To him, I am the one and only Farima: his progeny, his precious daughter, the one pure thing he helped bring into the world. He does not see my fossil bones, my smooth muscles of clay, or my skin of dry papyrus and rags; Mother’s enduring glamours camouflage my true nature. He has no inkling that every day here in the glittering city of Proximus is an agony to me, away from our home near the Source, the ultimate engine of my animation.
And to Mother? I was only ever a convenient tool of misdirection and revenge. Created in a moment of desperate need, she molded me from the materials at hand only days before she was driven into fatal exile. She instilled in me a single purpose: to fool Father into believing I was his daughter whilst the real Farima and Mother fled beyond the Wizard’s Wall, forever beyond his reach. She discarded me with hardly a thought.
Still, it is her blood that infuses my being; her guiding hands and mind which made me. I am as much Mother’s creation as that other child of hers, my namesake sister, the Farima of flesh and bone. Where is she now, my dear sister? Has she made good her escape from Father’s clutches? Is she living somewhere in Proximus, disguised as a scullery maid, or a rich merchant’s wife? Perhaps she has flown to the Far Kingdoms and joined a rag-tag band of rebels, plotting the downfall of the King and all his prohibitions on free magic. Maybe she has settled down, content with her lot, as a fish wife with a bawling flesh-baby of her own.
I do not think so. My sister was as beguiled by the Source as my mother. I know where she is—as close as she can possibly be to that mysterious place that is fatal to all mortals, where the magic field increases in strength the closer you approach until it first drives you mad and then kills you. That is where Mother and the real Farima are: somewhere in the warped, rippling landscape beyond the Wizard’s Wall, their cold and desiccated fingers stretched towards an unreachable goal, burned by its irresistible flame. I would join them in an instant, if I could.
As it is, I am just their echo. A temporary measure. A diversion.
A clay doll, made to fool.
* * *
“I’ve been a fool.” Father hurls a porcelain teacup across the room. It smashes against the lavishly painted wall, leaves a darkening stain. He breathes rapidly as he glares at the fragments.
We have returned to our Proximus residence, a grand villa in the grounds of the King’s palace: a maze of richly decorated and furnished rooms and halls, with fragrant gardens full of dancing pools and yew clipped in the shape of gladiatorial dragons. A hateful place, to my mind: a gilded pen to contain us at the King’s behest. Thankfully, Father is only required to be here a few weeks in the year, the rest of his time spent battling the free magician’s in the Far Kingdoms, or with me, at home in Cradlegate, near the Wizard’s Wall and the Source.
He paces the room, still dressed for the dinner in his formal dragonmaster uniform of black and silver. Zeffron’s flame-licked notes are scattered on the floor around him, a few crumpled sheets grasped in his hand. He curses. “It wasn’t free magic at all. The King knows damned well who killed him.”
“Who, Father?”
More sheets fly from his hand as he whirls to look at me. It’s as if he has only just realized I am still in the room, although I helped him gather the notes earlier after he had tossed them on the floor. I take another cup of tea from the tray I have brought in and offer it to him. My hands do not tremble.
“Gah.” It looks for one moment as if Angry Father is about to be unleashed—but he merely brushes the offered cup aside and slumps into the chair beside the arched glass window. He stares out at the yew dragons in the garden below. The sun has set, and the shadows of the fierce topiary beasts dance in the breeze-twisted torchlight. Somewhere outside in the city a bell tolls the hour.
“The King ordered Zeffron killed, didn’t he?”
Again Father looks at me. I fear that I, too, will be swept against the wall, smashed to tiny clay pieces, but Father just slumps further into his seat and nods. “Yes, I think so.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. But it has something to do with this.” He waves the sheaf of notes at me. “You’re not to repeat this to anyone, Farima, do you understand? Not a word—unless you want me nailed to a cross outside the palace walls, or dangling in the air with my guts spilled out.”
“I won’t say anything.”
Father looks down at the notes but his eyes do not see them. His voice becomes thoughtful, soft. “It’s long been thought there were eddies and currents in the magic field, but according to this, Zeffron created an apparatus sensitive enough to make accurate measurements. He found a consistent flow. A direction to magic.” Father stares up at me, as if he has said something of the utmost significance. “His measurements show that the direction of magic, the flow of the field, is towards the Source. Not away.”
I look at the field that swirls around us. Despite Father’s reaction, Zeffron’s discovery is no surprise to me. I know Father cannot see it, and for a moment I almost feel sorry for him. Not that quartz and clay and stone can feel.
The field is as obvious to me as a current to a fish or a breath of wind to a bird: it dances all around us, its wispy filaments aligned with that fierce beating vortex beyond the Wizard’s Wall. I have long since come to realize that people cannot see or sense the same things I can, so I do not speak of them; it would reveal my true nature, and that is forbidden by The Rules.
I say, “What does it mean, Father? Why would the King have Zeffron killed for that?”
Father frowns. “I don’t know.” He scans the dense scribbles, the cramped line-drawn diagrams. “This overturns everything we thought we knew about the Source. It’s not the fount of all magic—it’s actually drawing magic away from the world. The gradient created by that process, the Source concentrating the field around itself, that’s what makes magic so strong here in the Near Kingdoms.” Father’s lips move silently for a moment as he reads the bloodstained notes. He stabs his finger at a crumpled page. “Here it is. Zeffron had a plan. To get nearer the Source than anyone has before.”
I try not to show it, but my interest spikes. Everyone knows the Source cannot be approached. The magic grows too strong, too quickly, to allow anyone to survive being close to it.
“He’s formulated a spell—one that feeds on magic, that draws its power against itself. The caster is left inside a zone of no magic. Zeffron probably first developed it to use against the free magicians, but then he must have realized its true potential.”
“Potential?”
Father stands. “Ah, but this was Zeffron’s genius. Don’t you see, Farima? With such a spell you could walk through the Wizard’s Wall and beyond it, farther than any human being has gone for thousands of years... perhaps right to the Source itself.” He stares out the window.
“And he told the King?”
“Of course.” Father holds up a tattered page. He stares at it for a long while, and then mutters under his breath. The page curls and smokes and bursts into flame. He shakes his fingers and ash drifts to the marble floor.
“What did you just do?” I ask, although I know. He thinks he is now the only one who knows the spell.
The hour bell tolls across the city again, and he glances at an elaborate clock standing in its carved wooden cabinet near the door. “It’s past your bed time, Farima. Mention none of what I’ve said to anyone. Not a soul. Do you understand?”
“But, Father—”
“To bed, Farima.” His voice and stony gaze brook no argument. Father has his own Rules too, and Angry Father does not hesitate to enforce them.
I bow my head. “Good night, Father.”
Later, when I hear his familiar snores and I’m sure he is in his usual nightmare-laden sleep, I slip out of our gilded house, between the rows of snarling hedge dragons, to the real one chained up and feeding noisily outside the courtyard.
It is not in The Rules, but it is clear to me what I must do now.
* * *
They say that Mevl
ish the Mighty’s witch-wife, Princess Kaffryn of Admar, grew fey. Her mind became damaged from living too near the Source. She abandoned her husband, young daughter, and the grey fastness of Cradlegate to build her own tower beside the Wizard’s Wall, so close to the extreme edge of magic that few could approach it. They say that despite Mevlish’s entreaties she would not budge from her self-styled Lighthouse, spending her days and nights regarding the Wall and the unreachable pass that lay beyond it.
Trapped by her obsession for magic—refusing to see anyone, not even her own daughter—she eventually withered away. Her spirit still haunts that empty bone-white outpost by the Wall, wailing regrets to any who are willing to hear. The demons that lurk near the heart of magic claimed her soul for their own, capering now within her hollowed out skin, tempting and taunting those foolish enough to wander too close.
These stories are not true... except perhaps one.
Those times when Father is away and his telltale servants are busy, I creep out of Cradlegate and trek the half-mile or so up the mountain valley to the location of the Wall. I stand there and listen. And sometimes I think I can hear Mother’s voice, calling.
I have explored the abandoned Lighthouse, moved through its rooms grown warped and strange from prolonged exposure to magic. There is no sign of Mother there; not even of her spirit. A few of her servants wander there still: persistent kobolds determined to dust, garden, and otherwise maintain the folly they helped build; other barely sentient guardians squat over chests of past-their-best alchemical supplies and obsolete magical equipment. The place is haunted, certainly, but only by my own memories of my birth there.
I have tried to follow Mother and my sister, cross through the Wizard’s Wall myself. As a creature of magic, I thought myself immune to the strength of the field; I thought I would be unaffected by the madness inflicted on mortals. I managed to climb past Mother’s tower, past the last warped skeletons of the ambitious and the foolish, but only a few yards beyond the Wall the magic became too strong even for me. My vision swam, sparks flew from my dead twig fingers.
The feeling of strength was immense, intoxicating. I felt like a giant marching across the boiling landscape; I felt I could leap across mountains... but even in the midst of the exhilaration, I knew it was an illusion. The field was tearing me apart.
My bones cracked beneath muscles grown too strong for them. Every move I made tore ligaments of string and tendons of rope; the dry salt crystals of my eyes sweated grit tears. I had no choice but to turn back, just barely past the last human skeletons. They were not those of Mother or the real Farima. Their final resting place remains a mystery, far beyond my reach.
Until now.
* * *
Outside our grand apartment in Proximus, Gron is feeding at his specially constructed trough. Unlike Mother, who hated and feared Father’s dragons, I have grown up with the creatures and do not mind them. Gron is the oldest and the largest.
I step before his monstrous snout as he devours a half-rotted sheep’s carcass and kick him as hard as I can, dancing away from the burst of flames.
“Shhh!” I say. “Don’t wake everyone up.”
He shakes his head from side to side; his fierce yellow eyes squint at me.
“We’re going for a ride,” I say, my tone both nonchalant and full of authority. With dragons, as with people and dogs, expect a thing to be done, Father says, and it will be done.
Gron growls in approval, weary—as am I—of our distance from the Source and the relative weakness of magic here. Only around Cradlegate is the balance just right for creatures like us.
He rises, unfurls his wings. I stumble back, driven by gusts of hot air. The heavy iron chain around his neck snaps taut, tied to the anchor buried deep beneath the flagstones.
If Gron harbors any misgivings about the lack of Father’s presence, he does not show it. He is familiar enough with me. I grab a riding stick from the nearby rack and scramble up the worn stepping scales onto his ridged back. The windows in our villa remain darkened as I utter the release spell, overheard so many times as I sat clutching Father’s waist from behind. It pains me to speak the words of magic, drawing on my limited and irreplaceable supply of power, but the chain unravels from around Gron’s neck and he lurches onto his hind feet with a flame-throated snarl.
“Home,” I cry. “To Cradlegate!”
It is a lie, but it’s close enough to serve my purpose. The diversion I have in mind is towards the end of the flight, regardless.
Gron turns awkwardly, an elephantine shuffle, before extending his wings and launching into the air. The down-sweep sends us lurching upwards; we plummet, then we lurch up again, repeated until we have cleared the top of our guest-villa. The turrets and spires of the palace, all the golden night-time glow of Proximus unfold below us, a crescent of light hugging tight against the ragged boundary where the land becomes too wild and too full of magic for most people to live.
Gron’s wings beat more gently after we gain height. The air grows chill. We angle east, away from the dying light, towards a dark anvil of thunderous cloud. Deeper into the magic field, towards Cradlegate, and beyond it, the mountains that hold the Source.
I can feel the strength of magic increasing with every sweep of Gron’s wings. If I had a heart instead of a cold quartz stone, it would be beating so fast it might burst.
* * *
And there it is: the Wizard’s Wall, rotating below us as Gron banks and descends through the drifting rainclouds towards the place I know as home. A sharp tug on the stick lodged between the scales of his neck, and our course alters. We sweep past Cradlegate’s tower and the grey stone harbor of the dragon stables, closer to the Wall and the ruins of the Lighthouse, my mother’s last stronghold and the place where I was created. The landscape is all too familiar to me, the ground once churned and formed into armies as Mother fought Father over the destiny of their only child.
I try not to think about that overly much.
Gron settles in a cloud of dust, still some distance from the Wall. Even he, this great creature bred only through the power of magic, has a healthy respect for the strength of the field here. I pat his heaving side—who knows if he can feel my friendly pounding through his inches-thick coat of black, iron-tough scales—and dismount onto the rocky ground. Gron shifts uneasily, but he stays put. It is a good sign. If Father had called him, even from Proximus, he would have returned at once. I have some time yet.
Limestone cliffs loom on either side of the narrow valley, their pale faces reflecting the green light of the aurora that hangs constant above and beyond the Wizard’s Wall. The rising ground between them is littered with rubble and dry stream beds. Nothing much lives here; nothing much can: the magic field is too strong, too inimical to life. Only dust and half-forgotten memories drift through the valley.
Gron snorts flame and growls his discomfort at being so close to the Wall. Much as it will pain me—and I know that it will—it is time to cast Zeffron’s spell.
I am a creature of magic. Each spell I cast draws from the original, irreplaceable well of power Mother vested in me. It is the one failing of mine guaranteed to rouse Angry Father; my apparent unwillingness to use magic infuriates him. At first he blamed it on the trauma of separation from Mother, and for the first few years his own guilt stayed his hand, but over time it has become more difficult to placate him.
Ironic, considering I probably know far more about magic than he ever will; every night when he is asleep, and every day he is away fighting for the King, I sneak past my easily distracted minders into Cradlegate’s vast and ancient library and devour every book I can lay my hands on. Spell books, dictionaries, tomes on history and philosophy; my stone memory is perfect and it takes only seconds for me to memorize whatever I see. If I were to cast even a fraction of the spells I know, my body would soon be reduced to inanimate dust.
But this spell is special. It will take most of my—of Mother’s—life force to cast it. But if it works..
..
I begin the incantation, the one I glimpsed in Zeffron’s notes as I helped Father gather them from the villa floor. Mother would have scorned my use of incantation, of a spell constrained by word and speech; it was yet another reason her marriage to Father was doomed. She believed in free magic, in shaping the world by will and whim, unfettered by use of written spells approved and censored by the King. But I have no such choice.
The spell is not long, but it is convoluted. The words and ululations weave a pattern in my mind; cause it to interact with the field, to set up complex self-sustaining perturbations that reinforce and overlay themselves... that make and hence unmake magic.
The spell takes hold, and I experience a moment of elation. It is working! The magic field plummets in strength around me. The Wall will no longer be a barrier.
Then dismay.
All strength leaves me. I tumble to the ground, a fall of rocks. I try to lift a hand grown as heavy as a mountain. It trembles with the effort, but does not shift.
Oh, but I have been a fool. For all the books and grimoires and encyclopedias of human knowledge I have feasted upon, Zeffron’s spell has exposed my true nature. Without magic to bind me together, I am nothing more than a jumble of sticks and stones and wishes and hopes. The magic that sustains me is leeching away.
With a deep roar, Gron launches himself into the dust-laden air. I watch, helpless and unable to move, as he flies back in the direction of Proximus.
* * *
Mother is building.
Rock and dirt. Twigs, sticks and stones. All manner of debris taken from the dry, rocky soil that surrounds the Lighthouse. Her hands work the material, binding it with magic and blood, with love and with hate, with fear and courage.
She is building me.
“These are The Rules, my new daughter. Do you understand?”
I remember nodding. Knowing that nodding meant “yes”. Mother’s blood has mingled with my being and given me this knowledge.
“Never reveal what you are. Not under any circumstances. You will appear to be a girl, and that is what you must make others believe you are.”
Beneath Ceaseless Skies #128 Page 3
