CXXIV
NYLAN LAY AWAKE on his couch, his ears and senses listening to the gentle sound of Dyliess's breathing, his thoughts on scattered feelings and images-including an evening meal with only a handful of guards even there, most gone out into the twilight with full quivers; including the idea that the whole world was decided by violence and where no achievement or possession was ever enough.
His breath hissed out between clenched teeth.
"Are you awake?" Ryba asked quietly from across the gap between them.
"Yes. It's a little hard to get to sleep, no matter how much you need the rest, thinking of two thousand men who want to kill you and destroy all you've built." Nylan really didn't want to discuss the problems of violence and greed with Ryba.
"They won't do it. Not if we all do our parts."
"You've said that before. I know in my head that you're probably right, but my emotions don't always follow reason. You seem to have more faith than I do that we can destroy a force close to fifty times our size."
"Fierral thinks our archers have already taken out between a hundred and two hundred of their armsmen. She still has a few out there, the ones with night vision," Ryba said. "Tomorrow, if we can take out another two hundred and get them in a murderous mood coming up the ridge, your little traps could add a hundred or two more. We might get them down to an even thousand before you have to use the laser."
"And ... poof. .. just like that, our troubles are over?"
"What's gotten into you, Nylan? I know you don't like all the killing, but, outside of dying or running like outlaws until we're hunted down, what choices do we have?" She paused. "Oh, I forgot. We could spend the rest of our very short lives barefoot and pregnant and beaten, unless we were fortunate enough to subject ourselves to someone who's as kind as you are, and I've met exactly one of you in a life a decade longer than yours."
Nylan had no answer, not one that made sense. Logically, what Ryba said made sense, but he wanted to scream, to ask why logic dictated violence and killing, when the only answer was that only violence answered violence, and that some people refused to give up violence.
"Your problem is that you're basically good and kind, and you really have trouble accepting that most people aren't, that most people require force or discipline to live in any sort of order."
"I see that part," Nylan conceded. "What I don't see is why people are like that. War leaves a few people better off, but most worse off. Sometimes, it's even necessary to survive, but that means that the other side doesn't."
"Look at those Gallosian men who attacked earlier this summer." Ryba's voice was low and cool. "They couldn't conceive of women like us. They wouldn't face it. They would rather have died than faced the idea that women could be as tough and as smart-and they did. You have to face the facts, Nylan. Most people's beliefs aren't rational. They wouldn't do what they do if they were. But they do, and that's the proof."
"I suppose so." Nylan took another deep breath, trying to keep it low and quiet. He didn't want to talk about it anymore. He just wanted to know why people were so blind. Sure-violence was always successful for the strongest, but only one person could ever be the strongest. So why did so many people delude themselves into thinking they were that person? "I suppose so ... and I can see what you say. I don't have to like it."
"Neither do I." Ryba yawned. "But I can't change peo-ple."
Nylan wondered if she really wanted to, but said nothing in the darkness. He turned to watch the cradle, hoping that Dyliess might understand, yet fearing that, if she did, she would not survive. He studied her profile in the silence until his eyes got heavy, until he dropped into an uneasy sleep, far too late, and far too close to an early dawn.
CXXV
THE TRIANGLE RANG in the darkness, and Nylan bolted upright.
Ryba moaned in her sleep, and Dyliess snuffled and shifted on the lumpy cradle mattress. Slowly, the smith-engineer swung his feet onto the floor. He sat on the edge of the bed for a time, until Dyliess began to whimper. Then he eased his daughter from the cradle, and half sat, half fell into the rocking chair, with her on his chest, where he began to rock and pat her back.
The triangle sounded again, once, and Ryba mumbled, "Not yet."
Nylan agreed with the sentiment, but waited until Ryba shifted her weight again with another groan.
"The great day has arrived," said Nylan. "I hope it's great. Better yet, I hope they just take their army and turn around."
"That won't happen," mumbled Ryba groggily as she turned in his direction. In the dark, she fumbled with the striker for a time before she could get the candle lit. "I still don't understand how you can see in pitch-darkness. Demons, it's early."
Nylan patted Dyliess, but her whimpers rapidly progressed toward wails.
"She's hungry," he pointed out.
"I can hear that. Just let me get half-dressed." Ryba pulled leather trousers off the pegs and stuffed her legs into them, then pulled on her boots, leaving the thin sleeping gown in place over trousers and boots as she walked toward Nylan and their daughter. "Would you take Dyliess's cradle down to the main level while I feed her?" asked Ryba. "After you get dressed, I mean."
"You can feed her now?"
"Who else?"
Nylan stood, then handed Dyliess to her mother. Even before Dyliess started to nurse, the wails stopped.
"Greedy little piglet."
"She's not so little anymore," Nylan observed as he began to don his leathers.
"She's still greedy."
Like the whole world, thought Nylan, but maybe I can change her a little. After he dressed and strapped the pair of blades in place, he lifted the cradle, stepping carefully so that he didn't trip on either cradle or blades. He snorted, thinking how pointless it would all be if he tumbled down four flights of stone steps before the battle.
"I'll bring her down in a moment," Ryba said. "Go ahead and eat."
"Fine," he grunted, struggling through the door with his burden.
After he slowly trudged down the steps and set the cradle next to the others carried down by either Siret or Istril or those who had helped them, Nylan paused. He saw a hand wiggling and walked over to look down at Weryl. Flat on his back, his son studied his own chubby hands, his short fingers intertwining, then separating, as if they were not really connected to his own body. Antyl-the new and very pregnant guard-stood watching.
Nylan bent down and touched Weryl's arm lightly, trying to offer some cheer. After a bit, he straightened. In the next cradle lay Kyalynn, being rocked by Niera. His other daughter's eyes were wide in the dimness, but she only looked, first at Niera, and then at Nylan.
Nylan walked around the cradle so that he could bend down without getting in Niera's way, and he touched Kyalynn's wrist. Her eyes turned to him, deep green and serious as he looked at her.
Finally, his eyes burning, he stood. He swallowed, took a deep breath, and started toward the great room. Though his guts were tight, he knew he had to eat, as much as he could stomach.
"I saw that, Nylan."
He looked up as Istril stood there: Then he shrugged. "What can I say? I didn't have a lot to do with their birth, but nothing can change that they're my children."
"You had a lot to do with their birth, just not their conception." Istril swallowed. "I hope Weryl grows up like you."
"I hope he grows up," Nylan said bleakly.
"He will. I can see that."
"You, too?" Nylan forced a chuckle.
"Me, too." Istril paused. "You're not riding with the guard?"
"No. I'm supposed to stay with the laser, and try to hold off their wizards in some way that I haven't really figured out. So I don't have to worry, in the beginning, anyway, about arrows and blades."
"That doesn't reassure me, Nylan."
"What you're wearing doesn't reassure me much, either." Nylan looked at the silver-haired guard, in full battle dress with twin blades, and the bow and quiver in her hands. "What about... ?"
"Weryl? There are more than score eighty armsmen out there, and two of those small siege engines. Every person counts. Siret and I drew straws. I won, or lost, depending on how it goes. Yesterday, she went out with the sniping detail. You know they got almost two hundred of the Lornians, especially in the darkness?"
"What about their wizards?"
"They can't see that well in the dark, and Saryn had the tactics laid out well. Only one shot from each position, then move. When you've got twenty kays of trail to leapfrog along and they don't dare leave formation, it's not that hard."
"Of course," Nylan said, "by this morning those fifteen hundred or so who are left are ready to kill us all, preferably by attaching sections of our anatomy to horses traveling at high rates of speed in different directions."
"Probably. We just have to kill all of them. Then they won't be a problem."
Nylan looked at her. He thought he saw a faint hint of a smile. Then again, maybe he hadn't. "That's not a solution that works well over time."
"No. It'd be a lot easier if most men were more like you, but they seem to be more like Gerlich."
Nylan's stomach growled, and his head felt faint.
"You need to eat, and so do I."
Nylan nodded, and they walked toward the great room, where the tables were mostly filled. The candles helped dispel some of the predawn gloom, but not much, and they flickered with the breeze through the open windows.
Istril sat down at the second table.
Ayrlyn-dark circles under her eyes-nodded as Nylan sat down at the head table.
"You're tired," Nylan said, reaching for the pot that held the bitter tea he needed-badly.
"It was a late night."
"You went with the archers?"
Ayrlyn finished the mug of tea. "I can see in the dark. It helps."
Sensing her exhaustion, Nylan stretched across the table and refilled her mug.
"Thank you." The healer put a chunk of bread in her mouth almost mechanically, as if each bite were an effort.
"Do you want some meat?"
"No... thank you," the redhead added. "It's not your fault, Nylan, but it was a long and hard night." She slowly chewed another piece of bread.
"It's too early," grumbled Huldran. "Bad business to fight before dawn."
"We're not fighting before dawn," said Fierral. "We're eating."
"How did it go last night?" asked Nylan.
"Well enough that any other idiot would have turned around. There are bodies everywhere along the road. Their commander was smart enough to keep them moving, and not try burial. They've got a half-fortified encampment a valley or so down out on a rise that's surrounded by grass." Fierral chewed through a thick chunk of bread, and then a lukewarm strip of unidentified meat that Nylan had tried and choked down despite a taste like gamy venison. "We didn't get many after they camped. Too open."
"We got a lot, and lost a few ourselves," Ayrlyn said tiredly.
Nylan understood her exhaustion went beyond mere tiredness, and he wondered how many she had healed, or had been unable to heal.
Ryba, fully dressed, had carried Dyliess into the great room, although she had left her bow and blades on the shelves by the stairs. As she seated herself, and Dyliess, she answered Ayrlyn's comment. "That leaves a lot, and us with fewer guards."
Nylan repressed a wince, wondering how Ryba could sometimes be so insensitive-or so strong-as to ignore such pain. Which was it? he wondered. Then his eyes crossed Ayrlyn's, and he offered a quick and apologetic smile.
He got a brief one in return.
"We'll have the first of the picket posts set in a bit, ser," said Fierral. "I had some of the newer guards out real early, scrounging shafts and weapons from the ones that fell last night. They should be back not too long after dawn, well before the army starts moving."
"Men are slow in the morning," mumbled Huldran. "Excepting you, ser," she added to Nylan.
The smith-engineer wondered why he was the exception to everything-or was that just because Ryba needed him? Or because he disliked the use offeree to solve everything, even when he was guilty, or more guilty than just about anyone, of employing it? He took a sip of tea, then lowered the mug to his chin, letting the steam seep around his face.
After a few more sips, he slowly chewed a strip of hot-sauced venison, and then another, and then some more bread. All of it tasted flat, but he kept eating.
"... engineer's off somewhere ... got that look ..."
"... wouldn't want to be in his boots ..."
"I would."
"That's not what I meant..."
In time, he looked up. Ayrlyn and Fierral were gone. The tables were half-empty, and Ryba was wiping her face one-handed, juggling Dyliess on her leg.
"Can you take her?" asked the marshal. "Antyl and Blynnal are keeping the children, while Siret holds the tower..."
"I know. Istril told me." He stood, then took his daughter, still looking at her mother.
"You know what you're going to do?" Ryba asked.
"It's pretty simple, in theory anyway. You and the guards get them bunched on the hillside, and I fry them. That doesn't take into account that they may not want to bunch or that their wizards may have other ideas, or that the wizards may be able to block the effect of the laser. Or that the wizards may be able to fry me. But," he concluded, "I understand the plan." He paused. "Was there any problem getting some of the newer guards to trip the pikes?"
"No. There were a handful who'd have done it on a suicide basis."
Nylan winced. "There's a lot of hatred here."
"There's been a lot of hidden hatred between men and women in a lot of cultures, Nylan. It's just more obvious here." Ryba half turned. "I've got to go. Ill either check with you or send a messenger once we're set."
Nylan shifted Dyliess to his shoulder and patted her back as he walked slowly to the other side of the tower, trying and succeeding in not tripping over the pair of blades he wore.
He eased Dyliess into the cradle, then patted her arm and touched her smooth cheek. She smiled, then threatened to cry as he stood.
"Istril told me you were here earlier." Siret had just handed Kyalynn to Antyl, and she stepped toward Nylan. The silver-haired guard had deep circles under her green eyes, and a narrow slash across her cheek.
Nylan reached out and touched the skin beside the wound, letting a little order seep into it.
"You didn't have to do that."
"You didn't have to go out last night and try to reduce the odds against us."
They just looked at each other for a long moment.
Then Nylan cleared his throat. "Take care of them. Just . . . take care of them."
He turned and headed up the steps to the fifth level and the components of the weapons laser. Huldran joined him on the way up.
The sun had just begun to ease above the great forest to the east of the cliffs when Nylan carried the weapons laser head and cables across the lower meadow to the crude brick revetment. From the raised position on its platform on the highest point of ground east of the tower, amid the fields, the weapons laser had a clean field of fire in nearly any direction.
Behind him followed Huldran and three of the newer recruits, none of whose names Nylan knew, carrying the heavy firin cell block and the rest of the equipment.
Nylan positioned the tripod, then clicked the firing head onto the swivel. After that came the power cable.
"Let's move the cells to the center here," he suggested, and one of the new guards, a mahogany redhead, helped.
After that he straightened and looked at the three new guards. "That's all we need for now. Go do whatever you're supposed to do."
"We're supposed to guard you," the redhead said. "Oh ... all right. Then get as many shafts as you can and whatever else you need and report back here. When the time comes, try to use arrows and keep them at a distance. The farther away the better."
"Yes, ser."
The three guards started walking toward the tower. Nylan shook his head and turned to Huldran. "I'll check this out while you get our mounts. When you get back, I want to inspect the pike lines. Is that all right?"
"I get to walk up to get the horses and bring them back, and you get to ride?" asked Huldran, raising her eyebrows. "I thought it was a good idea," said Nylan. "Sometimes, ser, you still have certain male characteristics."
They both laughed. Then Huldran trotted uphill along the paved road to the stables and the corrals where not only the horses were, but where the sheep had been gathered.
As the early golden light fell across the meadows, and the fields, Nylan slowly went through each and every connection, letting his senses check the lines where the flows would follow. He did not power up the system. He could sense that it would work, and he knew that he would need every erg of power, and probably a lot more.
When he had finished, Huldran had not returned, and he looked out to the west, to Tower Black standing in the light against the shadowed rocky hills that rose eventually into the higher peaks of the Westhorns. In the flat morning light, the Roof of the World was quiet except for the steps of the last guards heading up to the stables. The grass hung limp in the stillness, dew glittering like tiny diamonds in the light. The scene appeared almost pastoral.
As Huldran rode across the grass, leading the brown mare, Nylan took another deep breath, conscious that he had recently been taking a lot of deep breaths, a whole lot-and that nothing had changed. He still had to destroy hundreds of men, just so Westwind would be left alone. He walked behind the emplacement and started to check the mare's saddle before he mounted.
The triangle rang three times-twice. A squad or group of guards rode down past the smithy and the tower, and over Nylan's short bridge and up the hill past the end of the paving. As they vanished over the crest of the ridge, the triangle rang again in triplets, and Nylan swung into the mare's saddle and started toward the pike emplacements.
Another set of riders passed the tower, and one turned her horse toward the laser emplacement, then changed her direction toward Nylan.
Behind her, the three newer guards hurried across the meadows, followed by a man in black-Relyn.
Nylan reined up and waited for Ryba.
The marshal drew up beside him, and began to speak. "The Lornians are forming up and beginning to march toward the flat down on the other side of the ridge. The scouts say that they're two kays down past the flat." The marshal glanced toward the sun. "I'd guess it would be after midmorning before they'll be in your range. Longer if we're successful."
"Then I hope you are most successful," Nylan said.
"We'll see. That's something I don't know. I'll try to send you messengers, if we have any to spare." Her eyes were bleak.
"Don't worry," he answered. "I'll do what I can." As if I had tiny real choice at all, between you and them.
As Ryba spurred her horse back toward her guards, Nylan glanced to the great forest beyond the steep eastern cliff that dropped away in its nearly sheer fall. The forest was almost a black outline against the morning sun, and Nylan's eyes rose to Freyja, glittering mercilessly in the cool and the clear morning light.
After a moment, he urged the mare up the hill. Rather than dismount and risk revealing too much, just in case the Lornians' wizard could see what he did, he rode past each post of the lower line slowly, letting his senses range over what he had constructed. The weights and links seemed sound, and all the cords were in place. Then he repeated the effort with the upper line before easing the mare up to the crest of the ridge.
All he saw on the northeastern side was what he always saw. There were no massed bodies, no horse soldiers, just grasses and road and trees.
He squinted and studied the area to the west. Perhaps there was a low cloud of dust rising above the trees that bordered the wide meadows leading toward Westwind, but the trees shielded his vision.
After a time, he turned the mare and rode back down the road and across the meadow to the laser.
"See anything, ser?" asked Huldran as he rode past the front of the quickly bricked emplacement. "Some dust, I think, but it wasn't moving that fast."
"It never is," said Relyn, "unless it's on the field and moving right toward you. Then the horses and dust rush at you. At the same time, you feel like they move so slowly."
Nylan reined up and tied the mare in back, beside Huldran's mount where she would be largely sheltered from stray arrows or crossbow bolts or whatever missiles the Lornians might employ. Then he checked the laser again.
For a while, as the sun climbed, and he began to sweat under the leathers, he walked back and forth. Then he wandered out into the grass. Except for the six of them, the entire Roof of the World appeared empty. The tower was barred and silent, and even the insects seemed quieter than normal. Or was that his imagination?
"Why are battles always fought on clear days?" asked Nylan to no one in particular as he sat down in the narrow slit entry, his boots resting on packed clay that had once been grass.
"They are not," answered Relyn from the left side of the emplacement. "I have fought in rain and mud. Not snow."
The smith-engineer nodded. Then he looked at the man in black. After a time, he got up and walked back and forth behind the silent and still unpowered laser. He looked at Relyn a moment, then beckoned, and walked away from the emplacement, letting the one-armed man follow. He stopped a hundred cubits out into the meadow and turned.
Relyn frowned. "What is it?"
"After this is over, it's time for you to leave-as soon as you can." Nylan glanced uphill, but nothing had changed.
"The Angel?"
Nylan nodded. "One way or another, I won't be in very good shape after this. Too much killing is hard on me." He met Relyn's eyes. "I promised. But don't lay a hand on anyone, or I'll chase you to the demon's depths."
Relyn shivered. "I would not, not after all this. Not after what I owe you." He shrugged, then smiled bitterly. "First, we must triumph."
"Don't prophets always win?" Nylan gave a wry grin and walked back toward the laser emplacement.
Relyn followed more slowly, fingering his chin with his left hand.
Huldran glanced from Nylan to Relyn, then just shook her head.
Shortly, a small group of riders appeared just over the crest of the hill, but turned their mounts to face the other way, presumably down on the advancing Lornians. Nylan thought he saw Ryba's latest roan, but he couldn't be quite sure.
Nylan was blotting his forehead, and even Relyn had opened his jacket by the time a single rider cantered down the road from the ridge. Nylan didn't know her name, though he had seen her in training, and she rode well.
"Ser! The enemy is about a third of the way up the ridge. The marshal said that she won't be able to send any more reports."
"Fine. Tell her to make sure the field is clear when the enemy comes down. Do you understand that?"
The guard's face crinkled. "The field must be clear when the enemy comes down?"
"The field must be clear of guards when the enemy comes down." Nylan corrected himself. "Do you have it?"
She repeated the words, and Nylan nodded. Then she turned her mount and started back up toward the ridge.
Relyn looked at Nylan's face. "You plan some terrible magic."
"It's not magic. Not mostly," Nylan added as his head throbbed as if to remind him not to lie, "but, if it works, it will be terrible." He muttered under his breath afterward, "And if it doesn't work, it's going to be terrible in a different way."
"What do you want us to do?" asked one of the new guards.
"When the engineer works his magic," answered Huldran, "his body will be here, but his thoughts will not. Our job is to protect him from anyone who would attack."
Nylan hoped no one got that near, but somehow nothing worked quite the way it was planned in any battle. Or in anything, he added mentally.
As the faint and distant sounds of the tumult mounted and purple-clad riders finally crested the ridge, Nylan powered up the firm cell assembly-seventy-seven point five percent. Could he smooth the flows for the fiery weapons head, the way he had for the industrial laser heads?
Another wave of purple riders reached the ridge top, and the Westwind guards began falling back, drawing back across the ridge top, sliding westward toward the road to the tower.
The Lornian forces slowed where the pikes should have triggered, but Nylan could not see what exactly had occurred, except for the unseen whiteness that signified death and more death.
Nylan sent out his perceptions, his eyes still on the hillside above. He could almost sense the Lornian commander, the arrows falling around him as the man gestured with the big blade. Idly, Nylan thought that he could have shot the man. Then he nodded, and his stomach chilled into ice. Ryba had ordered her guards not to kill him. She was not aiming for the defeat of the Lornians. She wanted to keep the Lornian army whole and moving into the laser's range, and she was gambling on the laser and Nylan to destroy them totally.
"Damn you! Damn you ..." he muttered.
Suddenly, as the Lornian forces began to move again, to flow around the east end of the pike defenses, the remaining visible guards seemed to peel off the hillside behind the pike lines and ride westward toward the tower. The flow of arrows dropped to a few intermittent shafts.
Ryba reined up on the lower hillside, just above Nylan's bridge, and the remainder of the guards did also-not much more than half a score. Even if some guards remained in the rocks and in the ridge trees, casualties had been high-as usual.
Nylan hadn't seen Ayrlyn, not since breakfast. Why did he keep thinking about her-because she was one of the few that seemed to care about more than force? Because he had come to care for her? He shook his head. The only thing he could do now was use the laser. His thoughts traced the power lines, and slowly smoothed out the fluxes and the swirls within the cells.
Slowly, slowly, the black and purple mass on the hillside continued to move, mostly westward, holding to the high part of the ridge slope, although a lobe offerees seemed to swing downhill.
Nylan let his senses settle into the laser, let himself feel the equipment again, as his eyes and senses also measured the hillside, and he took a deep breath. More than a third of the attackers remained shielded by the curve of the hill.
"Why is he waiting?" whispered a voice. "Leave him alone. He's got to get them all at once. Too many are hidden by the slope of the hill," hissed Huldran. As the sweat dripped from his forehead, and he absently brushed it away from his eyes, Nylan continued to watch, to sense. As the dark forces swelled and surged across the hillside toward the thin line of guards, he waited.
Finally, as he tasted salt and blood, he triggered the laser, and the beam flared, and spread into a cast of light that did nothing, just sprayed reddish light across the advancing Lornians.
"What's with the laser?" snapped Huldran. "We've got power."
"The wizards. They've got shields." Nylan extended his senses toward the focal point of the shields, stepping toward Huldran as he did. "Ease it right, more, more. Hold it there!"
White-faced, Huldran helped him ease the laser eastward.
The focal change failed to help, and another flare of light lit the hillside, even as the Lornian forces reached a point less than two hundred cubits from Ryba and the guards.
"Shit!" He could sense the interlocked shields of the two wizards on the hillside, and his mind and fingers tried to tighten the focus of the beam, to swing it right against those red-white shields.
The energy in the firin cells seemed to build, and Nylan could sense the surging power, surges with far more energy than those cells could have possibly contained, as well as the invisible hands of the white wizard, probing, jabbing.
The engineer concentrated, ignoring the nearing hoofbeats, ignoring the raging chaos in the power cells behind him, trying to focus his energy and order into the thinnest, sharpest needle of order and power.
The white shields pulsed, and the needle halted. Nylan concentrated harder, and the black needle probed at the reddish-white shields, narrowing, narrowing. Nylan squeezed all the firin cell energy into that needle, driving it, hammering like a smith might hammer a needle-thin chisel against the joints in armor, relentlessly probing.
His eyes burned; his head felt like an anvil he was using, as though each thrust of the laser and the chaos somehow added by the white wizards rebounded back through him. His fingers were locked on the laser, as though held there by an electric current that flayed his nerves.
Still, Nylan hammered the needle against the white-red shields, forcing more and more power into that thrust, more and more chaos, more and more disruption, fighting the chaos backlash, and the lines of fire that felt as if they streamed from the white wizards and fell like lashes across his mind and body.
The shields of the white wizards wavered, and Nylan eased every erg of energy, chaotic and nonchaotic, smoothing it into an overwhelming tide of massed energy that cascaded against the pulsing white shields of the struggling Lornian wizards.
Something has to give... has to... has to, thought Nylan as he strained against the barriers that protected the Lornians.
CRRUMMMMMPTTT!
Energy flared across the Roof of the World, and the sky shivered and the ground shook, and all three wizards were clothed in flame and chaos. At that moment, Tower Black, rearing mounts, guards, armsmen, and wizards were suspended in a timeless instant-bathed in fire, bathed in chaos, bathed in order.