by Damien Lake
Brisk and efficient, the guard brought him along the paved road to the palace complex, wanting only to complete his duty in a timely manner. A branching path led them around the palace’s side, through the thick, ancient trees. Under their spreading foliage grown over centuries it seemed to be dusk rather than the fourth bell of the morning.
Several minutes later when they finally emerged from the trees, a faint roar drifted to his ears. That must have been louder than the cheer when they dropped the line and the first horses raced off! I suppose the first block must have entered the water.
The noise faded quickly, a testament to how sheltered the palace grounds were. Only the loudest noises could breach the defenses, and then only momentarily.
Marik studied the building to which the guard had brought him. To his right he could make out the back wall of one palace wing through a thin smattering of trees. Decorative flowerbeds hugged the wall despite a gloom that surely deterred visitors. A second graveled path led from a door, through the trees and to a separate structure.
An odd building to his eyes. It was two structural types combined. A dome formed the lower half, a hundred feet wide at the base, curving up to thirty feet in height. Jutting straight up through the center was a tower sixty feet across and seven floors tall. Very few windows could be seen except in the tower’s upper reaches.
While the dome looked to be the same gray stone as the property walls, the tower was a blend of wood and plaster. It looked sturdy nonetheless, free of the rough hewn texture that most wooden towers familiar to him bore. Granted, this had not been built by unskilled hands on a deadline in contested territory.
The grounds surrounding this tower were the same compacted earth he would expect to find under a forest canopy. The guard ushered him quickly and opened a door before he could ponder this setting.
Marik entered a lady’s parlor, or at any rate a room in a similar vein. Or perhaps this was a kind of reception area. The guard directed him to have a seat and disappeared deeper into the building.
With a choice between several frail-looking creations of thin wooden spokes bent into a chair’s shape or one of the dozen fat cushions scattered around, he elected to stand beside the hearth and study the bookshelf. Perhaps their titles might reveal the nature of this peculiar tower set off from the main complex. He found they were each Galemaran histories. Probably a political choice on behalf of whomever had been in charge of stocking this room’s entertainment luxuries.
He no sooner finished reading the last title when the door opened and out came the guard, along with Celerity.
“I hope you are rested,” she greeted him, which hardly sounded a good omen.
“Why should I need to be?” he replied. The guard left to return to the gate post. “What I should be is with Hilliard Garroway, since that’s what I’m being paid to do.”
“He will be well protected.” Her assured indifference did little to reassure Marik. She added, “We have work awaiting us. Come.”
No threat accompanied the words, yet the placid command and her turned back did nothing at all to sooth his nerves. I will not be afraid of her! I will not be controlled by her! I will not let magic rule me!
Squaring his shoulders, he readied himself for a grueling challenge. That he was in the same state of mind with which his war-like relationship with Tollaf had begun never occurred to him despite his earlier thoughts.
While they penetrated deeper into the building, she chose to explain the reasons behind her summons. “So that your mind is eased, I have been looking into this matter of the red-eyed man. If your description is indeed correct, I think there is little chance he is a Devil in disguise.”
Marik grunted.
“But you have no experience in this field, so I must view him. If there is a loose Devil in the world, it is valuable knowledge. If it is in Tullainia…well, a great many rumors can be explained.”
Sunlight penetrated Marik’s brain. Ever since Celerity had approached him during the opening ceremony, he’d racked his mind for a reason why the most powerful mages in Galemar had taken an interest in his quest to find Rail. He suddenly understood.
Surely King Raymond held a significant interest in what transpired across the border. The refugee flood alone would require his attention. And of course he would set his mages to the task of finding out what in blazes was happening over there! For whatever reason, Tollaf had told Celerity about what happened, and she believed that he, an apprentice barely able to craft basic shields, had somehow seen what they were so desperately searching for! His scrye’s seeking serpent had been pointing west when it found Rail, after all.
Did she merely suspect the red-eyed man’s hand in the turmoil plaguing Tullainia, or did she possess corroborative information she felt he had no claim to? Was his father in danger?
“Mmhmm,” he grunted again, his mind spinning.
Celerity glanced sideways at him. “I’ve attempted several scrying workings on my own, but what I have is not enough. Tru also made an effort to scrye them. He specializes in scrying, and hardly ever fails.”
“So why do you need me? I can barely see into the etheric.”
“I need you,” she said sharply, “because blood is always the most powerful catalyst. With blood directly connected to the subject, then distance has no meaning and no other facets to the working are required.”
Marik stopped in the hallway. He was wary of her waspish words yet unable to hold his tongue. “I have no connection to this red-eyed man you’re so hot on! All I can do is call up my father. You say this stranger isn’t dangerous, but you’re spending all your time looking for him as far as I can tell! What about my father? How do you know he’s anywhere near this man still? Is he safe? Or are you hiding something from me?”
Celerity faced him while he ranted. His tone near the end came out harsher than he intended, and he winced when her features narrowed. He flinched when she stepped closer.
“As for your father,” she enunciated clearly in a low voice, “I have no idea. Your questions are ones that I, too, would like a clearer answer on. The first of which is whether he is in fact accompanying this red-eyed man. As we have failed to scrye either man, we are left clutching at straws. Now, come, youngling.”
Her eyes were frozen chips. She pierced him with her gaze until he finally moved. Marik had not felt like such a child since he left Tattersfield and he resented her for it. But the courage to storm away died under her glare.
They walked in silence. It quickly became apparent to Marik that his initial impression from the outside had been incorrect. He thought the tower extended all the way to the ground, penetrating the dome from the inside. Instead, the tower had been built atop the dome, a fact revealed when they climbed a staircase through the stone top-curve.
Reaching the tower’s third floor, which would actually be six floors above the trimmed forest floor, Celerity opened a workroom door. Marik found it bore an eerie similarity to Tollaf’s rooms in Kingshome.
“Over there,” she directed, pointing across the room. A large, oval mirror had been mounted on pivots at its center frame. Standing beside it, a hand lazily spinning the mirror every time it flipped halfway, was a man. Marik had never seen anyone with skin so dark as to be coal-black.
The robes the man wore were also black, a selection that must have been deliberate. It gave him a darker aspect. When they came to the mirror, the black man stopped spinning the mirror so he could reach out his hand.
“Heya,” he greeted. Marik clasped the proffered hand. “You’re that Marik, right?”
“I suppose.”
“I’m Tru.” He released Marik’s grip. “I’m supposed to be scrying for Celerity, but I can’t. I mean, I tried, but nothing happened. So what can I do?”
“I don’t know,” Marik replied. This man’s words were strangely disjointed.
Celerity sighed. “Tru, let’s not waste time, shall we? Use his blood to call up his father, then we’ll see what’s what.”
“Fine,” the man said, then lifted a long knife. He turned toward a startled Marik. “One or two bowls ought to do it.”
“What?” Marik jerked his hands behind his back.
“Tru!” Celerity sounded on the edge of losing her temper for good.
“What?” Tru looked innocent. “Come here,” he redirected at Marik. “You want to or let me?”
He gestured at a small bowl. Marik answered, “I’m not fond of cutting myself.”
“Whichever.” He made a quick cut in Marik’s forearm. Marik winced. Tru held the bowls under the dripping blood until the flow stopped.
“Well?” Celerity asked. Tru apparently knew what she meant.
“Let him go first. I have the blood, but you know… He’s not my father. I’m not like him. I mean, I don’t have any, uh, any…what you say, links.”
“I think you mean affinity,” Celerity scowled.
“Yeah,” Tru scowled right back. “So I can’t talk! So what?”
She muttered an oath under her breath. Her glare shifted to Marik as though he had offended her. “Sit down, already!”
The only nearby chair sat before the mirror. He hated the way he jerked to obey her sour command. Did these two actually like each other or not?
“First put up a physical shield in case you shatter my mirror. I’d rather not waste time calling our Healers to fix you up.”
“Ummm,” Marik hesitated. He had no idea what she meant. Rather than admit it, he tried to sidestep the issue. “Why don’t you do it? I think you want me to do my scrying working, and last time it took most of my energy.”
She studied him suspiciously before saying, like a woman answering the same question her husband has asked a hundred times before, “Because you can’t reach through a shield created from my energies. You can only reach through a shield composed of your own!”
“Right, uh, I knew that. So, um, how do I do that?”
“Do?”
“Make a physical shield. It doesn’t sound like any of the shields I know.”
Celerity studied him anew, this time with surprise. “Hasn’t Tollaf taught you shields?”
“I know some!” he replied with force.
Muttered curses escaped beneath her breath. “I’m amazed you’ve been apprenticed for over a full year. I never would have guessed. But we don’t have all day, so I’ll need to use the shortcut.”
Memories surged when she stepped behind and reached for his temples. “Wait a minute!” he shouted, leaping to his feet. “Couldn’t, uh…couldn’t he do it instead?”
He loathed it whenever Tollaf reached into his body to assume control over his mage talent, and never wished to experience it again. But the idea of Celerity doing it sparked a wild panic in him. Tru seemed less…cold. Maybe it would not be so bad.
Tru shook his head. “No way I can,” he said. “I’m not a mage.”
“You’re not?” Confusion wrapped its fingers around Marik.
“Nope. My talent’s as a magician.”
Marik leaned away involuntarily. His every experience with magicians had gone badly. Given the way the day seemed to be progressing, he might come off less abused this time, perhaps, but he felt his record would remain, essentially, consistent.
Glancing at Celerity, who grew increasingly impatient by the heartbeat, he noticed several pouches laying atop a table. Undoubtedly those would be Tru’s spell components.
“Sit down and look ahead!” she snapped before clamping her fingers to his temples. A familiar, gut-wrenching sensation spread throughout him. He watched with his mage senses while she reached into his talent with her own to withdraw a portion of his energy. She formed it quickly, creating a thin wall between him and the mirror. Though his intestines insisted they were spilling out through his navel, he noticed this particular shield’s details were similar, while slightly different, from the rest he knew.
“There. Don’t disrupt it,” she ordered when she released his head. “It will shield you from the glass shards if the mirror shatters. Get started and begin with the west first.”
What? Rather than ask, he studied his reflection in the mirror. He had no idea what she meant by that either, and chose not to inform her of the fact. The west? I guess that means I can focus the working.
Since intention formed a great part of the working’s framework, he thought that if he concentrated, west, to the west, when telling the magic what to do, it might perhaps begin there, rather than randomly starting elsewhere. Unfortunately, as he learned anew every time he attempted a new working, simply wanting a specific thing to happen was no guaranty. If he did not know beforehand exactly what it was he wanted to happen, how he wanted it to happen, how the energy would be shaped or allowed his thoughts to wander, the working’s inherent purpose would be contaminated. It was a wonder that any mage had ever figured out how to accomplish anything more complicated than lighting a candle with his power.
He remained keenly aware that Celerity waited for him to start. Marik held back a sigh and opened his magesight to the etheric place. To date, he’d had no reason go looking for etheric lines flowing near Thoenar. Surely there must be one. Thousands of people residing in the city must result in a torrent of cumulative life energy spilling over from the physical plane despite all the paving stones denying plant growth.
Letting his self drift from his body, he dropped rapidly through the tower floors until he hovered within the insubstantial etheric ground. The most tenacious mole had never delved so deep as he went. He found it far easier to search out lines while floating below the ambient glows of surface life. Starry sparkles from worms and insects spread above him, so closely resembling the night sky in the physical plane that at times he pondered the nature of his own world.
Within his view, three separate lines ran beneath the streets. Marik drifted to the one flowing closest to the surface. He had never seen two lines so close together before, let alone three, each separate, existing at different depths. Tollaf often compared the etheric energies flowing through the lines to water, so shouldn’t they merge into one, larger stream? And how could there be three when he remembered the thin diffusion in the warehouse district? There were still so many mysteries related to magecraft.
He felt the heat baking off the topmost line at a distance further than he’d ever felt from the line running beside Kingshome. At twice the diameter of his familiar line, the flowing power felt wilder, dangerous. Marik dipped his mental fingers into the flow cautiously after erecting a small shield to protect him from an exposure headache. His siphoning channel drew the energy easily enough. It flowed into his reserves much faster than he’d ever dealt with. Staying open to the line for a prolonged time would burst him like dropped water skin.
Marik left the link open and returned to the waiting court mages. A mild throb from his cut arm greeted his return to physical senses.
Was blood truly the easiest catalyst to scrye with? The last time he performed this working, it had required all the energy he could hold and siphon for candlemarks. Tru’s capabilities with multiple scrying methods suddenly made the black magician far more imposing.
That’s why I always scoffed whenever you demanded I teach you right off, boy, Tollaf’s voice abruptly sneered inside his mind. Irritated, Marik buried his attention in the task at hand, desiring not in the least to listen to an old fool half the kingdom’s length away. It was odd, though, how lifelike his voice had sounded. No doubt if the old man were present, the same words would have emerged verbatim from his scowling lips.
One time, his father had told him that the friends he’d fought beside who fell in battle never truly left him. They sit around up here, he had laughed while tapping his head. Most of the time they wonder why, by Vernilock’s measure, I’m still alive! The rest of the time they usually comment on the choices I make.
Only six years of age, understanding had eluded the younger Marik. He recalled that afternoon for the first time in years. Perhaps he could relate with his
father. A shade of sadness darkened his emotions that Rail’s voice, the one voice he wished to hear most of all, was also the one voice beyond his summoning. Too much time had passed. Marik could recall very little of its specifics.
A better reason than any to get on with his task. The desire to see his father, a desire he could usually keep caged behind the problems facing him in the present, rose strong. Celerity and whatever she might be keeping from him no longer mattered. He wanted to see his father! He wanted answers to the questions he’d been struggling with for years!
His reserves full, Marik formed the raw energy ring around the mirror’s frame. Every previous working he had learned became easier with each subsequent forming. This time, that was not so. Keeping the energy pure without tainting it would always be challenging.
Once completing the ring, he formed the link between the bowl, concentrating, telling the power matrix what he wanted. To the southwest. Start to the southwest and rotate north!
From atop the mirror, at the oval frame’s pinnacle, the etheric serpent shot out like a startled bird. Marik briefly sensed an unwinding coil of thin rope attached to a grappling hook hurled by an expert thrower. As before, it stopped without warning, the movement as it slowly circled imperceptible.
A raging thirst soon overwhelmed his other senses. Marik blinked and found Tru already standing at his side with a goblet and water pitcher.
“I know that look. Seen it every time I look in that mirror after I start a long one.”
“Thanks,” Marik replied, and accepted the goblet. It was heavy and unadorned ceramic. In barely a moment, he drained half the pitcher.
A sweeping glance revealed Celerity sitting in a luxurious chair across the room. She said nothing and appeared to be watching from the sunken recesses of overstuffed leather. He was glad his mage working had obeyed his desire. Whatever she might have said about his serpent starting in the wrong direction, he would be spared from it.
He hoped the serpent would find his father soon. His mother had died almost three years ago. In all that time since leaving the town where they had lived, he’d made no serious progress in his search for Rail.
