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Even as Aydindril sweltered in the summer heat, there was talk that by winter the enemy troops might be within striking distance of the city. Magda feared to consider how devastating such a strike would be to the place where she’d grown up. If the
city was overrun, that would also mean a siege of the Keep. The Keep could withstand a siege for a long time, but not forever.
Besides, it was impossible to win a war defensively. The forces from the Old World had made it clear that there would be no mercy. While some of Sulachan’s forces held the Keep under siege, others would lay waste to the New World. When the Keep finally fell, they would make examples of every last person.
That was what they did to every village, town, and city in their path. Either people surrendered, or they were made to suffer for refusing.
Simply hiding behind walls and iron doors would not eliminate the threat. Sooner or later even the Keep walls would fall. Evil had to be defeated or it would only grow stronger.
How they were going to destroy this evil, Magda didn’t know. All she knew for sure was that it was not only getting closer every day, it was already among them. She had felt the painful presence of the dream walker. She had seen the monster that had come out of the dark and killed Isidore. Those were not random events; they were connected. Magda had to find the truth behind those connections.
Making her way past crowds on the streets was at times like trying to move upriver. The peddlers shouting out the many benefits of their goods stood like rocks in that river as streams of people continually flowed around them.
Some of the street merchants tended carts with salted meats and fish, fresh vegetables, or a variety of ready-made goods. Other vendors carried trays stacked high with long loaves of bread. There were also hawkers draped with jangling strings of amulets prowling the crowds as they shouted out singsong warnings of curses and plagues. They attracted flocks of bouncing children wanting to hear about curses of magic as parents rushed in and pulled them away.
Magda sometimes crossed the street to avoid particularly aggressive hawkers she saw grabbing the arms of passing women, insisting that they listen to why they needed the protection of a magic charm. Potential customers were warned that when the enemy got closer, the supply of charms and talismans would all be gone and then it would be too late to get what was needed. Some people gave in to the warning or bought the least expensive of the amulets simply to free themselves from the hawker.
Warm as it was, as she passed throngs of people Magda, like many women, kept the hood of her light cloak pulled up. People down in the city weren’t as likely to recognize her as were people up in the Keep, but she had been the wife of the First Wizard and as such it often surprised her how many people she’d never met recognized her.
With time working against her, she couldn’t afford delays. As much as she would like to, she couldn’t stop to give guidance to people on the oath to avoid the dream walkers, or convey news from up in the Keep. There were also those who hated Baraccus and might want to give her a piece of their mind, or worse.
Most people understood that surrender was suicide at best, slavery at worst. But not everyone could recognize the face of evil when it presented itself in the guise of salvation. She could hardly defend herself if a mob wanted to stone her because her husband had decided that they would go to war rather than surrender.
Panicked people didn’t listen to reason and didn’t want to hear the truth. Sympathizers frequently stirred up resentment against the authority of military officers, the council, and even the First Wizard for being unwilling to accept the peace that the emperor had offered. Peace, these people said, was as simple as letting Emperor Sulachan rule instead of the council. They wanted to believe, and so they did, that the rule of either was the same difference in their lives.
If other people wouldn’t accept the wisdom of their notion of “peace,” the advocates were all too willing to use violence to make their point. It struck Magda as ironic that those who professed to want peace the most were quickest to use bloodshed to try to get their way.
Magda pulled her cowl farther forward as a knot of people moved past her. Unshaven men leered at her shape, even though they could see little of it under the cloak. They knew only that she was a woman, and therefore must be worthy of ogling. When a passing group of women happened to get a glimpse inside her cowl, Magda’s short hair told them that she was a nobody. They didn’t give her a second look as they went on about their own business.
At a cross street, Magda peered around the corner of a two-story brick building that housed a tailor. On the other side of the street was an inn with a blue pig painted on the sign hanging over the door. The narrow street around the corner followed rolling, uneven ground. Despite how confining and confusing this part of the city of Aydindril was, she knew that this was the turn she needed to take.
Magda had searched under the southern rampart but had learned that he was no longer living there. As much as she needed to find him, she hadn’t wanted to bring undue attention to herself by asking too many questions. Those kind of questions would sooner or later get noticed.
Isidore’s murder had made Magda more than a little cautious. She had nearly been a victim, too. A dream walker was no longer in Magda’s mind, but she had no way of knowing if one might be in the mind of any person she talked to. A dream walker could no longer follow her through her own eyes, but she didn’t want them following her through the eyes of others.
So, she had gone to Tilly. Tilly had been horror-stricken over the death of Isidore. At first she blamed herself, believing that if she hadn’t shown Magda the way, then maybe none of it would have happened.
Magda had convinced the woman that she was wrong. They were fighting evil, and the evil was not Tilly’s doing. Magda had told her that Isidore herself said that they were warriors in this war. Evil would not rest. It had to be fought.
Tilly had been silent for a moment and then asked if she, too, was a warrior in this war. Magda told her that indeed she was, and in fact she had been more help than any of the council had been. Magda said that since no one else would help her find Isidore’s killer, she intended to do it herself, and to that end she again needed Tilly’s help.
It had taken a few days, but Tilly had discovered that the man whose help Magda sought was nowhere in the Keep. After several more days of discreet inquiry she had finally been able to learn where he lived. Magda was surprised that he would have moved out of the Keep and down into Aydindril, and frustrated that it had taken so long to find where he now lived. She knew that time to act was slipping away.
After glancing around to make sure that she wasn’t being followed, Magda turned up the quiet street. There were no shops, only houses, mostly multi-family structures. She could see that trees beyond the buildings shaded an alley. The houses and two-story dwellings were tightly packed together and in some places connected with common walls. Out back people planted gardens and laundry hung on lines. She could hear chickens and a hog or two. A crudely painted sign on one gate said eggs for sale.
After following the street over several rises, she came to the place that was set back beside a two-story stone building. There was a forked plum tree in the front of the little porch. At the side of the small place she could see down the narrow passageway between the buildings that the back was heavily shaded by oaks. She also saw the corner of a shed along with wood scraps and odd bits of metal neatly laid out beside it.
On the porch, in under a low overhang, Magda tucked her small bundle under an arm and knocked firmly on the simple plank door. After a moment, she heard someone coming through the house from the back. He stopped on the other side of the door.
“What is it?” he asked without opening the door.
“Are you Wizard Merritt?”
“I’m sorry but I can’t see anyone right now,” he said from the other side.
“This is important.”
“I told you, I can’t see anyone now. I’m busy working. Please be on your way.”
She could hear the footsteps heading away from the door toward the back of the house.
Chapter 44
“Please, I need to see you,” Magda called to the door. “I come with news of Isidore.”
She heard his distant footsteps pause.
As she waited in silence, Magda wasn’t sure if he would come back and open the door or not. She wiped away a bead of sweat trickling down her temple as she idly watched a lacewing hunting for aphids on the lush green leaves and stems of a vine climbing one of the posts holding up the overhanging roof of the porch. At last she heard his footsteps returning.
The door opened enough that Magda could see that he was as imposing a figure as Isidore had said. After all Magda had heard about him—from Baraccus, from the men down in the Keep, from wizards she knew, and from Isidore—she found it was a somewhat strange feeling to finally see him in the flesh. After all the things said about him, he wasn’t exactly what she had pictured.
He was somehow more.
He was tall, and without a shirt it was plain to see that he was handsomely built. He was a good deal younger than Baraccus. In fact, he didn’t look much older than her—maybe a couple of years at most.
Magda had seen hundreds of wizards. The Keep was full of them. Merritt, especially without a shirt, didn’t look at all like her idea of what a wizard looked like.
His skin glistened with sweat and grimy smudges. There were a few streaks of soot on his face behind stray, wavy locks of light brown hair that was struck through with a lighter, sun-bleached, blondish brown. Disheveled as it was, it added to his rugged looks.
Somehow, impossibly, the sweat and the soot made him look all the better.
But it was his hazel eyes cast with a shade of green that caught her breath. It felt as if he was looking right into her soul, weighing it for worth. At the same time, she felt that she could see in his eyes that he was open about who he was, without pretense or deception.
Though they contained the same basic trait, the eyes of the gifted tended to appear quite different to her. In some people, such as warriors, the glimmer of the gift that she saw had a menacing aspect to it. In healers it had a softer, more gentle appearance. The aspect of the gift in Baraccus’s eyes had been passionately wise, resolute, formidable.
