The Sleeping Life (Eferum Book 2)

by Andrea K Höst

  'Maja' was Kolan for 'Magister', and since everyone in the room was an upper-reaches sort of mage, and they were all talking at each other, it was Maja, Maja, Maja all over the place. They sounded like a herd of cranky goats. But, Kendall had to admit, most of them soon shifted to quiet listening, explaining things to the next group of arrivals, and organising a hunt about for any focuses that had been missed among the roots of the vine.

  When Sukata came back carrying a lot of water in a segment of golem, one mage figured out a way to smooth the edges of other collected pieces so they had some useable glasses. Another filched all the slates and made detailed sketches of the readable sections of the carving Rennyn had been studying.

  "Do you think maybe we should try and talk Herself out of casting this Walk?" Kendall murmured to Sukata, when the Kellian girl had finally been freed of water duty, and Kendall couldn't find any other way to shut up the argument in her head about whether to take hold of Sukata's hand. "This lot can cast all the spells we need."

  "Look at the Duchess' feet."

  Kendall looked, and grimaced. Although Captain Faille had been carrying Rennyn about most of the time, the bottom of the makeshift bandages was dusty-black, and damp in patches. Oozing. Even with all the advantages of a couple of dozen mages, they were still out in the middle of nowhere having to make their supplies from scratch, and were already close to running out of spare shirts.

  "We spent all morning building a house for nothing."

  "I was not looking forward to sleeping in it."

  "I suppose we would have all caught Herself's cold, too."

  "Perhaps." Sukata reached out and took Kendall's hand, and squeezed it. "She will come through this. She has her own brand of pigheadedness."

  "Bah," Kendall said, and squeezed back. The air was decidedly nippy now, but she felt hot all over.

  Captain Faille had returned once again, and the mages clustered closest to Rennyn parted like magic to let him through to pick her up. Kendall guessed that he told her that there were no more mages to come, for she nodded briskly, and said something to Maja Keshkant, who promptly clapped her hands together like a teacher bringing a class to order.

  "We are to line up in pairs," Sukata translated, as the Kolan woman began speaking. "It is important that we stay as close as possible together, and move briskly. If anyone lags or stumbles, those around must do what they can to keep them moving. It is important to not prolong the casting time."

  Darian Faille had Lieutenant Meniar slung over her shoulder. The Pest and his sister-Samarin linked elbows. The more squabbly of the mages reluctantly found someone to hang on to. Tesin, toting the Imperial Smugness' sword, trotted down to play rear guard—and perhaps gee up anyone who started to lag.

  Invisible, intangible, loudly there, a tunnel opened. Kendall clutched Sukata's hand, remembering the headache she'd earned last time, and how that had apparently let her in for accidentally doing all sorts of things. That was probably important not to think about right now, so she kept her head down, and trooped forward with the rest.

  It seemed like no time at all before the feeling of a tunnel went away, along with the last trace of late afternoon. They were somewhere dark and cold, and Kendall briefly wondered if Rennyn had managed to send them altogether wrong, but then she turned and saw the lights of Aurai's Rest. And there came Lieutenant Faral, bounding at the head of a crowd to find Lieutenant Meniar in the confusion and snatch him into her arms.

  She must have squeezed him tight, because he woke up with a gasp, and then said: "Keste," in a pleased little voice, before going straight back to sleep.

  Rennyn had actually managed to keep her eyes open. Too many people were crowding around her for Kendall to get a proper look, even when they started conjuring little lights, and moving toward the nearest buildings. But she'd got them here, and there would be a warm bath, clean clothes, and probably half a dozen healers to fuss over her. Rennyn would be all right.

  She would.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Rennyn woke, and celebrated that fact. Then she groaned, coughed, and croaked: "Illidian?"

  "Off at a Kellian meeting."

  Rubbing grit from her eyes, Rennyn blinked at late afternoon light drifting through open windows, then shifted in time to see Kendall closing a Sigillic dictionary. The girl stood up, arms folded.

  "How do you feel?"

  The question sounded portentous, but the answer surely unsurprising. Rennyn's skin itched, her feet throbbed, and the inside of her throat was raw. Her bladder ached—though she was at least far less grimy than on her last waking. She…

  Rennyn lifted her hand to her throat, found a thin chain, and traced it to a wire pendant holding her focus. On the way, her fingers brushed the tender line she'd cut into her own skin, scored across the bite mark. Then she levitated.

  It was the kind of self-indulgent Thought Magic she had not dared for months, and her attention was all for how her aching body reacted to a sustained flow of Efera. She drifted up to the ceiling.

  "Enjoying yourself?" Kendall asked, with the particularly fierce glower Rennyn had learned to recognise as an attempt to hide pleasure.

  "Yes, rather," Rennyn said, but allowed herself to sink back down to a sitting position. "So they got the miscasting off me?" She felt dizzy, but it was from sudden, violent relief, not the bone-deep physical weakness that had dogged her for so long.

  "This morning. They decided they had to try, because...it was something about your heartbeat going too slow. And also, I think, because a whole bunch of them wanted to show each other up and be the one to do something that even you couldn't manage."

  "There are advantages to rescuing a few dozen mages. Did they use my Wicked Uncle's focus?"

  "Yes—they got Captain Faille to crush it. I think he liked that. You're still sick, though, and run down and all that stuff, and are supposed to stay warm and not do anything much."

  "I think I'll take myself to the privy," Rennyn said, with a level of pleasure that a year ago she would never have associated with such a statement.

  "I'll get you something hot to eat," Kendall said. "Don't go wandering—I'm not supposed to be letting you out of my sight."

  It felt like no effort at all for Rennyn to whisk herself down the corridor and back, but by the time she regained the bed the tremor she hated had come back to her hands. Run down, too many weeks without regular casting exercises, or a physical weakness she would never escape? Destroying her Wicked Uncle's focus made for appropriate symbology, but undoubtedly killing him would have been a better choice to rid her of all trace of the miscasting.

  She coughed for a while, numbed the pain in her feet, and decided that whatever the case it was still an improvement on yesterday. The great hurdle had been overcome. She could move on to other concerns.

  The tremor had mostly gone by the time Kendall returned, and she managed, under the girl's critical eye, to eat without dropping spiced mince all over herself.

  "What is the meeting about?" Rennyn asked, once the edge had been taken off her hunger.

  "You think they tell me stuff like that?"

  "That depends on the meeting. And whether you picked up enough to make a few educated guesses."

  Kendall shrugged. "Your stupid uncle, mostly. A bit about that smug-ass Emperor as well."

  That made sense. Two major potential threats to the future of the Kellian.

  "Are any of the mages we rescued still here?"

  "Most of them. You've only been asleep a day. They're still all covered in leaf patterns, and they never shut up."

  This had been delivered with a particularly aggrieved note. "And how have they been annoying you?"

  "That blabbermouth told them I can Thought cast. Talking of people who never shut up."

  "Fallon? Aurienne?"

  "Auri," Kendall confirmed. "You've given Fallon your cold, and he's already sicker than you are."

  Rennyn frowned. "I hope they're staying close together. I think Fa
llon is still sustaining her."

  "He still dreams of her all the time he sleeps, so yes. Captain Faille told her to stay in the so-called Dezart's room, and put Fallon in with her. Last I checked, she was trying on all his clothes." A pause. "Are you going to take her on as a student? She seems to think you will."

  "Not for Thought Magic," Rennyn said firmly. "Unless she demonstrates considerably more focus than I've seen so far. But I don't have a problem trying to teach her devising—if only to keep her in check. Unless something comes up, I'll start you on the exercises for abstract casting tomorrow. And what is that expression about?"

  After a very long pause indeed, Kendall muttered: "It should have been Sukata."

  "Should it? Why should it have been Sukata?"

  "Because she's the one who wants to be a real mage!"

  Rennyn summoned her hairbrush from a far bench, and considered the girl curiously. Kendall had clearly spent the day brooding over Sukata's feelings instead of celebrating her own progression—or the satisfactory-sounding conversation the two girls had had before Maja Keshkant arrived.

  "And so?" Rennyn said at last. "Your progress won't impede Sukata's. Are you not even a little bit pleased with your own achievements? Ignoring that it's a terrible term to use, don't you want to be a 'real' mage?"

  "No," Kendall said, screwing up her nose. "I already told you that! It's so boring. I'm never going to wrap my head around what makes the Eferum work the way it does, and why it makes monsters, and all that. When your brother starts on about it, it just sounds like blah blah blah to me. I can't make myself care about it. What's wrong with just casting these standard forms?"

  Highly entertained, Rennyn said: "There is some space in between taking on Seb's love of Eferum theory and only memorising established Sigillics. My family specialised in Eferum theory because they thought it necessary to defeat Solace, but the plan that ended up being used was nothing to do with the Eferum. You can be a devising mage, and a good one, while ignoring Eferum theory altogether."

  "And I don't want to kill people!" Kendall burst out. "Look at Auri! Not only did she make a mess of herself, she almost took the Pest with her. And that wasn't even with some new spell she made up, or all the guesswork that seems to go into this Symbolic rot. It's just not worth it."

  This was fascinating. Rennyn had put Kendall's reluctant approach to the Sigillic exercises down to being so far behind Sukata and Fallon, not because the known forms represented safety. There was still a great deal she didn't know about Kendall, and why she was so insistent that people didn't "mind each other's business". Had she been wrong to respect the girl's privacy, to not have her past investigated?

  "Aurienne is not who you should be comparing yourself to," Rennyn said mildly. "If the past few years haven't cured her of hasty overconfidence, I'll certainly work to do so, for it's the worst trait for a mage. As for devising Sigillics that work, and only do the things that you want them to: it's really not the great mystery you seem to consider it. First you learn the basics, then the accepted forms, and then apply what you know to a problem, and compose the solution that doesn't kill people."

  Kendall's expressions were wonderful. All that disdain and disgust packed into a single glare.

  "You say that like it's simple. But every second mage I've met is terrified of what you do."

  "Every second mage you've met has been taught that copying is the best approach," Rennyn said. "Think of it as cooking soup. No, don't roll your eyes at me. You're saying you only ever want to cook by using an exact recipe someone else has made up, without even adding a tiny extra bit of salt, because you can kill people with soup."

  "You can if you put in the wrong mushrooms."

  "Exactly. The first step is learning how to identify mushrooms."

  "Do you ever cook?" Kendall asked irrelevantly. "I've never seen you."

  Rennyn laughed, then took a sip of water to soothe her throat. "I have a basic competence. I haven't put the time in for more, since it's always been easier to buy someone else's expertise. Seb knows how to cook the three or so things he likes most, but nothing else."

  "You really think I could write spells that don't hurt people? I don't understand half the reasons you cast the way you do."

  "Kendall, you've only been learning Efanian for a handful of months. I fully expect you to compose workable Sigillics, and at least understand the fundamentals of Symbolic casting as well. You have both a good memory and a strong will, which will help considerably, and beyond that it really is going to depend both on your basic feel for casting, and on what you're trying to do. Isn't there anything you've ever wanted to do with magic that people can't currently do?"

  That produced a blank stare and then a withdrawal. The girl muttered something too low for Rennyn to make out, but then lifted her chin and said: "I sure as shine don't want to end up chained to any statues. Or to turn myself into one."

  "No, nor hung up in a garden to dry," Rennyn agreed. "I certainly can't predict whether becoming a mage will lead to such a fate, or merely make you better able to protect yourself. Corusar's problem, at least, is one of rule, and becoming a devising mage will not inevitably put you in charge of an Empire."

  From Kendall's expression it appeared Rennyn must too clearly have shown how enjoyable she found the idea of 'Empress Kendall', but the door opened and Illidian came in before Rennyn could entertain herself further.

  "I'll go check on the Pest," Kendall said hastily, and took Rennyn's tray away.

  When the door had closed behind the girl, Rennyn put down her water glass and considered her husband. Had she imagined the tension in him when she'd transferred Aurienne to Corusar's golem?

  He banished any immediate concerns by sitting beside her and kissing her thoroughly.

  "You'll catch my cold," she protested, at the first pause.

  "Unlikely." He tangled his fingers in her hair, but restrained himself to only another brief kiss before saying: "It is not simple wishful thinking to say that I can see at a glance that the miscasting truly is gone. It's in the very way you hold yourself."

  "I do feel like several anchors have been cut loose," she said agreeably. "Fel, it's been a complicated couple of days. I suspect we'll need to take ourselves back to Koletor rather quickly, too, to get Fallon and Aurienne untangled. If he's maintaining her waking and sleeping now, he's going to struggle."

  "Meniar and Sarana have come to the same conclusion. They do not expect an immediate decline, but it does not help that you have shared your cold. You don't feel you can solve the issue without Corusar?"

  "It would be a risk. Golems..." She paused, then laughed softly. "Golems really are out of my area of expertise, and I've not encountered the idea of copying memory at all before." She glanced up at him. "Those transfers bothered you, didn't they?"

  "The question of how separate he is from his copies does. I felt very distinctly that the person we knew as Samarin hated the mask he carried. Is that because the Emperor, trapped as he is, finds all masks intolerable, or is it because the Emperor-become-Samarin is a person with a five month lifespan?"

  "The mask a symbol of servitude to his other self?"

  "Something in that order."

  Rennyn followed this philosophical thread to the point of making herself dizzy again, then said: "I have no idea whether there is an answer to that. I don't think he limits the lifespan to prevent himself—his copy self—from abandoning whatever Imperial task he's been set and making for the nearest border. Most of Corusar's casting power is taken up with the enchantments set on the throne room, so creating a copy at all is quite a feat. I think it was important to him—Samarin, I mean—that we recovered the missing mages."

  "And asking Corusar for Samarin's opinion of the use made of him would gain little."

  Rennyn hesitated. "I don't know that the copy's identity would necessarily be lost or subsumed," she said. "To a certain degree, it may even be dominant. Though...no, it would have to take some form of merging, or C
orusar would have a reputation for occasionally forgetting several months of state business. Has that mask been sent on already?"

  "This morning. Depending on your condition, we will follow tomorrow morning."

  She felt her own momentary withdrawal.

  "We will not force you to wake the Ten," he murmured, after a pause. "It is a request, not a duty."

  "No, I think it is exactly that," she said. "A duty of my family to people who are, substantially, a branch of that family. I keep shying away from the idea, but I think eventually I would have asked to see the Ten even if I had not stayed with you."

  Illidian twined a strand of her hair around his fingers, watching it slip and fall. He was wearing another of her ribbons around his wrist: his own form of Symbolic Magic. Their marriage had been a series of challenges, but they met each one with—she would not even call it a determination not to be parted, but instead a mutual drawing together. Staying together was not work because she was as much home to him as he was to her.

  Touching the tip of one of his fingers, she traced the shape of the nail: not a sharp point, but it was longer than he had allowed himself for months.

  "I no longer see blood beneath them," he murmured. "But the nightmares have not stopped."

  Rennyn did not waste breath on platitudes, admitting instead: "I still don't think I could sit through the end of that play. Even after watching him flinch as I took a piece of broken glass to his throat. I'm not altogether sure even killing him would have...maybe eventually."

  "We have chosen to end our hunt for Prince Helecho." His tone was resigned. "Unless we discover he has found a way to cause harm. It is far from ideal for us, but we cannot justify killing him merely to protect ourselves from the possibility of inheritance."

  Rennyn curled her fingers through his, thinking of the Kellian under the command of her Wicked Uncle. Her decisions had tied their hands, and so the possible ascendency of Helecho Montjuste-Surclere would haunt them for years to come. Not so complete a nightmare as Solace, but a thing to dread.