The idea was for Mithris to get around behind the mad wizard without being seen. If he could sneak up behind the fool, maybe he could see a way to get the crystal away. He still had no idea how he would do that. The first part seemed to be going well, at least.
Zerto stared at the three false wizards, eyes wide and fearful. He reached for the pouch beneath the collar of his robe. Mithris knew the foundation crystal was in that pouch. The mad wizard would be more dangerous, more powerful, with the crystal.
There was something else, as well. Mithris could not figure it out. It was a feeling in the air, a strange heaviness. But it was also a weird crawling sensation on his skin, a tickling itch in his gums. It grew worse whenever he looked in Zerto’s direction.
He’s taken an elixir, explained Vapor. It increases his awareness and affinity for the ley lines.
Mithris frowned. Remaining still, he closed his eyes and extended his awareness in a way Deinre had taught him as one of his first lessons. He recoiled at what he sensed, nearly losing hold of the shroud that hid him.
There were dozens of ley lines intersecting somewhere just below this room. No wonder he had been able to defeat the earth elemental. Though he had not been aware of doing so at the time, Mithris knew he had drawn greater strength from the proximity of the magical fault lines. But Zerto would have the same luxury. And what had vapor said about that elixir?
It makes him even more powerful, Vapor said, able to read the direction of Mithris’ thoughts clearly for once.
Zerto tore the pouch from around his neck, snapping its cord. The withered old man opened his mouth and an impossible roar sounded in his throat. The fortress shook with his rage. Zerto flung out his empty hand and seized hold of something only he could see.
Mithris could feel the air vibrating all around him. He could hear the inaudible shriek of reality twisting at the ley lines as they bulged and stretched under a massive in-flow of power from other, primordial realms of existence.
One by one in rapid succession, the three false wizards disintegrated. Still retaining the image, the air and water making up the illusion split apart into millions of tiny fragments. Then the color bled from them and they hung suspended a moment, a fine mist that dispersed and evaporated a moment later.
Zerto stood blinking and staring at the empty spot where a moment ago three wizards had stood. He muttered to himself, hopping from foot to foot. Then his busy white brows shot up on his head and he leaped away from the altar, spinning around in midair.
He came down and made another grab at empty air, wriggling his fingers and speaking a word. Mithris felt his misty illusion rip away. The magical shroud blasted to fragments and faded from existence. Mithris crouched in the floor, fifteen paces from Zerto, staring at the mad wizard in grim terror.
“So!” Zerto howled, stomping his foot on the floor. He lifted his hand, once more clutching at nothing. Mithris felt the ley lines responding.
Leaping to his feet, he threw himself sideways across the room just as the floor where he had stood heaved up and cracked. A jagged spar of crystal shot up. If he hadn’t moved, Mithris would have been impaled.
“Bah!” snarled Zerto, twisting his hand in the air. Mithris dodged again. Another crystal spear shot up from the floor, narrowly missing him as he dove away.
Wards! Vapor’s voice was frantic in his head. Mithris did not feel like arguing. Surging back to his feet, already diving in a new direction, Mithris threw up a ward around himself. He placed its lower edge above the floor but beneath the soles of his feet.
Hoping he’d placed the magical barrier correctly, Mithris threw himself forward. The ward he’d placed was an invisible sphere of energy that surrounded him. It rolled across the floor like a bubble with a wizard inside.
Mithris spun end over end inside the magic bubble. Upside down and facing back the way he’d come, he saw the lower half of his boot-soles resting on the floor where his ward had sliced through them. Above the floor, beneath his feet. He’d shaved it close, literally.
Then the bubble swung him round again and he was facing Zerto. A crystalline spear erupted from the floor directly beneath him. It could not penetrate his ward, but knocked it upward like a ball thrown in the air.
“Great,” Mithris griped through clenched teeth, thrusting his hands out against the inner edge of his ward. “I’m really glad I cast this spell!”
The invisible balloon crashed down to the floor just as another spike shot up beneath it. Mithris caromed back into the air, hurtling directly toward Zerto.
The mad wizard grabbed empty air and screeched an incantation. Mithris plunged toward him, tumbling. A blast of power shot from Zerto’s fingertips. Striking the ward, it eradicated the invisible barrier instantly.
Free of his tumbling bubble, Mithris fell directly into the paranoid wizard as Zerto rushed to get another spell out. Crashing together, the two sprawled on the floor. The two wizards tumbled and rolled. Zerto buried his knee in Mithris’ stomach. Mithris struck Zerto across the face with an elbow.
They came out of their tumble, Mithris rolling off of Zerto and flopping on the floor next to him. Both were bloody and dazed. Zerto groaned, spitting blood from his split lip. The mad wizard heaved himself up and threw out a hand to cast a spell.
Mithris scrambled up and flung himself to the side just as a blast of fire shot past him. His eyes fell on the pouch, lying on the floor several paces away. Zerto had dropped the foundation crystal in their fall. Mithris dove for it.
Seeing the pouch on the floor, Zerto shrieked. He reached out and seized the energy of the leys and flung it mercilessly at the scrambling apprentice.
Chapter 34
Mithris crashed to the floor, his fingers closing around the leather pouch as he slid past it. An instant later, the floor where the pouch had lain exploded upward. Crystal fragments blasted into the air. Several sliced Mithris open as they flew by.
Panting and dripping blood, Mithris rose to his feet. He held Zerto’s pouch in one hand and grinned at the mad wizard.
“You give that back!” screamed Zerto, holding back his assault as if fearing to damage the foundation crystal. Mithris doubted that was possible, but he was glad for the brief respite.
“Listen to me,” he pleaded with the mad wizard. “I did not come here to fight you!”
“You came to take what’s mine!” Zerto howled. For all his advanced age, he sounded most like a petulant child in the middle of a tantrum. The mad wizard stomped his foot angrily. The image was so comical, Mithris nearly laughed at it in spite of the serious danger he was still in.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Mithris tried again.
“Bah!” Zerto roared with laughter. “You? You can’t hurt me, boy! ” With that, the mad wizard reached out with both hands and grabbed at the invisible energies filling the chamber. He clutched at them, squeezing, his fingers turning white with the strain. Then he twisted them around and wove something of the energy with muttered words. Zerto flung both his hands out at Mithris, and the lad could almost see the wave of magic approaching him.
As the pulsing energy flew at him, the spell began to resolve. Mithris could not tell yet what shape Zerto had given the spell. There was no time.
Mithris was not sure what he did. He acted more out of some unknown instinct than from any training or study. For the briefest of moments, he saw.
He shouted a single word, casting one of his best cantrips. It was the one that seemed to slow time. Distantly, Mithris knew that time did not slow—the spell sped him up. That knowledge floated somewhere just outside his focus. All his attention was on that onrushing spell.
Mithris moved in a blur. He leaped forward with arms outstretched. Somehow taking hold of the magic before it resolved, he grappled with the energy as it struggled to form a spell. He felt it in his hands like a solid thing. It could be twisted and reshaped, and so Mithris did. Wrestling the magic into a new form, he shoved it backward with all his might.
With a
wordless cry, Mithris fell back to the floor in a limp sprawl.
The spell, though, had been reversed. Zerto just had time to realize what Mithris had done—but that was impossible! The mad wizard’s eyes bulged in stupefied disbelief. The spell struck him with its full force.
A clamoring sound rang out, shaking the Arcanium and deafening Mithris. Zerto’s mouth opened in a howl that was drowned out by the cacophony of the backlash spell.
Mithris, still sped up from his cantrip, saw it all as if time really had slowed. Zerto’s dirty robes lifted around his body as if he stood before a strong wind. Sparks flickered at the tattered edges of the fabric, dancing in the air and winking out almost as soon as they were born. The sparks spread inward along the garment, and when they passed nothing was left.
Next, the wild tips of Zerto’s bushy brows began to smoke and then sparks formed there as well. The wizards fingers glowed a brilliant orange, the color of lava. Zerto’s skin boiled away to vapor and dancing sparks. His skeleton stood caught in the force of the spell and then it too dissolved, the ashes and dust blowing away on a wind that bore them through the cracks of reality to be swept up in another foundation.
The spell continued on, unsated. It ate through the wall behind Zerto and escaped into the grotto beyond. Moments later, a stony rumbling sounded.
We had probably better go, suggested Vapor just as the cantrip wore off and time resumed its normal speed for Mithris.
“Go? Oh yeah, that’d probably be good,” he said breathlessly. What in all the foundations had he just done?
One of the topaz shards from outside crashed through the Arcanium ceiling, high above Mithris. It plummeted, crashing to the floor a dozen paces away and shattering the crystal there. The entire fortress shook from the impact. Mithris could see cracks spreading across the ceiling.
Traveling spell.
“What?” Mithris shook himself, rising from the floor on shaky feet.
Traveling spell!
“You told me not to remember that one!”
And you always listen to me, don’t you? Now cast it, Mithris!
The fortress shook again. Broken chunks of glassy crystal, gone dull and lifeless now that Zerto no longer summoned his lights, fell in a hail all around Mithris. He still held Zerto’s leather pouch in one hand.
Seeing the cave crumbling around him, his sleeping mind pulsed into awareness. He shoved his other hand into his pocket and took hold of Vapor, the words already formed on his lips.
As the serpentine spell left his lips, he glanced up toward second shard of falling topaz right above him. It struck the floor where Mithris stood like an angry fist from a titan. But Mithris vanished a heartbeat before it did.
***
Mithris sat on a small stone ledge halfway up the face of the mountain. The slope above and below him was steep and treacherous, but this flat shelf was stable. He was going to have to use the traveling spell to get down, though. He sighed. When his sleeping mind was awake, he could see how the words of magic weaved together. It made casting magic now feel like trying to recall a fading dream.
“You were right,” he said, taking Vapor out of his pocket and gazing at the opalescent stone.
Aren’t I usually?
Mithris snorted and set the foundation crystal aside. Lifting Zerto’s pouch, Mithris tugged it open and dumped it’s contents out in front of him. A handful of rich, dark brown soil and another foundation crystal.
This one felt heavier than the others when he lifted it. Its surface appeared smooth, but felt rough and grainy to the touch. It was the same color as the dark earth it had been packed with.
“What’s this one’s name?”
Terra.
Mithris nodded. With the earthstone, Zerto had been able to create his paranoid paradise under the ground. He had controlled the rocks and stones and the molten stuff below. Maybe that was why he had crawled under his mountain.
You know better, said Vapor. And Terra says Zerto was mad long before he went to hide in his grotto. Mad with fear.
“Who says he was wrong?” Mithris asked. “His greatest fear was that a wizard would come to steal from him and murder him. Well? Isn’t that just what I’ve done? Vapor, I’m as bad as the rest of them! I’m as bad as…as Eaganar himself!”
Terra says you had no choice. Depths and I agree. The crystal hesitated. Mithris could feel its uncertainty. Mithris…I hope you’re not still insisting on trying to keep away from magic.
Mithris sighed. In his heart, he knew that he would never be able to stay away. He needed to become better and stronger. He needed to be able to cast traveling spells that took him where he wanted to go, not some rock on the side of a cliff. He needed to be able to defend himself from bandits and mad wizards alike. He needed to know, most of all, what it was he had done to Zerto’s spell.
Master Deinre’s spellbook, said Vapor, sounding more confident as it sensed the determination in Mithris. He spent decades trying to shape magical energy, but he never achieved anything like what you just did. Still. Read his notes, Mithris. They will tell you where to begin.
Mithris nodded. He had heard Deinre speak of this a time or two, but the Master wizard never told him much. Mithris was just an apprentice, still in his first decade of training. Master Deinre had worked magic for centuries.
He would read the notes in Deinre’s spellbook. He would study and practice. He supposed he would have to find a tower, or something like it.
Mithris was deeply troubled. He knew the crystals were right. Zerto had given him no choice. He had seen himself in the paranoid wizard. It was a twisted reflection of Mithris’ own distrust of wizards. He wondered if he would end up the same.
On the other hand, Zerto had been right about him. Mithris had come to take the crystal. It was that simple. He never meant to kill the wizard, but he’d done it. If he hadn’t come for the stone, he would never have had to. Mithris eyed the glimmering foundation crystals set out on the ledge before him. Vapor had talked him into it. The foundation crystals wanted to be joined together.
Why?
What were the crystals planning to do once he’d brought them together? And what else would they manipulate him into doing before they were through?
Mithris looked up and into the distance. The sun was setting in the distance. He watched it over the tops of trees far below his perch and sighed.
Chapter 35
Mithris stared at the painting in horror, shaking his head in slow denial. He sat at a long table in a scriptorium of the Grand Library. Spread before him on the table were an assortment of maps and a thick tome, the travel memoirs of a long-dead explorer.
Mithris had come to the Library to find out where he must go next. The foundation crystals—Vapor, Depths, and now Terra—could tell him the general direction, but for some reason they could not readily sense the fourth crystal, Ember, as easily as they had sensed each other.
Now Mithris had a pretty good idea why, and the painting which had just been wheeled in and unveiled by one of the stooped, elderly Librarians convinced him he did not want to go find out if he was right.
Mount Wileth lay five hundred leagues from Carran’s Landing and the Grand Library, but with his traveling spells Mithris could be there in an hour, give or take an hour. The painting, done in lurid oil on canvas by some eyewitness to Wileth’s last eruption, showed him what would be waiting.
“No,” he said. The Librarian, who had turned to shuffle off to wherever they hid when no one needed them, turned and gave him a stern, admonishing glare. Moving with painful slowness, the stooped old woman raised a finger to her lips. Then, with a sniff, she turned and moved away among the towering shelves.
“No,” Mithris repeated, lowering his voice. Reaching beneath the table, he untied a stout leather pouch from his belt and lifted it to the edge of the table. Loosening it, he opened the pouch around the three large gemstones within. Vapor, Depths, and Terra. “I am not going in there,” he told the foundation crystals.
Of the crystals—three of the most powerful artifacts in all creation—only Vapor seemed able to speak directly to Mithris. The crystal made itself heard directly in the young wizard’s brain.
Ember is inside that volcano somewhere, said Vapor. That does explain our difficulty in pinpointing its location. You’re right about that.
“I can’t go into a flaming volcano,” Mithris hissed, eyes drifting back to the painting. In vivid reds and orange slashed with stark and sooty blacks and grays, the painter had somehow captured Mount Wileth in the single breath before eruption. The mountains smoldering mouth belched thick smoke as the red-hot magma swirled and bubbled and began to rise. Mithris could almost feel the heat. He shook his head.
Mount Wileth has only erupted once in over a thousand centuries, said Vapor.
“Then it’s probably overdue,” countered Mithris.
What? Vapor’s voice was muffled somewhat, indicating it spoke to one of the other crystals. Not for the first time, Mithris wished he could hear all three of them—and then immediately wondered if he’d lost his wits. Why should he want more voices in his head?
Well which one is…Oh. Vapor made a sound in Mithris’ head, like a clearing of the throat. Mount Wileth has only erupted once in over a thousand months, the crystal corrected itself. I was in error.
“Months?” cried Mithris, then slapped a hand to his mouth and looked guiltily around the scriptorium. No Librarian sprang out to scold him, and he continued in a quieter voice. “A thousand months? That’s…how many years is that?”
Oh, how should I know? Vapor sounded irritated, but Mithris figured the gemstone was embarrassed. Time in your plane means nothing to us.
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