THE WALL SCREAMS

It was a wearisome journey through the white world, and they’d made all haste, Grandmother, Lala, and half a dozen others. She’d opened a portal and crossed a bridge onto the stark plains. She warned her people against straying or believing what they’d see there.

They’d been tantalized by groves of lemon trees, like those of Arcosia, only to have the fruits rot and fall to the ground and the trees shed their leaves and die before their eyes. There were other images that came and went, including one of the accursed horse of death the Sacoridians worshipped, standing off in the distance and watching them with a vulture’s gaze. Her people obeyed her, sticking close, and disregarding such illusions.

Grandmother navigated the white world with an enchanted ball of yarn she rolled across the plains. It unspooled enough yarn that it should have run out, but it stretched all the way to the last bridge, leading them true.

The white world was both unsettling and tantalizing, for it must have been centuries since any of her people crossed into it. The Kmaernians had built the bridges long ago, long before Sacoridia had been a mote in the emperor’s eye, but it had been Mornhavon the Great who learned the secret of the white world after his forces were ambushed one too many times by the enemy seemingly appearing out of nowhere when they were known to be much farther away. Once Mornhavon had acquired the secret, the empire had also been able to travel the ways and ambush the Sacoridians in like fashion. Soon battles raged not only across the landscape of Sacoridia, but in the white world as well, battles that had been mostly fought on a magical plane by great mages of both sides.

She nudged her horse off the final bridge with some regret into a forest full of natural light, color, and damp smells, smiling when she heard the exclamations of relief from her people as they followed her. When the last horse plodded off the bridge, the bridge vanished from existence. She supposed she could visit the white world again when she wished, but the chronicles warned against traversing it too much, with vague warnings of madness and death resulting, and something about lost souls.

In any case, she knew more intriguing places lay ahead, like the D’Yer Wall.

Before they reached the wall, Grandmother had made spells that rendered them invisible. Indeed, when they entered the encampment, the soldiers and laborers there went about their business unaware that eight members of Second Empire stood in their midst.

Grandmother guided her horse directly toward the breach, reining back when an oblivious soldier almost walked right into her, and she had to wend her way around a pair of laborers lugging water. Blackveil drew her. Its power wafted over the repairwork of the breach like a finger beckoning her on. She fairly quivered with energy.

She sensed also the weakness of the wall. Its cohesiveness was somehow undermined and she wished she had the book of Theanduris Silverwood at hand. She could bring the whole thing down now. But it would have to wait, for she’d been called to Blackveil. She had work to do there. Her destiny, and that of Second Empire, was about to be fulfilled. She would have the book later and the wall could come down then.

As she neared the wall, she felt the alarm of the guardians in response to her presence. She comes, she comes, she comes…, they shrieked. Yes, they recognized what she represented, but as disorganized as they were, they could do nothing to stop her.

She halted before the breach. “We must abandon the horses,” she said.

Lala was plainly unhappy, clutching the reins to her buckskin pony and frowning.

“My dear child,” Grandmother said, “we must leave the beasts behind. It would be cruel to take them with us. They’d be too terrified to bear us in the forest, and they’d prove a tasty meal for some predator.”

The little girl dismounted and wiped a tear from her cheek. Grandmother was touched by how much Lala had taken to the pony, for she rarely expressed much emotion. The others busied themselves removing baggage from the horses and strapping it to their own backs. Once the horses were released and wandered away from their masters, they would become visible to those in the encampment.

Grandmother surveyed the repairwork of the breach. The alarm of the guardians thrummed beneath her feet. “The stonework is well done,” she said, “but mundane for all that and no barrier. This shall take but a moment. Stand clear.”

Her people backed away, giving her space. Along their journey she had knotted and knotted a length of yarn knowing what she needed to do. She had used the indigo, and she now unraveled the knotted ball, speaking words of power, invoking the strength of water, freezing, thawing, wind, erosion, and time. The end of the yarn lifted itself from her palm snakelike, gravitating toward the stone. It glided along the joints between the facing, cracking mortar, weakening stone, and boring into it. Ice repeatedly etched across the stonework, and thawed so rapidly that in blinking one missed it. Tremors jostled the ground and Grandmother thought the guardians of the wall would bring about their own undoing.

The yarn, the knots, and the words of power did their work of weakening the stonework, aging and weathering it hundreds of years in moments. The repairwork of the breach buckled, crumbled, and thudded to the ground raising a veil of dust. The ground shook so violently that it almost knocked Grandmother off her feet.

“Come,” she said to her people even before the dust settled. “We must hurry across.”

Without a backward glance, she started picking her way across the rubble into the forest that beckoned.

The guardians sense the workings of the art. The stone in the breach does not live, but they nevertheless feel the reverberations of magic being used against it.