The Mirror After the Cavern

by Jeffrey Quyle

  “My lord, please help me know what to do with this terrible mess I’ve made,” he prayed the simple request. “I know that you’ve helped me and done things for me already. I just need to know what to do. And tell me what I can do. Do I have the power of telekinesis?” Silas pleaded with the god for answers and direction.

  “You have been given abilities,” a voice spoke from somewhere around him, perhaps everywhere around him. “You are my agent of good in this dangerous and threatening time. You have breathed the gasses of my home, and acquired many talents and abilities, but you must learn how to use them, and you must learn to judge when and why to use them. I count on you to learn and grow and act. The potential lies within you,” the god’s deep voice explained, resonating throughout the small sanctum.

  Silas knelt and listened. The voice ceased to speak, but Silas waited to see if there were any more explicit explanations or words of advice. He was coming to realize that the gods did not typically speak plainly. He wasn’t happy with their treatment, but he was acutely aware that there was no hope he could do anything about that either.

  After an appropriate wait, he rose and genuflected, then left the temple and returned to the caravan’s sales field, just as Treemor was facing a pair of grandmotherly women who were buying baskets from Silas’s wagon. Treemor pocketed the coins from the women and smiled smugly at Silas as the buyers walked away with their newly-bought goods.

  “That’s more commission for me,” he said with satisfaction.

  Silas nodded abstractly, and stood in front of his wagon, pondering what to do next. He suspected that Ruten’s advice to seek guidance from Prima might be the most concrete words of direction he would receive. When the caravan leader went strolling by minutes later, Silas impulsively jumped into action.

  “Prima!” he called out, and waved the man over.

  “Silas? Some problem with the baskets?” Prima wanted to know.

  “I’ve got a problem, but it’s not the baskets – they’re fine. It’s different. And bigger,” Silas began.

  “I told people that Ivaric was preparing for war,” Silas tried to tell the truth without making himself sound too brash or thoughtless.

  “People in our caravan?” Prima pinned him down immediately.

  “No, people in other places, using Wind Words, as a Speaker. I tried to give a warning,” Silas explained.

  Prima’s eyebrows rose.

  “I told them that Ivaric was going to attack Shouldteen,” Silas admitted.

  “Why?” Prima asked. “Did you have proof?”

  “You said they were,” Silas replied plaintively.

  “I said I guessed they were. I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t say it,” Prima shot back. He emphasized ‘guessed’.

  “Well, the Speakers Guild doesn’t like me being a Speaker without their permission,” Silas went on.

  “Can they stop you?” Prima asked.

  “Not really,” Silas shook his head.

  “Don’t let that bother you too much. Some of the old ways are lazy ways, and need to be rattled. In this case, I think some of the Guilds, especially the Speakers, are far too complacent, lazy, and greedy. That’s why I like having my own free Speaker in our caravan!” he smiled.

  “Well, I also got a note from, someone,” Silas began.

  “That messenger that tracked us down?” Prima wanted to know.

  Silas nodded his head. “And the note said that Ivaric was going to attack Avaleen, not Shouldteen. So I think I should warn the people who are really in danger.”

  Prima bowed his head as he thought.

  “I don’t think you have any reason to worry about the Wind Word Guild. They can’t stop you.

  “You’ve opened a can of worms. Ivaric presumably knows you have revealed their plans?” Prima asked.

  “I think I’m on their list to kill twice now,” Silas nodded.

  “Just send out a message that states the facts. Say that you’ve seen a warehouse in Ivaric full of weapons, where soldiers have been picking up weapons for days like they’re getting ready to go to war. Describe the weapons you’ve seen, and estimate the number of soldiers who may have been armed. Don’t say anything more, and send the message out far and wide. Let the listeners draw their own conclusions,” Prima advised.

  “I’ve got to go see something Minnie advised me on,” he patted Silas on the shoulder. “You do the right thing after you think about it, really think!” he emphasized, and then was gone.

  Silas nodded slightly as Prima left, then immediately answered a question from a passing villager who enquired about a basket, then began to consider Prima’s advice.

  The decision was difficult, though it seemed simple. He could send out a message just as Prima described. But then he could add that he had been told that Avaleen was the target. He began to consider just how to word his message, but was interrupted by occasional interested basket buyers who broke his train of thought. He sold four of the baskets before the caravan was told to close up and prepare for departure.

  He decided to add one element to his message. He would address it directly to the Speaker at the palace in Avaleen, where he hoped the Council of Nobles would hear of his message and decide to take it seriously. And in order to do that, he would have to know who the Speaker was at the Avaleen palace, and he didn’t know. He couldn’t remember what he might have heard while at the Academy, and he had hardly been in Avaleen before Ruten had smuggled him out of the city on a fishing boat, so he hadn’t had the opportunity to hear anything in the city that might have stuck in his memory.

  “Jimes, Speaker of the Palace of Amenozume, this is Silas, on a caravan east of Barnesnob, calling to you for information,” he began to deliver an appeal for knowledge. Jimes was a distance away, and the message might take a while to travel but he wanted to hear the response of a friendly voice. He continued his message, using a simple code to place his request.

  “And please tell Jade I said hello to her and her sister, if you happen to see them,” Silas added, before he gave the code to finish the message. It was only a little after noon, so the message would have plenty of time to reach the Amenozume palace before sunset, giving Jimes a high chance of receiving the message. And if Silas didn’t hear back within a day, he would use the mirror to ask Jade to relay the question to Jimes for him. He might lose a day’s time by waiting to know the Avaleen Speaker’s name, but he thought it was worth the wait.

  Hron plodded on, pulling the wagon until he felt hungry, and then let Silas know of his hunger. Minnie happened to ride back along the line of wagons at nearly the same time, distributing canvas sacks that held lunches for the wagon riders to eat as they travelled. Silas waited until she had given him a sack of fruit and bread, then spoke to Hron as the lady on her horse rode ahead towards the front of the caravan line.

  “Okay, pull over to the verge of the road and munch away at your lunch while I eat mine,” Silas said. “You’ll have to pull faster later so that we can catch up, and this won’t be long,” he warned his friend. He hopped down from the bench as he guided the wagon to the side of the road, and led his mule to the spot he thought would serve them best. Then Silas sat upon a large stone and ate his meal and speculated about how long he’d have to wait for Jimes’s answer to arrive.

  He finished his meal and pulled a reluctant Hron away from the sweet grass that grew in the roadside ditch, then the pair and their wagon resumed rolling along the eastern road. Within an hour they rejoined the caravan, finding Ruten riding behind the wagons and on the lookout for them.

  “I thought you’d decided to try some crazy Speaker power,” the guard told Silas when they met.

  The rest of the day was uneventful, until Silas and Ruten were engaged in their swordwork practice, and Jimes’s message arrived.

  “It was good to hear from you, my outlaw friend!” Jimes’s voice sounded in Silas’s ears, just as Ruten struck at him.

  Silas stepped back from the attack, dropped his practice sword,
and waved at Ruten.

  “I’ve got a message coming in,” he explained as he cupped a hand to his ear and turned away. He began to walk away to find privacy as he listened to the arriving news.

  “I’ve certainly heard quite a bit about you in recent days! There is all kind of chatter about a person who had become a Speaker without visiting the temple,” Jimes exclaimed. “And your words about Ivaric don’t surprise people too much.

  “The person you seek in Avaleen is Artin. He’s been there for several years. Good luck sending whatever message you seek to deliver.

  “And I haven’t seen your friend Jade all day, but when I do, I’ll give her your greetings. Safe travels, and tell me that you’re coming back soon. Please confirm arrival of this message, Jimes,” the voice ended.

  Silas stood for a moment to digest the words, then turned and saw that Ruten was scrutinizing him closely.

  “It’s over. I got the message,” Silas explained.

  “You heard a voice talking?” Ruten asked dubiously. “I’ve never been around a Speaker in action. I didn’t hear a thing, but you did?” he asked.

  “I received a message. It was around seventy or eighty words,” Silas measured the length of the message unconsciously, in the way that all Speakers did.

  “It told me what I wanted to know, so I can send out more messages tomorrow. I talked to Prima today,” he clarified.

  “So our all-knowing leader told me,” Ruten affirmed. “Ready for a last stretch of practice?” he asked, and they proceeded to cross sticks for several more minutes.

  When practice was done, Silas ate dinner, then returned to his wagon and pulled out his mirror. He had his writing pad ready so that he could converse with Jade, and he turned the mirror over as he sat in the gloom of sunset, hoping to see his friend.

  Instead, he found a different view, a new one. It was a dressing room, but an empty one. He wondered if Princess Lumene had chosen to have her mirror moved to a new room, and what that meant for his ability to see Jade, but then his mind refocused, and he realized the room he was viewing was not in the palace at Amenozume – it was the dressing room of Dianu, the young wife of Stout, the master of the Healing Guild. He’d been in that room – after some misadventure in moving the mirror into it.

  “Great gods!” he muttered. “Am I able to look into every mirror on the face of the land?”

  He thrust the mirror back into the pack, while making a note of the Healing Guild mirror. Perhaps it would come in useful someday, just as the Amenozume and Ivaric mirrors had proven to be useful. He didn’t know how, but he would keep it in mind.

  And, he told himself, he would try his best not to spy on Lady Dianu in her dressing room.

  The mirror came back out, and showed the correct location. The mirror showed an empty room, one that was well lit by the sunlight that streamed in through the windows of the western location where the sun was still high in the western sky. There would be no Jade to speak with that evening, Silas sadly concluded, and he put the mirror away.

  Chapter 27

  Silas awoke the next morning, aware that he had dreamed of sending messages about Ivaric out to the Speakers on the world. He was ready to do it in real life as well, now.

  After training and care for Hron, and then breakfast, the caravan began to turn south; its journey to the east had taken it beyond the boundaries of Barnesnob, into an unclaimed territory of independent towns and small cities. There were no more profitable points further east, Prima maintained, so the wagon train would turn south and go towards the kingdom of Faralag, at the extreme southern end of the continent.

  Faralag was a weakly ruled nation, with a king who had a court and little else in the way of government, Prima had explained. But it was a nation that seemed to function nonetheless. It had no neighbors other than Barnesnob to its north, the Spinal Mountains to its east, and the ocean to its west and south.

  Prima’s wagon contained a map of the entire continent, and Silas had studied it once upon a time. The nations of Ellan Sheeant were nearly all aligned along the western shore of the continent, while the Granite Range Mountains were a curving, impregnable barrier running down the middle of the land from north to south. But on the eastern side of the mountains, there were no nations, no cities, nothing denoted on the map.

  Silas had asked Ruten about the empty eastern half of the continent, and why it existed in such a state.

  “It’s haunted over there, they say,” Ruten answered.

  “The whole place?” Silas asked skeptically.

  “I know, it’s hard to imagine. Every year someone travels over there and tries to homestead, and they always end up coming home saying things move around, the place is cursed, there are voices in the air. No one stays more than a few weeks,” Ruten replied emphatically. “I may not believe it, but I don’t say they’re all liars either.”

  Silas briefly pondered the exchange with Ruten, wondering what it would be like to visit the haunted east. Perhaps with a Speaker along to announce the events as they happened, people would better be able to understand and even explain.

  Soon though, he decided the time had come for him to send out his message. The hours of the morning had flown by, so that the Speakers in every western nation would have risen and begun listening for messages. He pulled out the message he had received from Charms, hoping that having its written words in front of him would help steady him as he made the factual statement that Prima had proposed he share.

  Hron pulled the wagon at a steady gait, and there was nothing of substance for Silas to do on the gently rolling road, so he felt free to begin his broadcast.

  “This is Silas, a Speaker in a traveling caravan, far east of Barnesnob, with a message for Artin of Avaleen,” Silas was facing towards the rear of the southbound wagon, looking to the nation in the north west as the wagon was pulled in the opposite direction. Silas was kneeling on the bench, bending over its back as he repeated his opening comment.

  “I want to tell you some facts. A few weeks ago, I saw a warehouse in Ivaric, one that was full of crates and bags. Then men in uniforms began to enter the warehouse. For day after day after day, I saw a steady stream of men walking through the warehouse, at least hundreds every day. They all were collecting weapons in the warehouse – swords, spears, shields, bows and arrows. They were preparing for war, and there were ever so many,” Silas was looking at the message from Charms, but now he focused more intently on it.

  “Their target may not be Shouldteen as I thought. I have been told,” he paused and looked for the exact wording, “the true target of the coming Ivaric war is Avaleen, not Shouldteen,” he repeated Charms’s verbiage, and as he focused on the paper’s message, it flew out of his hand.

  “Think on what I say,” he hastily ended his message. “This is Silas.”

  And with that he hopped down and scrambled down the road, running to the north to recapture the wayward piece of paper. He was the last wagon in the line of the caravan, so there were no intervening vehicles behind him to get in his way, allowing him to soon capture the message, then turn and catch his breath before he trotted forward to return to the still rolling wagon, which Hron had placidly pulled along despite the lack of a driver.

  It had happened again! Despite his annoyance at the need to run like fool, Silas felt an exultation. He was convinced that he had exercised telekinesis! Not only could he move words through the air over impossible distances, but he could move objects. It was an unheralded skill, an accomplishment that no one would believe until he demonstrated it.

  But he wouldn’t be able to demonstrate it until he knew exactly how he had done it.

  He wanted to practice, to experiment, to test and try and give every effort possible to discovering the secret that he didn’t understand. But first he had to deliver more messages by the usual Speaker means. Then, when that was done, he could try and play and practice all he wanted to recapture the unusual ability.

  He proceeded to send out a half dozen
more versions of his story, omitting the part that was a quote from Charms, and leaving only the facts about his own observations. He even sent his message to the Master of the Guild at Heathrin, to leave no doubt about what message he had spoken….and to perhaps rub the nose of the intransigent Master in the reality of Silas’s disobedience.

  When that was done, he was ready to begin practicing his telekinesis. Except he decided there was one other thing to do, and that was to look in his mirror to see if Jade was available for a chat.

  She was. She was waiting for him it seemed, her face low and close to the mirror, her complexion pale except for the dark rings below her eyes. Something was very wrong, Silas could see.

  “I’m so glad you’re here! I need a friend,” she scribbled her message madly when she saw Silas.

  “What happened?” he scribbled just as frenetically and raised his pad.

  “Mata is in prison!” Jade’s paper held a shocking report, one marked by the tear drop that had splashed upon it as she wrote.

  Chapter 28

  “How? Why? She’s too good!” Silas wrote back, startled by the incredible pronouncement that the pearl-diving girl had been arrested.

  Jade held up a finger to signify the need to wait, then she began to write furiously on her pad, covering the full paper with the beginning of her message for Silas. She turned the pad over, as Silas waited impatiently, his mind unable to conjure any scenario that could lead Mata to criminal activity.

  At last, after a pause that seemed to last for hours, Jade held up her pad, and Silas began to read.

  Of all the impossible reasons that could force Mata into the cruel arms of the guards, only one was remotely possible, and somehow it had managed to come true. Silas ground his teeth in frustration.

  Ivaric was at the root of the problem. No matter the distance, the evil nature of the cruel kingdom had managed to contaminate and hurt a good person on Amenozume.

  Silas digested the series of messages that Jade proceeded to reveal through the mirror. Jade had been shocked by a visit from other pearl divers who had come to the palace and demanded to see her. They had eventually persuaded the guards to pass a note to Jade, and then spoken to the lady-in-waiting in person to explain what they knew.