I kept my eyes locked with his as I replied, “These do not belong to the Empire; they belong to the people of Coldetz.” I suppressed the urge to cough as my voice turned hoarse, and my eyes began to water. “We keep them here unless we absolutely require them to find what we are looking for.”
Pi’Vari broke eye contact with me and sighed. “Such a waste, to have articles such as these locked away in some provincial castle,” he said wistfully. “But you are of course correct, Jezran. I do not believe we will require the presence of these original documents if you can confirm there is nothing magically hidden within them. If they are simply mundane documents, I can copy the entire collection in perhaps two days.”
I nodded. “Good call, Pi’Vari,” I said as I stood and moved to the table where he had laid the poster-sized scrolls. Aemir stood back slightly, and Dancer was already asleep on the other side of the room. Pi’Vari didn’t move an inch, as I had come to expect.
I closed my eyes and calmed myself. Augury and other forms of divination were notoriously sensitive, and even the smallest noise could interfere with a proper reading. When I felt like I had reached an appropriate state of mind, I willed the symbols I knew were needed for the spell I was to cast into my mind’s eye.
Casting a spell is an odd thing, at least in my experience. It’s kind of like mentally selecting a series of equations, but the relationship between them is usually counter-intuitive, unlike mathematics which is pretty straightforward when you understand the basic principles. The first step of casting a spell is to recall which symbols or equations are needed, but even more important than which symbols or characters are necessary, is the sequence and timing of their combination necessary to form a complex, functional structure.
I can’t explain why I was able to do any of it in the first place, but it came naturally enough and even felt ‘intuitive,’ if that’s the proper word. It was almost as though the right selections came to the forefront of my mind unbidden, and it was just a matter of ‘remembering’ how and when they went together, kind of like a familiar puzzle.
This particular spell was a complicated one, but it didn’t require much energy to cast. So I brought the right symbols together in my mind, and they formed a kind of triangle which glowed bright white in my mental landscape. Then I imagined that symbol, writhing and churning constantly but somehow maintaining its exact shape, to manifest itself on my forehead.
Satisfied that I had cast the spell correctly when I felt heat on my forehead, I opened my eyes. I can’t explain how it is to see with three eyes, especially when the third one doesn’t see like the other two, but that was what had happened.
I knew that it wasn’t really a third eye on my forehead, and was just the same white triangular shape I had envisioned in my mind’s eye glowing in the space above my eyes, but it still made me self-conscious.
I looked over the papers one by one, as I knew I could maintain the spell as long as was necessary considering how little power it required, but after only a few minutes I had read all of the papers except the last.
When I came to that paper, I froze. It was covered with the same scribbling as the other ones, as well as a few unfamiliar diagrams, but it was what I saw beneath the ink that caught my eye.
There were colors cascading back and forth, like laser-lights at a dance club. I tried to focus on them individually, but just when I thought I had tracked one down long enough to get a good look at it, it broke into two very different bits of swirling light. Those lights in turn danced hypnotically across the page, tearing my attention in two different directions.
For a moment I couldn’t resist the urge to try to maintain focus on them, even when they each split into two more, quite different bits of flashing color whose speed appeared to have increased. In frustration, I narrowed my focus and followed them all the way through to the third division. I was then following eight separate bits of light, and my mind felt ready to burst at the strain.
I closed my eyes, turned my head away abruptly and cut power to the Third Eye spell. “All of them except this one are normal,” I said, never having taken my hands off the enchanted scroll. A bout of vertigo overcame me and I steadied myself against the table to prevent myself from falling to the floor.
“What does it say?” Pi’Vari asked eagerly.
I shook my head a few times before opening my eyes, trying to clear the cobwebs caused by my attempt to read the magical writings. “It’s encrypted,” I explained, “I could probably break it with a few weeks of study, but we don’t have that kind of time.”
Pi’Vari’s shoulder slumped slightly. “I suppose that one must come with us, then,” he said with mock regret.
I nodded as I rolled it up carefully. “I agree. I might get lucky and be able to decipher it on the road, but even if I can’t, we still have to take it with us,” I said regretfully before continuing, “Which means we might as well take the whole lot and save ourselves the time it takes you to transcribe them.” I returned the sheets to their original order before carefully placing them inside the scroll tube. “I need to make an official request for these before we go,” I said absent-mindedly, waving the tube as though to remind myself.
“We have a destination, then?” asked Aemir hopefully.
Pi’Vari and I nodded. “The sketching of the flying monsters also showed an unmistakable landmark, which appears to be where the author observed the creatures,” Pi’Vari explained.
Aemir nodded enthusiastically, “What is this landmark, then?” he asked as he moved to the bed he had stowed his gear under.
Pi’Vari hesitated and looked at me. I allowed a grin to play out on my face before turning to Aemir, “Let’s just say you’ll need some warmer clothes.”
Chapter VI: On the Road Again
The great, dome-shaped peak of the northernmost mountain depicted in the drawings loomed before us after nearly two weeks of travel on foot. The weather had turned wet almost as soon as we had set out, and two weeks of walking in the mud and rain had proven enough to test our patience.
The mountain was large enough that it wore what I supposed was a permanent crown of ice which extended about a third of the way down from the top. It was the mountain’s distinctive shape that made it the obvious destination, as neither Pi’Vari, nor anyone else in Coldetz knew of a similar mountain.
“I thought wizards could fly,” grumbled Aemir as he brought up the rear. He was much more heavily bundled in layers of clothing than I had ever seen him in our travels together, but he still shivered and fidgeted with his hands to keep them warm.
Dancer grunted his agreement from his position in the lead. Dancer had taken a grey bearskin cloak from Coldetz, and he looked surprisingly fierce with the head of the bear worn over his own like something out of a cartoon. The cold really didn’t seem to bother the little man all that much, in any event.
Pi’Vari tisked from beside me. “Only wizards with the proper licenses can use regulated magics like flight for travel,” he chided for what had to have been at least the tenth time in recent days. “Otherwise, the sky would be filled with wizards flitting about this way and that, which would be a very unseemly—not to mention dangerous—situation.” Pi’Vari’s clothing hadn’t changed since Coldetz, due to his incredible tolerance for different climates.
Pi’Vari had the currently envious luxury of bearing a blood connection to a mystical creature of some kind. He had always been reluctant to divulge details on this aspect of his heritage, but I had learned that such connections were often part of larger bargains struck between people and the powers that lie beyond our world. The most likely scenario was that his great grandfather or grandmother made a pact with a supernatural creature of some sort, and their blood would bear the mark to some degree for all time. A fringe benefit of this mingling was an incredibly high tolerance to heat, cold, and apparently even low levels of oxygen.
“We didn’t have time to apply for any licenses before we left Veldyrian,” I reminded them. “
Besides, the price would have been absurd.”
I heard Aemir shaking his head from the rustling his head wrapping made. “Your Empire is a very, very strange place,” he said bitterly.
Again, Dancer grunted his agreement.
“You’ll get no argument from me,” I remarked casually as I skirted a particularly nasty mud hole. The absurdity of the bureaucratic mess in Veldyrian was truly unbelievable, and this is coming from someone who once studied to be a tax accountant in the USA before deciding it wasn’t my cup of tea.
Special magics like flight weren’t the only things which were regulated in the Empire. In order to legally cast a spell of almost any kind, you had two options: the first was to research the spell entirely on your own and then apply for an Imperial patent. The patent approval process was actually fairly quick to resolve, but in the event that your own version of a given spell too closely resembled one which was already registered, your application was denied and you could even be sued for what effectively amounted to copyright infringement.
If the spell you wanted was beyond your own ability to create independently, or if it was one you simply didn’t want to spend months or years researching, then you had to use the second option: apply to whichever House held a patent for that particular spell effect and pay for a license according to a predetermined value, which was set at the time of the patent’s initial approval. That number was reviewed periodically by the Inner Circle of High Wizards, with adjustments made as they saw fit.
The problem with this option is that the House holding the patent was the final arbiter of who could or couldn’t carry licenses to use their proprietary magics, and while there were laws on the books to prevent the Houses from simply charging more money if they wanted to gouge a prospective customer, there was nothing to prevent them from skirting the letter of the law and requesting a new client to undergo an evaluation of sorts.
There were certain extenuating circumstances which allowed for limited access to a House’s magic assets, but they required a fairly significant commitment in one form or another, and the only House with whom I currently had such an arrangement was House Listoh (otherwise known as ‘The Guild’), and they had made it pretty clear that I wouldn’t be receiving further access than what I had already been granted.
So, the long story made short goes like this: no member of House Wiegraf (which wasn’t even as old as its Master, Magos Antolin) had researched any magics to aid in travel over great distances at speed, so we were stuck with walking.
Aemir continued his grumbling after a while. “We should have at least acquired fresh horses. We would have already been there if we had ridden,” he complained.
“No horses,” Dancer quipped. “Horses weak; not go this way,” he elaborated with a tilt of his head toward the mountain.
I nodded. “Besides, there’s nothing for them to eat,” I said, waving my arm at the barren landscape. “It doesn’t look like grass has grown here for years, and we can’t afford another mule train disaster.”
Pi’Vari snorted, probably in agreement. Our previous venture into the wilds to harvest some of Antolin’s private fungus gardens had been planned around a pack of mules, and while they had actually helped at first, eventually they provided too tempting of a target and more than half of them had been killed in an ambush.
Defeating the brigands had been no great test of our abilities, but afterwards we decided that the mules presented too great of a liability, so we opted to travel light this time. We were faster this way, but the food was also considerably less desirable.
Fortunately, Aemir was pretty good with spices so at least our food had a little bit of flavor to it.
“Night falls soon,” Aemir observed, and I was surprised to find that he was right. It seemed like we had only eaten lunch a few hours before. “We should find a site for camp,” he said, pointing toward a small copse of dead shrubs down a nearby gully.
I was forced to agree. We needed to get a fire started quickly if we were to avoid the harsh onset of night’s freezing winds. It was unnatural just how far out of balance this entire region had become, and frankly it was amazing that Coldetz had held out as long as it had. Plummeting morale should have been enough to bring them down, but they defiantly stood their ground in the face of an implacable foe.
It was exactly that defiance which made me want to help them. Their struggle to maintain their independence was something which I desperately wanted to be part of, even at great personal risk. My life had been turned upside down even before I had been mysteriously brought here, but I had gained new perspective since arriving. I had gifts, and I needed to use those gifts to do what I thought was right, and helping the people of Coldetz was clearly the right thing to do.
“We should start a fire,” I suggested, “an early winter night would be bad enough even without the unnatural decay here.”
Dancer shook his head. “Fire no good. Easy target,” he argued.
“It’s a risk we have to take, Dancer,” I ordered. “It’s not just our bodies that this unnatural cold drains at night.” The morning following each night we had camped, I had found my magic reserves to be less replenished than they should have been. Normally, I was able to fully recharge in just a few days, but it had been two weeks since the battle at Coldetz, and I had only just regained most of my magical strength.
Pi’Vari nodded. “I have felt it as well,” he agreed, “there is something here which seems to slowly gnaw upon magic itself.” Pi’Vari’s training had left him sensitive to significant magical disruptions, as well as allowing him to create the most rudimentary effects. And I had been working with him to ‘expand’ that level of sensitivity during recent months with significant success.
Dancer shook his head again. “Not weaker,” he said, shaking his spear defiantly.
I nodded patiently. “Yes, Dancer,” I said in mild exasperation, “your spear’s magic is different from my own. That’s why it is not so greatly affected,” I explained. The truth was that I had checked his weapon a few times in the last week, and it had in fact weakened slightly during our exposure to this harsh region. The drain had been less significant than I had expected, but given another month of exposure, I was pretty sure that the enchantments bound within the curious tribal totem would fall apart.
Fortunately, the disc-shaped Spell Key I had received in trade from Arch Magos Rekir seemed impervious to this drain. I still didn’t understand how the object actually functioned, or the method of its construction, but I was thankful to have it. Master Antolin’s staff and robes, which I had kept in a bundle strapped across my back, were also not showing any signs of degradation. I had no idea how to use them, and I really didn’t have any desire to do so, but I also thought it best to keep them close.
After a half hour, we had made our camp around a fire, which had been more difficult than usual to start. Sleep that night would not be easy to come by, but I was certain that we would reach the foot of the mountain before noon the following day. After everything I had already been through, it was almost a relief to be potentially so close to the source of the problem.
Chapter VII: A Puzzle
We failed to get much sleep that night, but we did manage to rest and regain at least some of our strength.
After yet another less-than-inspiring meal to start the day, we set out for the base of the mountain.
“Do you yet have a notion as to how we intend to enter the mountain?” Pi’Vari asked.
I nodded. “I believe the notes indicate that the entrance he used was a small crevice on the southern edge of the snow cap,” I replied. I had climbed mountains before, and had actually considered it fun going up Mt. Adams and Mt. Shasta with friends. But in this body, there was no way it would be remotely enjoyable. “It’s listed as sitting beneath a large, sheer cliff face with red streaks.”
Aemir rubbed his hands, even though I doubted there was any heat generated by the movements, due to all of the layers of clothing he had used to wrap eve
ry inch of his body. “We go to the snow?” he asked in surprise.
“Yes, we go to the snow,” I replied.
“What exactly was the nature of this ancient wizard’s observations?” inquired Pi’Vari. “Noting how he entered the place where he saw these creatures would seem to indicate that he desired to return at a later date.”
I had arrived at a similar conclusion, so I merely nodded as I finished strapping my master’s robe-wrapped staff to my back.
My herald continued smoothly, “Which would further seem to indicate that he felt there was something of value to be found beneath the mountain, and that such value was worthy of the risks associated with securing it.”
I shrugged, hoping to dissuade further discussion on the subject. “Or maybe he was merely cataloguing everything as exactly as he could, so that he might sell the location to the highest bidder?” I offered.
Pi’Vari seemed to consider this for a moment. “I suppose,” he answered simply, but he was pretty clearly not buying my proffered rationale.
After nearly an entire day’s worth of climbing (more than half of which on my part required Aemir’s assistance) we saw the sheer cliff face with streaks of red mentioned in the old writings. We had paced ourselves, since we all knew that to exhaust me before we even arrived at our destination was a recipe for certain disaster, but even so I was nearing my physical limits.
“Well,” Aemir said, “we f-found it,” he bit out somewhat less than triumphantly through chattering teeth. We were only a few hundred meters from the snow cap of the mountain, and there was already a noticeable difference in temperature between here and where we had made camp the previous night.
Pi’Vari, still seemingly unaffected by the cold, scanned the surface of the cliff face. “Were there any patterns in the cliff face which would assist us in discerning the location of the crevice?” he asked, his eyes flicking this way and that across the landscape.
Revelation (Seeds of Humanity: The Cobalt Heresy) Page 7
