The Soldier Son Trilogy

FOUR

Mage Work

At the edge of the road, I hesitated. Then I left life behind and stepped out into the silence of the soulless road. I felt I tore myself free of my roots to do so. With every step I took on the roadbed, I felt my awareness of the forest net of life stretch and tear. By the time I stood in the centre of the road, I felt small and exposed. Overhead, there was no friendly canopy of leaves and branches, only a terrible rift that bared me to the endless night sky. I felt my Speck self retreat and Nevare came to the fore. I blinked my eyes as if I were waking from a dream. I looked around at all that must be done in the space of a night. Then I took a breath and began.

I felt like a commander on high ground, overlooking his massed forces just before the assault begins. I felt within myself for the magic. It was not an easy thing for me to do. I groped for something I could not feel or sense in any ordinary way. And once I thought I had found it, I had to find, not the will nor the intellect, but the emotion to apply it.

It was harder than I’d expected it to be. I was, I discovered, tired of feeling. I’d had enough of hurt and betrayal and despair. I didn’t want to open my heart to emotions strong enough to send the magic streaming through my blood. But I had promised. I closed my eyes for a moment and then opened them to the night. No colour was left in the day, save what the pallid moon would wring from the landscape. The road all around me was a flat, grey stripe of desert … No, not desert. No matter how barren a desert might appear to be, it had structure and life and connections. This road had none of those things. Dry, forsaken, it had no life of its own and severed the connections in all the lives it divided. I had thought that when I toiled in the graveyard, I dealt in death. In reality, there I had been part of the turning cycle of life and death and life. Here was true death; here all life ceased.

Anger at what had been done warred with sorrow over the loss. With an effort of will, I turned my fury aside. Instead of hatred, I let my sorrow fill me. This dead stripe of earth had once been rich, seething with life in all its stages. I grieved for its bereavement. I let go of all self restraint and became my grief.

Then I used the power of the magic guided by my Gernian logic.

Hitch was right. I knew exactly what to do and I wanted to do it above all else. I lifted my arms and spread wide my hands, and then I lowered them, beckoning. I was confident of it. The magic had to come. Nonetheless, I felt a resistance from it, almost as if it questioned what I was doing. The magic was not accustomed to being used in such a way. What I contemplated was not the forest way nor the Speck way. But I knew what I was doing, and I was certain it would work. ‘It’s a Gernian way,’ I said softly to the night wind. ‘A Gernian tactic to turn back the Gernians. Isn’t that why you wanted me? To use me as a tool against my own kind? Then trust me to know how I am sharpest!’

The magic relented. I felt it well up from inside me and flow outward. It strengthened my arms and then filled my hands. They grew heavy with it. I kept them closed in fists, containing it until I was sure my focus was clear and my purpose strong. Then I opened my fingers and let the magic shoot forth.

I began where it was easiest. Water always summons life. Epiny had blown up the culvert and the pooling water had washed out part of the road and soaked even more. The work crews had gone far to repair it today, but the moist earth still beckoned. It was ready to receive what I had to give.

I reached to the smallest plants, the tiny single-leaved cresses, the strands of algae that waited in the stagnant ponds at the side of the road. Given time and no disturbances, they would, in the course of a month, repopulate the damp soil and the standing puddles. From the sun and the earth, they would draw sustenance in minute daily quantities. They would edge into the available space, slowly repopulating it as their resources allowed them.

I opened myself. I surrendered to them the energy that the magic had given to me. In a matter of moments, I fed them the resources it would have taken them a year to gather. And they responded. Like an unfurling green carpet, the massed plants surged forward, enveloping the forsaken roadbed. They sank pale roots into the packed gravel, seeking the scant moisture of the settling dew, absorbing the dust of nutrients trapped among the pebbles. They were like new skin covering a gaping wound.

I choked the newly set culvert with greenery. I beckoned the lush, fat-stemmed, flat-leaved plants to fill it. I heard the rustle of their growth, and the muddy water that had flowed freely through it suddenly gagged, backed and swelled. I waited. A crystalline trickle emerged from the filtering plant life and a pond began to back up on the high side of the road. By morning, I calculated, a new stream would be cutting its way across the road’s surface. I turned away.

I strode down the road, naked to the moonlight and the distant stars. I spoke to the trees that lined the road. I was as heartless as a herder culling cattle. Most of the trees that lined the road had had their side roots cut. They would linger for years, but they were already dying. To the weak, I commanded, ‘Let go your grip and fall!’ The strong I bade, ‘Send out your roots. Buckle and break the road.’

And as I strode along, I heard it happen behind me. I did not turn back to look at my destruction. I felt what happened. Dying trees crashed across the road. I felt the breeze they created as they fell, and bits of bark flew up and showered down again. Other trees stirred suddenly, and sent roots questing through packed earth and bedded gravel. They did not grow slowly seeking nourishment. They tunnelled like gophers, thrusting and rucking the surface of the road like a crumpled rug. I walked towards the end of the King’s Road and destruction followed me like a giant trampling the earth.

I drew abreast of the equipment shed where the guards kept their watch. They had heard the falling trees and the shifting earth of the buckling road. Long guns gripped in their hands they had come to the open end of the shed. I saw them silhouetted against their fire. They could not see me. I was darkness against darkness, and their paltry light could not reach out to touch me.

They were shouting questions at one another. ‘What is it? What’s happening?’ but none of them were venturing out from the feeble shelter of the shed to see for themselves. I walked past them, the small sounds of my passage cloaked in the falling trees and shifting stone that followed me. I heard them arguing that someone should ride back to town and raise the alarm. No one wanted to go, and one man shrilly but sensibly demanded, ‘Alarm against who? Alarm against what? Trees falling? I’m not going out there.’

I thought of bringing their shed down around their ears. I could do it. I could have commanded the trees to topple it with their roots. I did not. I told myself it was not because they were my erstwhile countrymen, but because it suited the purpose of the magic better to leave them alive and unscathed. Let them give witness tomorrow to how the forest itself had turned on the road and attacked it. I strode past them unseen, and in my wake the road surface burst upward with questing roots, only to be concealed moments later by falling trees. The terrified shouts of the guards were drowned in the groans and crashes of the falling timber. Their firelight and sounds faded behind me as I moved on.

I left the finished road behind, travelling over the roadbed that was still under construction. Here the soil had not been packed and the roadbed was not yet levelled. It was easier for the trees to hummock their roots across it. There were still plenty of dying trees lining the clearings. As each one fell, I felt slightly diminished. Did I have the right to tell them to surrender what remained of their lives? I steeled my heart and decided that I did. It was not the individual trees but the forest itself that I was trying to save. Yet the magic that made them topple was the most demanding of what I was doing, as if the magic itself were appalled by my ruthlessness. With a wave of my hand, I ordered a vine to crawl from the ditch and shroud the fallen tree in greenery. It did, sinking its roots into the fallen trunk and limbs and reaching up to unfurl leaves to sunlight that wasn’t there. But I was. I fed them the energy that they needed, and felt the vines grow thick and tough as dried leather. Encouraged, I spoke to the brambles. It was harder to bring them forth; there was little in the soil to sustain them and they were reluctant green troops quailing under fire. I gritted my teeth and by my will drove them out to where I needed them. The rising sun tomorrow would bake them brown. It would not matter. The thorny mat they left behind would be one more obstacle to the road builders. Cannon fodder, I thought to myself, closed my heart to my doubts, and strode on.

My body diminished as I used the magic. My hated fat, the reservoir of my power, was dwindling away. It felt very strange. My trousers sagged on my hips. I could not hold them up; I needed my hands to do the summoning. Growling at the delay, I paused and tightened my belt. It pinched my loosened skin. Ignore it. I was nearly at the end of the road. I had to go on; I had to finish my barricade against the road builders. I summoned my will and my emotion once more, and threw wide the reserves I had stored. For a brief moment, the magic fought my will, and then the power came under my dominion again. The magic sang through my blood, intoxicating me with command. I brought the trees down more swiftly, laughed aloud as the road buckled in my wake. I spoke to the weeds and scrub brush that had survived in the ditches, and they burst into rampant growth, running up the banks and crawling across the road. My parade of destruction had become a charge. Nothing could stop me.

The end of the King’s Road was a tangled darkness before me. I looked with the eyes of night and my heart sank at what I saw. The singing of the magic in my blood became a dirge. The loggers had brought down another kaembra tree. The massive trunk had been severed, and the fallen giant had crashed down onto the cleared apron that would eventually be part of the road.

I stood for a moment, my nearly depleted magic simmering in me, and stared at the tragedy. Until I had come east to Gettys, I had never imagined such trees existed. I had been raised in the Midlands, on the plains and plateaus where it might take a tree a score of years to increase its girth by an inch. We had ancient trees, but they were twisted, battered things with trunks as hard as metal.

The giants of the Speck forest still awed me. The fallen trunk that blocked my path was far too tall for me to climb over; I would have had better luck scaling the palisade that surrounded the fort at Gettys. I walked around its severed base, suddenly exhausted and staggering. While I had wielded the magic, I had not felt tired. Now my weariness hit me with full force.

Beneath my loosened clothing, my emptied skin sagged around me. The excess skin on my arms, legs, belly and buttocks all but flapped around me as I walked. I groped at my body, finding the jut of a hipbone and the ripple of my ribs as if greeting old friends. The warning of Jodoli, a Great Man of the Specks far more experienced with magic than I was, came back to me.

‘You can die from loss of magic, just as you can die from loss of blood. But it seldom happens to us without the mage knowing exactly what he is doing. It takes a great deal of will to burn every bit of magic out of yourself. A mage would have to push past pain and exhaustion to do it. Ordinarily, the mage would lose consciousness before he was completely dead. Then his feeder could revive him, if she were nearby. If not, the Great One might still perish.’

I smiled grimly to myself as I tottered on towards the standing stump of the fallen tree. I had no feeder to come and tend me. Olikea, a woman of the Specks, had served for a time as my feeder. The last time I had seen Olikea we had quarrelled because I had refused to turn against the Gernians and come live among the Specks. She had reviled me before she left; I’d been a great disappointment to her. She competed hard with her sister Firada, Jodoli’s feeder. I wondered, almost sadly, if I had ever been someone that she cared about, or only a powerful but ignorant mage who she could manipulate? The question should have meant more to me but I was too tired to care any more.

But I had done it. My blockade of the road builders would slow them for months. For a fleeting instant, pleasure warmed me as I thought how proud of me Epiny would be. But a chill thought followed it. Epiny would never know it was my work. She would hear of the dog’s death I had died, and mourn me fiercely. If she heard of what had transpired at the road’s end, she would put it down to Speck magic. I was dead to her. Dead to her, dead to Spink, dead to Amzil and her children. Dead to my sister Yaril, as soon as word reached her. Dead to old Sergeant Duril, the mentor of my youth. My exuberance drained and darkness swirled around me. Dead to everyone I loved. Might as well really be dead.

I fell to my knees in my weariness. That was a mistake. The instant I settled into stillness, hunger woke in me and clawed at my guts and throat. It was beyond hunger pangs; it felt as if my guts were devouring themselves and I groaned with it. If Olikea were here, I thought hazily, she would bring me the berries and roots and leaves that sustained my magic. And afterwards, she would have roused my passions and then sated them. Some desperate sentry in my brain realized that my thoughts were circling uselessly. The sky was greying. I’d spent the night as recklessly as I’d spent my magic. Daylight was coming. Time to flee.

It took me some little time to rise. I staggered on, my ears ringing. I felt as if I could hear a great crowd of people talking at a distance. There was that uneven rise and fall of vocalization, rather like water lapping against a shore. I lifted my eyes, but no one was there. Then my knees folded under me again. I had not gone even a dozen paces. I crumpled to the earth beside the massive stump of the fallen kaembra tree. I caught myself before I went face down in the wood chips and sawdust that littered the forest floor. With a groan I twisted my body to lean my back against the stump. I had never felt such weariness and hunger, not even in my worst days of starvation in my father’s house. ‘Am I dying?’ I asked the implacable night.

‘Probably not,’ a dusky voice behind me said. ‘But I am.’

I did not turn my head nor even startle. Despite my own distress, I felt shamed to have forgotten that others suffered more keenly than I did. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said to the tree. ‘I’m sorry. I tried, but I was too late to save you. I should have tried harder.’

‘You said you would speak to them!’ he cried out. ‘You said you would do your best to put an end to this.’ His outrage and pain rang, not in my ears, but in my heart.

I closed my eyes to sense him better. ‘I thought you would be dead,’ I said thoughtlessly. My own deep weariness and stabbing hunger eroded my manners. My magic was at its lowest ebb. I could barely sense the old Speck in the tree. Once his hair had been dark, but now it was long and grey, with the streaks of white barely showing against it. His pale blue eyes were almost white, and his speckled markings had faded against his skin to a dapple of freckles. He’d been old when he went into his tree, I suddenly knew. Once he had been fat, a Great One, a forest mage like myself, but now he was bleeding to death. As his magic ran out of his tree, his flesh hung flaccid around him. I stared at him, wondering if that was how I looked, and if our fates would be the same.

‘I am dead,’ he told me bitterly. ‘Swift or slow as the end may come, it certainly comes now. They cut me with cold iron, with many, many blows of cold, sharp iron.’

I shuddered, imagining the pain. Could it have been worse than a thousand lashes? He had been unable to flee his fate as I had done. His life had depended on me, and my paltry efforts to save him had failed.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said with great sincerity. ‘I did try. I was too late for you. But what I have done tonight should frighten the road builders. If they find the courage to try again, I have created a chaos they will not quickly undo. Even if they start tomorrow, it will be months before they undo my destruction. Winter is coming and work will stop when the snow flies. I have bought us some time in which we can seek a permanent solution.’

‘Months,’ he said with scorn. ‘Part of a year? What is that to me? Nothing, now! I am dead, Jhernian. My death will be a slow fading to you, but I will be gone before the spring comes. And to me, it will seem but a wink of the eye. Once we have our trees, we do not count time in hours or days or even seasons as you do. I am dead. But while there is still enough of me left to speak, I will tell you again. Delaying them is not enough. You must drive these intruders out, so that they never come back. Kill them all, if you must. For years now we have refrained from that, but perhaps it is the only thing that will stop them. Kill them all. A delay? What good does that do? You have been just like any other Jhernian, bidding living things die to please your ends, and then claiming you have benefited us all! What a fool you have been, throwing magic like dust, wasting a hoard such as not been seen for many years!’

I had scarcely the strength to answer him, but so stung was I that I rallied what little remained to me. ‘As the magic wished me to do, I have done.’

He laughed bitterly. ‘I did not feel the magic speak at your act. Instead, I witnessed you bending your will to force trees to their deaths, to push plants to spread where they cannot sustain themselves, to push life just as unnaturally as the intruders have pushed death. Any of us could have told you that it would not work. Tomorrow, half your magic will be undone by the rising sun as the plants wither and fade. What a waste!’