The Silver Lake (41 page)

Spar frowned, knowing the voice had dropped the word village in as bait.

“What village?”
he asked suspiciously.

“Whatever village.
”

Spar snorted, convinced now that the voice was just lying to get a rise out of him.
“It won’t happen.”

The voice chuckled.
“I will tell you this much: Brax, at the very least will be drawn into danger. He’s Estavia’s
new Champion, and, in
case you’ve forgotten, She’s not the God of daisies and love poetry. She’ll call him and he’ll go. He’ll either live or he’ll die. You could know which it will be, and knowing, you could do something about it, unless of course, being fed, clothed, and safe really is all you care about. ”

“Spar?”

About to deliver a scathing retort, Spar started at the sound of his name. Glancing over the edge of the roof, he saw Kemal gesturing at him.

i“Come down please. Jaq’s whining is drowning out the lesson.”

Spar nodded.
“Thanks a lot,”
he growled as he began to make his way toward one of the small, tower windows. “You made him notice me.”

The voice chuckled.
“As I said, considerable, although deeply latent, mental abilities. I wish you had the time to see if they develop naturally, I really do, but you havent, so I’m going to help you access them whether you want to or not. ”

The responding icy laughter which echoed through his mind made the hair on the back of Spar’s neck rise.

“Oh, believe me, Delin,”
the voice replied.
“I’m not.”

With an impatient shake of his head, Graize waved the lights away. They’d grown stronger over the last two weeks, coming closer to the integrated Godling he knew they would one day become. Weaving in and out of his thoughts, using his experiences to build a rudimentary understanding of the world, they whispered newly audible words in his head with an increasingly annoying sibilant hiss, words he had no interest in. They’d already made him aware of the northern sorcerer’s ambition and increased interest and Graize had patiently explained his own lack of concern. Whatever the foreign seer now knew, or thought he knew, was of no importance at the moment.

He told the lights so and, buzzing hungrily, they reluctantly withdrew, merging with the ever present spirits swirling just out of reach as Graize returned his attention to the task at hand.

Seated on one of the kazakin’s more docile mounts, he’d accompanied Timur and Danjel out onto the plains that morning to taste the signs on the winds of an approaching thunderstorm. Unwilling to take his abilities at face value, the ancient wyrdin had been teaching him to see the spirit world as the Yuruk saw it, as simply one aspect of the world as a whole, and the spirits themselves as no more than the wild sheep that dotted the faraway mountainsides, as creatures to be ignored or domesticated as he saw fit.

Licking his lips, Graize stared out at the vast horizon of power and potential that shimmered all around him like a silvery sea. Resisting the urge to draw all that power to him, he stroked the smooth length of the new bow Danjel had gifted him with before bending an ear to Timur who had been speaking to him for the last few moments without a response.

“Hm?”

“I said, what do you see, Wyrdin-Delin?” Timur repeated patiently. Like Danjel, the old wyrdin was bi-gender although, unlike Danjel, Timur preferred to remain physically ambiguous, to more easily converse with the spirit world.

Graize licked his lips, catching up a tiny, imprudent spirit with the tip of his tongue. “Power,” he whispered.

“And?”

He frowned. “What else is there?”

“Life.”

“It’s the same thing.”

“Not necessarily,” Timur retorted, shaking one thin and gnarled finger at him. “Life is the smooth, rhythmic ebb and flow of all things, great and small. Power is simply life’s fuel.” A wave of one hand took in the entire landscape around them. “Every event in life’s rhythm sets up its own pattern of ripples, like insects touching the surface of a still pool of water. If you know how to look, how to listen, how to ask, you can learn many things.” Timur leaned forward, the bells on the old wyrdin’s pony chiming softly. “Such as, we’re expecting the banners of the first kazakin of the Khes-Yuruk from the west. Are they near? Ask the ground beneath your feet; ask the wind on your face and the hills it’s traveled over.” One arm swept up. “Ask the sky.”

Graize stared out at the distant horizon with a frown. Some of what he’d told Danjel that first day had been the truth, some more bravado than certainty. With the lights and spirits as his guide, he
could
sense an army coming, find an enemy’s weak spot, and know when to attack it, but only if they knew. The lights were more interested in their own internal growth than the external world these days and spirits, anxious about the future, crowded so close to his body that all they could tell him was the beating of his own heart. Likewise, the ground, the wind, the hills, and the sky showed him nothing more than the vast expanse of power spread out for the taking. It made him hungry; it made the lights hungry; hungry like the spirits were hungry, desperately and angrily. He narrowed his eyes.
It always came down to hunger, didn’t it?
he thought, hunger and need.

Tipping his head to one side, he made a pretense of studying the flattened grasses under his pony’s hooves while Timur and Danjel waited either patiently or impatiently as their nature dictated.

Nature.

Hunger.

Need.

In the shining city he’d needed money to satisfy his hunger, other people’s money. To get it, he’d needed the game. He was good at the game. Here he needed more, here he needed the Yuruk. But to get them, he still needed the game. Yet what was the game here?

Nature.

Reaching into the hide bag at his belt, he gripped the dead stag beetle at the bottom, rubbing at the cracked and jagged carapace to collect his thoughts. The Yuruk believed he was a prophet. To be one, he had to act like one—whether or not he really was one was again unimportant—but it helped if he could really do the things they expected him to do, and the spirits and lights could only tell him so much. The Wyrdin-Yuruk used the spirits in their augury as he did, but they also studied the natural signs all around them; signs they’d expect him to know as well, signs of the game.

Graize had always been very good at the game.

The tiny spirit he’d sucked up had tasted of rain, but that wasn’t enough.

Closing his eyes, he raised his face to the breeze and felt ... something. The air was damp and chill. It smelled like the tiny spirit had tasted ... of rain.

Encouraged, he opened his eyes. Stretching before him, the tough meadow grasses undulated like a green sea, the thick, ribbed underside of each blade turned upward. Upward towards the rain, so the rain would be soon.

The darkening clouds above his head stretched across the horizon, swollen with power and driven by the rising wind. The wind was from the west. The rain would come from the west. His eyes narrowed. But that hadn’t been Timur’s question, had it?

Confused suddenly, his mind began to drift, listing to one side like a leaky boat. The lights pressed forward, sensing his returning receptivity, and he pushed them away with an impatient shake of his head. What had Timur’s question been, he demanded silently. He’d just heard it. Something about banners, the regiments of a Yuruk kazakin.

His expression cleared as he remembered. No, not
a
kazakin,
the
kazakin; the first kazakin come from the west to answer the new wyrdin’s call to arms. His call to arms; his and the Rus-Yuruk’s. He remembered.

The elders—Kursk, Ayami, Timur, and the rest—had needed little convincing to agree to attack Yildiz-Koy. With the long, tedious winter over and the sharp spring breeze calling them to ride and to fight, the promise of victory was as unnecessary as any outside motivation; they’d only needed someone to name the place. And although they wouldn’t trust him to lead, not yet, one village was no better or worse than another and so they would trust him to name the place. The place would be the test of further trust to come.

Still, Yildiz-Koy was walled and well guarded and so Kursk had sent messengers out across the plains:
come and fight with us; come and bloody the nose of the great Warriors of Estavia with us; come and loot a fat farming lakeside village with us.

Come and see with us if our new wyrdin is truly as powerful as he pretends to be.

The first kazakin from the western Khes-Yuruk was due to arrive any day now. Was it near? Graize had to know, but he didn’t know. But he
had
to know. But he
didn’t
know. His mind began to splinter under the dual pressure of panic and doubt and suddenly, buzzing impatiently like an angry wasp, a single light darted forward and exploded across his vision. Startled, he jerked back, and then began to smile. He’d forgotten. The lights needed this attack to grow. They needed it to feed. The lights would know, and they would tell him. Gesturing them forward, he formed the question in his mind.

Finally understood, the lights cavorted about his head, then streaked into the air, forming their answer in the sky, and Graize laughed out loud, his mind suddenly clear and clean for the first time in days, almost as if the rain had already swept past, carrying off each loose, chaotic thought like a swollen river might carry off debris. He turned, his eyes purposely blank, the game already forming in his mind.

“I see horses,” he said in a distant, singsong voice, “wearing the scent of moisture on their flanks.”

“And on the horses?”

The lights formed his new answer at once.

“Riders. Many riders, dressed in furs with curved blades in their belts and destiny surrounding them like gray mantles.”

“Are they near?”

The lights pulled back, lines of mist streaming down to pool upon the ground. He shook his head.

“Not yet. It’s raining in the west, storming. They’re standing beneath a steep escarpment, protected from the storm. When it’s done and the sun comes out of hiding to bathe the plains in light, then they’ll come.”

Beside him, both Timur and Danjel nodded in satisfaction and he felt their thoughts as if they’d shouted them aloud. The riders he could have made up, but not the reasoning, he was still too new to the plains. Or so they thought.

“When will the storm come?” Timur prodded.

This time he knew the spirits could tell him, feeling their excitement and suddenly understanding why. His lips pulled back from his teeth in a triumphant grimace more a snarl than a smile as the wyrdin’s own words echoed in his mind.

And what a fuel it was, he agreed.

“Tonight.”

“Plenty of time, then. We should get back.”

Turning, Timur and Danjel led the way back to the encampment as Graize took one last look at the sky. The lights swooped in on him again like a flock of seabirds, their newly found hunger almost screeching in his mind.

“We have a new enemy,”
they insisted.

“It doesn’t matter,” he
answered.

“No.”
Lifting one hand, he ran a caressing finger ithrough their midst, bleeding off their anxiety.
“He can’t
stop
us,”
he assured them. “You’ll
feed; I promised
that
you would.”

Comforted, the lights calmed. They were still hungry, but they would feed. Graize had promised that they would.

His own mind racing with excitement at the thought of this new stream of possibility, Graize brought his mount awkwardly into step beside Danjel’s. The game was on. The lights would feed and so would he. As soon as the storm came. Catching up another tiny spirit, he tasted the approaching rain and laughed out loud.