Stained Glass Monsters (4 page)

She almost missed it, would have if she
hadn't caught the scent of a storm and realised what it meant just
in time to turn her eyes back.

ShhooTHuMP!

Falk exploded. Not in flames, but into
splinters. The outer buildings were shredded by fragments of the
houses that were closest to the White Lady, only a few remaining
upright. Pieces of wood flew well beyond the village's circle,
spearing into the ground after crossing more than half the distance
to the cordon. The first wave of destruction passed in a moment,
but among the buildings which hadn't been completely destroyed
there followed a series of sliding crashes, as walls collapsed and
settled.

"Stronger than the last," said Captain
Faille, as if he watched homes being shattered every day.

"Yes." Lady Weston shaded her eyes to
peer through the night, ignoring the cries of astonishment and
dismay all around. "Danress, prepare the same divination at its
edge please."

"Yes, M'Lady." Lieutenant Danress took
two of the outriders and headed into the edges of Falk's ruin as
both the Troop Captain and Mayor Dorstan approached the Grand
Magister's carriage.

"Captain Vesan, I will perform some
further divinations here before heading into Sark. One of the
Queen's Hands will reach here from Asentyr by morning, and will
take charge." Lady Weston nodded at the militia-man, then turned a
softer look on Mayor Dorstan. "I'm sorry for your loss, Sir. I wish
I had been able to prevent this."

Mayor Dorstan was a ghost of himself,
hollow and without his usual force. He touched his hand to his
forehead, and muttered something, then added: "We're all whole,
M'Lady. That's as much as any man can hope for, when such a thing's
visited on him. It will – you say it will keep expanding? Could you
reckon how far? There's some who are fixing to set themselves up in
Morebly, and I mislike uprooting them twice."

"The size will depend on the quality of
the caster. The first Grand Summoning, that of Queen Solace, formed
the basin of Lake Surclere. I would not depend on Morebly."

The Mayor took a step backward, then
bowed and faded into the twilight. Kendall didn't know how big Lake
Surclere was, but she did know that there used to be a town there,
one which had had thousands of people living in it. And three
hundred years ago the Black Queen had cast the Grand Summoning,
trying to increase her power. The spell had let all kind of
monsters loose on Tyrland and, the stories said, the town and all
the countryside around it had been sucked down into a pit, into the
Hells outside the world where the Life Stealers lived.

Examining this idea, Kendall followed
Lady Weston and Captain Faille to the new edge of the heaviness,
where Lieutenant Danress had cleared and compressed a section of
dirt, and marked out a circle of magic writing among the ruins of
Falk. It was easy to tell where the heaviness started, because that
was where the ground began to slope downward. The gleaming white
figure was now about three feet below them, in the centre of a
rubble-strewn cone sunk into the earth.

"Guess we should have slit her throat
while we had the chance," Kendall said to Lieutenant Danress, as
Lady Weston once again began to cast. "Could we have stopped her
from finishing her spell if we'd understood sooner? And why did she
decide to do her spell in the middle of Falk instead of somewhere
people didn't live?"

"It's a little complicated." Danress
glanced at the shadowy stillness which was her senior officer, then
moved a few feet away. "Before the expansion, Lady Weston
thoroughly examined the White Lady and found little in the way of a
physical element, for all she appears to be directly in front of
us. That may be what the caster looks like, but she isn't really
here. The apparition is a distortion out of the Eferum, and no
weapon would have been able to even scratch her."

"She's in the Hells?"

"If you want to call it that. The proper
name for the world surrounding this one is the Eferum. While Efera
flows from there to here constantly, like water through a sieve,
magi risk their lives to enter the Eferum to Summon their focus
stones, to increase the amount of power they can call upon. It's
only possible to stay there for a short time, and it's dangerous.
Queen Solace – the Surcleres were pre-eminent experts on the
Eferum, and the Queen discovered a way to prolong the amount of
time she could endure in the Eferum, immensely increasing the
strength of the focus stone she would be able to summon. But the
Grand Summoning, as well as the obvious destruction, caused the
barrier between the Eferum and this world to weaken, and there were
a great many incursions. Most natural breaches aren't open wide or
long enough for many Eferum-Get – what you'd call Night Roamers –
to get through, but the Grand Summoning created rifts of dangerous
length."

"Night Roamers are going to come out of
Falk?"

"No. This projection is something unique
to the Grand Summoning, a physical manifestation of the spell, of
the amount of power the caster is drawing to bear. What you can
feel when you come into its range is the weight of the Efera
itself. It is...the strength of it will dwarf all of Tyrland's
mages, make us into ants. Whoever is casting this will be like a
god to us if they complete the Summoning."

"How do we stop it then?" Kendall asked
practically. "Prince Tiandel stopped Queen Solace didn't he?"

"Prince Tiandel knew the precise
construction of the Grand Summoning, witnessed its casting, and had
been entrusted with Queen Solace's younger focuses, which he used
as a tool against her. He would not share the knowledge after; we
don't even know precisely what he did to kill her beyond disrupting
the Summoning with the focuses. Then – there was a great backlash
against the Surclere line after Queen Solace's death, and Tiandel
Montjuste-Surclere renounced claim to the throne and withdrew from
society. Hero and villain. It was Tiandel who assisted her, Tiandel
who helped prepare the spell, who had custody of her library, all
her researches. There were frequent attacks against him, calls from
the Court to have him brought to account, many stories that he
intended to attempt the Grand Summoning himself. Yet it is believed
that it was actually loyalists of the Black Queen who set fire to
his home. The entire Montjuste-Surclere family were killed, and
that library, all the primary records of the Black Queen's
researches – gone."

"Oh." Kendall stared through the
increasing gloom at the White Lady. "So what can we do? Just wait
till whoever she is finishes and hope she's nice?"

"It may amount to that," Danress
muttered. "Of course, there is this mess, and there will be the
incursions to deal with. Beyond that – you realise how important it
is to find that woman, don't you? She knew, before any of us, that
the Distortion circle would expand, that this was a Grand
Summoning. She must know the caster, probably knows the initiating
point. If we're to do anything at all, we need to find that place,
and be ready for the caster's return from the Eferum."

"I guess," Kendall said
unenthusiastically. She hadn't been entirely convinced that silly
woman was really involved at all until one of the Ferumguard – the
Sentene's outriders – had returned from Morebly with a blank scrap
of paper. Lady Weston said the writing must have been conjured, so
it couldn't be used to trace her, even if she was close enough to
trace. "I don't see how we're going to find her, though. She's long
gone. Are you going to collect all the black-haired girls in
Tyrland for me to look at?"

"Not that improbable an idea," Danress
replied. "All the black-haired mages, at least. We will certainly
be combing the Register for anyone who fits the description you
gave."

"What about the White Lady? You saw her
up close, didn't you? Lady Weston didn't recognise her?"

"No. And she's certainly distinctive. An
outland mage, perhaps? It's more than confusing, because the White
Lady sightings have been occurring for centuries. The most recent
was in Loise, almost sixty years ago, but there was no expansion in
any of the previous cases. It's a greatly confusing thing to
discover this White Lady is related to the Grand Summoning –
they've been occurring innocuously for so long that we have no
explanation as yet."

Lieutenant Danress sighed, then moved
back to watch Lady Weston doing nothing visible. It was almost full
dark now, the moon not yet risen, and the night broken only by the
lanterns held by the militia and Ferumguard. Kendall shook her
head, tried not to think about Night Roamers, and went to sit in
Lady Weston's carriage.

She didn't want any part of this, and
maybe would have taken the chance of ditching the Sentene once they
reached Sark if not for the memory of Ma Lippon's face as she
herded her brood down the road toward Morebly. Lippons had been
living in Falk since forever, just like the Stocktons. Ma Lippon
might've been bossier than anyone could care for, so sure she knew
what was right. But Kendall would no more have seen her turned out
of her home than she would have struck the sun from the sky. Ma
Lippon belonged in Falk, and Falk wasn't there any more.

Kendall made a practice of looking after
herself, of not poking her nose into other people's doings. This
wasn't her business. Not her job to fix wrongs or try and protect
kingdoms. Not her problem if the Lippons no longer had a home to go
to.

But if she had the chance she'd point
out the woman who knew about the Grand Summoning, all the same.

There was something more than strange
about Captain Faille. Kendall hadn't noticed anything except his
weird voice during the fuss and turmoil of evacuating Falk, but
this morning in Sark she'd seen that his hair was blond not grey; a
pale, clear yellow like wine. Or so she'd thought, but inside the
carriage it had looked grey again, transparent and faded. It was
very fine, reminding Kendall a little of feathers: short, soft and
following the shape of his skull. When they had the door closed and
no handy magelight uncovered so that it was all gloom inside, it
had been hard to see him at all. Unlike Danress with her bright
hair, he faded most completely into his corner, till only the
Montjuste Phoenix reminded Kendall anyone was there at all.

Kendall had been debating whether it was
only imagination when one of the Ferumguard knocked on the outside
of the carriage, and the driver drew them up. Both Sentene got out
to see what was going on, and Captain Faille paused a moment just
outside the door to say something to Lady Weston. Kendall could
only stare, for his hair was most definitely blond now, sunshine
gold, and his eyes were yellow disks, the pupil drowned. Lit from
within, like there was a candle inside him.

That certainly wasn't imagination,
though Kendall rubbed at her own eyes as if that would change what
she'd seen. She glanced surreptitiously at the Grand Magister, who
had been busy making notes in a journal, but must surely have seen
it as well.

"Lady Weston?"

"Yes, child?"

"Why does Captain Faille keep changing
colours?"

The Grand Magister hesitated, though she
didn't seem surprised. "Faille has, quite a number of the Sentene
have non-human ancestry. Have you heard of the Kellian?"

The word was vaguely familiar. "Wasn't
that the name of the Black Queen's bodyguards?"

"Just so. They were a magical construct,
a variation of a flesh golem. Their descendents are rather more
human, but retain many of the properties of the Kellian. It makes
them ideal for dealing with strays from the Eferum, for those
creatures are difficult to find or combat without the ability to
sense Efera in some form. Others among the Sentene are descended
from higher Eferum-Get."

Kendall was incredulous. "Stalkers can
have children? With people?"

"Not those particularly. Most Eferum-Get
have little intelligence, and the Life Stealers don't even have any
substance. Stalkers are monstrous animals. But occasionally
something different emerges into our world. These are not unlike
humans. Travellers, they're known as. They appear in our world for
only a few days, and have a tendency to take an interest in, ah,
willing females. Danress is a grandchild of one such as this."

"Really?" This was the last thing
Kendall would have expected of the freckled and carrot-topped
Danress.

Lady Weston laughed at her. "Truly.
Indeed, some argue that all with mage talent could unearth
Eferum-Get in their family tree, if only they looked back far
enough. For Danress, it is merely fewer generations."

The carriage door opened again, and
Lieutenant Danress climbed in, looking entirely human even in her
impressive uniform. Captain Faille remained standing outside, his
eyes small suns.

"A messenger sent to intercept us,
M'Lady. There's a sighting outside a town east of here. At least
two Escaton-types."

"We'll divert," Lady Weston said
immediately.

Captain Faille nodded, and closed the
door again. The carriage shook as he climbed up with the driver,
and then they started off again.

"The first incursion brought on by the
Summoning?" Lieutenant Danress asked.

"Very likely. Prepare yourself, Jolien.
Escaton are not to be taken lightly."

The Lieutenant nodded, then drew a
hinged book of slates out of her coat and opened it. She spent the
rest of the journey drawing chalk symbols and making them glow.
Lady Weston took another slate-book out of her bag and filled it
with tiny, precise writing but not making it glow. Kendall sat
taking up seat-space, wondering if Escatons were something other
than Night Roamers, since Night Roamers just didn't come out except
at night, and trying to decide whether she could really herself be
just a little bit not human. It would be interesting to be a person
who messengers rode furiously to fetch. How good a mage would she
have to be, to become a Sentene? And how silly would she look in
that coat?