The Singing by Alison Croggon

  Cadvan looked across to Maerad, and she met his gaze. "Of course Malgorn's right," she said. "And no, I don't feel quite so bad." Not, she thought privately, that she felt especially good either.

  Cadvan made no comment, and he and Malgorn began to chat idly, talking of things that had nothing to do with the pres­ent crisis, jesting to break the tension. Maerad found herself laughing with them. Maybe she felt all right, after all.

  Even so, when Cadvan turned to her and relayed Indik's question about the fog, she wanted to refuse. It would be easy to claim that she needed more time . . . She quailed before the thought of attempting to feel out the Landrost: she feared espe­cially how it would expose her to the Winterking, who could trace her presence with an alarming precision. She longed to remain as she was, shielded inside her own skull, untouched by the larger forces that now bent their malignant consciousness on Innail.

  Instead, she sat up, casting off the blanket she had been clutching around her shoulders. She shut her eyes, questing through her own inner darkness toward the strange, intangible world of feeling where her magery held its power. She moved warily: she did not want to be seen. It was possible that the Landrost thought he had succeeded in destroying her, and would not expect her to return, but it was equally possible that he would be especially vigilant.

  The Landrost, she felt at once, was close—very close. His presence clotted her whole being with dread, and she almost retreated altogether. She stilled herself, making herself as small as possible. Then, with infinite caution, she sent out some tendrils of awareness. There was no reaction, and she extended them fur­ther, ready to snap back at any moment if she needed to.

  She couldn't read the Landrost's intent at all. She only sensed a huge heaviness, a gathering sense of awful gravity, but nothing seemed to be actually moving. Puzzled, she brought herself back to the Watch House, where Cadvan was waiting gravely.

  "He's there," she said. "By the gate, I think. I don't know what he's doing. He could have called the fog, but then again, it might have just happened by itself."

  Cadvan nodded and relayed the message to Indik. Maerad stood up and found her legs were no longer shaking. Good, she thought. I'm all right. She walked to the table and poured herself a small glass of medhyl. Its herbed tang in her mouth was like the shock of very cold water, and she felt its virtue spread through her body, lifting the worst of her weariness. She poured another, and wiped her mouth.

  "I'd feel clearer outside," she said.

  "It's very cold out there," said Malgorn. "A strange sort of cold, too. It's a damp cold, and there's no ice. But it feels much colder than that, as if everything ought to be frozen, a kind of dead cold. It doesn't make a lot of sense."

  "A dead cold?" said Maerad. A sudden intuition made her feel sick with foreboding.

  "Just a turn of phrase." said Malgorn. Then he saw the look on Maerad's face. "What are you thinking?"

  "I don't know . . ." Maerad hunted for words. "The Landrost is doing nothing. He's just . . . gathering . . . some­thing . . . but what is he gathering? I mean, even as we wait, perhaps . . . perhaps for what he's doing now, he doesn't have to do anything..."

  "Maerad, you're making no sense at all," said Cadvan.

  "I know..." Maerad said despairingly. "Can we go outside?"

  "Shall I come with you?"

  "Please come with me. Hurry."

  Cadvan grabbed the blanket that Maerad had thrown to the floor and put it around her shoulders, and they left the Watch House almost at a run, heading for the palisade by the gates.

  When they left the shelter of the Watch House, the cold hit like a physical blow; Maerad felt her face turn numb almost at once, and her foreboding increased to a sense of panic. She wrapped the blanket around her head like a shawl as she ran. The pres­ence of the Landrost was so heavy it made her feel nauseated; he was in the very air, thick, cold, implacable ...

  It feels as if it's well below freezing, said Cadvan into her mind. But there's no ice.

  No, said Maerad. I don't think it's that sort of cold.

  When they reached the palisade, Maerad glanced around at the soldiers. Here they were mostly Bards, some standing still, gazing out into the formless darkness, others stamping their feet or walking up and down to keep the blood moving through their bodies. A brazier was lit, but it gave off no heat. Those who were still made Maerad's heart miss a beat.

  "Everyone move!" she shouted. Her voice didn't carry far, muffled by the fog, and a few Bards turned to look at her curi­ously. "Everyone movel Cadvan, make everyone move! Tell Indik to order everyone—"

  "Move where?" asked Cadvan.

  "Not anywhere, just get them to move!" Maerad ran up to a Bard who was leaning against the wall, looking through an embrasure, and touched her shoulder. She made no response, and in a fury of impatience, Maerad shook her arm, shouting at her. To her horror, the Bard slipped heavily against the wall and then toppled stiff as a log down to the ground, her armor clat­tering against the stone. Maerad knelt next to her, shaking her, slapping the woman's face, which was deathly pale in the flick­ering torchlight, her open eyes glittering like frost.

  Indik spoke over Maerad's shoulder, making her jump. "She's dead, I think," he said. "Frozen where she stood. I'll call a healer."

  Maerad groaned, feeling chill tears running down her cheeks, and shook the woman again. She had a vision of sol­diers lining the walls of Innail, all standing at guard, all dead. Too late, too late ...

  Indik took her hand and pulled her up, looking intently into her face. His lips were blue, the skin on his face chapped and raw, and fear clutched at Maerad's heart: how close was Indik himself to death?

  "Maerad," he said. "I'll attend to this. I don't know how you knew this, but I count on you to find out more. This is no ordinary cold."

  "No," said Maerad. "It's the cold of death. He draws the life out of us—the air is sucking it away. I'm too late—" She was shaking again, close to panic, and Indik took both her hands in his.

  "Maerad," he said again. His voice was gentle, but it held an iron edge. "While there is still breath in us, it is not too late. And I need your help. Now."

  Maerad took a shuddering breath and calmed herself. She looked around, suddenly aware of a bustle of activity: people were running and calling, healers were rushing onto the pal­isade with stretchers to carry away those who were dead or dying. Cadvan was nearby, his attention focused on a Bard who had fallen even as she was speaking to Indik.

  "He'll attack now," said Maerad to Indik. "I know it."

  "Aye," said Indik. "And those of us who are still alive are as ready as we can be. That's not your business. Now, Maerad ..."

  She nodded, and moved to a niche in the far wall where she would not be in the way, touching Cadvan's shoulder as she went so he would know where she was. Then she steeled her­self, and prepared to find the Landrost. It was hard to concen­trate, with the cold sapping her will, and with the expectation that siege ladders would be thrown against the wall at any moment. She loosened her sword in its scabbard, and huddled the blanket around her head.

  She flinched as she opened her mind. The Landrost was so close—a stone's throw, if that—and for a moment she thought that he was aware of her, that something gathered in recogni­tion. The moment passed, and Maerad breathed out in relief: perhaps he thought it was a false alarm, perhaps he was too preoccupied. All the same, a sense that something was aware of her presence, however vaguely, made her cautious. The Landrost's proximity made it more dangerous for her to probe, but she had no choice.

  Gingerly, Maerad began to open her mind, trying to ignore the swirl of Bardic feelings that obscured her perceptions: she was dimly aware of grief and fear and horror, of a growing miasma of despair, but with a wrench she deliberately turned her mind away. That, as Indik had said, was not her business. She cautiously began again to send out feelers, trying to steal into the Landrost's mind, just as he was stealing into the minds of the soldiers and Bards of Innail, th
ieving the very breath of their lives. A deep anger began to smolder within her, and she pushed it down, it was not useful. Not yet, anyway. As she con­centrated, her fear dissipated. The Landrost, she thought, was too busy to notice her fiddling at the edges of his power.

  Maerad realized that what he was doing was, in a way, quite simple. In the middle of the Landrost there was nothing, nothing at all, and that nothing was drawing into its emptiness the warmth and breath of every living thing in Innail. Soon, if she could not stop him, even walls and warm hearths would be no protection. For a moment, Maerad was blank with astonish­ment. Was the Landrost alive in any way that she could under­stand? How could he become such nothingness? Even the

  Winterking, for all his utter coldness, pulsed with being, with a pure, charismatic vitality. She skipped over that thought—it was perilous. The Landrost was Unbeing, Unlife. There was no way to fight something that simply wasn't.

  So, if she could not fight it, what could she do? There was not enough of her to pour into that endless hole, that inhu­manly greedy maw. It desired nothing, you could do nothing to it, it was nothing. If there was a key, Maerad thought desperately, some kind of... If she could hurt the Landrost, somehow, into becoming something ...

  She felt panic rising inside her again, as she cast about for a lever, for even the beginning of a way to stop him, and came up with nothing. And then, on the periphery of her awareness, she heard faint cries, clashes, screams—the mountain men, she pre­sumed, were finally attacking the School. And what had the Landrost done with the wers? That's not your business, Indik had told her. He was right. She forced out of her mind the thought of the vicious battle that was taking place around her tranced body and fought down her panic. In this strange world of the mind, time did not exist: she had no idea how long she had been pondering the problem of the Landrost. It could have been less than the blink of an eye; it could have been hours and hours. But in that other world, she knew she was running out of time, and she could not think what to do.

  Destroy him.

  The voice fell so lightly into her mind that at first she thought it was her own, and she almost laughed out loud at her own foolishness.

  Elednor Edil-Amarandh na said the Winterking, and Maerad's stomach turned over, feeling the pull of him, the leap of desire that rose within her, independently of her conscious choice. Destroy the Landrost. Or do you lack the will?

  I lack everything, said Maerad fiercely, a sudden anger flar­ing inside her. You speak as if I simply had to stamp on a spider. How can I destroy something that isn't there?

  He isn't not there, said the Winterking. He is here. As I am.

  As she understood Arkan's meaning, Maerad forgot her anger, even forgot him. Of course the Landrost was there—she felt his presence everywhere, thickening the very atmosphere with fear, with an implacable deathliness. The nothingness was his center. She was making a mistake in focusing on his noth­ingness.

  An unrelated thought flashed into her mind, a scrap of something she had read during her brief studying with Dernhil, in which the Light was described as a sphere in which the cen­ter was everywhere and the circumference nowhere. Somehow the Landrost had made himself like that, but the other way around: his center was nowhere, his circumference everywhere.

  She halted, baffled. This thinking was all very well, but she still didn't know what to do. She cast around blindly for Arkan; if he claimed she could destroy the Landrost, surely he would know how she could do it. But she could feel no trace of him; the Winterking seemed to have vanished utterly. Maerad's heart sank, and the anger smoldering within her flared again. What was the Winterking doing here, after all? She had no reason to believe that he was not deceiving her; she certainly didn't think he was there to help her. It was more likely by far that he aimed to bring about her downfall, that he was in league with the Landrost for his own malign purposes, planning to capture Maerad for himself after Innail was taken. And even without the Winterking behind him, she had as much chance of destroying the Landrost as she had of demolishing a mountain with her bare hands.

  On the walls, a desperate and savage battle was being waged to prevent the Landrost from overwhelming Innail. It was not, in fact, the mountain men who were swarming the battle­ments, as Maerad had thought: if the men climbed the walls, they too would be victims of the emptiness that sucked the life out of Innail. They were camped below by their fires, awaiting the destruction of the defending forces; once they were dead, the invaders could enter the School at their leisure, to rape, sack, and pillage. For now, the Landrost was sending his wers to wipe out the defense.

  Cadvan had thrown a shield of magery around Maerad, to protect her while she attempted her own strike against the Landrost. In her distress after speaking to Indik, she had forgot­ten to do so herself.

  Their position, if serious, was not quite as bad as Maerad had feared: of all the forces around the walls, three men and women had died of the cold, their lives imperceptibly slipping away as they gazed over the battlements. Another eight had been rushed to the healers, either unconscious or on the brink of stupor. All of them, as Indik noted grimly to Cadvan, were Bards. The other soldiers, though they felt the cold and the creeping stupor, were not quite as vulnerable to it as those who wielded magery. And the necessity to fight was, perhaps, keep­ing the Landrost's death cold at bay, although Cadvan felt its insidious tug, as if his blood were being slowly drained from his body where he stood, and he could do nothing about it.

  Cadvan suspected that the Landrost had called the attack earlier than he had planned: perhaps Maerad had somehow prompted him to move more swiftly. He glanced over to where she stood, barely visible against the wall, the faint shimmer of magery blurring her figure. Maerad's sudden intuition had per­haps saved many people from that particular death. But, he thought, the Landrost was offering the people of Innail many ways of dying.

  He set his jaw and braced for a grim battle of swordcraft and magery, standing shoulder to shoulder with Indik as they cast White Fire against their attackers, driving them back over the battlements, or hacked them down so that piles of wer corpses began to build on the palisades. Innail stood against wave after wave of wers, more than seemed possible—black wings and long, curved claws that slashed down out of the darkness and were beaten back or struck down. But still there were more, and more again, and the lines of defense began to thin. The longer they fought, the fewer they were, and the weaker; all the warriors were pale with exhaustion, fighting not only the wers, but the Landrost.

  Just as Cadvan thought their line would break and the wers would at last take the palisades, there was a brief lull in the assault, and he and Indik stumbled back from the walls, waving other soldiers forward to take their places, and leaned on their swords, breathing hard and wiping the sweat out of their eyes.

  In the flickering torchlight, Indik's face was a savage mask of grime and blood. Once he had caught his breath, he turned to Cadvan and grinned mirthlessly. "I do not believe," he said, "that we are going to last until dawn, my friend."

  Cadvan met his eyes steadily. "If they keep up this attack, we will not last the hour," he said.

  Indik's eyes went blank for the briefest moment. "The attack is by far the most fierce here, by the gates," he said. "But it is hard to trace its pattern, all the same; elsewhere they make an assault here, or there. You cannot predict it because you can't see them massing in this fog. So we must keep guard every­where." He straightened himself and winced. "Of course, the blow falls hardest here, and here most of all we must not fall. I am hoping with all my heart, my friend, that the Landrost has at last run out of wers."

  "That is perhaps hoping for too much," Cadvan answered.

  Even as he spoke, they both heard the wing beats that heralded another wave of wers. Their eyes met.

  "I have always hoped for too much," said Indik. "I will say at the Gates, whenever I get there, tonight or some other night in the far future, that sometimes that hope was answered. But even if Mae
rad manages to stop the death cold, I fear we are too weakened to hold back the Landrost now."

  Cadvan nodded, and saluted Indik with his sword. "It has always been an honor to know you, my friend," he said.

  "And you, my friend," said Indik.

  Maerad knew that time was running out. She flickered her awareness quickly to the palisades and saw with horror the savagery of the battle that was taking place there; she saw Cadvan and Indik, side by side, among the forlornly thin line of warriors defending themselves against the wers. The wards still prevented the wers from all attacking at once, but that so, the defenders were hard-pressed. Even as Maerad watched, three defenders fell, killed or wounded, and a wer screamed in triumph at the breach and swooped toward it with a dozen others. Indik, Cadvan, and two more leaped to the breach, fighting hard, White Fire arcing from their swords, and the assault was beaten back; but Maerad could see the weariness in their bodies, could see that the only thing holding them up was their wills. And even the wills of Cadvan and Indik could be broken ...

  Maerad couldn't bear to see any more, and pulled herself back into the world of the mind. As she crouched before the great nothing that was the Landrost, she felt despair rising inside her: never, not even when she had faced death in the mountains, had she felt more alone. Then, she had mourned for her own tragedy, for her death and the death of her friends. Now she knew that she alone stood between the larger world she loved—Innail and everything it meant—and its utter destruction. There was no one to help her. And she didn't know what to do.