Would Warlock Lith’rian offer quarter, or would the elf do to the imps what they had planned for the elves?
A runt. He had looked about fifteen.
The roar of flames was quite audible now, the fire visible. Whole trees were exploding into flame. Where was Warlock Olybino?
Shandie charged into his tent and headed for the chests where the secret documents were kept. He threw up the lid and then began to cough again. Even within the tent, the smoke was thick enough to see.
He turned to Ylo. “Get a bugler!” Ylo ran, almost colliding with Centurion Hardgraa as he led up the proconsul’s horse. Despite its blindfold, it was struggling and thrashing, insane with terror. Normally a horse wrestling Hardgraa would be an interesting match to watch.
Striking camp in a gale was never easy; it was impossible in a choking fog of woodsmoke. The mules were as terrified as the horses and could not be loaded. Shandie probably recognized the inevitable as fast as any man there and admitted it much sooner than most commanders would. He abandoned the baggage, called for column of route. Even then he was too late. Withdrawal became retreat. Retreat became rout.
The flames were coming faster than a man could walk; the smoke alone was a killer. Before the dull red sun was clear of the horizon, four legions had been reduced to a panic-stricken rabble, fleeing eastward. Time and again men found their way blocked by flooded streams. Time and again men crested a safely grassy hilltop only to see fingers of fire already curling into the valley ahead. Some claimed to have seen dragons, but the claims were doubted—in that brutal smoke, a man did well to see his own boots. Whatever was making the forest burn, the fire alone was enough to save the elves.
No Imperial Army had faced sorcery since the War of the Five Warlocks. The casualties were surprisingly few, but the survivors staggered back to Qoble in tatters, a starving mob half crazed by terror. The other two legions were attacked by the elves under Sirdar Puil’stor and driven from IIrane with heavy losses.
The Seven Victories had been followed by a crashing defeat. For the first time in nearly a thousand years, the Protocol had failed the legions.
Voices prophesying:
And mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices, prophesying war!
— Coleridge, Kubla Khan
FOUR
Destiny obscure
1
The Gaib Place, on the western flanks of the Progiste Mountains, was known to everybody as one of the best there was. It had its own spring, which failed only in the driest of summers, and it was tightly enclosed by steep slopes on three sides. The only way to it was along a path winding through the plantation of coffee trees that Gaib tended so carefully. The Place also grew beans and pumpkins, sweet potato and bananas, corn and melons and a thousand other things—more variety than any other Place in the district.
The only fault the neighbors could ever find with the Gaib Place was its isolation, for there were no other Places within a quarter day’s walk. In Thume that was a very unusual criticism. Pixies were a shy and reclusive people, prizing privacy above all else.
The very center of the Gaib Place was marked by a gnarled gray boulder about the size of a chair. When Gaib and Frial had built the first room of the cottage, they had enclosed that boulder within it, because it marked the exact spot where they had consummated their joining and thereby consecrated the Place to be their dwelling ever after. As Gaib had added other rooms around it, that one had remained their bedchamber. They slept there always, on a fragrant heap of fern fronds, laid on the packed clay floor. Such was the way of the pixies.
As their family had grown, the cottage had eventually sprawled out into an untidy collection of four rooms. The construction was skimpy and patchy even by local standards, for Gaib was much more inclined to nurture trees than to cut them down and he had tried to make do with deadfall as far as possible. The poles of the walls were too narrow to hold chinking properly and the shingles leaked in the rainy season. So the cottage was nothing much, but it was a good Place.
Gaib and Frial were distant cousins. Their family was recorded as Gifted, but that had never been a problem for them. Gaib had an undoubted talent for green things. When Gaib planted something, it grew. Some of that was experience, which he would share when asked. He could explain with great patience how one must transplant a coffee seedling with its taproot straight, else it would die before it even flowered, but sometimes his success was inexplicable, uncanny. The neighbors joked that Gaib could talk a sick tree better, or make an old ax handle sprout and bear fruit.
Frial had Feeling, which was both a blessing and a curse to her and might explain why she had accepted a Place so remote from the clamor of others’ emotions.
Despite their respective abilities, neither she nor Gaib had ever been recorded as having Faculty, nor any of their ancestors, either, as far back as the great-great-grandparents they had in common. Oral traditional could reach no farther than that, but the recorders insisted that the family was Gifted.
Three children they had reared there. Feen, their son, had gone off in his time and found a Place of his own amid the cedar groves of Kestrel Ridge, and found a good woman to share it with him. Sheel, their older daughter, had toyed with several suitors until her easy-tempered childhood friend Wide had taken her to see a fine spot he had discovered some two days’ walk to the north. She had accepted him there. Frial and Gaib saw little of Sheel now, but she was known to have at least one child.
Now only Thaile remained at home. She was fifteen, gangly and awkward yet, but a loving, lovable girl, a joy to her aging parents. A year ago Thaile had kept Death Watch for Phain of the Keez Place and had received her word. That was when fear had entered their lives for the first time.
The rainy season was almost over. Winter still ruled the high country, but the cool season was the most pleasant part of the year in Thume. The day was sunny and calm, although storm clouds hid the palisade of the Progistes, that comforting barrier against the terrors of Outside. The aromatic scent of coffee blossom had gone now, but there was a rich sort of greenish, growing feel to the air around the Gaib Place. Pigeons were purring tenderly to each other.
Gaib had killed a pig that morning to replenish the dwindling larder. He sat on the bench by the door, enjoying the sunshine and scraping the porker’s skin with a split rock. Frial was making sausage in the tiny kitchen.
She came out carrying a bowl of offal and took it across to tip in the midden pit. Chickens rushed over to investigate the treat; they began games of grab and chase. As she came back, Frial stopped suddenly and stared off to where the path wound away into the trees. A shadow seemed to fall over her, although the rest of the clearing was filled with sunshine.
Gaib said nothing, for he was a slow-spoken man, but he ceased his work on the hide and watched. She was still a fine woman in his eyes, although younger men might have remarked on her thickening body and the streaks of gray in the nut-brown hair tied tight about her head. Her woolen robe she had woven herself, the wool having come in trade from a neighbor in return for coffee. It was a dusty brown shade, coffee colored.
Her chin was not as pointed as it once had been, or her neck as slender. The face that had once glowed with the innocence of spring dew had creased into lines of sadness as she aged, but that was the price of having Feeling—to sense the darknesses that lurked within everyone she met, as well as the joys and loves. Despite that burden, she was a happy-spoken person and still eager on the ferns beside the boulder.
She came hurrying back to the door. “I think I shall go to the Feen Place,” she said a little breathlessly. “Take them a hock and perhaps some ribs.”
Her eyes said more, then she glanced again at the path. “You will not make it back by dark,” Gaib said softly. “You remember to coop the chickens, then!” She vanished into the cottage.
Gaib frowned and continued his work on the hide. In a remarkably few moments, Frial came bustling out with her warm cloak on, and shoes, and a bonnet still untied. She had a basket on her arm. She bent to kiss his forehead and he reached up and touched her with the back of his wrist, which was clean. She scurried across to the trees and disappeared. She would double around to the path when she Felt it was safe.