A Blight of Mages

by Karen Miller

  “My lord…” Morgan frowned at his pea-stained sleeve. “You must eat.”

  His father sneered. “I’d eat if those cursed servants brought me food. That’s not food. It’s slop.”

  “Ranmer said—”

  “By the scales of justice!” his father bellowed. “Do not prate to me of pothers! Do not task me with soup! Do not—do not—” He broke off, gasping, the stubborn phlegm curdling noisily in his chest. One frail fist beat at his breastbone, forcing more angry words into his throat. “You say you regret displeasing me, Morgan, yet what do you do but find ways to salt my wounds? You look to feed me as though I was an infant, you dismiss my concerns about your magework, and you refuse to pay attention to your single most pressing duty.”

  Stung by the attack, Morgan sat back in his chair. He lashes out because he’s shamed. Because he cannot reconcile himself to what he’s become. But understanding why his father railed at him didn’t mean he wasn’t hurt.

  “My lord, you speak in riddles. I have shirked no duty.”

  “No?” His father stabbed at the dining room’s frescoed ceiling with one pointed finger. “Then instead of locking yourself away in that attic of yours, experimenting, why are you not busy finding yourself a wife? How little you must truly care for the Danfey name and legacy, to leave me languishing with no hope of our future! Are you so eager to call this mansion and my title your own that you’d seek to kill me with despair?”

  Jaw tight, temper freshly woken, Morgan summoned his will and whispered an incant. The soup stain on his sleeve vanished. With another harshly breathed incant he translocated soup bowl and spoon to the kitchens. That left the stains on tablecloth, wall, floor and Feenish rug. He raised a hand to banish them, but his father snatched at his forearm.

  “Leave be!” he said, savage. “Am I a tit-sucking babe, that I can’t attend to my own mess?”

  Morgan folded his hands on the dining table. It was a matter of pride that they did not clench to show white knuckles.

  “No, my lord.”

  “No,” his father echoed, bitter. “Then keep your incants to yourself.”

  Greve Danfey had never been a robust man. In his childhood there were fevers. His prime had lasted but four years and after that had come a slow descent into bouts of haggard ill-health. For many years he’d managed to keep his weakness at bay, but no longer. Twice in the past year he’d flirted with dying and twice Ranmer had pulled him back from the brink. Morgan was loath to admit it, but the truth could no longer be denied: a third reprieve seemed unlikely.

  Watching his father sweat over a simple cleansing incant hurt him in ways the shouted, intemperate words never could.

  “There,” his father said at last, rheumy, tear-filled eyes defiant. “You see? I’m not dead yet.”

  He forced a smile. “I know you’re not, my lord.”

  “My lord.” Glowering, his father blotted his forehead dry of sweat with the napkin. “A lip-service respect. That’s all you have for me.”

  And that hurt, too. “No, my lord. You have from me all the honour due to you.”

  “It is so,” his father said, stubbled chin trembling. “One son, I have. One son.” He was staring through the chamber’s windows now, communing with the clouds and the afternoon sun dipping in and out between them. “And in him resides all hope for our proud family. But will he marry? Will he sire a son who’ll carry the Danfey name stitched to a broad and alabaster brow? He will not. He dallies with incants nobody needs, instead of with a woman.”

  Morgan slid from the chair to the floor beside his father, bruising his knees even though there was a rug beneath them. “Please, my lord. You mustn’t distress yourself. We can talk of my marriage another time. For now, bend your thoughts toward regaining your strength. How many more days do you want to spend prisoned within this mansion? You must eat, you must rest, you mustn’t fret yourself with my future.”

  “Your future?” His father snatched up the crumpled napkin and threw it in his face. “Have a care for your future, should I? When you care naught for the Danfey legacy?”

  He was a fool to persist, but the injustice here was untenable. “How can you accuse me of not caring? Am I not the first Danfey to earn a seat on the Council of Mages?”

  His father flinched at the question. Appointment to the Council had been Greve Danfey’s ambition, denied him due to a misstep in his youth. Never reconciled to the blunder, he was both proud and resentful of his son’s success.

  He’ll not admit it, but I’ve surpassed him. Therein lies the seed of all his caution and rancour. And were he not my father I would rip out his meanness by its roots.

  “My lord?” he persisted. “Have I not honoured you with that?”

  “Yes, and I’ve already praised you for it,” his father muttered. “Don’t look for me to repeat myself. Besides, it would be of more use if you’d barter the honour into a taking of marriage vows. Perhaps I’d live longer if I had before me the timely prospect of your heir.”

  Morgan bit his lip. Unkindness piled upon unkindness, and no way to portion all blame to his father’s poor health. This was an old wound rubbed to new rawness by recent events.

  “My lord, I but learn the lessons you would teach,” he said, goaded enough to indulge in a little unkindness of his own. “Fathers with eligible daughters do not care to be flattered into submission. Nor are they vulnerable to the demands of a man so lately come into Council prominence. Given past Danfey indiscretions, a touch of circumspection cannot go astray.”

  Another flinch as his father noted the barb. “And too much circumspection can run you to ground. In learning from my mistake, best you not make one all your own.”

  “My lord—”

  “Morgan,” said his father, fastening thin fingers to his shoulder. “You are thirty-six, unmarried, and you have no son. Yet here you kneel claiming you respect me. What am I to make of that, when words and deeds stand so far apart?”

  The grip on his shoulder was painful, but he made no attempt to shrug his father’s hand free. If Greve Danfey chose to see his only child’s unwed, childless state as a mark of disrespect then what could he say to the complaint? The only answer to satisfy was a wife with a belly full of grandson.

  “Morgan, Morgan…” With a sigh, his father released his shoulder and patted his cheek instead. “The girl died fourteen years ago. Will you mourn me as long?”

  Luzena, his youthful passion. Eternally preserved in a stone coffin, her beauty arrested out of time. A flower he’d been too reverent to pluck before she was formally his to touch. He’d loved her, brutally. Her death had marred him. His father was cruel to beat him with her memory, but there was no use saying so. In this instance Greve Danfey was the one who’d been ill-used… or so the old man felt.

  “Don’t speak of mourning, my lord. Such talk is nonsense.”

  “Another insult,” his father said, sour as stale milk. “You’re in fine fettle today, Morgan. But you’re wrong and I’m right and I think I’d rather you smothered me in my sleep and had done with it. A slow death by disappointment is little to my taste.”

  At times like this love was hard to find. “If I answered that charge as it deserved, my lord, then you would have cause to accuse me of disrespect.”

  A flicker of shame in the old man’s eyes, quickly extinguished. “If you’re so shy of facing facts then it could be I’m mistaken and you’re not fit for marriage.”

  “And it profits us how, my lord, to bandy words of your dying?” Morgan retorted, uncoiling to his feet. “You might chafe me with this carping on marriage and sons but the fault isn’t so great that I’d repay it by describing your funeral long before you’ve drawn your last breath!”

  “Carping?” His father slapped the table. “What right have you to throw such a word in my face?”

  “And what right have you, my lord, to call into question my duty to you and this family? There is time for me to sire a son. I am not a dying old man!”

  �
��So you admit my decline at last.” His father smiled, revealing loosened teeth and pale gums pinpricked with blood. “That’s progress, of a sort.”

  Pained by the words, by his father’s grotesque physical decline, Morgan retreated to the dining room’s wide windows and stared across his family’s estate toward distant, sun-glittered Elvado.

  “Why are we wasting precious time with harsh words?” he said at last. “Have I ever said I wouldn’t marry? Have I ever said I would let this family die when I die?”

  “No,” his father admitted. “But Morgan, who knows better than you that life is unpredictable? If it weren’t you’d be a husband with sons enough to carry their grandfather’s body in solemn procession to the family crypt.”

  “Yes, my lord. I would,” he said, and thought he heard the ghost of Luzena’s sweet laughter. “But I had a wake, not a wedding. How unnatural a man your son would be if he did not grieve the loss of his unconsummated bride.”

  “Grieving for one year is natural. Grieving for fourteen is unbecoming. Morgan, it’s unmanly. And yes, it is disrespectful to me. It is past time that you chose another bride.”

  He turned away from the window. “You think because I don’t speak of this that I’ve given it no thought. You’re wrong. But the plain fact is, my affections are not engaged. You’d have me court an eligible young woman with false coin?”

  “Affections are like the moon!” said his father. “They wax and they wane. You fancied yourself in love with Luzena Talth and perhaps you were, greenly. But had she lived you might well despise her today. It happens. Affections have no place in this business. When you choose a wife you do not ask Do I love this girl? You ask Is she born of a First Family? Can her bloodline strengthen our own? Has she enough to recommend her that I’ll stiffen when it’s needful she be planted with my son? Those are the questions you must ask. Tell me that love answers any of them and then I’ll listen to talk of affections.”

  Morgan stared at his father. As well as stripping his flesh, illness had caused much of the old man’s hair to shed, leaving him bald in spreading patches. His scalp was scaled and oozing, the rot defying Ranmer’s many ointments. Even so, he’d refused to have his remaining hair clipped close. As though surrendering to the scissors was the same as surrendering to death.

  “Did you ever love my mother?” he said, almost whispering.

  “She stiffened me. It amounts to the same thing.”

  He continued to stare, torn between revulsion and fascination.

  I loved my mother. I loved Luzena. I do not count that as a weakness. Did I never see this in you before, this cool, cruel detachment?

  No. Because not even one day in his life was he given cause to doubt his father’s fervent love for him.

  And if you can love me, how could you not love the woman who birthed me?

  “You never remarried,” he said, cautious. “I would ask you why not.”

  His father shrugged. “I had no need of a second wife. I had you.”

  There was flattery in that, even though he was still disconcerted. “And if I, like Luzena, had died untimely?”

  “If that had happened I would have found another woman to bear me another son,” said his father. And then he frowned. “Morgan, enough. You are years too old for giddy romanticism. Breeding the next generation of mages is a serious matter. Perhaps with Luzena you could indulge whimsy, but that time is gone. Let me speak plain: I want your word given to me, here and now, that aside from your Council duties your only concern will be the finding of your unborn son’s mother.”

  Before he could stop himself, his gaze flicked up as though it could penetrate every chamber between this dining room and his attic workroom.

  “Your experiments?” With a grunting effort, his father levered himself to standing. “Morgan, I forbid your experiments! Until I see you wed, and hard on your vow’s heels learn of a son in the woman’s belly, I tell you there will be no more magework in this house.”

  “And I tell you there will be, my lord. When I was that green youth promised to Luzena then perhaps you could forbid me. But like Luzena, those days are long dead. You are my father and I honour you but do not presume to—”

  “Presume?” Fresh spittle flecked his father’s blanched lips. “When I house you? Feed you? If there is presumption to speak of, Morgan, of a surety it is yours.”

  “And there’s a calumny, my lord,” he retorted. “When I stay because you beg me not to leave, because you will not hear of me finding rooms in Elvado, when I stay because—”

  “Because this is your home!” said his father, and thudded back into his chair. “Where else would you live?”

  Heart pounding, Morgan glared at him. “I would live where no man thinks to forbid me my life’s work.”

  “Morgan… Morgan…” His father clasped trembling hands, each breath a wet whistling in and out of his soft lungs. His eyes were teary again. “I spoke hastily.”

  “My lord, you spoke from your heart.”

  “Hastily and from my heart, yes,” his father admitted. “I would not deny you your life’s work, Morgan. Therein lies Danfey glory. But in pursuing it, would you deny me your heir?”

  How can I deny him anything when he looks so pale and poorly?

  “Of course not.”

  “Then let us not quarrel,” his father said, beseeching. “Let us instead make our own vows. You will choose yourself a wife before the leaves fall, and I will not plague you about antithetical incantations.”

  He returned to the dinner table. “Almost, but not quite. I will choose a wife, and you will aid me with my antithetical incantations. My lord, this quarrel started because I asked you to be my second set of eyes. Let us end it with you helping me put a finger on where my reworking of the transmutation sigils went awry.”

  His father coughed, trying to hide his feelings. “You would trust me so far?”

  “My lord…” Morgan kissed his father’s forehead. “Talk nonsense like that and you’ll have us quarrelling again.”

  “No, no,” said his father hastily. “That’s behind us. Come. You can show me these newfangled sigils from the beginning.”

  “Now? Perhaps now is too soon. Perhaps you should rest, then—”

  “Talk nonsense like that and you’ll have us quarrelling again,” said his father, mock-scolding this time. “Enough, Morgan. I am not dying quite yet. Let us return to your attic and do magework together.”

  Chapter Five

  But his father’s strength was short-lived. Morgan was scarcely halfway through his explanation of the theory underpinning his brand new sigil and incant, being careful to gloss over certain aspects he knew would cause dismay, when the tremor marring the old man’s hands spread throughout his frail body.

  He set down his fresh crucible with its burden of rare and costly powdered azafris.

  “My lord, perhaps we might continue this discourse on the morrow? Your lack of enthusiasm reproaches me for failing to remember that most basic rule: simplicity must form the foundation of all magework.”

  A muted gleam in his father’s eye told him the ruse was noted… and appreciated.

  After escorting him back down the mansion’s narrow attic staircase to the third floor landing, and from there to his privy suite of apartments, and seeing him reposed once more in the bed he should not have abandoned, Morgan made his way outside to clear his mind with fresh air.

  Why had his reworking of Hartigan’s sigil failed?

  Strolling the mansion’s immaculate garden, aware of servants’ raised voices in the stables, of the temperature falling as rain clouds gathered overhead like a frown, of the fear he felt for his father ever-simmering beneath the surface, he dismantled his work step by painstaking step.

  And could find no reason to explain the sigil’s collapse.

  Which means what, exactly? That my father is right and there can be no compatible clockwise construction of the energies?

  No. He refused to accept that. Reversal
of the primary energy conduits was key to his new transmutation incant. An incant that would make Sorvold’s triumph seem paltry child’s play. Only by reversing the natural inclination of the matrix’s coherence could he hope to expand the effect of the transmutation itself. He was seeking to undo nature, after all. No timid tinkering would answer his need.

  Perhaps the fault lies in my choice of catalyst. Perhaps azafris does not best serve my purpose.

  And that would be unfortunate. Not only had he risked his standing on the Council to procure, by illicitly roundabout means, more than the sanctioned amount of the mineral, he’d been forced to sell his second-best horse to cover the cost. Besides, he was certain that azafris was the key ingredient in his new sigil’s creation. Which could only mean that his error was in combining it with oil of atlar.

  Very well. A mistake easily unmade. But if not atlar, then what—

  A spit of water on his face. Startled, he looked up to see that the frown of clouds had become a black scowl. Thunder rumbled, shivering the chill, lightless air. Moments later a predatory wind roared through the dense woodland belting the family mansion’s cultivated grounds. Branches whipped, leaves tore, and a few moments after that the neatly tended flowerbeds thrashed beneath the onslaught. Morgan laughed at the elemental savagery, the sudden raw, crackling power surrounding him.

  And then the skies opened, pouring water, and he ran. Still laughing.

  A simple incant took care of his rain-soaked attire. Returned to his attic workroom, with freshly conjured glimfire banishing the gloom, he again brooded over the question of his elusive new sigil as he took a soft cloth and wiped the three used crucibles clean of failure’s blue smears. With that done, he cleansed them further with a neutralising incant.

  Balance. The catalyst and its counter-catalyst must balance. They must clear a path for the energies to combine. To overturn nature, first I must master it.

  At length he sighed, and nodded. So. He was ready.

  A pinch of precious, dwindling azafris. No oil of atlar this time, but two meagre drops of tilatantin. The stink of it had him recoiling. He paused, then, to make certain his decision wasn’t about to catch fire in his face. When there was no untoward reaction he continued, adding a pinch of powdered bone and finally a shaving of urvil root.