by Greg Curtis
Others like Ashiel felt mainly shame, she knew. Shame that not only had they allowed such an evil to survive and harm their ancestors, but even that they had allowed such evil to be born within them, because though it hurt, she knew Agrin was simply the worst example of what they had all become. If it hadn’t have been him it would have been someone else. It was the inevitable consequence of always seeking greater and greater strength. Afri had taught her that.
He was evil too, but until he had revealed his hand to them all and shown them just how far he was prepared to go to seek power, he had been one of them. Even through his arrogance and insufferable pride, he had been a Huron to look up to. She too had once. How many other she wondered, had travelled down the same path? How many more would have had the dragons not bound them? Would she? They were questions she didn’t want the answers to.
Most though, knew only a dull feeling of fear gnawing away at their insides. Even Ashiel knew a little of that fear, and that Dava kept telling her, was a good thing. That she was afraid meant that she didn’t want to die. Strangely he was right. She didn’t want to die. When she’d come to that decision she didn’t know, but at some time she had, and that was a good thing. Even if it seemed that certain other people wanted to take advantage of it to give her more work to do.
Alan was one of them, as he came to see her some days, to speak with her about her work and her future, and to give her more duties every time. He never failed to do that, taking great efforts to bring her books on history and the Order of Sera, and testing her studiously. They never spoke of what had happened to her. They never would. In his heart she knew he was a noble and to speak of such things would be rude. But she also knew he cared. That he was in his own, strange and annoying way, trying to help her, and that helped. He was young, it had shocked her when she had found out how young, and he had missed out on a lot of the teaching his parents should have given him, but he was a good man, and one day might become a great one.
Most telling of all however, he never flinched in her presence, never pulled away, never told anyone of what had happened, and never treated her as anything other than a junior member of the House. He knew her shame and yet he treated her with respect. That at a time when tempers among her people were flaring as people became alarmed by what was happening all around them, and when he was spending all day every day, summoning his armies without ever a complaint of tiredness.
Some days he even made her smile.
Meanwhile the war continued without an end in sight, the lands all around them were slowly being evacuated, and bit by bit even this new lair was becoming isolated, a lone bulwark against the dark armies of the necromancer. Without the might of the dragons and Alan’s armies of elementals, they would have fallen long ago, and though the undead armies were slowly being destroyed, the news of the necromancer’s essence promised more danger ahead. It seemed that whatever he was, he was growing.
“You want to go back to the kitchens?” Esille was right to ask of course. They had their duties and thousands of people required enormous amounts of food, and though they weren’t scheduled to work for a few more hours, given that everyone else seemed to be here, it might be for the best. But much as she might want to return to her duties, she couldn’t drag her thoughts away from the gathering below. Even her gardening duties, and she was slowly learning to love her time in the great gardens surrounding the lair, couldn’t have torn her thoughts loose from this new nightmare.
“No, we’re not due.” Ashiel shook her head, but didn’t take her eyes off the speakers. At least with Alan’s light elementals, little glowing orbs of light that he’d summoned in their hundreds, the great chamber was better lit than before, and she could see everyone clearly, even as they failed to find an answer.
Her mood wasn’t helped any by the dreams she’d been having of late. Strange dreams, impossible dreams, dreams that made no sense, but which left her feeling different each morning when she awoke. Tired as though she hadn’t slept, and yet alert as though she was filled with strength at the same time. She’d never known dreams like them, and though she’d visited the apothecaries, even their very potent sleeping draughts didn’t seem to help. The dreams continued. And somehow she had the strange idea that they had something to do with what was happening below.
So she stood there, leaning over the stone hand rail, watching and listening, and waiting for something, she didn’t know what, to help her understand why she was even there.
The only thing she knew for sure was that Alan was lucky not to be there. He flew outside the lair, raising his armies during the bright of day, and was blessed by not having to think beyond that. For all his magic, he was in the end a soldier she realised, and he knew the blessings of his simple calling. Sometimes she wished she could be the same.
“He’s a dream.” The dark elf elder was merely repeating the same thing he’d said a thousand times before that morning, and at least his idea fitted the criteria. It made no sense, but at least it could allow for all that he wasn’t. “A nightmare in truth. An echo of what he once was.”
“Dreams can only exist if someone dreams them.” S’roth was of course responding the same way he had all morning, patiently trying to explain what was wrong with the theory. “If the necromancer’s a dream, who’s the dreamer?” The dragon was as ever, logical, and his question still unanswerable. There could be no dreamer.
“The traitors.” It was of course the only answer and it had already been spoken and knocked back. Ashiel waited patiently for it to be knocked back again. The traitors, those that had been found, weren’t organised. They weren’t a religion or a faith, they weren’t a cabal or anything so advanced. For the most part they were simply scared people, fallen under the spell of whatever Agrin was, doing whatever they could to survive. In every war there were those who would sell out their own kin just to save their hide. And so they made their deals, they fed the necromancer what he wanted to know, and they hoped that when it was all over, they would survive. As if he would have let them live. That was never Agrin’s way. Nor had he gifted them any power, and neither had they dreamt him into existence. He ruled, they were peons only. Traitors for certain, but in the overall scheme of things, little more than his rats and mice. Soon enough the dark elf found those same answers thrown back in his face, and he fell silent once more.
“By the way I heard something today, a bit of gossip you might enjoy.” One thing about Esille, she would always be who she was, a happy chatterbox, and Ashiel was grateful for that as she interrupted her dark thoughts. In these dark times her vibrant spirit was welcome.
“Go on.”
“It’s about Rosalie.” Ashiel’s ears suddenly pricked up as she heard the woman’s name mentioned. Esille was right, she would always be interested in her. The woman had actually threatened to rip her ears out, and that could not be borne. Especially when she was large enough and strong enough to do it.
“You know she’s an apothecary?” Ashiel nodded briefly. She had heard that but in truth never thought much about it. In the end she was merely a rival to be defeated.
“She’s also become a ranger.”
“A ranger?” Ashiel was surprised, such a thing surely wasn’t a role for a woman even in these strange times. And yet she also wasn’t. Alan had mentioned that she was a capable archer, and she had the graceful and strong physique of a dancer. Maybe this new role was actually just a part of her nature. Healer and warrior woman. It made sense in a way. It made her more dangerous too, especially when Ashiel no longer had her magic to defend herself with.
“She’s riding with the fallen elves around the southern towns. Healing their wounds and fighting shoulder to shoulder with them. They say she’s quite good too.”
“That’s all I need!” And without her magic, the human slut with her longbow would be a very dangerous foe.
“No it's actually quite good.” Esille had a strange view of good she thought, but Ashiel listened anyway, hoping that she might be rig
ht, for once.
“Aston had an outbreak of foot rot, and her patrol is with the people, helping them move further south. She’s likely to be escorting them for at least a month or more.” And therefore wouldn’t be coming to the lair any time soon. That was Esille’s point, but instead it stirred up other thoughts in Ashiel’s tired brain.
“Foot rot?”
“A painful fungal disease that attacks the toes especially and makes it difficult to walk.” Of course it was but Ashiel already knew that. It wasn’t what the disease was that mattered to her, it was the fact that it was a disease, and there was something important in that, something vitally important. Something that was from her time long before she’d gone to sleep for thousands of years.
“Master Jillan!” His face popped into her thoughts, and she suddenly knew the rather spry and now long dead elder from the academy had something to do with it. It was something he’d done or said, except that he was an archivist. He stored documents and wrote learned scrolls and taught lessons for students. He had been a good teacher, a good man, but in the scheme of things he had never been a power among their people. His gift was too weak. So what could he know that was so important?
“Your mentor?” Esille was looking confused. “What about him? He never even wed.”
“No, no! Not about the human slut. Something he said, something he knew. It matters here, now. It matters a lot.”
“How? He was no warrior. Just a scholar. He could never have fought against Agrin or the others. He didn’t even have any war-spells.” And that was true Ashiel remembered with a sense of shame. Master Jillan had been a good teacher and a nice man, but with his magic so weak and none of it ever useful in combat, he could never have advanced to a prominent position even before the war. The highest position he could ever have aspired to was to be a teacher, a position that in truth he seemed to have relished.
“Disease.” Someone down on the debating floor uttered the word, and it resounded in her thoughts. Master Jillan and disease, the two were linked somehow, and it mattered.
“Mother be praised!” Ashiel muttered the blessing as she tried to concentrate, for once not even annoyed with herself for doing so. As the days and months in the lair had gone by and she’d lived and worked side by side with the dryads and the dark elves, she’d started picking up some of their sayings, and she hated it. She was Huron, even without her magic, not some deity worshipping primitive. She was above such things. But this time she wasn’t.
No sooner had she uttered the simple blessing then everything finally came together in her thoughts, and she knew what had been screaming at her. Master Jillan, disease and one thing more, his endless lectures on enchantment.
“Mother be praised!” For the longest time she just stood there, letting the picture sort itself out in her head, and finally understood what had happened. And the terrible thing was that it was obvious, in hind sight. It was one of the very things her old master had warned her and the others about. And one of the things that she and all his other students had secretly laughed about. Not because they didn’t think it was possible, but simply because they were Huron, and such disasters as he warned of were simply things they could fix with their magic. Now there was a reason for shame.
“Ashiel?” Esille was touching her shoulder, shaking her a little and looking worried, probably because she had been standing there for the longest time looking like a mad woman. But it didn’t matter.
“I have to get down there.” It wasn’t her place, but it was true, and before her cousin could stop her she walked out of the alcove and headed for the main tunnel and then the debating floor. Once there she headed straight for Dava who as one of the elders of their people had been asked to attend even if he had little to say. In fact when she reached him she knew he didn’t want to be there either. Not when he could give no answers. That much was written in the deep lines of his face.
“Dava, I know what Agrin is.” Her uncle stared at her, possibly wondering if she was either kidding or crazed, before he saw how serious she was. He raised an eyebrow in question.
“I need to speak.”
For some reason that she didn’t fully understand but would always be grateful for, he cleared his throat, loudly, disturbing the other speakers, and then bowed to the queen.
“Honoured Sera, my niece Ashiel has some insight which she wishes to share.”
“Highness.” Ashiel bowed low to the image of the queen as had her uncle, something she hated doing to anyone, but equally something she was beginning to realise was right.
“I may know what Agrin has become and why he cannot be fought.” It was hard work standing there before the image of Sera, and not just because she was so vast and this was a part of her realm. There was something about her that spoke not of power so much, but rather righteousness, exactly as Alan had said so long ago. He obeyed because it was right to do so. Ashiel had never known that feeling before, save when she was little and her parents had been her world. And this felt like that all over again.
“Speak little one.”
“Long ago, before I went to sleep, I was a trainee archivist at the Academy, learning under Master Jillan, a very learned man. He also was a man who predicted and feared this very thing happening.” If only she’d realised how prophetic his words were at the time. But that was before the war had become truly terrible, and before Agrin had even become the enemy of all the people. It wasn’t much of an excuse for her arrogant dismissal of his words, but it was all she had.
“Go on.” Sera was she thought, being very calm when she’d just told her that she knew what might be the most important piece of information in the entire war.
“You know that we, the Huron, respected and sought power above all. And that we fought, and found ways to start stealing magic from one another. We also found ways to store up our magic, to keep it with us at all times for those times when we might need it unexpectedly. The first of those ways was enchantment. Storing our magic within objects around us.” It was a simple magic, honest and valuable, but it had never been enough for the strongest among them, nor even for her.
“A long time ago our strongest spellcasters realised that enchantment was not enough. You can add only so much magic to an object before it is full, and as we sought more and more power, that was not enough.”
“Then one day one of our most powerful and learned discovered the magic of infusion. In enchantment magic is added to an object as water is added to a goblet. In infusion the water itself combines with the goblet, and both are changed by it. Imagine that the goblet was suddenly made of sea sponge and so it not only held the water within its hollow, but also within its body.”
“Infusion was seen as a master stroke of spellcasting, as suddenly an enchanted amulet holding a simple spell could become a far more powerful object holding far more magic and far more complex spells. Some said that an infused object could hold tenfold the magic of enchantment. Others said twenty-fold or more.”
“But such magic came at a price. Binding the magic into the object’s very essence does far more to it than just fill it. It changes it. An infused sword may no longer function as a sword any longer. It may not even look like a sword. When the magic is bound within the essence of an object, the old laws no longer apply to it.”
“Stranger still, the infused object often takes on some of the characteristics of the one who infused it. Their likes and dislikes, beliefs, sometimes even their humour. That was seen as a good thing however. An enchanted object be it a sword or a staff, can be used by another. An infused object can only be used by the one who infused it.” Which meant of course that it was safe from one’s enemies. Which was why when the war had come, infusion had become the most practiced of magic.
“Master Jillan though, foresaw that infusion carried another danger, a far greater danger. He foresaw that sooner or later, some of our most powerful would infuse not objects, but parts of the land itself. He foresaw that they would infuse homes, castles and for
tresses as they tried to make themselves ever more powerful against their enemies. And he argued that when what was infused was not a discrete object such as a ring or a staff, that the infusion would spread like a disease.”
“Agrin is dead and gone, but that which he infused, his fortress, has become a disease.” There was silence in the chamber as the others thought on her words, she hoped not too unkindly. She decided to hurry on before they could show otherwise.
“The disease thinks it is Agrin, which is bad, and because it is not him it may not be fought as if it were him, which is worse. The first time he could be beaten back only because he actually believed he was Agrin. Now he knows that he cannot be beaten back that way again even if he yet does not know what he is. But worst of all the disease he has become is spreading. It gains in strength like any disease, by drinking of the strength of its host, and slowly but surely extends its reach across the land.”
