The Conservation of Magic
Page 23
Merrick nodded and began the process of introducing himself properly. He went to each of the pieces of the earth, one by one, and tried his hardest to learn their names. Each one was completely different than the other, so he could not figure any way to remember their names, other than repeating them over and over in his head. Each time he learned a new name, from either Fenton or from the object itself, he carefully touched the thing, trying to understand and to feel its true nature through his fingertips.
After a few hours, he was exhausted, but he showed Fenton and Balach what he had learned by repeating the creation names of every living thing he could find in the area. He only made one or two minor errors in the pronunciations that were quickly corrected.
Fenton told Merrick and Balach to step back, as he had one more thing to do before they retired for the night. Fenton stood with his hands placed flat against the interior mountain wall. Although Fenton’s back was all that Merrick could see, he could hear the assertive sounds of the Earth Dragon tongue booming forth.
Merrick listened to Fenton’s words, sounding like giant boulders grating together. He hoped that he could someday deliver his words with the same assertiveness. The phrases held no anger or tone of superiority, but they were enunciated with natural authority and confidence. Fenton was a man who was more than just a Master Builder—he was sure of who he was and was confident in both his power and that of his surroundings.
When Fenton was finished talking to the mountain, silence engulfed all three of them.
Turning from the mountain with a smile on his face, Fenton walked up to Merrick and Balach, explaining to them that he had just told the mountain that Merrick might be building there and had asked the mountain to only let him build within a certain area. Fenton wanted to make sure that nothing Merrick did would affect the rest of the city. It was a precaution that he was sure the Queen and the council would require anyway, and doing so ahead of time might speed the approval process.
The three of them walked back to Fenton’s house, ready to sit down and talk about the day’s events before heading to sleep. Fenton promised to speak to the Queen the next day and to hopefully have an answer for Merrick by that evening.
Merrick could not resist smiling. Things were finally going right for him, and he was joyous at the thought of building his own dwelling. His only concern was getting the Queen’s approval.
That night, he lay awake, staring at the ceiling, going over the new creation names he had learned that day and trying to emulate, in his mind, the tones that Fenton had used when he had spoken to the mountain. Even as his excitement and anticipation grew, he felt a twinge of sorrow at the thought of leaving Fenton’s home. Ohman may have been his father, but Fenton and Balach were becoming more like family to him than anyone he had ever known.
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Heinin stared at the inside of the thatched roof, trying to fall asleep. It was strange, being here by himself. He felt like an adult, but still missed his parents. Other than the animals, they were his only real friends. He remembered his mom often saying that a mother had to love her son, but that she didn’t have to like him. She was always quick to follow up by telling Heinin how much she loved and liked him.
His mother and father had met when they were both children, when their families lived up on the mountain. Heinin often wondered how he would ever meet his wife if he never left his life here. There was a whole world out there, with plenty of young women just waiting to meet a respectable, hard-working fellow like him—at least that’s what his mother always told him.
Maybe when his parents returned, he would talk to them about going to school down in the next valley over. They did their best to educate him at home, and he learned to read and write and even to speak some of the dying language of Gaelic that both of his parents spoke. But he longed for the companionship of others his age.
As his thoughts spun, he gradually faded off to sleep. He’d talk to Mom and Dad when they got back the day after tomorrow. Even though he felt anxious about finding someone sooner rather than later, he also knew that he was still young, and that he had his entire life ahead of him.
CHAPTER 26
CARA HAD GOTTEN only as far as the coastline of Scotland before the earth had refused her further passage. She had gotten stuck there, as one with the slime and vegetation of the ocean floor, trying to think of how to proceed. In the end, she had decided to return to Rune Corp. Even though she had traveled along Terrada’s spine many times before, she still found it hard to perform normal mental tasks while doing so. Simply making the decision to return had exhausted her.
Normal humans could not even relate to using the earth as a means of transit. They had nothing to compare it to. Traveling through all of Terrada’s incarnations was nothing like being a passenger on a train riding along a set of fixed tracks. It was more like traveling from the top of an hourglass to the bottom, particle by particle, losing oneself literally in one’s surroundings.
Cara sat alone in her office, analyzing her failed journey to the Earth Clan’s city. The best she could figure, the council must have extended and tightened their security wards around the mountain, charming the earth into not allowing any visitors whatsoever. What a useless thing to do, Cara thought. Didn’t the council realize that Eudroch would travel on Sigela’s tail, not Terrada’s, to reach them? Even the tightest of Earth security wards wouldn’t stop Eudroch and his tribe from riding the lightning. That’s how Cara would invade the Earth City if she were Eudroch.
Maybe the clan really was led by fools, just like her father had always told her—dangerous fools, but fools nonetheless.
With Earth travel no longer an option, Cara would have to go with a more conservative mode of transportation. It would take an airplane about nine and a half hours to get to Heathrow and then another hour or so to shuttle to Edinburgh, Scotland. From there, they’d have to rent a car and drive as far as she could into the Highlands, taking another few hours or so. The team would have to hike in the rest of the way, where the terrain was too rough even for the most hardy of sports utility vehicles. All in all, it would be a couple days before they arrived at the mountain of the Earth Clan and then who knew how long it would take to infiltrate the clan’s home. All of this was assuming that she and the rest of the team could sleep on the way over the ocean, so as to minimize the effects of jet lag—a concept she had heard all about, but had never experienced for herself—yet another benefit of traveling through Terrada.
Now, she had to tell the rest of the team so they could be ready in time. Most of the employees would have to stay behind, to continue fortifying the building, in case the fight came to their front door, but she needed Chris and the team she had asked him to form while she was gone. She hoped that Chris was over his anger about the way Rune had tampered with his memory for the last couple of years.
Cara called in her secretary and instructed her on the flight arrangements to be made. Cara then made her way to the lab where she figured Chris would be working to perfect his cube configuration.
As she suspected, Cara found Chris and Melanie both in the lab, six divinium cubes connected with thin wiring made also of divinium and arrayed on the long workbench. Cara quickly told Chris and Melanie about her failed travel and that they had two hours to have the team ready. Their flight left at noon. They would have to pack light, and put the cubes in their carry-on luggage to make sure nothing happened to them in transit.
“Anything else?” Chris asked as Cara started to walk out the door.
“Just one more thing,” Cara said. “Make sure the team knows what they may be up against. They need to stay on their guard, even before we get close to the Highlands. Eudroch or his people could be anywhere. We have no intelligence at all about their activities or their location. If you sense hesitation in any of the team, replace them with someone else. This is going to take everything they’ve got. Understand?”
Both Chris and Melanie nodded as they turned back to work on the cubes.
As she made her way to the elevator, Cara passed the giant yew tree. She knew that her father was gone, but she could feel his presence when she looked at the mighty yew tree that stood as the central pillar of the company her father had built.
When she arrived downstairs, she pushed through the swinging double doors and walked out to the center of the basketball court. Seconds later, Chris arrived with Melanie and three other Rune Corp employees following closely behind. Ann was almost as experienced as Melanie and had been with the company almost since its opening days. Gary and Steve looked like the proverbial muscle of the group, in shape with short-cropped hair. They were all excited with just a hint of fear passing through their faces—just the way Cara wanted them—afraid enough not to try anything stupid, but amped up enough to carry through with the mission.
As they gathered around, Cara told them to follow her to the Women’s locker room door. Once there, she placed her hand on the back wall that was made of large concrete blocks. She spoke a short series of Earth Dragon words, calling the concrete by the names of its separate components. As she did, a circular portal expanded to fill the wall, and Cara stepped through to a previously hidden room on the other side.
Once inside, Cara pointed out a series of suit bags hanging across a single metal pole that floated in mid-air in the middle of the room.
Turning to the group, Cara proceeded to take off her clothes, quickly and without losing eye contact with the astonished Chris. She then turned and unzipped one of the garment bags to reveal a shimmering black set of clothing. Quickly slipping into the one-piece outfit, Cara pressed the front of it closed, the material adhering to itself despite the lack of any apparent buttons or tabs. Once the suit was on, it shimmered with the familiar pulsations of the divinium cubes. In her skin-tight divinium battle suit, Cara looked more like a sports model than a corporate executive about to go to war.
The group of Rune employees stood motionless. Cara imagined that Chris was still trying to come to terms with the fact that he had just seen her without any clothes on. Melanie and Ann were already blushing, having figured out that Cara meant for them all to change into their battle suits right away. Cara cleared her throat, and each of the five members of the team walked hesitantly toward the suit rack. With the two women turning their backs to the group, they all quickly stripped down and suited up.
Cara stood in front of them, her face taking on a look of stern concentration.
“Listen up,” Cara said. “These suits are more than just stylish. They’re made from the same material as the cubes. That means that when you’re wearing them, you’ll have a stronger connection to your cube. You’ll also be able to cast spells with greater force than you ever have been able to in the lab. The bad news is that, each time you use your cubes, you’ll be drawing mostly on your own internal magic—so use them sparingly—only when necessary. Don’t depend on your cubes for things you can do without magic, or you’ll be too old to be of any use when and if we get into the battle proper.”
“We’ve never had to worry about the cubes sucking our lives away before this,” Chris said.
Cara looked at Chris. She knew that her answer was going to raise his anger again, but she felt that she owed Chris and the rest of the team the truth.
“The divinium…the cubes always have this effect if they’re used to tap into a user’s internal magic. Divinium helps its wielder draw magic from the source of least resistance. The cubes you’ve all been using are designed to always siphon energy from the user, just as these suits are. Your cubes have always worked off of your own magic, but we restore any energy you lose every time you leave the building by replacing it with magic energy from the earth herself. Our entire human employee population working round the clock until they died wouldn’t use enough energy to make a dent in the earth’s magic.”
Just as Cara had thought, Chris went silent, obviously trying to hold back his anger. She saw him shake his head and take a deep breath, trying to calm himself.
“Anything else we should know about, Cara?”
“Just remember what I said, and you’ll all be fine. You’ll get all your life energy back when we return to Rune Corp. Now—put your street clothes on over the suits, get the cubes and the rest of the equipment in our bags and let’s get going. We’re looking at a day to get into Scotland, another day to get near the Earth Clan mountain and then it could be another day or two, I’m not really sure, to get into the mountain. It will depend on Merrick’s situation when we get there. I’ll brief you all in the plane…and don’t look so scared, at least we’re traveling first class.”
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As they headed to the airport in the Rune Corp corporate van, Chris tried hard to suppress his smile, opting for Cara to think he was still angry. He wouldn’t admit it to Cara, but he loved the divinium suit he was wearing. It was like a second skin, and he could feel his own power coursing through him, ready to be tapped at a moment’s thought.
With the suit to help him, he felt even more certain of his abilities. The rest of the team would fare well also—they would be equipped with the cubes that held the new configuration that Chris had developed and that Melanie had altered to make it easier for normal people to use.
Chris’ cube, however, was loaded with his own raw configuration, with none of Melanie’s changes—none of the childish interfaces and certainly none of the conservative safety features. With his configuration, Chris could make use of every single word in Rune Corp’s partially constructed lexicon of the Earth Dragon. The others only had access to the canned spells and enchantments that had been tested and proven in the lab, even though they had all been tweaked for battle use.
Chris knew that the real world was usually nothing like the lab. He had grown up in D.C. and had been picked on mercilessly as a child for being too smart and too stuck-up. When he was a little older, his parents sent him to take a Karate class. Chris had excelled in class, working his way up to the rank of brown belt in three years. Before he was about to go for his black belt test, Chris had been beaten up by some of the rough kids at school. Everything he had learned and done so well in the classroom had been worth nothing. After that, Chris had started hanging out with a different, rougher set of friends. He helped them cheat with their schoolwork, and they taught him how to really survive on the streets. It had been a hard apprenticeship, but one that gave him lessons he wasn’t going to forsake now. He was packing serious magical power, and he wasn’t about to water down his chances of survival by going along with what Melanie, Cara, or the lab said was best. To survive on the outside, you had to be agile and adaptable, ready to do whatever was necessary to win—and that’s what Chris intended to do.
Looking out the van window, Chris realized that this was the first time he had been outside of Rune Corp while still being able to remember everything about magic and the cubes. Chris unobtrusively touched his satchel that contained his extra set of clothes. Through the fabric of the folded up material inside, he could also feel the hardness of the spare cube he had packed. He was sitting at the rear of the van so that he would be the last one out when they were dropped off at Dulles Airport. It was a simple plan, but Chris hoped that it would work. He had recorded a detailed set of instructions and messages and stored them on the spare cube, which he had stowed, along with a headset and an enunciator, in a separate bag in his satchel. He was sure that, given the time of their flight, the lines for checking in would be long, giving him plenty of opportunities to make his excuses to go to the men’s room. He would find a locker and put the cube inside. Then, he’d simply place the key somewhere where he was sure to find it after all of this was over and he had a chance to retrieve t
he cube. Chris was counting on the fact that, once reminded of magic by his own voice, his full memory would be jogged. At the least, he was sure that he could learn how to use the cube from his recorded directions in a short amount of time. As to what he would do after that, he wasn’t sure. Maybe win the lottery somehow, or maybe just sell the cube to the highest bidder and let its new owner worry about what to do with it.
Everything was looking up for Chris. He was about to save the day for Cara when they met up with this Eudroch character, and he was only a short time away from becoming rich. Unable to suppress it any longer, Chris smiled. He was ready to face whatever Eudroch or anyone else could throw at him, on his own terms, and in his own way. Things couldn’t be better. If Eudroch was anything like his brother, Merrick, Chris was sure that he would have no problem taking him down.
CHAPTER 27
FENTON RETURNED FROM speaking with the Queen, with a look of astonishment on his face.
Merrick feared the worst, but Fenton told him and Balach that the Queen had given her permission. Fenton would not even have to go before the council. The Queen had said that she saw no reason why Merrick shouldn’t have his own home, and thought that it might be a good project to help him work on developing his craft.
Even though the day was half over, Fenton, Balach, and Merrick went to work right away on Merrick’s new home.
At first, Merrick was not able to duplicate his previous success at breaking the stone with a clean edge. Instead, the stones broke off in chaotic chunks, falling to the ground and throwing up rock dust. Fenton explained to Merrick that he had to calm down.
“Your enthusiasm’s getting in the way of your focus,” Fenton told Merrick. “First, you master and control your technique—then you can use your zeal to add power to your craft.”