Dangerous Waters

by Juliet E. McKenna

  She could sense the furnace heat many leagues deeper down. The Hearth Master was holding his hands over the bowl now. The water was swirling round and round, the motion hollowing the middle. The gold of her own magic warmed further to a fiery orange.

  It would be the work of mere moments for this nexus to draw the molten ores upwards from deep beneath Hadrumal, sundering the very land the city was built on. As long as they all agreed on it, which of course, they never would.

  ‘Nolyen,’ the Hearth Master prompted.

  The younger mage slid his outstretched fingers into the water and the swirling magic stilled. Magelight rose like vapour, rainbow hues sliding over and under each other. Nolyen gestured and the magelight formed a ring floating above the silver bowl’s rim.

  Kalion leaned forward to study the image reflected in this magic mirror. ‘Do any of us know this place?’

  It was a town of wooden buildings with wide, well-made streets. Jilseth could see that, just as she could see that no one else in this nexus had any more notion where it might be than she did.

  ‘Let’s see look for some clues,’ Nolyen murmured.

  He sent the spell scudding along the road. Jilseth only wished doing this didn’t make her feel quite so nauseous. She should be more sympathetic to sea-sick Caladhrian barons.

  ‘It must be Solura.’ Canfor’s voice sharpened with anticipation. ‘That’s their script.’

  Jilseth saw an inn had some bold proclamation painted on its whitewashed wall. ‘This is the furthest anyone’s scryed after him so far.’ She caught Nolyen’s eye and grinned.

  ‘Fine food and clean beds. Horses and carriages for hire.’ Kalion looked at the three of them, challenging their surprise. ‘Solurans visit Hadrumal from time to time. I have long considered it folly that more of us don’t learn their tongue and their script.

  ‘No knowledge is ever wasted,’ he went on with something of his usual superiority. ‘Nolyen, kindly find me the main market. There will be proclamations posted there with the local lord’s seal and insignia.’

  Jilseth sat as quietly as Canfor, both focused on maintaining their part in the magic while Nolyen did as the Hearth Master instructed. The water mage soon found a stone pillar nearly invisible beneath layers of broadsheets, the last to be pasted up detailing entertainments for the Solstice feast.

  ‘Pastamar,’ Kalion said. ‘Nolyen, please show me the course of the river.’

  As the town shrank away, the magic soaring like a bird, Jilseth had to close her eyes.

  ‘Nadrua.’ Kalion’s satisfaction was tempered by perplexity. ‘Why is this vagabond swordsman travelling so far from home?’

  Jilseth opened her eyes to see the magical reflection searching along the wharves of a riverbank crowded with sail barges and humbler scows.

  ‘Is he there?’ Kalion peered into the spell. ‘Or has he already moved on?’

  That was a refinement of quintessential scrying which Jilseth had come to value. Where the customary spell merely showed where someone or something was to be found, this enhanced magic could trace out their path.

  ‘Is he still alive?’ Canfor wondered. ‘Jilseth?’

  Outside the nexus, she knew, his question would fall somewhere between a taunt and a challenge. Within the magic, he was honestly curious.

  She concentrated on Corrain and as she did so, Jilseth found she could pick out the individual note of the tansy oil amid the heady mix of perfumes. She teased it out of the circling magelight. Focusing her own magic through it overlaid the vivid image with a pale golden veil. It was both like and unlike working necromancy. Instead of drawing on some scrap of flesh or bone, now she was seeking such carrion.

  Not any carrion. Only Corrain’s dead body. Could she do this at such an incalculable distance? No, this was no time for self-doubts.

  As Nolyen surrendered control of the spell, she sent it searching this way and that. Jilseth was conscious of Kalion watching her intently. She could feel his elemental affinity reaching through the fire woven into the quintessential scrying. The Hearth Master sought some understanding of the magic she was working.

  Canfor’s pale eyes were avid. She could sense tension in the elemental air threaded through the spell. His instinct was to take control of the spell, even as wizardly reason must tell him that the magic would be torn asunder if he did. Jilseth recalled her own struggles with this unnatural intimacy of affinity.

  She had to find Corrain, if he was there to be found, before Canfor’s innate self-importance triumphed over his conscious intellect. But she was only sensing emptiness.

  ‘I’m sorry, Hearth Master. I don’t believe he’s here, dead or alive.’ She swept the golden haze away from the magical reflection of the distant town and felt the tansy oil merge with the perfumed scrying once more.

  Canfor opened his mouth, doubtless ready with some cutting criticism.

  Kalion spoke first. ‘I regret to say I must agree. My compliments, madam mage. The clarity of your magic is such that there can’t be any doubt of it.’ He looked up, not to Jilseth but to Nolyen. ‘Can we follow his trail from here?’

  ‘Let’s see.’ But after a few tense moments the emerald magelight in the scrying bowl glowed with Nolyen’s chagrin. ‘I regret not, Hearth Master.’

  Canfor opened his mouth. Jilseth was ready to kick him if he sneered at Nolyen. Instead he surprised her.

  ‘Let’s try the pendulum, Master Kalion, now that we can start with a specific point on the map.’ He gestured at the ensorcelled reflection.

  Kalion pursed his fleshly lips. ‘We’ve had no luck with that magic at such a distance.’

  ‘We haven’t tried with this particular nexus,’ Canfor countered, ‘and Archmage Planir is insistent that we find this man.’

  The Archmage had agreed, when Jilseth had returned from Kevil and told him what she had learned, and what she suspected after her visit to Halferan. She looked at Canfor and wondered what Planir had told him. Or what Kalion had told him, though of course that depended on what the Archmage had told the Hearth Master.

  Kalion considered this and then nodded. ‘Very well. Nolyen?’

  ‘Hearth Master.’ The water mage deftly disentangled the scrying magic.

  Canfor was on his feet, carrying the bowl to a side table before the water stilled. He snapped his fingers, summoning a rolled parchment with a crackle of azure magelight. His other hand already held a faceted diamond pendant on a silken thread.

  He’d come prepared, Jilseth noted, intent on winning the prestige of finding the fugitive. She didn’t say anything, instead joining Nolyen in fetching small statues from their niches to weight the corners of the stubbornly curling map.

  Kalion contemplated Solura’s coast, so far away to the west beyond the Gulf of Peorle, the long thrust of Ensaimin into the Southern Sea matched by the Great Forest on the far side of the Bay of Teshal.

  ‘Here.’ He pressed a plump finger on the junction of a lesser stream from the mountains and the mighty river separating the kingdom from the forest.

  ‘Let’s see where he went after that.’ Canfor stretched out his hand, the silk thread held between finger and thumb. The diamond’s pointed tip hung over the town’s inked symbol. The gem glowed with blue light.

  Kalion laid his palm over the back of Canfor’s hand and the radiance shifted to lavender before Nolyen’s magic darkened the magelight to an ochre hue. Jilseth rested her own hand on top of the water wizard’s and saw the enchantment lighten as golden radiance poured down into the stone.

  She drew a startled breath. Now her wizardly senses extended for leagues above this tower. She could feel different layers and densities within the air, just as she was accustomed to sense the myriad seams and veins in the rocks beneath her feet. This was disturbingly different to the weighty reassurance of soil and stone. The sky was an ever-changing turmoil of wind and weather assailed by the sun’s heat and suffused with water vapour rising from land and sea alike.

  The gem began to swi
ng back and forth. Jilseth swallowed baleful resentment at the thought of Canfor succeeding. What mattered was finding Corrain.

  The pendant glowed more brightly until the white light was too painful to look at. Jilseth squinted at the map and seriously considered using her free hand to shade her eyes. Before she was forced to reveal such weakness to Canfor, the pendant faded. Now it was merely a diamond in the sunlight, its facets edged with shifting rainbows owing nothing to quintessential magic.

  Kalion sighed. ‘It was worth a try.’

  ‘Hearth Master?’ Nolyen’s question saved Jilseth from asking.

  ‘All this tells us is the man was here, as your spell did.’ Canfor spoke through clenched teeth. ‘We’d see an uneven oscillation if the pendulum was going to lead us towards him.’

  Jilseth realised the lingering perfumes in the room had been burned away by the light emanating from the gem stone. She had felt the diamond magic’s intensity evaporating before it could pick up their quarry’s scent. Something about that felt significant but she couldn’t identify what.

  ‘Forgive me, Hearth Master.’ Nolyen withdrew his hand, forcing Jilseth to do the same. The water mage wiped sweat from his brow.

  ‘Kindly warn me before you do that again,’ Canfor snarled and Jilseth saw an unhealthy blue pallor around his lips.

  She was glad to take her own seat unnoticed. Tremors ran through her, from fingertip to fingertip and from head to toe. She was as fatigued as if she’d just run from the bottommost step of this tower to the top without pause for breath.

  Kalion was apparently unperturbed by their spell’s sudden rupture. He was leaning over the map, peering ever more closely through a lens of ensorcelled air. That was how these wizard maps could be drawn with the finest detail, with a pen nib as fine as a single hair.

  ‘I will bespeak the Soluran mages I know,’ the Hearth Master announced. ‘They may have travelled in that area recently or some of their own acquaintance might have done so. I’m owed a few favours which should buy us some Soluran scrying.’

  ‘Then this hasn’t been all in vain.’ Nolyen’s drained eyes brightened a little.

  Canfor grunted, rising from his chair. ‘With your permission, Hearth Master?’

  ‘Of course.’ Kalion favoured him an absent smile before returning to the map.

  ‘Please excuse me as well.’ At the Hearth Master’s nod, Nolyen followed Canfor to the door. ‘Some wine?’

  Jilseth thought the taller wizard would rebuff him. Then he nodded curtly. ‘Why not?’

  Jilseth considered following but her legs felt as heavy as lead. She would sit here a little longer.

  Kalion was still absorbed in the map. He brushed aside the diamond which Canfor had discarded, the thread mimicking Solura’s rivers. The gem was worthless for further magic now, whatever price a jeweller might put on it.

  As Jilseth looked at the stone, she felt for her own pocket, hidden within the light twill of her skirt. That lump inside the linen pouch was the ensorcelled lodestone she had used to find Minelas, forgotten among her folding knife, her keys and a mesh purse holding a few coins for a wine shop or the bakery. Why was she carrying the stone? Minelas was long dead.

  Why was she thinking of it? Because she was recalling the shining grey stone pulling on the pewter chain. The sensation was reminiscent of the diamond pendulum’s swing. But quintessential magic or not, that particular working had to be initiated by an air mage.

  Jilseth frowned. There was some insight to be had here, if she could only puzzle it out. ‘Excuse me, Hearth Master.’ She rose to her feet.

  ‘By all means.’ Kalion was removing the statues from the map and rolling the parchment with a noisy rattle.

  Jilseth nearly stumbled as she went down the stairs; her knees were unhelpfully inclined to buckle. She concentrated on getting safely out into the quadrangle before returning to her inner deliberations.

  Kalion was welcome to try persuading some Soluran mage to scry for Corrain. Even if the Hearth Master’s reputation was sufficient to secure such co-operation, none of those distant wizards had even laid eyes on Corrain. The best they could do was scry at random in hopes of seeing a man of his description. If he had the sense to cut his hair and lose that broken manacle, they had no chance of success.

  The manacle. How might that feature in the magic she was groping for?

  Jilseth hurried back to her own room. She wanted peace and privacy and the tools of her affinity around her. If she could refine this inkling of a spell, she might succeed where Canfor and his pendulum had failed.

  If so, that scoundrel Corrain would learn that no amount of distance travelled could take him beyond the reach of Hadrumal’s wizardry.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The Great Forest

  8th of Aft-Summer (Caladhrian Parliamentary Almanac)

  10th of Lekinar (Soluran calendar)

  CORRAIN COULD HAVE followed the Soluran contingent’s trail himself. Not as quickly as Kusint, he silently acknowledged. Not when the track through the woods branched and the summer soil was too hard and dry to be dinted even by an iron-shod hoof. Corrain knew he wouldn’t have been nearly so swift to spot the bent grasses and ruffled leaves which were the only traces to show which route their quarry had taken.

  This was nothing like the roads he was used to riding through woodland. Caladhrian undergrowth was cleared for a plough-length on either side, allowing the sun and wind to dry out the ground as soon as any rain ceased. In Ensaimin, so he’d been told, the vegetation was cut back as far as an arrow-shot from the highways for fear of bandits. This track could be mistaken for a game trail, if not for the occasional rut from a wheel’s metal rim where shade left the soil softer.

  ‘How far are we from the Great West Road?’ Corrain had only the vaguest idea of where that mighty highway arrived in Solura after cutting through the trees from Selerima, most westerly of Ensaimin’s great trading cities.

  ‘Fifty leagues north of here,’ Kusint said absently. ‘Sixty perhaps.’

  He had dismounted beside a tree stump hollow with age and rot, marking another divide in their route. The Solurans could have gone either way.

  The Forest lad looked around, brows knitting. Corrain felt uneasy. That was more than a squint prompted by the sunshine.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ Kusint stiffened. ‘I think,’ he said warily, ‘that we should stop here.’

  Without waiting for Corrain’s agreement, he perched on the frayed stump. His horse, a sturdy dun cob, nosed at the long grass flourishing around its base.

  ‘Why?’ Corrain searched the shadows beneath the trees. What had Kusint seen?

  ‘Because he knows that’s it’s courteous to wait for an invitation into somebody’s home, Caladhrian man.’

  Corrain’s rough-coated mount stamped, startled. A Forest man had stepped onto the track a stone’s throw beyond the stump. Where had he come from, silent as a deer at dawn?

  ‘You understand our tongue?’ asked Corrain. The stranger was speaking Tormalin with an accent strongly reminiscent of Ensaimin.

  The Forest man smiled. ‘I know all manner of speech, from east to west and from north to south.’

  Maybe so, but his clothing was wholly unfamiliar. Tight leather leggings were criss-crossed with leather thongs while a sleeveless leather tunic, close-fitting as a second skin, was cropped short at his waist. His pale arms were as mottled with freckles as the track was dappled with leafy shadows.

  He wasn’t as tall as Kusint and to Corrain’s eye, the newcomer’s leanness owed as much to hunger as it did to a wiry frame. With autumn’s bounty of nuts and fruit half a season away, the woods offered meagre forage in high summer. Kusint had bought plenty of dried fruit and meat and travel bread for their saddle bags back in Solura.

  Corrain noted the short bow slung on the man’s back and a pigeon’s feather caught on the woven quiver strap across his chest. The quiver was made from spotted deer hide. How many folk was the man hunting for, if he we
nt hungry despite such proof of success? How many of those might be lurking in the trees?

  ‘I’m Corrain and he is Kusint. May we know your name, friend?’ he asked cautiously.

  The Forest man angled his head. Corrain was put in mind of a fox; sharp-eyed and quick-witted. Crafty too.

  ‘You assume that I offer friendship?’

  Something in his tone reminded Corrain of the way Kusint had been teasing him of late. ‘I can only speak for myself,’ he replied. ‘I am assuredly no enemy to you and yours.’

  The Forest man’s gaze darted to Kusint. He was old enough to be the youth’s father, Corrain reckoned, his hair faded from burnished copper to something closer to gold, and drawn back in a tightly plaited braid. ‘What have you to say for yourself?’

  He added something in the Forest tongue which prompted a blush furious enough to obscure Kusint’s freckles. He replied hotly in the same language before checking himself and explaining to Corrain.

  ‘He says that I sound like a boar piglet from last year’s litters moving through the underbrush, while you make more noise than a sow rising from her wallow.’

  Corrain refused to be provoked. Not now that he had this seemingly endless journey’s end in sight. Or the halfway point where he could turn for home, once he’d secured a wizardly ally. As long as this Forest man knew where the Solurans were.

  ‘How noisy are the men we’re tracking? The men-at-arms from Pastamar?’

  Kusint spoke up before the man could answer. ‘Have you seen any Mandarkin in these woods?’

  Idle birdsong drifted through the treetops. The Forest man visibly made a decision.

  ‘The Solurans whom you seek are half a league or so ahead. Shall I show you where they’re making camp? That might be safest, since there are indeed sneaking Mandarkin hereabouts. Your Solurans are hunting them. My name is Deor,’ he added, an apparent afterthought.