The Sable City
Page 88
*
Deskata jerked Phin off his feet and strode down the ring of stairs, dragging the wizard along by a fistful of robes. The collar twisted tightly around Phin’s neck as he tried to get to his feet, but Deskata loped quickly across the flat circle of floor and started up the dais, banging Phin’s knees and then an elbow against the rising steps. Phin gasped for a breath and at the top was thrown on his side in front of the curving platinum posts. The silvery white metal seemed to glow spectrally against the black stone background.
Deskata set his tower shield aside on its rim, slid the satchel off his shoulder to hold it by the book within, and drew his ugly, fat-bladed short sword. He kept the weapon at his side with the blade pointed at the floor, but his eyes stabbed at the wizard.
“You will cast your spell or speak your words, now!” he roared, his voice suddenly thick with some accent that was not of the Empire. “Open this gate, that I may pass through to Miilark.”
Phin stared back at him. “Miilark?”
“You heard me.”
“I’ve never been to Miilark!”
A vein throbbed along Deskata’s jaw, and his fingers tightened on the hilt of his sword.
“I did not ask if you had been there, I told you to open this damned gate!”
Phin was on his side, but he rolled to his back to look up the long tower at the false sun suspended high above him. He laughed bitterly.
“Nine Gods, you people are all morons!” Phin yelled. “Do the Legions bar entry to anyone with enough brains to pour piss out of a boot?”
The ex-Centurion glared, but he made no move as Phin got shakily to his feet, and shook out his robes which had bunched up awkwardly as he’d been dragged to the center of the room. He pointed a finger at the satchel in Deskata’s hand.
“Who told you idiots that thing could open a gate?”
Deskata glared, and from the utter lack of light in the depths of his muddy brown eyes Phin did not doubt that the man would not hesitate to kill him. Phin just found it hard to care about that at the moment.
“A seer,” Deskata said.
“A seer! That’s really brilliant. Some Orstavian local, I expect? Was he wearing animal skins and rocking back and forth in a tent? Smoking herbs and drinking fermented toadstools? Nice choice. That is exactly who I would consult regarding an ancient work of thaumaturgy, written in Tullish!”
Deskata’s nostrils were wide and he took deep breaths through his nose, as his mouth was shut so tight his lips were going white. He had to pry them apart to speak.
“He said this gate, when opened, could lead anywhere in the world.”
“He wasn’t even close!”
Phin spun toward the posts and threw out his hands.
“When this thing worked, it connected to only one or maybe two specific places. And it hasn’t worked in fourteen centuries! All that is in that book in your hand are musings about why that might be so. Did the cataclysm that tore Vod’Adia out of the world sever the links? Did some safety measure shut it off, so that the rest of this world did not disappear along with the city? It is theory, Centurion. Wonderings and ruminations.”
Deskata shook the satchel with stiff, jerky motions.
“There are spells within this book!”
“Quite right. Three teleport incantations, written as models of how the gate might have worked, once again, fourteen centuries in the past. And before you say then teleport me to Miilark, know two things. One, a wizard teleports by envisioning a destination in his mind, one that has been studied intensely and committed to memory in its every detail. I can’t envision a place I’ve never been, now can I? And two, no spell of any kind can function across a magical barrier. Like, for example, the big gray misty one you may have noticed when you walked into this city! Do you think the Shugak would let magi come into this place if they could teleport away anytime they liked, without paying taxes on the way out?”
Deskata stared at the platinum horns, graceful in their lines and beautiful in their way, and utterly inanimate. Phin spread his hands at his sides, and shrugged. Deskata took a stiff step toward him, then dropped his shoulder and plowed into Phin’s chest.
He hit Phin like a charging war horse, lifting him off his feet and slamming his back into one of the posts. Phin’s breath exploded out of his lungs and as he started to slide to the ground on legs gone to water, Deskata drove a knee into his side so he toppled between the two posts on his way to the floor.
Phin actually had an instant of nervousness, based on nothing, but his body took a predictable path as he sprawled to the dais floor for the second time, albeit on the other side of the gate. He glared up at Deskata, and managed to shout, “Ta-da!”
The Centurion’s face was flushed. He looked at the posts to either side, then took a breath before stepping between them himself. Nothing of course happened, and he stood over Phin.
“Does it feel like home?” Phin asked, sneering. “Smell that Island air?”
“There must be something…”
“There is not.”
“There must be!”
The Centurion shook Kanderamath’s book out of the satchel over Phin’s head, and the Circle Wizard narrowly managed to catch the heavy volume before it hit him in the face. When the bare skin of his hands touched the worn leather covers, the world turned white in Phin’s eyes.