A Wizard's Sacrifice

by Amanda Justice

  He buried his nose in the cloth. “Smells delicious. How is your son?”

  “Much better now. Thank you for all you’ve done.” The woman curtsied to Ashel and returned inside her hovel.

  Lornk extracted a dumpling and handed it to Ashel. “She’s a very good cook. Eat, you’ll feel better.”

  The Buzzards’ scowls softened as Lornk greeted them by name, always speaking in the Oreseeker tongue. Many thanked him for favors, gave him small gifts. One old man handed him a satchel in which to carry the ungainly collection of foodstuffs and handicrafts. Some flashed condolence signs at Ashel, a few even coming to him and pressing their palms to his chest; all of them turned to Lornk afterward and expressed their gratitude or approbation.

  They passed beneath the iron filigreed Buzzards onto the wharves, and Lornk pointed out a tenement where the physician Moralen had been born. “He saved my life when I was a boy. I’d fallen, and a broken bone opened a vein. Moralen found me, but bliss-lust ran strong in him at the time. He robbed me and left me to die.”

  Ashel’s remaining fingers bent into a fist. If Lornk had died then, Ashel would be whole now—or he might never have been born. The paradox left him seething. “What changed his mind?”

  “His conscience and his compassion.” A sardonic smile tilted Lornk’s lips. “Just like yours. Moralen gained a purpose that night, which filled the void he’d packed with bliss. He made a project out of me, showed an angry, resentful boy what real suffering and injustice looked like.”

  Rage washed the last vestiges of bliss from Ashel’s blood, and he shook his maimed hand in Lornk’s face. “This is what your benevolence looks like to me!”

  Shrine’s bitch, you’re finally sober, Geram said.

  Over the bay, wind tore the clouds apart, and the color of the sea shifted toward blue. Ashel turned up a flight of limestone steps leading toward the Circle, concentrating on his breath and thudding heart as Lornk trod after him.

  I thought you liked not Hearing me.

  Geram didn’t respond as townhouses morphed into palazzos with marble walls and iron gates. The ascending footpath took them across streets noisy with peddlers, cooks, and housekeepers, then past leaf-draped walls where the shouts and murmurs of traffic faded into the plop and gurgle of hidden fountains. The ocean breeze died under the rising summer sun, and the walk sweated the night’s excess from his blood, leaving him with a vicious thirst and a throbbing head.

  Lornk grabbed his arm when they reached a terrace. “Ashel, wait.” Huffing, he waved at the Commissar’s palace, far below. “Everything I do is calculated, whether the kindnesses I bestow on Buzzards or the horrors I unleashed on you. All of it is so I can claim that palace as mine. Thanks to your parents’ failure to prepare Victoria, I have no control over the outcome of the coming Concordance, so all my planning may be for naught.”

  “You really are mad if you think telling me this will convince me to help you!”

  “Yet, you should. The difference between me and Parnden is my ambition. I seek glory as the sovereign over a just and prosperous nation, not ignominy as a selfish tyrant who rewards his toadies and hangs his critics, along with the children of a despised underclass in order to cement their oppression. Nor do I want to be that craven king I saw when I was a boy, the one who allowed the Kragnashians to feed on his people so he could save his own skin. I have no natural conscience or compassion—this is an imperfection I freely acknowledge. Therefore, I surround myself with people who have these attributes. They are my moral lodestone.”

  “Is that what you want from me?”

  “In the main of it, yes. But I cannot use you if you’re lying in your own piss at Emily’s feet.”

  Shrinejump, bliss? That’s why I couldn’t Hear you last night? said Geram.

  You think I’m asleep when you go to her, but I’m not. Ashel charged up the stairs, his blood churning with a cascade of outrage and Geram’s lust.

  I can’t help it—I love her, the other man replied.

  She is my mother!

  Geram raised a Listener’s baffling between them, dampening his feelings. I will shield you as best I can.

  You told Mother you’d stop if I found out. Well, I’ve found out!

  I . . . I have a duty.

  To spy on Fensin for her? You’re making that your excuse?

  I will not leave her, Ashel, unless she tells me to go.

  Reaching the palazzo gate, Ashel stopped and shut his eyes, wanting nothing more than to turn around and go back to that filthy room and sink into oblivion.

  Lornk staggered up behind him, mopping his brow. “And I thought I was fit.” Grooms and gardeners hailed them as they passed through the courtyard. In the foyer, Lornk grasped Ashel’s arm again. “The Commissar has invited us to a dinner on Thirdday. He has specifically asked that you and Wineyll attend. I want you to stay away.”

  Ashel sneered. “That makes me want to go.”

  “You won’t. That night, I will launch the coup, and I need you to remain out of it, in case it fails. If it doesn’t, I promise I’ll explain the bargain I made with the Kragnashians for Vic, and how we’re going to get her back.”

  “So, you did sell her.”

  “I traded her services for the greater good.”

  “Whose? Yours?”

  “Knownearth’s!”

  “And where were your conscience-bearers that day?” Striding into the parlor, Ashel took a bottle from the cabinet and retreated to his bedchamber. He needed to forget.

  The Long Battle

  Chewing a piece of Prenlin’s sour dried fruit, Vic studied the half-dozen buildings in Meylnara’s compound. The Direiellene she knew was—or would be—comprised of thousands of structures swarming with tens of thousands of Kragnashians. Perhaps a few hundred People passed in and out of the handful of hives below. Meylnara had thousands of troops at her command, but they didn’t all live here—they wouldn’t be able to fit.

  “In this entire rainforest, this is the only Kragnashian settlement you found?”

  “It is the one where Meylnara lives.”

  “You mean it’s the only one you cared to see.” She leaned forward. “There, do you see them? Coming out of the fourth building, southeast of the main one?”

  Thabean peered through the vines screening the surveillance blind. “Two of the bigger creatures, with the longer mandibles. So?”

  “Look at the tattoos. Those are warriors.”

  “Clearly, madam. Meylnara marks them to keep track of them.”

  “They do it themselves. What will convince you they have sense?”

  “Structures such as these are made by the crawlers on the Semena plains. Everything else in this compound was manufactured by Meylnara.”

  “By herself? How could she have learned to make these things if someone didn’t teach her? You said the Council executed her mother twenty-five years ago.”

  “She would have been twelve, madam. Old enough to have learned all she needed to know to survive. And with wizardry, one can accomplish much more than a drudge. Her minions appear quiet today. Shall we resume our lesson?”

  Exasperated, Vic followed him as they stole away from the Lair. Once on the ground, they used no power until they’d walked a good mile. Finally, Thabean signaled the start of a new exercise, and she waited while he moved off and hid. After a count of twenty heartbeats, she floated up above the canopy and held herself there, feeling for him. Her breath silent, her ears perked at rustling leaves, chirping insects, the calls of larger animals, even the distant clicks and whistles of Kragnashians. Detritus and blossoms flared her nostrils; a breeze prickled her skin. And then she felt it, a ripple in space, not the wind but a passing wave, like the surf’s ebb. How often had she felt Elekia’s waveform? Every shudder she’d ever suppressed in the queen’s presence had new meaning. Remaining still, she waited for Thabean’s next pulse. Each wizard felt different. Grunnaire had the shortest wavelength, Mey
lnara the longest. Saelbeneth pulsed unevenly like a cipher; the current of Nelchior’s power stayed with you, thrumming with your heart.

  Thabean’s waves were steady, stable, neither short nor long but solid, predictable, like him, and Olivet. Two men who trained her to become what she was. Blade. Wizard. Mistress. Her eyes snapped shut, and she felt Lornk’s hand on her neck, his thumb on her windpipe, his scent thick in her throat. Inhaling deeply, she drew in the hot moist air of Direiellene, reminding herself she was beyond his reach. Her palm pressed a stretched belly, and she remembered the defeat in his face that morning she and Ashel emerged as a wedded pair. She was beyond his reach the moment she’d found Ashel in the Kiareinoll.

  Her heart suddenly ached for the depth of compassion and wisdom in those dark, beautiful eyes. “I’ll come to you, my love,” she whispered. “I promise.” But the Device in Meylnara’s keep was the only way back to him, and the only way to reach that was to kill Meylnara.

  Another ripple passed, reminding her of the lesson. She sank deeper into the canopy, following the waveform north and east, staying hidden in the understory. Thabean’s path arced toward the north gate. She neither rushed nor dawdled as she followed, matching her speed to his while circulating a layer of cool air over her body. Do only enough. A month had passed since she’d awakened to herself, and she still had bouts of nausea, but the headaches were rare. Do only enough.

  Prenlin said that in a few weeks the brooding sickness would end and she’d feel better than she ever had in her life. “It’s called the bliss,” the Healer had told her, scowling. Vic grinned as the baby bumped against her womb. Prenlin also said she shouldn’t be feeling the baby yet, but the Woern had opened her senses to all sorts of unimagined perceptions. Like another wizard’s power, she thought, realizing Thabean’s waveform had stopped.

  Now the hunt was on. Chortling, she descended to the ground, taking in every bit of bark, every scatter of humus, every snapped twig. A forest was a three-dimensional space where enemies could ambush from the canopy above or a gully below, but Thabean was reared on the plains, and his woodcraft was no match for hers.

  “Madam!” he whispered in her ear.

  Polarizing the surrounding ions, she spun, aiming her boot at his knee, but her kick caught only air.

  Floating upside down, Thabean laughed. A net of lightning crackled over her ion barrier but did not touch her skin. “Good shield.”

  Creating a vacuum, she sliced through the lightning. “You’re using the Woern. How? I can’t feel you at all!”

  He alighted on the ground and swept up a stick near his feet. “You’ve learned to follow the waveforms of a wizard. Now it’s time for you to learn how we hide within them. Here.” He tossed her the stick.

  She caught it and yelped, dropping it. The stick hit the ground, and she shook an electric sting from her hand.

  “What the Shrine?”

  “Are you certain you were a successful assassin in your own time?”

  She returned a wry grin. “You’re the first wizard I had for quarry. Why did the stick sting me? And how did you hide?”

  “To the first question. Never grapple with a wizard during a duel. Why?”

  “Why?” She thought back on their training sessions. “A wizard’s weapons—lightning, fire—are best wielded from a distance. You don’t want to get caught in the backlash. Or is it simply part of the Code, as a point of honor?”

  “No, madam, this prohibition is for your safety. When a wizard is engaged in battle, the Woern shift into a defensive state. Direct, skin-to-skin contact between wizards when epinephrine or cortisol are elevated can trigger a surge of energy through the nervous system that may burn out the wizard.”

  “By what mechanism?” She filed away the unfamiliar medical terms—something to look up later. Thabean had trained as a Healer before he took the Elixir.

  “When we are peaceful, our Woern long for each other, which is why it is pleasant, even stimulating, to touch another wizard. Yet during battle, the Woern repel each other. The worse the fear and pain, the stronger the defensive response. Usually the attacker comes out the worse.”

  A sigh huffed out as she remembered the vicious stinging that had cramped her hands when she tried to throttle Meylnara. “Well, that explains something that happened when I fought Meylnara in her Lair.” She frowned at the stick. “The stick isn’t a person, Thabean. No skin, no epinef-whatever, no Woern. Why did it sting me?”

  He sniggered. “True. That was merely an electric charge. How did it get there?”

  Kneeling, she studied the stick. Bark pitted by decay, it looked ordinary, but she felt it pulse in a rhythm that echoed the beat coming from Thabean himself. “You put your waveform on it somehow.” She met his eyes again. “But you stopped using the Woern. I know I didn’t lose you.”

  “I did not stop using the Woern. I imbued the stick with my waveform, then positioned myself opposite it and used my power pulses to counter the current from the stick. You happened to follow the wave to the stick, and then found yourself in the pocket where its waves and mine canceled each other. We call it a void. It is a good way to hide from another wizard while you continue to use the Woern. I routinely use one when we surveil Meylnara. Why do you think she never detects our presence?”

  “I assumed she was simply ignoring us, so long as we weren’t attacking her keep.”

  “Really, madam, when she wants you so much?”

  “Her attacks have been less frequent. Perhaps she’s realized it’s more sensible to bide her time until the baby’s born.”

  He snorted. “We have no definitions of sensible where you and Meylnara are concerned. In any case, back to the lesson. The imbued waveform fades. Touch the stick.”

  Tentatively, she touched the bark. A faint tingle passed along her nerves to her elbow, but the stick was quickly becoming just a stick. She raised an eyebrow at him. “You enjoyed that.”

  He grinned. “I did.”

  Chuckling, she hopped onto a fallen log, letting her feet swing. Sunbeams slanted through the canopy, but a line of deeper forest shadows approached them, heralding rain. “You asked me about being an assassin in my own time. Do you believe us now?”

  He joined her on the log. “In the month I’ve trained you and fought beside you, I suppose I’ve come to trust your word. Besides, the Elixir is closely guarded and has been here, with the Council, since we began this campaign, its supply undiminished. However you acquired the Woern, it was not by stealing from us.”

  “That sounds like a sensible conclusion. And Saelbeneth seemed to trust the commodore’s word, vouching for us, from the beginning.”

  He inclined his head. “With a Portal in Narath, she has frequent relations with the pirates.” His mouth quirked. “Rumor would have one believe very close relations.”

  “Thabean, are you gossiping with me?”

  His smile broadened. “I am a man of honor and would not spread innuendo.”

  “Of course not,” she intoned, then added, winking, “though the Caleisbahnin are sworn to serve the Council.”

  “As it suits them, yes. They bring steel to a fight. I value that, but their pledges mean a grain of sand to me.”

  She snorted. “Me too.” The coming rain spattered nearby leaves. Drops plopped onto shoulders and heads. Copying the wizard, Vic pulled a thin shell of matter around herself to keep dry. “They kidnapped me from Cairo, in the north,” she blurted, her words smacking like the rain. “Then sold me as a concubine to a Citizen of Traine. I don’t suppose that sort of thing happens now.”

  His smile faded, the light dimming in his eyes. “Bethniel had told us something of this. The iron merchants in Traine are well known for their vices, madam. I’m sorry for your troubles.”

  She nodded her thanks, studying him. He was not so much what history had made him—a cad, a tyrant, but one turned to good by the love of Victoria.

  The duo on stage plays the last note, and
she swipes her cheeks dry, feeling a fool for crying over a ballad about a pair of sorcerers ending an affair.

  “Is it strange for you, hearing that song?” Ashel asks.

  “Why would it be?”

  His teeth gleam at her, his eyes creased with mirth. “You, captain, have a famous wizard for a namesake.”

  Her mind pounces on the name Kara, and her cheeks turn icy with mortified anger. Ashel’s face falls, and he stumbles into an explanation about a Victoria of Ourtown being a member of the Council that defeated Meylnara.

  Her anger evaporates into a chagrined smile. “That is absurd.”

  “What amuses you?” Thabean asked.

  She liked Thabean as a comrade, but as a lover? That was absurd. “Nothing here is what we expected, least of all you. Thank you for being . . . not what history made you out to be.”

  He guffawed. “That sounds ominous, madam! You must tell me what flaws history has recorded, so I can remedy them.”

  “I would not presume, sir. How about the next lesson?”

  Horns echoed through the trees. Mirth vanished, and they tore over the canopy. Only an hour ago, Meylnara’s People were peacefully going about their business, not marshaling for an attack, yet Kragnashians marched upon the encampment, tattooed mandibles and shining carapaces aligned in even rows.

  “I don’t think Meylnara’s with them,” Vic said as she and Thabean joined the Council above the assault. “She always hides within an armored mass of Kragnashians, and there is none.”

  “She must be here,” Nelchior spat. “The creatures are attacking with great precision. See how they have chosen to breach the weakest point in our defenses.”

  “Csichren’s camp will soon be overrun,” Saelbeneth said. “There is no time for arguing. Let us to our tasks.”

  The Council broke, and Vic flew to Thabean’s artillery unit.

  “Ho, Victoria!” cried Dealn as she landed.

  “What’d you bring home from market?” she asked.

  “Madam.” He gave a shallow bow, his grin matching the one Thabean had worn earlier. “You will not be disappointed in our fine selection of boulders and sulfa.”