by Simon Brown
“Thieves?” Kumul looked at him in wonder. “Even you could not be so naive.”
Lynan felt a twinge of anger. Surely no one, not even among those in the Twenty Houses who hated him the most, would arrange for him to be killed. The risks of being found out would be too great. He looked around the room again. Perhaps the risk might be worth it if there would soon be a succession.
“Are you certain?” Lynan could not help the tingle that traveled down his spine, and he glanced nervously over one shoulder and then the other.
“Not yet. I have my people working on it. But there are others who would see you out of the way, even if they hold no personal animosity toward you. Assassinating a prince, even a prince as lowly as yourself, must unsettle your mother, and that would serve to unsettle the kingdom. This is why you must not leave the palace at night by yourself. Whoever tried to have you killed last evening may try again.”
As soon as the throne room had cleared, the members of the court returning to their offices, guild halls, or commissions, Kumul returned to his quarters to check on Ager’s progress.
The crookback was sitting up in bed and gulping broth from a huge mug. Kumul was surprised to see how well his friend looked. Ager put down the mug and offered him a huge smile, his single gray eye twinkling.
“I did not expect to see you awake so soon,” Kumul said.
“And last night I did not expect to ever wake up again,” Ager replied. He turned aside and lifted the nightshirt to show Kumul his wound. It was nothing more than a raised white scar. “How did this happen?”
“The queen herself performed this service for you.”
Ager swallowed. “Usharna? Here, in this room with me?” Kumul nodded. “What did she do?”
“She used the Key of the Heart,” Kumul said, his voice subdued.
“On me? But why?”
“Have you already forgotten the youth who was the cause of all our trouble last night?”
Ager frowned in thought. “Of course I remember him. He was asking all those questions about the battle of Deep River…” His voice faded away, and his gaze lifted to Kumul. “There was something about him… I dreamed it last night in my fever. His face turned into the general’s face, and I thought…”
“You still haven’t put it together, have you?”
Ager’s frown grew deeper. “I thought I had, but I can barely remember all that happened after I was knifed. The youth was called Pirem—no, that was his servant’s name. I heard you call him Lynan, and… my God, that was the name of the general’s son!”
Kumul nodded. “So now you understand the queen’s interest.”
Ager’s mouth dropped. “A prince of the realm bought me a drink? Chatted to me like a young soldier talking to an old sergeant?”
“Is all the pain gone?”
Ager laughed. “Gone? Not only do I not feel the wound, but it is the first time in fifteen years I’ve felt no pain at all, not even in my back. And my empty eye socket doesn’t itch anymore. I feel like a new man.”
“Well, your shoulder is still raised, I’m afraid. It would take more than even the queen’s power to rid you of that.”
Ager shrugged. “I got used to being a one-eyed crookback, but I never got used to the pain.”
“I’ve been thinking about what to do with you.”
Ager looked suspiciously at Kumul. “Do with me? I’m no beggar, Kumul. I can make my own way in the world.”
“I’ve no doubt about that. But I need your services.”
Ager still looked suspicious. “My services? You need my experience as a bookkeeper?”
Kumul smiled. “No. I need your experience as a soldier. Most of my troops are too young to have fought in the Slaver War. Since then, Kendra has been at peace, thank God and the wise head of Queen Usharna. But I need old blood as well as new in the Royal Guards. I’d like you to take over my training duties.”
“What’s the pay like?”
“Captain’s pay. Keep and board, and tenpence a day.”
Ager looked impressed. “Better than I ever got in the Kendra Spears.”
“You’ll work for it, mind. The Royal Guards are the best Kendra has.”
“As good as the Red Shields?”
Kumul snorted. “No regiment will ever be as good as the Red Shields. We had the general back then. Well, what do you say?”
“I’ll need time to think about it, Kumul. I’ve been a wanderer for thirteen years. It will be hard to give that up.”
“How much time?”
The crookback paused in thought. After a minute he said: “That was plenty of time. I actually hate the roving life. Do you think you can get a uniform to fit over my hump?”
Chapter 4
The summer dragged on in Kendra like a slow ox plowing a field of clay. On the hottest days the city entered a great torpor. Sailors rested over hawsers and stared at the blue waters of the harbor, dockworkers lounged in the shade of unmoved bales of hay and kegs of grain, soldiers drooped over their spears, and craft workers and stall owners did their best to ply their trade with minimum effort. Stray dogs lay in whatever shade they could find and panted desperately. Even in the palace, where work only became more urgent the longer it was left unattended, members of the court moved with sullen obstinacy, and the queen and her bureaucracy struggled through the mountain of appeals and offers, trading licenses and administrative minutiae. And on those few days that were relatively cool, the people spent their time recovering their energy and enthusiasm, and then husbanding it against the next heat wave.
Just after midday on one of the hottest days of the year, tucked into the corner of the second floor in a low stone building not far from the docks, Jenrosa Alucar slammed shut the book she had been reading—ignoring the clump of dust that geysered into the air—and stood up from her desk.
The Magister Instruction of the Theurgia of Stars, a long strip of a man wizened by age and alcohol, looked up in surprise. The other four students in the room kept their noses down but their ears pricked open.
“Student Alucar? Is there a problem?”
Jenrosa actually seemed to consider the question, an event rare in the Magister’s experience, and finally nodded. “Yes.”
“Is it something I can help you with?”
“I doubt it,” she said flatly.
“I see. Is it something, perhaps, that the maleficum himself could help you with?”
“I do not think either you or the head of our order can help me.”
It was the magister’s turn to pause in consideration. With something like exasperation he regarded the young woman with the sandy hair and spray of freckles across her too-short nose. She stood with legs apart as if steadying herself in expectation of trouble. She looked as pugnacious as she really was.
A bad sign, the magister told himself. Always a bad sign. And she possessed such a promising mind…
“If it is the text you are presently studying, we could rearrange your schedule,” he offered.
“You mean give me yet another book on interpreting the movement of the stars,” she said, her hazel eyes seeming to spark with frustration.
“You are in your third year of study, Student Alucar, and interpreting the movement of the stars is the prescribed course. Without it, how could you go on in your fourth year to study interpreting the movement of the planets?”
Jenrosa picked up the book she had been reading and waved it at the magister. “But the summaries of interpretations included here directly contradict many of the summaries in the book we had to read last term.”
The magister shrugged. “That, regrettably, is one of the great conundrums of our art. We hope, through constant observation and analysis, to explain away those very contradictions. And yet, without being aware of those contradictions, how would we know where to direct our efforts?”
Jenrosa nodded wearily. “I know the argument, Magister. I just do not see the sense in it. We have been observing and analyzing now for hundreds of yea
rs but have managed to do no more than collate even more contradictions. We now have more contradictions than there are stars in the sky. Why don’t they have these problems in any of the other theurgia?”
“Dealing with the vagaries of the soil and of metals, even of rain and the sea, are straightforward compared to the vastness of the Continuum. If it takes a magicker in the Theurgia of Fire, for example, a decade to discover that certain chants and routines produce a harder steel, then how much more time is needed to discover the secrets of those bodies that traverse the night sky and their influence on our lives?”
“But I don’t…” Jenrosa bit off the sentence.
“But you don’t have centuries in which to make great discoveries?” the magister guessed.
Jenrosa blushed, making her freckles stand out more brightly. “I am sorry. I know that reveals abominable pride on my part.”
The magister sighed deeply. “Perhaps it is the heat as much as your frustration that irks you so. But the frustration is something you will have to learn to deal with. As for the heat, even those in the Theurgia of Air have little control over it in summer. You may go. Take the rest of the day off. Do not read any more summaries. Clear your head and come back tomorrow, refreshed.” The other students now looked up eagerly. “Jenrosa alone,” he continued. “The rest of you, obviously less befuddled by contradiction, may continue with your study.”
Jenrosa left the school and found herself on an almost empty street. A woman carrying a basket of bread on her head walked by, the sun’s heat adding to her burden. A dozen steps away a street vendor, sweating and swearing at the lack of customers, was packing away his stall. Air shimmered above buildings and stone pavings, and the harbor was aflame with reflected light.
Jenrosa put her hand in her tunic pocket and jingled a few loose farthings. She decided to make for a local tavern that promised shade and a beer, but when she got there, she discovered the tavern was filled with other refugees from the summer sun. After buying her drink, she ended up sitting on the street under the shade of the tavern’s eaves.
She had intended not to dwell on the incident at the school and instead think about the cooling swim she would have in the local baths west of the docks once the sun was down, but her frustration at having lost her temper thwarted her intentions. She knew the magister had let her off easily this time, but another outburst could see her brought before the maleficum, and that could result in her dismissal from the Theurgia of Stars. And where would she be then? The theurgia gave her a place to sleep at night, fed her twice a day, trained her for a lucrative career, and paid her a modest stipend that allowed her to buy the occasional beer and go out with her friends every few days.
She took a swig of her drink and promised to do better. She would work harder at study, work harder at trying to comprehend the conflicting paradigms nesting within the Theurgia. She must not lose her position. The theurgia was home… and more. She never regretted the time and effort spent actually learning as opposed to simply memorizing. She yearned to discover new ways of doing things, to find links between the magic of the different theurgia. But the magic guilds were increasingly stratified and stultified, increasingly separated from each other.
She dribbled some of the beer from her mug onto the ground and concentrated. The puddle divided into droplets that started moving around one another. She saw a tuft of grass growing out of a crack in the tavern’s wall, pulled out some of its shoots, and carefully placed them vertically in the droplets. They whirled around like skinny dancers. She muttered a few words and the tips of the shoots changed color.
Jenrosa laughed at the absurd spectacle. No, she told herself, not absurd. No one else could perform magic so easily from different disciplines and make it work together, and only as a student within the theurgia would she have the opportunity to learn all that she wanted.
And, she reminded herself again, she had no other home. She had been six when the magicker with his entourage of students and guards had come to her village. She had been outside the house she shared with four siblings and a mother who cared more about getting her next flagon of wine than looking after her children, when she had noticed the procession of strangers. She was feeding scraps to the pig—her family’s only asset—when she saw the man who led the way was wearing the stiff-collared tunic of a magicker. As Jenrosa watched, he made his way through the village, looking neither right nor left, but walking with determined precision as if he was following someone else’s footsteps. When he finally came abreast of Jenrosa he stopped and turned to stare at her with eyes as blue as the sky.
“What is your name?” he asked gently.
Jenrosa was not used to being spoken to by adults, and she hesitated. The magicker smiled at her and made a sign in the air. A white mist seemed to follow his finger, forming a sign that raised goose bumps on her skin. Without knowing how or why she did it, she copied the sign, and the mist disappeared. The magicker was watching her keenly now, and came closer. He bent over and drew a second sign, this time on the ground. There was no mist or magic this time, except that again she was compelled to copy him. As soon as she had finished it, a small whirl of air formed above them, spraying dust into her eyes. She blinked the dust away and saw that both signs had gone. The magicker pulled a bracelet off his wrist and said something in a language she did not understand. The bracelet seemed to melt and reform before her eyes, taking on the shape of a silvery snake. She touched it and the snake immediately reformed into the bracelet. The members of the magicker’s entourage started talking excitedly among themselves. One of them came forward and handed the magicker a simple wooden drinking bowl, poured water into it from a flask, and stepped back. The magicker made a sign again, tracing it in the water. Before Jenrosa’s eyes, the water seemed to change, become greener and deeper somehow. She thought she saw fish swimming in it, and other creatures she did not recognize; it seemed to her she was looking down into an ocean from a great height. She placed her palm over the bowl, closed her eyes, then took her palm away. The bowl held just normal well water again, clear and untroubled. The magicker stood up. He looked ready to laugh out loud.
“One more test,” he told her in his gentle voice, and pointed above his head. Without any control over her own actions she looked up, and even though it was a clear day she saw a group of stars set against the blue sky. She stared at them for a long time before anything happened, but then they started to whirl about a central point, like dancers around a spring tree. Some of the entourage clapped at the performance. Jenrosa pointed at the stars and they blazed briefly in a glorious light and then disappeared.
“What is your name?” the magicker asked again, but before she could reply, her mother appeared, curious about the eruption of noise on the street. When her mother saw the magicker, she took a step back into the house.
“I hope my daughter’s done nothing to offend you, sir?” she asked in a whining voice.
The magicker shook his head. “What is her name?”
“Jenrosa.”
“Jenrosa is to come with me.”
Her mother considered the words for a moment, and then a smile creased her face. “That would come with a fee, sir?”
The magicker nodded. “Of course. You will receive an annual award as determined by the queen. What is her family name?”
“My husband is dead, sir, and so she inherits mine. Alucar.”
Jenrosa tried to let go of the memory, and returned her attention to her beer, but not before acknowledging with some bitterness that her name was the only thing her mother had ever given her, and she would do anything to avoid returning to her.
And what if there were contradictions in her studies? she asked herself. Magic itself was a contradiction, a way of viewing and manipulating the world that broached common sense and was out of reach of the vast majority of people. Some were lucky enough to be born with the ability to take advantage of that contradiction, to influence the way clouds formed and rain fell, or the way metal change
d in a furnace, or the way water ran down a hill, or the way crops grew.
Or the way the stars influenced the lives of all the mere mortals trudging the common earth beneath their gaze. Maybe.
Jenrosa shook her head. She knew all the other theurgia—those of Air, Fire, Water and Earth—performed real magic, but she was yet to discover anything magical at all about the stars. Or rather, she had not learned a single magical thing. What she did know was what she had picked up from observation, and from questioning sailors in taverns just like the one she was now outside. She knew that if you kept the prow of a ship in line with the star Leurtas, the last point of the constellation known as the Bow Wave, you would eventually reach the pack ice that lay far south of Theare; or, conversely, if you kept the constellation dead on the stern, you would head north into the Sea Between, eventually hitting the reefs and shoals that guarded the waters around Haxus. She knew that all the constellations spun around the very point of Leurtas, moving in a slow graceful dance, and that, as you sailed north, new constellations came into view even as the familiar ones disappeared behind you. And yet, as far as anyone in the Theurgia of Stars knew, there was no formula, no sign, that could make the stars bend to human will or human desire. Jenrosa knew there had been great sages in the past who could use the stars to predict momentous events, but the last of those had died decades ago, and no one alive today could replicate their achievements, although many within the theurgia tried. As far as Jenrosa could tell, the real stars obeyed only their own rules. She sighed heavily and finished off her beer. Despite her misgivings, if she wished eventually to earn her own keep, to gain even a modest independence, she would have to keep her doubts to herself and accept—contradictions and summaries and conundrums included—what the theurgia instructed her to accept, and in that way survive.
The problem, as Lynan told himself afterward, was the sun. Or rather, his position in relation to it. When he was sent sprawling by the guard’s side-stepping maneuver and sweeping foot, he found himself staring straight up into the glaring orb.
