by Dorian Hart
“Agreed,” said Morningstar.
They spent the next hour exploring two sizable caves, each larger than the spacious Greenhouse living room. Their search pattern stayed the same; Morningstar would first stand in the opening and sweep her gaze through the darkness, looking both for the Eye of Moirel and for anything that might pose a danger during a close-up search. Then Aravia would come in and shine her light around, and they’d both explore the cavern’s entirety as thoroughly as possible.
Both caves came up empty, but there was a third they had spotted twenty more feet downstream. They picked their way over the stones and scrub until Morningstar stood in the entrance.
There was a man in the cave, asleep on its pebbly floor, tucked in a blanket with his head on a wadded up shirt. The remains of a small campfire rested inside an ad-hoc ring of stones close at hand.
The sleeper stirred and rolled onto his back, revealing his long handlebar mustache.
“Gods, it’s Sagiro, the man from the Mirrors,” whispered Aravia.
Sagiro opened his eyes. Morningstar drew her weapon. “Aravia, get the others. Quickly.” Before the mustachioed man could even sit up, Morningstar strode forward and placed the sharp flanges of her mace against his neck. “Stay on the ground, Sagiro, and don’t make any sudden movements. Do you understand me?”
“Of course,” said Sagiro calmly. There was no trace of confusion in his voice as one might expect of someone just woken. “I do prefer that my neck remain unperforated.”
“After what happened at the Seven Mirrors, I’m tempted to lean a little harder,” said Morningstar.
“You mean when I called upon the people of our fair kingdom to apprehend a band of murderers? I believe the scales of morality are currently weighted in my favor concerning the events to which you refer.”
“We didn’t kill that…man. He killed himself, ingested some kind of poison.”
“I watched you and your friends assault him unprovoked.”
Her patience was fraying. “Why are you here, Sagiro? I already know, of course, but it would make me less inclined to make holes in your neck if you would just admit it up front.”
“Very well. I am here seeking an Eye of Moirel, just as you are. I have had no luck searching in other caves and was taking a rest before setting out to explore this one.”
“Tell me again why you are searching for it.”
“Why would I not want to find a diamond worth hundreds of gold crescents?”
Ell’s shadow, but he sounded so reasonable.
“And how did you know to look here for it?”
“That is information I am disinclined to share. Are you threatening to kill me if I do not speak?”
That was an easy one. “Yes, I’ll kill you unless you tell me. How do you know where to find Eyes of Moirel?”
Sagiro looked up at her, seemingly relaxed, though the spikes of her mace pressed dimples into his skin. She did not feel moved to mercy towards those who attacked her, but Sagiro had not, as far as she knew, committed any evil acts. Still, the need for this information was worth a bluff.
“On that subject, I regret that I cannot disclose my sources, not even with my life in such peril,” said Sagiro. “If you must kill me, there is little I can do about it.”
Damn. Was he was calling her bluff or simply resigned to his death?
“However, I can promise that if you let me live, I will depart this place entirely and leave the search to you and your friends. I know when I am bested. Would that be acceptable to you?”
Aravia returned to the cave. “They’re on their way.”
Sagiro’s rapier was leaning against the nearest wall. “Aravia, do you see Sagiro’s weapon? Over there. Could you take it, please?”
Aravia did so.
“Also,” added Morningstar, “if he makes any hostile moves, blast him or set him on fire.”
She hoped Aravia would play along, and her faith was rewarded. Aravia wiggled her fingers. “I’d be more than pleased.”
“Stand slowly,” said Morningstar. “Collect your things, and don’t do anything that might make either of us think you’re up to something. When my friends are all here, we’ll let you go, on the condition that you head straight back upriver. Agreed?”
“Will you return my weapon?” asked Sagiro.
“No chance. Letting you live will have to be enough.”
“I have no wish to harm you, truly, but I understand why you are suspicious.”
Morningstar removed the head of her weapon from beneath Sagiro’s chin, and the wiry little man stood, slowly, keeping his hands in plain sight.
Ernie and Dranko appeared in the cave mouth.
“Well, look who’s here,” said Dranko. “The guy with the mustache who tried to frame us. You tried to frame us, I mean. Not the mustache.”
“Sagiro was just leaving,” said Morningstar. “He’s agreed to give up his search and leave the area. We keep his weapon. Ernie, Dranko, why don’t you help pack up Sagiro’s campsite while I keep an eye on where his hands are.”
Sagiro stood stock still while his belongings were stuffed back into his pack. Dranko made no attempt to hide that he was rooting through the man’s possessions, going so far as to pull out a small leather pouch that jingled. “You don’t mind if I take this, do you? I’m sure a man as enterprising as yourself won’t be poor for long.”
Sagiro did not reply. Dranko pocketed the pouch while Ernie tied up the bedroll.
“I hope someday we meet in better circumstances,” said Sagiro. “Perhaps you will have learned the errors of your ways.”
He took a step toward the cave mouth just as Kibi and Tor arrived.
“You!” said Kibi. “What are you doin’ here?”
“Our friend has agreed to skedaddle,” said Dranko. “We keep his weapon, he agrees to go back to where he came from and leave the searching to us.”
Kibi was staring goggle-eyed at Sagiro. “You can’t let him go! He’s got an Eye of Moirel right there in his pocket! I’m lookin’ at it right now, red as a rose.”
Sagiro sighed.
The blood drained from Morningstar’s face. How could she have fallen for such a simple ruse as that? “You’ve had it all this time?” she cried. “You…you little weasel…”
“You know,” said Dranko, “I admire a man who runs a good con. But when your opponent can see the cards up your sleeve, it’s a good idea to cut your losses.”
Sagiro still acted unruffled. “Is that a colorful way of telling me you intend to take my lawful possession by force?”
“Yeah,” said Dranko. “Though the less we have to hurt you, the happier we’ll all be.”
“We don’t want to hurt you at all,” Ernie added quickly.
“And I do not wish to be hurt,” said Sagiro. “Nor do I wish any harm to you. It seems you have won the day again. I invite you to reach into my pocket, which apparently your friend Kibi can easily identify, and remove the object you seek.”
Morningstar sensed a trap. “No.” Dranko said “no” at the same time, probably thinking the same thing. She added, “Take it out of your pocket yourself and toss it to the ground, then back up.”
Sagiro reached into his pocket and pulled out a round diamond, a twin to the one in the Greenhouse. He graced them with a rueful smile.
“Now would be a good time,” he said.
Morningstar only had a second to wonder what the mustachioed man meant or whom he was talking to. A shockwave blast of red light pulsed from Sagiro’s hand, lifting her slightly off her feet, as though she were floating in an ocean while a slow wave rolled past. Something like a blanket was thrown over her sense of self, and all went dark.
* * *
Slowly, slowly she regained consciousness. Her head throbbed, but nothing else hurt, so she sat up. Late afternoon sun shone in her eyes; looking away from it brought her friends into her field of vision. They were all out cold, though their chests were rising and falling.
It took h
er ten good seconds of hard thinking to remember where she was and why everyone was sprawled on the ground inside a cave. Sagiro! The man with the handlebar mustache had done something, attacked them with the Eye of Moirel. There was no sign of him now. She stood and walked gingerly to the cave mouth, but the only living creatures nearby were two deer drinking from the river. They spooked and bolted. Sagiro was nowhere in sight.
One by one the others awoke, groaning and rubbing their eyes. Only Kibi was still unconscious.
Dranko lurched to his feet. “Damn. Where’s Sagiro?”
“Gone,” said Morningstar. “I wonder why he didn’t kill us all when he had the chance.”
“Or at least rob us blind while we were out,” added Dranko.
Ernie had propped himself up against a wall. “Because that’s what you two would have done, right? Because we’re Horn’s Company, band of thieves and murderers.”
“Relax, Ernie,” said Dranko. “We’re talking about someone who hasn’t treated us very well both times we’ve encountered him.” He grinned. “Also, yeah, of course I’d have looted him. It’s strange you even have to ask.”
“Sagiro did say he didn’t want to hurt us,” said Tor. “Maybe he was telling the truth.”
“He just blasted us all into unconsciousness,” said Dranko, “and that hurt.”
“But Morningstar’s right,” said Tor. “He had the opportunity to kill us all and didn’t take it.”
“Could be Sagiro didn’t know how long we’d be unconscious,” said Aravia, “and getting the Eye away was all he cared about.”
“So now what?” asked Tor. “Should we go after him?”
Aravia shook her head. “He’s been gone for hours, and we have no idea where he might have headed.”
Kibi was the last to wake. “What in all the Hells jus’ happened?”
“Our mustachioed friend did some trick with the Eye of Moirel,” said Dranko. “Kibi, you never told us those things were little magic weapons. We should stop keeping ours locked up and start carrying it around for emergencies!”
Kibi groaned and sat up. “I ain’t got no notion of how that’d work. Sagiro must be some kind a’ wizard.”
“I don’t think so,” said Aravia. “Did you hear what he said right before he released the concussive blast?”
Ernie nodded. “He said, ‘Now would be a good time.’”
“And who was he talking to?”
No one answered right away.
“The better question,” Aravia amended, “would be ‘what was he talking to?’ Because I think he was telling the Eye itself to cast its spell.”
“And it listened?” asked Ernie.
“Kibi has talked to ours,” said Aravia. “Even when it wasn’t possessing your stuffed bear.”
“But it just spewed out a bunch a’ cryptic mumbo jumbo,” said Kibi. “’Course, it ain’t been all that clear in the bear, neither.”
“You should sit down and have a chat with it when we get home,” said Dranko. “Promise it you’ll give it a good polish every night if it’ll let us carry it around and zap our enemies for us.”
No one was saying the important truth out loud. Morningstar turned her back to the sunlight spilling into the cave. “What will it say when we show up without its brother? When we come back having failed.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
FAILED. THE WORD should be making her angry, given the reactions of her companions. But it wasn’t. Everyone else was so demoralized—not as much as when Mrs. Horn had died, but there was an air of inevitable doom hanging in the cave.
Aravia was intimately familiar with suffering setbacks. The Gods knew, during her apprenticeship with Master Serpicore, that her improvisations and experiments had not always been resounding successes on the first try. But every time she had accidentally set the workbench on fire, or turned a rack of valuable glassware into sand, or caused Serpicore’s hair to disappear, she had used those…miscalibrations…to improve her techniques and knowledge of the arcane.
For all of Serpicore’s faults, he had never stopped hammering home the importance of keeping a level head. “Being a wizard means being a failure,” he had told her once. “A thousand times you will be a failure before every great success. But if you allow each botched attempt to dishearten you, you will never achieve your potential. There is no place in magic for your heart, and no place in your heart for magic.”
But what was in her heart? She searched the memories of her childhood—a perfectly ordinary one, the daughter of two cartwrights in the city of Sentinel, though she spent more time reading and less time learning the family craft than her parents would have preferred. She remembered a presumably typical collage of young emotions: joy, fear, frustration, excitement, sadness. There was the time she had taken a dare from her friend Camilla to swing on a leafy vine across the narrow point of the Adderflun River. She could pick apart the memory, examine it from different angles, note the exhilaration of flight followed by the terror when she realized she wouldn’t reach the far bank, and the relief when she had successfully swum to shore.
But all of that was in her mind, not her heart. The emotions associated with that memory were faded and gray, moved into a dusty cabinet seldom examined.
When Aravia was seventeen, her parents had crumbled in the face of the indisputable evidence of her genius and sent her to study arcanism with Master Serpicore. Though Serpicore was notoriously strict and only accepted students of a certain potential, he had admitted her after but a single interview, forgoing the usual battery of tests. He had even agreed that she could keep Pewter, though he detested pets.
Her heart beat faster when she thought of her cat, left behind with Serpicore. She missed her Pewter, and that was real. She wasn’t sure she could put him in the danger that so clearly was part and parcel of working for Abernathy. But if she discovered that Serpicore was mistreating him…
There. There was something that made her angry.
Morningstar and Dranko began to bicker, which jarred her from her reverie. She understood that she should try to cheer the others up, make them see that there was success on the far side of this failure.
“There’s another one, right?” she asked Kibi. “Another Eye?”
“Well, I guess so. The Eye we got at home, it said, ‘You must find my brothers. One is close.’ Maybe it’ll tell us where to find another one, sure. Come to think of it, at the Mirrors, it told me it lacked ‘two willing brothers.’”
“We’re oh-for-one so far,” said Dranko. “And Sagiro has at least one. How many are there altogether?”
“Seven,” said Kibi. “The green one we got said there was seven.”
“That makes sense,” said Aravia. “Magic is full of symmetries, and there are seven Mirrors as well. Kibi, you said the Eye Sagiro just took was red, didn’t you?”
“Yup.”
“And the one we have at home turns green when it’s…active. Now, remember that when the Mirrors flashed, they formed a seven sided light-structure where each side was a different color. I’d say there are seven Eyes, each one corresponding to one of the colors at Flashing Day.”
“Brilliant!” Tor exclaimed. “That has to be right. And there are still five more, and we only need two of them.”
She smiled at the boy. His attitude flew right in the face of Serpicore’s teachings. He was never discouraged, but he achieved that state not through any intellectual rigor or practiced self-discipline. He was all heart, and it kept him boundlessly optimistic. That was boosted, of course, by the fact that he was incapable of dwelling on anything negative long enough for it to color his worldview. Nor was he ever likely to become a wizard.
“But we don’t know how many Sagiro already has,” said Ernie. “Or the Sharshun.”
“More importantly,” said Morningstar, “we don’t know what the Eyes do.”
“They unmake the world,” said Tor. “Do we need to know the details?”
“Knowing how they unmake the world
might help us put a stop to it,” said Morningstar.
Aravia knew they weren’t going to find any answers standing around in a cave. “Then let’s go home. Maybe Abernathy has woken up, or Bumbly will have more to say. Gather round, and I’ll teleport us back to the Greenhouse.”
* * *
She cast her spell, the cave vanished, and there was the Greenhouse door. But just like before, something tugged at the magic, as though it was taking its effect only reluctantly.
“It happened again,” said Ernie, looking around. “Where’s Kibi?”
“Running late,” said Dranko.
As when they teleported the first time, the stonecutter appeared five seconds after the rest of them. He stumbled a few feet sideways.
“I feel like I been stuffed in a barrel and rolled down a hill,” he said. “Aravia, any way you could make your teleportin’ a mite less dizzifyin’?”
Aravia frowned at him. “It should be a seamless translation,” she said. “Did any of the rest of you experience any discomfort?”
“Not me,” said Tor, and no one else had either.
“You’re also showing up a few seconds late,” said Aravia to Kibi. “For some reason the spell isn’t working quite right with you.”
“I’m startin’ to get the sense that all magic goes wonky where I’m concerned,” said Kibi. “Though I suppose there’s more good than bad in that if that’s why Hodge’s crazy fire didn’t bother me.”
“But Sagiro’s attack with his Eye of Moirel knocked you out, longer than any of us,” said Aravia. “We’ll have to experiment on you to know for sure.”
Kibi crossed his arms. “We won’t have to do any such thing.”
“Have it your way. But if it were me, I’d want to know as much as possible about my resistance to magic. And that reminds me. Kibi, I want to check all the objects you brought back from Seablade Point, to see if they’re enchanted. I don’t have much magic left today after teleporting, but one aura sense before bed shouldn’t be a problem.”
