When they had the strength to sit up and look, the city was gone.
They stood then, staggering, heads spinning, trying to find any landmark to which they could hold. The city had vanished totally. Nothing of it remained. No house, no tower, no remnant of wall. West sparkled the sea. East lay the wrack of the wave, and as though by mutual consent they walked the considerable distance to the first line of bodies, the soaked and leveled sands like an endless beach, a harder and easier road than the desert dunes had been.
The Aresian ships lay on their sides, battered and broken. Bodies were tumbled like storm-wrack, here piled high, there spread apart, men from Mahahm and Ares together, a sprinkling of the women and children of the town, not many. There had never been many Mahahmbi women, and recently there had been all too few. Even the few were too many, Genevieve thought, as she wept over them.
Aufors turned, seeking the swell of sand that had covered the Shah’s treasure house. “Gone,” he said, gesturing widely. “1 thought you were giving them the P’naki, but it’s all gone.”
“Not only what was stored, but what was growing,” she agreed. “It will not grow again where the seas sow salt.”
“The wave went all the way across the desert?” he cried, incredulously.
“Not this time,” she said. “Not while we were here, but when we have gone, next time, yes.”
“Next time!” He gave her a look of disbelief, then walked farther among the bodies, here and there saying a name as he recognized some from among his captors, calling out loudly as he came upon a particular group of bodies: the Marshal and the Prince, turned to wooden statues, their hands locked around one another’s throats in a final conflict. Nearby were Ogberd and Lokdren and their father, clinging to one another, eyes wide and empty.
Aufors’s face was ashen as he said, “You did this. You called this down on them.”
She thought about it. “No, and yes. It was the only way to destroy the lichen. Also, it was the only way to destroy both those who knew about the lichen and those who coveted it.”
“You have . . . that power? Oh, Jenny, what am I to do?”
“About what?” she asked wearily, turning to lead them away from the piled corpses, for already the carrion birds had come to spin their toothed wheels in the sky, while across the sands they saw the tiny figure of Terceth as he came slogging toward them from the rocky pinnacle he had achieved just in time.
“I considered myself worthy of you,” Aufors said in a hopeless voice as he trailed five paces behind her. “Though you were noble and I was common, I was proud of my accomplishments and I knew you valued me. And you were worthy of me, also, for you were honest and kind and intelligent, unlike many of the nobility, and I loved you to distraction. When your father . . . when the Marshal told you to take no concern for your safety, I hated him and valued myself, for I thought I could protect you if he would not. I wanted to protect you, treasure you, care for you. And when you leapt into the sea, I thought . . . well, you know what I thought, or felt, that I could not protect you as I had hoped to do …”
“And now, now I feel like a fool. How could any common man have any role at all with . . . what you have become?”
She laughed, then cried, then did both together. After a moment, she stopped walking, laid Dovidi on the sand and collapsed cross-legged, bent into her lap still laughing, sobbing, able at last to lay down all pretense of being in control of events. “And what have I become, Aufors Leys?”
“You are, you can . . . summon the sea!”
“Did you never post a signalman to summon the army when the enemy appeared? Did the signalman create the army, or command it? He signals because that is his assignment, and good soldiers carry out their assignments. So I called the sea because that was my assignment, and among creatures of honor, I will do what I can.” She tried to wipe her eyes on her soaked sleeve, then wrung it out instead, laughing almost hysterically at herself. “If I tried to summon the sea now, I could sing until sundown and nothing would happen. I can’t even hurry the tide! Oh, Aufors. I am no more nor less than I was when you met me. It may be I have already done most of what I have to do in my entire life. It may be I will never again dive that deep or do that much to such purpose . . .”