“Is it all Tastairiane Apailika?” Lord Bertaud asked at last. He was not looking at Jos. He was staring into the fire. If he had noticed that the fire burned ceaselessly without wood or coal, he had not commented. Perhaps he had not noticed. A lord would not be accustomed to building up or maintaining his own fires. And he seemed much absorbed in his own thoughts. He asked again, “Is this Tastairiane, all this determination to defeat the Wall? Without him, would the People of Fire and Air so passionately desire to burn their way across the world?”
He, too, spoke of the Wall with the slight pause and distinct emphasis that Jos felt the Great Wall deserved. And, Jos noticed, the lord called the griffins by the name they called themselves without hesitation, without even appearing to think about it. He thought once more of how Kairaithin had said, I carried word to Bertaud son of Boudan, and again he wondered what the relationship between the two comprised.
But he did not know the answer to the lord’s question, and only shook his head.
Lord Bertaud looked Jos in the face for a moment and then suddenly got to his feet and turned away, the sharp motion of a man who could not bear to sit still. He said harshly, “I cannot—they cannot be permitted to do as they wish to do.” Going to the cottage’s single tight-shuttered window, he put back the shutters with quick, forceful motions and let in the cold, brilliant morning light. Then he stood perfectly still for some time, gazing out. From the direction of his gaze, he was staring down toward the Wall.
The pale dazzling light that poured in through the open window was welcome, the harsh cold much less so. Jos opened his mouth to say, Close the shutters, man, are you mad? but then, watching the Feierabianden lord, he did not speak. The constraint he felt was, he realized, due far less to his fear that Lord Bertaud would take offense than to his surety that the lord would not even hear him. Jos thought the other man was so deeply absorbed in his own thoughts and fears that he would not have heard the crash and roar of an avalanche coming down from the frozen heights. For the first time, it occurred to Jos that the lord’s enduring silence might be due to his own distraction and worries and not to any distaste or scorn he felt for his company.
After a moment, Jos went to stand behind Lord Bertaud and look over his shoulder. The Wall glowed in the morning light, but the light that struck it from either side was entirely distinct. On the desert side, the molten sunlight poured down from a savage white sky that seemed oddly metallic. The light on that side of the barrier seemed to pool against the barrier of the Wall, thick as honey, pressing against the huge granite blocks as though it possessed actual body and weight. On the other side, ice flashed and glittered in a pale, thin brilliance that came down from the high, blue vault of the heavens, carrying no warmth at all.
From both sides, light seemed to gather and pool in the cracks in the Wall. Light ran down from the cracks like liquid; steam billowed up from them, glowing in the sunlit air, gradually dispersing as it rose into the sky.
And the griffin mages flicked abruptly into view high against the white-hot brilliant desert sky and plunged downward like striking falcons, crying in their high, fierce voices.
Ashairiikiu Ruuanse Tekainiike, youngest and most arrogant of the fire mages, burned in fiery metallic colors, bronze and gold with flickers of blazing copper. Opailikiita Sehanaka Kiistaike, a smaller and more graceful griffin of gold-flecked brown, carried Kes on her back. Even at this distance, the girl was visible as a streak of white and gold against the darker, scorching colors of the griffins.
They blazed downward without pause, straight toward the burning sands of the red desert, far too fast. But at the last moment before they would have struck the sand, they blurred into wind and light and reshaped themselves, at rest and laughing beside the towering Wall. At least Jos imagined they were laughing—at least Kes would be laughing, and the griffins blazing with their fierce silent humor, so like and yet unlike the humor of men.
Kes stepped forward and laid her hands on the Wall. Fire blazed up at her touch, licking in rich, blazing sheets up the side of the wall. Fire found the longest, deepest crack and poured into it, filled it, pried at it. Great white clouds of steam plumed upward. Jos could hear, in his mind if not in truth, the hiss of fire meeting ice. He fancied he heard the stone shift and crack under the assault of the flames; he imagined he could even hear the powerful magic of making and building that had been woven into the Wall groan with the strain as it tried to maintain the cohesion of a Wall that suddenly wanted to explode into a chaotic storm of shattered, knife-edged shards of granite and crystal.