The Fire Mages

by Pauline M. Ross

  “Follow me,” he said, and disappeared into the hole.

  Close up, wooden steps were visible. With a quick shrug of one shoulder, Drei went after the mage, I followed and then Marras at the back. She had left her lamp behind, too, for the lower level was lit at intervals by large glass lanterns hanging from hooks along one wall.

  We were in a vast circular tunnel, lined with tiles and bricks. A walkway wide enough for three people at least ran along one wall, the mage already striding away. Below it, the lowest point of the circle, was a small stream. There was a faint but unmistakeable odour of urine.

  “I thought no one lived in the Imperial City,” I said.

  “No one does,” Marras said, jumping the last three steps to land beside me. “It’s quite empty. Why?”

  “So why is the sewer still disposing of – well, sewage?”

  “There are working water buckets in the library. The scholars have to pee, you know.”

  “Come on, come on!” the mage called back to us. “No dawdling!”

  He led us on at a fast pace, his white hair flying, turning every once in a while to urge us forward. He held a piece of ivory, carved into the shape of some sinuous plant, a vine, perhaps, or a fern unfurling. His vessel. What magic was he working here? I was aware of when we passed under the walls, but in the sewer itself I couldn’t detect any magical energy at all. Just a precaution, maybe.

  At length there was a matching wooden stair leading upward, and we emerged into another cellar, this one with white painted walls, then up wider stairs to an entrance hall of what looked to be a house. A wealthy one, though, to judge from the mosaic floor, sculpted stone animals on plinths, a wall carving depicting mountains and a tower, marble furnishings. More stairs with ornate banisters led upwards, elegantly carved wooden doors hid other rooms and at the far end, a pair of large doors with glass panels. Beyond, sunlight. The outside. The Imperial City.

  I could feel it pulling at me. There was energy all around me, for the walls glowed softly with their own light. Not as strongly as the city walls, but enough to see around. But outside! It called to me. Come and explore, come and find me... I took an involuntary step forward.

  “Not that way! No dawdling, no going outside!” The mage was exasperated, but I couldn’t tear myself away.

  “We mustn’t,” Drei said. He took my arm, and there was a noticeable fizz of energy between us. “Not that way, Kyra.” Then, an almost inaudible whisper in my ear. “Not yet.”

  I was sure it would have been easier just to step outside and follow the streets to the library, but the mage led us through a bewildering maze of corridors and basements, up and down again, more corridors, past rooms that were kitchens or workshops once, now empty. Wooden signs were placed at every junction, pointing the way. All the walls glowed, very gently, giving us enough light to walk without stumbling. There was no dust, no grime, no detritus. I’d expected walls fallen, floors rotted, animal droppings, autumn leaves heaped in corners. It was as immaculate as if it had been newly swept by very particular servants.

  “Who keeps it clean?” I asked.

  The mage clucked in annoyance, but Marras answered. “No one. It just stays like this. Clever, in’t it?”

  “Where did everything go – all the stuff? Pots and pans, furniture?”

  “This path’s been cleared of everything, just in case. Discourages people from lingering, y’know? In other parts, the houses are just as they were. So I’ve been told.”

  “So people do go into other parts?”

  “Some do,” Marras said, the smile gone from her face. “But – it’s very dangerous. My brother – well, it’s dangerous. Mostly people stay on this path.”

  “Why is this way safer than the streets?”

  The mage spun round. “It has been demonstrated, over time, to cause the fewest problems.”

  “Yet you’re still concerned about it, aren’t you? You’ve been spell-casting the whole way.”

  “What makes you say that?” he growled.

  “You’re holding your vessel.” I pointed at the ivory in his hand.

  “You know about vessels?”

  “I was drusse to a mage, not long ago.”

  “Ah. Well then, yes, I am spell-casting. The first journey to the library is always the most risky, so we use charms of protection and propitiation. You know what those are?”

  “Yes.” Propitiation – warding against malevolence? Interesting. It was almost as if they believed the city was alive.

  “Good. Then if you could possibly cease your unending chatter, I can concentrate on keeping you safe.”

  A few more turns brought us to a room with water buckets to one side and another stair, and this, it proved, was the final one. A long rise and then we emerged into the library.

  Even now, I can barely grasp the scale of it, a vast circular room with a great dome rising surely to the height of the Keep, and entirely open in the centre, so that I could lean my head back and look right up to the top of the golden roof. Around the edges the book stacks were arranged in alcoves, towering most of the way to the top of the dome, thousands upon thousands of them, holding uncountable numbers of books. Walkways were arranged for access and little pillars provided glowing light to read by. Tables and chairs stood in each alcove.

  The marble floor was empty between the book stacks, apart from a single carved stone sphere, many times the height of a man, in the centre. It was embedded in the floor, with a pool of still water all round and a single narrow bridge arching towards but not touching the sphere. Even from across the room, I could feel the power in it. It was not a source, like the pillar of the renewal room, for it was a different kind of power, but I badly wanted to investigate it.

  Drei saw my hesitation. “Later,” he whispered. “When we don’t have company.”

  “Do you feel it too?” I whispered back, and he nodded.

  The mage put his vessel away and beamed paternally at us. “Here we are, safe and sound. And now I must leave you to Marras. Remember – return by the same route, no deviations!”

  Then he was gone.

  Marras was a much cheerier guide. She led us across the floor, chatting merrily, to an alcove where a couple of people sat at a table, surrounded by opened books. They looked up at us incuriously, then returned to making notes from their books. They weren’t hand scribed, like most that I’d seen, they were printed in a neat, tidy script unintelligible to me. Yannitore was now the only place that still printed books occasionally. So few people read at all, that it was much easier and cheaper to get common scribes to copy pages for pieces.

  “Right, these are all our books. Nessatan here, then Breshtorian, Gratakkian, Old Pentish across there, and New Pentish on that bottom shelf there. Not many of those, eh?”

  She waved at various shelves around the alcove, filled with a variety of book types, from scrolls and folded ones to the more familiar leather-bound. It amounted to a few hundred volumes, a tiny fraction of the entire collection.

  “Our books?” Drei said. “What about the rest?” He gestured to the endless stacks above and on either side.

  “Oh, we can’t read those,” Marras said airily. “No one’s managed to understand the scripts yet. Didn’t anyone explain that to you? These are all that we’ve worked out so far.”

  Drei and I exchanged glances.

  “This is going to be harder than I’d thought,” he said.

  15: The Library

  While Drei and Marras began trawling through the shelves looking for anything relevant to the supposed project for the Kellon, I stood gazing around. It was too vast for my mind to take in, so far outside my previous experience that I had no point of comparison.

  In all honesty, I was rather awed at how far I had come. At Durmaston village, the largest room in the largest house was perhaps twenty paces from end to end. At the mages’ house, my room was bigger than my parents’ house, even including the servants’ wing, Father’s workshop, the pigpens and the apple
house. At the Kellon’s hall at Ardamurkan, I had lived in a suite of rooms which would have dwarfed the village inn and guest house combined. But nothing had prepared me for the scale of the Imperial Library.

  The name was erroneous, I had discovered from one of the many books Drei had insisted I read. The story told in the village was that the King’s Keep had been built by the One King when he first settled his capital here, but that the old city was the last remnant of some ancient empire, long disappeared. The truth was that long before the One King, or the Three Princes or even Bennamore, both Keep and city were here, empty and sleeping, gradually becoming shrouded in myth and superstition as the centuries passed.

  The nomadic people who first settled the region avoided them, believing they were haunted by spirits of the dark. It was a descendant of the first King who brought his court here when he converted to worship of the sun, to prove that even demons had no power against the sun. As for any empire – no one knows, and unless a great many more of the books in the library can be translated, perhaps no one will ever know. It was impossible even to guess how old the buildings were. Legend says that the Drashon’s realm will fall into anarchy and be washed away by time, while the Keep and Imperial City, sustained by long-lost magic, will live on in eternal silence.

  I could feel magic everywhere, a multitude of resonances that my unskilled mind couldn’t untangle. The glowing walls were one kind of magic, a very low level which I could distinguish – just – if I were close enough. There was something too in the air, which made my skin tingle constantly, energising me very slightly. There were other threads of magic below my feet, detectable but nothing I’d encountered before. Then there was the sphere. Even with my eyes closed, I could tell where it was and recognise the enormous power within it.

  One of the scholars saw me gazing round, awed. “It is amazing, on first sight,” he said, setting down his pen and stretching his arms, hands clasped so that the knuckles cracked together. “I never tire of being here.”

  “What does it do?”

  “The stone ball? Nothing at all. The mages have crawled all over it, as you might imagine, but they found nothing. It is a lump of stone, no more sinister than that. Decoration.”

  That was strange. I could feel it from the far side of the room, but they couldn’t find anything odd about it. “May I go closer? Have a look at it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Kyra, don’t touch anything,” Drei called out.

  The scholar laughed. “No need to worry. It is stone, nothing more or less. If the mages could not make it do anything, I hardly think anyone else will succeed, do you? I have touched it myself many times.”

  He couldn’t know, of course, that I was not just anyone else. Maybe I would be able to make the sphere ‘do’ something, who knows. It was very curious to me that I was so different from the mages. I could detect magical energy where, it seemed, they couldn’t. I could empower spellpages without needing special paper or quill or ink. I could recognise a lie. I could heal, and I didn’t need a vessel to do it. Then there was Drei, who could see my aura, and make fire. Perhaps we would find other capabilities as we experimented. I burned to understand it all, but there was no way to find out without admitting a mage to our secret and that we could never do. The ultimate penalty for using magic without authority or proper training was uncompromising – immediate execution.

  So I was cautious as I approached the sphere. I walked very slowly across the floor, allowing my body to sense every scrap of magic. I found that the energy below my feet surged at certain points, then died away again. I wondered what that meant. Perhaps there was no way to understand everything about this place. Gradually as I walked the emanations from the sphere became strong enough to drown out everything else.

  It was huge, many times my own height, and covered with a vast array of carved symbols and shapes. Some looked vaguely like drawings – a bird or a tree, something that looked like a weird carriage, a crescent moon – and some looked like script but most were meaningless, or so it seemed to me. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that they meant something, that there was a purpose to them.

  I was drawn irresistibly towards the sphere, first round the edge of the shallow pool, and then, inevitably, across the narrow bridge. At the far end, it widened into a little platform, not touching the ball, but close enough that I could reach across and put my hand on it without stretching, if I dared.

  The urge to touch was almost overwhelming. My hands twitched constantly as they tried to get closer. I had to force them to stillness despite the desire flaming inside me. Nevertheless, with three strangers watching me, the fear of discovery far outweighed my desire to know. After a long time, I turned away.

  ~~~~~

  For almost a ten-sun, Drei and I diligently kept up the pretence of researching for his father. Marras helped for a couple of suns, finding a heap of suitable books for Drei to trawl through, which he did with surprising authenticity. Sometimes he dictated notes to me, which I wrote down in dot script, but mostly he read, leafing through pages, and occasionally browsing through other books on the shelves to see if he could find anything relevant to our true purpose, about the nature of our abilities.

  The scholars eyed us with suspicion at first, but after a few suns they got used to us and ignored us, coming and going on their own business, sitting buried in their books, or whispering in little huddles. Their main job, it appeared, was to decipher the scripts used in the vast number of unreadable books. Sometimes a mage would appear, check who was there and then vanish again. But however early in the morning or late in the afternoon we arrived, there were always scholars there. Not always the same ones, but all just as inconvenient. I didn’t dare go near the stone sphere if even one scholar was present. It was very frustrating.

  While Drei was occupied, I mooched about the library, climbing the winding stairs to the upper stacks and examining the books up there. They were all incomprehensible to me. I had never realised just how many different kinds of scripts there were, or different ways to record words. I liked the books that folded out best, and if I found one with pictures I’d spread the full length out on a table to admire. Some were quite beautiful, and there were coloured ones, too, which enchanted me. One of the scholars told me the books were several thousand years old, the same age as the city itself, but I couldn’t believe that. The city, perhaps, but not the books. They were pristine, as if they were made only recently and no one had even opened them, but I knew from Mother’s books the decay that came with age – the browning pages, the brittleness, the mildew. Surely even preserving magic would wear off in the end?

  On one of my strolls, I walked round behind the stacks. There was a matching set of stacks on the other side – twice as many books as I’d thought! There was a gap, and then the outer wall of the library, plain, featureless, softly glowing, curving into the distance. I walked on, following the wall, wondering if perhaps there was a window somewhere with a view of the outside.

  No window. It was a forlorn hope, but I was sick to the heart of being trapped inside when there was a whole city out there. A little glimpse of it would have raised my spirits no end.

  Then, on the wall, a mark. It was no more than a smudge, an odd reddish stain at shoulder height, but it was the first blemish I’d seen on any of the city walls. When I got closer, I could see that it made a shape. A thrill ran through me – I recognised it! A hand, as if someone had daubed paint on one hand and pressed it to the wall. It was a left handed print, and a little further on was its right handed partner.

  I lifted my hand to mirror it, almost but not quite touching. I tried to feel for any magic, but I couldn’t detect anything beyond the amount that was all around me in the walls, the floor, the air and the sphere.

  I rested my hand on the mark, matching my fingers and outspread thumb, although mine were shorter and plumper. It was a stupid thing to do, of course. I should have known better than to touch anything with so many people sittin
g just the other side of the stacks, close enough that I could hear their voices. I didn’t care. I was bored and frustrated, that must be my excuse, but just at that moment I was consumed by a reckless excitement. I had to know.

  I touched it and at once a low vibration ran through me. I jumped, and lifted my hand. The vibration stopped. I could see lines on the wall, but as I looked, they faded and vanished. A door! Or perhaps a window... a rectangular opening, anyway. I placed my hand firmly back on the mark and held it there as the vibration returned. Then a long shushing noise, loud enough to echo. I lifted my hand in dismay, but it was too late. A part of the wall slid aside and I was looking through an opening.

  Outside! I could smell the fresh air, feel a little breeze blowing onto my face, lifting the loose ends of my scarves. Beyond, a paved courtyard, high walls curving away, rooftops visible and something on a pole – a street lamp, perhaps.