Enchanter (Book 7)

by Terry Mancour

  As you wish, Master, Rondal replied dutifully.

  “Min, she’s been doing stuff,” Lorcas said, accusingly, as he searched the chamber. “Look at this!”

  It was a board laminated with weirwood. There were several different types of magical stones on it. Snowstone, various corals, crystals, and other stones. Some were tinted light blue. Some I didn’t recognize, but others I did. There were other places where stones had been until recently.

  “That’s some powerful enchantment,” Lanse noted. “She’s upstairs? She’s got some power with her,” he warned. He studied the board again, and looked up even more concerned. “A lot of power, Min!”

  “We suspected as much. Let’s set up our countermeasure.”

  I closed my eyes and reached out to Dranus who was still in Sevendor with the rest of my non-combatant magical corps.

  All right, Dranus. We’re ready to begin. We’ve taken the tower, everything save Isily. But she’s got some strong defenses based on what we’ve found here. Be prepared to send as much as you can.

  Understood, Excellency. Good luck, Minalan, he added.

  I held Blizzard between my gauntleted hands and waited for the connection to get established through its auspices. Back in Sevendor, my reserve team was positioning half of a sympathy stone, the first half of which was in my warstaff.

  In a few moments, a tiny snowflake appeared in the air in front of me, brilliant in spectacle, twinkling like a star as it grew and transformed.

  I contacted Dranus again. I have it, I reported. Just like in the test. I do hope this works.

  As do I, Excellency, he agreed. We’ll start adding power to it immediately. Draw what you require.

  I took a deep breath and exhaled as the snowflake in front of me grew four inches while I watched. That should be sufficient for my purposes, I figured.

  It was time to face my ex.

  *

  *

  The tower top was cleared of most of the gear of war one expects in anticipation of a siege. Instead the wide expanse of timbered floor was barren, save for a plinth of stone that was set there. Isily was standing behind it.

  She didn’t look well.

  She was livelier than her husband, I’d give her that. She was standing defiantly behind her plinth, an array of arcane equipment in front of her. Her dark hair was streaked with white and greasy. Her eyes and teeth had the same bluish coloration that Dunselen’s had, only darker and more pronounced. Her nails, too, had adopted some bluish tint. Her face was long and worn, as if she had been through a great hardship, but she’d tied her hair back with a diadem that lent her a certain horrid majesty as it flickered with moonlight and magelight.

  “I was wondering when you would come see me, my love,” she said, smiling madly. “I can only guess by the staff in your hand and your panoply that you discovered my little deception sooner than I had planned,” she said, as if she’d fibbed about her age, not attempted to compel my will.

  “Isily, I’m here to demand your stone,” I said, bringing the snowflake up to shoulder height. “I call you in violation of your oath to me.”

  “You want my witchstone?” she laughed, with hoarse derision. “Which one? I have a collection, now,” she said, revealing her spell. It was a platform of weirwood, as the one below, only more richly decorate and more purposefully enchanted.

  Upon it were five shards of irionite, glowing and pulsing as one and glinting off of her diadem. In their center was a small yellowish sphere – a covenstone. I had a larger one that was being used in the Denehole, back home. They allowed the gathering of multiple streams of magical force into one usable channel. There were other elements to the board, gems and crystals and corals, but the irionite was what captured my attention.

  Isily had more raw power than I’d had when I’d held the witchsphere.

  She knew how to use it, too. With a wave of her hand over the construct she was enveloped in dark violet fields of force centering on her and extending out into the air around her. Together they resembled the petals of a flower of fell shape with herself as the sinister stamen.

  “When I married that dolt I inherited a lot of things, but among the best was the name of his house. It so well describes my vision of the world. A dark green flower to cover the world, beneficial to all. A world led by a dynasty of magi who would end the petty bickering of the nobility and senseless politics of the moment. Is that not a dream worth fighting for, Minalan?”

  The petals shimmered around her as tendrils of force began to emit from the center and snake toward me.

  “Not worth killing my family over,” I observed, coldly.

  “That was not my doing!” she insisted. “Mask went against my orders, and against my wishes. I could never harm your children, Minalan. Each one is truly precious to me.”

  “What about me?” Alya’s voice asked, from behind me – and my blood went cold.

  She was supposed to be downstairs, safe. Rondal, Tyndal, Lorcus Bendonal and Lanse filed up behind her. I realized that none of them were able to withstand her direct order if she should chance to use Blue Magic. But Alya ignored her peril and closed with the sorceress, angrily. “It was my life that was threatened, and my husband you seduced. You must answer to me, for that! If that means I have to give you hamsoken and beat you in your own home, so be it!”

  “Go away, little peasant girl!” sneered Isily, flinging a tendril of force at my wife. “You are unworthy of the man the gods have given you. Your wishes mean nothing, compared to the fate of humanity. Don’t you see that he is destined to be Archmage, someday? And that you are not the woman worthy to be his consort?”

  “Isily, surrender now, and we’ll discuss this!’ I said, as calmly as I coild manage. “But this is your last chance. I will take your power from you!”

  “But not my life – for I am your children’s mother!” she laughed. “Minalan, you are powerful, but you are a fool! Do you not realize that you are attacking me in my keep? And that my keep is no longer entirely of this world? Already dark spirits of the Otherworld come to my summons, to do my bidding! They have real power here in our castle of bluestone!”

  As if to answer her summons, dark shadows began to coalesce in the boundaries of the tower top. Lines of magical power spread out from her dark flower and fed them, and they grew.

  “This is your last warning,” I said. “Isily of Greenflower, surrender your stones or face the consequences!”

  “Come and take them, darling!” she invited, wickedly. I could feel Alya rage at the familiarity. But I didn’t have time to react. Suddenly those dark shapes were coming toward us, and Isily was lobbing globes of magical burning fire with both hands.

  “I thought you said she’d be weak, this soon after birth?” Tyndal demanded, as he used his blade to stop a ball of fire.

  “She’s a strong woman,” Lorcas called, as he fired a powerful bolt of energy at the greenflower. The dark petals of eldritch power absorbed it without effect. “This could be going better,” he muttered changing his tactics. He looked meaningfully at me, and I realized that I was standing there, not doing much in particular.

  So I began really using the Snowflake for the first time. The projection of its power through Blizzard was tenuous, at this point, but Dranus and his team were pouring energy into it. My own covenstone was sitting in front of the thing as nearly a dozen magi donated their collective power to the effort.

  Even though we had made hundreds, if not thousands of arcane connections between the paraclete and the arcane architecture of the Snowflake, the enneagrammatic pattern within had not “awakened” yet. But it did respond to power. The more we gave it, the more effective it became in projecting that power back.

  It was a little like fighting someone by standing behind a man who’s passed-out drunk and using their lifeless arms to flail about. Arcanely speaking, that’s what I was doing with the Snowflake.

  Isily was shrugging off the blasts of simple destructive power that my lads were
dispensing so liberally, and every opportunity for one of them to close with the sorceress saw them pushed back or knocked back. That didn’t tend to stop them, but it was slowing them down a lot.

  I decided it was time to give her everything the snowflake could produce. As more balls of fire and dark tendrils probed across the moonlit and magelit roof, I answered by summoning a powerful blast of electricity in her direction through the artifact. The result was more spectacular than I anticipated, and Isily’s defenses were challenged for the first time.

  She could be hurt. That was hopeful.

  I pressed forward, producing sparkling balls of whirling force and bolts of energy, spells to weaken her resolve and spells to weaken the floor under her feet. I was using whatever tools I could matching them with the arcane potentials of the Snowflake.

  The green flower that covered the blue woman was starting to wilt. Isily could feel it, I saw, and redoubled her efforts. At first she fired bolt after bolt of punishing force at me, but the snowflake intervened of its own accord. Frustrated, she began hammering away at my defenses, to no avail.

  So the wiley bitch turned her attention to my companions. She picked up Lanse and smashed him against the merlons at the edge of the tower, knocking him out. Rondal she blasted back and nearly off the edge before he was able to defend against it. Tyndal she intercepted as he made a gallant charge, and sent whirling across the floor. Even Lorcus, when he tried to stand his ground, ended up collapsing in a heap.

  I fought every new attack with a counter, but she seemed adept at absorbing the damage I was inflicting. Whatever had happened to her, she had toughened herself and her spellwork. The more I blasted away at her or tried some insidious attack she wasn’t looking for, she seemed able to intercept it.

  It was getting frustrating. And I was out of warmagi.

  When it was down to just the two of us, I pressed her with every bit of force I could. Nothing seemed to work. Her magical shroud was protecting her. As one spell after another failed to bring down her defenses or do her real damage, she started grinning, maniacally.

  “See how worthy I am of you, Minalan?” she called, through the noise of the spellwork. “See how powerful we could be together? A dynasty of Archmagi superior to all the ages before!”

  “I’m married, thanks!” I snarled as I threw another round of force at her.

  “That can be cured,” she said, reaching out past me with a magical tendril. I reacted quickly and sliced it with the staff. Another joined it, then another. Despite my best efforts some got through . . . and Alya went flying toward Isily.

  I desperately tried to stop her, and sent all manner of attempts to counter the spell, but nothing penetrated her shroud. Alya didn’t even squeal as she was dragged within the sphere of the mad sorceress.

  “Stop!” I commanded her. I eschewed magic, now, and merely pushed forward. She had Alya.

  “Minalan, don’t!” she shrieked, as she flailed within the magical bonds.

  “She’s pretty,” conceded Isily as her dark flower battered against my defenses and held me to a standstill. “Or was when she was young. Of course, magic and childbirth hasn’t exactly been as kind to me either . . . but I think you’ll find the blue becoming, in the end, Minalan my love,” she called to me.

  “He . . . is not . . . your love!” Alya said, angrily, as she struggled against her magical leash. “He’s mine!”

  “You will not be around to lay that claim, my lady,” Isily said, wickedly, and with false sympathy.

  “The hells I won’t!” Alya said, her eyes filled with rage. “You dragged me . . . right where I wanted to be!”

  I watched in horror as Alya suddenly raised her hidden dagger and plunged it toward Isily’s breast. The sorceress laughed as the blade turned brittle and pitted with rust and melted away into ochre dust.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t be prepared for a knife between my shoulder blades?” she taunted. “Slaying you will be a pleasure!” she said, as Alya stared in shock at the hilt of her dagger.

  “Now, before you are a widower, do you have any final words for your first wife?”

  “I love you Minalan!” Alya called to me as the wind picked up. The storm was approaching, driving the light of the dawn away behind a front of dark clouds, and blowing Alya’s hair wildly across her face.

  But before I could respond to her with more than a horrified expression . . . she brought the pommel of her broken dagger down on one of the witchstones in her magical lacis.

  The last thing I saw before the blinding wave of arcane trauma that resulted from her crushing the witchstone, pulling me into my own personal darkness, was Isily’s ghastly blue eyes, full of hate and shock.

  And then Alya’s eyes, beseeching mine.

  Full of love.

  Epilogue

  The carriage halted inside of the abbey gates, and I slowly emerged into the early autumn sunshine. I looked around at the stately buildings, the solemn temple, the scroll-and-staff of Luin’s clergy, and I could feel the sublime nature of the place around me. Here was where Law was accounted as holy as War, in Duin’s precincts, or Grain in Huin’s. Or stolen kisses in Ishi’s cult.

  I’d heard about Stapledor since I’d come to the Bontal Vales. As the largest ecclesiastic estate in the county, it was a secular power of some note. But like magic in Sevendor, Stapledor’s industry was law.

  When the Bontal Valley was originally settled from the river outwards, the early settlements in Sendaria soon expanded to the even more fertile lands to the south. As the grand valley between Sendaria and the Uwarri foothills was settled, one of the early Lensely counts gifted one of his less-profitable but centrally-located domains to a group of nine lawbrothers from Wenshar with instructions to build an abbey on the long hilltop there.

  In two generations the thriving monastic community was training the younger sons of nobles and the more intelligent commoners in the holy rites of Luin, the Sun God. The simple abbey expanded into a large temple, dormitories, library, scriptorium, and all the other institutional requirements for a lexit, as they styled their acolytes, to become a Lawbrother.

  Support of the temple by its members (the Luinites are one of the wealthier temples) allowed it to thrive independently of the agricultural lands around it. Stapledor’s Lawfather evolved into one of the most important clerical positions in the county. While his monks tried cases and defended their clients, the Lawfather of Stapledor did his best to peacefully settle disputes between the claimants far-flung Lensely dynasty.

  It has been suggested by some historians that the recourse of the folk of the Bontal to such an abundance of legal advice was, perhaps, one of the factors involved in the bloody Lensely succession dispute. There can be no doubt that the marks of Stapledor are all over it – the abbey supplied counselors to both sides, at the time.

  Eventually, the constituent lords of one of the nascent baronies overthrew the puppet baron Sendaria tried to force on the lands, and rose in rebellion. Sendaria was far too weak at the time to take action when the seven wealthiest castellans and tenant lords banded together under the auspices of the Lord of Sashtalia to form the Sashtali Confederation, and proceeded to bully their neighbors into joining. The Lensely lords who objected to the move were often conquered and forced to give up their lands, or forced into taking holy orders. For two generations the abbey was stocked with former Lensely lords that the lords of Sashtalia felt were safer with scrolls in their hands than swords.

  I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time . . . but the result was Sashtalia creating a hotbed of pro-Lensely and anti-Sashtali foment in a place that he was, legally, unable to bully. The lawbrothers of Stapledor had become more and more anti-Sashtali over the generations, and the monks that they produced for the lords of Sashtalia were not necessarily without political positions.

  All of that was in the past, now. The Sashtali Confederation was no more.

  That was why I was here, actually, to transfer the deed and execute
the agreement I had with Arathanial. After his Sashtali foes took a beating at a few battles, and when Trefalan’s reinforcements from the eastern domains were delayed because they couldn’t take the short-cut through Lorcus-controlled Rolone, the Sashtali retreated to their big fortress in their home territory.

  Though Arathanial was prepared for a siege, when they holed up in Sashtal Castle, it proved unnecessary. Sire Cei used his big warhammer and magical Talent to destroy the portcullis and great doors to the keep. After only three days of fighting, Sire Trefalan’s men, discouraged, demoralized, and frightened, agreed to hand over their liege to Arathanial in exchange for lenient terms.

  The war was over by Huin’s Day, Sendaria victorious.

  That was, historically speaking, a very big thing. The Lenselys had ruled these vales for a century before their power crumbled. Arathanial was the last landed baron of that house left. While promoting a cadet barony within his lands might have seemed like a poor economic move, he had high hopes for the future of the Bontal Vales. Arathanial had aspirations of his descendants retaking control of parts of Bocaraton, Miseldor, and Fleria that had once been Lensely lands.

  Of course, that also included modern Sevendor. That was unlikely.

  The gray-robed lawbrothers escorted me into a starkly serene chamber that was often used for such meetings of high importance. A simple table with the staff-and-scroll sigil of the order inlaid upon it in gold was surrounded by austere but surprisingly comfortable chairs. I was greeted by a senior Lawbrother with practiced deference, offered wine, and invited to take my seat.

  Arathanial and his chief advisor, his illegitimate half-brother, Lawbrother Hamaras the Clever, arrived within the hour. The baron looked tired and worn, but proud and satisfied with his conquest. He also looked a few years older than he had at Chepstan. War will do that to a commander, even a war that had gone as well as his.

  “Baron Minalan!” he exclaimed, expansively. “So glad you could attend to this personally! I was afraid that you would be indisposed, in light of the news . . .”