“There has to be a way to get him out!” I said in frustration.
“Who, Drei? I know, and we have to work it out quickly. Look!” He gestured to a side street, where a pair of brown-clad servants wearing broad-brimmed straw hats swept fallen leaves into heaps. “They could send him outside at any time! We have to get to him before that happens. Every sun that passes, every hour is critical.” He ran his hands through his disordered hair. “Critical,” he muttered.
“Let’s look at it logically,” I said. “We can’t go into the servants’ areas, even when we know where the doors are.”
“Even when the door is open. There’s some constraint that prevents it.”
“Exactly. If we go through without magic, we become servants too, with no guaranteed way to escape. But there has to be a way. When this place was fully functional, there would have been people everywhere, the gates probably stood open all the hours of sun. Non-mages must have wandered in accidentally sometimes. Were they condemned to a lifetime of servitude for a simple mistake?”
We were both silent. How could we answer a question like that? We knew nothing of how the city operated in its prime.
“Maybe everyone knew the rules,” Cal said. “Maybe the gates stayed closed most of the time. Maybe guards kept the peasantry out. Maybe there was no town outside the walls at all then. Maybe, maybe, maybe. I don’t think we can solve this by trying to guess how things worked in a society we can’t even imagine. We have to come at it a different way, and I think the answer is in the library.”
“But we can’t read the books!”
“True, but I’ve been looking for maps and drawings, something to show me another way in.”
“That’s clever. What have you found?”
His face fell. “Nothing. Not a thing. I found a whole section of books full of plans of the city, but I can’t read the notes in the margins that explain them. But one of them showed that tunnel that we just walked through. That’s how I found it, and it had a picture of the stone sphere on it.”
“Will you show me what you found?”
The library was empty when we reached it, for the scholars had been banished temporarily and the mages were all out patrolling. The book was on an upper walkway, but Cal brought it down to spare me the climb and spread it on a table. It was a large book, but thin, each page covered with detailed drawings of various parts of the city, but only one page was of interest. There was the library with its great dome, and the main street, the arch and the two buildings beside the main gate. Beneath them, but drawn in such a way that it was visible, was the tunnel. Most of the surrounding detail was not sketched in, except for two items: the stone sphere in the library and the statue in the building by the gate.
I leaned over the table as far as my belly would allow. “The library is safe, isn’t it?” I said. “And here’s a building just by a gate which connects directly to the library. I think it’s just a safe way for outsiders to get to the library. Probably it was open to everyone – well, it still is.”
“Oh. That’s not very interesting. Moonshit! There has to be a way.”
Two mages came in just then, so we hid the book to avoid having to explain it at tedious length and went back to our house. We went round and round the problem, but without getting any nearer to a solution.
After evening board, Cal said diffidently, “Would you mind if I go back to the library? I know the answer is there.”
A prickle of annoyance. “Are you avoiding me?” As soon as the words were out, I regretted them. This was hardly the time for us to be sniping at each other.
He flushed, and gazed at his feet. “It’s not like that. I mean, it’s not that I don’t want to, but... I’m so jumpy, I can’t concentrate on... things like that.”
“I’m sorry.” I reached awkwardly to kiss him. “I’ve been very selfish. Of course you’ve got other things on your mind. You go and talk to your stone ball.”
A wry smile. “I’ll be back soon enough. It’s not a great conversationalist.”
Impulsively I said, “I’ll come with you, if you like, and keep you company.”
“Really?” A pleased smile. “But you need your sleep.”
Impossible to explain how much I feared being alone. “I’ll only stay for an hour or so, but maybe two minds combined will come up with something. Or perhaps the ball needs a feminine touch.”
Most buildings are strange and different at night, but the library, with its vast windowless dome, was exactly as it always was. It was dark inside when we arrived, but gradually the walls began to glow and once they were fully light there was no way to tell the hour except for the clocks, four of them, each a different design. I’d never taken much notice of them before, but now the soft clicks and whirrs of the mechanisms helped to fill the night’s silence. I liked the water clock best, its many little clear pipes filled with a bubbling flow, driving wheels and filling containers which emptied in a sudden gush. There were several coloured markers which spouted through pipes and spun into pools, before ending up stationary for a while to mark the hour or section. Then they rushed on, only to bob up somewhere else a little while later.
As soon as there was enough light to see, Cal strode across the floor to the ball, his coat tails flapping. A few steps took him across the narrow bridge onto the platform high up the ball’s side. He placed his hand flat on the surface of the ball.
“Hello! I am Lord Mage Cal,” he began. Laughter bubbled up in my throat and I fought to suppress it. “This is Lady Mage Kyra, but you probably can’t see her unless she touches you. I have a question for you. Why does the sun rise every morning?”
Nothing happened.
“Why do you ask that? Don’t you want to find out about Drei?”
“Of course, but I’ve been through all the obvious questions. Now I’m working through various subjects in case something triggers a response. I’ve tried history and politics and art. I’m currently trying science. Hush now. Let me concentrate.”
I let him carry on, although it seemed pointless to me. If the ball wouldn’t respond to one question, it would hardly respond to a different one. I prowled about the base of the ball, looking closely at the pool that surrounded it. When I came to the bridge, I had the idea that the ball might work with two people touching it. I made to cross the bridge, but found myself engulfed in some invisible barrier, like thick treacle clutching at me, holding me back.
I must have cried out, because Cal stopped what he was doing and came rushing towards me. As soon as he broke contact with the ball, the barrier disappeared. When I explained, his face lit up, and he spent a considerable time racing back and forth, experimenting with ways to create the barrier. It was simple enough: whenever anyone had contact with the ball, the barrier appeared to prevent anyone else crossing the bridge.
Then abruptly his good spirits collapsed. “We’re getting nowhere! None of this helps! We’ll never work it out.”
“What about if both of us try?”
“Touching the ball at the same time? Oh, yes! Let’s give it a go.”
There was nothing to prevent both of us crossing the bridge at once, but when we touched the ball, after a giggly moment when our hands bumped together, there wasn’t even the usual little fizz of magic.
“No, that’s not right at all,” I said. “But – you’re left handed.”
“You’ve known that for years.”
“Yes, but maybe it makes a difference. Try the other hand. Or try both hands, like the pillar.”
“Oh! Brilliant idea. Quick, go! Go!”
I hurried back down the bridge, and as soon as I was clear he slammed both hands against the sphere.
Glowing blue lines lit up all over the surface of it.
Cal was so shocked that he shrieked and dropped his hands. The blue glow dimmed and then winked out.
“Gods! What was that? Did you see?” He tore across the bridge towards me in an excess of nervous energy, then turned and flew back up it. “Shall
I try again? Shall I?”
Without waiting for an answer, he touched the sphere again, palms of both hands flat. The lines reappeared, seeming to flow over the whole surface several times, before slowing and then becoming stationary. Then we waited. Nothing at all happened. After a long time, he removed his hands and the blue glow disappeared. Over and over he tried, but to no avail.
“What does it feel like?” I asked, when in frustration he marched off the bridge again.
“Nothing. Or rather, it feels the same as always; that little buzz and then nothing.”
“Do you want me to try?”
“No. Let me try again. I’ll see if I can use magic on it.”
I thought it unlikely but I said nothing. When he was in this kind of mood, logic didn’t help. He was too jittery to listen.
He strode back up the bridge, and hurled his hands against the stone, as if pressure would make a difference. The blue lines appeared, flowed about, settled, stopped. Everything hung in stasis. Cal growled in frustration, a low rumble that turned into a high-pitched wail.
“Do something, you stupid fucking ball!” he howled.
The stone responded. The blue lights dimmed slightly and it began to blur. That’s the best way I can describe it, because to me it looked as if the stone was spinning, slowly at first and then faster so that the surface became indistinct. However, Cal’s hands were still firmly planted, and he told me later that to him the ball never moved at all, seeming only a little out of focus such that the blue glow was spread over the whole surface.
I held my breath, hands to mouth. With magic there was no knowing what the end result would be. You tried something, and you accepted whatever happened and made a mental note for next time. I knew something was happening, but whether it would be positive or negative, whether it might even leave Cal crippled or insane or dead – I could only wait, heart pounding, mouth dry, and hope for the best.
Slowly the blurring settled and the ball became distinct again, the blue glow fading to nothing. Even from where I stood I could hear Cal’s ragged breath and see him shaking. His hands fell limply to his side, and like a man in a dream he stumbled back across the bridge, half falling as he stepped off, so that he had to cling to the rail, every part of him trembling.
“Are you all right?” Stupid question; obviously he wasn’t.
“Wine,” he said, his voice thin and high. “Need wine.”
I scuttled round to find some. There were any number of jugs lying around, but the mages were usually thirsty when they rested between patrols and it took me a while to find a jug that wasn’t empty. I found Cal sitting on the floor with his back to one of the book stacks, as if he’d leaned against it and just slid down to the ground like a dropped doll.
He sipped the wine, then caught my eye and started to laugh. Once he started he couldn’t stop, an odd hysterical laugh like a man not quite sane.
“Are you all right?” I said again, and it was still a stupid question but I couldn’t find the words for anything more coherent. I was close to hysterics myself.
“I’m fine,” he said before another fit of giggles took him. “All this time... stupid thing... just needed to swear at it!”
I saw the funny side myself, then, and we both laughed till tears ran down our cheeks.
“But what did it do?” I said as soon as I could string a sentence together.
Another burst of laughter. “Nothing. Weird experience, so, so weird, but... no effect at all. It hasn’t changed anything.”
“Shall I try it?”
“No!” He was serious all of a sudden. “We don’t know if it might have an effect on the baby.” I saw the sense of that. “Gods, I’m tired. Let’s go to bed, shall we?”
I had no objection to that.
42: Retrieval
We slept late the next morning, exhausted by the events in the library rather than any bedroom activities. I didn’t mind; it comforted me just to have Cal there, to feel him lying along my back, his breath warm against my neck, one arm casually resting on my hip.
He was calmer when he woke, and we got up and dressed with all the relaxed familiarity of a couple long married, rooting through drawers for undergarments, stepping round each other with practised ease. We were so late for morning board that the servants were cleaning and tidying the other rooms. After that, they would clear away the food whether we’d eaten or not. Then they worked on the upstairs rooms before they disappeared for several hours, returning only for evening board.
As we passed the door to the room where they were working, murmuring away to each other, Cal stopped dead, so that I slapped into his back with a little ‘oof’.
“What—?”
“Ssh!” Silence fell. “Shit, they’ve stopped.” He strode into the room where the servants were, and they turned to him, moon-faced. One held a lamp and a flask of oil, the other a cloth and a jar of polish, frozen in mid-task. For a moment, no one spoke. Then one of the servants said something in his impenetrable language.
Cal gave a strangled cry and then replied, and to my utter astonishment, he spoke in the same language. They had a short conversation, then he turned back to me with a grin. Grabbing my elbow, he dragged me down the hall to the morning board room.
“It did do something!” he hissed. “The ball – it gave me the language.” He chortled with delight.
“You can understand them?” It was so incredible to me that I could hardly make sense of it.
“Understand and talk to them. I’ve asked for some cakes for you, those little fruity ones you like so much. D’you want some cheese? I am so hungry.”
We soon found another consequence of Cal’s newly enlightened state; he could see signs everywhere that had been completely invisible to us before, and he could understand them too.
“Oh look, the street of the honest moon,” he’d say, pointing to a blank piece of wall. Or “Malvinordrius the Beetle lives here,” on a modest house. “The street of the sun turning west. Three stones to the house of remembering and forgetting. The hall of dream lights. What bizarre names.”
“Maybe they sounded better in the original,” I said.
In the library, there were many more signs, labels on every section of the book stacks, signs on walls pointing to the exits and bucket rooms, places to leave books that were finished with, a table marked ‘Enquire here’, and the universal library admonishments: ‘No running’, ‘Do not remove books from this room’, ‘Respectful quiet at all times’. Cal ran gleefully up the stairs to the upper stacks to find vast arrays of books he could now read and understand.
“This will be so useful for the scholars,” I said.
He flicked his fingers. “Unimportant. Just now we need to find something that will tell us how to get Drei out.”
“Shall I try the stone? Then I can help you search through the books.”
He hesitated. “We still don’t know all the consequences. I don’t like to expose you and the baby to such strong magic. You’ve had enough to cope with just lately.”
I was disappointed, but I saw the sense of it. I’d seen the effect it had had on Cal, and I was in no hurry to submit myself to such a violent event, just for the ability to learn the ancient language of the city. While he scrambled over the stacks looking for books on the city itself, occasionally shouting down about some find or other, I sat alone at a table down below, my mind empty, enjoying the solitude. I should have felt nervous knowing Drei could reappear at any moment, but Cal’s presence reassured me, as always. After a while, Cal disappeared round the far side of the stacks. The silence began to grate so I fetched the book we’d looked at before, the one with plans of the city, and started riffling idly through the pages, the drawings passing under my unfocused eyes.
My father always said that the mind is a subtle tool, which works best when allowed the freedom to wander wherever it will. Or so he told my mother when he sat outside of a summer evening chewing graylon leaves and she reminded him about unfinished chores. �
��The mind is like a child,” he would say, “in needing space to roam free and build connections with the world. Leave me be, wife, when I’m building connections.” Then she would sigh and go and do whatever it was herself.
He was right, though. Sometimes ideas just pop into your head when you least expect them, when you’re not even thinking about the problem you need to solve. I wasn’t thinking about anything at all as I turned the pages, letting each picture with its fine detail float before my eyes for a few heartbeats. I wasn’t even looking at them properly. Then I stopped. Turned back a couple of pages. There! The entrance to the library as seen from the square outside, the big double doors wide open, the lobby clearly visible. There was no book. I flipped the pages forward to find the drawing of the room with the stone statue on its plinth. No book there either.
The Fire Mages Page 46
