Choice (Majaos Book 3)

by Gary Stringer

  The hobbit grasped her meaning instantly. “Yes! The teachers set up a series of doors on which there would be a clue to a particular spell. When you figured out which spell it was, you had to draw the appropriate Life Flow Diagram and if you got it right, the door was spelled to open. So you think the magic door to the Well of Life has a key like that? Like a test?”

  “It makes sense,” Rochelle agreed. “Only someone who understands this ultimate Life Flow Diagram can be allowed to gain access to the source of all magic.”

  Thanks to her Catalyst training, Eilidh could visualise the patterns of Life Flow in the diagram and she soon had all the connecting lines drawn.

  “OK, now what?” Phaer asked.

  “Well, I presume this Life Flow Diagram has to be drawn using the pretty multi-coloured ink provided,” Eilidh quipped.

  “What ink?”

  She pointed to the Maelstrom.

  “Oh, I see.”

  “Alright, everyone stand well back!” Eilidh instructed. Her friends complied. Clearing her mind of all distractions, Eilidh manipulated the flow of the Maelstrom very, very carefully - she had never worked with such highly concentrated magic before. Even with her magical defences operating at peak levels, exciting the Maelstrom was still highly dangerous. There was inertia in magic, but once she got it moving, it became easier and easier to form into the pattern she wanted. The pattern achieved, she locked it in place, not allowing it to get away from her.

  She held it and held it waiting for a door to open or something, but after an exhausting five minutes' work, absolutely nothing happened. She even tried invoking the name of the Du y Kharia - it had worked to open doors before - but still nothing. In the end she was forced to let it go.

  She stood bent over, hands on her knees, gasping for breath, frustrated. “I don't understand!” she panted. “That should have worked! I was so sure!” Rochelle and Toli were studying the map, putting their magical heads together, druid and magician, trying to see anything that Eilidh might have missed.

  For a moment, it almost became entirely moot, as a lizard-like chaos creature dropped its camouflage and headed straight for the group. Before it could really threaten them, however, a silver-blue-sapphire dragon landed on top of it. Callie then shot a lightning bolt from her jaws, striking more chaos lizards that only she could see, which turned to stone as they were electrocuted.

  “Don’t worry,” she told her friends. “I’ve got your backs. Just keep doing what you’re doing!” With that, she swooped off. Crisis averted, Phaer moved close to Eilidh and put a supportive arm around her shoulders. “It's OK, you'll get it,” he said encouragingly. “Don’t give up now. You just have to keep thinking.” She was doing exactly that, as Phaer continued. “Does this pattern…I don't know...mean anything to you?”

  Eilidh blinked. “Mean anything?” she asked, startled by the unexpected question.

  “Sorry,” the ranger apologised. “Stupid question. I'm new to all this magic stuff.” He was right: it wasn't something anyone with magical training would ask. Eilidh remembered a time when she had asked something similar in class, she'd been about six at the time, and got laughed at. LFD's didn't mean anything - they were just diagrams, patterns of Life flow...or so her teachers always said. Eilidh felt herself go cold as a forgotten childish notion once again filled her head. Quickly, she snatched the map out of Rochelle's hands. Somewhere in the back of her mind, her new social skills pointed out that that was rude, but Eilidh didn't care. She had more important things to do than worry about etiquette. She focused again on the marked points and the connecting lines she had drawn, seeing it through new eyes, a child's eyes. She needed to see as a child saw because a child possessed a wondrous gift: a creative imagination that had not yet been told all the things that were impossible.

  She laid the map on the ground and Phaer found a couple of rocks with which to weigh it down. Impatient, Eilidh beckoned Toli and Rochelle over. They obliged, eager to learn what fantastic new revelation their friend had come up with.

  “Phaer,” she began, “there's no such thing as a stupid question. Ganieda hi nted that I'd never figure this out without you and she was right. It's sheer brilliance! The thing is, Phaer, you've got an advantage: you've had no magical training, so you don't know when you're talking nonsense.”

  “I thought you just said it was brilliance?” “It's a fine line,” Eilidh told him. “Remember Kismet? Since I first met him, I've been convinced that in the middle of all that nonsense he spouts is a revelation so unimaginably profound that it just sounds like nonsense. Now watch this...”

  Eilidh lay her hands on the map, palms down, creating a roughly triangular gap where her hands touched thumb-tip to thumb-tip and forefinger touching forefinger. “What does that look like to you?” she asked, framing the area around one particular asterisk . She didn't want to prejudice them by telling them what she thought it was. “Forget what you know it's a part of," she coached, "look only at the lines you can see now, focus on them out of context and tell me what it looks like.”

  Toli found it first. “It's the symbol for the Secret of Fire!”

  “But it can't be!” Rochelle protested. “It's just coincidence, surely?”

  “You think?” Eilidh asked, moving her hands to another section. “That's Air, wouldn't you say?”

  Rochelle was still sceptical, but Toli needed no more convincing. “Can I have a go?” she asked.

  Eilidh moved aside and let Toli look. Toli's hands were smaller, so she had to hold them a little further apart, not quite touching, but it was clear enough.

  “There’s mine: Earth!” Toli exclaimed.

  Rochelle spotted hers, “Water!” The gnome was amazed: all four Elemental Secrets were embedded in the Life Flow Diagram. “Are the Ethereal Secrets there, too?”

  “Look for yourself,” Eilidh offered.

  Toli co-operatively moved aside, allowing the druid to search the Diagram. She found her first one: Shadow, and then Time.

  “Where's mine?” Phaer asked.

  Eilidh had already picked it out and directed Rochelle to the right place. There it was: Spirit.

  Toli found the last of the Ethereal Secrets: Techmagic.

  Finally, Eilidh circled the area around the X and announced, “And there's mine: the Secret of Life.”

  "This must be why those arcane symbols were chosen in the first place," Rochelle realised. "They’re not arbitrary, they’re a representation of the natural pattern of Life Flow around the magical nodes."

  Stepping back from the map, Eilidh said, “Now see the LFD as a whole, but also see the symbols.” Using one of the copies, to more easily illustrate her point, she labelled the Central Convergence of All Magical Nodes– the Maelstrom– with a letter `L` for Life - Catalysts like herself. Then, starting at the westernmost point and working clockwise, they read: Earth, Fire, Air, and Water. She labelled each one with a letter and drew a rough approximation of a cross to connect them:

  “OK, they’re not exactly cardinal points, but there’s still a rough sense of North, South, East, West about the positions. Now look at the Ethereal symbols.” She again used a fresh copy to make things clearer. Starting from the North West corner and working clockwise, they read: Shadow, Time, Spirit and Techmagic. She labelled them and connected them with a diagonal cross:

  “Again, they’re not precisely in the ordinal positions, but it does create that general sense.”

  Combining the two, gave a more complete picture:

  The original map with all of Eilidh’s Life interconnecting Flow lines drawn on it was far more complex, but her three friends were all agreed about what they were seeing.

  Turning the map over onto the reverse side, the Catalyst used it as a blank page on which to draw an idealised version with which they were all familiar:

  It was the symbolic representation of Life Flow on Majaos; the most fundamental of magical symbols, showing the relationships between the Nine Secrets, known as the Twin Circ
les of Life, or alternatively, The Life Flow Map. Eilidh had seen it so many times in her life - as had everyone in Mythallen. She had inscribed it with her footsteps while walking the streets of Merlyon. The last time had been a model constructed in gold inside the Ancient temple of necromancy where she had found the Great Key.

  “That -that's simply breathtaking!” Rochelle marvelled. “The Life Flow Map written in the flow of magic across the continent! Now that you’ve pointed it out, I can sort of see it in the example diagrams in the book, but the present arrangement looks closer to the idealised version than those.”

  Eilidh nodded. “That’s probably why Niltsiar chose this time to return to Majaos.”

  “Presumably it madethings easier for her, too,” Phaer caught on.

  “Time and tide wait for no-one, but sometimes Time requires that we - even Niltsiar wait for it,” Rochelle said. “Something Artisho taught me,” she explained in response to her friends’ unspoken question.

  “But how does this help us, Eilidh?” Toli wanted to know, wide-eyed and almost speechless. “What does it mean?”

  “That's what I asked,” Phaer reminded them. “It means,” Eilidh said, “that what I was doing before with the Maelstrom was, you might say, both completely right and completely wrong at the same time. I drew that,” she said, pointing to the complete map, “and what I'm supposed to end up with should look like that, but,” she emphasised, “I'm not supposed to draw it - I'm supposed to writeit!”

  Eilidh could see that was losing her audience, so she drew three lines in the ground with her staff:

  “What's that?” she asked.

  “It looks like a letter `A`,” Phaer answered.

  Eilidh held up a finger for emphasis, “Ah, but suppose you couldn't read: what would you see?”

  “I'd just see three lines.”

  “Exactly!” She added two more letters at either side of the `A`.

  “Now, what's that?” she asked.

  “It's my name,” Phaer replied. “But if I couldn't read, I wouldn't know that,” he continued, following Eilidh’s line of reasoning. “I'd just see a bunch of lines...oh!” Suddenly he arrived at the place where Eilidh's mind had been for some time.

  Toli was there, too. “So what you’re saying is, these Life Flow lines on the map are actually some kind of language, but we didn't recognise the symbols - the letters so we couldn't read it!” “That's it exactly,” Eilidh confirmed. “Now, someone who couldn't read, couldn't write `Phaer`. They could copy my lines in the dirt, but that's not the same thing at all. And if it wasn't just block capitals, but say, Phaer's signature, I could try to draw something that seems to match it, but Phaer would most likely recognise it as a forgery. In the same way, then, when I drew these Flow Lines in the Maelstrom, even though it seemed to us like the correct pattern, the lock on the Magic Door to the Well of Life recognised it as a forgery, so it barred us from entering.”

  Rochelle suddenly giggled and the others looked at her questioningly. It was hardly an appropriate time for humour. “I'm sorry,” she said, “but I've just had a thought. Do you see how elegantly simple this is? I mean, it's like you say, Eilidh, about a revelation so profound, it just sounds like nonsense!” The others shared a blank look. “The symbols are like letters, right?” The others nodded. “And letters make words?” Again, they nodded.

  “So that means that the magic key to the magic lock in the magic door...is a magic word!” "But there's no such thing as magic words," Toli protested. "That's not how magic works. Not outside of children's books anyway. Are you saying that all these years, all these centuries, we've been doing magic wrong?"

  "Not wrong," Rochelle replied. "There's just more to learn." Eilidh tended to agree with her assessment. There did seem to be a whole new undiscovered language of magic, but as fascinating as that was, that was a subject for future research. Right now, she was only interested in the practical application.

  While Rochelle put everything away, then, Eilidh stood up and walked to the edge of the Maelstrom. She controlled her breathing, visualised the current pattern of Life Flow and manipulated it, changed it, reshaped it, but this time she didn't draw it - she wrote it. She began the Ethereal Ring with the symbols for Shadow, Time, Spirit and then Techmagic, which she connected back up to Shadow. Keeping that stable, she began to write the Elemental Ring with the symbol for Earth and moved in a clockwise direction to write Fire, Air and Water, which she reconnected to Earth. Finally, she wrote the symbol for the Secret of Life at the central hub and connected that in the proper way. The colours of magic flared with the brilliance of an exploding star. The two rings and the central hub spun and rotated through the dimensions, causing a great blast of air to blow out from the centre. Eilidh could barely keep her footing to watch the awesome spectacle that easily put the Northern Aurorae to shame. She could almost imagine the central hub as a giant acrobat performing gymnastics, while spinning a pair of large hoops around her body. The rings moved faster and faster, with their attendant symbols whirling around in a blur and then the central hub abruptly stopped, seemingly locked in position. This was followed by the inner Elemental Ring and finally the outer Ethereal Ring clicked into place.

  It really is a magic key, Eilidh realised, and it's just fitted itself into the lock. The Catalyst almost expected a loud creaking sound as the door opened, but instead there was silence - complete, utter silence and stillness as the world of nature parted for the world of magic. The Life Flow changed all by itself, forming a wide straight corridor from the edge the Maelstrom where Eilidh stood, through into the secret area behind the door. They had found it. Inside the space before them lay the source of all magic on Majaos: The Well of Life.

  Her friends ran close and threw their arms around one another, jumping up and down in joy and excitement at what they had achieved. This was it: journey's end... ...but their celebration was short lived as a tall, graceful woman in golden robes materialised into reality. Rochelle was the only one who had ever seen her before, but they all knew who she was. She could be none other than the enemy herself.

  Niltsiar had arrived. “Greetings, Du y Kharia,” she said, imperiously. “How kind of you to open the door for me.”

  Chapter 31

  Word of Niltsiar’s arrival spread quickly and specialists in eight of the Nine Secrets of Life Magic launched a massive magical assault.

  EARTH: Wizards summoned demons and fearsome mythical beasts. Conjurors and magicians worked in concert: the former converting the energy of Life magic into weapons of regular matter and energy; the latter enhancing the magical destructive potential of their conjurings.

  FIRE:

  War mages fired missiles of rock and flame, wind and ice, lightning bolts and shock spheres. Enforcers cast entrapment spells - fire rings and paralysis, petrification and of course Nullmagic.

  AIR:

  Climatomagi wielded the powers of storms and natural disasters.

  WATER:

  Druids attacked her body fluids to inflict illness and disease.

  SHADOW:

  Sorcerers assailed her with powerful illusions both physical and mental.

  TIME:

  Chronomagi assaulted her senses with altered perceptions of time, impossible temporal paradoxes, accelerated ageing.

  TECHMAGIC:

  A variety of devastating weapons and ingenious devices were brought to bear.

  LIFE:

  Catalysts sought to Drain her Life Store.

  Niltsiar hardly even noticed. She didn't retaliate; she didn't get angry. They were insignificant. The assembled combined might of the entire Council of Magic was simply irrelevant, beneath her. Their magic either fizzled or else could not touch her.

  As for SPIRIT: The only necromancer was Phaer, who opened his mind to the voices of the dead surely there must be someone who once knew her weakness. For the first time since his Life Gift flared, however, a single voice drowned out all others. The powerful voice of Akar-Sel, raging against the world t
hat had made him endure the Turning for close to two hundred years, only to be denied life so soon after his restoration. However, Phaer got the impression that AkarSel wasn’t the true source of the spirits’ apprehension. Even the dead had something to fear from Niltsiar, it seemed. Eilidh sensed what he was doing and for the benefit of all of her friends, she shook her head slightly. This was not a battle they could win. The only rational option was unconditional surrender.

  Niltsiar obviously didn't plan to kill them just yet - she could have done that in less time than it took to sneeze - so maybe they would have an opportunity later. Accepting that same reality, the Council leaders gave the order for the army to ignore her and redouble their efforts to exterminate the chaos creatures, although how they were going to destroy an enemy with an apparently infinite supply of reinforcements, Eilidh had no idea.

  Niltsiar's only comment about the war was a slight irritation at the absence of dark elves. “They were supposed to be here,” she grumbled to herself. “I wonder what's happened to them.” She had gone to visit them and rally them once again to her banner - they had proved useful before and when she left, the dark elves prepared for war. They quickly found themselves with nowhere to go, however, as a wall of silver had suddenly been erected around the perimeter of their land.

  Having learned the location of the dark elves' home from Phaer, Sir Marcus Braithwaite had laid plans, and after treating their wounded following the mission to save Callie, he had ordered a forced march to lay siege to the dark elves. The Knights respected their boundaries, making no attempt to invade: that would be a dangerous gamble. They had no wish to destroy the dark elves, but rather sought a stalemate, a balance - their siege designed simply to contain them. The Knights of Balance were a young fledgling order. They had nowhere near the numbers of their Paladinian cousins and they had not the power to take on an entire city as the Dark Knights were doing at Avidon. But the dark elves were also relatively few in number and since they had no magic, this was a task to which the silver Knights were well suited. They chose to do the small thing, leaving the major battles to others, and sometimes it was the smallest things that made the biggest difference. The dark elves didn't know it, but at that moment, Niltsiar was watching, her eyes clouding over as she scryed across the continent. Taking in the scene before her, she abandoned them. They were unworthy of her favour. Even her primary agent, Z'rcona, was dead, just like Akar-Sel before her.