touched him as tangibly as a cold hand, then let go and vanished. He suddenly felt as if someone were watching or trying to watch him before this disembodied gaze swept on and disappeared. He swore aloud.
‘What is it?’ Arzosah snapped. ‘You’ve turned white.’
‘Let’s get out of here. Someone’s looking for us, just like Evandar said, and I don’t much like it.’
‘I don’t suppose any creature in its right mind would. Here! I just thought of somewhat. You’ve got that lovely talisman round your neck, so how did Evandar find us? Unless, of course –’ She paused for a clack of fangs. ‘Unless love guided him.’
‘Hold your black and ugly tongue, Wyrm, or I’ll order you into that river!’
Rhodry turned on his heel and strode back to camp, with Arzosah padding after in a rumble of laughter.
Every morning at dawn Jill would leave her chamber in the broch of the gwerbret’s dun. She’d trudge up the five floors’ worth of circling staircase and climb through the trap door onto the flat roof of the main tower, which had become an arsenal of sorts. All round the edge stood little pyramids of stones, ready for a last desperate defence, and bound sheaves of arrows wrapped in oiled hides to keep off the rain. While she caught her breath, she would look out and consider their situation. Like an island from a shallow sea, the three hills of the city of Cengarn rose from its besiegers, who spread out on all sides and camped just beyond bowshot from the town walls.
Cengarn lay in a beautiful situation for defence. To the north, across a narrow valley, lay broken ground lower than the city itself, and beyond that strip rose hills that would have taken two armies to secure against a counter-force. Even though the invaders had to place men on the north ground to complete their line, those troops were exposed and vulnerable. To the east, the broken ground became a long ridge, where white tents decked out with red banners stood. Jill suspected that the important leaders of the Horsekin sheltered there.
To the south and west the land fell away, leaving the city perched on the top of cliffs. At the western edge of town, where the dun itself stood, any climb up would require ropes and stakes, while to the south the road ran steep and narrow. Below the cliffs in those directions stretched a wide plain, where the bulk of the army camped, comfortable but vulnerable to attack when the relieving army finally arrived. To protect their men on the plain, the Horsekin were digging ditches and piling up earthworks, or rather, their human slaves were doing the digging and piling. Since they depended on their heavy cavalry and needed to ensure free movement for their own horsemen, they would never be able to make a solid ring all the way round the camp. Rather, they’d placed earthworks as baffles more than walls to protect vulnerable points.
Inside the city walls seethed potential chaos. Crammed into every valley among the three hills, lining every street, crowding every open space, townsfolk and refugees from the farms roundabout huddled amidst cattle and sheep, dray horses and chickens. They’d been living that way for weeks now, and the gwerbret’s town marshals had recruited some of the men from their lord’s warband to help keep order. Fights were breaking out, over food and water, though for now at least the town ran no danger of starving, and over space, a scarcity indeed. Filth, human and animal, was piling up, swept or carried down to line the inside of the walls. In a pinch, it could become another weapon, hurled by basket or catapult. Even up at the dun, which stood behind its own walls on the highest hill the stench rose thick. From long practice Jill could ignore it, but the threat of plague was another knife at the city’s throat.
She herself felt none too strong these days, nor did she look it. Her hair, cropped off like a lad’s, was perfectly white, and her face was thin, too thin, really, so that her blue eyes seemed enormous, dominating her face the way a child’s do. Overall, she was shockingly gaunt, not that such was so unusual for a woman who was over seventy. What worried her was the shaking fever she carried in her blood, an unwelcome memento from a long-ago sojourn in tropical lands. Even though she was the greatest master of dweomer that the kingdom had ever seen, she could cure herself with neither magic nor the medicines known in those days. All she had to fight it was her strength of will.
Every day, before she began her magical work, she would try to scry out Rhodry. Normally, since she’d known him so long and so well, she would have seen his image simply by turning her mind his way; her vision would have appeared on any convenient dappled thing – the clouds in the sky, sunlight dancing on a bucket of water, trees tossing in a wind – with barely an effort on her part. These days, though, she could only summon a haze as thick and grey as smoke where an image should have been. Although she couldn’t know, she could guess that he wore some powerful talisman, whose bound spirit worked to hide him. On the morning that Rhodry took leave of Enj, though, her scrying just happened to coincide with Rhodry’s thinking about her, and for the briefest of moments she caught a glimpse of him.
‘At least he’s alive,’ she said aloud. ‘And I’ll thank the gods for that.’
It was, of course, perfectly natural to fear for a fighting man at the beginning of a war, but Jill had a further concern. Some months past she’d received in a hideous flash of ill-knowing a glimpse of bitter Wyrd hanging over him as if upon dark wings. The omen had come in such a rush of certainty, like a brand burnt into her mind, that she knew the vision for a true one. Yet even if he’d been close by, there was nothing she could say to him, no warning she could deliver. Mentioning such an evil omen to a man might well bring it about, just by planting the thought in his mind that he was doomed. She could only try to protect him as best she might when the event came upon him.
At the moment she could spare little time for worrying about the man she once had loved and still considered a friend. Her real work was guarding the city by reinforcing a peculiar sort of battlement round it. In the brightening dawn servants were hurrying round the ward far below on their various errands, and from their barracks the warband strolled out, yawning and stretching, occasionally looking up her way, but the dun had seen enough dweomer by now to put up with her standing on the tops of towers and doing odd things. She walked into the centre of the circular roof and focused her mind on the blue light of the etheric.
It seemed that the bright sunlight round her faded and a different light rose, dim and silvery, though through it she could clearly see the physical world. In this bluish flux she raised her arms high and called upon the power of the Holy Light that stands behind all the shadowy figures and personified forces that men call gods. Its visible symbol came to her in a glowing spear that pierced her from head to foot. For a moment she stood motionless, paying it homage, then stretched her arms out shoulder high, bringing the light with them to form a shaft across her chest. As she stood within the cross, the light swelled, strengthening her, then slowly faded of its own will.
When it was gone, she lowered her arms, then visualized a sword of light in her right hand. Once the image lived apart from her will, she circled the roof, walking deosil, and used the sword to draw a huge ring of golden light in the sky. As the ring settled to earth, it sheeted out, forming a burning wall round the entire town of Cengarn. Three times round she went, until the wall lived on the etheric of its own will. At each ordinal point, she put a seal in the shape of a five-pointed star made of blue fire. After the sigils of the kings of the elements blazed at the four directions, she spread the light until it was not a ring but an enormous sphere of gold, roofing over the dun and the town both and extending down under them as well. Two last seals at zenith and nadir, and Cengarn hung in the many-layered worlds like a bubble in glass.
At the end of the working, she withdrew the force from the image of the sword, dissolving it, then stamped three times on the roof. Sunlight brightened round her, and she could hear the sounds of the dun, shut out earlier by sheer concentration. The portion of the sphere above the earth, however, remained visible – that is, visible to someone with dweomer sight. Such sight could never penetrate the glowing shell, and everyone inside the
