Manx

by Greg Curtis

  It was a pity. Because a Smythe would be an absolute wonder in unravelling the twisted mass of spells she was dealing with. They understood mazes and locks and traps in a way others couldn't. But he simply wasn't the one they needed.

  “I doubt it too. But his family may be of more use.”

  “Ahh, you want to go to Clairmont!” Finally she understood what Larissa was talking about. “It might help, if there are actually some Smythe's there who understand their family gift.”

  Sorsha wasn't actually certain there would be. Though she hadn't had much of a chance to explore this world – she'd been far too busy freeing their people – it had struck her that things here were very different. Four hundred years without magic had had a vast impact. And every time she took her eyes off the work and looked around the changes hit her.

  It wasn't just that the fashions were strange, the people far more numerous, or the buildings taller. It wasn't even these strange steam powered devices that were everywhere. It was a whole slew of other things. Like where were the horses? The streets should have been full of them. Why was everything covered in a thin layer of soot? And why did these damned machines have to run day and night, lending a strange and unpleasant hum to the air? It was unnatural! And it smelled!

  And then there was the big question. Why did everyone point and stare at her? She knew they hadn't seen a walker before. But even so. They should have got used to the sight of someone with a third eye by now. She'd been here long enough. And until she'd been abducted, no one would have given her a second glance. It was just a normal part of life. As were people with antlers, horns or pointed ears. Certainly no one would have pointed at her. She found it strange. Disconcerting. And sometimes even uncomfortable. As if she'd become a freak – when she'd always been this way. At least since her magic had started to manifest.

  “It seems logical,” Larissa answered her. “You think otherwise?”

  “Two things stuck me while Peth was talking. Other than the image of a man feeding his own child to the lions. And the first was a question. If the world changed so greatly and everyone with magic was locked away, why did the Smythe's escape that fate? How?”

  “Because of all those who the magic claims they're the only ones who don't change form. They can hide.” Larissa looked at her curiously. “Or you think there's something more to it than that?”

  “I do.” Sorsha nodded. “In our time,” – by the gods was that a strange thing to have to keep saying! – “the Smythes weren't an unknown family. Even if they didn't manifest their magic in their form, people knew them and what they could do. So how did they escape the purge?”

  “They're good at hiding. At moving unseen through the world.” Larissa gave her the obvious answer. But then she paused, and considered the matter. “You have another answer?”

  “They haven't changed their names. Surely if they were in hiding that was the first thing they should have done? But instead the Smythes have become some sort of nobility. And they were always a perfidious family. Siding with whoever offered them the best deal. So what if instead they were a part of it? What if the reason they weren't locked away was that they were those doing the locking away.”

  “That's … interesting.” The shaman stood there thinking it over.

  “There's more,” Sorsha continued while the shaman was absorbed in the thought. “Another horribly obvious question. How could the Silver Order have done this?”

  “Because it's such a complex trap?”

  “Because they don't have any significant magic,” Sorsha answered her. “Or they didn't then. They can enchant a few things, but they're no sorcerers. And they're certainly not walkers.” In fact the thought had always been that they were really just the distant descendants of true sorcerers. Not even half bloods. Which explained why they only had eyes of ice blue. A full sorcerer would have had sky blue eyes that glowed and fingernails that did the same.

  There was no proof of that of course. In fact most scoffed at the idea. Someone either was of one of the families or wasn't. But it made sense. And no one had really cared about it anyway. The people with the ice blue eyes had been nobody of importance, until the King had created the Silver Order and they had formed its numbers. Then they'd worried a little. But only a little, because at the end of the day, the Silver Order had only minor magic. How could they keep others with true gifts in line? How indeed, as it turned out! The answer was in front of her of course.

  “There are a lot of them,” Larissa pointed out. “Or there were.”

  “Maybe. But what I'm looking at is far beyond anything I've ever even imagined. It's an almost perfect overlaying and twisting of dimensions through local space and time, that even a master walker couldn't have created. How could a few people with a minor gift for enchantment have created such a thing? Or even a few thousand?”

  “Almost perfect?” Larissa raised an eyebrow in her direction.

  “Almost,” Sorsha stuck to her words. “Only the effects of time and the shoddy spellcraft of those tasked with maintaining this riddle of the realms undid it. If the Silver Order had paid more attention to their work, none of us would ever have escaped.”

  “They were running out of members,” Larissa pointed out.

  “And there's another question in itself. Why?” Sorsha paused for a moment to take a sip of her tea and put her thoughts in order. “I mean if they were on the outside, not locked away like the rest of us, in a world where they had the most powerful magic left, why weren't they growing more powerful? Increasing in numbers and wealth. Their family should have been growing in strength. Instead it seems to have waned.”

  “Four hundred years ago they were becoming something. A force within the world. A family in their own right. And now there are only remnants of them left?”

  The shaman shrugged. “And this concerns the Smythes how?”

  “I think we're looking in the wrong direction. If the Smythes were involved in what was done to us, they won't help us. Especially if, as I suspect, they had a role in creating the mazes protecting the dimensional prisons. But they wouldn't have been very helpful anyway. They're Smythes and we have little or nothing to trade with them in return for their help.” And that was always the first rule when dealing with Smythes. Be prepared to pay. They were mercenary beyond everything else.

  “In any case, I think we need to start hunting down a few of the Silver Order. If anyone can tell us more of what happened and how to fix it, it's them. I think we need to keep looking for this Lady Jayla Marshendale. Redouble our efforts.”

  Everyone talked about her. They wrote about her in the papers. She was the only known member of the Silver Order still in the city. And she was the one the people of the city laid their hopes on. If only they knew the truth! But no one could seem to tell them where she was. Of course that probably wasn't surprising when she surely knew they were looking for her. When she guessed they might not have the best of intentions towards her. But still, unless she'd escaped the city – and from everything she'd heard about her, Sorsha doubted she was the sort of woman to run – she had to be somewhere nearby. And she had to be found.

  “Maybe.” Larissa looked doubtful. “But she's dangerous. And there are still not enough of us free.”

  That was more important to Larissa than to the rest of them, Sorsha knew. She was a shaman. Linked through her Goddess Ao, to other shamans of the same Goddess. But there were a lot of gods out there, and even though many shamans had been freed now, few other than Larissa were followers of Ao. And without others of her faith with whom she could speak across the distances, she felt diminished. Alone.

  But it mattered in other ways. Without the shamans to carry messages across the realm in mere seconds, they were forced to use the druids and their birds. It was a much slower system, which meant that they were always late when it came to learning what was happening in the world.

  “But no one is going to be able to tell us more about this damned dimensional prison than a member of
the Silver Order,” Sorsha replied. And that was what mattered as far as she was concerned. Because some days she doubted that she had the skill to fully unravel the knot in front of her. That was the fear that kept her up at night. That and the thought that she might never find her family. That they would be lost forever in the dimensional maze because of her failure.

  Suddenly she felt guilty for the time she'd taken off talking to Larissa. She should be working. So she swallowed the last of her cup of tea and handed it back to the shaman. “I should really get back to work.”

  And now that she had done enough pushing and pulling at the tangle to expose a bit more of the prison dimension, she should start fishing again. Maybe this time she'd finally catch someone she wanted to see.

  Chapter Twelve

  The library wasn't going to be opening again any time soon. That much was certain. The building, like most of its neighbours in the heart of the city, was covered in vines. Three massive stories of vines, creepers and other hanging plants now called it their rock. It was actually quite pretty in a way. A living tower of green. But the birds nesting in it, weren't so nice as they left their deposits everywhere.

  But at least it didn't have any monkeys. The damned long tail monkeys had taken over half the nearby buildings, and troops of them wandered the city like armies. But thankfully they'd left the library alone. It was probably too far away from the food – which basically meant the outdoor market.

  How could plants grow like this? That was what he didn't understand. Of course he knew it was magic. But just saying that didn't explain anything. And it still wasn't natural. But as he drew his hacker and tested its edge, he had to wonder, what was natural anymore? There were people all around the city with impossible magical abilities. And people with strange deformities – except that they wouldn't call them that he guessed. They were the physical manifestations of their magic – as if that made any more sense.

  In the end though, he knew that none of that mattered. For the moment what mattered was bringing the vines down. At least the ones around the entrance.

  “Careful with that!” Whitey purred at him from his hood. “You know that with your natural lack of grace you could cut something off that won't grow back!”

  “You mean like your head?” He asked pointedly. Manx still didn't know why the cat had come with him. She was after all a cat and they didn't like wandering far. Actually they didn't like wandering at all as far as he could tell. They liked sleeping. Eating. And mostly making his life a misery. But she'd managed to find a comfortable way to travel, making herself at ease in the hood of his coat, and breathing on his neck. It made his skin crawl. He suspected she knew that.

  “Very droll monkey man! But someone has to keep you safe.”

  “You're keeping me safe?!” Manx' eyes nearly fell out of his head. “And if I get attacked by a wolf, what are you going to do about it?”

  “Tell you to run of course!” She purred. “Otherwise you'd probably just stand there and get eaten!”

  Manx sighed. She had an answer for everything. But none of them were good answers. Still he suspected she was actually worried about him. Worried that he might get himself killed and then not come home to feed her! Then he started work with the hacker, smashing it into the vines.

  To his relief they weren't too thick yet. The flesh was still soft enough to cut through easily. And they fell down in a hurry. But that was also a curse. It meant he had a lot of them to start dragging away. All while the birds looked on and squawked.

  “I don't suppose you can tell me what all those damned birds are saying?” he asked as he worked when the din became especially loud.

  “Only that you'd make an exceptionally large target!”

  “You don't understand them?”

  “What's to understand?” she replied. “Birds don't talk. Only cats talk.”

  “And people,” he reminded her.

  “Cat's talk and people mumble things. Like parrots!”

  Manx thought about saying something, but decided against it. There was no winning with the cat. And anyway he had a lot of work to do as the vines covering the entranceway were at least a yard deep. He had to chop them away one by one, taking out the base and then a piece a little above head height, and then drag each piece away and throw it down the steps. He just had to hope that by the time he was finished here, they hadn't regrown and he would have to chop his way out as well.

  But maybe they wouldn't. The freed druids and shamans seemed to have settled down a little in their madness. No large predators prowled the streets any more. The city guards looked almost bored as they patrolled the streets. And the elephants hadn't come back either. But of course there were some things they apparently couldn't do anything about. So birds filled the skies. The monkeys roamed the streets in hordes. And there was no going near the river as the hippos were everywhere. They'd actually turned it into a giant mud bath that ran from one end of Winstone to the other. And of course being hungry, they'd foraged the gardens of every house along its banks. Now those gardens were quickly turning into mud holes as well.

  Things weren't yet returning to normal. But they'd stopped getting worse for the most part.

  It took him about half an hour to finally clear the entrance to the library, and by then he had worked up a good sweat. He could also feel the huge scars along his arm and shoulder, cracking open. That was the one thing no one had ever told him about scars. They didn't stretch like normal skin. And no amount of unguent would fix the problem. Which meant that too much stretching was a problem for him.

  But he put those nuisances aside as he finally unlocked the door and stepped inside the blacked out building.

  “Balls!” He swore as he walked into the cave, shocked by the darkness.

  It shouldn't be that dark. But unfortunately the vines were covering all the windows, stopping the sun's light from reaching the interior. However when he flicked the light switch, things improved remarkably. Obviously the wires were all still intact for the moment and the lightning was still flowing through them.

  The lights added a certain surreal look to the library. All the windows had turned into black mirrors completely surrounding him. The plush blue carpet had for some reason turned purple. And things sparkled strangely. It looked for all the world as if he was in some sort of underworld grotto. But it was still the library he knew.

  “Alright,” he announced to the empty building, “time to get busy.”

  His plan was simple. To go through the shelves full of books on magic and steal every one of them that might be useful to him. Of course what he might find useful was probably not of much use to anyone else.

  “I can't help,” Whitey objected. “I can't turn a page. I can't even pick up a book.”

  “Then you can stay here and guard the door,” he told her. “Or sleep.” He was sure that that was what she'd actually intended to do. She'd certainly never intended to help. She was a cat after all.

  “It doesn't look very comfortable,” she complained, no doubt talking about the check out desk.

  “Fine, I'll do something about that if you get down.”

  The cat did as he asked, for maybe the first time in her life, and was soon standing on the desk, looking around and clearly finding nothing to her satisfaction. But she was happier when he pulled off his long coat and scarf and hat, and placed them on the desk for her to stretch out on. The desk still probably wasn't as comfortable as a bed, but it was better than solid wood. And while she started improving on the softness around her by kneading the thick wool of his coat and no doubt putting holes in it, he grabbed his pack and headed off deeper into the library.

  He didn't have far to go. What books they had on magic, were just at the back of the ground floor. He didn't have any stairs to climb. But he also didn't have a lot of books to search. The library simply didn't keep books on magic and the arcane. Why would it? Nobody wrote them. What it did keep however, were histories and myths and legends. Ancient stories, balla
ds that had been written down, and epic poems. Those were his targets. Because while they weren't books of magic, they did contain references to it. Perhaps more importantly, they had references to thieves. Historic thefts. People wrote about important thefts.

  The shaman and the druid had both informed him that he was a thief from a family of thieves. Magical thieves. And that had sent his thoughts running in strange directions. Because they also referred to themselves as being great families. At the time he hadn't realised that. He'd thought a family was simply a family, or perhaps a lineage. But they meant something else by it. They meant that all druids were a family. All shamans were a family. And probably all walkers or fiends too. Presumably all Smythes were the same.

  How that worked exactly he didn't know. But what he did know was that Smythes were a family of thieves. Not a blood lineage as he'd assumed they meant. But a type of magical person.

  And that in turn had reminded him of another point. Names. When people only had one name, for whatever reason, they usually then chose a second name, a surname, based on either where they lived or what work they did. So there were Whitmores and Sunderstones, both of whom had originally come from those towns. And there were Coopers and Masons, both of whom had probably started out in those trades.