under his feet was. . grass. Some of the bushes a little farther away looked unfamiliar to him, but he would have had to be an herbalist to recognize the differences. The buildings on the edge of the dragon farm. .
They had steeply pitched roofs. In that, they resembled buildings in Kuusamo and Lagoas and Unkerlant, which also saw a lot of snow. But they didn’t look like houses or hostels. They looked like gray stone fortresses. They were spaced well apart from one another, too, as if the Gyongyosians didn’t think it safe to have them too close together. When the Gongs weren’t warring with their neighbors, they often fought among themselves. Their architecture showed it, too.
A man emerged from the nearest of those fortresslike buildings and walked toward Fernao. He wore a sheepskin jacket over wool leggings. Gray streaked his beard and hair. “You are the mage from Kuusamo?” he called in slow, oddly accented, but understandable classical Kaunian.
“I am Fernao, a mage of the first rank, aye. Actually, I represent both Lagoas, my own kingdom, and Kuusamo,” Fernao replied. “And you are, sir …?”
“I am called Vorosmarty, a mage of five stars,” the Gyongyosian said. “It is a rank more or less equal to your own. How can you be trusted to represent two kingdoms?”
“I am from Lagoas, as I said. And I am engaged to be married to a Kuusaman mage. Neither kingdom feels I would betray its interests,” Fernao said. That wasn’t strictly true. Grandmaster Pinhiero was less than delighted to have him representing Lagoas. But he was the best bargain Pinhiero could get, and so the grandmaster had had to make the best of it.
Vorosmarty shrugged. “Very well. This is not truly my concern. I am ordered to show you Gyorvar, to show you what your magecraft has done. I obey my orders. Come with me. A carriage waits for us.”
He didn’t, he couldn’t, know that Fernao was one of the mages who’d unleashed that sorcery. His
“Marshal Szinyei, who ordered our surrender, has announced that the stars commune with his spirit, and has declared himself our new ekrekek.” Vorosmarty’s voice was studiously neutral. Fernao judged he would be unwise to ask the Gyongyosian wizard how he felt about Szinyei’s elevation.
As he got into the carriage, he did ask, “How far to Gyorvar?”
“Perhaps six miles,” Vorosmarty replied. “No dragon farm closer than this one survived in working order.” His gray eyes flicked over to Fernao. “In the name of the stars, what did your wizards do?”
“What we had to,” Fernao said.
“That is no answer,” the Gyongyosian said.
“Did you expect one?” Fernao replied. “Even if I knew how this wizardry was made”-no, he wouldn’t admit it-”I could not tell you.”
Vorosmarty grunted. “I am sorry. I do not know how to act like a defeated man. No such disaster as this has ever befallen my kingdom.”
“Lagoas and Kuusamo tried to warn your sovereign,” Fernao said. “He would not believe the warnings, but we were telling the truth.” Vorosmarty only grunted again. Had he been one of the advisors telling Ekrekek Arpad the islanders couldn’t do as they claimed? If he had, he wouldn’t want to admit that.
Gyongyosian farmhouses also looked like strongpoints, designed as much for defense as for comfort. Since they were of stone, their exteriors showed little damage. But the fence rails were wood. Before the carriage had got even halfway to Gyorvar, Fernao saw that the sides of the rails facing the city were scorched. Vorosmarty noticed his gaze and nodded. “Aye, your spell did that, even this far away.”
Before long, fruit trees showed leaves sere and brown, as if autumn had come early. But something worse than autumn had come to Gyorvar. After another half mile or so, even stone farmhouses looked as if they had been through the fire. And the trees weren’t just scorched-they were burnt black on the side facing the Gyongyosian capital, and then, a little later, burnt black altogether.
The air stank of stale smoke. Here and there, smoke still rose from one place or another. A different stench also rode the breeze: the stench of death. “You threw this whole city on a pyre,” Vorosmarty said as they passed a party of workers taking bodies out of a block of flats.
“You would not yield,” Fernao said. “This was the way we saw to make you know you were beaten.”
Vorosmarty shuddered. “When you raise your children, do you spank them with swords?”
“No, but our children are not trying to kill us,” Fernao replied. “When our children grow up to be murderers, we do hang them.” The Gyongyosian mage sent him a resentful look. He pretended not to see.
As they got closer to the heart of Gyorvar, devastation grew worse. Only a few upthrusting charred sticks showed where wooden buildings had stood. Stone structures were more common. They went from looking burnt to looking slagged, as if the stone blocks from which they were built had begun to melt. A little later on, there was no doubt of what had happened to them: they looked like butter sculptures starting to sag on a hot day. The death stink got stronger.
“This was a great city once,” Vorosmarty said. “How long shall we be rebuilding it?” The carriage rattled over something in the middle of the road. Wreckage? A burnt body? Fernao didn’t want to know.
He said, “You should have thought of the risks you were taking when you went into this war. You should have had the sense to yield when you saw yourselves losing it.”
“Risks?” the Gyongyosian rumbled. “War has risks, aye. But this?” He shook his head. His beard seemed to bristle with indignation.
“For the past century and more, the thaumaturgical revolution has made war more horrid at the same time as it has made life better during times of peace,” Fernao said. “You Gyongyosians should have realized that. Yours was the only kingdom not of eastern Derlavai that kept its freedom and learned these arts itself.”
“We never imagined the stars had written. . this for us,” Vorosmarty said. The carriage stopped. Vorosmarty opened the door. “Here we are in the heart of the city. Come out, representative of Kuusamo and Lagoas. Come see what your sorcery has wrought.”
Fernao got out and looked around. He wished he didn’t have to breathe. The smell was so thick, he was sure it would soak into the fabric of his tunic and kilt. Here where the sorcery had been strongest, the flames hottest and thickest, next to nothing remained standing. Buildings had melted and puddled. The sun sparkled off curves of resolidified stone as smooth as glass.
Perhaps a quarter of a mile away, something had been massive enough to stay partly upright despite everything the spell had done. Pointing toward those ruins, Fernao asked, “What was that?”
The look Vorosmarty gave him was so savage, he took an involuntary half step back. “What
“May I go there?” Fernao asked.
“You are the conqueror. You may go where you please,” Vorosmarty replied. When Fernao started straight toward the ruined palace, though, his guide said, “You would be wise to stay on the streets, as best you can. Some of the melted stone is but a crust. Your foot may go through, as with thin ice, and you would cut yourself badly.”
“Thank you,” Fernao said, and then, “I did not suppose that would make you unhappy.”
“It would not,” Vorosmarty said frankly. “But you might blame me for not having warned you, and, since you are the conqueror, who knows what you might order done to me and to this land?”
Fernao hadn’t thought of that.
“This sergeant says he saw what you did to Becsehely,” Vorosmarty replied. “He says he wishes everyone would have heeded the warning.” The sergeant added something else. Again, Vorosmarty translated: “He says it is even worse close up than it was from the Kuusaman ship.”
Fernao ducked into the palace. Though the walls had held out the worst of the sorcerous fire, not much inside remained intact. Maybe the Gongs had already carried out what they could salvage. Maybe there hadn’t been much
