Choice (Majaos Book 3)

by Gary Stringer

  Bunny had sneaked away from Eilidh and the others the instant their backs were turned. It had taken her a while, but she'd finally realised why the area seemed so familiar. She’d been there before. She'd been born or rather created nearby. It looked different with the Maelstrom dominating the landscape, but it was definitely the right place. She'd once had a conversation with Phaer about her desire to save her own people. She’d confessed that she wasn't sure she would ever have the courage, but now the moment had come, she’d seized it. She had cast the very best self-cloning spell she could muster and hidden while deliberately getting her clone to make a small amount of noise breaking in. Too much noise and her creator would have been suspicious, but just the slightest soundand he would simply assume it was a lapse, a mistake. She hadn’t tried to give her clone any autonomy, but rather used her as a puppet or projection. Through her clone, she was able to talk to wizard Ryan in complete safety. She had to give him a chance. She owed him that much after all, he was the closest thing Bernice Ardra had to a father. That was why her adopted surname was an anagram of his. Sadly, he was still the same Ryan Adarr - an amoral wizard, consumed by his work to the exclusion of all else, acting in the name of some nebulous greater good. Keeping to the shadows, moving silently, she had allowed him to lead her to the cages and then lifted his keys from his belt and clobbered him with the handle of her mace.

  Voice muffled, Ryan yelled something along the lines of, “Let me out of here this instant, you something-orother!” “Now why would I want to do that?” Bunny asked ,imitating him. “That would do nothing to advance my research. I intend to test whether sumorityl value freedom when it's offered to them. I'm afraid I won't have time to come back here and tell you the results, but I daresay you'll figure it out for yourself.

  After unlocking all their cages, she asked the sumorityl to congregate in the cavernous laboratory where she addressed them the same way she'd seen Eilidh do it. “Some of you know me,” she began, “and most of you will have heard of me. The label I was given by our creator, wizard Ryan, is Bunny, but I also have a human name: Bernice Ardra. I chose that for myself. You have been told that you are nothing more than lab animals, incapable of making choices and decisions or thinking for yourselves. I tell you that is a lie. Four years ago, I chose a life for myself beyond this existence. I chose to strive to be more than what I was. Along the way, I've made mistakes, done things I'm not proud of, but recently I’ve made friends, people who don't see me as an experiment or an animal whose value lies only in my usefulness to others. What I've got is freedom!"

  "Have you come to save us, then?" asked a voice in the crowd.

  "Of course she has," answered another. "Didn't you hear her? She's giving us our freedom!"

  There were cheers at that, but Bunny raised her voice to cut through it. "No!" she insisted. "That's wrong!" The crowd grew quiet, uncertain. "I can't give you freedom because that would imply it's my choice to," Bunny explained. "It's not. It's yours. You have to choose it for yourselves. I'm not your saviour. All I've done is open your cages and shown you the way out. What you do with that information is up to you. Each individual must decide for themselves. Don't take freedom lightly! Slavery is easy, freedom is hard. You have to think for yourself, make choices and face the consequences of those choices. The gods know I haven’t always got it right, but that's the challenge. That’s what makes it fun!”

  There were murmurs of agreement as the idea sunk in, but Bunny wasn’t finished. “There’s another factor,” she warned them. “ Right now, not far from here, and all over this land, there's a war going on. It's a struggle against the forces of chaos that will destroy us all if we don't stop them. Now, you can stay here and cower in your cages, but believe me: if chaos wins, you will die in those cages. We can either put our faith in others to fight for us, to die for us, or we can step out there and fight for our own freedom. If we choose this, some of us will probably die, but at least out there we have a chance, and I believe it's a good chance. Wizard Ryan created us to be an army, so I saylet’s be an army and fight for our lives!”

  Her Sumorityl people, caught up in her words and in her passion, cheered loud enough to wake the dead, and Bunny, normally so used to giving a performance of one form or another, suddenly felt an attack of nerves, almost making her want to run away. No wonder Eilidh's heartbeat accelerated so much when she was in Bunny's place!

  At last the cheers echoed into silence. “That’s all I have to say," Bunny concluded. "I've told you the truth, explained the reality, and `reality is reality` as a friend of mine likes to say. Stay here for a moment, think about what I've said and then each of you make your own choice. Either I'll see you out there or I won't. It's up to you. I don't have the right to tell you what to do. Your lives are your own. You have a chance for freedom. Take it or don't. That's the first choice you've ever had to make in your lives, so choose.”

  Bernice let her words hang for a moment and then without another word, she turned and walked away.

  She had returned to Eilidh to find that Hannah lay dying... * * * * *

  “...And if I'm right about the potential of my sumorityl people,” Bernice said, concluding her story, “they should be here just about...”

  A fierce, strange-looking army appeared from behind a hill, a thousand strong and half again. It seemed that practically all of them had chosen freedom and were very keen to fight to keep it.

  “Now,” Bernice finished, redundantly.

  The sumorityl army ripped into the multitude of chaos creatures. Some with weapons, some with tooth and claw. Together, they might just turn the tide in this battle, especially with what happened next.

  From a south easterly direction, came a small army of undead creatures. Skeletons and lichs, ghosts and spectres, poured onto the battlefield and tore into the chaos creatures, adding to the general melee.

  We are come here to assist you, Du y Kharia, said a voice in Eilidh's mind.

  “From the Spirit temple!” Eilidh realised.

  Toli nodded. “They must have got out when he did,” she pointed to the charred remains of the red dragon, “and been drawn here. Not so meaningless after all, eh, Eilidh?”

  “Well, it helps keep the chaos horde at bay,” Eilidh allowed, “but it doesn’t help us stop Niltsiar.”

  There was no holding Jayne back this time. “Too ‘ell wiv Loric’s orders!” she cried. “I’ll do as I damn well please!” With that, she charged into the fight, issuing a blood-curdling battle cry.

  “Well, I suppose I'd better be off, too,” Bunny told the others. “Hardly fair to ask them lot to fight if I'm not willing myself.” Phaer, Toli, Rochelle and Eilidh all embraced her and wished her well, the latter pausing just long enough to Grant her Life so that the sorceress was fully topped up before launching herself into the battle. Even with Hannah’s mithril sword, she was going to need all the help she could get.

  “And then there were four,” Phaer observed.

  From somewhere in the midst of the raging battle, Prime MagusGamaliel's voice rang out, “Eilidh! Remember: window dressing!” Eilidh called back, respectfully. “Understood, Master!” He may have told her to drop formalities when they were alone, but there was no way she was going to call him `Gamaliel` in front of the entire Council of Magic on the battlefield.

  “What was that all about, Eilidh?” Toli asked. “Is it some kind of secret code? I love codes!” “Not exactly a code,” Eilidh answered, “but something only I would understand, yes. When Gamaliel first sent me on this quest,” she explained, “he told me that the war was nothing more than window dressing - a diversion, a deception, allowing a small party - us to go quietly about our quest undisturbed.” “Genius!” Rochelle said appreciatively.

  “It'll be wasted genius if we don't find the Well of Life before She arrives,” Phaer pointed out.

  “Exactly,” Eilidh agreed.

  “But we've been right around the Maelstrom, the dragons have flown over it, and we've all been in t
he middle of it. What else is there?” Toli wondered.

  “I don't know,” the Catalyst confessed. “There's something I'm overlooking,” she mused.

  “What's that, Eilidh?” Rochelle asked. “No idea -like I say, I'm overlooking it,” Eilidh replied, flippantly.“Sorry, that's not helping is it?”

  Chapter 30

  The Knights of Paladinia had arrived by now - a little late to the party but no less welcome for that. Eilidh supposed the Dark Knights of Zhentilon were still waging their own private war against the Hand of Darkness Liberation Front in Avidon City. Where the Knights of Balance were, Eilidh could not guess.

  With the additional strength, the allied army was able to place a wall between the chaos horde and the Maelstrom, protecting Eilidh and her three companions. Callie remained behind the lines, patrolling the skies above them. Unlike Loric and the mounted silvers of the Paladins who were in the middle of the fighting, Callie wasn't a combat dragon, but she could certainly zap any stray chaos creatures that broke through the lines.

  Eilidh took a deep breath and restarted her brain. “OK, we need to think this through from the beginning,” she began. “Start with the facts. What do we know?” “Well, according to my research,” Rochelle offered, “All Eight Major Magical Nodes lead us to the Central Convergence. The Nodes exist in the form of Life Eddies, so it's reasonable to conclude that the Central Node is like the biggest Life Eddy you've ever seen.” She gestured to the Maelstrom. “And here it is. That verifies my work.”

  “Good,” Eilidh said, nodding. “This is exactly what I need. Next step?” “The Wise One, whose advice hasn't let us down so far, told you that at the Central Convergence of all Magical Nodes - the Maelstrom as we've nicknamed it - we will find the Inter-Realm Gateway that leads to the Well of Life.”

  Something clicked in Eilidh’s mind. “But the `Inter-Realm Gateway` was just a name the Wise One made up - a nickname like `The Maelstrom`. He said he wanted something better than `Magic Door`.”

  “So?” Phaer challenged. “What's in a name?”

  “A very great deal, actually,” Eilidh insisted. “Precision of language is very important. He told us that himself, do you remember, Toli?”

  The hobbit nodded, thoughtfully. “When we first went to see him, after we'd rescued Princess Mystaya, we asked about Niltsiar and he gave us a long history lesson. Then we asked how to stop her, and

  he gave us that quest to find the Great Key or Kij or whatever it was. And he criticised us for being unclear with the wording of our questions. As you say, being imprecise with our use of language.”

  “That's right,” Eilidh affirmed, placing an encouraging hand on her friend’s shoulder. “Now suppose he's guilty of doing the same thing?”

  “What do you mean?” Rochelle wondered. “He didn't like the term `Magic Door`, so he invented some other, `better` words to describe it, but there can be nothing better than calling something exactly what it is. So what's the difference between a gateway and a door?”

  “Gates are mostly external; doors are mostly internal,” Rochelle pointed out. “In most houses, a gate gets you into the garden; a door gets you inside the house.”

  “Or from one room to another,” Phaer added.

  “So maybe the Well of Life is like a room inside the Maelstrom and we'll get inside through a Magic Door?” Toli offered.

  “Maybe. Now, of course, it wouldn't do to have just anybody wandering by the Well of Life,” Eilidh reasoned.

  “In the same way as you wouldn't want just anybody walking in and out of your house as they please, getting up to all sorts, taking stuff, traipsing mud everywhere and doing damage,” Toli put in. “That's right,” her Catalyst friend agreed. “Naturally there would be security. In fact, even if we get through this Maelstrom, I’m sure there will be more security inside, but let’s take this one step at a time. You would expect a door to a secure room to have a lock; a lock requires a key. It also follows that a magic door would have a magic lock that needs a magic key.”

  “So you're saying we're standing outside the front door but we're locked out,” Phaer concluded.

  “Unless there's a key under the mat,” Rochelle suggested.

  “Good idea,” Eilidh commended her. “Rochelle, I need to understand your research and I need to understand it quickly.”

  “You read my reports, didn't you?"

  "Well--"

  "-I've even got copies if you need a refresher.”

  “No, that's too much detail. Simpler.”

  “How simple do you want it?”

  “How simple can you make it?”

  Rochelle thought about that for a momentand then she hesitantly ventured, “Well, without wishing to insult your intelligence...I suppose you could just...look at the pictures.”

  “Perfect!” Eilidh accepted. “That's the whole point of diagrams, after all.” Rochelle fumbled inside her magic bag and pulled out one of the books that had been most central to her research, along with a clever Techmagic device that could duplicate sheets of paper. The book was so well used by then that it opened naturally at the section on what they knew as magical nodes. She turned a couple of pages to the example diagrams and handed the book to Eilidh, who held it out so Phaer and Toli could see it, too.

  On each page, there was a rectangular diagram box, and while the exact arrangement differed, each one showed a series of eight small asterisks and sixty-six dots arranged around an X marker somewhere in the middle:

  “Hmmm,” Phaer mused. “It looks a bit like a star chart, like constellations.”

  “Phaer!” Eilidh gasped, excitedly. “You are a genius!”

  “I am? What is it? What are you thinking?”

  Eilidh's mind was already rushing onward, however, and she couldn't afford to reverse now. There wasn’t time. “Rochelle, have you got our map with the Life Nodes marked on it?” she asked.

  The gnome replied that she did. She fished it out of her magic bag, unrolled it and showed it to Eilidh:

  Eilidh wrinkled her brow, confused. “Rochelle, I'm seeing asterisks and a cross why are there no dots?”

  “Oh, those are just the Minor Nodes,” the gnome answered with a dismissive flick of her hand.

  “What are Minor Nodes?” “Well, the eight Major Nodes are the eight Life Eddies dotted, or should I say asterisked, across the continent. The sixty-six Minor Nodes are also points of elevated magic concentration, but on a much smaller scale. It would take a Life Gifted Catalyst to spot them, and then only if she were really looking for them.”

  “But the Wise One said the Magic Door to the Well of Life was at the Central Convergence of all

  Magical Nodes,” Eilidh pointed out. Ro chelle nodded. “Yes, and so it is! We know all the nodes move. In fact, moving just one Major Node can shift the Central Convergence by hundreds of leagues. Movements of the Minor Nodes - the positions of which can be calculated from the positions of the Major Nodes – can move the Central Convergence by only a few hundred yards. So you see, the effect of the dots is so tiny compared to that of the stars, that they can be dismissed as irrelevant to the calculations to work out where the cross is. The simplified calculations put the Maelstrom about two hundred yards Southwest of here, but we corrected for that small error with our eyes when we teleported to this area.”

  “If you ran the full calculations, though, they would put the Maelstrom in exactly this spot?”

  “Yes, but the full calculations would have taken quite a bit longer to work through, so it was far more practical to use the simplified form, and get close enough to just go, `Oh look it's over there`!” “OK, I can appreciate the logic of that,” Eilidh agreed. “The Minor Nodes are irrelevant to the calculations, but if we joined them up to make patterns, like constellations, they wouldn't be irrelevant then, and maybe that's important. Rochelle, you said you could calculate the positions of the Minor Nodes from the positions of the Major ones. How long would it take you to work that out?”

  “Not long a
t all I've actually done most of the work already.”

  “You have? When did you manage that?” “Back at Shakaran Castle, for the most part. I asked one of the staff for another map - I didn't want to clutter up the one we'd been using, but I thought it might be an interesting exercise to keep my mind occupied. I brought it with me so I’d have something to do, to stop myself from worrying if there should be any more waiting around, and there was. Between you going for a stroll around the Maelstrom and Z'rcona's attack, I managed to get a few more done.” She reached inside the bag once more for her notebook into which, true to her word, was folded another map of Mythallen. This one had marked on it all eight Major Nodes, the Central Convergence and all but three Minor Nodes. Sitting down to work, she floated a piece of charcoal out of a pocket and began to work through the remaining calculations. “I'd got quite quick at these before I was rudely interrupted,” she muttered, marking a new dot on the map. Two more dots appeared inside fifteen minutes and that was all sixty-six completed. After making a few copies, Rochelle handed the completed map to Eilidh as she put her things neatly away. Eilidh studied the markings:

  Something about the patterns stirred a memory in Eilidh’s mind. She visualised herself as a child in class, studying Life Flow Diagrams for different spells. Different text books had different representations, but she remembered one, a very old one, lost and forgotten in a dusty corner of the Great Library of Magic, which presented LFD's diagrammatically with a cross to represent the point of focus, asterisks to demonstrate the basic shape in which Life flowed as a result of the spell and small dots to indicate a more detailed idealised shape thought to be produced by a perfect casting. This looked a lot like that.

  “I think,” she ventured, “that this is an enormous Life Flow Diagram, and I also think it's the key to the door.” Eilidh didn't know what form Rochelle’s magic tuition took, under the rule of the Hand of Darkness in Avidon, and Phaer of course had none at all, but she knew at least one person in her group would understand. “Toli,” she said, “do you remember those practical exercises with the magic doors?”