Anna refrained from swallowing. Hanfor had always agreed with her strategies to minimize death, carnage, and general mayhem. Now, he was suggesting obliterating a town whose major crime was harboring the former Lord of Dumar.

"Every war must have a battle, preferably a great battle, to mark its end. We cannot hazard a battle, and so we must have great destruction, destruction so great that all in Dumar will understand the folly of crossing the sorceress of Defalk. There must be a single... destruction ...a monument ... so vast that none can deny your power." Hanfor swallowed. "This I like little, but I have watched and I have listened. Men are not as we would like; they respect but force, and you must supply that force if you are to gain the respect you will need to enforce peace."

As if to punctuate the arms commander's words, a volIcy of a dozen arrows or so arched out from the walls, falling several hundred yards short of where the three- and Anna's guards-surveyed the town.

Anna looked at the arrows falling harmlessy into the gra.s.s, then at Hanfor. "Lord Jecks said that, too, you know. Or something like that."

"Lord Jecks has seen more of those in power than have I, lady. In that, I would respect him."

"I have to respect your judgments, Hanfor, and those of Lord Jecks. I don't like them, but I respect them."

Again...it's back to force, violence, power. Not reason, not common sense, not decency... but power. . .

force of arms, force of sorcery....

Anna took another look at Envaryl, then glanced northward, but the pair of refugees had vanished over the low hills. Finally, she nodded curtly. "Fine. Let's get on with it. Summon the players. Ehara-and the lords of Dumar- and of Defalk-will learn." Dissonance, will they learn...arrogant b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. If you want force...you'll see force.

Hanfor bowed his bead.

"I'll need something to eat and drink while the players and the rest of the armsmen gather. We can do it from here. There's no sense in moving close enough for them to hit us with those arrows." She looked from Hanfor to Alvar and back again.

Both veterans looked away from her.

Somehow, the way she felt, it didn't surprise her. She turned Farinelli and rode back down to the depression on the other side of the bill where she dismounted. Rickel and Lejun arrayed the guards around her in a wide circle, deploying two on the hillside above as lookouts or scouts. Neither guard spoke as she handed Lejun Farinelli's reins.

She patted the gelding, At least, he didn't look at her in reproach.

Standing by Farinelli, who had lowered his head to sample the lush gra.s.s, she pulled out the provisions bag and searched for some of the less-aged yellow brick cheese they'd picked up in one of the towns along the river road. Had it been Jusuul? Or Penilirk? Or Genwal? Or another town whose name she hadn't even noted?

She bit into the hard cheese savagely. After several mouthfuls, she broke off a crust of bread, a dry rye- like bread that scattered crumbs everywhere. Two bites of bread, and she had to moisten her mouth with a swallow from the water bottle.

Anna turned as Liende rode up and halted beside Rickel. The sorceress licked her lips of the crumbs and took another swallow of water.

"Good morning, Lady Anna." Liende dismounted, but remained holding her horse's reins when she faced the sorceress.

"Good morning, Liende. Well ...it's morning, anyway." Anna cleared her throat. "We have work to do."

"Will you wish the flame song, or the armsman seeking song?"

Anna shook her head. "Today... today I will need the battle hymn."

"We have not played that spellsong in weeks, Regent." Liende's face blanked.

'I know. You can gather your players, and practice for a time-on the hilltop there." Anna offered a grim smile as she pointed westward toward the top of the slope she had ridden down. "I hope it will be the last time we have to use it." You hoped that the last time, and here you are ...again. How many more times?

"You are regent, Lady Anna, and we are your players."

"1 wish it didn't have to be this way," Anna said. Does it? Does it really? "But Ehara began this war with blood and treachery." The regent shrugged. "I can't offer him mercy-nor those who still follow his treachery."

Liende nodded, a nod that was acknowledgment, but not agreement. "We will make ready."

"Thank you."

"We are your players, lady and regent." Liende inclined her head.

Anna nodded. "You may go."

After Liende remounted, Anna finished the last of the hard yellow cheese, and the bread. Another swallow from the water bottle, and she replaced the water bottle and began to warm up.

"Muueee, muece..."

After three notes, she coughed up some mucus. She resumed the vocalise, but only for another handful of notes before her voice cut out. She cleared her throat, and tried again, pushing back the battered brown felt hat. It was going to be a long warm-up, not surprisingly, because she was agitated, and agitation and tenseness didn't help the asthma that Brill's youth spell hadn't removed either.

Anna felt as though the warm-up had taken her nearly a gla.s.s, by the time her cords and throat were clear. She remounted slowly, her eyes going toward the west, where the clouds continued to build. Rickel and Lejun eased up beside her as she rode back to the low hillcrest, the intermittent sun falling on her back, nearly a score of mounted guards around her.

At the top of the rise, she slowed, then reined up, her eyes on the walls to the west. Envaryl remained the same, the gates closed, the town apparently still, the crimson banners billowing now and again in the gusting winds. Ehara remained barricaded inside the yellow-brick walls, waiting for the worst, unwilling to surrender, unwilling to flee.

The players, standing on the gra.s.s to Anna's right and facing the town, were in the middle of the warm-up song. None looked in Anna's direction.

Hanfor eased his mount beside Anna, and Rickel and Lejun moved forward, their shields up. Anna touched the small ensorcelled shield in the holder by her knee, trying to sense any draw of sorcerous power from her, then straightened in the saddle.

"Arms Commander," she said "Lady and Regent."

Hanfor's eyes met hers, and Anna could see the darkness behind them. She wondered if her own eyes held that blackness, and feared that they did, and that the darkness would only increase over the years.

"Lord Ehara will not come forth," Hanfor said quietly. "That would give you honor."

"And if I destroy Envaryl?" she asked. "Will that dishonor me and Defalk?"

"No." The arms commander shook his head. "You will triumph by force of might, and all will understand."

Anna wanted to scream in frustration. To save lives she was going to have to butcher a town. To save women from chains, she was going to have to kill some of those same women. So why should you be differernt? Military leaders had made those decisions for centuries. "Because," she murmured under her breath, "I didn't want to be a military leader." You still chose, and you have to pay. Lord, she was always paying, and if she said any thing out loud...well, everyone would think that the regent was self-pitying and self-indulgent.

A low rumble of thunder echoed in from the west, and the breeze stiffened. The crimson banners above the closed south gates of Envaryl flew free in the wind.

To her right, the players started the battle hymn, raggedly at first, and then with greater intensity, as if the stirring music helped focus them.

When they finished, Anna glanced at Hanfor, nodded and rode toward the waiting players.

Liende inclined her head. "We stand ready, Regent."

"Liende, the battle hymn."

"There is a storm nearing... Lady Anna." Liende looked at Anna, almost pleading.

"I know, chief player. Have them play the battle song." There won't be enough left of Ehvaryl or Ehara to... To what? Does it matter? "It has to be this way." She shook her head. "Just have them ready to play the battle hymn when I signal."

"Yes, Regent." Liende looked down.

With a barely concealed sigh, Anna dismounted and handed Farinelli's reins to one of the newer guards- Junert. The armsman took them without meeting her eyes. The sorceress walked to the open s.p.a.ce in front of the players. A drop of rain spattered against Anna's cheek.

Rickel and Lejun already waited, shields and eyes facing the yellow-brick walls of Envaryl. Standing between them in the narrow s.p.a.ce pointed toward Ehara's last stronghold, Anna began another vocalise.

Between the hill and the yellow-brick walls, the rain intensified, the heavy droplets flattening individual blades of gra.s.s in waves.

Anna turned.

"At your command, Regent"

Anna looked toward the doomed town, toward the yellow-brick walls set in green gra.s.s, toward the crimson banners that streaming in the quickening wind, shivered as the rain struck the fabric.

"Ready," Anna said.

"The battle hymn. On my mark.. Mark!" Liende gave a sharp gesture then turned and lifted her own horn.

With the strains of the music, Anna sang, sang the song she'd hoped never to use agajn.

"I have sung the glory of the thunder of the sky, I am bringing forth the voltage so the bolts of death can fly.

I have loosed the fateful lightning so Ehara's men will die.

My songs will strike them dead.

Glory, glory, halleluia; glory, glory, halleluia glory, glory, halleluia, my songs will strike them dead!"

Out of the datkness came a violent gust of wind that whipped Anna's battered felt hat off her head and into. the storm somewhere. She kept singing, ignoring the little voice that said, It's only a strophic spell...

only a strophic spell.. She concentrated on a mental image of storms, earthquakes, and lightning-all flattening and annihilating Envaryl and Ehara, turning the town into a wasteland.

"In the terror of the tempest, death is brought between the hills, with a slashing through the bosom that flattens as it kills The clouds swirled, their mottled white-and-gray turning night-black well before the end of the spell. The wind's whistle mounted into a howl, and Anna found herself bracing her legs against the force of the wind as she finished the last words.

Flashes of strobelike intensity flickered within the building stormclouds. From out of the clouds over En- varyl white globules fell, hammering at roofs and walls, enormous white projectiles-hail. Hail such as Anna had never seen as she stood, panting, horrified.

The ground itself rumbled, once, twice, and the gra.s.s flattened in circular waves rippling away from the walled town. Then, chunks of the brick walls began to tumble, outward, a cascade of bricks fragmenting, exploding, as the walls slumped into heaps of broken and shattered yellow chunks, darkened with the sheets of rain that swept over Envaryl.

Anna held her breath as a deep thrumming chord plucked the dark sky, and a wave of blackness swept like a silent wind out of the night clouds. For an instant, silence held the rolling hills and doomed town.

The first bolt of lightning was almost hesitant, like Anna had felt, forking down at the south gate towers, slashing into the timbered gates themselves, splitting the left gate, and throwing the right gate wide. A second bolt followed the first, farther west, lashing down somewhere behind the yellow brick walls that had turned green in the stormlight.

After the third, sunlike, slash of fire, the lightnings rained on the tumbled buildings of Envaryl so quickly that a garish arc-lamp illumination lit the hills, casting strange, elongated shadows, shadows that shifted instantaneously, fluctuated.

Some of the horses around the sorceress screamed, and yells of armsmen struggling with spooked mounts vied with the thunder and sizzling of the rain of power that hammered at the ancient town.

Abruptly, the lightnings stopped. The thunder rumbled into dull and distant mutterings, and the intermittent sheets of rain subsided into a cold drizzle. From darkness emerged a gray dawn that slowly brightened.

Anna looked up at the dark clouds that covered the entire sky, even as they lightened and began to turn back to mottled white-and-gray. With the misting rain that fell all around her, her hair was plastered against her skull, and her head ached, inside and out. Her eyes burned, burned with faint double images...as if to say that she had created Darksong through Clearsong.

A last, long line of fire-lightning streaked across the late-afternoon sky, well to the north, and a single rumbling, like a distant timpani, faded away.

Anna forced herself to view what had been Envaryl.

The highest structures remaining were the heaps of blackened yellow bricks that had been the walls, bricks that steamed where the rain bathed them, creating a low ground fog that misted the details of destruction. Occasional tongues of flame leaped out of the fog, and the crackling of fires hissed across the wet gra.s.s between the Defalkan force and the fallen town.

The ground rumbled and shook one last time, then shuddered into silence.

Rickel and Lejun lowered their shields until the lower rims rested on the ground. Their eyes remained focused westward, as if they could not look away.

Thin trails of smoke, light gray and dark gray and white and black, swirled out of the wreckage, weaving up and above the steam and fog through the lightening rain, twisting together.

Anna turned back toward the players. Delvor sat in a heap. Yuarl stood, sobbing. Duralt, his black hair swirled in the wind, looked blankly westward. Of all the players, only Palian and Liende met Anna's eyes.

"What must be, must be," said Palian.

"It is done, Regent," said the chief player.

"No," Anna said heavily. "It is done here. Only here." Her eyes went westward again, where the clouds fragmented. Despite the knives stabbing from inside her eyes, despite the shivering within that felt like dissonant chords, she watched the clouds, their images doubled, and a few patches of blue sky, before her eyes dropped to what remained of Envaryl.

The far hillside steamed, charred, sodden. The antlike figures of those few survivors who were nor armsmen- and there were but a handful-staggered into the sudden light.

Anna walked with leaden legs to Farinelli and climbed laboriously into the saddle. Her breathing was not quite gasping as she sat, gazing westward, yet looking at nothing.

"No one will challenge you again in Dumar," said Hanfor.

"Not in Dumar." But everywhere else where she had not used fire and sorcery...every leader in Liedwabr seemed to think he-or she-was different. Hanfor and Jecks were right. Only force worked. Only f.u.c.king force.

At least in the short run...and she'd never been given enough time to do anything... Not on earth, not on Erde....

Anna turned Farinelli back toward the river road, and toward Hasjyl, where Jecks rested, and with luck, had recovered enough for the trip back to Dumaria.

Hanfor wheeled his mount alongside Anna's, and they rode eastward through the continuing drizzle, the silent lines of armsmen following, turning away from the sodden steaming heap of yellow brick that had been Envaryl.

Lord, she was tired.

120.

ENCORA, RANUAK.

Veria stands at the entrance to the sitting room.

"Come in, and don't look so pleased with yourself," says the Matriarch. "You see the beginning of a new age in Ebra. I see slaughter and death and rape and pillage, and you and your South Women have created it."

"I didn't come to be insulted," answers the dark-haired Veria. "I'd hoped we could talk as adults." She steps into the room, and glances around, her eyes touching Alya, Ulgar, and the Matriarch.

"What did you wish to discuss?" asks the round-faced Matriarch.

"Why you talk and do nothing, and why you are so angered when I undertake to act?" Veria stands beside the empty straight-backed wooden chair, but makes no move to seat herself "Veria, sometimes, had I not seen you emerge from my own body, I would say that you could not have been my daughter" The Matriarch's voice is nearly flat, empty of the cheer that usually fills it. Her round face is stern.

"Mother..."