The Splintered Eye (The War of Memory Cycle)

by H. Anthe Davis

  Surely.

  Rian poked his cheek, and he grimaced and pushed the cup aside. “I…there is a situation,” he said slowly. “I don’t want to involve you, but…”

  “Fraid?” said the goblin quizzically.

  Geraad’s mouth thinned and he looked away, but nodded. “The necromancer. He…returned. At least they believe it to be the same one. And your friend, the young man—“

  “Cob!”

  “Yes. He is involved. The Council knows that you were with him. They want to see your memories.”

  A flash of needle-teeth set Geraad cringing, hands raised to protect his face. But the goblin leapt from his shoulder to the counter and hunched there, thin tail lashing, body shivering but teeth concealed again, the threat restrained. “Not go,” he said.

  “I know,” said Geraad. He looked longingly to the tea. “I wouldn’t let them. But it needs to be done—we need to stop the necromancer. I said I would ask you if I could look.”

  “Bad magic.”

  “Yes, I know. I have been hurt by magic too. But I promise I will not hurt you. No poking, no prodding, just looking. And then I will not need the dozy tea.”

  With a hiss, Rian lashed out and knocked the teacup over. Water and herbs spilled across the counter, sizzling on runes.

  “Rian, no,” said Geraad, pinching a rag between two twisted fingers and moving to dab at the spill. “How many times have I told you not to—“

  The goblin fled the kitchen with a skitter, leaving Geraad to the mess.

  Annoyance cleared his head at least, so that when he finally came to the parlor it was with his usual winterleaf mix and a plate of crackers and fruit. He settled into the overstuffed chair and regarded the book he had set aside yesterday: Cailus Mirrimane’s Consolidated Wardcraft, the main primer on modern wards and protective circles.

  So many of those practices required functioning hands, not just to shape the arcane energy but to inscribe or inlay the necessary sigils on the ground, to manage multiple ward-arrays, to utilize focal tools for quicker and more self-sustaining barriers. Though Mirrimane had noted that physical motions were themselves simply foci meant to harness the Warder’s will, Geraad had no experience in constructing wards ‘free-mind’. The suite had a warded casting room for just such experiments, but he feared harming himself further by trying such tactics without a tutor.

  And so he had trapped himself: incapable of normal wards, afraid to chance free-mind casting, isolated both for his own protection and by his persistent anxiety. No amount of tea would fully smother the fear, just as no amount of mental suppression could stop the nightmares.

  A small hand tugged the edge of his robe, and he made an effort to dismiss his self-pity. “Yes, Rian,” he said, trying to sound stern.

  The goblin peeked over the arm of his chair. The paint that had once decorated his scalp had long since washed off, leaving smooth grey-mottled skin and fine brows above the big, slanted eyes; if not for the lack of wrinkles, he would have resembled a tiny old man gone to age-spots. Geraad saw his tail flicking agitatedly in the background, but he did not hiss, only stared.

  “Is there something you want?” he prompted.

  Black-fingered hands clasped the arm of the chair, and Geraad lifted his teacup out of danger as the goblin swung into his lap. Prehensile toes gripped through the robe as the goblin stood up straight to peer down at him, nearly nose-to-nose.

  The hairs on the back of Geraad’s neck lifted, but he sensed no threat from the goblin, just a thin roil of nervous excitement. “Rian,” he said calmly, “what is it that you want?”

  “No bad magic,” said the goblin.

  “Yes, I already told you—“

  “Only good magic.”

  Geraad blinked. “I…yes, I do my best to only do good magic…”

  “Bad magic man Morshoc here,” said Rian, tapping his forehead with a long finger. “You take out?”

  “He’s in your mind?” Geraad said, alarmed. Setting the cup aside, he motioned for the goblin to sit, and reluctantly Rian did so, settling onto his haunches in Geraad’s lap. “Is this….permission to look through your memories?”

  Rian nodded, then nestled his head against Geraad’s chest, legs curling up into a near-fetal position. It pained Geraad to see him frightened, but if the necromancer truly did have some mental hold over him, that needed to be excised immediately.

  Closing his eyes, Geraad set bandaged fingertips to the goblin’s brow and let his barriers fall.

  The world took on a new clarity as he slipped into the goblin’s senses. Scents swarmed in with frightening intensity—not only the familiar tangs of food and alcohol and perfume but more esoteric ones, electric, acrid. He caught the flavor of his own magic, brisk and tannic, and for a moment found himself staring up at his own face: a weary, slightly gaunt man quietly passing his prime, his eyes dark-circled from minimal sleep.

  The disorientation vanished as he found a gap in the goblin’s wall of fear and slid through, leaving the material world behind.

  At first it was like sliding down a kaleidoscope tunnel, everything a blur, the walls reverberating with whispers. Geraad checked his descent and let the chaos resolve into images, to find himself faced with a strange new view of the suite. The furniture towered over him, fuzzy at the edges of his vision. All the colors were brighter, the light from the tall windows sharper, the bearhide rug thick beneath his fingers. His tail wove back and forth in delight as he watched rainbows dance on the wall, focused through a prism he had claimed as a toy. Geraad felt himself smile faintly.

  Properly stabilized in the goblin’s perspective, he stepped backward through the memories, the world flipping and rocking as the goblin cavorted through the suite in reverse. Faster and it became a blur of windows and rooftops, birds and gargoyles and bright magic, rooms and bed-corners—

  He stopped short as his own face loomed again, blown up to monstrous size in the goblin’s view. Puffy-eyed, bruised and beaten, the way Rian had first seen him.

  The way the Gold Army had left him.

  He forced himself further backward, knowing that if he stared into that memory too long, it would consume him. The mindscape held manifold dangers, but the worst were emotions—both the subject’s and the mentalist’s. Trauma unleashed monsters within the psyche, and he could wake them if he was not cautious.

  Geraad forced the Thynbell cell to recede, barely glimpsing Cob there, and followed Rian’s claws as they spider-crawled across the warded ceiling. Another push and time spun faster onto the spool. A flurry of black feathers and suddenly he was in the air, the world below a cross-stitch of snow and evergreen, before alighting again in a Corvish camp.

  There, he took a moment to look around, interested despite himself. As a civilian mage, he had never been part of the assaults on Corvia, and his post in Varence County had been too close to the Rift edge and the Imperial Road to see much Corvish activity. The rare Corvish trader came through, but otherwise all he knew of them was from the monthly Gold bulletins on bandits executed, forts razed, and general warnings to outpost-folk. He was vaguely aware that the Corvish would rather kill themselves than be captured—thus the persistent dearth of information on their full strength and main bases.

  But from Rian’s view of their camp, there was not much strength to measure. A low, broad cave full of women and children; a cluster of thatch huts standing outside, defended by a palisade wall; crows and foxes dwelling among the people like pets. No great ritual spaces, no weapon stockpiles, just a few fletchers hard at work while others butchered game and tanned leather, wove, watched the children. No vicious brigand-base full of bloodthirsty savages. Just short, ragged people preparing for the winter.

  Obviously the men are out banditing, he told himself. Moving backward, he saw the approach to the camp, the path that led to it from the Imperial Road, and knew that the Gold Army would prize such knowledge. They were determined to extirpate the Corvishfolk. A settlement of non-combatants would be an ins
tant target.

  It occurred to him that he could buy his safety from the Golds with such information, but the thought was nauseating. He had already experienced what they did to their own.

  He skipped back further, contemplating the two people Rian traveled with. A dark-skinned southern woman and a fair-haired man—and also a wolf sometimes, which was odd. But no Cob, no necromancer. Uncomfortably aware of what he sought, he paused to raise an emotional barrier, then took another backward leap.

  Into a sudden frenzy of fear.

  Wings. White wings and screaming horses, phantom antlers like branches, blue-black lightning and the stink of rot and madness. Rattled, Geraad pulled free of the goblin’s mindform and found himself within the panorama of the encounter between the necromancer’s wagon and his own team. He glimpsed himself on the ground down the road, flung from his horse, and forced his gaze away. Nearby, the Gold beacon flared, calling his soon-to-be captors.

  On the wagon were the necromancer and Cob, barely distinguishable through a haze of manifestation and magic. He watched them struggle for a few moments, white against black, heard the crack of a spine, saw Cob’s scars gape open redly.

  Nasty, violent and confusing. He could have moved closer to examine the struggle, but his gut said that there would be easier memories to sift through, and he did not want to stay here with his pre-torture doppelganger staring up at him from the road.

  Further, he thought, and returned to the goblin’s mindform.

  The bed of a rickety cart. Cob there, holding onto the goblin whose thoughts were striped with pain and fear, and the drape of a cloak and a thick mane of red hair above. Backward, backward, until two squat stone towers reeled into view, dead soldiers scattered in fleeing poses across the broken slate road.

  The goblin clung to Cob’s back. Watching over his shoulder, Geraad froze the memory to see the necromancer clearly.

  His face was undoubtedly Corvish, with the pointy chin and crafty features so indicative of that people, but behind those dark eyes was someone else. Someone cold, calculating, and comfortable with dwelling inside a dead husk and destroying everything in his way. Not a Corvishman then, as much as Geraad’s own Wyndish nature said to blame them.

  But as for other inklings of identity, Geraad saw little. The blue-black energy he wielded could have belonged to anyone—after all, the color of magic was cosmetic, used mostly as a method of differentiating one’s work from one’s enemy’s or, conversely, providing solidarity within a group. Black was intimidating, so many neophytes used black-colored magic.

  This necromancer was no neophyte, but Geraad knew too little about necromancy to measure his power. By the wings he had worn in the later scuffle, he was some kind of spiritist too, which boded ill. Cob’s spirit-thing had nearly extinguished permanent Gold wards; what could the necromancer’s do?

  Geraad slipped from the goblin’s mindform to move closer, trying to pick out some detail in the necromancer’s face or attire that could hint at the man behind the corpse, but there was nothing. He had neither the posture nor the expression of a Corvishman, nor was the name 'Morshoc' Corvish, but his affect did not clearly indicate another nationality, and his voice—from the few snatches Geraad had heard—was unaccented. He could be a Heartlander or almost any Valent mage, and seemed to carry no gear but that appropriate to his Corvish body. Even his appearance was unremarkable but for the scar through his right brow.

  For lack of another option, Geraad stared at the scar. The man’s skin was nearly white but, curiously, the scar was whiter. Bloodless. As if—

  The mindscape trembled. Despite Geraad’s grip, the frozen memory-image of the necromancer flickered, his eyes jittering in his placid face to turn toward Geraad.

  Not possible, Geraad thought. He felt no other presence, no struggle against his control, but as the necromancer’s piercing stare fixed on him, his skin crawled. This was not a mentalist’s doing—not a mind staring at him, but something else. Something he could not even perceive.

  Panicked, he leapt backward into the goblin’s mindform, and for a moment felt something vast and terrible lunge in pursuit, something made of burning wings and bright laughter—

  And then he was blurring through time again, through the dark confines of the Rift Climb, through chaos in Riftward, through rain in the grasslands of Illane, diving into a city packed with people and tunnels and metal statues and then emerging in a tavern.

  The dark-skinned girl again. The blond man, this time reeking of ichor and wriggling with some kind of symbiote beneath his skin.

  And Cob, in the form of a black beast with antlers at full spread, tearing his way through the magic of a Crimson Army assault team.

  He stared at this scene for a long time, trying to regain his equilibrium, but could make no more sense of it than anything else, and when he went back further he found only subterranean meetings and dark tunnels—some Shadow Cult thing. Not pertinent.

  That, then, was all the goblin knew of Cob and the necromancer.

  Slowly he withdrew from Rian’s mind. The goblin trembled and mewled under his hands, and he reflexively curled his arms around the small creature and felt spindly arms curve likewise around his neck.

  They would both have nightmares tonight. Rian for having such bad memories stirred up, and Geraad for what he had learned.

  That the necromancer had done something to Rian—something he could neither detect nor remove. That the Gold Army would hunt them all the more for what the goblin had seen. That the Crimson Army was as implicated in this matter of concealing Cob’s existence as the Golds were.

  And that the necromancer’s eyebrow-scar, the one that must have been cut into dead flesh, was something Geraad had seen before.

  *****

  Mid-day found Geraad in the Great Library of Valent, paging through old treatises while Rian napped under the desk. Though he knew he should have brought the goblin’s memories directly to the Council, Geraad could not shake the feeling that there was something he had overlooked—something he knew but was unable to pinpoint.

  As a mentalist, he should have been able to find those connections easily. Eidetic memory and self-examining meditation made such work less a matter of straining after a slippery thought and more like following a near-physical chain of logic to its inevitable end. But too much distress had been stirred up by his excursion into Rian’s mind, too much chaff, and he could not sift through it in such a raw state. The only alternative was to seek additional information.

  Thus he had ventured from the safety of his suite, across the fine bridges of Valent, to the Great Library which occupied its own tower in the Citadel’s north wall. Sixteen floors of archives, apprentice journals, Master theses, political and arcane histories, donated Archmagus paraphernalia, thousands of collections of scholarly articles, and displays of new advancements in arcane theory and practice made the Great Library both an important resource and a bewildering overdose of options. Though he could have wandered through it for days—as many students did, since the Library had its own balcony teashops and bakeries and gardens, as well as hundreds of out-of-the-way study spaces and cushy chairs for naps—Geraad had enforced discipline upon himself and checked out a cloud-serpent ring from the Summoner manning the main desk before retiring to a quiet study carrel.

  His construct guards had not been allowed inside, nor had his wards; beside the librarians’ servant-summonings, no magic was permitted in the Great Library lest it disturb the enchantments that held together many of the old tomes. Rian had only been allowed in on the condition that he not climb, throw, chew on or play with anything in the tower, and Geraad had solemnly vouched for his good behavior, though he knew that if the goblin deigned to ignore him, there was nothing he could do.

  Thus far, Rian had been perfectly well-behaved, and the cloud-serpent had done its best to bring him books on the topics he requested. The miserably small stack on his desk only proved the Council right.

  Geraad had gone through every po
ssible iteration of necromantic keywords he could think of—which, granted, was not much. Only every fourth or fifth guess made the cloud-serpent speed off to select a tome, and what he found in those tomes was minimal. The majority held only passing mentions to necromancy, or to accused necromancers who had either been found innocent or executed, and so far the only book with actual information on necromantic practices sat open before him: A Treatise On the Use of Physical Foci In the Practice of Medical Magic.

  In the Council meeting, he had heard the Archmagi talk about the disappearance of all the necromantic tomes. Had it happened less than a century ago, it would have troubled him. As it was, he found it frustrating to realize that there was no way he could learn about this necromancer, this Morshoc, from a safe distance. Even the Treatise was useless; an archaic soliloquy about experiments long-past, it described scarification, bone reinforcement, bezoars, implantation of crystal grains to aid arcane channeling, facial reconstruction, use of leeches in limb-reattachment, and various other bizarre and ghastly procedures that Geraad imagined must have been outlawed. Comments on necromancy were minimal, except to note that certain procedures were not to be confused with that dark art.

  Frustrated, Geraad flipped to the index in the back, trying to find some other keyword to test. He knew he should be researching spirits more than necromancy—after all, the Council wanted to understand the thing inside Cob—but Cob was not a threat to him. Morshoc bore a spirit too, but any malevolence contained within that entity could only flavor that of the necromancer himself.

  Words and names blurred as he skimmed down the endless list. Useless, all useless. No connections at all…

  Rivent, Morshoc. 113, 123, 216.

  He blinked, then stared at the words. A name swam up from the depths of his memory: Artificer Archmagus Morshoc Rivent, 84-93 IR. Architect of the Citadel at Valent.