The Ninth Talisman Read online

  She could feel the ler around her with every step; something had disturbed them, she knew, though she could not guess its nature.

  A moment later she passed the marker shrine into the village proper, hurried past the Carver family’s house, and found a clump of half a dozen women talking quietly in the sunlit meeting common, their arms wrapped around themselves to protect them from the warm wind.

  (Somewhere, Sword marveled at the sight of what he recognized as the town square, but without a single building he knew around it. There was no pavilion on the ridge, none of the houses he had grown up among—but then he realized that he could see the village shrine, and the hearthstone he now lay against, in the correct spot, though exposed to the elements, without their familiar shelter.)

  “What’s happening?” Tala called as she approached.

  Her voice was almost lost in the murmur of the wind, but six worried faces turned toward her, her aunt Tanner among them.

  “Priestess!” Tanner said. “There you are! We were beginning to worry.”

  Tala glanced up at the sun. “I’m not late,” she said. “It’s not yet noon.”

  “But . . . well, we thought you might have heard and cut your ritual short.”

  Tala ignored the foolishness of suggesting the ritual could be shortened; if she had been so disrespectful as that, the forest would have allowed the village no venison, no coney, no walnuts, not so much as a mushroom for the next year. “Heard what?” she asked. “Where are the men?”

  “They’re at the border,” Tanner replied, gesturing in the general direction of the ridgetop.

  “An attack is coming,” Redlocks added.

  “An attack? What kind of attack?”

  “Armed men. From another place.”

  That made no sense. Armed men could not simply walk through the wilderness to attack the town. “But nobody would . . . But how? Why? How do they know these men are coming?”

  “Priest said so. He was walking the bounds, and the spirits warned him. He came and got all the men, and they left about an hour ago to meet the enemy at the border, just over the ridge.”

  Tala was still puzzled. She had never heard of such a thing. No one had ever threatened the village before. “Who’s attacking us?”

  “We don’t know,” Tanner said. “Priest said the warning just said it was many men.”

  “Ler generally can’t count very well,” Tala commented.

  “He said he had asked if there were more men than we had in the village, and the spirits said there were about that many, maybe a few more or a few less.”

  “So all the men went out to fight them off?”

  The women nodded. “That way,” Tanner said, pointing. “Across the ridge.”

  “They took spears,” Greeneye said.

  “And bows,” Redlocks added. “Smith wanted to bring one, but of course you had his with you.”

  Tala tugged at the bow slung on her shoulder. She had been showing it to the game spirits in the forest, so they would know what would strike down their creatures. “My father couldn’t hit anything with an arrow anyway.” That was due as much to his occupation as anything else; something of the fire and iron clung to him and disturbed the ler of bow and arrow, making it reluctant to do his will. Tala had tried to teach him a little of the archery spirit’s true name, so that he might force its cooperation, but he had laughed and said he saw no need. The village had enough hunters without him, and no other smiths.

  “But it would look that much more fearsome, a big man like that with a bow,” Chitchat said.

  “They want to frighten the attackers off, not kill anyone,” Tanner offered. “It wouldn’t matter whether he could hit anything.”

  “Priest said he would arrange some surprises,” Redlocks added.

  And of course, Tala knew, he would. He would talk to the ler and make sure that every sharp pebble found its way under an invader’s foot, that muddy earth would be more slippery than it looked, that birds and rabbits would startle at just the right moment, that sawgrass would cut at the foe’s ankles and branches would whip at their eyes. The defenders would be untouched by these hazards, perhaps protected behind cooperative bushes or friendly trees. All the local spirits would come to the aid of their own people, and help drive away the intruders. The village, human and ler together, was a single community.

  And the invaders must know that. Tala frowned. Every village had its own patron spirits to protect it.

  Something didn’t make sense. A large group of men? Who in all of Barokan would be stupid enough to make such an attack? How could they get there? What could they hope to accomplish?

  And how could the spirits have known that these strangers intended to attack the village?

  Tala knew there was no point in asking the village women; none of them knew much of anything about ler. Only priests and priestesses, the men and women born on a midsummer’s night when the full moon was in the sky, could hear the spirits’ voices and learn to bargain with them.

  Which, at the moment, meant Tala, whom the villagers called Little Priestess, and Dein, generally known as Priest—naturally they did not use even the shortest fragments of their true names in the course of normal events. They were the village’s only contacts with the spirit world, needed to coax the crops to grow and the game to draw near, to regulate the rain and keep the frost away until the harvest was in, to calm the river when the spring floods raged.

  Dein was almost twenty years older than Tala, and had been her mentor throughout childhood, introducing her to the ler, teaching her their names, explaining the long-standing agreements the priests of previous generations had negotiated. She was grown now, and taking on a larger share of the priestly duties, including the three-day annual ritual of meeting with the inhabitants of the forest to bargain for the right to hunt there. And she was beginning to suspect, from some things the spirits had said, that she was already better at the job than Dein had ever been. Sometimes Dein seemed to just go through the motions, without thinking about what the ler told him.

  Had he thought to ask how the spirits of the village lands knew the attackers were coming? By their very nature, most of the spirits could not travel beyond the bounds—they were confined to their own territory, and in fact the village lands were defined by the territory where this particular community of ler dwelt. The priests of one village could not command the ler of another; the very laws of nature, the rules by which the spirits operated, varied from one place to another. Dein could not have spoken to any ler outside his own village, so spirits inside the village must have warned him—but how? They could not have seen the invaders approaching.

  Tala tried to find sense in it. Why would anyone attack the village? How could Dein have been warned of their approach?

  She had already had a lifetime of practice in asking such questions, in order to deal with the ler and their inhuman logic. Their behavior often seemed strange and irrational, but there was always a reason for what they did. She just had to figure out what it was.

  A spirit had told Dein an attack was coming, but was anyone actually attacking? What if the warning had been false? What did someone hope to accomplish?

  Well, what had it accomplished?

  It had sent all the men and weapons to the far side of the ridge, leaving only unarmed women and children and a few old men in the village itself. If she had been here, instead of in the forest, she would undoubtedly have gone along as well, leaving the women and children without even a means to hear any warnings the ler might give.

  That was surely what their actual foe had intended.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, spirits, defend us!”

  We stand ready, a chorus replied. The air is troubled and hostile, and we are ready to face whatever it may bring.

  “What is it?” Tanner asked. “What’s wrong? Did the spirits say something?”

  “No,” she said, not entirely accurately. “I just thought of something.” She looked around.

  S
everal of the village women were working in the surrounding fields, soothing the ler of earth and plant with the simple chants that had been passed down through the generations, driving away birds and insects, checking to see how soon the crops would be ready to harvest. Others, her own mother among them, were tending children, scattered across the fallow fields on the hillside.

  Gathering them all together to organize a defense might take an hour or more—and a defense against what? Tala was certain the attack that had drawn the men away was a fraud, a feint, a distraction, and that the real attack would be made on the village itself, but she still did not know what sort of an attack it might be. The spirits’ reference to troubled air could mean anything.

  The village had no enemies, no treasures worth stealing. Their lives were comfortable, but not luxurious, and their possessions were the ordinary substance of everyday existence. No one could steal the land itself; the fields would be barren, the game elusive, the water foul, without the services of a priest or priestess to coax cooperation from the ler, and only a priest who had been born here could serve.

  The only things worth taking, she realized, were the villagers themselves.

  And that, she knew, was all too possible. There were places where people kept slaves. There were landless rogue males who wanted women as wives or concubines.

  And there were said to be ler that demanded human sacrifices. Oh, not in the immediate area, but there were stories about communities in the flat country to the south, or in the marshlands to the west. Their raiding parties were said to roam far and wide, abducting travelers and dragging them back to die on bloodstained altars.

  Someone had lured the men away by giving Dein a false warning, and now the real attackers would descend on the undefended village . . .

  “What is it?” Tanner asked. “What did you think of?”

  “How could anyone give a false warning?” Tala said aloud.

  The warning came on the wind, the earth told her.

  “Well, they couldn’t,” Tanner said. “That’s how Priest knew . . . Priestess, what’s wrong?”

  “There are people who could give a false warning,” Tala said.

  “But the spirits warned Priest, not a person.”

  “And who told the spirits?”

  The warning came on the wind, the ler repeated.

  The women looked at one another.

  “I don’t understand,” Redlocks said.

  “The only people who can command ler are priests and wizards,” Tanner said.

  “I don’t think this was a priest,” Tala said. “We don’t have any enemies among the priests of Longvale. And I have never heard of priests who could command the wind that blows freely from place to place, yet the spirits tell me the wind carried the warning.”

  A gust of wind rustled blouses and sent skirts flapping.

  “Oh, burning fire!” Greeneye said. “You think there’s a wizard involved in this attack?”

  Everyone knew that just as priests learned to control the ler of specific places, wizards learned to control ler who were not so constrained—the ler of air and fire, of heat and cold, of migratory birds and wandering beasts. And where priests were at the heart of their communities, most wizards were outcasts, as rootless and unreliable as the ler they commanded.

  The wind swirled dust up from the common and whipped at Tala’s hair as she said, “I think there’s a rogue wizard on his way to the village right now—or perhaps he’s already here.”

  There is a stranger among you, the earth beneath her agreed. He has not touched me, and so I did not know him until you spoke.

  Tala raised her arms. “Spirits of earth and air, I beseech you, reveal to me any enemy that may be present!”

  She could sense a struggle around her as the village ler bent their power to the task she had given them; then the wind shifted, and from the corner of her eye Tala saw a flicker. She whirled.

  It was as if a veil was blowing away in tattered pieces, gradually exposing the man standing by the village’s central shrine. Tala turned to face him directly.

  He was tall, and wore crossed leather belts over a blue silk tunic. Loops on the belts held at least a dozen assorted pouches and talismans, and the pockets of his leather breeches bulged with more; rings shone on every finger, each undoubtedly representing a spirit he held in thrall. A blue cap was set jauntily on his head, still securely in place despite the unnatural wind, and he was smiling sardonically at Tala.

  And he was hanging in the air, an inch or two off the familiar soil of the village.

  “Very good, Priestess,” he said.

  Redlocks shrieked and ran; Greeneye backed away whimpering. The others stared, stunned, at this apparition.

  “The wind was the clue,” Tala said. “You made a wind-spirit tell them an attack was coming.”

  The wizard’s grin widened. “Indeed I did, and now they’re all thrashing about on the wrong side of the ridge, looking for a nonexistent army, while I have my pick of their women.” He glanced around. “I see a few who would suit me.”

  Tala stared at him for a moment as the others backed away; she was thinking furiously, trying to devise some way to repel this invader and protect her people.

  The bow on her shoulder was not strung; in the time it would take to string it, draw an arrow from the quiver on her back, nock, draw, and release, the wizard could unleash a dozen spells. He obviously controlled several wind-spirits, and probably fire-spirits as well; the wind might snatch the bow from her hands, the fire burn it to ash, before she could loose.

  Likewise, she could send a message through the ler and summon the men of the village home, but even if they ran, the wizard would have a quarter of an hour to work his will upon their women. He could easily pick a few and carry them off in that time.

  And the women—well, they could put up a fine resistance, she was sure, but how many would be hurt by wind or fire or other magic? How much damage would be done to houses and crops?

  As for the native spirits, what could they do? The wizard could obviously fly above any attack they might make.

  Fighting him was not the solution.

  But what was? She could hardly let him rape and enslave any of her fellow villagers. Even Felri, who had teased Tala mercilessly when they were children until the ler began tripping her repeatedly, did not deserve that.

  She had to do something. Protecting the village was her job, her role, the task she had been born to. It was a burden she did not always enjoy, but she had never failed to bear it. Even when she had been so sick of the constant demands of the ler that she had dreamed of leaving the village and going somewhere she would be just an ordinary young woman, she had never considered doing so until another priest or priestess was born.

  But now she could see no way to carry out her duty.

  No way but one.

  She said, “I’ll go. Take me.”

  A sudden stillness fell over everything; Tala knew she had the undivided attention of the spirits around them.

  The wizard’s grin vanished. “What?”

  “Take me,” Tala repeated. “Get me out of this village.”

  He cocked his head to one side, and one hand closed on a wooden talisman carved into a shape like a candle flame. “Why? I’m not looking for a wife or an apprentice, woman, just a whore, to warm my bed and scrub my floors.”

  “A slave, of course. And what am I here?” Tala replied. “I spend my days being ordered about by the ler, running their errands so that they’ll allow the rest of the village to live unmolested. I have no husband—you think that’s by choice? The ler forbid me to bed a man! No man, no children, no land of my own, no time to do anything but run hither and yon at the spirits’ bidding! I spent the last three nights sleeping in the forest, rather than my own bed, at the whim of these spirits! Better to scrub your floors, wizard.”

  The stillness shattered. You lie, a hundred voices said in unison. You lie!

  Tala turned and shouted at the bare
ground, “What do you know about it? What do you know of the human heart? Better a human wizard than a lifetime of you!”

  “But, Priestess . . .” Tanner began, and Tala whirled to face her.

  “Don’t start, Aunt!” she said. “You don’t know what it’s like any more than the ler themselves do!” Then she turned back to the wizard. “Take me with you. I’m so tired of this! Let Priest fend off the disease!”

  Once again a sudden hush fell, though Tala could feel the earth, the stones and grass and the air itself, listening intently.

  “Disease?” the wizard said. Tala could feel the ler echoing the question, and hoped the wizard could not sense it as well.

  “Don’t worry about that!” she said desperately. “I don’t have it, I promise! I swear, by the spirits around us, I do not have the plague!”

  The wizard’s gaze flashed from one woman to the next, Tanner to Greeneye to Chitchat. “What about them?” he asked.

  “Don’t worry about them,” Tala said. “The ler protect them from its ravages as long as they’re here.”

  “And elsewhere?”

  “They don’t go anywhere else. No one leaves here. No traders come here. You know that. Isn’t that why you chose us?”

  “Do they all have it?”

  “Just take me with you!” She stretched out her arms and took a step toward him.

  The wizard drifted back, bumping against the shrine and knocking his hat askew. His face had gone pale.

  Then he straightened up and pointed a talisman at Tala. “I think not,” he said. “Stay back, Priestess; I have changed my mind. I think I will find another village, one more to my liking.” He reached up with his free hand and doffed his cap, then returned it to its proper place. “Your pardon, ladies, but I think I will be going now.”

  The wind, which had died away somewhat, suddenly rose to a howl, and seemed to wrap itself about him; he flickered and faded and was gone.

  “No, wait!” Tala cried.

  “Farewell, Priestess,” his voice answered from somewhere overhead. Tala looked up, blinking in the sunlight, but could see nothing but blue sky and high clouds. The wind whipped her hair across her face and stung her eyes, and she had to turn away.