by Tim Stead
“What battle is that?” He could see that she was becoming impatient with his questions, but he persisted.
“Whatever battle I am destined to fight.”
“There are other things you could learn here, san Regani, new things.”
“Strength comes from the sword,” she said. “You are lucky to have so many men to protect you.”
“Is that what you think?”
“Of course. Your trader games are all very well, but they are no match for a body of armed men.”
He laughed. “You are indeed your father’s daughter,” he said.
“And proud to be,” she was annoyed now. “You dare to mock me now, but in my father’s house you would be beaten for your insolence.”
“You think that makes it the better place?”
“Are you nothing but a bag of questions?”
Corban sat down and placed his elbow on the table in front of him, his hand open and raised.
“You believe in strength, san Regani, put my arm down and I will cease my questions. If I win you will allow me to show you other wisdom. Do you accept?” He saw the look of contempt in her eyes. She had practiced with sword and bow since the age of eight, wrestled and tried her strength against stone hard men. How could she loose against a boy who counted sacks and wrote on papers.
“I accept,” she said. She sat opposite him and placed her hand in his. They stared into each other’s eyes and Corban felt for a moment what he had felt on that first day. “Call it,” she said. “Or are we going to hold hands all day?”
“You may begin when you wish, san Regani. I am the challenger.”
She pushed, and she was very strong. Corban held her easily, though. He allowed his hand to descend towards the table a small way, then pushed their arms upright again. She looked surprised, and her face was flushed. Do not be cruel, he reminded himself, and pushed her hand over gently until it touched the table. She snatched it away.
“You are very strong,” she said.
“And you are very surprised, Calaine. You made the mistake of judging a man by his coat.”
“How is it that you are so strong?”
“I climb.”
“What?”
“I climb cliffs – mostly the ones up behind the house where the granite of the Peaks cuts through the softer rock. Some of the faces are quite difficult.”
“Why? There must be an easier way to get to the top.”
“When I was young I used to go up there in spring, when the children from Gulltown would come over on an evening and climb after birds eggs. I tried it myself, and broke a leg. After that I watched them, and the best climbers always did certain things, so I copied them when I was mended, and I found that I liked climbing, but even more than that I liked getting to the top. When I tired of the easy climbs I sought out harder ones, and after that still harder. My strength comes from years of holding on by a couple of fingers and toes fifty feet above the ground.”
“Well, you have won your wager.”
“The militia will be disappointed.”
“So show me this other wisdom.”
For all his fine words before they had matched strength Corban was now a little at a loss what to tell her. His irritation with her had driven him to this, and now he had to come up with something concrete. Ella was the scholar of the family, and he wished for her council now, but he was very much on his own.
“Our library,” he said, “contains many volumes…”
“Show me climbing. Show me what you do.”
It was a lifeline, not wisdom, but something different.
“That will take a little while,” he said. “To be safe we must have a line secured at the top of the cliff, and men will have to ride around to the west to do that. I will arrange it.”
It took an hour, and they spent most of the time in the garden, which was between the main house and the slope that led up to the peaks. It was a private place, designed that way, and full of fruit trees, hedges, and quiet corners.
“Why do you climb?” she asked him.
It was a question that could be answered on so many levels. He chose the simplest.
“Because I enjoy it. The challenge is considerable, and I am better for meeting it.”
“There must be more. They are just, well, cliffs.” She seemed genuinely puzzled.
“Perhaps you should try it?”
“I intend to. But I want to understand, first.”
Corban thought back to conversations he’d had with Ella.
“There are two schools of thought in ancient philosophy,” he said. “One holds that everything is perfect; that I am a perfect Corban, that you are a perfect Calaine, that this is a perfect house of Saine, that today is a perfect today, simply because each is unique, singular, unrepeatable. All the things that we perceive as faults are part of the unique signature of the individual thing. Anything we change, even ourselves, just creates a new, perfect thing. I do not like that idea. It is stagnant. It says that there is no real point in changing anything. The alternate idea is that perfection is a destination. The journey can never be completed, but we travel anyway. If we travel well we get closer, but sometimes we get distracted and move further away. Any facet of ourselves that we improve brings us closer. Any new thing that we embrace gives us another avenue to advance. I like this idea because the journey pleases me.”
“What is the point of a journey if you never arrive?”
“The journey is the point. In a way it is the destination. Have you never travelled and just enjoyed being on the road?”
“I have never left the city.”
That, in a sentence, was the problem for Calaine, he thought. Her world had been so restricted that it could be summed up in a few ideas, a few square miles, even a few people.
A militiaman came to tell them that the ropes and guards were in place, so they walked up the hill behind the house to the base of the cliffs, while Corban tried to explain the principles of climbing to her.
They stopped and looked up at the sheer face. To Corban it looked like a map. Routes that he had climbed before stood out clearly, and he knew how to judge the appearance of each crevice, crack and lump. He knew the rock, how it weathered, how it supported weight.
“Look at the climb for a few moments,” he said. “Try to see a way to the top, what you can reach, each place for your hands and feet, and watch what I do.”
He tied the rope around his waist firmly, picked out his route with a practiced eye and climbed steadily to about twenty feet above the ground. He tugged on the rope to make sure that it was firmly held at the top, and then stepped out into the air. He was lowered to the ground.
“No real harm can come to you,” he said. “Try.”
Calaine attacked the slope with great vigour, but no real foresight, and quickly worked herself into a position from which it was impossible to move upwards or even to the side.
“Go back,” Corban said. “Try a different route.”
She worked back down the face and moved across at the first opportunity onto a pitch that he knew to be awkward. She went up again, but in a minute or so was in difficulties, breathing hard and struggling to hold on. The holds she was using were too small. Eventually she slipped and was caught by the rope, lowered back to the ground.
“Now look at the face again,” Corban said. “See where you climbed the first time, under that smooth face. Nobody could get past that. The second time you went up the right where it’s not much better.”
“You climbed further to the left,” she said.
“You can see why.”
He was delighted to see that she was tracing his route, as far as it went, and on upwards. There was a fairly clear line that looked quite rough and broken, with lots of handholds.
“There’s a place up there with nowhere to grip again.” She said, pointing at a band of rock forty feet above them.
“It looks that way,” he said. “Walk over here.”
He took her to
one side, and as the angle changed a vertical crack across the smooth area became visible.
“I see it!” she said. “This is like strategy. Most of the thinking is done before the climb begins.”
“On a short face like this you can see almost everything,” he agreed. “But on higher climbs it is hard to see all the way to the top. You have to select areas that look promising, and hope that they are climbable when you get there.”
“I want to try again, on the left.”
“Are you rested?”
“I feel strong,” she replied.
This time he moved the second rope even further to the left and climbed beside her. It was a harder route, but he had mastered it years ago. She made good progress, and after a few minutes had reached the vertical crack. It was a point shared by both routes, so Corban made himself as comfortable as he could and waited for her.
Calaine was having trouble getting a grip on the crack. There were no horizontal surfaces.
“Put your hand in and turn it,” he called across. “Make a fist if you can.”
He knew that it would hurt, but she adopted the technique without complaint. Progress resumed, and he followed her up the face to the top, where they arrived at about the same time. Calaine sat heavily on the ground, breathing hard. Her face was quite flushed and she was flexing her fingers to get the stiffness out of them.
“You do this all the time?” she asked. “My arms feel like they have been nearly pulled from their sockets.”
“It feels better as you get used to it,” he said. “On some of the longer climbs you can be on the face for over an hour.”
They stood side by side on the cliff top and looked out over the city. The view was even more spectacular from here than it was from the house, and it was possible to see the whole breadth of Samara in a single sweeping glance.
“I understand why you do this,” she said after a while. “The feeling is different from anything I’ve felt before. It is very enjoyable.”
Corban was equally thrilled. He had never climbed with anyone before, never shared the exhilaration. Although this face was easy, and normally he would have got little enjoyment from it, Calaine’s joy was something that he was able to share, and she’d been good. Her movements on the cliff face had been natural and relaxed.
“Can we climb again tomorrow?” she asked.
“It would be my pleasure,” he said.
22 Secret Magic
Serhan knew where he wanted to go, and he wanted to travel alone. The things that he had to do were secret, forbidden things. It was impossible for him to leave White Rock now without an escort of some sort, so he took the minimum, a group of five guardsmen, and rode east for a day. He had picked the men carefully. He knew that they would obey his instructions to the letter.
They camped in a wood that evening, and he ate with the men, sharing a couple of bottles of wine from the cellars with them, talking with them. He was genuinely interested in their opinions and troubles, and took the opportunity to gauge how his new policies were taking root. He found that oblique questioning after a few drinks was the best way to ferret out the truth. He was pleased to hear that the villages had become our villages, and the people in them were part of the greater community that was White Rock, and the definition of White Rock itself had expanded from the curtain wall of the fortress to include the entire domain.
He slept well, and after a long and large breakfast with the guardsmen he told them that he was going to be absent for a couple of days, and that they should stay in this spot, relax, perhaps do a little hunting, but keep vigil for his return. They were pleased enough at the idea. It was like a holiday for them.
He rode off about the middle of the morning and continued to ride east for an hour or so until he came to a place where the land fell away and there was a spectacular view to the south. He hobbled his horse in a clearing where there was plenty of grass and spoke the words of the spell that created a black door. He stepped through it.
On the other side of the door he was fifty miles north of White Rock in an empty, cold land. There were few hunters in these parts, and his chance of coming across anyone was slim. He set up a small tent, lit a fire and gathered a supply of wood to keep it going.
He had chosen the place carefully. His small camp was pitched on a south facing slope looking over a clear, blue lake and surrounded by ranks of pines. It was a spectacular spot. The mountains above the camp were dressed with autumn snow above the tree line, and cool, scented winds sighed down through the dark mass of the trees.
He sat by the fire, looked out at the lake and allowed himself to review what he had drawn from Corderan’s book.
The mage had believed, for many good reasons that he laid out in detail, that there were more directions than the obvious ones. The familiar ones, up and down, left and right, forwards and backwards, were only the beginning. There was no meaningful way to name the others, so names had been made up: in and out, warm and cold, light and dark, and several others. Corderan insisted that these directions were very small, and that only the tiniest of movements were possible in each additional direction. He also believed that entire worlds, existences even, were hidden in these small spaces. There were uncountable other places.
So it was possible to move inwards and darkwards and come to another place where the sun shone, winds blew and oceans washed the shores, but it was not this place. He had struggled with this idea for a long time, but eventually accepted Corderan’s assertion that each place was very thin in the additional directions, even though it was full and fat if looked at in the up and down, left and right, forwards and backwards way.
Furthermore, the worlds moved through time at different rates, and they rubbed against each other. It was like rubbing your hands on a cold day, which warmed them. The worlds rubbed like hands and produced heat that wasn’t heat. He called it energy, and he called that energy magic.
If two worlds adjacent to each other moved at very different rates through time, then a lot of magic was produced, and was available to those who could use it. This place was such a world.
So it was like this to be a mage; to see the world that others saw, and yet to see something different. It filled him with wonder.
The practical applications were simpler. It was not enough to mutter the words of a spell in order for magic to occur. The mind was the organ that manipulated this magical energy, and the intent of the spell must be held clearly in the mind for it to function. It was the words that shaped the energy, but the mind that directed it. Gestures, too, helped in so far as they focussed the mind. Pointing, touching, raising the hands, all confirmed and strengthened the intent.
This, of course, was the great test. The understanding made it possible, in theory, to create a new spell, something that had never been done before.
Serhan had been working on something simple for weeks. He wanted to prove that he could make a new spell, and here he was in a place with no other people, and with the time to experiment. He had decided on a spell of transference.
He opened the pack that he had brought with him and took out a wooden bowl and a flask of water. The bowl was a plain thing that he had blackened in a fire. He poured water into it and set it before him on a rock where it caught and reflected the blue sky and a hint of a cloud, slowly settling as the water stilled. The words of the spell were clear in his mind, and he concentrated on what he wanted to happen, and spoke the words, at the same time placing a finger in the water.
He felt the surge of power flow through him. It was small compared to other spells that he had used, but it was different this time. His own words had summoned magical energy to do his bidding. He looked down at the bowl and on its surface he saw an image of White Rock, as seen from the road that approached it from the south. It was like looking through a small window, but for a second he felt dizzy because he was looking down at the bowl, but the bowl was looking sideways at White Rock, as though the world was twisted around.
He sat
for a moment, completely still, looking at the image. There was no way that he could be seeing it if the spell he had created had not worked. He shivered. The world had just changed, and the lake looked the same, the breeze still ruffled the trees, the ground was solid, and the sky was blue.
He was no longer a slave to the creation of others. It was difficult, yes, but he could make new magic, like Corderan. He spoke more words and the view in the bowl changed, swooping into the courtyard of the fortress. He could see and recognise the guards walking towards the gate to relieve the sentries. More commands, and the view travelled up the stairs to his own chambers. He looked at his own desk, his bed, then out again. There was nothing he could not see.
He ended the spell and emptied the bowl. This was something that Gerique must never know. He was now indeed a mage, and his understanding would grow as time passed. There was still the problem of the Faer Karan, but it did not seem urgent to him. Each day that passed made it more likely that they would discover him for what he was, but now each day would make him stronger. He had the beginnings of what he needed and diligence and time would bring him the solution he needed. It always had.
He felt hungry. It was past his usual hour for lunch, so he unpacked food that he had brought with him and cooked it on the fire.
His only regret was that he could not share this joy. Even so, he thought of Mai.
23 Sorocaba
Delf insisted that they camp outside Sorocaba for a night before they went in. From what Serhan had said he was sure that the people would be unwelcoming, and he wanted a whole day to make it obvious that they weren’t anything other than builders. He had already led them around the surrounding countryside locating supplies of wood and clay that they could use as building materials until even Wulf was getting impatient with him.
It was just after dawn when they finally rode in. People noticed the contingent of White Rock guard almost at once, but the twenty civilians and the wagons loaded with timber and equipment made them curious.
His first problem was to find a place to build. Ideally it should be somewhere near the middle of the town, so he headed for the town square. By the time they got there a group of about thirty people was following them, and it was getting bigger by the minute. It looked like the beginnings of an angry crowd. The sergeant in charge of their small protecting force rode up alongside Delf.
