A Bitter Brew

by Greg Curtis

  “This woman Erohilm wandered the worlds, spreading his message. But for some reason she was either not heard or heard but not understood. Perhaps the message was simply rejected. And the people continued to use the crystals as they commanded the worlds.”

  The crystals? Hendrick was caught by surprise by that. What could they possibly have to do with anything? And yet he couldn't help noticing that all the Mythagan wore them. Their garbs varied as did their faces. But in that one thing they were alike.

  “When he saw that they would not listen, his hope faded and his anger returned, more terrible than before. He had tried to end the rancour and find peace and his attempt had been spurned. So he sought to teach a lesson. He found the greatest of all the worlds of the Vordan Empire, the one that crafted the amulets, and he showed them the price that had to be paid for enslaving magic as the amulets do. Very few survived, and the world was lost to the Empire. Malthas was lost. This world.”

  A lesson? The destruction of an entire realm was not a lesson! And yet what was it that his mother had said during that disastrous showing of the past – that he had been thinking too small? Maybe she was right. A world was a vast thing – to him. But when you had hundreds of them? Maybe not.

  And then there was the other thing she'd said – enslaved magic. It was exactly what the ancient wizards had done. Were the amulets of the Mythagan the same? He hadn't guessed that. And yet it made sense in a way. Styrion – Malthas – had once been part of this ancient world spanning empire. And as such they shared the same knowledge. The knowledge of how to enslave magic.

  But why did the Great Beast care about it? How could that be a matter of the heart? He didn't understand. But he guessed the Mythagan weren't going to explain anything. They looked worried by what she'd said, but they still weren't talking to anyone else.

  “And you say you're free of the beast's influence?” Hendrick's mother abruptly jumped in again, suspicion to the fore.

  “Free?” Sana turned to her. “No. I will never be free. But I am clearer in my thoughts. Especially when I see your son. The behemoth likes him, like a pet, and so it's easier to speak to him. With the Mythagan the behemoth's rage rises in me every time I set eyes on them. Not so high as it did, but high enough that speaking to them is difficult. It is why I wanted to speak to your son.”

  The behemoth knew him? Liked him? Hendrick was caught by surprise by that. But he swiftly decided it couldn’t be true. This was the confused thinking of a woman who had had a monster inside her and been under the influence of a spell of some sort. He tried to tell her that.

  “No. He likes you. Even when you completely ruined his plans for Styrion Might he knew fondness for you. Maybe even a form of pride.”

  “Pride that I stopped him murdering tens or hundreds of thousands of people?” Hendrick couldn't understand that.

  “I'm not sure. I know that what was to happen in the city was not as it appeared. That he had plans that went far beyond destroying the city. And that when you let the people escape, they came undone. Yet still he felt fondness for you. Even happiness at what you had done.”

  “And you owe Hendrick your life.” His mother stepped in.

  Sana shrugged helplessly, as if she couldn’t quite accept that. The beast had undoubtedly lied to her. But Hendrick had no doubt about it. No one could survive giving birth to such a creature. Even with the creature dead and only half grown, and with her gift of healing, she had barely survived.

  “Why did you attack Oster?”

  “I don't know. As the creature grew in me, I found it harder to escape Vitanna's mist. To know what were my thoughts, and what were the behemoth's or the creature's. There was my anger, the behemoth's fury, and the baby's instinctive pain and savagery. Things were going very wrong. And everything I did by the end, became a battle between all three of us. I don’t know what I was supposed to do. There was a plan, but I couldn't keep to it.”

  Hendrick believed her. He also believed that she was telling the truth about the rest as far as she knew. Much of what she was saying didn't make sense. He said as much and got only a helpless stare in reply. She didn't know. Tyrollan just nodded in agreement to his unspoken question. She was telling the truth but was too confused and too badly deceived to be relied on.

  “Why did you need to speak to me?”

  “I told you. Because I can. And because this has to be said. Even though the behemoth no longer commands me, his feelings are with me. Every time I look at the Mythagan, or hear them speak, something in me hates them as I hate nothing else. It is unreasoning and overwhelming. I cannot trust them. I cannot tell them anything. I can barely look at them. And I cannot control it. But you – you are different. When I look at them I feel hatred. When I look at you I feel … fondness. I can speak to you when I cannot speak to them. I can even speak to them a little, in your presence. I do not understand it, but I feel it.”

  There it was again. This strange idea that the beast liked him. Hendrick didn't understand that. He didn't know what to even think about it. But when he looked at Tyrollan the man nodded at him. She was telling the truth.

  “Well, I'm sorry Sana, but I think you will have to speak to them. I know nothing of their worlds, or the right questions to ask. But if it helps, think on me as you speak with them. Listen to their questions but look upon my face and believe that I ask the questions. That they only speak for me.”

  It was a strange thing to ask of her. But as the Mythagan began asking their questions he knew it was the only help he could give. Maybe it helped a little as she tried to choke out the answers? Even if most of those answers were simply that she didn't know.

  Meanwhile as he sat there on the pile of lumber, watching and listening and encouraging Sana whenever she seemed to lock up, Hendrick tried instead to reflect on what she'd already told him. And when that just left him confused, he thought about the future and what plans he should make. But even that seemed pointless. Because what she'd told him, didn't seem real enough for him to base any plans on.

  And then there was the other question. What were they supposed to do with her? Should she go back with the Mythagan? Or stay in the Guild, at least while she continued recovering? Or did they simply kick her out into the world as a cripple and outcast? There were problems no matter which option they took. Clearly she did not want to go with the Mythagan, though he knew that would be their preference. Yet she could not stay in Styrion. She was a traitor to the realm, so if she wandered free she would sooner or later be caught and hung. And if the Guild sheltered her, they would be in trouble too.

  Then again, perhaps those were matters that the others could deal with. And so when the questioning came to an awkward end, he got up and poured himself a cup of tea. That was a matter he could deal with.

  Maybe, he thought, his role in this had ended now? Because if she was right and the beast's target was another world, then there was nothing he could do about that. Only the Mythagan could. But having to fight tens of thousands of those ghost dragons? He doubted any victory against them was possible. Especially if their ward stones didn't work.

  Still, his curiosity was prodding at him. And there was one thing he very much wanted to understand – the crystal amulets. Had they truly come from Styrion? Or Malthas as it had been then? If so he thought, then the secrets of their making would be here too, somewhere in the past. He could seek them out. And if he did maybe he would finally find out what it was that the Mythagan were hiding.

  Chapter Forty Seven

  Mountain climbing was never something that Hendrick had done – or for that matter, ever wanted to do. But at least his magic made it easy. Relatively easy. He'd managed to completely avoid travelling through the southern wastes simply by making the journey across another world. Then instead of crossing back to the southern wastes and trying to scale a mountain, he'd simply found yet another world with a giant hill in roughly the right place, and long stepped up it. That brought him half way up the mountain once he stepped back t
o his realm.

  He was glad of that. Not just because of the effort it had saved him, but because when he looked back down at the land below he knew a sense of dread.

  This was a bad land. He'd visited scores of worlds and dealt with all manner of creatures. He’d faced death many times. And yet the wasteland below was the place where he felt the greatest sense of dread. And this was his own world!

  Looking down, all he could see was miles of swamp that extended as far as the eye could see. Mist rose from it when the sun shone, and the smell of death and decay assailed his nose even halfway up the mountain. But most of all he found himself wondering about what lived in the wastelands. He was too high up to see anything through the canopy of twisted, knotted trees below. Too high to even hear anything. But still, when he looked down upon it, he felt dread. He didn't plan on going down there.

  One thing had dawned on him though as he'd travelled to the mountain. The book his mother had given them to read was right in at least one respect. The world was far larger than he’d guessed. Styrion contained its fifty cities and thousands of towns within a boundary of six hundred leagues east to west, and three hundred or so north to south. This mountain was at least a hundred and fifty leagues south of the southernmost border of Styrion. And when he looked further south he could see no end. These were the southern wastes, and he had to wonder; just how far did they extend?

  He knew that this mountain along with all the lands surrounding it had all once been a part of Malthas. The memories of the ancient wizard told him that. It seemed his mother was right. Clearly the wizard wars had destroyed an immense area of land. And Styrion was just a fraction of the whole of the ancient kingdom. A tiny fraction.

  Hendrick’s climb to the terrace at the top of the mountain had soon become an exercise in the use of the spell of warp. He would find a relative flat piece of rock to stand on, and then use his magic to lift him up to another piece. The spell might lift him twenty or thirty feet at a time, before he had to step off it and onto another piece of the mountain, but it was a lot easier than actually trying to climb it.

  The strange thing was that as he lifted himself up the side of the mountain, spell by spell, he was sure he'd done it before. Of course, he hadn't. The memory came from the ancient wizard himself. At some stage he was sure that the ancient wizard had made this very journey. Probably even used the very same spells. He was also certain that his destination had been important to the ancient wizard, even if he didn't know why. All he knew was that when he had thought of the crystals the wizard had thought of this place.

  That echo of memory grew more and more intense as he approached his destination – the ancient terrace just below the peak of the mountain. With it came a feeling of both anticipation and dread. Again, they weren't his feelings. They were memories. Something up there had been very, very important to the ancient Mithril wizard. So important that the excitement and fear had been burned into the wizard's very soul.

  Even using his magic it took Hendrick many hours to reach the terrace. Hours of simply casting his spell, lifting himself up, then stepping off one rocky platform on to another, before releasing the first spell and casting the next. It was beyond boring. But as he drew closer to his destination his heart beat faster. He didn't know what lay ahead – the wizard’s memories had only shown him an empty flat rock terrace and the entrance to a mine – but he knew it mattered. So he pushed on, climbing the mountain spell by spell, until finally he stepped on to the terrace.

  The moment he did so a flood of memories and understanding washed right over him and almost left him gasping. All of them were fragmentary, but the emotion behind them was overwhelming and together they told him the true history of magic in the realm.

  It was here that the seeds of the world’s destruction had been sewn, though no one had guessed that at the time. And yet over the years that had followed the ancient wizard's thoughts had returned to this place and to this meeting, over and over again. Constantly he had asked himself whether this had been his greatest triumph or his most terrible mistake. It was only at the end had that the wizard had understood that it was the latter. Too late.

  Even as Hendrick stood on the bare rock, staring across an empty terrace to the entrance to the mine, he could see the others standing there as they had been over a thousand years before, drawing up their plans. At that point they had all still been human.

  He could see their faces, know them as friends even if he didn't know their names – he didn't have those memories. But he knew them and trusted them. Or the ancient wizard had. More than that, he'd respected them. The seven of them were the most powerful mages in the world. They were also all honourable and decent. And they had come here because they were worried about what was happening to their world. To Malthas.

  With a sense of disbelief Hendrick realised that what they had done had been done for the most noble of reasons. To save their world.

  Malthas had been dying. Slowly, painfully but inexorably. One of the greatest worlds in the Vordan Empire, had been heading for its painful end. And its death was of their own making. The crystals that they had mined here had been corrupting the people of the world – of all the worlds! Malthas was simply the world that was being destroyed fastest. It had been the most badly affected because it was the world that had the most crystals. Elsewhere the crystals were expensive. Not everyone had one. And if they did they were careful not to waste the magic they contained as getting a replacement would take time and cost. Not in Malthas.

  Yet when the crystals of this ancient peak had been discovered centuries before, they had seemed like a gift from the gods. Because the crystals allowed magic to be concentrated. They absorbed it from the world around them, much like the black stones that powered their cities. But unlike the black stones, the crystals released their magic to people directly. The black stones were powerful, but they had to be precisely directed to release their magic. And only those with the gift could use them. But the crystals allowed anyone, whether they had the gift for magic or not, to use magic. All they needed was a crystal, a little time for the connection to be made between it and the wearer, and then anyone could command the magical energies of the entire universe with their thoughts.

  They could fly or swim the deepest oceans! Create an impenetrable barrier or walk through walls! See a thousand leagues into the distance, or study the most minuscule of creatures! Nothing was beyond them – as long as they had a crystal.

  With the discovery of the crystals their world and the entire Vordan Empire had changed overnight. No longer was magic just the province of a few. Nor was it limited to carrying out specific functions like powering vehicles and warding as they did with the black stones. It was free for everyone to use.

  Suddenly those who had had the gift had become figures of derision, because their magic was weak in comparison to those who had crystals. With this discovery the true mages had gone from being some of the most respected and powerful people in the world, to the most pitied. But that wasn't why the seven of them had stood here and made their plans.

  The world had changed too. Malthas had once been a small backwater in the Empire. A bucolic realm where food was grown, but little more. A place where anyone who dreamed of greater things, left it for the other realms. But once the crystals had been discovered, their small, peaceful home had become a world of bustling cities and incredible wealth. It had become something it had never been meant to be. But that wasn't why they had made their plans either.

  Science and technology, the studies that had been bringing great boons to the peoples of all the worlds, had been forgotten. What need was there for vehicles that could propel themselves by burning fuels when you could simply fly? Why should you bother constructing small, well designed buildings, when with a simple thought you could create a massive structure that would stand a million years because it was made of materials stronger than diamond? And what use were schools when all the knowledge of the universe was available to anyone simply
by looking in on ancient classrooms and listening to long forgotten lessons? As for hospitals, within a few very short years, they were gone. Wealth had disappeared even before that. Anyone could simply cast a spell and summon enough gold to fill a mountain. Soon the entire world, a world comprised of thousands of cities and billions of people, was running on magic. Stolen magic!

  Magic had washed away thousands of years of history, tradition and culture overnight. But that wasn't why the seven of them had stood on this terrace knowing that they had to act either.

  What scared the seven of them, what had forced them to do the unthinkable, was that they had begun to realise that people had to have limits. And the crystals meant that there were no limits. The plain truth that everyone had ignored, was that not all were meant to have magic. Nature and the gods decided who should have the gift. Not a bunch of miners.

  The magic was being abused. Those born to it like the seven of them, understood it. They could use it and shape it to their needs. They took what they needed and used it wisely. But those who weren't born to it felt no need for such restraint.

  Because of that their world had been falling into chaos. All the magical black stones that powered the cities had been being damaged and destroyed as people with no feel for what they were doing, unleashed the magic of their crystals in ever more grandiose displays of power. They'd acted as if they were gods. When things went wrong they called their mistakes accidents. As if they weren't to blame. But they were. The ancient wizards had known that.