Darkening Skies (The Hadrumal Crisis)

by McKenna Juliet E.

  ‘I rescued him, the Mandarkin mage, from the Solurans since they wouldn’t help us.’

  Zurenne realised that Corrain was addressing her dead husband’s ashes rather than talking to her.

  ‘He’s a starveling wretch—’ but the contempt in Corrain’s voice warred with fear ‘—he only wanted gold and food to fill his belly, fine clothes on his back. But he had magic the likes of which—’

  Corrain shook his head, eyes closing on some lacerating memory. ‘The Soluran wizards called up dust storms to blind him and set their own guards’ swords on fire to cut through armour like it was wax. He still cost them two of their own before escaping all unseen.’

  Now Corrain was pleading with the funeral urn. ‘The Solurans wouldn’t help us. I couldn’t come home empty-handed. We have no quarrel with Mandarkin—’

  His face twisted with anguish. ‘He killed all the corsairs plundering Halferan Manor. He used his magic to find their anchorage through my ties to that cursed place. I thought he would kill them all, I swear it!’

  Zurenne struggled to recall their conversation, when she had still been reeling from the shock of Corrain’s reappearance amid the ruins of Halferan. He had walked back in through the manor’s gates like the shade of a dead man fleeing Poldrion’s demons.

  What was it the old wives said, as in the sewing circles sharing their wisdom of age with newlyweds? Be careful what you wish for. Eldritch Kin lurking in the shadows might hear and send that very thing, to spite the gods who know far better than you do.

  ‘You said that the corsairs had enough loot to satisfy ten mages.’ She grasped at a fugitive memory. ‘If this Mandarkin sought gold—’

  ‘He said he was claiming their whole island and would take all the corsairs for his own slaves.’ Corrain seemed oddly bemused. ‘He didn’t sink their ships. He just closed up their harbour with a wall of water. Then he sent me back to Halferan.’

  ‘What does all this mean?’ Zurenne’s voice was shrill with confusion and apprehension.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Corrain finally looked at her. ‘But you should know that I defied Planir of Hadrumal, like my lord. And I was betrayed just as he was.’

  His voice was harsh though Zurenne couldn’t tell if he was condemning her dead husband or his own folly.

  She seized on a far more vital question. ‘Are you saying we must still fear corsairs?’

  Corsairs with a mage to call on? Magic such as Jilseth had used to slay those last raiders? That prospect was so truly dreadful that further words froze in Zurenne’s throat.

  Corrain twisted the shackle around his wrist. ‘He swore there would be no raids on our shores as long as he ruled their island.’

  ‘You trust his word?’ Zurenne frowned at abrupt recollection of something her husband had once told her, of the southern barbarians’ ignorance and superstition. ‘But the Aldabreshi abominate magic. They kill all wizards on sight.’

  Corrain nodded. ‘Perhaps that’s what we should pray for, my lady.’

  ‘That they kill him and reclaim this island you speak of? When that would leave the corsairs freed from his oath and his rule, to sail north and attack us again?’ Zurenne cried. ‘Corrain, what have you done?’

  What manner of man had she shackled her innocent daughter to? What bargain could she possibly strike with the Archmage now, to save them all from the corsairs’ return?

  What would Planir do, to punish Corrain? What could he do beyond that, to curb this unknown wizard’s ambitions, whatever they might prove to be?

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Terrene Hall, Hadrumal

  8th of For-Autumn

  ‘JILSETH?’ NOLYEN’S KNUCKLES rapped on the oak.

  She hurried to open the door. ‘Keep your voice down!’

  Living cheek by jowl was convenient for wizards eager to share their knowledge but it could prove cursed awkward with a close neighbour who was a light sleeper.

  Jilseth looked warily across the quadrangle as Nolyen pushed past her into her study. Thankfully she saw no sign of Simne stirring. The austere mage would be like a bear roused from its winter torpor to be woken so soon after dawn. He rarely closed his own shutters before midnight.

  ‘What has you coming here so early and in such haste?’

  She opened the shutters to allow the pallid daylight through the ivy cloaking these walls and encroaching on her windows.

  Nolyen paused in loosening the drawstring of the leather sack he had dumped on her table. ‘What’s keeping you from your sleep?’ he asked, looking at her critically.

  ‘Apart from your arrival?’ Jilseth snapped. ‘Excuse me while I dress.’

  At least her current incapacity hadn’t reduced the privileges her wizardry had already won her. She enjoyed one of the Terrene Hall’s most coveted apartments with a separate bedchamber as well as a spacious study well supplied with bookshelves.

  She closed the connecting door with an emphatic snick of the latch rather than a slam to relieve her anger and to annoy those still asleep above her. Pulling her linen nightgown over her head, she found the chill in the air raised gooseflesh on her naked skin. Summer was definitely passing.

  Nolyen had arrived too early for her to ring for one of the hall’s resident maidservants in hopes of a kettle of hot water. Well, a swift wash in the cold water of her basin’s ewer chased away some of her weariness after another broken and troubled night. She dressed swiftly in a fresh chemise, stockings and a plain grey gown. Perhaps Nolyen had brought something to distract her from more fruitless musing.

  Returning to the sitting room, she saw that he’d lit the lamps in the sconce by the door and on the table by the fireside chair where she was accustomed to sit and read. Their glow burnished the carved stone figurines arrayed along the front of every bookshelf; animals, buildings, men and women, as varied in style and craftsmanship as the rocks they had been made from. Every line had once told Jilseth some secret of their substance or of their shaping.

  She contemplated the items which Nolyen had laid on the table; a shallow silver bowl and lumps of black rock seamed with sandy stone. Bitumen. The hardest, purest kind from a ravine in remotest Gidesta kept a close secret by the miners who profited from it. Jilseth didn’t need her mage senses to recognise such a specimen so intriguing to any earthborn wizard.

  Nolyen’s amiable face reflected his chagrin at his foolish question earlier. ‘I would have asked you to join me in my chamber but I thought we would do better with more space.’

  Jilseth judged that was the closest she would get to an apology. She decided to accept it. ‘That’s true enough.’

  Nolyen had only recently quit the room which he had shared as a lowly apprentice. Now he had a cramped chamber in the noisy courtyard where the Seaward Hall ran alongside Hadrumal’s high road. Flood Mistress Troanna did not believe in cosseting her pupils with featherbeds and hip baths like Hearth Master Kalion.

  Nolyen grinned. ‘I’ve been wondering how to go scrying for the Mandarkin without actually scrying for him.’

  ‘All night?’ Jilseth queried. His eyes looked as shadowed and heavy as her own felt. ‘It’s too early for riddles. Let me make a tisane.’

  She crossed the room to the small fireplace, reaching for the mantel where she kept her glasses and herb jars.

  The small blaze she had lit for comfort the evening before had long since died. Cool though the morning was, no one would cover their embers to keep them smouldering overnight until the turn of For-Winter.

  Jilseth could not countenance reaching for steel and flint, not with Nolyen in the room, for all that his back was so tactfully turned. Throwing a handful of kindling onto the ashes, she concentrated all her wizardly strength on summoning a spark of elemental fire. To her profound relief, a cheerful yellow tongue licked at a frayed twist of bark.

  Jilseth set the kettle on its hook and turned to ask Nolyen what herbs he’d favour in a tisane. As she did so, she caught sight of the muslin bundle from the Taw Ricks lodge. She ha
d left it on the windowsill, well away from the fireplace in case of undue stickiness.

  Nolyen was Caladhrian, from some northern barony, and noble born besides. A third or fourth son, if Jilseth recalled correctly. Not the eldest and heir anyway, which must have made the revelation of his magebirth and the necessity of sending him to Hadrumal easier for his parents to bear. With his quick wits and love of learning he would surely have been destined for the university at Col regardless.

  ‘Nol, what do you know about eryngo?’ She made sure to pronounce the curious name as Doratine the cook had done.

  He was wringing water out of the empty air to fill the scrying bowl. ‘Eryngo? Why do you ask?’

  ‘Why are you blushing?’ Jilseth couldn’t decide if she was more entertained or perturbed by that.

  ‘It’s a—’ Nolyen stroked his neatly trimmed beard to a point ‘—restorative herb.’

  ‘So the Halferan cook said, when she gave me some sweetmeats,’ Jilseth informed him drily.

  ‘Eryngo toffee?’ Nolyen looked relieved. ‘Yes, that’s a treat for convalescents.’

  ‘And for those who haven’t been ill?’ Jilseth wasn’t about to let him off this hook.

  A splash of emerald magelight bounced back from the brimming bowl as Nolyen set his hands on the table. ‘Men losing their potency between the bed sheets favour the candied roots,’ he said without looking up at her. ‘Any man whose wife is seen buying them can expect to be the butt of a good many jokes in his local tavern.’

  ‘Oh.’ Jilseth was surprised into a laugh.

  ‘Shall we discuss bitumen?’ Nolyen asked pointedly.

  ‘Not commonly used in scrying.’ Jilseth sat at the table.

  ‘No,’ he agreed, ‘but widely used for caulking ships, along all the mainland coasts and right through the Archipelago.’

  ‘Quite so.’ Jilseth supposed that a mage with a water affinity would know what barriers might be used against it.

  ‘We found Corrain in Solura because you thought of scrying for that metal shackle which he wears.’ Nolyen looked intently into the water though no magelight glowed in its depths. ‘I wondered if we might find the ships trapped within the corsair anchorage in similar fashion. Why should the Mandarkin mage veil those from our sight? Once we know where the anchorage is, we can direct a scrying there and see what’s afoot without encroaching on his own magic.’

  ‘How are we to find some corsair galley among all the countless hundreds that ply the Archipelago’s sea lanes?’

  Jilseth felt a thrill of anticipation all the same. Nolyen wouldn’t have roused her so early if he didn’t think he had an answer. Or the possibility of one. He couldn’t be certain of his magecraft though, otherwise he’d have taken this to Flood Mistress Troanna or Archmage Planir.

  ‘We need something specific to draw our magic to those particular ships,’ Nolyen gestured at the lumps of bituminous rock, ‘which is precisely what we have here.’

  ‘Not so very specific, surely?’ Jilseth was puzzled by his certainty.

  His smile widened with satisfaction. ‘According to Mellitha Esterlin, this particular pitch comes from the very shipyard in Relshaz where a ship known to have joined these corsairs was laid up for repairs and refitting the winter before last.’

  ‘Along with how many others?’ Jilseth protested.

  Nolyen shrugged. ‘A good few, doubtless, but if we have to search through them all, we’ll be closer to finding this Mandarkin mage than if we scryed after every ship afloat.’

  Jilseth was sorely sceptical. ‘These shipwrights haven’t replenished their stores? A boatyard must get through sacks of this stuff.’

  ‘Mellitha had her man scour the corners of the storage bins,’ Nolyen said stubbornly. ‘She’s confident that these are the remnants of that season’s deliveries.’

  If that assurance had come from anyone else Jilseth wouldn’t have given it a moment’s credence. Mellitha Esterlin offered an entirely different quality of information. In addition, her understanding of scrying magic was acknowledged as second to none. It was widely whispered in Hadrumal’s wine shops that she could have been Flood Mistress, had she chosen to challenge Troanna.

  There was no such agreement on the far more puzzling question of why she had chosen to leave Hadrumal and had established herself in Relshaz as a tax contractor for the Magistracy which ruled the port city. What was the attraction of such a humdrum life when she could have been a pre-eminent mage of Hadrumal?

  Did she use her magic to spy on the myriad merchants, to read their ledgers through shuttered windows and inside locked storage chests? Opinion on that was as sharply divided, though apparently the Relshazri all believed it and thus saw no point in trying to cheat her.

  That must make life easier for Mellitha, so the wine shop sages nodded over their goblets, both in delivering the revenue which she was contracted to deliver to the magistrates and in securing a handsome profit for her own coffers.

  Jilseth wondered why it occurred to no one that Mellitha must surely be one of Planir’s chief sources of information about mainland affairs. News from every nook and corner of those lands formerly ruled by Toremal came along the roads and rivers with all the goods which the Relshazri bought and sold. The city also handled more trade with the Archipelago than any other port, so Aldabreshin news and rumour landed there, first and freshest.

  She stroked a piece of the bitumen with a fingertip. Her wizardly senses, dull as they were, felt the rock’s distant kinship with the ivy growing around the windows.

  Like coal, this curious substance had been formed from plants growing in some remote age far beyond hope of memory. Before it had been sunk deep into the earth by the shifting mountains and sinking seas, to be transformed over aeons through slow and subtle alchemical processes born of crushing and heat.

  That elemental understanding gave her affinity mastery over it. That was to say, it always had done. After so many recent failures and disappointments, Jilseth was growing reluctant to try the simplest magecraft.

  She handed the lump to Nolyen. ‘Can you feel the essence of the plants within this?’

  Mages with a water affinity were by far the most adept at manipulating growing things. Even wood felled generations ago remembered the sap that had once flowed through it, offering a conduit for their emerald wizardry.

  ‘I can.’ He grinned.

  If Jilseth’s elemental senses had been blunted, she had her wits. ‘You’re hoping to weave your hold on that essence into your scrying.’

  Nolyen nodded. ‘Just as you combined the lodestone fragments in the shale oil into our scrying for Corrain’s shackle.’

  ‘That was a very different working.’ Jilseth frowned as she recalled using the unseen magnetic fragments to direct the searching magic for that singular piece of metal. Could she ever hope to craft such wizardry again?

  ‘What would you like in your tisane?’ She rose and went to the fireplace to swing the singing kettle away from the flames.

  ‘Whatever you’re having.’ Nolyen peered closely at the lump of bitumen in his palm and it began to crumble.

  By the time she returned with two glasses of hot water and steeping lemongrass, she had herself in hand. ‘Surely an enhanced scrying would be better tried with a full nexus of mages?’

  Saying so nearly choked her but the search for the renegade Mandarkin was too important to risk her own inadequacies hampering Nolyen.

  ‘If you can light that fire under your kettle, you can melt this stuff for me,’ he said firmly. ‘I can’t, not once it’s in the water, not and have any hope of scrying. That’s all I need from you. Once the bitumen’s melted, we can see if it’s sufficiently distinctive to be worth pursuing. Then I can direct a nexus in a quintessential search for the ships trapped in that anchorage.’

  ‘I see.’ Jilseth nodded.

  Of course he wouldn’t be trying to work the full spell with her unreliable assistance. Of course he would find any fire magic nigh on impossible to wo
rk within his own element of water. Jilseth found the volatile magics of Air the most elusive and challenging of all, so far removed from her earth-bound instincts.

  And if this all proved to be a delusion born of desperation, only she and Nolyen would know of it and he could trust in her discretion for the sake of their friendship.

  ‘Let me melt the pitch.’ She cupped her hands around the cool scrying bowl.

  The pure metal’s familiar touch soothed her fraught emotions. Jilseth realised she had forgotten how calming silver could be. That was a worthwhile reminder, whatever else might come of this dawn experiment.

  Nolyen dropped a few chips of bitumen into the water.

  Jilseth searched for the memory of heat born of crushing deep within the black essence while denying the water’s desire to drain all such warmth away. To her delight, that proved easier than she had expected. Bitumen in its natural state was a liquid after all, albeit one that commonly flowed more slowly than the thickest treacle.

  Its vapours would be far more insidious than the scent of Lady Zurenne’s cook’s toffee. Jilseth took care to keep the lead and quicksilver seeping out of the melting blackness contained within the scrying water. Painters might choose to poison themselves with orpiment for the sake of vivid yellow in their sunsets but mages tolerated no such hazards.

  She looked across the bowl to Nolyen. ‘Can you feel the metals leaching out and their alchemical balance within the bitumen?’

  His chances of success through the quintessential scrying would depend on that. If Mellitha was correct and the caulking the corsairs had used on their boats had truly included pitch from this particular source.

  Any earth mage could distinguish between candlesticks wrought from silver from two different mines though they might be identical to the non-wizardly eye. Had Nolyen learned enough of such wizardry? Jilseth could hope so; water magic had more sympathy with earthborn spells than with either of the other two elements.