Ascendant

by Craig Alanson

  Koren lifted his arm to his nose and sniffed his shirt sleeve. “Oh! Blast! That smell is in my clothes, and my hair now.”

  Ariana backed away, making sure to be upwind from the stinky pair. “Perhaps you two had better bathe, maybe in the stables?”

  “Or a pigsty.” One of her guards muttered under his breath.

  Koren shivered as he scrubbed sand into his hair, then lathered his hair, for the fourth time, with a rough bar of soap. Taking a couple deep breaths, to steel his nerves, he plunged his head under the surface of the pond again and again, until he was gasping for breath. Sniffing, he still caught a whiff of that terrible smell. Or he imagined it. Or the smell now was in the pond water. Or in the tissues of his nose. Either way, he couldn't get himself any more clean without scraping his skin off, which he'd almost done. The stablemaster hadn't let him in, or even near the stables, when many of the horses panicked after getting a nosefull of Koren. Paedris had been brought to the servant's bath in the castle, there to be attended by several servants who doubtless wished they'd volunteered to shovel out the stables that day, but Koren had been left to scoot out a rarely-used castle gate, and bathe himself in a cold pond that lay half a mile from the imposing stone walls of the castle.

  Fish had swum away in a hurry when Koren plunged into the pond, and not only because he'd disturbed them; he was polluting the water with a horrible stench. Standing up, wearing only short underpants, he looked in dismay at his clothes. There was no way he could ever get that smell out of the wool and cotton fabric of his clothes. Best to dig a hole, then, and bury them.

  Would the cost of the clothes be taken from his pay? So far, all his clothes, and his meals, and everything he'd needed in the castle, had been free. When Paedris sent him out to get something from the city, the wizard gave him coins, and never bothered to count the coins that were returned to the brass money chest in the wizard's office. A chest full of coins, that was not even locked!

  Koren scratched his now-itchy scalp, and put on the clean, rough work clothes he'd brought with him. The wizard was a good master to Koren, he could not ask for better. Around Crebb's Ford, there had been stories of sons or daughters who had been sent away to serve an apprenticeship, to learn a trade and secure their futures; stories of masters who abused their young charges, blamed them for everything that went wrong, demanded more money from their parents, and failed to provide any training. Koren knew of two boys who had run away from their abusive masters, run away and come home shamefully, for their parents had spent much hard-earned coins to get the apprenticed, and now the sons returned with no money and no trade learned. Or worse, for everyone had heard the tale of Annabelle Clintock, who had been excited to go away to be a house servant for the family of a knight. Everyone in the village had been excited for her, too, until she returned one day, clothes dirty, shoes missing, having walked most of the way home. The mistress of the house had beaten her for the slightest reason, the girls in the family were also cruel to her, and when the knight was at home, he had taken to sneaking up on Annabelle and kissing her roughly. Which the mistress of the house blamed on Annabelle. When the man tried to open the door to the tiny attic closet where she slept one dark night, she had escaped out the window, climbed down a rosebush, and made her way home to Crebbs Ford over the next week. Almost every family in the poor village had contributed something to the girl's family, Koren's family had donated a piglet, but her dreams of becoming a royal maid had been dashed.

  Koren was willing to take abuse, up to a point; as a commoner it was simply part of life, that his betters would lord themselves over him. To a point, and no more. So, if Paedris insisted that Koren pay for the ruined clothes, he would do that. But he wasn't taking all the blame for stinking up half the castle.

  “You wished to see me, Lady Trehayme?” Paedris said as he swept into Carlana’s royal office chamber, cutting off the frustrated guard’s attempt to announce the wizard. Technically, Carlana had summoned her court wizard, but Paedris had taken his time arriving at the palace. No one summoned Lord Paedris Don Salva de la Murta, and he certainly didn’t respond to a summons from a timid Regent.

  But if Carlana noticed the wizard’s lateness, she didn’t mention it. “Oh, yes, Paedris,” she said, looking up from a pile of scrolls scattered across her desk, “come in, come in.” She dismissed the guard with a gesture, and walked over by the window, where they could speak without being overheard. Also, where there was a breeze coming into the room. Paedris and Koren had been scrubbed until their skin was pink in the stables two days before, and declared that the smell was gone, but Carlana wasn’t taking any chances. “I’ve news of Koren’s parents.”

  Paedris’ eyebrows shot up. “Indeed?”

  “Yes,” the Regent said with a frown, “his father only had one sibling, a brother, Koren’s uncle,” she checked the scroll for the name, “what is it, oh, ‘Ander Bladewell’, and he was no help. Koren's mother’s family are traveling traders, one of my search parties located their caravan in Holdeness, where they’re staying over the winter.”

  “Search parties?” Paedris asked in surprise. “I didn’t know-“

  “Ariana insisted. And we do owe the boy, after all. With the caravan are a couple of his mother’s relatives, they knew where to find his mother’s cousin, where his parents told Koren they were going. The cousin lives, or lived, in Surtagne.”

  “Lived?”

  “The search party reports that he died four months before Koren left, um, Crab Ford, or something, his village. His mother wouldn’t have known.”

  “I take it that the search party didn’t find Koren’s parents in Surtagne?”

  Carlana shook her head. “No, and no one remembers his mother being there. I think his parents lied about where they were going, before they, they-“ Carlana’s hands gripped the rolled-up scroll, twisting it in anger, “dumped him on the side of the road. What kind of people abandon their own children? If we ever do find them, I’d be tempted to hang the miserable wretches!”

  Paedris took the scroll from the Regent, and laid it on the table. “Carlana, they believed their son was cursed, a jinx. Based on what Koren tells me happened around him in that village, I don’t blame people for thinking he was a jinx, the fact is, he was dangerous. In the last incident, he destroyed the village’s only grain mill, by accident, of course. The people of his village are poor farmers, they live year by year on their crops, and if they can’t grind their grain, they have nothing much else to sell. His parents, well, they must have figured there was nothing they could do about a jinx.”

  "Koren! Koren!" Paedris called out from his laboratory. "Where is that boy?"

  "Here, sir." Koren gasped, having dashed up two flights of stairs when he heard the wizard calling. "I was copying your book of healing potions, as you asked, sir."

  "Oh, yes." Paedris said absentmindedly, having forgotten what he'd instructed Koren to do earlier. "Having any trouble with it?"

  "No, sir. There are some foreign words, but I'm copying the letters on those."

  "Not foreign, those are Old Lengish. The language you here in Tarador refer to as the 'Common Speech' is called Lengish everywhere else, and those words are from Lengish a long time ago, words that are not used anymore." Paedris thought the term 'Common Speech' showed how people in Tarador arrogantly considered their land to be the center of the world, which was not true. Although, in terms of the long struggle between light and darkness, between the underworld and the world of the real, Tarador truly was the center. And that was why Paedris had left his homeland.

  "Oh. I didn't know, sir."

  "No matter. I need you to go to the rooftop garden, and see if there is any basil left." Paedris had put the delicate plants inside glass boxes as the weather grew colder, to extend their growing season.

  "Basil, sir?" Koren couldn't remember basil being used in any of the potions he'd read. But then, there were many, many potion books he hadn't touched yet, in the tower's library. "For a potion?" />
  "No," Paedris said with a wink, "for my dinner. The royal kitchens are preparing noodles with tomato sauce and meatballs, and the cooks here never use enough basil."

  "Oh," Koren laughed, "yes, sir, I think the basil has not gone by yet." Koren never had tomato sauce, or noodles, before he came to Linden, now that dish was one of his favorites. Food in Winterthur province tended toward potatoes and gravy, which was filling, but rather bland after a while. Thinking about climbing the stairs all the way to the tower's roof reminded Koren of something that had been bothering him. "Uh, sir, I've been meaning to ask you a question, about the stairs to the rooftop."

  "Mmm, I was wondering when you would ask me about that." Paedris said with a twinkle in his eye.

  "I figured something was different about it, the second day I was here, sir." There was one set of stairs from the bottom of the tower to the fourth floor, then the stairs split, with one going only to the two top floors and the roof. "There aren't enough stairs, sir. I mean, I went outside and counted, and the windows aren't spaced evenly, but there aren't enough stairs to go from the fourth floor all the way up to the roof."

  "Most people take a long time to notice, if they ever do. Come with me." Paedris led the way down one set of stairs to the fourth floor, where the other stairs were on the other side of the tower, behind a door. The wizard opened the heavy door, and walked ahead of Koren into the stairway, lit only by one narrow window that lay partway around the curve of the tower. Soon, too soon, they arrived at the landing on the eighth floor of the tower. Koren had been carefully counting steps.

  "Tell me, what did you notice?" The wizard asked intently.

  "The stairs are only enough to go up one floor, maybe a bit more. And the stairway curves too tightly into the tower, sir, we should be in the center of the fifth floor, but we're not, we're still up against the outside of the tower wall."

  "Anything else?" Paedris said hopefully, with a raised eyebrow.

  There weren't enough stairs, the passageway curved too tightly... what else could the wizard be hinting at? Koren mentally walked back through the lower doorway, up the stairs, past the window- "The window! Sir, the window should face west, with the afternoon light shining directly in, but it's not." The window was too high up the wall for Koren to see out and tell from the view which way the window was facing.

  "Very good!" The wizard said delightedly as he clapped his hands. "Very good indeed! You are correct, there are not enough stairs to climb four floors, and the window faces north, even though it should face west. The answer, Koren, is magic, true magic." Paedris gestured Koren over to the upper doorway. "You see how the stone around this doorway is thicker than the tower walls?"

  Koren peered at the dark stone. The doorway was thicker than his arm was long. He reached out gingerly and touched the stone, his fingertips tingled sharply, and he jerked his arm back.

  "Ha!" Paedris chuckled. "Watch yourself there. This doorway, and the one below, are portals, between them the fabric of our world has been, the best way to explain it is stretched. That is how one flight of stairs can climb four floors in this tower. The truth is, there are no stairs, not in the real world. And there is no window. One thing you didn't notice is that footsteps don't echo in there, the sound is muffled, because there is no real stone in there."

  Koren peered warily down the stairway, the stairway that didn't really exist, according to the wizard. "How did they build the tower that way?" He asked, completely astonished.

  "The tower wasn't built like this, I added the staircase when I got here," the wizard said with obvious pride in his voice. "This tall tower may look impressive, but living here, with all these stairs, is painful for my old knees. I had the original stairway blocked up at the top and bottom, it's still there behind the stones. The workers installed these thick doorways, and I created the pathway between them. My original idea was to simply step directly from one doorway into another-"

  "You can do that?" Koren's head was spinning.

  "Yes. But then I thought that would be disturbing to any guests who are not wizards. Also, it takes more energy to go directly from one portal to another, and I was showing off already."

  "What do you mean, sir?"

  Paedris, the powerful wizard who could whisk people from one floor of the tower to another, looked sheepish. "I created the shortcut soon after I arrived here. All those stairs wore me out, I couldn't see myself using anything above the fifth floor, but with all the books, scrolls, and the equipment for my laboratory, there wasn't much room for me to have any living space. The portal was a way to make the upper floors practical, but in truth, I was showing off. I'd just arrived, I was a foreigner, and I was feeling rather full of myself. It was a way for me to impress the wizards of Tarador, because none of them could create such a portal." Paedris couldn't help mentioning the last part, with justifiable pride. "It was a lot more work than I intended, but once I started, I had to finish it."

  Koren looked at his fingers, which were still tingling. "Sir, this is, it's amazing. Is, is it dangerous? What if you're in there, and the magic, uh, stops working?"

  "Hmm." The wizard was uncomfortable with the question. It was a good question. He didn't know the answer. Not for certain. It had taken enormous energy to create the portals, over many months, and he had to renew the spell from time to time. Years ago, when he'd grown weary of renewing the spell, he had considered letting the portals decay, and using only the bottom four or five floors of the tower, but his pride wouldn't let that happen. Really, he thought the whole tall, narrow tower to be a silly place to live. It was intimidating to most people, and living there did add to his mystique as a wizard, and the tower was built for the first wizard of Tarador, so Paedris didn't have a choice in the matter. "Well, it doesn't simply stop working, it fades after a while, a long while, mind you, not overnight. You would notice the stairway getting dim, and," Paedris struggled to recall what a fading portal was like, as he'd been mostly very regular about renewing the spell, "it gets to be like walking through a thick fog, or walking through, sort of, water, I would say. And it takes longer to go from one end to another, you would notice that. But it wouldn't simply stop with someone inside, unless a person deliberately decided to live in there for a long time for some reason. No, what would happen is that, you would no longer be able walk through the doorways." While he was speaking, the wizard was wondering what would happen, if, say, an enemy wizard destroyed the portals, while someone was between them. Where would the person go? Likely, the person would pop back into the real world inside a wall, somewhere between the fourth and eighth floors. Releasing that much energy would destroy the tower.

  But, no matter. Any wizard with the power to destroy the portals could use that energy much more effectively by doing something else, something even more destructive. Still, it was a good question, about what happened when a portal collapsed. Paedris didn't know anything in all the literature of wizardry to answer that question. He started constructing an experiment in his mind, he loved experiments. Perhaps he could create very small portals, and send in a bug, such as a beetle, and then collapse the portals. Of course, such a potentially destructive experiment could not be conducted in his tower, he would need to be somewhere out in the countryside-

  "Huh? What?" Paedris suddenly realized Koren had been talking to him.

  "The basil, sir, I'll go get it now?"

  "Mmm, yes. I'll be in my study. I have an idea for an experiment that I want to write down, before I forget my thoughts."

  Koren walked quickly up the stairs, the regular, normal, real, stone stairs up to the roof, and opened the glass case to collect basil. If Paedris was thinking up an experiment, Koren wanted to be far away. He wrapped a small handful of the fragrant herbs in a clean cloth, then sat for a moment, looking out to the west, over the rooftops of Linden. The top of the wizard's tower was the highest point for many miles, and the view was thrilling. That day, Koren wasn't thinking of the view. He was thinking about how he lived w
ith an enormously powerful wizard, a man even more powerful that Koren had imagined. Paedris could stretch the fabric of the world! Koren didn't know what that meant, exactly, but one thing it meant was that he needed to remind himself, despite how nice, and jovial, and absent-minded Paedris was, that the man was the court wizard of Tarador, and Koren was a barely educated, homeless farmboy who had lucked into a place to live. Koren knew he had, since Paedris returned with the army, become overly familiar with the wizard, and not being properly respectful, or fearful, of the man's incredible power and station in life. If Koren hadn't saved the crown princess, it was likely he would never be able to look the wizard in the eye, in the extremely unlikely event they ever met.

  Koren went back down the stairs to the upper doorway, that he now knew to be a portal to another world. He peered into the stairway that didn't exist, but as there didn't appear to be any fog, he took a deep breath, and ran though the nonexistent stairway as fast as he could, stopping only when he crashed into the reassuringly real stone hallway at the bottom. He looked fearfully back up through the lower portal, grateful that the wizard didn't send him up to the upper floors often.

  Koren knew he was supposed to be quiet, and keep still, and not be noticed. He couldn’t help craning his neck to gawk around the throne chamber. It was filled with nobles, and their servants. Of all the servants, he was the only one standing next to the crown princess, on the floor below the steps that led to the throne where Carlana sat, with Paedris standing by her side. Ariana leaned toward Koren, close enough that he could inhale her perfume. Seeing her in her formal gown reminded him that she was royalty, and he nothing but a common servant, and he felt a bit ashamed. “I wish I was wearing your robes, Koren, the collar of this dress is scratching my neck.” She whispered.

  “I don’t think a crown princess is supposed to be wearing servant’s robes.” Koren whispered back. “Besides, that dress wouldn’t fit me.”