Enchanter (Book 7)

by Terry Mancour

  “I do hope she offered some spiritual comfort,” I said, innocently. I watched his expression change, his freckles turning red with his blush.

  “She did,” he said, hurriedly. “I, uh, she told me to follow my heart, or something to that effect. But enough about my dreams, Excellency – how did last night’s ball go?” he asked, suddenly squirming.

  “Splendidly,” I sighed. “The Orphan Duke is firmly on his throne, and I put forth certain proposals he was favorably disposed to. It was an enchanting evening, all around. Now, to business.”

  “To business,” he repeated, pulling his portfolio of parchment to him as his eye caught sight of another woman across the hall. “I, uh, this morning we received word from Lord Lorcus that he and his men have secured all three southern castles and have begun preparations to take Rolone Castle.”

  “When?” I asked, surprised.

  “Later today,” he said, though it was clear he was doubtful of Lorcus’ plans. “He reports that two small squadrons of Roloni have been captured and held, and that he has started certain rumors that have filtered into the city. He says he will begin his operation near midnight, tonight, and invites you cordially to visit him tomorrow, to enjoy the consummation of his plans and the fall of the domain of Rolone.”

  “I’ll work it into my schedule,” I nodded.

  “Really, Excellency? You think he can take the great keep of Rolone? The castle has its own well, deep and fresh, and great storerooms. How can so few dare to strike against such a great keep?”

  “A month ago I would have wagered against him taking three castles in a single day, but I saw him do it,” I pointed out. “He is a man of rare talents. And unquestionable loyalty.”

  “He’s mad,” Sir Festaran suggested.

  “I never said he wasn’t. But he’s useful. More useful than I’d imagined. What next?”

  “Master Andalnam wishes an audience, to discuss certain issues of enchantment, and the Manufactory. As does Mistress Rael. I believe the two discussions may be related.”

  “I have no doubt,” I sighed. “Anyone else?”

  “Oh, my, yes. Banamor and Dranus both want a word. Sir Forondo wants leave to loan twenty more Bovali archers to Amel Wood for the duration of the conflict – all volunteers, and at his expense. The Karshak wish to speak to you – specifically Master Azhguri, but he was here with Master Onranion, so there’s no telling what that was about. And the reeve of Gurisham wants leave for the village to start gardening the six rods of cleared land left from the road clearing, adjacent to their village. They need the space, Sire,” he added, sympathetically.

  “They do. That’s the easy one. Grant it, and add the rents to the commune’s fees, not their tribute. I might want to use it for something later. As for the others, uh, yes to the troops, as loan, and on the condition that they bear Amel Wood’s device as soon as they leave our frontier. Lorcus will need the reinforcements.

  “As for the domestic business, I’ll deal with Dranus first, then the Alon, and then Banamor. And hopefully I can get it all done before luncheon,” I added, as a maid came with a bowl of porridge and a trencher of bacon and eggs. “I’d like to get back to work, eventually. Politics takes too much effort.” I drew my dagger and started with the bacon. I was hungry .

  “There is one other thing, Sire,” the young knight said, nervously. “Lady Dara reports that Frightful’s eggs are near hatching, as are the giant hawks in the ridges. She is nervous but hopeful, Sire. She has kept to the mews for days, using her other birds to spy on the wild hawks from afar.”

  “She must be exhausted. Why don’t you ride out there this afternoon and make sure she’s taking care of herself.”

  “Me, Sire? To the Mews?”

  “She is one of the domain’s leading noblewomen,” I reasoned. “And she’s involved in a project vital to the defense of the kingdom. Not to mention the fact that her Alka Alon friends have abandoned her, for the moment,” I added, not mentioning that a moment for an Alkan could be a few years for a human. “She needs our support. Ensure she lacks for nothing she needs, and report how she fares. If I need to go out there myself, then I will . . . but I think that would make her more nervous than anything else.”

  “As you wish, Sire,” Festaran said, his eyes suddenly wide with fear.

  “Let me go speak to Dranus, and then the others, and we’ll speak later,” I promised.

  Dranus, where are you? I asked, mind-to-mind, as the assistant castellan shuffled away, filing through his notes until another girlish giggle attracted his attention.

  In your study, Excellency, awaiting your convenience.

  I passed two young people – a lad from the stables and one of the fosterling girls – cuddling in the stairwell, and I had to run them off. Dranus was waiting for me in the small room at the base of my tower that used to be my bedchamber.

  “Thank you for your time, Excellency,” he said with a short bow. “I will be brief. I believe that Sevendor is currently under some sort of magical attack, one which affects the desires of our folk.”

  I groaned audibly, and flopped onto my chair. “It’s not an attack, it’s an effect. From a spell.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “One of yours, Magelord?”

  “Not as such,” I sighed. “It was divine magic. It wasn’t intended to spread – I think – but . . . it was necessary.”

  “Necessary, Sire?”

  “This is one of those rare times I’m going to ask you to trust me without explanation,” I explained. Or didn’t. “When magic involves both your personal life and state security, things can get complicated. I had to beg assistance from some . . . alternate sources to contend with a difficult situation. It worked, I believe, but this, alas, seems to be the unintended consequence.”

  “Ah. I see. I think. Just how long shall we expect this episode to last?”

  “I truly have no idea. I would hope just a day or so. Any longer than that, and I’ll have to do something.”

  “You don’t wish to do something now, Sire?”

  “From what I understand, this level of magic flows along natural lines. It will wane, in time. I hope.”

  “Your sense of adventure has always fascinated me, Sire,” he said, dryly.

  I chuckled. “What is the matter, Dranus? Are there no ladies you have an interest in?”

  “I am as much a man as any,” he said, gruffly. “In truth, my heart belongs to a lady in Remere I knew from my youth. But I have taken pleasure, when I have found it,” he admitted.

  “Perhaps you should consider some sort of energetic entertainment tonight, to try to reduce the pressure.”

  “Are you sure that’s advisable, Excellency?”

  “Possibly not,” I considered. “But if you try to repress this kind of energy, it can manifest in other ways. Unpleasant ways. Or so suggests my resident expert on sex magic. I’d advise anyone who is worried about self-control to take a few days in Brestal. Or beyond.”

  “I shall make some inquiries, Sire. Any other advice?”

  “Wear something that makes your shoulders look big. Women like that.”

  *

  *

  The two old Alon geezers, Azhguri and Onranion, had formed an unlikely friendship in their study of the snowstone phenomenon. Both masters at very different arcane specialties, our collaborations had been fruitful, as we hacked away at the thaumaturgy of the stuff.

  But today they wanted to discuss the Snowflake, not snowstone.

  “We’ve been thinking, Min,” Onranion said, putting his feet up on the battered table the two had appropriated from somewhere. While each had their own workshops, they had taken over the incomplete storeroom on the fourth floor of the new gatehouse until it was finished. It was a good neutral ground for their discussions, when it was too early in the day to adjourn to the club in the outer bailey. “We have both assayed the Snowflake without success, from our diverse disciplines, and know you have met with similar frustration using your simple Imperi
al magic.” He just couldn’t resist. It was part of his charm to be casually insulting.

  “That’s a fair assessment,” I agreed. “I did pass along the hint that I got, to go through the center. Did that bear any fruit?”

  “Yes and no,” grunted Azhguri, flopped on a bag of mortar, smoking his more intricate pipe. He was an avid smoker and had a collection 0of them. “We both changed our approach, and was able to make some progress, but ultimately the result was the same. However,” he continued, with a smile of triumph, “while trying to sing the thing, yet again, I realized something: the center portion of the damn thing is actually separate from the rest of the structure, for just the briefest of moments.”

  “We’ve established that,” I nodded.

  “But what we didn’t notice is that the effect producing a kind of arcane sheering effect, for the briefest of moments, around the entire crystal, like a flash of lightning. I never would have noticed it, myself. Too focused on the song and the stone. But this ugly scarecrow happened to be watching the entire matrix while I was singing, and when that flash happened he noticed the effect.”

  “A sheering effect,” I said, thinking hard about that. “What exactly does that mean?”

  “It means that the center is briefly unstable. Oh, you still can’t move it – your Sire Cei could smack at it all day with his mighty hammer and get nothing but a sore shoulder, I’d think. But when the sheering effect happens, the entire centerpoint goes slightly out of phase.”

  “Enough to be subject to certain dimensional magics,” Azhguri nodded.

  I stared at both of them. “You mean I could put the Snowflake in a hoxter pocket?”

  “Oh, no, no, no,” laughed Onranion. “That is a molopor, my boy. It’s unmovable by definition. Quantumly locked to the planet’s magosphere. But,” he continued, with a smile, “the centerpoint, during the sheering, is just a little quantumly . . . wobbly.”

  “Wobbly?”

  “Wobbly!” Azguri proclaimed. “Wobbly enough to become just unstable enough to slide into an hoxter pocket, under the proper conditions.”

  “Like what?” I asked as I stroked my beard, intrigued.

  “A huge amount of power, for one thing,” Onranion said. “A really staggering amount of power, just to keep it there.”

  “All right. So we have a portable centerpoint—”

  “Well, that’s the thing,” Azhguri interrupted. “The centerpoint never actually leaves the center of the Snowflake. Theoretically.”

  “But you just said it was in a pocket,” I said, confused.

  “It is. But the pocket isn’t anywhere. So when the center is pulled out of the pocket, it returns to the Snowflake. Or re-appears at the snowflake. Something like that. We think.”

  “So what do we do with it?” I asked, still confused.

  “’What do we do with it’, he asks?” laughed Azhguri, choking smoke all over the room.

  “My lad, a molopor is a powerful magical tool, if you know how to use it. The problem with the damned things is that they’re always off in the middle of the wilderness, or in the sky, or at the bottom of the sea, or some other inconvenient place. Usually the site of some horrific magical catastrophe of old, so local conditions can be challenging. Having one whose powers you can access anywhere you happen to be would be . . . almost inconceivable.”

  “You think we could do that?”

  “It’s all theory, but we’ve been discussing it in detail,” Onranion assured me. “We think it could happen, under the right conditions. With the right combination of magic, luck, and skill.”

  “Well, what kind of thing are we talking about here?” I insisted, a little frustrated. “What the hells could it do?”

  “You told us that the Snowflake was a fulcrum? This is the part of the fulcrum in which you stick the lever. What we’re telling you is how to build the lever,” Azhguri said, patronizingly. “I think that big whopping crystal you have might serve as a physical anchor. Embedded in a chunk of irionite, for instance, to sustain the power to keep it in place—”

  “By my calculations, a volume of around half a kilogram would do it,” Onranion said, casually. “With some songspells to bind it to the gem.”

  “And then I’d sing the two in concert,” Azhguri finished, “and add some runes to help bind power flow. Like building the banks of a stream up,” he said, saying the words slowly and clearly, as if I was an idiot.

  “Once the power stream is established and maintained, the rest should be easy, theoretically. The gem acts as a conduit, an interdimensional space that can filter the power of the centerpoint and into your, what do you call it? Your thaumaturgic awareness,” he said, remembering the technical term.

  “So I get lots and lots more power,” I sighed. “I’ve already got plenty of magical power. What can it do?”

  “Theoretically?” the Alkan master mused. “Anything that the Dead God could do, and perhaps more. He has a simple molopor. This is that . . . and more. You wouldn’t even need as much power, to match him, as once the initial work was done, the construct would be self-sustaining . . . as long as there was a consciousness compelling it to be. A heart, so to speak, to keep the magic pumping.”

  “That’s where we are stuck,” Onranion admitted. “And where your quaint little magical system comes into play.”

  “And just how is that?”

  “Well, the weakness of the proposal lies in the interface between the crystalline matrix’s intricate depths, and the mage’s mind. Your bloody minds are just too . . . simple. So are ours,” he added, before I could get offended. “So we think you need some sort of paraclete.”

  “That’s what I’ve been saying,” I nodded.

  “The fact is, the mutable nature of the matrix requires a mind of such complexity that . . . well, I’m not certain it exists.”

  “Well, not anymore, perhaps,” Onranion sighed, wistfully. “Long before either of our peoples came to this world, there were the great intelligences of the deep. Minds of such staggering complexity, legends say, that their awareness encompassed millions of creatures.”

  “It would take something like that, I think,” nodded Azhguri, grimly.

  “We don’t happen to have something like that laying around,” I said, suddenly discouraged.

  “Don’t you?” asked Onranion, suddenly. “I’ve seen the wonderful toys your people have made, bypassing your usual crude spells and using enneagrammatic magic. You must be capturing them from somewhere. Animal sacrifice?” he proposed, curious.

  “No! In fact, I have access to a node of Ghost Rock, known to my profession as the Grain of Pors. It was discovered a few centuries ago north of the Kulines, in the wilderness, and used to retrieve enneagrams for use in his constructs. After the Conquest, it got locked in a vault, until we retrieved it. And started researching it.”

  The Alon exchanged meaningful glances.

  “We thought it might be something like that – although I was curious to see how you do an animal sacrifice. No matter. Ghost Rock? Yes, that would be sufficient to give awareness to your toys. But dangerous, Minalan. You don’t realize how dangerous,” he warned.

  “Aye,” sighed the old Karshak heavily. “That stuff is trouble. The legacy of times long past, when the sun was new and the mountains young. Some not even formed yet. Aye, we’ve come across such deposits before, and the wise avoid them.”

  “Well, humans do have some facility with enneagrammatic magic, owing to their odd collective subconsciousness,” Onranion pointed out. “Their awareness doesn’t bleed away so easily in the context of such endeavors.

  “But that only mitigates the danger,” Azhguri said, shaking his head. “The issue isn’t their capacity for madness – which is vast – but their foolishness in unleashing powers they don’t understand on the world!”

  “Oh, posh!” Onranion dismissed with a wave of his long fingers. “We do that sort of thing all the time, all of us. Who was responsible for bringing dragons into this world
, after all?”

  “Yes, thanks for that!” the Karshak said, bitterly. The Stone Folk and the Iron Folk had always been special targets of the beasts, in the Alka Alon legends. “What the hell did my people ever do?”

  “Unleash the Beldurrazeko on the world?” he asked, an eyebrow raised accusingly.

  “Oh . . . that,” Azhguri said, suddenly looking away, guilty and ashamed. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “As did the dragons,” agreed the Alkan spellsinger. “Both our races have learned a valuable lesson in humility, after indulging in tragic explorations that led to horrific catastrophe. Its high time humanity had its turn.”

  “What exactly are you proposing?” I asked, still confused. I had no idea what a Beldurrazeko even was.

  “What he’s suggesting is that you find within your Ghost Rock some ancient horror who hasn’t seen the light of day for millions of years, pull its enneagram out, and slap it into the Snowflake,” explained Azhguri. “Which is the most foolhardy and suicidal idea these ears have ever heard.”

  “Yet it would nicely solve the thaumaturgical problem, if you could integrate the enneagram into the matrix and manage to keep it there. That would take power, too . . . but once the centerpoint was captured, there would be no real issue, because the power is pouring through the centerpoint, which is, in fact, still at the center of the Snowflake.”

  “You think that would be enough to keep the enneagram stable?” I asked, realizing that what he suggested was, indeed, thaumaturgically sound.

  “It would if you used that other pretty rock on it,” agreed Azhguri. “The stability stone, or whatever you called it.”

  “The Amara Stone. You are the ones who named it, remember? So a part of the enneagram would be in the irionite, with the gem, and part would be in the Snowflake.”

  “Theoretically speaking, it would be present in both places simultaneously. Depending on the complexity of the enneagram, that could be sufficient to act as an interface.”