Battle Magic

After nearly two years in Evvy’s company, Briar knew limestone when he held it. The surprise lay in the image embedded deep in its surface: a curved section of leaf much like a fern. Interestingly, it was unlike any fern that Briar knew — and after five years of Rosethorn’s teaching, he knew many. He stared at the cliff across the river, not really noticing the twenty-foot-tall rectangular crack that was writing itself into the rock face.

As he would if the fossil were a living plant, Briar reached for it with his magic, only to find nothing. The limestone held an image, but no remainder of the plant that had left it. Briar glared at it and reached for another piece of stone. It was unmarked, but the third rock he examined gripped a fossil much like a sardine.

“This is a sea fish,” Briar muttered. Life near the docks from early childhood had taught him the look of salt- and freshwater fish, flesh and bone.

“Eons ago all the Gyongxin flatland was a sea,” murmured the God-King. Slowly he straightened. His pen fell from his hand. “Then the Drimbakang mountain gods were born. They shoved their molten bodies up against the shore and dragged the Realms of the Sun with them.” He said it as if chanting an ancient tale, half awake, half sleeping.

Briar tried not to shiver. It felt as if every hair on his body were standing.

The God-King continued in that unearthly voice. “Higher they drove the shores and the sea. Greater they grew, the youngest gods, clawing at the sky, rising toward the Sun and the Moon and the Stars. When they could grow no more, when they stood taller than any other mountain gods, the sea drained away between them, seeking its ocean mother. The immense shoreline forests of palm, cactus, and fern withered. Only firs, spruces, larches, junipers, and hemlocks thrive here, and rarely on the open plateau. Here the gods see everything. Gyongxe has nowhere to hide from the gods of this world.” He slumped. Briar was almost afraid to breathe until the younger boy blinked and straightened. Rubbing the back of his neck he looked at Briar sheepishly. “Did I go off? They never give me any warning, you know. I’ve told them and told them that it frightens people when they grab me, but gods and spirits don’t really understand fear.”

“Do they do that to you often?” Briar whispered, goose bumps rippling all across his skin.

“Often enough. The land is crowded with them, what with one thing and another, and I can never tell when one of them will work through me.”

A large crash split the air. The God-King jumped to his feet with a whoop. “There we go!” he cried as if he had just won a wager.

Briar remembered what had brought them to this cold ledge on a chilly morning. Setting aside the boy’s tale to ponder later, he looked across the river.

Rock tumbled from a rectangular hole at least twenty feet high in the cliff’s face, cascading around a solid shape at its center. The shamans continued to dance and the musicians to play as they backed toward the place where Evvy and the other observers stood. Briar whistled in silent admiration: He knew he couldn’t dance and walk backward, yet the shamans and their musical helpers never faltered. Only Evvy moved, walking forward around the line of shamans. Dokyi lunged to grab her again and missed. Evvy took a place on the riverbank, in front of whatever was going on in the cliff, and held out her hands.

Briar fought to stand, spilling the tray of ink. He ignored it, but he could not ignore it when the God-King grabbed one of his arms.

“Stop,” the younger boy ordered in a voice that froze Briar where he stood. “She will be fine. Watch.”

He released Briar, who instantly found he could move again. Rather than continue to try to reach his student, Briar waited.

He wasn’t quite sure if Evvy made any noise. The racket caused by the grinding, collapsing wall of rocks drowned out any other sound except, of course, for the God-King’s voice. Briar wondered if Evvy might not be chanting a spell, though. He knew she was working her magic, because the tumbling rock split on either side of the opening it made, like curtains before a window. That was pure Evvy. Neat piles of broken stone grew from the falling rock on either side of the rectangular gap in the cliff. At its heart stood a pair of embracing, human-like, stone skeletons. As the heaped boulders and chips in front of them shifted to either side, the twenty-foot-tall skeletons walked out of the cliff.

Evvy wavered. She was trying to do too much at once. Worried, Briar stepped up to the edge where the tent was pitched, then halted again. Dokyi had reached the girl. He stood next to Evvy, writing signs on the air as he worked spells of his own. She straightened, able to control the falling stone again with Dokyi’s help.

The skeletons, which had paused when she seemed about to fall over, resumed their walk away from the cliff. One of the two skulls looked curiously at Evvy and Dokyi while the other scanned the riverside behind them, the gap in the cliff, and then the shamans and their musicians. An arm from that skeleton reached around to tap the skull that had cocked its head as it stared at Evvy. When that skull turned to glare at the other, the tapping hand pointed to the shamans. Both skeletons lumbered toward the dancers.

Briar looked at the God-King. “What are they for, the statues? I don’t think you said.”

The God-King squinted at the dancing skeletons. “Such things are a promise from this realm to those who build their temples here. They are our blessing on the temples, and a sign of our protection. They tell invaders that the temple is guarded by the gods of Gyongxe as well as the gods of the temple where the statues stand.”

Seemingly unafraid and without missing a step, the dancers and musicians continued to back up, dancing or playing as they went. The warriors mounted horses to form a half circle around them. Other members of their group that handled the wagon they had brought helped the musicians into it. As smoothly as if they often traveled this way, the warriors and wagon set off in the lead, their half circle ending with the dancers just inside. The two skeletons, arms around each other’s stone spine waist, came last of all.