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Authors: L. E. Modesitt Jr.

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BOOK: The Soprano Sorceress: The First Book of the Spellsong Cycle

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WAHRWELTTRAUM

A
nna’s eyes were gummy, and her head pounded, and someone was talking to her. She opened her eyes slowly, but could see nothing for a moment. Was she blind? What had happened? Then points of light wavered in the darkness—it was night.

Daffyd was talking.

“Are you all right? Lady Anna, are you all right?”

“I don’t know,” Anna finally said. “I think I can see. It’s dark out, isn’t it?” She was lying on something, a bedroll, that didn’t soften the ground underneath very much.

“It’s well after sunset, could be close to midnight.”

“Midnight?” It had been around midday, or early afternoon, she thought, at the end of the battle, except it hadn’t been a battle—more like alternating slaughter. Her lips twisted. Had she really done it? Really summoned whips of fire? She shuddered.

“Are you all right?” Daffyd repeated.

“What happened? Tell me what happened.”

“But are you all right?”

Anna slowly rolled on her side and struggled into a sitting position. Her head ached. In fact, her entire body ached. She felt like she even had bruises on her stomach. “No. Do we have any water? Where are we? What happened?”

Daffyd fumbled and then extended a water bottle—her water bottle. It was only half full, and Anna drank nearly half of that. The throbbing in her skull subsided to a dull aching.

“Where are we?” she asked again.

“A little off the foothill road from the Sand Pass to Synope,” Daffyd answered. “A long time ago, before the pass
sanded up, this was the main road between Synek and Sudwei. Now it’s not much more than a trail.”

“Fine … . What happened?”

“The weather changed. Lord Geansor got crippled—”

“No. At the Sand Pass.”

“You turned a whole lot of the Ebrans into cinders, and then you just fell down. I barely caught you before you almost rolled off into the courtyard.”

“Great … .” muttered Anna. Fainting just because she sang a spell?

“Everyone was so surprised that I carried you down and … anyway, we got out of the fort. Palian and Liende headed back to Mencha. They said no one would bother plain old players. I didn’t know about that, but I didn’t think that was a good idea for you, not after … what happened.”

Anna’s ribs were sore, too. “How did you get me here?”

“I couldn’t carry you,” Daffyd said defensively.

“You didn’t drag me, did you?”

“No. I sort of tied you in your saddle. It wasn’t easy, and I had to go really slow. We’re not very far from the fort, really.”

“Everything hurts,” Anna murmured, more to herself than to Daffyd, then asked, “Why aren’t we headed back to Mencha?”

“I’d thought we’d be riding to Synope. We can’t be going back to Mencha.”

“Why not?” snapped Anna.

“All the darksingers saw you on the walls. Enough of them lived that they’d be killing you on sight, and, well, without Lord Brill or Lord Barjim …”

“What happened to Barjim?”

“He was heading out with his guards when one of those thunderbolts brought the south tower down on’em all.”

Anna recalled the tower falling, but hadn’t realized Barjim had been beneath it—but she should have guessed. There had been too much chaos, and Barjim—or Alasia—had been too organized to allow that to happen. “Lady Alasia, too?”

“I fear so. Lord Jecks managed to break through the dark horse, but you gave them some help.” The player’s face twisted into a smile. “That was something. I wish I could do sorcery like that.”

“No, you don’t,” said Anna bleakly, thinking about all the screams that had echoed in her ears and soul. “You don’t.”

“That’s what Lord Brill said. You sorcerers just don’t want anyone else to learn what you do.”

Anna sighed, but that hurt, too. After uncorking the water she drank a little more. Brill certainly hadn’t wanted to share. Would some sort of harmonic spell have been better? But how could she have persuaded Brill with so little time when it had been all too clear how little she had really known?

“Are you all right?” he asked again.

“I’ll live.” She took another swallow. “Synope? That’s where your sister lives? Delia?”

“Dalila,” corrected Daffyd.

“What would happen if we went back to Brill’s hall?”

“Even if the darksingers didn’t get there first, could you hold it?” asked Daffyd.

“Hold it?”

“It’s a lot of sorcery. He calls forth the water, and keeps it cool in summer, and warm in winter—”

“He did that all with sorcery?”

Daffyd nodded, a gesture Anna had to strain to see in the dark.

“What will happen if we don’t go back?”

“Nothing for a while. Nobody would want it, except another sorcerer, or sorceress. I guess it belongs to the Lord of Defalk—except we don’t have one right now, unless it’s Lord Jecks.”

Anna rubbed her forehead, and tried not to breathe deeply. Her diaphragm was sore, and she wasn’t certain that Daffyd hadn’t just slung her across the saddle.

Whhuuuffff.

She smiled as she recognized Farinelli’s whuff in the
darkness, but the smile faded quickly. “Why won’t people in Synope recognize me? Or ask questions about a stranger?”

“You could be my other sister,” suggested Daffyd. “No one’s seen Reneil in years.”

“I’m years older than your sister.”

“Not anymore, Lady Anna, not anymore.”

Anna shivered again, and her eyes burned. She was glad that Daffyd couldn’t see that closely. She was young again—because a dying sorcerer thought she was someone else. She was young again, in a strange place, where she might never see her children again. She was young again, in a world she barely understood.

The tears flowed, silently, in the darkness.

WEST OF THE SAND PASS, DEFALK

T
he harp strums in the darkness of the tent, then whispers.

“Songmaster?”

“Yes, Evult?” Eladdrin rises and faces the instrument centered in the small pool.

“The sorceress must be destroyed.”

“I know. Do you have any suggestions as to how?” asks Eladdrin.

“Songmaster …”

Eladdrin’s eyes are fierce as he faces the pool. “Never have I felt such power—that was more than a league away—and that power was supported only by a tiny stringed instrument. With a dozen voices like that, we could hold the world. She destroyed five hundred massed voices—and you order me to destroy her. I would do so gladly, if I knew but how.”

“We may have to use others for that. And do not think
of trying to enlist her. She will break you like an arrow snapped across my knees.” The distant voice recedes momentarily. “I will send another cohort of darksingers and more armsmen.”

“I had planned to take the harvests to resupply.”

“This time, until we discover where the sorceress is, you can move slowly.” The words that whisper from the harp stop, then resume. “There is a sorceress, a travel-sorceress, in Mencha who called the blonde one from the mist worlds. Ensure that she can call no others. That you can do, Songmaster.”

With a discordant clinging, the harp falls silent.

Eladdrin walks out into the twilight and stares at the distant stars as they begin to appear. “As if I could move other than slowly … .”

T
he next morning was worse. Anna could barely roll over because her stomach muscles were so sore. Her head felt like it had been used as the chimes in the
1812 Overture
, and her eyes were so gummy that they felt glued shut. Unseen needles jabbed into her brain every time she moved her head.

The sun had barely cleared the horizon, but she could feel the heat building, and she smelled like she’d run a marathon.

And Daffyd was humming to himself, almost tunelessly, as she fumbled with the water bottle. The two swallows left in the bottle that had been at her belt weren’t really enough. She levered herself onto her knees and looked around.

The rest of her gear, including the other water bottles, was sitting almost within reach, beyond the head of the bedroll. From the weight, she could tell the first two she
tried were empty. The third was full, but why was it always the last place you looked that you found what you needed?

“Are you awake, Lady Anna?”

“No. I’m still sleeping,” she answered after taking a long swallow.

Wisely, Daffyd did not reply.

For a time, she just sat and sipped the water, looking around. Daffyd had set up camp under a rocky overhang that was several hundred yards uphill from the winding trail he had said once had been a main road. It didn’t look like it had ever been anything but a trail, but she wasn’t exactly the expert on Erdean roadworks.

The air remained clear, and the sun pounded down. She was glad their crude campsite remained in the shade.

To the south Farinelli and the mare grazed on the scattered clumps of mostly brown grass. To the north, Anna thought, there was a thin twisting plume of smoke—the fires of the Ebrans? Or the burning ruins of the fort?

She looked at her boots, sitting by the bedroll. Finally, she corked the water bottle and pulled on one, then the other. She tried standing up, and every muscle in her body suggested that she was well over a century old. The faded green trousers sagged, and she had to retie the belt even tighter.

“You should eat something,” Daffyd ventured. “There is travel bread and cheese in the cloth there. I left it out for you.”

“Thank you.” Anna limped toward it, bending slowly to retrieve the food off the rock ledge.

The cheese was hard, and the bread stale, but Anna had no trouble eating everything. Daffyd was packing his gear on the gray mare before Anna finished off her breakfast with more water.

After beating the dust out of the floppy-brimmed hat that seemed to have followed her, she went through her saddle-bags, but everything was there. “Did you pack these?”

“No. Palian threw everything in there while I was carrying you down the steps. I put the mandolin in, though.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Lady Anna.”

Anna carried everything over to Farinelli. The gelding ignored her and kept trying to nibble on anything remotely green.

“I can’t get you water unless we get you saddled.”

Farinelli kept grazing.

After looking at Farinelli, and wondering if she really wanted to ride however many leagues it was to Synope, Anna fumbled the blanket in place, and then the saddle.

As she lifted the saddle, she frowned, realizing that her shoulder didn’t even twinge, that there wasn’t even a trace of soreness there. Once she fastened both cinches, she looked at her left hand—there was only the faintest thread of a white line there—if that. Hadn’t there always been a line there? She crooked her head and pulled her shirt and tunic forward. There wasn’t even a scab where the arrow wound had been, and she could tell her stomach was flatter than it had been in years.

She shivered, but Farinelli brought her back to reality with a long whuffling sound and a toss of his head.

“I know. You’re hungry and thirsty.”

“What?” said Daffyd.

“We need to find water for the horses.” Anna fastened the saddlebags in place.
And for me, before I get so dehydrated I can’t function.

“We will.”

The sorceress wished she were that certain. Perhaps she could use a variant of the cool-water spell to bring some to the surface—but she’d have to be close to where there was water underground, and she was a singer, not a geologist. She took a deep breath. The needles still stabbed into her brain, and she knew she was only a singer, when she needed to be so much more.

A
nna pulled off her hat, wiped away the thin film of muddy dust that collected on her forehead, then readjusted the hat, and reached for the water bottle. Farinelli walked stolidly down the gentle downgrade into another dry valley, filled with sandy red dirt, a handful of twisted juniper-like trees, more than a few barren and dead tree trunks, and scattered clumps of browned grass.

“Is it like this all the way?” she asked.

“I suppose so.” Daffyd’s voice was hoarse, and he glanced back over his shoulder. “It didn’t used to be this way. There were more trees and grass.”

“Drought,” Anna said, half standing in the stirrups to relieve the hardness of the saddle, except that her legs protested the extra effort. If the second day on the back road to Synope had been hard, the third had been even worse, and it was only early afternoon. They had no travel food, just the water Anna had been able to call from dry creekbeds—enough for the horses, and to fill the water bottles.

The sun continued to beat down, and Anna’s face felt raw and burned, despite the hat, and the needle-stabbing headache seemed constant. Her muscles remained sore, especially around her stomach and in her legs, since she still wasn’t that used to riding, although she had the feeling, if she stayed in Erde, that would change.

If?
she thought. Brill might have been able to figure out a way to get her back … and he was dead. Daffyd was bright enough, but, as for visualizing earth … ? And the business of some people being burned when they tried it—that was another question. She shook her head, and her eyes stung, wondering what Mario and Elizabetta thought, wondering
why she was being so punished for thinking that she just wanted to get away—anywhere.

She forced a deep breath. Anywhere was where she was. She’d laughed about the old saying
“Be careful what you wish for because you might get it.
” It didn’t seem quite so funny at the moment.

Daffyd glanced back over his shoulder again.

Anna turned in her saddle to follow his eyes. Was there dust in the air, not from their slow progress, but from some other traveler? Not many travelers took the trail they were on. Anna hadn’t been able to make out either a hoofprint or a wagon track, but she was no tracker. “Does anyone use this road anymore?”

“It’s not overgrown,” Daffyd said.

“Nothing grows here,” Anna pointed out.

“Oh …”

Anna looked back again.

The group that appeared at the hill-crest of the trail behind them, little farther than a dek back, was more than just a few riders. Anna squinted. The others were moving at a trot, clearly aimed at catching up with them.

“There are eight of them,” Daffyd said. “They don’t look like soldiers.”

“What are they?”

Daffyd urged the gray mare to move at a quick walk.

“I take it that means they aren’t friendly?”

“They don’t have pack animals, and they’re trying to catch us. I think they must be bandits, but I’ve never seen or heard of any here.”

“You told me this was a main road, too,” Anna said, urging Farinelli to move more quickly. “Times have changed, it looks like.”

“I didn’t know.”

Anna snorted. How many times had she heard that from students?
Then, are you any better? You didn’t know that wishing to be anywhere else would lead to this. Why couldn’t you have just been happy to stay in Ames? … Singing for the Founders or whatever,
even dealing with
Dieshr and her snide comments from her high position as chair, is better than fighting battles, starving, and being chased by bandits with no good in mind.

She looked back again. The dust given off by the bandits was rising higher, as if they had spurred their mounts into a quick trot now that they were on the flat.

“Can’t you do something?” asked Daffyd.

“What do you suggest?”

“Anything. They’ll kill us for sure.”

Anna’s stomach congealed in a cold lump. After an instant of frozen silence, she asked, “Are you sure?”

“Bandits are killed, even if they spare their victims.”

Anna twisted toward the saddlebags, fumbling open the right one, then closing it and opening the left one in her search for the mandolin. Where was it? Finally, she lifted the mandolin out and slipped the strap over her neck, trying to ignore the tightening in her shoulder.

If only Daffyd had been able to finish the lutar—although it really wasn’t either a lute or a guitar—she would have felt happier. The mandolin was tinny, and it didn’t project far enough.

What could she sing? Their pursuers weren’t armsmen, and she’d learned that the words targeting a spell-subject had to be fairly precise. Bandits, evildoers, villains … what were they?

The pursuing horsemen were closer, perhaps half a dek, and she could see several bare blades, and at least one bow.

“Aren’t you going to do something?” asked Daffyd.

“I’m thinking,” she snapped. Only nursery rhymes seemed to go through her head, like
“Sing a song of sixpence …”

An arrow skidded across the ground, leaving a line of dust in the road thirty yards behind them.

“‘Sing a song of’ … what?” she murmured. “Villains?”
Then what?
It was hard to think and ride.

Then she had the words. They weren’t great, but they just might work.

She began to strum the strings, hoping the mandolin was
close enough to being in tune, but her fingers fumbled and the chords were off, and she was about to fall off Farinelli because she wasn’t good enough to ride and sing and play all at once.

She reined up and turned Farinelli so she faced the oncoming riders.

“What are you doing?” Daffyd looked back, but didn’t slow his mare.

A handful of arrows flew toward her, the closest going by her left shoulder. Holding back a shiver, trying to keep her voice relaxed—how was she supposed to do that with people shooting at her?—Anna cleared her throat and began the simple chords to an even simpler song.

“Sing a song of villains, stop them as I can; four and twenty arrows shoot into each man. If that is not enough, then wrap their necks in stringing; now isn’t that a better way to stop their evil singing?”

Anna winced at the lousy rhyme, but tried to visualize what she had in mind. Again, she got the sensation of a giant harp vibrating behind the bright blue sky, and a shuddering wrench of the ground.

Farinelli half whinnied, half whuffled, and Anna patted his shoulder, then squinted through the sudden dust. She swallowed, trying to keep her stomach in place. Eight trussed bodies lay on the road, eight bodies that looked like pincushions.

That was the way her head felt, even more so after the spell.

Behind her, she could hear the ugly sound of Daffyd retching. Do something, he’d said. They’ll kill us. She had, and now he was retching.

Anna turned Farinelli toward the bandits’ horses. Queasy or not, she and Daffyd could use food, coins, whatever the raiders might have. She swallowed again, but she left the mandolin out, strapped around her neck.

One by one, she went through the wallets. At least with
the big belt wallets, she didn’t have to dig through the bandits’ pockets.

She noticed something strange. The bandit’s quiver was empty, and he had neither bow nor bow string—yet she had seen both.

After the second bandit, a good-looking blond young man of that sort vaguely similar to Mario, she did lose it, retching into the dusty dirt beyond the shoulder of the road. She looked over. Daffyd still leaned against his gray mare.

She tightened her lips and went back to looting, thinking as she did.
No one asked me if I wanted to be here. No one’s providing for me, either, and Daffyd wanted me to use sorcery. And this bandit wasn’t Mario. Mario wouldn’t rob and kill people.

In the end, she had a half dozen gold coins and over a dozen silvers, not to mention a large handful of coppers. She stuffed most into her wallet, looking up as Daffyd rode the mare toward her slowly. His face was pale. “Do you need any help?”

“Yes. Gather all the food and water bottles they had and pack it on two of their mounts—the two best ones.”

“What about the others?”

“Take off their bridles and saddles and let them run.”

“They’re valuable,” Daffyd protested.

“What would happen if we rode into Synope with ten horses?” Anna asked, proud of herself for thinking about it. She recalled her grandfather’s words, and expletives, about horse thieves. “We can explain two extra mounts as left from casualties from the battle, but ten?”

Daffyd nodded stolidly.

“Do you need some coins?” Anna asked.

Daffyd shook his head.

Anna walked over to the young player. “Take these, at least, as payment for finishing that lutar.”

“I haven’t …”

“You will.”

“Yes, Lady Anna.” After accepting the two silvers and some coppers and putting them in his wallet, he slowly rode
toward the most distant bandit mount, and Anna turned to the one nearest her.
What does he expect? He’s like a kid whose watched violence on TV, and then he sees it close and learns what it’s like
. She shook her head. She had no doubts about what the bandits would have done to them, to her.

All the bandits’ quivers had been empty, she realized. Then she nodded to herself. Brill had said spells basically rearranged things from nearby material—probably most of the arrows had been the bandits’ own, and the particolored string they were wound in had probably been their blankets.

Her knees began to shake, and she ate the first food she could find in the bandits’ saddlebags—travel bread so dried that the stale stuff she’d finished the morning before seemed fresh by comparison.

What had she become? Killing people with spells, eating barely edible food, and justifying it?

Her eyes burned … but she continued to eat, if more slowly, more deliberately. Shortly, Daffyd joined her, but he did not look directly at her.

BOOK: The Soprano Sorceress: The First Book of the Spellsong Cycle

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