Chapter 199: One of the Eight Stars [BONUS]

The old man looked him up and down. Then he looked past him, north, at the Elder coming down the hill. At the horde. At the bending line.

He sighed. It was the long, heavy sigh of a very old man who has been dragged out of his garden for something he does not want to deal with.

"Well," said the Grand Magus. "You certainly weren’t exaggerating."

The Grand Magus did not raise his arms.

He did not chant. He did not draw circles in the air or speak in strange languages or do any of the things that the court mages in the capital did when they wanted to impress a crowd.

He simply lifted his walking stick a few inches off the ground.

And tapped it once against the rock.

-Tok.

It was a small sound. Encrid barely heard it over the noise of the battle.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then the air in front of the line began to shine.

It started at the edge of the gorge, a quarter of a mile north of the Span, just in front of the Third Legion’s shields. A thin line of pale gold light, running along the ground. It ran west, straight as a drawn string, all the way across the road and up the side of the steep hill where the archers stood.

Then it rose.

It rose like a curtain being lifted. Ten feet. Twenty. Fifty. It went up and up, pale gold and faintly shimmering, until it was taller than the hill. Taller than the Elder’s tusk.

Then it curved.

It bent over at the top and came down behind the line, and behind the Span’s northern end, until it met the edge of the gorge again. A great half-dome of golden light, covering the whole northern end of the Span and every soldier standing in front of it.

The horde hit it.

Encrid saw a Reever leap at the knights’ shields and strike the light instead. It did not bounce. It simply stopped, in mid-air, as if it had run into a wall of glass. Then it fell to the ground outside the barrier, stunned.

A Talljack swung its long arm at the light. The light did not move. The Talljack’s arm did not go through.

Along the whole length of the barrier, Roamers were throwing themselves against it.

None of them came through.

? ? ?

The line stopped fighting.

It happened slowly. Knights lowered their swords and stared at the golden wall in front of them. Archers on the hill lowered their bows. Men who had been bracing their shields against the weight of the horde stumbled forward as the weight suddenly disappeared.

In the middle of the line, Ysolde stood very still with her sword in her hand, looking up at the light.

Then she turned around.

She looked across a quarter mile of road, straight up at the rise where Encrid stood. At the little old man beside him, leaning on his walking stick.

Encrid could not see her face from this distance.

He did not need to.

On the Span, the people crossing had stopped too. They were standing on the stone, turned north, staring at the dome of gold light that had suddenly appeared over their heads.

"Tell them to keep walking," the Grand Magus said irritably. "That thing won’t last forever, and I didn’t walk six hundred miles to watch a lot of people stand on a bridge."

Encrid turned and shouted down the slope.

"Harun! Get them moving! Everyone across!"

Hope began to rise once again.

Harun stared up at him for a moment. Then he turned and began shouting. Slowly, the column on the Span began to move again.

Encrid turned back to the old man.

"Six hundred miles," he said. "In how long, Elder?"

"Two days," the Grand Magus said. "My knees are killing me."

He looked Encrid up and down again, more carefully this time.

"You’re younger than I expected," he said. "From the letter, I thought you’d be at least forty. Nobody under forty writes that rudely to a stranger."

"I’m sorry."

"No, you’re not. You’d do it again." The old man sniffed. "Your letter had three lines. The first two were things I’ve heard a hundred times. The third one is the only reason I left my garden."

He paused.

"We’ll talk about that later. If there is a later."

Encrid did not say anything.

He knew exactly what the third line had said. He had written it very carefully, and then he had sat for an hour looking at it, wondering if he should send it at all.

He did not let himself think about it now.

? ? ?

Footsteps came up the slope behind them.

It was Zuri. Then Gareth, still breathing hard from the line. Then Ysolde, who had walked the quarter mile from the center of the line without seeming to hurry and yet had arrived only a moment after them.

They stopped at the top of the rise and looked at the old man.

Zuri’s face had gone very pale.

"Brother," she said slowly. "Who is this?"

Encrid did not know how to answer that in a single sentence.

The Grand Magus saved him the trouble.

"Nobody important," he said. "An old man with bad knees. Your brother wrote and asked me to come. I came."

Gareth was staring at the barrier. He had fought for thirty-one years. He had seen court mages, battle mages, the Emperor’s own magicians at the Grand Tournament.

"That barrier," Gareth said, "is at least an eighth circle spell, isn’t it?"

"Ninth circle."

The old man corrected Gareth, which made the expression on his face more grim and shocked.

"There are four mages in the Empire who can cast ninth circle spells."

"There are three," the old man said. "Tellis died last spring. Nobody told you, I suppose. They never tell anybody anything."

Gareth opened his mouth. Then he closed it again.

Ysolde had not said anything.

She was looking at the old man with an expression Encrid had never seen on her face before. It was not fear. It was not respect. It was something in between the two, the way a soldier who has been the strongest person in every room for nineteen years looks at something that makes her feel very small.

"You’re one of them," she said. "The Eight Stars."

The Grand Magus sighed.

"People always say that like it means something," he said. "It mostly means that people come and bother you when things go wrong."

He turned and looked north, through the golden light of the barrier. At the horde throwing itself against it. At the endless grey mass stretching back to the hills.

At the Elder, walking down toward the Riven.

"And things," he said quietly, "have gone very wrong."

? ? ?

Thank you @Stingdragon for the Magic castle~