Mind of the Magic (Arhel Book 3)

by Holly Lisle

  Faia stopped. “What?”

  Medwind smiled slowly. “It’s an old Hoos wish—it means, ‘May the bones of your enemies become a bridge beneath your feet.’”

  “I’d wish you the same, but I’d have to swallow a live cat to say it.” Faia laughed and shook her head. “Do the Hoos have any sayings that aren’t about people’s bones?”

  “The ones about sex.”

  “Ah, yes. Sex.” Faia hugged her again. “Be well. When I come back, I’ll try to bring you a man.”

  “If you bring me back my youth, I’ll catch my own man.”

  Chapter 15

  OUTSIDE the library, the Bontonards argued over the distribution of some of their load. Delmuirie watched them, plainly disgusted. Gyels balanced like a dancer on his snowshoes, quick and graceful, impatient to be off.

  Faia picked up Kirtha and hugged her.

  “I don’t want you to go, Mama,” Kirtha said.

  “You’ll be fine with your da.” Faia looked over at Kirgen, who stamped his feet to keep them warm, and gave her an encouraging smile. He’d take good care of Kirtha, Faia knew. He and Roba would do fine—and if Faia didn’t survive the trip through the mountains for help, then they would raise her well and love her. “Be a good girl, Kirthchie. I love you.”

  She didn’t want to think about not coming back. It could happen so easily—the mountains were dangerous, and Thirk even more so. She kissed Kirtha and handed her to Kirgen. “Take her inside,” she told him quietly. “It’s too cold out here.” She swallowed hard. “And Kirgen—if I don’t make it back, please help Kirtha burn a candle for me next Month of Ghosts.”

  Kirgen nodded, his face suddenly solemn. “Safe journey,” he said. “And safe return. We’ll be-here waiting when you get back.”

  Faia pressed her lips together tightly and looked away.

  Tears froze on her cheeks. “Tell Roba I hope the birth goes well, and that I wish I could have seen her before I left.” Faia could imagine Kirtha with a baby brother or sister; could imagine her daughter with Kirgen and Roba—growing up without her. She wished right then that she didn’t have such a good imagination. She shivered and wiped the streaks of ice from her face.

  She looked back to see Kirgen trudging through the snow, back to his home, with Kirtha hanging over his shoulder, waving good-bye. “Your mama will be fine,” he was telling her. “Now let’s go in and sit by the fire, and I will tell you a story.”

  Faia waved until the two of them disappeared from view. Then she took a few slow breaths to regain her composure, and walked over to join the men with whom she would be traveling.

  Besides Edrouss and Gyels, there were the two scholars from Bonton. Both were as tall as she, though one was dark and lean and the other was broad and solid and fair, with curly coppery-brown hair. She’d learned that the dark one’s name was Bytoris Caligro, while the fair one was Geos Rull. She knew nothing of either man—though in the few minutes she’d had to talk with them, she hadn’t thought them as loathsome as Medwind seemed to find them. They seemed nice, if ordinary.

  Edrouss Delmuirie watched the two Bontonards, who were arguing over a particularly awkward piece of equipment that both men wanted to take but neither man wanted to carry. Delmuirie turned to Faia and, in a bemused voice, said, “I can’t believe all of you came here and not one of you brought a pack animal. Not one.”

  “We flew.” Faia gave him a dark look.

  “You flew.” He shrugged his shoulders to reposition his pack and adjusted the wrap that wound around most of his face—he’d had to borrow winter gear from Kirgen, and Delmuirie was broader through the shoulders and a bit taller. He looked uncomfortable in the borrowed gear.

  Gyels moved to Faia’s side and rested a hand on her shoulder, the gesture uncomfortably proprietary. Faia saw Delmuirie’s eyes flick from the hand to Gyels’s face, and then to Faia’s.

  “Well, Faia—are we ready, then?” Gyels asked. “Or are we going to stand around while they repack their gear one more time? Every minute we waste is another minute the wind and the weather get to destroy our sign.”

  The Bontonards, it was obvious, had never packed for a hike in their lives. They probably weren’t up to the trip, either, but Faia was unwilling to leave them behind. “Oh, they wouldn’t repack again,” she murmured, then realized that it appeared they intended to do exactly that. Faia wanted a crowd with her—or as close to a crowd as she could get. But catching Thirk had to be the first priority.

  She looked from Delmuirie to Gyels and sighed. “Let’s go-”

  The three of them started off. Her heart felt as heavy as her pack—but she was afraid the first would grow heavier even as the second grew lighter.

  Gyels took the lead, heading uphill toward the break in the First Folk wall. He set a brutal pace. Faia’s ribs began hurting almost immediately. She wondered how she could possibly keep up—but she could understand Gyels’s haste. Thirk wouldn’t wait, and neither would the prints he left in the blowing, powdery snow. She forced herself to keep her silence—she wouldn’t let anyone know how much she hurt unless she could no longer go on. She did, however, think longingly of the bonnechard in her pack.

  The three hikers in the lead had made it to the first steep rise that led to the break in the wall when Faia heard the Bontonards shout, “Wait! We’ve only got to balance our loads a bit more evenly.”

  “Keep going,” Delmuirie said. “Or they’ll be balancing their loads while the grass grows up to their knees.”

  Faia chuckled and she and Edrouss kept moving. She hadn’t wanted to stop anyway. If she went too slowly, she knew she would fall so far behind Gyels that she would lose sight of him.

  Ignoring the Bontonards seemed to be the best policy, and in fact, not long after she heard their first plaintive yell, the two foreign scholars ran up behind her, slipping and stumbling and cursing. Faia wondered if they might jump into the lead if she pretended not to notice they existed at all.

  “Slow down a bit to let them catch up—but don’t look at them.” Faia kept her voice low enough that it wouldn’t carry beyond Delmuirie. “Let them think we’ll go on without them if they don’t keep up.”

  She tried to watch the Bontonards out of the corner of her eye without making it obvious she was doing so. She figured if she pretended to ignore them, they couldn’t do much to try to convince her to stop while they repacked.

  Edrouss winked at her and nodded. He slackened his pace almost imperceptibly. She followed suit.

  Edrouss Delmuirie seemed happy enough at the moment, Faia thought—his equanimity was quite a change from his reactions upon discovering he’d been held in the emeshest for uncounted hundreds of years. When he first regained consciousness, he’d raged. Then he’d withdrawn into himself and said almost nothing, finally curling up by the fire to sleep while Medwind had patched Faia’s ribs.

  But the moment the rest of the would-be travelers decided they were going after Thirk to try to retrieve the chalice, Edrouss Delmuirie volunteered to go, too. He’d said nothing else about the world he’d lost and had quickly packed the winter gear he’d been able to borrow, and had immersed himself in the business that occupied all the rest of them. Faia couldn’t help but think about the fact that he’d lost his entire world and everyone he’d ever known in an instant; his loss had been more complete than hers when she’d returned home to her village to find all in it save one dead of plague. Yet somehow he carried on; he was able to smile and talk and act.

  Faia discovered that she admired him enormously for that.

  They reached the place where the inner portion of the city wall had crumbled, the gods only knew how long ago; it was the only place along the inside wall that made a passable ground route out of the city.

  We should have known from the first time we saw this place that the First Folk were fliers, she thought. What other sort of people would build a city with walls but no gates?

  The travelers shed snowshoes and strapped them on their backs,
then clambered up the loose rubble of stones—the fallen rocks were snow-covered and in places slick with ice. Dangerous. Faia lost her footing once and smashed her knee into a square-edged stone; she swore under her breath, then began to laugh as she realized four other people were at that moment stumbling and slipping and swearing. No—three. Gyels went up the rubble like a goat, then stood on the top of the wall glaring impatiently down at the rest of them.

  Delmuirie, struggling beside her, whispered, “I could grow to hate him.”

  And Faia, ribs and knee and hands hurting, couldn’t help but agree.

  “How did you get in and out of the city before?” Faia asked Delmuirie. She assumed the wall had been in good repair when he had last seen the place.

  “Klogs—what you have called First Folk—let us set up rope ladders to climb in and out; the young ones were forever jeering at us as we went up and down them, or flying overhead to dump dirt and grass and the like down on us. They despised us, and only permitted us the ladders because we did not have wings.”

  “Why did you come here, then?”

  “Part of the agreement with the bastard Klogs. Humans, Annin, they called us… in their tongue it meant anything that couldna’ fly—had to have ‘ambassadors’ in their cities whose presence guaranteed that Annin wouldna’ hunt Klogs—or our lives were forfeit.”

  “You were hostages.”

  He looked over at her and arched an eyebrow. “You do not think you would find it sufficient honor being ambassador to the Klogs?” He grinned “I did not, either. That is how I got myself in such a fix.” He reached the top of the rubble before Faia, and held his hand out to assist her to the top.

  She hesitated only half an instant, then accepted his proffered hand. He smiled down at her. She scrambled the rest of the way up, and the two of them stood atop the wide stone wall, watching the Bontonards climb.

  He looked down the rubble and shook his head. “So you flew in here, did you?”

  “Well, the Bontonards flew.” Edrouss Delmuirie was having a hard time accepting the very concept of magic—Faia did not think he was ready to hear about the saje magic of transporting.

  Questioning magic did not appear to have been his intention right then. “I would love to fly,” Delmuirie said softly. His wistful expression made Faia think for an instant of Kirtha wishing for a flying castle. “I think if we had been fliers, the Klogs would have accepted us as equals.”

  “I’ve done it often enough. Sometimes it’s pleasant, but sometimes things go wrong. The ground is usually safer—at least this time of year. In the summer you wouldn’t want to walk down there.” She pointed over the opposite edge of the parapet to the snow-covered ground far below. “You can’t see it now, but there’s a killing field just below this wall,” Faia said. “The kellinks use the wall as a corral; the bones down there are waist-deep in places.”

  The Bontonards reached the top, panting from the climb.

  Delmuirie looked where she’d pointed and said, “They always did. So there are still kellinks, are there? Too bad. With all the Klogs gone, I had begun to think this new life I fell into was heaven in disguise.”

  Faia smiled ruefully. “There are still kellinks. I wish I could say there weren’t.” The kellinks, poisonous six-legged pack hunters, were among the few big predators in Arhel that considered humans fair game. And they were plentiful in the jungles north of the Wen Tribes Treaty Line. “There are all sorts of dangerous things in Arhel.”

  Delmuirie chuckled and set off at a brisk pace, hiking along the wide wall, southeast and uphill. “There always were.”

  The party followed along a fairly level uphill track, until they reached the place where the wall intersected the First Folk road. The road, carved out of the living rock, rolled along just below the mountain ridgeline, a broad ledge sheltered from the prevailing wind, covered with blowing snow but safe and well out of the reach of predators like the kellinks, who did not venture into the mountains even when the weather was good. The monuments left behind by the road’s builders—white standing stones worn down by wind and weather—stood like jagged, uneven teeth.

  Gyels stayed ahead, and the Bontonards lagged behind, more interested in talking to each other than in getting to know their companions. Faia found herself walking with Delmuirie. After they’d been on the road for a while, Faia told him, “I want to know something.”

  Edrouss Delmuirie smiled “I would like to answer. What would you wish to know?”

  “You said you got in trouble with the First Folk because you didn’t want to be an ambassador to them, right?”

  “Indeed. ‘Twas how I ended up stuck like a bug in sapstone in their burial ground for gods only know how long.”

  Far ahead, Gyels dropped to one knee. He looked like he was having trouble finding sign of Thirk’s passage.

  Faia noted that, then returned her attention to Delmuirie. “So… what did happen?”

  “The Klogs held a grand meeting—called it the eahnnk gurral. The words mean ‘burning memory’—I never found out what the meeting was to be about. To my knowledge, they had never had another like it in their history—but the damned Klogs would not tell any human what was on.”

  Delmuirie swung the tip of his walking stick and struck it on the ground as he walked. The swish and thud as it hit the stone beneath the powdery snow punctuated his speech. “On the first morning of the eahnnk gurral, every Klog in Arhel left the cities they had built, whole flocks of them taking off with the babies clutching the backs of the birds or flitting along in the care of the young hussies, and flirts and rangers soaring ahead, so that the sky was dark with them. The Klog scholars left last, after making sure everything in their blessed library was secure. ‘We will return by first of spring,’ they told us. ‘Entertain yourselves as best you can while we are gone, and keep the beasts fed and cleaned.’ Then they pulled up the ladders after themselves, and went away.”

  He sighed. “I was one of the ambassadors expected to work with the librarians and scribes on documents that affected Klaue and Annin. I knew the library, and I knew there was a secret passage into it. If the Klogs knew I had found that passage, they would have killed me, I know; every once in a while, an ‘ambassador’ would stray into the wrong part of Skeeree and have a little accident, and the Klogs would fly his body home, all teary-eyed and sympathetic.”

  Faia leaned into her walking stick as the road wound over a steep rise. “Doesn’t sound like the sort of work people would be lining up to get.” She panted and braced her free arm against her ribs to splint them. That helped.

  Delmuirie’s laugh was a short, harsh bark. He said, “It was not. We drew lots among those who were qualified to serve, actually. Losers had to go, so that the rest of Arhel’s humans could live in relative peace. My number came up after a friend of mine was brought back dead from service.”

  “That’s terrible.” Faia thought about having to go work for someone who had killed a friend, and thought she’d probably try to find a way to revenge him.

  He nodded. “It was terrible, and I lived in fear of meeting my friend’s fate. Still, once the Klogs were gone on their secret trip, I went into the library and back to the hidden passageway. I let myself in, thinking I would find something in there that would give me an edge on the Klogs. I was just sure when they came back, I would know a way for the Annin to beat them—to send them off so that we humans would have a place of our own.”

  “But there’s nothing at the end of that passage but a graveyard,” Faia blurted. “And once you get in, there’s no way out.”

  “Aye.” He gave her a rueful smile. “We know that now, do we not? But I did not know it then. I went down there, and I was trapped. None of the other ambassadors knew where I was, the Klogs would not be back for nearly two months. I would be good and dead before they got back, and if I were not, they would be sure to kill me when they got back. Oh, I was in terrible trouble.”

  “What did you do?” Faia asked, drawn in and sym
pathetic to his plight in spite of herself.

  “He prayed,” Gyels muttered. Faia had not realized that they had almost caught up with him, or that he had been listening.

  “How did you know that?” Delmuirie stopped dead and stared at the tracker.

  Gyels was unflustered. “It’s what every man does when he gets in trouble. No need to look so surprised. When people get themselves in a fix, the first words across their lips are ‘Oh, god help.’”

  “That’s true,” Faia agreed “That’s usually the first thing I say—though I call to the Lady.”

  Edrouss Delmuirie nodded thoughtfully and started along the road again. “He’s right. That’s what I did. I lifted the empty cup I found, begging for water, and swore on my blade that I would do anything for my god if he would just get me out of the mess I was in.” He fell silent, and walked along the road, swinging his staff into the snow with almost angry emphasis.

  Faia gave him a moment to continue, but when he didn’t, curiosity overrode patience. “So what happened?”

  He looked at her, and shrugged “I don’t know. One instant, I am trapped in the Klog catacombs; the next, I have fallen into a place of light and music, happy as can be and not a thought in my head.” He looked into Faia’s eyes, and she shivered at the hollow, haunted expression she saw in them. “And an instant or an infinity later, the light and the music die and I find myself trapped in the catacombs in the dark with a lunatic who keeps praying to me to save him.”

  Faia felt lost. “But what did you do to create the Barrier—or had you already done that?”

  “The Barrier… that madman Thirk kept insisting I had to lower the Barrier.” He frowned. “What is it?”

  “It’s…” Faia struggled for the words. “It’s magic—a sort of wall of magic that goes all around Arhel, and nothing can go in or out of it.”

  “Good lord above. And people blamed that on me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Whatever for?”

  Faia sighed. “This is from my reading, mind you, and from classes I took at the University, and discussions I had with Medwind and Nokar. I am not a scholar, merely an interested layman, so I may not have this exactly right.” She cleared her throat and considered how to explain what she had learned as logically as possible. It had never seemed like a particularly logical story to her. “There are records in some of the old tomes attributing the thing to you. They are copies of copies, of course, and the original sources are obscure, to say the least. But the name Delmuirie has been linked to the Barrier since the oldest records anyone has. The records are of two opinions—they say either that you were a hero protecting Arhel from some unnamed evil of unimaginable proportions who sacrificed your life to build a magical barrier; or else they say you were a complete idiot playing with forces you didn’t understand, and that those forces overwhelmed you and trapped all of us here.”