Sorcerers' Isle

by D. P. Prior

  They caught up with Pheklus and Gulgath in a passageway that ran parallel to their original course. The sorcerer had regained his composure, and was stooping to stroke his dog as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

  “Thought the dog was supposed to protect us,” Vrom said.

  In the ghost light of the crystals, Pheklus was a wraith sweeping toward him. The necromancer reached for Vrom’s face with skeletal fingers. Gulgath picked up the end of his leash in his jaws and padded up behind his master, whimpering.

  “Remember your place, apprentice,” Pheklus hissed. His eyes narrowed to bloody slits.

  Vrom swallowed and glanced at Tey for support, but she could see what Pheklus was doing: maintaining an appearance, keeping his apprentice in check. She could learn from that, use the same approach on Hirsiga.

  She looked away from Vrom and met Pheklus’s gaze. When she nodded her understanding, he relaxed, and the hint of a smile played across his face, intended only for her.

  And that was the start of it, the first acknowledgement from either that they were colleagues now, part of a cabal that stood over and above the humdrum people of the isle. Maybe Hirsiga and Vrom would get there one day. If they did as they were told.

  But the instant Tey recognized what had passed between her and Pheklus, doubt began to gnaw away at her. What if the Archmage didn’t accept her as Slyndon Grun’s replacement? What if he wanted her punished for what she’d done? What if she just wasn’t clever enough to be a sorcerer? What if she was too damaged, too unstable, too crazy?

  They continued on in silence, hour after hour. Tey’s progress went from slow to slower as Vrom no longer lent his shoulder, and her good leg was a swollen agony from bearing the brunt of her weight. It felt like glass fragments rubbed beneath her kneecap, and her foot was so badly blistered, it took all her willpower not to cry out at every step.

  Even so, Vrom lagged behind, a sullen presence trailing them. Dark stains spread from beneath the straps of Hirsiga’s pack, as if the skin beneath her dress were so chafed it wept blood. A determined look was fixed upon her face, and when Tey caught her eye, Hirsiga stared right through her, bit down on her lip, and continued to struggle on.

  A few times, Pheklus asked Tey to check the map, and they discussed the best route to take. When the sorcerer suggested they find somewhere to rest up awhile, no one disagreed with him. Tey located a door on the map that appeared to lead into a large chamber or hall, and within minutes, Pheklus had found it.

  Like the others they’d passed, the door was metal, rust-free and strangely burnished. There were heavy hinges one side, a handle and a clunky lock with a keyhole the other. They had similar locks on the wattle-and-daub houses in Malogoi, an invention from another time, Theurig had told them. He’d once demonstrated how to open them without a key, using what he described as a pick and a torsion wrench, more artifacts from the distant past. An inverted triangle had been riveted to the door at head height. What looked like yellow paint flaked from it, and there were symbols in black at its center, too faded and smudged with grime to recognize.

  “Apprentice,” Pheklus said, gesturing for Vrom to try the handle. “Come on, we haven’t got all day.”

  Vrom muttered something but did as he was told. “Locked,” he said.

  “Put your shoulder into it.”

  Vrom threw his weight against the door; winced when it didn’t budge.

  “Can you pick it?” Tey asked.

  “What does that even mean?” Pheklus asked.

  “Open the lock without a key.”

  “Of course I can’t,” Pheklus said. “What a ridiculous thing to ask.”

  “Theurig could have.”

  “Then it’s a pity he’s not here. But I bet you Theurig couldn’t do this.”

  Pheklus rifled about in his coat pocket until he produced a stoppered glass tube the size of a forefinger. It was filled with black powder, and a foot or so of glistening thread protruded from the center of the cork. He inserted the tube into the keyhole, letting the thread hang down in front of the door. From his other pocket, he took out a sliver of flint and held it up for Tey to examine. A pattern of lines had been carved into the stone. At one end, the score marks formed a tight triangle, and she almost gasped, on the brink of some realization that wouldn’t quite manifest. It was the same pattern as on the vambrace. The same the Shedim had marked between her breasts. It had to be important, but what was it for?

  From within her bones, the Shedim scoffed, but it said nothing. Was she supposed to work this out for herself?

  “Stand here,” Pheklus said to Vrom. “Take Gulgath’s leash.”

  He put one hand on Vrom’s forehead, and with the other held the sliver of flint, thumb covering the triangle. He then touched the end of the flint to the thread hanging from the cork and closed his eyes, concentrating. Vrom groaned and Gulgath whined. A shudder passed beneath Pheklus’s coat, and silver sparks sprayed from the flint.

  “Everyone stand back,” Pheklus said, as flames traveled up the thread toward the tube nestled in the keyhole.

  Pheklus covered his ears, and on instinct Tey did the same. There was a fizz and a bang, and a flash of blinding light. Somewhere in the distance, a chorus of gibbering sounded in response.

  “Now try it,” Pheklus said, taking back the dog’s leash.

  Vrom took a step toward the door, bent double, clutching his stomach, and vomited all over the floor.

  Pheklus rolled his eyes. “You, then,” he said to Hirsiga. “Assuming, of course, that’s all right with your mistress.”

  Tey nodded absently, staring blankly at Vrom. What had just happened? Pheklus’s hand on Vrom’s head, the other holding the flint, thumb touching the triangle symbol… Had the necromancer just used Vrom to power his artifact, his sliver of flint, and create fire? If he had, he must have siphoned off Vrom’s essence directly, rather than storing it in his well. Did he even have a well? But if she was understanding what she’d just witnessed correctly, no one had been killed to effect the magic, and the sliver of stone looked exactly what it was: flint carved with lines, nothing at all like the lunula the Shedim had shown her, or the cleverly crafted vambrace she’d taken from Slyndon Grun.

  Hirsiga’s fingers curled around the door handle. She turned it, and there was an answering click. She looked at Tey, about to ask permission to push the door open, but Vrom dropped to his knees, now dry-heaving. He looked different somehow. Frail, lighter. As if he’d lost substance. Odd as it sounded, he seemed less real.

  [Crude and inefficient,] the Shedim said, startling Tey back to alertness. [This fool knows even less of sorcery than the last one. Why do you think I taught you about your well? Without it, you would be forced to use up your own essence, and you would not long survive. But this charlatan has no store within him. Instead, he is dependent upon what he finds around him: a willing apprentice, perhaps an animal, maybe even that dog. But see the effect it has on the other party.]

  Pheklus watched patiently as Vrom climbed unsteadily to his feet. “Good boy,” the sorcerer said, clapping him on the back. “Well done.”

  Vrom let out a hacking cough. He covered his mouth with his fist, then looked at his hand in horror. It was speckled with blood.

  Hirsiga cast a worried glance at Tey, still holding onto the door handle. Tey simply glared in return. It wouldn’t do to let the others know she’d been surprised by Pheklus’s action. She needed to appear harder than she felt, accustomed to the use of sorcery. And Hirsiga needed to believe that she could be next in line.

  [It is more humane, don’t you think, to take all of a person’s essence in one go, so that their suffering is not prolonged. And how much more potent the force drained, when the donor is at the height of both pleasure and pain.]

  “Go on,” Pheklus said to Hirsiga. “Don’t just stand there gawping. You’d think you people had never seen magic before.” He raised his eyebrows at Tey and gave a mischievous smile.

  Hirsiga pushed the door
open, and they followed her inside.

  LAKE PLEROMA

  Water lapped at the prow as the boat cut through the blanket of mist covering the surface of Lake Pleroma. The waterway seemed unimaginably vast to Snaith, like the ocean he had heard about but never seen. Wispy vapors curled above the gunwale, directed by some hidden malevolence. Snaith knew it was his mind again, playing tricks on him, probably as a result of the specters at the ruins.

  The Lakeling stood on a raised platform at the stern, a clot of shadow in his beaked mask and cloak of black feathers. His oar made a gentle splash, first to one side of the boat then the other. The butt of the oar above the Lakeling’s shoulder flashed silver as he rowed. Affixed to the pole was a wicked steel spike.

  The man hadn’t uttered a word since they found him waiting for them at the edge of the lake. One of the guardians of the Wakeful Isle, Theurig had whispered. That was the purpose of the entire Lakeling Clan, apparently: to ferry others to and from the isle, to guard its secrets, and to protect the Archmage who held dominion over Branikdür, while no one barring the sorcerers and the High King ever even suspected he existed.

  Snaith did his best to shield the open book in his lap from the droplets that accompanied each oar-stroke, but it was a losing battle. The pages were spattered with damp spots that smudged ancient ink and threatened to wear through the papyrus or whatever it was Cawdor’s The Four Invasions of Branikdür was comprised of.

  Theurig sat up front, pointing out cormorants and osprey in the branches of the solitary cypress trees that poked above the water, remnants of a drowned forest. The frequent interruptions were an irritation Snaith could have done without. It was hard enough plowing through Cawdor’s turgid writing without having to keep going back and re-reading the same line over and over. Even so, he persisted. He had to know whether the shadows that had tormented him were real, and whether there was any clue in recorded history as to what they might have been.

  Several times he considered asking Theurig but rejected the idea. If the sorcerer knew the ruins were haunted, surely he would have said something. After all, he’d warned Snaith about the Skaltoop. The fact that he hadn’t left Snaith questioning his own sanity, but a part of him had to wonder just how much Theurig knew about a great many things and kept to himself. Including what had happened to Bas and Jennika Harrow. He was growing more and more certain that Tey had been right. The thing was, how to prove it. And even then, what could he do about it? He was starting to think the sorcerer had a contingency for anything he might do or say, so right now, the safest thing seemed to be to do nothing, and to keep as many secrets as he could of his own.

  Theurig’s insistent voice drew Snaith’s eyes from the page yet again. It was getting hard not to curse, or better still, shove him overboard.

  “You missed it,” the sorcerer said with a sigh of exasperation. “A gator-turtle. Big one, too. Dived down between those cypress knees.” He pointed to a cluster of spikes sticking up out of the shallows close to the bank.

  Snaith made a show of looking disappointed. Then, with just enough reluctance to appear polite, he dragged his gaze from the receding spikes to the water up ahead, where patches of sparkling blue formed islands in the mist. Lazy ripples rolled across the surface, while beneath, slender black fish glided in among the long grasses on the lake bed.

  They passed a debris bank of compacted algae, silt, and mulched leaves that had collected around a partially submerged log. Lined up along the log were dark-shelled turtles, some with yellowish underbellies, others red.

  “Sliders,” Theurig said. “Snappers that will take your finger off with one bite.”

  Snaith gave an impressed nod then turned his attention back to the book.

  The problem with Cawdor’s writing, he decided, was that it was deliberately obscure. The section he’d been reading—there were four: one for each invasion—began with a verse couplet that summarized the main gist of the prose that followed. Flicking through the rest of the book, Snaith realized this was a device Cawdor used at the beginning of each part. It was the language of folk tales, like the kind Theurig frightened the clansfolk with whenever he felt the need to remind them of the dangers of straying from the village.

  With a deep breath, he bent once more to the task of wresting some sort of meaning from the lines, and again came up blank:

  FIRST INVASION:

  THE COMING OF THE WAKEFUL

  Surprise blood spilled ere armies thronged

  —The Wakeful’s wintry blast.

  No one-quick-strike chimera song

  Would cleanse the Dark Isle fast.

  The prose that followed was no better: vague accounts of spirits falling from the stars to take up home on the Dark Isle that came to be known as Branikdür. These beings, the Wakeful, adapted to their new environment by growing carapaces of flesh, and it was this enfleshment that proved their downfall. But at this point, Cawdor again reverted to verse. Snaith got the impression these poetic summaries were drawn from some older text, perhaps even an oral tradition, which to his mind made them the most important passages, and the most frustrating:

  The denser skin that Nemus spawned

  Sloughed free from Gardeners’ pall.

  So human flesh took Wakeful lords

  Before the Isle should fall.

  Snaith’s head started to throb. He shut the book and stared at Theurig’s back for a long moment. Finally, he decided he had to ask. Even without all the distractions, it would take him a lifetime to work out what Cawdor was trying to say. And what if Cawdor didn’t really know the true history of the isle? What if he was making it up?

  “Nemus is the name of the world,” Snaith said, seeking clarification. “The world the Crafters made.”

  “Look!” Theurig jabbed a finger toward a rust-colored bird as it took flight. It had a long neck and a broad wingspan. “Some kind of heron, I think. But the hue—not something I’ve seen before.” He glanced back at the Lakeling rhythmically shunting them ahead with strokes to either side. “Have you? Do you know what it is?”

  No answer.

  “Of course not.” Theurig sighed and swiveled round to face Snaith. “Nemus, yes. You’re telling me something I told you.”

  “But who are the Wakeful?”

  “A myth.” Theurig was looking past Snaith’s shoulder at the Lakeling.

  Snaith realized the rowing had stopped. When he cast a look behind, the Lakeling was glaring down at him through the glassy amber eyes set either side of his curved beak. The mask was cleverly molded, stitched along its center with coarse thread. The cloak of feathers that obscured all but the Lakeling’s black-wrapped arms glistened blue and purple like oil where the muted sunlight clipped it.

  “Cawdor says they fell from the stars,” Snaith said.

  The Lakeling resumed his monotonous strokes, and the boat continued to drift ahead.

  Theurig scoffed. “Naturally. Where else would they come from? Spirit-beings, he calls them, who adapted to the conditions on Nemus, somehow grew a husk of flesh.”

  “Which sloughed away.”

  “A magical battle, we are led to believe,” Theurig said. “The Wakeful waged a long campaign of terror from their island fortress—the ‘Isle Within the Isle’ as it was then known; what we call the Wakeful Isle, which you shall soon see for yourself. After centuries of struggle and decline, our ancestors appealed to the Gardeners, the tenders of the Crafters’ creation, and they unleashed a sorcerous plague that returned the Wakeful to their natural state.”

  “But then they took on human form.”

  “That isn’t what Cawdor says.” Theurig raised an amused eyebrow. “He says ‘took’, not ‘took on’. The Wakeful, before they lost their bodies, mated with human women. It was a union that produced the Shedim.”

  “And none of this is true?”

  “I didn’t say that. I said the Wakeful were a myth. That is not the same thing as a lie. There are some who believe—and Cawdor is among them—that when the Wa
keful were ‘un-enfleshed’ their spirits seeped into the very ground of Branikdür.” He looked into Snaith’s eyes and held his gaze for an uncomfortably long time. “This is why I want you to read Cawdor. Not just for the Wakeful, but for knowledge of the Crafters, the Gardeners, and the Shedim. It’s all in there in some form or another, all the long, terrible history of Branikdür. It then falls to the reader to apply Cawdor’s history to the facts that can be gleaned from the world around us, from the clues that lie hidden beneath the earth, or among the ancient ruins that stain its surface.”

  Snaith looked out across the lake, imagining with all the vividness that came naturally to him that the mist was the crest of the cloud cover that kept Branikdür in perpetual gloom, and the boat a gigantic bird that bore them high above the world. Then, just as vividly, the bird became a black-scaled dragon with tattered wings, and he was riding on its back. It craned its sinuous neck to glare at him with eyes of crimson fire. Like a man buried alive digging his way free, Snaith gasped in a snatch of humid air that failed to fill his lungs. He panted for breath, and sweat trickled from his forehead into his eyes.

  “Snaith?” Theurig said. He sounded more curious than concerned. “What just happened?”

  “Nothing.” At least nothing he needed to share with the sorcerer. Had it just been an image thrown up by his overactive mind? It should have come as no surprise, given the tattoo Theurig had inked on his chest, and the mosaic floor back at the ruins. But as with the specters, Snaith couldn’t suppress the feeling there was more to this than his own imaginings. For Theurig’s benefit, he added, “Just a lingering superstition.”

  “Oh, and what might—”

  Snaith opened his eyes wide and stared out beyond the prow. This time, he was aware he was deliberately creating an image, one in response to a niggling thought. He pictured a vast waterfall up ahead, then the boat tipping over the edge.

  “What would happen if we reached the end of Nemus and fell from the world?” he asked. “Where would we fall to?”