The Duke himself was ostensibly retiring for the winter to one of the intact estates he held in northern Gilmora, on the edge of the invasion zone. The rich domain had survived and even thrived in the aftermath of the goblin invasion, as the refugees and the high cotton prices that resulted had enriched them. I’m certain the castellans of the estates were taken aback to have their master arrive and claim his rightful portion, after so long an absence, but they were legally his.
What he was actually doing was quietly gathering expatriate Wilderlords and Alshari nobles in exile who were interested in returning with him. Landfather Amus made most of the discreet inquiries, but from what he reported to me there were nearly fifty gentlemen of reasonable loyalty to the Alshari coronet to base a campaign around. After the Fair, Pentandra and Arborn and their party would join them, and then they would cross the border and journey to Vorone unannounced, just before Yule.
By the time anyone at the royal court in Castabriel knew about it, Anguin would be firmly established in Vorone, beginning to piece together his shattered realm . . . out of easy reach or influence of the royal family. At least that was the plan.
It was a gamble. A dozen things could go horrifically wrong. Such a move could result in civil war or rebellion, if we weren’t careful. Yet the benefits so outweighed the potential risks that we plunged on ahead.
Wizards meddle. It’s what we do.
By the time the green poop-stained young man triumphantly placed my pipe in my hands, the sun was setting over the western ridge, and I was genuinely tired. I gave my usual congratulatory speech, magically cleaned the ordure off of him, and took his oath in front of the whole crowd. Then I invited him back to the castle for the Champion’s Feast (after an opportunity to change his clothes), where the minor prizes of the Fair would be awarded to the other winners. Tomorrow everyone would pack up and head back home, and my domain could start to get back to normal.
The winner’s name was Doran, and to my surprise he was neither warmage nor spellmonger. In fact, he was a wiry footwizard from Wenshar who had used his wits as much as his magic to claim his prize. After a terrific struggle to get to the top of the hill, he had witnessed a fellow contestant’s failure with the Shieldbeast and had elected to wait. When the next entrant attempted to pass the unrelenting chelonian construct, Doran had used a thrown stick to knock the pipe off of the boulder, picking it up and springing away just as the alarmed construct blasted his competition to unconsciousness.
I couldn’t fault his ingenuity. That’s one of the things I liked about the Trial, it wasn’t merely a test of magic. It also tested your ability to think and plan and prepare. Doran was just the kind of intelligent, clever wizard I wanted to elevate to High Mage.
I skipped most of the ball that followed the feast, allowing Dara to preside in my place. Pentandra had already retired with Arborn for the evening, and Alya was exhausted and wanted to go lay down when she put the children to bed. I started to relax, once I got confirmation that Dunselen and Isily passed through the Diketower headed home. Tomorrow, I consoled myself, I would be done with events and meetings and would be able to do some real work.
It was late, and most of the castle was asleep. I dimmed the magelight that hung over my tower when I was in residence. I wanted to curb nocturnal insects – and visitors. I went to my tower for a little while, stared at the huge pile of work that had gathered during the Fair, and decided I wasn’t quite ready to delve into that yet. I considered reading something – and I had a gracious stack of books, folios and scrolls to get through – but that seemed like too much mental energy.
I knew what I needed. I needed to see the Snowflake.
The thought of standing in its presence in a state of quiet contemplation filled me with an eagerness nothing else. I didn’t want people, either living ones to speak to or dead ones to read from. I wanted quiet solitude and unimaginable magical power, a living arcane mystery that was mine alone to fathom.
I grinned to myself. I had purposefully not scheduled anything until tomorrow afternoon, anticipating a morning of rest and repose before returning to business. While it was late, it wasn’t that late. I could spare a few hours to rest my mind in a living symbol of magic. Enough with the rationalizations, I urged myself, let’s go see it!
I grabbed a bottle and a cup along the way. I didn’t plan to get drunk, but it had been a very long day, and a glass of wine is a comfort. Another rationalization, but I didn’t mind making it. But rationalizations are like drinks. Once you’ve had one . . .
The night was dark, only a sliver of moon to add a second shadow to the magelight’s glow. I went to the gate in the wooden fence behind the castle waved to the Karshak sentry watching the entrance, and headed toward the mountain.
At night the great flat area in the stone floor that the Karshak had been chipping away at all summer glowed serenely as I passed through. It was wide enough now to begin placing the cornerstones to the gatehouse. The first two, along the back, had been placed while I was on the Great March. They were nearly a bowshot apart, from end to end. The rest of the foundation was being outlined in colored chalk, strings, and ribbons tied to stakes all over the site. The entire area of the gatehouse was a third larger than the entire keep of Sevendor Castle.
I cut across the path through the tangle of lines and headed to the mountain, proper. To the right the long, low lodge that housed the Karshak was quiet, but not silent.
Once the entrance to the mountain quarry was opened and weather was no longer a hindrance, the lodge ran three shifts of masons, night and day. Already the opening to the mine was forty feet across and the main tunnel expanded to half that as solid blocks of white basalt were carved with precision from the living rock and transported to the gatehouse. Already a pile of well-trimmed stone blocks two stories high was prepared, ready to be placed this autumn to create the foundations.
The entrance of the mine had a single magelight hovering overhead, more as a beacon than a light source. One inside the Karshak preferred little light. Their eyes could see splendidly in the slightest amount of gloom, and though they employed their version of magelights when necessary, they preferred cunning little oil lamps to magic, even here in the heart of a magical mountain.
The passage into the mountain was impressively long, now, and ten feet wide or wider in most places. Karshak crews were at work every couple of dozen feet, hacking their way into the side of the tunnel, digging down, or even dropping cut stone from above their heads. I made do with a Cat’s Eye spell, because nothing would piss me off more if I was a Karshak mason carefully lowering a ten-ton block of basalt down from above than to have some cocky asshole wizard blind me with his bloody magelight.
Karshak are edgy enough, while they’re focusing on work. A Karshak mason leading a team tends to become not just anxious, but even emotional if things are off by just a fraction. Tensions were high, at this stage of the construction, Master Guri had reported. One misstep and a cave-in could kill hundreds.
I gingerly moved past the Karshak, but in truth they barely noticed me. As I went deeper into the mountain, the passage narrowed, and at the appropriate spot I took a right. The steps dropped down a flight, then the passage continued to the . . . I don’t know, but I think it was around a forty-five degree angle from the main tunnel. It narrowed to less than five feet for the next fifty or sixty, then opened into a small chamber the Karshak had cut at my request.
At the end of the tunnel a single opening led into the snow-white rock vesicle, the Denehole, where the Snowflake hummed, hissed and glowed.
I felt better just seeing it . . . feeling it, really, down in my bones.
As if I was going to settle in and watch a fire for the evening, I pulled the chair I’d had brought there directly in front of the thing. I poured a glass of wine, used the chamberpot in the corridor (I’d been spending more and more time down here, and I didn’t want to be interrupted at a crucial moment by my bladder) and then settled into my chair to watch th
e show.
Watching the Snowflake is always mesmerizing. You don’t expect something that rigidly solid to move with such fluid grace. You don’t think crystal can flow like sea foam until you see the six arms of the construct meld together or break apart with the single mindedness of a natural phenomenon. And that’s just the visual element. When you opened yourself to arcane energies, and extended your thaumaturgical awareness to include the Snowflake, then it really got interesting.
It was still largely a crystalline enigma, then, an unexpected gift from my inflamed brain and excited subconscious. In a quintessential way it was a reflection of my mind, in abstract form. After all, I had chosen the snowflake as my heraldic device, and my fortune and much of my power was built on the magical stone that came to be the night my son was born in a snowstorm . . . you could say the symbol had a lot of significance to me.
Now it stood before me, morphing from one perfectly complex hexagonal shape into another with absolute precision. It had been forged in the flames of my soul . . . and I still had no bloody idea what to do with it.
I tried thaumaturgical assays, of course, because that’s what a thaumaturge does . . . but apart from telling me it was a supremely powerful artifact that radiated arcane energies like a glowing stove sheds heat, it had yet to be very useful. I was working with more sophisticated spells, now, separating out my consciousness and delving into the outer perimeter of the Snowflake in attempt to gain entrance to its innermost workings.
It was fascinating and frustrating at the same time, particularly as I examined the points of the thing. With them constantly changing and evolving it was almost impossible to insinuate my consciousness within them. But every assay I attempted revealed some new fascinating aspect of the artifact.
That kind of intense thaumaturgic work looks an awful lot like sitting and staring, to the casual observer, and it’s quite easy to get so involved in the spell that you forget about the needs of your body. When I finished a particularly long and intense survey, I shifted my feet, which had grown numb from inactivity, and they stubbornly refused to move.
I tried to shift in my seat to return some circulation to them, but my hands missed the seat of the chair. Indeed, they felt like two lifeless clubs at the end of my arms. I couldn’t feel my fingers at all, and they would not respond to my commands.
I started to panic. There are all sorts of unpleasant physical side-effects to doing deep thaumaturgic work. Usually a good thaumaturge will use an assistant (called a Famulus) to keep such problems from arising, but I didn’t think that I had been delving that deeply, yet. It had only been around an hour – less, I realized. Perhaps I was more tired than I thought . . . or still contending with the lingering effects of my nine-day magical coma, a few months ago.
That’s when I heard her voice, and the truth of the situation became clear.
“It’s absolutely gorgeous, Minalan!” Isily’s voice said in an excited whisper from behind me. “How did you ever create such a marvelous thing?”
“Isily!” I hissed. “What are you doing here? You left with Dunselen!”
“Minalan, I’m a shadowmage,” she reminded me, condescendingly. “I am a mistress of deception, obfuscation, and misdirection. Convincing my dullard husband I’m where I’m supposed to be when I’ve got business to conduct is trivial.”
“And what business might that be?” I asked through clenched teeth. I could feel the numbness spreading up my arms to my elbows and up my legs to my knees. My lower back was starting to stiffen. “Poisoning me?”
“It’s not poison,” she clucked. “Or, not really. I found the most remarkable flower in that little garden estate of yours,” she mused, as she crossed in front of me. She was wearing a dark cloak of shifting colors, just the sort of thing that you wouldn’t notice at night. Her expression was mischievous and she was beautiful, against the Snowflake. “You won’t die, but you’ll be unable to move anything of your own volition, unless I tell you to. And you won’t be able to concentrate enough to use magic effectively,” she smiled, turning back toward the Snowflake.
“But enough about you . . . what about this wonder? What is it?” she asked, excitedly.
“It’s a birthday present for my wife,” I said, through clenched teeth. “Everyone needs a hobby.”
“You jest, of course . . . this is awe-inspiring, Min! I was impressed enough at that lovely baculus you gave Pentandra . . . I’m not above coveting such pretty and potent devices. Here I thought that was the peak of your art, but I can see it’s just a toy, compared to your real work. What is it?” she repeated, a third time. “And do be candid!”
“It’s a big bloody crystal snowflake,” I grunted, feeling as if I should cooperate. “It’s kind of a molopor.”
“You . . . made a molopor?” she asked, incredulous.
“I said it was kind of a molopor,” I corrected. But part of me appreciated the professional respect. When you pull something that impressive out of your . . . brain, it’s nice to be recognized for the result, even if you have no idea what it does. “Only, clearly, it isn’t exactly a molopor.”
“Clearly,” she agreed, studying the Snowflake more closely. “It hums, it throbs with arcane power! You have every mage in the world outside your door, and yet you kept this pretty secret from us all!”
“It’s not done yet,” I grunted. “And it’s mine.”
“Such the artist . . . you really are a special man, Minalan,” she sighed, looking back at me with a disturbing amount of affection and admiration. “I am so glad we were able to reach an understanding, and forge an alliance. I can see this is going to be very fruitful and fulfilling for both of us.”
“You know, I’m starting to re-think that whole alliance proposal,” I admitted, calmly. I tried to summon power from my sphere. No luck. I couldn’t get my mind to focus enough of the necessary will to do so. “Getting poisoned by your new ally doesn’t exactly build confidence.”
“Oh, don’t be silly,” she dismissed. “I knew you had to be up to something, in this incredible mountain of yours. If you’re able to produce wonders like the baculus and the other spells I’ve seen here, you had to be doing it someplace. It didn’t take much inquiry to find out you had been spending long nights deep inside the mountain. So I followed you, once you thought I was gone. Just being curious.”
“And the devastating paralytic agent . . .?”
“Men have a tendency to be reactive, when their secrets are discovered,” she said, philosophically. “I decided that you would be more willing to sit and talk with me if you were drugged, unable to move, compliant and suggestible.”
“Don’t let the secret of that poison get out,” I said, harshly. “Every wife in the world will want it!”
She smiled. Damn, she had dimples too, I was reminded.
“See what I mean about you? You’re enlightened, Minalan. For the son of a baker, you have a sophistication and understanding of things far beyond your original station. You could be angry and bellicose, right now, hurling curses and threats, but instead you make jests.”
“I’m pretty angry,” I pointed out, calmly. “In fact, unless you kill me, I’m starting to have some pretty savage fantasies about the repercussions of this meeting.”
“Oh, I bet they’re terribly daring, too,” she cooed, stroking my hair. I really wanted to be able to recoil from her, but my neck wasn’t answering my summons. “All sorts of degrading and painful lessons to teach me my place . . . you do have such a creative imagination! But don’t consider this an abrogation of our alliance, my sweet. On the contrary, this just deepens it. Now that I know your pretty little secret, we can proceed on a more even footing. I have no desire to ruin your ambitions, Minalan – on the contrary, I want to see you prosper. I want to see you in triumph!”
“I’m feeling less than triumphant at the moment,” I grunted. It was getting harder to talk.
“Perhaps, but that’s temporary,” she consoled. “Thanks to the power of the drug,
and some casual enchantments I have laid to help ensure your cooperation, you will be quite willing and able to rise to the heights of greatness you are capable of. I’m even more confident of that, now that I’ve seen this,” she said, nodding reverently toward the snowflake. “It would be awe-inspiring even from the hand of an Alkan master, but to have come from the mind of a former warmage and village spellmonger? This proves I was right in supporting you!” she rationalized to herself, more than to me.
“What do you hope to gain from this?” I asked, my mind getting even more clouded. But if she was in a chatty mood, I figured I should try to take advantage of it and learn all I could. It wasn’t like I could do much else but talk and listen . . . and the talking was getting harder and harder.
“Isn’t it obvious? Power. Influence. Control. You aren’t the only one who overcame challenges . . . and I have enemies,” she said, darkly. “Any hope I have to escape them and live my life in freedom lies in cultivating my power and influence within the arcane world.”
“You would betray Mother, then?”
“I would free myself of her shackles!” she said, defiantly. “My past work has afforded me reward, in its way, but it has also cemented her control over me. Now I have a modicum of independence, for the price of submitting to that witless oaf, and with that independence I can create my own power base. I don’t wish to destroy the royal house, but I do wish to be sundered from its whims. The things I have done . . .” she said, shaking her head.
“And now you want to enslave me?” I asked, harshly.
“Enslave is such a strong term,” she clucked. “No, Minalan, I just wish for you to be quite well-disposed to me. Enough to offer me refuge, for instance, if I rebelled. Or provided me assistance, if I needed it. Our daughter was one way to accomplish that, but I prefer a more comprehensive approach.”
“Blackmail?”
“Blue magic,” she said, taking a scroll from beneath her shadowy cloak. “This is an emotional affinity spell, one so powerful that it was prescribed by the Censorate and locked away in but a few libraries. This will ensure that you will have nothing but protective and loving thoughts toward me.”
Enchanter (Book 7) Page 12
