The Silver Sorceress (The Raveling Book 2)

by Alec Hutson

  “I am free to go?”

  Demian watched her with eyes of liquid black. “Aye. My servants will not stop thee.”

  Keeping her gaze on the creature, Alyanna began to slowly back towards the cavern’s entrance. It continued to watch her, until her wizardlight had moved far enough away that the thing that had been Demian was swallowed again by darkness.

  She had nearly reached the passage from this place when the voice of the swordsinger came again, echoing in the vast emptiness.

  “Sorceress, a warning. Five abominations are loose again in the world. Children of man tainted by the realm beyond—thou knowest of what I speak, and of thy role in freeing them. They will come for thee once you leave this mountain.”

  Alyanna clenched her fists, feeling her roiling power rise within her. The air around her trembled, hazed by the force of her anger.

  “Let them come.”

  “What are we doing here, Keilan?”

  Nel’s raised voice brought Sella grudgingly awake. She groaned and buried her face in her pillow, knowing what was coming next.

  “We are waiting.”

  “Waiting for what?”

  They were outside, probably around the small table the shrouded servants of the sorceress set with meals every day. Sella turned her head so that her cheek rested on the cool fabric and glanced at the window—it was very early, the sky just starting to lighten. Keilan must have tried to slip away to see his grandmother before anyone got up, but Nel had caught him. The argument that usually happened in the late morning was now being played out at dawn.

  “Waiting for Niara to decide what we should do. She knows about the demon children. She has a weapon that can kill them.”

  “Then it seems obvious what the best course is.”

  “And that is?”

  “We all go together to Herath. We bring the sorceress and her—what did you say it was? A dagger?—to Queen d’Kara. Let them decide the best way to oppose these creatures. Because by ourselves we cannot!” Nel fairly yelled these last words, and Sella flinched. She didn’t like it when people were angry, even if it wasn’t because of her. She’d learned from experience that anger at something else—like when Teneal Gundersorn had moved her father’s boundary stone in the southern field—often still resulted in her getting beaten later. “This is a war between the great and powerful, not us! We did our part by finding the sorceress and telling her what is coming. We can do no more!”

  “I can help them!” Keilan replied, his own voice rising. “Niara is teaching me how to control my sorcery. Already I can summon light and harden it to make a shield. Yesterday I learned how to create blue fire from the air itself.”

  “That is the simplest kind of sorcery, Keilan. Apprentices in the Scholia can do the same after their first year.” Sella heard a heavy sigh from Nel. “She isn’t teaching you how to fight these demons, I promise you. Anything that can cause the destruction we saw cannot be stopped by a novice sorcerer who still struggles to control his wizardlight. So ask yourself, Keilan—why is she developing your sorcery now? What does she want?”

  “Niara is my grandmother! She is teaching me because we are family, and unlike every other sorcerer I’ve met, she knows I’m ready to learn!”

  “Keilan,” Nel said, and it sounded to Sella like the emotion had suddenly drained from her voice. “I know it feels like your mother has come back. But remember, she was running away from Niara. This sorceress was part of a ceremony that brought about the death of countless innocents.”

  “She wouldn’t have done that knowingly,” Keilan replied with firm conviction. “Jan was tricked, and I think most of the others were as well. Only the leader, Alyanna, knew what would happen to fuel the spell.”

  “Are you so certain?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ask her, then. Because if she was aware of the first cataclysm when it was approaching, she might not care very much about stopping the next one.”

  Sella heard the scrape of a chair as someone stood.

  “I’ll see you tonight.” There was a hardness in Keilan’s voice now. Sella had never heard that edge before in his words, and for some reason it made her frightened.

  “Keilan –”

  Nel did not finish, and from the sound of footsteps Sella guessed Keilan had started on the path up to the sorceress’s house.

  Nel continued muttering loudly to herself long after the steps had faded, colorful curses that Sella listened to with interest and squirreled away for later use.

  Finally, she lapsed into silence, and Sella heard her get up from the table. She didn’t come back to the hut they shared, so she must be starting her wandering early. Nel had spent the last few days pacing around the small space the sorceress had confined them to, restless as a caged animal. Like Sella, Nel didn’t seem to enjoy waiting very much.

  Sella’s thoughts began to fragment as she drifted towards sleep again. The strange birds had started singing to the rising sun, but rather than bringing her fully awake the sound was drawing her back down into the soothing darkness…

  Pressure on her pillow—it was like something small had alighted behind her head. She tried to fight back towards consciousness, but her body wasn’t responding. Was this a dream? Had one of the birds fluttered into the hut through the open window? She struggled to come fully awake.

  “Sella.”

  A tingling panic washed through her. The voice was small and reedy, barely a whisper.

  “Sella, listen to me.”

  She tried to turn her head to see who else was in the hut—in the bed with her, even!—but she could not move no matter how much she strained. Who was talking?

  “Can you hear me?”

  Suddenly Sella could move her head, ever so slightly, and she nodded.

  “Good. There are things you must know.”

  And the voice told her. When it was finished, Sella’s blood felt frozen in her veins. Her thoughts whirled—she had to tell the others.

  Her fingers twitched. Then the grip on her body seemed to loosen, and she could move her tingling limbs again. She turned her head, and as she suspected, the doll she had brought out of the ruins lay on her pillow, unmoving. This terrified her, but she forced herself to remain calm as she slipped from the bed. The small painted face stared up at her. Had it been a dream? Could what the voice had said really be possible?

  Fighting back her fear, Sella reached down and picked up the doll—nothing but old, weathered wood and tufts of straw for hair. Holding it gingerly, fervently hoping it would not twitch in her hand, she carried it to the door. Dream or not—and it felt more and more like it had been a dream the longer she held the doll—she should tell Nel or Senacus about this.

  She pushed open the door, then stumbled back in surprise, the doll falling from her slack fingers.

  A shrouded figure glided inside, its pale white hands reaching for her.

  “Come sit,” Niara said distractedly as Keilan entered her sanctuary. “I’ll be with you in a moment.” The sorceress was examining a large ceramic sphere perched atop a stand of dark wood, running her hand over the pearly surface as if searching for imperfections. “You are even earlier today than you said you would be.”

  Keilan flopped onto one of the divans where they usually conducted his lessons, careful to avoid the great red and white cat sprawled on the floor, its tail twitching. “I’m sorry.”

  She glanced over at him, catching his tone. “You sound angry. Something has upset you?”

  Keilan shook his head, not wanting to share what he had been discussing with Nel. “Just a disagreement. It’s nothing.”

  Niara drifted over from the sphere and sank down across from him. She gestured, and the shrouded figure that had escorted him here turned and shuffled away.

  “They want action, I imagine. For the hunt to begin. Patience is a rarity in the
young.”

  Keilan watched the robed creature vanish back through the old monastery’s entrance.

  “What are they?” he asked, nodding in the direction the servant had gone. It was a question he’d been meaning to ask for days… and he also wanted to change the subject.

  Niara sipped from a porcelain cup decorated with twining blue flowers. “What do you think they are?”

  “I think they must be something you made. Like the animals on this island.” He remembered his first impression of the creatures—that they were like the clockwork toys he had been shown back at the Scholia. Mindless automata.

  Niara set down the cup and dabbed at her mouth with an embroidered cloth. “They are not.”

  “Then… I don’t know.”

  Niara stared at him with pursed lips for a long moment. Finally, she sighed, as if she had reached some decision.

  “You could say, Keilan, that they are the very reason I started my great work. They were the inspiration.”

  “They inspired you?” How could these strange, silent things have done that?

  “Yes.” Niara rose and glided over to the balcony that overlooked the sea. She clasped her hands behind her back, staring out at the rose-colored water. The great cat rose and padded up beside her, nudging her shoulder with its massive head.

  “How old do you think the one that brought you here is?”

  “I… have no idea.”

  “He is older than this sea,” she said, her voice distant. “Older than the mountains. Older than anything alive at this moment except for the Ancients themselves. And he may be older even than them.”

  Keilan remembered that great eye sliding open in the darkness, far below the waves. Vhelan had told him about the Ancients, the impossibly vast and terrible creatures that slumbered in the hidden places of the world, and how Keilan had for a moment disturbed the rest of one of them. That was what had first brought him to the attention of the Crimson Queen, and perhaps also to Demian and his allies. The thought that these cowled, silent creatures could be older than the presence he had encountered under the Broken Sea seemed impossible.

  “Where do they come from?”

  “I found them,” Niara said, turning away from the dawn. “In a ruined city clinging to the walls of a canyon at the bottom of the ocean. That city had not even been built by them, but by another species that has since vanished into obscurity. A temple had been erected around where they slept, and I believe they were at one time worshipped as gods. I woke them and brought them here to study.”

  “How can they be so old?” Keilan whispered, awed by what she had said. “And why do they serve you?”

  “They serve me because there is nothing left inside of them. Their will has atrophied after all these eons. But once, they were the masters of this world.” Niara twisted a strand of silver hair around her finger as she spoke. She seemed to be struggling with what to tell him first.

  “Let me start at the beginning. The cataclysm that destroyed the Imperium and Min-Ceruth was a thousand years ago, Keilan. The Warlock King was slain another thousand years before that. The earliest writing of mankind, scratched on turtle shells or on the walls as our ancestors huddled in caves, was only a few millennia old when Menekar was founded. How long is our history as a species? Five thousand years? Ten? That is only a tiny sliver of time—if your life until now represented the entirety of our world’s history, the span since mankind’s emergence would be the same as since you entered my sanctuary and sat down. Can you conceive of that, Keilan? The immensity of what has come before?”

  He shook his head mutely, trying not to show his confusion. Niara’s speech was becoming more impassioned as she spoke.

  “We are not the first race to develop language and art and sorcery, or to build cities and empires. A hundred have come before us, perhaps a hundred hundred. But the length of time is so vast that all remnants of their civilizations have crumbled into dust. Only the most recent of these elder races have left evidence for us to find that they once straddled this world—the others have vanished without a trace. In the Frostlands there are creatures known as wraiths –”

  “I know them!” Keilan interrupted. “A pack of them attacked a caravan I was traveling with.”

  “Then you know how far they have fallen. But at one time they ruled these lands, carving magnificent kingdoms from the flesh of mountains. Now they are little more than beasts.”

  “What happened?” That horrible ambush was seared into Keilan’s memory—he remembered the scabrous skin and flaming red eyes of the wraiths as they flowed through the long grass, slaughtering the merchants. Could those things have once been like men?

  “As I said, they fell. It would be comforting to think that the story of our species will be one of constant progress. Perhaps a few missteps here and there, but when the dust settles our civilization will continue its march ever forward.” Niara traced an ascending line in the air, and a silver thread hung in her finger’s wake. “Sorcery, mathematics, art, philosophy—always improving, until we arrive at a golden age.” She stared at the glimmering line for a long moment with a slight smile, as if imagining such a future. “But that is never what happens.” With a cutting motion, she obliterated what she had drawn. “This is the story of almost every race.” She sketched another line in the air, one that rose until it reached a peak, and then descended again until it had returned to the starting height. “Most species are like wraiths—they begin as animals, and they end as animals. The glorious epoch in the middle becomes just a faded race memory lurking somewhere deep in their bestial minds.”

  “And you think that will happen to men?” Keilan whispered, staring at the glittering arc suspended before him.

  Niara again wiped away what she had drawn. “I do not. I said most species, Keilan. A few of the elder races mastered sorcery to such a degree that they were able to achieve the great dream of every sentient creature that has become aware of its impending death—they made themselves immortal.”

  “Which you have done,” he said quietly.

  The sorceress pursed her lips. “Yes. Although recently I have begun to suspect that the spell that rendered me ageless was in fact flawed.” She held up her hand and stared at it as if searching for something. “I believe I am again aging.” She sighed and shook her head. “But no matter. Events are finally coming to a head.”

  The silver light sprung from her finger once more as she drew a new shape in the air. This one ascended like the last, but after it reached its peak it descended only slightly before leveling off.

  “This is the history of the few elder races who mastered the secret of immortality. They could live forever, but the sacrifices made to achieve this great feat permanently stunted them. The genthyaki were like this.”

  “The genthyaki?” That name tickled Keilan’s memory.

  “They were another of the elder races that persisted into our own time. Only a handful of them achieved immortality, the greatest sorcerers of their kind, and they did it at the cost of the rest of their species. The few that remained could not sustain a true civilization, and they instead retreated into the shadows as new species emerged, lurking in the fringes of the cities and empires that arose, secretly feeding on wraith and man. We wiped them out a thousand years ago when we discovered them living among us, cloaked in human skin.”

  The shape changer! Niara was speaking of the monster that had attacked them along the Wending Way! And she thought them all to be dead… so she was not allied now with Demian and the other sorcerers who had brought down the cataclysms. Keilan felt a tingling relief at this.

  “And my servants here are another of the elder races that achieved immortality, though long before the genthyaki. Their name has been lost to history, but I call them the Ashen, for they are the cold ashes of what once must have been a great and powerful people who burned very, very bright.”

 
Her expression grew serious as she searched his face, but for what he didn’t know. “So do you understand, Keilan? What I am doing here?”

  He shook his head, utterly baffled.

  She reached out and clasped his hand with her own. “I am trying to save us from the fate of all the other species that have come before us. In the end they disappeared, as if they had never been, and that is what will happen to mankind unless I can complete my great work.”

  “What is your great work?” he whispered.

  She clutched at him, her nails digging into his skin. “To change us! To elevate us above the wheel of history, so we are not ground to dust as it turns!” Niara paused, taking a deep breath.

  “Ascension, Keilan. I am speaking of ascension.”

  Keilan leaned back, his thoughts whirling. Ascension? What did she mean by that?

  He started as one of the Ashen silently glided past him and bent to whisper something to Niara, the hem of its cowl brushing her hair. She listened, her face clouding as it spoke. Then the creature straightened and drew back a few paces.

  Niara blinked rapidly, as if trying to come to grips with what she had been told. When she finally turned to Keilan again, she looked troubled.

  “Keilan,” she said slowly, “something has happened to your companions.”

  “What?” he cried, coming to his feet.

  She waved at him to sit again. “They are alive and unharmed. But they have been taken to the cell I use as a prison on this island.”

  Slowly, he lowered himself back onto the divan, though his body was thrumming with nervous energy. “Why?”

  Niara sighed. “I warned them, Keilan. Not to leave the huts and explore the island. But one of them—the little girl—she crept away and stole something very, very important to me. When my servants found out, they did what I had instructed them to do in such situations and imprisoned them all.”

  “She didn’t know any better,” Keilan said quickly, almost babbling. “She’s very young and I’m sure she meant no harm –”