Turiel held the blade up to the light of the fire for a moment. “This is very nice, young man. Very nice indeed. You made this?”
“I did.”
“You should be proud to have created something of this quality at such a tender young age.”
“I am a century old.”
“Still just a pup,” Turiel cooed, setting the blade in her lap to continue her work.
“We should also consider the possibility that Deacon, if he is subverted, will be expecting this. With the amount of intrinsic difficulty in establishing a link of communication, it would require no effort at all to block or intercept said communication. If Deacon, or someone with access to his expertise, does not want us to communicate with the outside world, we will not. Certainly not with methods he prepared personally.”
“So what would you suggest?” Desmeres asked.
“My sister’s assessment of a portal is one possibility. However, given that the chaotic nature of the portal that deposited Deacon led to his current predicament, and given that the portal that delivered Turiel to me required the single most potent mystic focus in all the world as a target to bring her here safely—and even then it required some intervention on my part—I think it is safe to say we will not be transporting anyone. The swiftest and most certain method would be to send someone through the cave. They could bring a pad and stylus, or similar communication device of our creation, and thus open both a means of communication and a thread to copy for further communication devices to be created on your side. And whatever messenger brings the pad would be far more capable of ensuring the message is delivered, and might even be able to render aid.”
“But the falls have begun.”
“That isn’t an insurmountable problem to solve. Merely a very challenging one.”
“You should certainly send someone. And when you do, they should take this with them,” Turiel said.
She handed the dagger back to him. The weapon had no outward signs of having been altered, but even Desmeres’s untrained mind could sense an influence. Turiel had added an enchantment to the weapon.
“What have you done to it?” he asked.
“I have prepared it to deal with Deacon’s issue.”
“In what way?”
“I understand death in a way that few people do. Thus, I understand rot. And when the rot begins, there is only one thing you can do. Cut away the damaged tissue.”
“You are suggesting that the proper way to cure Deacon is to kill him?”
“No. I’m telling you to cut away the part that is rotten.”
“And how do you expect me to do that?”
“With that blade.” Turiel turned to Azriel. “Not the brightest fellow, is he?”
Further assessment by Turiel or objection by Desmeres was interrupted by a soft clinking sound followed by a crackle and whimper.
“What is that scamp up to?” Turiel said.
Desmeres and Azriel hurried from the room. He slipped the blade into its sheath and nearly crashed into Azriel as she stood with hands on her hips at the scene playing out before her. Mott was on the table. He’d coiled his tail around the fishbowl and had two of his spidery legs clacking about, chasing the tiny Calypso. Rather than allow herself to be menaced, she’d frozen Mott’s jaw shut.
“Mott!” Azriel shouted. “You are a guest here, and we do not treat ourselves to other guests.”
Mott turned to her, ears and head drooping. He unwrapped himself from the bowl and clattered dejectedly to the room to seek solace with Turiel.
“My apologies, I am unaccustomed to having so many guests at once without some manner of a structured activity to occupy them,” Azriel said.
She lifted the bowl and handed it to Desmeres. He tried to ignore the fact that the unfathomably powerful wizard who had escorted him here was now sulking in a container small enough for him to hold without much difficulty.
“I do hope you have found this visit fruitful. My advice is to create something in the vein of Deacon’s pads here in Entwell and send it along with a messenger as soon as possible. I am confident the people of Entwell will be able to oblige, but if you prefer, I believe I can work up a procedure for their creation. It should be an engaging exercise, and I quite likely can achieve it more quickly than our current crop of gray wizards.”
“That might be best.”
“Excellent. Will there be anything else?”
Desmeres was tempted to take this opportunity to make his exit. Thus far he’d escaped any of her more unsettling whims, unlike Calypso. But there was a lingering point of concern. He glanced down at the bowl.
“Forgive me, just a moment more.” He looked to Azriel. “And this matter is something I think you would prefer if we discussed alone. Just you and I.”
“As you wish.”
The bowl in his hands became somewhat heavier. He glanced down to discover that what had once been a bowl of water was now a perfectly round orb of solid glass with Calypso’s tiny form frozen in the center like an insect in amber. When he looked up, he found the door to the adjoining room had vanished.
“What did you wish to discuss?”
He spoke quickly. Though he imagined whatever Calypso was experiencing at the moment wasn’t life-threatening, he very much doubted it was pleasant.
“There is the matter of your sister. What is to become of her?” he asked. “By many measures, she has the bloodiest hands in our world’s history. To spend the rest of her days pleasantly chatting with her sister in a cottage tucked away from the world hardly seems fitting.”
Azriel shut her eyes and crossed her arms. “She has much to answer for. I am neither inclined, nor qualified, to judge her or to absolve her. If she can be redeemed, it will be a long road. But it is a road that should be taken. Justice will be served, and my affection for her should not shield her from the consequences of her actions. But my sister and I have been apart for many years. Forgive my selfishness, but I wanted some time with her before whatever must be done is done. For this reason, I am trusting you to keep her presence here a secret. And I believe I can trust you in that.”
She tapped his head. “Just by coming here, you give me a far clearer view of your nature than you might realize. You are not trustworthy, but in this, you can be trusted.” She tapped the glass orb. “Calypso, not so. Too much curiosity, too much duty. Does that satisfy you?”
“It doesn’t satisfy me in the slightest, but it answers my question.”
“Quite understood. Give me a day or so and you can send someone in to collect the proper spell to create one of Deacon’s pads, or something suitably similar. Until then, I bid you farewell.”
Her final words were still reverberating through the air when Desmeres suddenly and startlingly found himself standing on the glassy surface of the crystal arena once more. The orb had vanished from his grip, replaced with the fishtailed form of his mermaid chaperone cradled in his arms. The sudden weight of a full-sized mermaid sent them both toppling to the ground. Calypso untangled herself from him. A gasping breath and a few hasty spells later, she crawled from atop him with a fresh pair of legs and helped him to his feet.
“I swear she is harder on wizards than warriors,” Calypso said shakily as she tugged him from the surface of the arena. “It is a sign of respect, but it is difficult to embrace it when you are dodging the jaws of a massive abomination while on display like a pet. Do we have a solution?”
“I’ll fill you in with what I can, but I certainly hope time isn’t of the essence, because it seems the only way we are getting word to the outside world is via an old-fashioned messenger.”
“I see. That… that is disappointing. But still, we mustn’t give up. Life isn’t life without some worthwhile challenges.”
Chapter 7
Ivy plucked the strings of her violin with her claws. It had been her hope that she could get Leo to keep some sort of beat with the drum she’d given him. Alas, his enthusi
asm could not be contained by the structure of any normal song. Ivy decided to simply fill the space between beats with the best approximation she could muster of a pizzicato tune that might accompany such a din. It served the purpose of keeping Leo distracted. In many ways, this made Ivy the most successful at her assigned task.
Myranda had returned from the front. The stream of messages had slowed considerably, though what messages did come through told tales of gradually more worrisome events. This at least provided enough of a gap in the flow of information for Myranda to jot down her own message informing them of the developments at the front. Since then, she’d been doing her best to make sense of what the events might have in common. She and several scribes had worked their way through the information, and now she was making use of a room in the palace she’d unsuccessfully attempted to avoid having rebuilt. The war room.
Freshly painted lines and labels separated a large table into a map of the three kingdoms and Tressor. Troop markers had been repurposed to label the locations of the unexplained events. Now, while Ivy and Leo filled the air with their cacophony, Myranda attempted to find patterns.
“Is this noise a problem?” Ivy asked. “It’s the only thing that keeps little Leo from calling for Deacon.”
“Ivy, if you ever have a child, and I hope that you do, you will learn just how effectively a parent’s mind can inure itself to a racket.”
A gust of wind threatened to knock the latest markers from their place. Ether stepped into the room a moment later.
“What have you found?” Myranda asked without taking her eyes from the map.
“As with the last three events you sent me to investigate, I found no trace to physically or mystically imply something had occurred. It is clear to me that most of these reports are due to imagination and panic.”
Myranda plucked a marker from the map and set it aside.
“However, as I returned, I spotted another. In the Rachis Mountains, the mausoleums where the black carriages left their cargo.”
Ivy shivered. “The place where the dead came back to life. We just read through that part of Deacon’s account.”
“It was that precise event, save one significant difference. We weren’t there. The ruined husks rose. The great stone structures fell. Every attack I had hurled that day landed, I simply wasn’t there to throw it. And before the battle could come to the same end as it did the first time, it all vanished, returned to the stone rubble we left behind.”
“So the events are still brief. That is a small mercy. I suppose it is good news that there aren’t echoes of us included. This is troubling enough without the appearance that we are actively engaged in such matters,” Myranda said.
“It further illustrates that what we are seeing are not perfect recurrences. It is not truly a moment of another time, but some sort of living memory.”
“A living memory that can open the same scars as the original moment.” Myranda rubbed her eyes. “Tell me you see something I don’t.”
Ether looked over the table. “It all appears random to me,” she said.
“Why in the name of the gods did this have to occur at a time when Deacon isn’t here? He would have been giddy with delight attempting to solve this riddle.” She looked to Ivy. “Have you tried the pad recently?”
“I wrote him letters in the big pad. And Leo scribbled.”
Myranda gazed at the map. “… Perhaps there’s too much information…” She turned to her scribes. “Is there anything remaining that we cannot confirm?”
They consulted the copious notes and, using hooked sticks, plucked away a handful of the markers. Only seven markers remained. Myranda darted her eyes across them.
“Castle Verril. Kenvard Palace. Bydell… I know these other places. There. That is where I rescued you from where the D’Karon were holding you. And that is where we found Ivy. If we include the sighting of the white wall, that was where Lain fell… They’re all beginnings and endings for us.”
“But what of Wolloff’s tower? You’ve swept items from the map based on arbitrary criteria. You are seeing patterns where you wish to see patterns.”
“Perhaps. But without anything more useful to draw upon, I can at least test if the pattern holds.”
She raised her hand to will a handful of white markers into the air. One by one she dropped them down in all the places she recalled significant wins or losses during their journey through the Northern Alliance in the final days of the D’Karon. Several landed beside the remaining markers. One of them was alone. It was a small lake quite far from any cities.
“The place where we lost Myn,” Myranda said. “It is too far from a city to have been easily observed. Ether, I want you to go there. If you find evidence that that horrid day has played itself out again, let me know. If not, remain there for a time. As useful as it would be to know that we’ve worked out a proper pattern, it would be far more useful to discover we were able to predict an event.”
“As you wish,” Ether said. She whisked into her wind form again and slipped away.
“Wow,” Ivy remarked. “She must really be as baffled as we are. She did what you asked without even dismissing it as a waste of her time.” The malthrope looked to Leo. “Now I’m worried…”
#
Desmeres paced toward the lake near the oceanside cliffs at the eastern edge of Entwell. Following the latest somewhat uneventful treatment from Vedesto, he’d returned to his quarters to find a note from Calypso requesting his presence there. For lack of a proper method to get her attention, he crouched by the lakeside and selected a smooth stone. A practiced motion sent the stone skipping across the surface. He watched the little ringlets produced by the stone ripple in ever-expanding circles across the lake’s surface. When they’d nearly died away, and Desmeres was considering selecting a second stone, a new ripple appeared. It was wedge-shaped and moved toward him with purpose. Calypso broke the surface of the water and came to a stop just beyond the shore.
“Excellent! You’re through already. Come! I think I have something,” she said.
“Come? You wish me to join you in the lake?”
“Don’t dawdle,” she snapped.
She turned her back on him and motioned with her hand. He interpreted it as a beckoning motion for him to follow into the water—something he had no intention of doing. As it turned out, the motion wasn’t intended for him, but for the water itself. A swell of crystal-clear lake water lurched past the bounds of the shore and drenched him. As it washed back into the lake, it dragged him along, plunging him into the water. Unlike when the water had swept upon him in the crystal arena, this was in no way illusory. He was actually dragged beneath the surface, blinking to focus his eyes and fighting to hold his breath. Calypso took him by his false hand and dragged him downward. As she swam, she gushed with words, far too excited to share her thinking to wait for him to reply.
“I’ve been waiting for you. Frankly, you are the only one I can discuss this with, at least for now. I’ve been puzzling over our little problem. I think I may have an answer to the question of how we are going to get word to the outside in a matter of days instead of a matter of months. It’s really been a fascinating riddle, and the answer I’ve got is so simple it just has to be the proper answer. A proper answer is always the simplest one available.” She glanced in his direction. “Oh, my word. Water-for-air first.”
She touched the pendant around her neck with her free hand. Warmth rushed across Desmeres’s body. His held breath suddenly felt wildly insufficient. He coughed out his lungful of air and, in a uniquely terrifying sensation, felt cold water pour in to replace it. A few panicked spasms shook him before he realized that what he would normally classify as drowning had instead taken the place of breathing.
“I’m told that is a bit uncomfortable for the first time. I wouldn’t know. Mermaids have been doing air-for-water for so long, we tend to take our first breath of air long before we’re making any memories.
It is like learning to walk, in a way. Perhaps learning to talk would be more accurate.”
They reached the strangely out-of-place hut at the bottom of the lake. It wasn’t unlike the other huts of the village, save for the fact that it was entirely stone and entirely submerged. Now that the dizzying journey was over and he’d had a moment to come to terms with his aquatic adjustments, Desmeres took a moment to appreciate his surroundings. Beautiful marbled patterns of light shifted along the floor of the lake. A stunning statue of a familiar dragon joined a handful of other statues scattered around the hut.
“Make yourself comfortable,” Calypso said, nudging him into the hut. “I’ll try to lay it out as plain as I can. It is really quite simple.”
She tapped a small crystal dangling from the center of the ceiling. A soft aquamarine glow illuminated the single central room.
“I’d considered all the ‘obvious’ options. Deacon escaped via a portal. A small but crucial issue with that tactic is that it is in violation of our ways. I say this is small because things change, and they should change. It is entirely possible that if presented in a logical and dispassionate light, the elder would give her blessing for such a thing. There remains, however, the more substantial problem, and that is that no one here but Azriel is likely to be able to achieve the desired effect. Even she required aid, and I am quite certain if she had been willing to perform that task, we would not be having this discussion. So we move on. Is there a way to leave this place other than the cave?”
She swirled the water. Crystals began to form, and slowly an icy replica of Entwell formed before her. “You once called this place home,” she said. “Have you ever found yourself in the discussion about its isolation?”
Desmeres experimentally tested his voice, now that he was breathing water, and found it to be operational, albeit with a bit more effort.
“I was somewhat single-minded in my time here.”
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