The Sah'niir

by Kim Wedlock

  "Ruined?" He asked carefully.

  "The Sayaah took me to Liaha, our village healer - a mage - and she confirmed with such...certainty that it was magic. There was no room at all for misunderstanding. And from that moment on, I was the pupil of a healer, not a priestess.

  "I'd thought at first that it was a gift from Aya'u, a means of serving Her all the better - I thought, if I could master it, that the other elements would come more clearly and I'd gain attunement with the wind that much more quickly. But Liaha told me that I wouldn't have enough time to train as a healer and as a priestess, and as the magic was a gift from Aya'u - a means to serve Her people - I had no choice but to put that first. And she was right, of course: training my magic took up all of my time."

  He watched her shoulders round beneath the thin cloak, and her eyes gleamed in heartbreak as she reflected on her lost dreams. Anthis was almost afraid to speak, because, in truth, he didn't fully understand. "But you still have a connection to Her," he said very carefully at last. "Everything you've done - you've not lost Her..."

  "...No," she admitted quietly, "Her voice feels distant sometimes...but it has never faded like I feared it would. But this...this isn't what I expected of my life..."

  "There are two sayings among my people: 'life is made of broken expectations', and 'the unplanned moments are the most meaningful moments'. Eyila, the ability to heal - that's no small thing. I know of no other mage who can do it. Except Kienza, I suppose, but...I'm not too sure she's any ordinary mage..." He observed her for a moment, watching her pull at the cloak's fraying hem. "You were called away from becoming a priestess, but Aya'u hasn't abandoned you for it. And I'd say, somehow, you've found some way of balancing it."

  She smiled, and for a moment it shone with nostalgia. "Truth be told, I never fully gave up on my practice. I found moments to slip away - Haya, my best friend, was also training to be a priestess, and she found me in meditation on a mesa one night. Priestesses are forbidden from meditating for more than seven hours a day, but she was sneaking in extra training, anyway, and she...helped me. Offered advice, techniques, passed on anything she'd learned that could be of use to me. But when she reached attunement and became a full priestess, she couldn't spare the time any more. And with my own duties as the village's healer, I...couldn't spare enough time, either. And so I never reached attunement."

  "...Does that matter?"

  She looked at him in surprise, her eyes maimed. "What?"

  "It sounds as though you really couldn't have done both. But Aya'u never abandoned you when your duties changed, just as you never abandoned Her. You still haven't. And isn't that what counts?"

  "...Haya said my 'heart was Hers long ago'."

  "I think she was probably right." Eyila smiled very briefly, but her gloom quickly shooed it off. He sighed to himself. "Well, if it means anything at all, I'm glad you didn't become a priestess. You wouldn't be with us if you were."

  He smiled as she breathed a laugh, and cast him another glancing smile. But her gaze lingered, and he felt his cheeks, obedient and cool for so long, begin to flush. "Thank you," she said, to which he shrugged meekly.

  "You're welcome."

  "No," she turned further towards him, as well as she could upon the branch, "not just for that. Petra told me that you...that you laid out my people by our customs."

  "Oh...well...it was the right thing to do...anyone would have--"

  "No, they wouldn't. Had you not been there, no one else would have done it. Even if they'd thought to, had they been told of those customs beforehand, they wouldn't have done it."

  He disagreed, shaking his head despite her own impassioned tone, but he couldn't bring himself to mention Rathen's name. His voice outright abandoned him however as she leaned over and placed a soft kiss upon his cheek.

  "Thank you, Anthis."

  He didn't notice his foolish smile, and he couldn't have helped it if he had, just as he could do nothing about the burning of his cheeks but turn his head away and try to keep his giddy surprise under control. Which didn't work because he didn't turn his head away in the first place. In his loss for words he gestured instead, waving her gratitude away, and successfully knocked his assembled papers from his lap.

  She laughed heartily as he threw a futile hand after them, and quickly pulled him back before he could slip and follow them. She chuckled again at his defeated smile, and when her own embarrassment began to colour her face, she at least managed to turn away. Looking over the edge, she summoned a wind - with signs this time, Anthis noticed - and the scattered pages lifted from among the old roots and fluttered back up towards him.

  As he reached out to take them, however, he saw something that hit him so hard he thought he'd fallen out of the tree after all.

  Each sheet floated, as tattered as the last, suspended before them in a haphazard spread, and under nothing more than perfect, impossible chance, the overlapping edges of four insignificant pages connected insignificant ink stains. A near-perfect circle was created. And around it, and with a tilted head, the ragged edges and corners of those pages formed an eight-point star. A distinct eight-point star whose top limb was longest, the bottom, left and right half its size, and its four diagonals, little more than meagre flares, were no less intentional.

  Anthis blinked twice, snatched the papers, and scrambled down the tree leaving Eyila frowning after him in disappointment.

  Chapter 41

  "Impossible."

  "What is?" Rathen asked absently, squinting at his scribblings in the waning light of the fire as Garon trudged heavily back into the hollow of the hill they called camp.

  "Petra! How am I supposed to make amends if she won't listen to apology?!"

  "Well you know what they say...'even thorns have roses'..."

  Garon fired him an unappreciative look until the sound of urgent footsteps rushed clumsily in their direction. He tensed and reached for his sword, then grumbled in irritation as Anthis blustered out of the trees, holding aloft a handful of old papers.

  "I was wrong!" The historian declared, stumbling frantically into their hovel while Eyila stepped after him with much more grace. "I was wrong...what are you doing?"

  "Savouring the moment." Rathen opened his eyes and dropped the book into his lap. "Continue." But the three of them frowned when he presented the tattered papers in answer, and proceeded to watch in confusion as Anthis knelt on the beast-worn ground and began scattering them with meticulous precision. Rathen cast Eyila a curious look, but she could only shrug.

  "There."

  They all looked over, but no one made sense of the arrangement until Aria got up, shuffled around at an angle, and examined it with far more open eyes. They snapped up quickly, suddenly beaming. "The anarchists! There was something in the Wildlands after all!"

  "Why wasn't it painted across the walls like the others?" Garon asked as Rathen moved in an attempt to locate the shape himself.

  "Perhaps it was and we missed it. They haven't all been obvious." Anthis knelt closer and began poring over the collection. The others waited - for quite some time - but he didn't speak again. Only once they began to scatter and return to their own business did he finally rouse, and he beckoned Rathen over curtly. "Notes - the Zi'veyn - experimental--"

  "If you would just calm down and breathe you'd make it a much easier time for the both of us."

  He tapped the paper excitedly. "Read it!"

  And, to the best of his ability, he did. His eyebrows rose gradually, he made himself more comfortable, he shuffled the sheets and tilted them into the light, and eventually took them back to his own private spot beside the fire despite Anthis's strangled noises of possessive concern.

  "Well?" Garon asked impatiently after they'd waited in clueless silence for nearing twenty minutes.

  "Experimental notes," Rathen replied without looking up. "Anthis, this elf, he wanted to suspend the magic to stop his friends from getting hurt or hurting anyone else, right? Well, there's sort of a problem wit
h that - I never gave it much thought because it wasn't relevant to what we're using the Zi'veyn to do, but I did wonder about this elf... That suspension is only enforced upon another person while the Zi'veyn is actually being used. As soon as he put it down - or if he was stopped - the magic would be unleashed back into the blood again and whatever he was trying to keep from happening would go ahead and happen. Well, here it looks like he was trying to find a way of prolonging it - trying to encourage the spell in the Zi'veyn to sort of...'cast' another spell itself, or trigger one that would produce a second layer of suspension for a time, even when the Zi'veyn wasn't being actively used. A safeguard for if the wielder was incapacitated."

  "But he couldn't make it work?" Anthis guessed before Garon could voice a hopeful comment, and Rathen promptly shook his head.

  "He tried approaching the magic in different ways, and it looks like he came close to rendering it inert and even disabling it altogether, but the results...frightened him, it looks like, so he abandoned it. I guess he was going to try to use the Zi'veyn as-is, but discreetly."

  "Are there any details?" Garon demanded suddenly, at which point Rathen finally looked up and flinched back as he found all five of them staring at him in anticipation, including Petra, who stood otherwise facing out over their surroundings. "Anything that can help us?"

  "Um," he flicked quickly back over it all. "Yes, but not a lot. Approach with intent to calm, not destroy...that didn't work. Come at it hard and fast, a shock attack to break the magic, again that didn't work...then there's something similar but aiming for the heart - and even if that did work, it's useless to me since the magic is loose...wrapping a spell around it to suspend it and...and modify it to dissolve it?" He looked closer at the paper. "It would only have been temporary while the heart was still in tact, it would have continued to produce magic, but it would have taken a long time to replenish..." his voice descended into a mumble until he lowered the papers and stared off into the fire, lost in thought.

  "Rathen!"

  He snapped back to them. "Uhm? Right. Yes. Well...ultimately the Zi'veyn calms the magic by suspending it in the blood. To do that, something must pass through the blood and come into contact with every mote of magic in it in order to affect it as a whole. The spell in the Zi'veyn is like a net, but it doesn't catch and hold, it just passes over; it screens the blood, detecting everything in it...so if we tightened the net...no, if we replaced it...no, coated it with--if we did something to that net so that each mote of magic wasn't just noted but also tagged by some kind of...parasitic spell, something that could...drain every mote...destroy it..."

  "Can you do it?"

  Now Rathen's quick eyes dulled with hesitance. "I can't modify the Zi'veyn. If I damaged the spell, I couldn't reverse it, and if I tried to reconstruct it, odds are I'd get it wrong, no matter how much Anthis has collected on it. It would need to be a whole new spell." He looked cautiously across their dubious faces, and turned to Garon last. He was just as intense as he'd expected. "I'm trying. And this will help. But more than that, I'm not prepared to say."

  "I have other notes and papers that this might shed some light on," Anthis offered, to which Rathen nodded gratefully. Then, he handed back the papers, avoided the inquisitor's gaze quite deliberately and directed his attention wholly upon Aria and the doll in her hands. It was clear as he seized his notebook, rose to his feet and abruptly declared that she and Isabelle were both in need of a bath, that he had no interest in entertaining their many remaining questions.

  Half Turunda's breadth away, however, there was no such mercy.

  Shadows writhed in the stuffy darkness of corridors and stairwells, reaching away from the pockets of torchlight as though trying to escape the heat rather than through any natural laws. The sconces that had for so long housed gentle and expansive arcane lights now held only fire, and the flames added offensively to the summer warmth that grew only more stifling with every flight of stairs.

  The decree against unnecessary magic was being taken very seriously, even to the point of the grand magister's own discomfort. And yet Owan had pulled a uniform robe over his plain clothes anyway. Temperature aside, anything less would have been unseemly when answering these late-night summons, and the matter must have been serious. Any normal person would have been asleep at that hour.

  Owan, however, had just been pulled away from his work.

  For the last two weeks he, among a select number of trusted mages, had been observing the increasing concentration of magic across various areas in north-eastern Turunda. It hadn't taken long at all to discover an unfortunate pattern, and that in turn had enabled the educated prediction of sites most likely to follow suit. But though they'd dispatched a few to investigate those sites, they'd found nothing and no one unusual - except, of course, the spells the Arana were using to trap such areas in a crude attempt to catch the guilty mages. But they were easily overcome.

  Unfortunately, besides a few key locations to keep an open eye on, they'd learned little at all of consequence.

  His contact with Rathen hadn't yielded much to extrapolate with, either - in fact he'd offered very little; no more or less than what Owan needed in order to confirm a few things he'd already worked out for himself. He was certain it had been a tactical move. Rathen hadn't changed all that much. Born no doubt from concern toward the rebellion, he hadn't wanted to risk anything more than necessary falling into the wrong hands.

  But that tight-lipped response had only lent further credence to his own private suspicions that far more was going on than his old friend would have him know. Had Rathen had a hand in the sudden reduction of magic at other saturated locations? A sparrow could only carry so much paper; he'd likely decided that it wasn't important enough to include. If he was responsible, even partially, he'd probably concluded that the Order didn't need to know. And if he wasn't responsible...well, then there was nothing to tell.

  Assuming of course that Rathen had actually read the entire message properly and didn't just skim over it or only answer the first or last thing he'd read...

  Reaching the door of the eminent office, Owan took a moment to recover from the heat before knocking, and entered at the distracted call from within.

  Aside from the anticipated heat, the first thing to strike him was how old Arator looked. His lined face was twisted in the grips of unpleasant meditation, and his usually neatly combed and tied grey hair was loose and vaguely dishevelled, as though he'd run frustrated fingers through it a few too many times. He did just that as he looked up at Owan's arrival, and though he tried to appear his usual amicable self, gesturing to a chair and offering a glass of water, he was unable to keep the severity from darkening his eyes.

  "I'll get to the point," he said as he dropped heavily back into his own seat. "Earlier today, mages attacked Bowden. There's regrettably nothing unusual about that, and a few still loyal to us and the Crown apprehended them before it could go too far...but..." the old mage sighed. "They've been questioned. It seems there was a little confusion at the onset of their...activity. They were awaiting a signal - the finalé to the fire-breathers' performance. Instead, plumes of fire rose from the centre of the city some ten minutes sooner, and they took that as a modified signal. They thought that something had gone wrong and they should act immediately if their strike was to go ahead."

  "...But it hadn't?"

  "It depends on how you wish to look at it. The Arana were responsible for those plumes."

  Owan's confusion deepened. "The Arana? Were they trying to frame us?"

  Arator grunted a short, humourless laugh. "If they had been, there was little need; the rebels incriminated themselves almost immediately. All the Arana did was hasten them into it. But it's not as simple as all that. It was no mere Aranan mage. It was the keliceran himself."

  "The...the keliceran? That's the...the head of the Arana, isn't it? He has magic? Should he even--should that be allowed?"

  "I can't comment on that," he replied, waving a tired hand
, "but for the head of a powerful authority to possess magic - myself excluded, of course - well...suffice it to say that it's everyone's problem."

  "But how can we be sure that it is the keliceran?"

  "Through our own good fortune - though that is again a matter of perspective. One of our own was in a building overlooking an alley; the activation of magic drew her attention, she looked out, noticed right away that he was not one of us - rebel or otherwise - and so could only have been from the Arana. She witnessed his magic in that moment. Then, she sent me this." He handed him a roll of parchment from his desk and waited as he studied it. Naturally, Owan could only shake his head in ignorance despite the perfect realism of the image. "I know this face," Arator declared. "I met him only once at a Crown meeting, years ago - but, knowing his position, I felt compelled to commit his face to memory."

  "The keliceran...that's..."

  "Impossible." He smiled at Owan's strange look, though he'd known that that wasn't the word on his tongue. "But for all this magic and late awakenings, it has happened. He possessed magic no one - not even himself - knew about until recently, and he has been trained, I would guess, by those among his ranks in order to keep it hidden from the rest of us. His spells were sloppy but they worked well enough, and given that the Arana have developed all kinds of ill spells we can't even begin to guess at...we have no idea what he could be capable of. Or what he would try to do with his new-found power. Power he neither respects nor understands."