and years?”
“Assuredly, my love,” he said, and kissed my bro
w.
Isphet, Zabrze, Boaz, Azam, myself, and two or three others led the trek. Sometimes Yaqob joined us, but he generally kept to the mid-section of the column.
Neuf sat on a mule directly behind us where Isphet could keep an eye on her. She smiled whenever someone turned to check on her progress, but otherwise I think she just stared listlessly.
Most on foot had panniers strapped to their backs, even Zabrze walked with a load of grain and fish cakes. Boaz’s load was lighter than mine – in the dark hours before we set out I’d loaded some of the grain he carried into my pannier. I still distrusted the strength of the scar on his belly, and I did not want it to split and re-infect so far from the healing slime of the Lhyl. I had several pots of the powder with me, and others stored in sundry panniers throughout the column. But I would prefer that Boaz stay healthy and not in need of saving a second time.
For the first day, and well into the second, we walked through the fields on the estate. It was pleasant, and not overly hard, even in the heat, for the robes and wraps about our heads kept us cool, and a light breeze came up from the river.
On the third day we moved into uncultivated land. Isphet angled us north-east, and said that if we kept to an easterly direction we should pick up the first of the markers on the trail to the mountains.
“Markers?” Zabrze asked, striding by her side.
“Few of us would ever leave the mountains to come to what we called the low river lands,” Isphet explained. “Perhaps four or five people a year. The trail is hard, and it is even harder should anyone become lost. So our people constructed markers through the Lagamaal to guide us between the river and hills.”
“Will they still be there? It has been many years since you passed this way.”
“The markers have been there for hundreds of years, Zabrze. I doubt they have given up and died in the ten or eleven years since I left.”
Given up and died? Isphet would not explain, but as the day passed I noticed worry lines crease her forehead, and their depth only increased as we walked into our fourth day.
There was no trail now, only that provided by the sun and stars, and I hoped Isphet knew what she was doing. The ground was hard and littered with shards of rock and small pebbles. Every so often a stand of larger rocks appeared, some four or five paces high, and Isphet said they were the remnants of mountains so old they had worn down to these crags.
I smiled at that.
Low, twisted trees with dark green spiky leaves provided us with little shade but did give us good fuel for our fires, and tufts of tough, wizened grass poked out from between the stones.
“If we run out of food,” Isphet said, “we can survive for some time on the tubers at the base of those grasses, although if a person eats them for longer than a week they risk death from their slow poisons.”
There were creatures about, too, which we normally only saw at dawn and dusk. Hares, thin and rangy, and the snakes and beetles that Isphet had spoken about. They did not bother us, for we were very many thousands of feet trampling through their plains, but we checked our blanket rolls at night and our robes in the morning, fearful lest some cold-skinned reptile had snuggled into their warmth.
As noon approached, Isphet stood and muttered, peering into the distance as she shaded her eyes.
“There it is!” she cried, although none of us could see anything out of the ordinary. “There!” And she hurried through the grass and over the stones.
We followed at a more leisurely pace, relieved that Isphet had found whatever it was she looked for.
Some forty or fifty paces on, Isphet knelt before a low mound of rocks. I looked at it curiously, but could see nothing that set it apart from the many other mounds we’d passed. Isphet was slowly running her hands over the rocks, then stopped about midway down the eastern face of the mound.
“Ah,” she breathed, scrabbled about a little, then drew out a small, dull grey metal ball.
She rubbed it between her hands, warming it, and whispered to it. She listened, her head cocked, then her face creased in a broad smile.
“The ball tells me who has passed and what has happened in the immediate vicinity over past months. Boaz, you feel. Listen.”
She handed him the ball. He concentrated, then smiled. “The hares have been mischievous, but not much else.”
“Yes.” Isphet handed the ball to me, and then to Yaqob who had wandered up.
“Can any Elemental hear it?” he asked.
“Not at first. It must be awoken by one who is already of the mountain community, otherwise it will remain mute, even to an Elemental.”
Not only did I hope we didn’t get lost, I prayed we didn’t lose Isphet along the way.
“And the trail,” Boaz said. “It spoke of many things, but not of the trail.”
“Ah,” Isphet replied. “Again, the ball will only respond to me in this.”
She stood and tossed the ball high in the air. It sparkled momentarily, then hit the ground with a greater thud than I would have expected for a ball of its size.
Instantly the loose soil, gravel and small stones before us began to writhe.
Save Isphet, we all stepped back in horror, Zabrze cursing and stumbling in his haste, and I heard Neuf cry out some paces behind us.
“Be still,” Isphet said. “Look.”
A narrow path of rock and soil writhed to the east.
“It will lead us to the next marker. Come now, don’t fret. The soil will cease moving the moment a foot is set upon it.” She secreted the ball amid the marker stones again.
Zabrze swallowed, looked at Boaz and Azam, then waved us forward.
And so we followed a snake of soil and stone through the plain, the five thousand trailing in a long line behind us.
We travelled throughout that day and the next two. Each night we camped at one of the markers, then in the morning Isphet would retrieve the dull metal ball, listen to what it had to say, then toss it in the air to set off the next pathway of shifting soil and pebbles.
Despite the aridity of the landscape and the foot-wearing march, few seemed despondent. Nzame had not spoken again, and Boaz said that he hoped the creature’s sight and voice had only extended as far as the lake. Boaz himself relaxed into such light-heartedness that he often had our entire lead group laughing as he made up humorous stories about the communities of hares and beetles that we passed.
His hair he cut even shorter, and he let a light beard grow. It was his way of sloughing off the outward appearance of the Magus, but I thought it made him look like a bandit. When I told him this he grinned, and said that we were nothing but bandits, travelling through the plains in such fashion.
Once we’d reached a marker in the late afternoon Zabrze ordered a halt, and we would spread about in a vast camp. Isphet showed us how to search for water in the deep depressions scattered about. If four or five men dug until they reached damp soil, then lined the hole with stones, water would seep through until, by the morning, it was a clear pool, and we could fill our flasks and splash the sleep from our faces.
As dusk fell campfires would twinkle cheerily. We would cook grain, or reheat the fish cakes, and occasionally someone would catch a hare, and then the campfire to whom she or he belonged would have fresh meat. The smell of cooking meat drifting across from a neighbouring campfire one night made Zabrze and Azam swear they would catch a hare for us, but the hares were swift and the two men were not in the first flush of youth. We laughed so much the next day when Zabrze tripped and tumbled both himself and Azam to the ground that they grumbled and said we’d have to make do with the scents wafting and not the meat cooking.
Yaqob would usually join us once he’d eaten with his group, and then the discussion would invariably turn to that dawn rite on the lake. We would also discuss Nzame, who and what he was, but we got nowhere with that.
Boaz questioned Isphet closely about the Graces, but she knew little.
“We revere them greatly,” she said, “and try not
to disrupt their contemplations.”
During these discussions Zabrze would remain silent, his dark eyes flitting about the group, Neuf dozing in his arms. I thought they had become closer over the past few days, as if it had been the confines and schemes of court that had kept them at such emotional distance for so many years.
And yet I wondered, remembering that fleeting caress of Isphet’s cheek.
Twice I read from the Book of the Soulenai. Isphet and Yaqob were enthralled by the stories, and both admitted that perhaps the skills of reading and writing were not entirely bad.
“Except when manipulated and ensorcelled by the Magi,” Isphet could not resist saying, shooting Boaz a dark look.
“Perhaps you would like me to teach you to read, Isphet,” he replied. “And you, too, Yaqob. It is a skill that is only dangerous, as Isphet said, when misused. And any skill can be misused.”
I expected Isphet and Yaqob to refuse, but they surprised me. Isphet sat turning a pebble over and over in her hand.
“Among the Graces there are those who have mastered the skills of reading and writing,” she admitted. “And there are stores of scrolls and books that have been laid down over the centuries. I think that I might like to be able to read them. If you don’t mind, Boaz,” she finished hastily.
“It would be my pleasure,” he said. “Yaqob?”
“That book is a wondrous thing,” he said slowly, looking at it, then he raised his eyes to Boaz. I always tensed at these moments. Yaqob could be so unreadable when he chose, and I wondered whether his seeming acceptance of Boaz was pretence or artifice. “Perhaps I will watch when you give Isphet her first lessons.”
Boaz smiled. “Then we will begin tomorrow night.”
But that night, the third since Isphet found her first marker, gave us other things to worry about.
Several hours after I had gone to sleep, I was shaken awake by Isphet.
“Tirzah. Tirzah!”
“Mmm?”