Part 62 (2/2)
”The battle tune. On my mark.... Mark!” The head player gestured. and lifted her clarinet-like horn, turning to join in the melody she had started.
Anna tried to stay focused and relaxed, letting her body and cords carry the music, her mind on trying to hold the image of the dam, her eyes on the drawings, attempting to project them in place in the narrow gorge below.
”My words must start the damming of the river here below Even from the first words, the sky seemed to silver, and to freeze-a silver-blue hemisphere frozen in time. From the players' separate parts-each note rang like a tiny bell, even the sweet singing of the strings, and the deeper ba.s.s of the falk horn.
Anna forced her thoughts back to the image of the dam and to the song. ...
”With a building of the strongest stones from where the waters flow...”
The melody from the players welled up around her, and the sorceress half smiled. Never had they sounded so good, so solid.
”...setting every block into the place that it must hold...”
The phrasing flowed, just as she had planned.
Just before the last chorus. Anna could sense an enormous pressure behind even the silver-blue sky, and she could feel her knees trembling. Even with all the help of the players, Anna had this feeling she wasn't going to make it. Lights seemed to flash around her, and the ground groaned and rumbled.
She hung on, concentrating on the last words and the notes.
”Glory, glory, halleluia; glory, glory, halleluia; glory, glory. halleluia, these stones will last and last!”
She slumped, panting. Never... so... hard.... Such a short song ...
THRUMMMMM!!!
The entire heavens pulsated with a series of chords, the chords seemingly unheard by any but Anna, and silver clouds that were mist and yet not mist, filled the gorge. Underneath the ground trembled, and shook.
Farinelli half whuffed, half screamed, then half reared, dragging Lejun and his mount uphill and away from the river.
”...dissonance!”
For a moment, utter silence, a blanket of silence that m.u.f.fled absolutely all attempt at sound, descended.
THRUMMMM!!!.
With the second chord, sound resumed, and the silver mists over the river rose and boiled away. The haze lifted, showing a picture-perfect arching dam of glistening gray stone. The spillway was even there.
Anna could sense tears welling up in her eyes. She tried to take a deep breath-and couldn't. Dwnned asthma....
The world turned red, and then black and swirled around her.
82.
DUMARIA, DUMAR.
The two lords, one of Dumar, one of Sturinn, sit on opposite sides of the low table which bears a large carafe of wine, a bowI of honeyed nuts, and one of dried fruit. Ehara lowers the scroll and looks at Sea- Marshal jerRestin. ”And how far upsteam is the Falche dry?”
”Not a drop of water flows over the first cataract or the second. Your sorceress has stopped the entire Falche. Even I would not have thought it possible.”
”She's hardly my sorceress, Sea-Marshal,” Ehara says with a ragged laugh. ”It was done, Sea-Priest.
Don't tell me how you would not have believed it possible. Half your fleet sits grounded in the mud below Dumaria. The waters of the Envaryl lap around their hulls. What of the other half?”
”They remain at Narial. The bay is tidal.” JerRestin reaches for a handful of honeyed nuts. He eats them deliberately.
Ehara lifts the scroll he has been reading. ”The sorceress has sent this. She has suggested that it might be better for me and my people if the Sturinnese fleet returned to Sturinn.” He extends the scroll to jerRestin.
The Sea-Marshal reads slowly. ”Behind the polite words, she is ordering you to dismiss us... and to pay her thousands of golds.”
”It does not sound like such a bad idea, at least until the river is returned to us.”
”You do not wish to pay all those golds. Nor do we wish that, either. The sorceress cannot hold back such a mighty river forever. It will not hurt to wait.” The Sea-Marshal smiles. ”In any case, the s.h.i.+ps at Dumaria cannot sail anywhere.”
''What if I requested you to leave?” asks Ehara.
”I would take your request, and then I would send it to the Maitre. It is on his orders that I am here.''
”I see.”
”I think you do, Lord Ehara. Shall we have some of that wine while we wait for the sorceress to act? It may be some time. You know she is prostrate. The scroll might not even be her work. She reached beyond herself, and she may not recover. Often those who do such great works do not recover,” JerRestin smiles. ”Some wine?'' he repeats.
”Ah...of course.”
83.
Anna opened burning and blurred eyes, slowly, painfully.
Jecks looked solemnly at her, propped up as she was by lumpy pillows in the high-backed bed. She met his glance for a moment, then closed her eyes against the pounding headache and the miniature starbursts that flashed before her.
When she opened them again, the white-haired lord sat in the chair by her bed.
”My lady...Lady Anna --- you cannot continue like this.” Jecks extended a goblet. ”It is wine, honeyed.
You must drink.”
Anna drank. Then she closed her eyes for a moment ”You must eat and drink more before you sleep.”
Obediently, she forced her eyes back open and took another sip of the wine, far too sweet for her preference. She tried to get her eyes to focus on the white-haired lord, but one moment he seemed clear and the next a silvered fuzzy image.
''Another,” he urged inexorably.
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