by Guy Antibes
Shiro took a deep breath. This train of thinking wouldn’t save Mistokko. He’d have to be more focused. He continued his walk around the outside of the Guildhouse compound until he found a door in the wall. The wards told him that the small side door hadn’t been open in a long, long time.
He smiled as he walked up and began to clear away the wards as another might wipe away cobwebs. No one would suspect him of using this door unless they could see the wards as he felt that few, if any, could. The clearing process took a bit longer because Shiro took care not to break the magical bonds. He merely stretched them aside. He sensed wards on the other side and, without being able to see the weaves, removing them took even longer.
The door wouldn’t budge, but Shiro had hoped for such a way into the compound from a place that no one would think to look. He took out a short thick knife and began to pry the edges of the door aside. Once that was done, he took a jar of grease out and slathered it on the ancient joints. He spoke the barest of spells to force the grease in between the surfaces of the rusted metal and gradually he worked the joints. The wooden bar that kept the door locked from the inside moved up and away with Shiro’s magic.
He slid into a tiny alleyway, about a half pace in width. A building had been built nearly against the wall. Moonlight painted it’s pale light over the narrow pathway. It had taken hours to get through the door, but he now walked the paths of the Guild House in complete anonymity.
Shiro thought he’d need to sit and recover his powers, but with his new sensitivities, living for weeks close to the valley nexus, his ability to absorb power had increased. He remembered that the Guildhouse sat on one and he used his Affinity to seek out the source. The tingling took a bit longer to feel, but soon his powers were back at full strength. It made sense. He wondered how many guilds were similarly situated.
He’d never tried to locate the energy pathways within the earth. Perhaps he’d study that once he returned to the valley with Mistokko. Shiro still felt he knew so little. Ashiyo tried to tell him otherwise, but sometimes, he didn’t fully trust everything the man told him.
He faced a courtyard and stood in the shadows, getting his bearings. The basement was close. He crept like a cat through the compound until he found the main building. Shiro pilfered Remmi’s domain for a sorcerer’s robe and put it over his black outfit and slipped into the building. He walked through the hallway, reaching out with his senses to see in the dark. This was another talent that sorcerers kept from the apprentices.
Light fought it’s way up through the stairwell enough to indicate the basement levels below.
Shiro’s tattoo had long been removed, but Ashiyo had drawn a facsimile in ink just before he had left their house with the straight line of a lesser sorcerer. Down he traveled. Mistokko would undoubtedly be kept at the lowest level and warded. It all seemed so easy. Too easy. He had expected more sorcerers about, even if it was in the middle of the night, but he found none.
He carefully walked past all of the cells. None had any openings, but fresh wards covered one of the doors. Where were the guards? Shiro squinted in the darkness, reasonably confident that he had walked some kind of trap. How would they know of his rescue attempt? The realization that they suspected his presence weighed down on him. Shiro refused to let his suspicions affect his decision. He teleported into a cell that showed no signs of being used in some time and decided to wait out the night. The cell would be his protection. He could teleport to the other side of the door at any time and escape.
The darkness of the cell together with his own inner tension worked to make his eyes heavy and after a few moments of fighting off drooping lids, Shiro fell into a light sleep.
Voices in the corridor woke him up.
“It didn’t work,” Yushidon said.
“I’m sure someone slipped past me in the night,”
“Guards…” Yushidon spoke the word as a distasteful slur. Shiro heard a cell door open. “You are still confined?”
“What do you expect, vermin!” Mistokko’s voice reverberated along the corridor. “He didn’t take your bait did he? Doesn’t surprise me. Do you think that Shiro would attempt to open that death trap you covered with wards?” The captain laughed. “I don’t know why someone would seek me out in this stinkhole of a guild. You overestimate my importance, Yushidon.” The door clanked shut and Mistokko’s voice became a muffled sound.
Yushidon continued his discussion with the guard. “Mistokko is still in the cell and you think someone walked past you? Well if he did, he obviously feared the wards, but didn’t touch them.”
“But he wouldn’t have found Mistokko, anyway,” the guard said.
“Shiro wouldn’t have known that. Perhaps he’ll try again tomorrow night. I’ll send a message to Roniki in Hoksaka and he’ll find out why the White Rose provided us with inaccurate information.”
The voices drifted away and Shiro heard them fade up the steps. He waited for any other sounds for some time before he teleported back into the corridor. He needed more light and examined the floor for evidence of where they kept Mistokko. There, on the damp floor, he saw some recent scuffs and then he transported into Mistokko’s cell.
The captain had lights at all four corners, while he sat on a bed, more of a shelf, really, built into the wall. “I wondered if that was you scratching around in the middle of the night.”
“I heard your voice well enough.” Shiro played at cleaning out his ear. He grinned and put his arms around the massive captain. “I have come to save you. I may need your ship.”
“Then let’s escape. Roniki has transported right into my cell before, so if you’ve learned how, we can just leave. I learned to levitate, but I never had the power to transport.”
Shiro didn’t think his exit would be so simple. He transported the both of them all the way to the inn he spent his first night on the way from Koriaki to Hoksaka.
“I would have taken us to the nexus valley or Hoksaka, but it appears…”
“I heard. Roniki probably has my ship watched and you, honorable sir, have a traitor in your midst,” Mistokko said.
Shiro nodded as he helped Mistokko to his feet. The weather must have stretched from Roppon all the way to North Isle. The cold temperature in Boriako generally didn’t make it so far north, but Shiro still shivered. The weather tempted him to keep his sorcerer’s robe on, but he took it off.
“You look like a proper thief,” Mistokko said as he examined Shiro’s black garb. The captain wore dirty silk clothes, now sodden in the rain.
“It’s better than this green instructors robe.” Shiro tossed it deep into the bushes at the side of the road. “I think we both deserve a night at the inn just around the bend.” He adjusted the cover on the hilt of his sword as he disguised himself as Boreko and clapped Mistokko on the back. “So fill me in, why did they capture you?”
Mistokko rubbed his hands and then looked at Shiro with astonishment. “What… You look just like Boreko!”
Shiro laughed. “Something that the White Rose taught me. I’ll show you how it’s done, and then we won’t have to worry about being seen. Now your story.”
Mistokko shook his head. “Only once I get some hot wine in me, please.”
Shiro showed him how to disguise himself and he saw Shinku jog down the road. Shiro had no choice but to catch up to him.
Once they had sat down and ordered a morning meal with hot wine, enduring the skeptical glare of the innkeeper, Mistokko sat back and rubbed his eyes. The wine came.
“We travelled too far this morning and these old bones need lubrication.” Mistokko looked up into the disapproving eyes of the innkeeper as he downed his first up. “Ahhh. Does a body good.”
Shiro couldn’t help but smile. They had sat far enough away from the few people dining this early in the morning. “So what happened?”
The captain lifted his chin. “Your body needs a bit of warmth as well. I’ll not drink alone.”
Shiro happily obliged.
>
“I had a lady friend. Ah, Sumi. Beautiful little wench. She met me on the docks and asked me to winter in port. I never do that, you know. I now winter up in southern Besseti where it’s a bit warmer, but not in Roppon. Sure enough, Roniki and a gaggle of his sorcerers showed up to capture me. They put me in a warded cell. Not the one they tried to lure you into. I think I was there for three weeks.” Mistokko shrugged his shoulders.
“The Wicked Wind is still in good hands,” Shiro said. “Shinku” He kept quiet about ‘Sumi’. Could she be the same person? There were certainly enough Sumi’s walking about. His stomach turned at the prospect of the Guild having already taken over the White Rose. He desired the Guild and the White Rose to come to terms, but it appeared that the Guild still wanted Shiro dead.
Mistokko nodded. “Once they determined that I wouldn’t teleport out of the cell, they put me in a non-warded cell and used my old cell as a trap. Destroy those wards or call out my name and you’d be destroyed. How did you know?”
“They were too lax. I made it down there too easily. I decided to teleport into a cell and just wait. Yushidon came down and spoiled his own trap. I didn’t need to call out your name and just had to look for recent scuffs on the floor. That was pure luck.”
Mistokko clapped his hand on Shiro’s shoulder. “You are the luckiest man I know and here we are, both alive and free.”
Shiro furrowed his brow. “I don’t think we are very free. The White Rose Society is compromised and you’ve been captured. They knew I’d come for you again. It seems our prison is all of Roppon.” For the first time, Shiro felt utter defeat. How could he escape the Guild? The Sunstone didn’t give him any special powers other than a good boost of power from time to time.
“I can see you’ve given up. Your face betrays your bitterness,” Mistokko said.
“What choice do you have? You’ll go back to your ship and sail from port to port, never setting your foot on dry land again, right?”
Mistokko nodded.
“That’s giving up. Your prison is the sea. Mine is yet to be defined, but I can’t seem to shed envy and betrayal. It’s followed me from the time I left my village. Affinity hasn’t been a power; it’s been a curse. My life died along with my family. I’ve been a ghost flitting from here to there ever since.” Shiro took another cup of wine. He wiped away tears of frustration and depression. The feelings he continually fought began to prey upon him again. “I thought I had put all of that behind me. My family, Boreko, Ashiyo, you, others in the White Rose Society.” He shook his head and poured another cup of wine. “I guess I sought a family again. Something I’m destined not to have.”
“Boreko? What happened to him? Last I heard he mentored you and then you both disappeared.”
Shiro told him a quick version of his life after Boreko and he were transported to the desert of South Isle.
“What an adventure! You’ve done more than I ever could. That’s not a life? You’ve lived three or four since I left you off at Boriako. Now you’ve become the sorcerer I always knew you could be. Still good with a blade?”
“I’ll show you my sword work along the road,” Shiro said. He eagerly sought the rain and the cold as a distraction from his troubles.
The innkeeper sold them a couple of old musty cloaks and sent them on their way in the morning.
Shiro stopped Mistokko under a large pine tree some paces from the road. The rain seemed to let up and they sat on dry pine needles, shoulders touching as they leaned against the trunk.
“This is my sword.” He slid out the Sunstone sword and handed it to Mistokko.
“A foreign antique. I could tell the sword was exotic from the sheath, but this is a wonder. Ancient steel. What’s underneath this cover?”
Shiro leaned over and unwrapped the leather than hid the stone. “This is the Sunstone.”
Mistokko’s eyes seemed to glow in wonder. He just about touched it, but drew away his hand. “I don’t believe it. Where did you get this?”
“The Ropponi emperor that threw this away chose the far end of his empire, the prison island that I labored on with Boreko. I found it deep in the earth. It might have been buried, but the gods thought it had suffered enough in the lonely soil and here it is.”
“What does it do?” Mistokko asked.
“It recharges my power faster. I’ve had visions when I’ve touched it. Things that happened long ago. According to books I’ve read, it was used for communicating with the Emperor of all Goriati in ancient days until he disappeared. He had the Purestone and the other three, Moonstone, Bloodstone, and this were on the Besseti, Zarroni and Roppon.”
“Ah. I remember. The Moonstone was lost about the time of the rise of the Dark Lord and the Bloodstone is in the Red Kingdom in Besseti. You could retire if you sold that sword to the Emperor.”
Shiro shook his head. “If I did that, with my power, they’d just kill me for it. Lord Udishi nearly succeeded. They threw it away for some reason. I think the sword would be hidden from view again.”
“You’re right.”
Shiro looked off into the forest and the road beyond. “I think I’ll have to leave Roppon. It’s my home, but I don’t want to endanger anyone else.”
Mistokko put his hand to his chin. “I’ve heard that lords in Besseti are hiring mercenaries and that includes sorcerers. Few people have the power we have in Roppon. They will pay well and you will be well rid of Roppon. I have a mind to join you. Perhaps after we have amassed a fortune we can travel everywhere but the cursed lands of Ayrtani. I’ve been to the single port that lies on the entire southwestern coast. It’s a poor excuse for a land.”
“Where the great Emperor supposedly went mad and disappeared?”
Mistokko made a face. “With your power, you could banish the curse. A new land. Well, sparsely populated with natives that are little better than animals. I’d be willing to give it a try. If you fail, you can live in Besseti. Find a friendly kingdom and settle down.”
Shiro discounted the offered adventures in Ayrtani, but perhaps an exile of sorts would work. He was all but exiled in his own land, even now.
“ I’ll talk to Ashiyo and Chika.”
“Chika? Who’s she?”
“A friend and a warrior. We can be warrior-sorcerers. A company of such would be valuable in the petty squabbles that always crop up in Besseti.”
“Not always so petty, but certainly valuable,” Mistokko nodded his head. “Let’s go to the valley and find your traitor.”
“Who’s the traitor? You and I or the supporter of the emperor and the Guild?”
“Betrayal is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. I’m all for looking out through my own eyes,” Mistokko said.
“So am I,” Shiro said as he wrapped up the Sunstone and put his sword back in its sheath. He disguised the shape and repeated, “So am I.”
~~~
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
~
THEY CONTINUED TO TRAVEL EASTWARD towards the valley. Mistokko practiced with his disguises. He took on the form of one of his younger sailors when they stopped for a rest.
“Oh, how I wished I could have looked like a young man sooner!”
“You haven’t met Sumi, yet. I suspect that she is the same woman who betrayed you. Most White Rose Society members know the disguise trick. The real Sumi is middle aged and not that provocative.”
Mistokko’s face screwed up in mock pain. “Middle-aged? Oh, what a trickster.”
Shiro shrugged. “Look. I’m nearly middle-aged as Kinoru, an old friend from my village. I can tell when someone is in disguise. It takes a bit more power.” He showed Mistokko how.
“Now that you’ve taught me that trick, I can see that you look a little blurry around the edges.”
“That’s enough to detect a disguise and you’ll see more than a few employed in the village. A lot of the women are afraid to show their real faces. The South Isle has become a hostile place for women with Affinity.”
Mistok
ko picked up a thin broken branch and began to doodle in the drying mud as they talked. “I didn’t like being the lure to capture a friend. We were lucky to get out.”
“I know. I’ve been thinking as we walked. I find the concept of living in a different land more and more appealing. The thought of being a traitor has preyed upon my sense of honor. I suppose that’s a good thing since I’ve been focusing so much on simple survival.” Shiro gazed at Mistokko’s doodles. “That’s a map!”
“It is. Hoksaka is here and the Middle Ocean separates us from Besseti. We will have to sail far to the west and then struggle through the tides in the middle of the world. We then ride the current east and hopefully land at the port of Grianne. It’s a nice enough place and we can make landfall while it’s still summer. The southern edge of Besseti is home to a number of petty dukedoms. No ancient bureaucracy there. The boundaries shift as fortunes ebb and flow and new vulnerabilities catch the eye of their neighbors.
“To the north lies the Red Kingdom on the west and the land of Learsea to the east. Both have been large and stable, but I last heard that strife had hit the Red Kingdom. Some say the Emperor of the Dakkori stirs up trouble. I don’t know why. We Ropponi have little interest in other climes, but perhaps that will change, eh?”
Shiro stood up. “I yearn for change and our country fights against it.”
“It’s been that way for centuries and will continue. The difficulty of navigating the Middle Ocean has served well enough to kept us apart most of the time and we are different peoples in just about every way. Less magic to the north, that’s for sure.” Mistokko rose and obliterated his map and stretched.
“We’ll make it to Ashiyo’s house in the darkness. I rode a horse the last time I came this way.” It seemed like a lifetime ago, but Shiro wasn’t yet thirty years old and he, yet again, faced uncertainty and a bit of fear for his future riding the same path now. The journey would be different this time and one of his own making. He’d head north rather than south. Shiro made a smile that was closer to a grimace. “Let’s go.” He walked ahead of Mistokko. Scenarios of disaster plagued him for the rest of their journey.
