Light exploded near her with a boom that shook the leaves about them. Blaize leaped up in a fighter’s crouch. Mira was on her feet, too, ready to run but waiting to see if she should.
Gar and Alea sat still, though, staring at the apparition that appeared next to Lodicia: an old man in a robe and pointed hat embroidered with zodiacal symbols. His beard fell down over his chest, his hair around his shoulders. “Why don’t you tell them the rest of it, old woman? About the tractors that wouldn’t work because Terra wouldn’t send us any more parts, the ethanol distilleries that had to shut down, the famine that stalked the land as we reinvented plowing with horses and oxen!”
“Yes, all of that happened, Aesc,” Lodicia said, her lip curling, “but that didn’t give you the right to set yourself up as a petty tyrant.”
“Right? It was my duty!” Aesc exclaimed. “Everything was falling apart when Terra cut us off! No one knew how to repair the machines, or what to do when the villages couldn’t talk with the towns anymore, to call for help or to plan! Everyone swarmed out of the cities, leaving only the idiots and the deformed to hunt for nuts and squirrels to eat! People were starving, whole villages were turning bandit and stealing other villages’ food! Someone had to gather people together and show them how to farm like primitives! Someone had to overawe the bandits and chase them away! We were one step away from turning into a feudal society with all its oppression!”
“So you beat them to it and made lords of the magicians, instead of the warriors,” Lodicia said with scathing sarcasm. “Wasn’t it the better way?” Aesc demanded. “Now, instead of lords leading armies to kill each other by the hundreds, we had magicians with scarcely a score of soldiers battling it out by illusions and tricks!”
“And how were you to know that some of you had turned into telepaths and were making your tricks deadly?” Lodicia sneered.
“Who could have guessed that could happen in only three generations?” Aesc countered. “Who could have known that the strange gossamer clouds blowing through the air could turn into ghosts when dying minds seized them? Who could have known that those ghosts would select and pair up people who had ESP talents? It’s not as though we set out to become real, genuine mind readers!”
“Oh, I believe that,” Lodicia said. “Tricks are so much easier to control.”
“All right, the new powers became unpredictable!” Aesc admitted, thin-lipped. “Is it any surprise that even we who wielded them began to believe in the supernatural and came to call ourselves shamans instead of magicians? After all, we were healing with one hand while fighting off bandits with the other! Who could have guessed that we were really using psionic talents as much herbs and weapons? But we kept the warlords from rising!”
“You became warlords!” Lodicia retorted, eyes burning. “You turned into the very monsters you claimed to be fighting! What did it matter that you were using your so-called magic instead of armies? You were still petty tyrants, feudal lords!”
“Fewer people died in battle, only a handful—that’s what difference it made!”
“And the only difference! You fought each other to stalemates and kept any real government from rising! You overawed the councils so that they withered away! There was no power left to protect the poor and send food from those who had plenty to those who had none! You made each magician into a petty king over his own few square miles with the power of life and death over his hundreds of people—and he wouldn’t let them leave his estate, because what’s a lord without somebody to browbeat? The people became serfs and the shamans became lords just as surely as though you had called yourselves dukes and earls! You were no better than any other kind of warlord—you oppressed your people just as harshly! The only thing you really changed was the kind of power you used to bully them—charlatans’ magic instead of fists and clubs!”
“Scoff if you like,” Aesc said, eyes blazing, “but we never did let a warlord rise and conquer his way into a kingship. Individual domains remained free!”
“Aye, the magician lords remained free, but no one else! Now the serfs dress in rags and are driven to grub in the fields so their lords can dress in velvet and loll about in their great padded chairs taking their ease! Guards still march to war at the commands of their lords! Serfs who displease you and escape your death sentences take to the forest and become bandits, harrying all the villages! You have fashioned a living nightmare from the ruins of your grandparents’ dreamt”
Before Aesc could retort, Gar said quickly, “ ‘Needs must as the devil drives,’ as the old saying goes. Maybe the shamans made a worse choice than they could have, but they did keep the people alive, kept some vestige of civilization.”
“Vestige indeed!” Lodicia said indignantly. “Can you really call it civilization when there is no trade, no arts, no crafts more skilled than rough carpentry?”
“Civilization is the way of life of people who live in cities,” Alea put in.
“Yes, and there are no cities here, only mansions and villages!”
“But there is a basis for civilization to grow again,” Gar said in as soothing a tone as he could manage. “A crystal city may still grow from the ruins.”
“How, as long as the magicians block any power but their own?” Lodicia asked bitterly.
“By reviving the power of your dream,” Alea answered. “If we can teach the villages to cooperate again, they will outdo the power of the lords’ conflicts.”
Aesc eyed her narrowly but said nothing, only listened. “How are you to do that?” Lodicia demanded.
“By learning how to command wyverns, for a beginning,” Alea answered. “We have a young woman here who has discovered she has a talent for it—discovered it rather abruptly and rudely, at that. Can you find us the ghost of a wyvern-handler to teach her?”
“What! Raise up one more magician?” Lodicia cried. “I will never be a magician!” Mira said hotly.
Lodicia chopped the denial aside with a wave of her hand. “If you learn to work magic, you are a magician.”
“But I will never oppress the poor! I will use my gift to make their lives better, sweeter!”
“So said many who are now lords,” Lodicia said sourly, “and look what power has done to them.”
“Surely taming beasts is not truly magic,” Aesc objected, “no matter how supernatural their appearance. If the lass uses wyverns to protect the poor, can you really object?”
Lodicia gave him a simmering glare while she looked for the flaw in his argument. At last she said, “It takes a talent, you can’t deny that. What’s the difference between talent and magic?”
“When I look at the paintings of the masters and listen to the symphonies of the great composers, I have to agree with you,” Gar said. “Still, I don’t think their magic is quite the same thing as throwing fireballs or raising hosts of ghosts.”
Lodicia glowered at him but didn’t answer.
“She is a serf,” Alea reminded the crone’s ghost, “and means to send wyverns to defend serfs’ villages.”
“Perhaps,” Lodicia allowed, then turned on Mira with eyes that flamed. “Though mind you, girl, if you betray your fellows with this power, I shall haunt you for the rest of your days!”
“Do so.” Mira bore up bravely under her glare. “If I should so forget the hurts my people have borne, I could deserve no less.”
Still Lodicia held her stare, but the fire in her eyes faded until they only glowed. Then she gave a single nod. “Well enough, then. I shall summon Hano.” She scowled more deeply than ever. The companions waited, holding their breaths.