Lyn had nodded along, but in her head were all the old stories. She’d barely been able to focus on the actual words spoken, because of the older and far more persuasive words in her mind. Astresse Regent rode forth, and at her side the sorcerer. Battles against Ulmoth’s monsters. The undoing of evil magics and the salvation of the realm. And so she’d gone herself, after that closeted council meeting. She’d spoken with those same emissaries, heard their wild stories. She’d tried to pierce through their panic to some mundane kernel of internecine strife, just as her mother believed. But it wasn’t what the refugees believed. A demon.
She wasn’t a child anymore, and her mother and her sisters and her tutors and the snide majordomo took pains to remind her of it, until she had looked in the smudged bronze of the mirror one morning and known it was true. And that things like the glorious ballads of Astresse Regent and her sorcerer were becoming like the bright clothes she could barely fit into, where all her new clothes were severe and stateswomanlike and sombre.
And the Ordwood refugees spoke of demons, convinced of it, and it was as though Lyn heard different words to everyone else. In their ears it was just war and civil strife and the traditional political instability of the Ordwood region as her tutor would say. In hers it was demons and dark magic. Enemies from the stories, that only another story could defeat.
Astresse Once Regent wouldn’t have sat idle, with or without her sorcerer. And so Lyn had talked herself into a position of moral righteousness in which this last reckless fling of childhood could just about be seen as upholding her family duty and honour.
The fact that bringing a sorcerer into a neighbouring land was probably not in accordance with her mother’s foreign policy had since crossed her mind, but at speed because she had actively chased it to the borders and watched until she was sure it wasn’t coming back any time soon.
*
Another thing the sorcerer didn’t understand was fires. Or presumably he understood fire, but he didn’t know what to do with it. When Lyn and Esha huddled close to the blaze against the chill mountain nights, Nyrgoth Elder just sat off by himself. She half expected to find him frozen the next morning, but there was a circle about him where the frost hadn’t touched, and which was toastier than the fire’s ashes by the time dawn rolled around. Not that she’d dare warming her hands on the sorcerer. He’d doffed his gold-embroidered robe for the journey, appearing in clothes that looked as though they’d been made by a blind tailor who’d had real human clothes described to him once. They were of strange materials, shiny in places, utterly lustreless in others, and mostly without visible weave or obvious buttons. He had a hood, but he was too tall and too oddly made to blend into any crowd Lyn had ever seen.
Two days later, as they were beginning their descent towards the banks of the Barrenpike, a monster attacked them.
Back in the coastal marshes that Esha called home, there were things called Stirg-wasps, many-legged flying things half the size of a man that hatched from stagnant pools and drained the fluids of people and animals. Esha’s people went beating for them every other short-season, killing their slug-like aquatic larvae wherever they were found. The thing that attacked them was something like one of those but ten times the size, and instead of a halo of beating wings it had two motionless discs that kept it lurchingly in the air. It had no beak; rather, its entire head was composed of whirling blades and sharp-toothed wheels. An eldritch monster, plainly, and it came for Nyrgoth with a furious whine. Esha cast darts at it that rattled from its metallic hide, but Lyn got in its way with her sword, battering it furiously across the nightmare of its face.
It chewed up her blade, ripping the weapon from her hands and shredding the fine steel, the best her mother’s smiths could forge. She was left with her arms extended in a perfect warrior’s form, hands empty, staring at that oncoming storm of jagged, translucent teeth.
Nyrgoth spoke a word and then three more, and the monster veered away, screaming in a voice almost too high to hear. Then he shouted after it, spitting out more arcane syllables until the demon dropped from the sky and crouched timorously on its five legs, the moving parts of its head slowing to a stop.
The sorcerer’s hand fell on Lyn’s shoulder and she stiffened at the uninvited touch, waiting for the magic or the curse that must surely follow, some punishment for her stupidity. Instead, he just moved her out of the way, gently but firmly, and then went to converse with the monster, leaving her feeling the nag of unfinished business, that she owed him something, or he owed her.
The monster spoke to him in reedy, piercing tones, twittering and singing like the wind over wires. Nygoth made three pronouncements, sequences of sounds that had the rhythm of sentences, each with its own termination, and none of which Lyn could make anything of. Esha was listening keenly, though; polyglot traveller as she was, perhaps some words of wizard-speak had meaning to her.
Then the demon was aloft again, just rising vertically into the air with its legs folding beneath it. It said one more thing to the wizard and then wobbled off into the air, heading for the higher peaks until it was lost to sight.
“It sensed certain talismans that I bear,” Nyrgoth Elder said apologetically. “It would not have troubled you if I were not here. I have bound it with oaths and, though I fear it may yet seek me out again, it should not threaten us.”
His words were portentous, and yet his manner suggested that he found the whole episode less than the stuff of legends, something soonest done and soonest forgotten, as her tutors used to say when disciplining her.
That night, the last by Esha’s reckoning before they came to Wherryover and the haunts of men, he sat away from the fire again, his back to a stone and staring up at the peaks as though seeking the monster out again. Still feeling the imprint of his hand on her shoulder like an itch, Lyn approached him.
“Is it your enemy from another age, Elder,” she asked formally, “the monster?”
He frowned at her blankly for a moment and then said, “It was but a worker whose masters are long dead. It wants to be of use, if only anyone needed any of the tasks it was made for. Your warlord, Ulmoth, learned command over such things from his study of the old languages.” The words were slow to come from him, and he seemed oppressed by something, even if it wasn’t the return of the creature.
She knelt, because it seemed disrespectful to stand and look down on him. The light of Esha’s fire chased over the rocky ground and touched his face, making it seem carved from pale stone a long time ago. It caught in his beard and the ridges of his horns, his long nose and fierce brows. All of a sudden she was very aware of how human he wasn’t, how everything about him was just an approximation of her kind, or perhaps all the people she ever knew were but poor copies of his.
“Forgive me, Elder. If not the monster, then there is some other foe in the world that causes you concern?” The thought was dire, and yet there was something weighing on him, and surely one did not become a great sorcerer without making great enemies.