Scott J Couturier - [The Magistricide 01]

by The Mask of Tamrel (epub)

  Tamrel recoiled from her outburst, his fingers fluttering as the wounds sealed laboriously shut. “Masks are sacred things, my lady,” he said when the final broken string of the lute had ceased to vibrate. “I see that you wear one. I wear one. Kelrob wears one. While it is my sacred duty to tear aside veils and dispel lies, I am not in the business of breaking masks. To do so would be quite hypocritical of me, I think. No, my lady, the mask is the necessary artifice of awareness: we wear them to embody their meaning, to shed individuality, to find self amid myriad representation, and above all to taste the absurd, for who but a jester dons a mask? Truth is the mask we hang on a pitiless universe, a means of direction, the grand identifier hovering like a sun in the meaningless void. What I show you is indeed facsimile, for truth is without substance. It is the work of art — or magic, if you wish to dabble in semantics - to shape truth into discernible form, to summon it as the shamans of old once called gods from the mountaintops and homunculi from the abyss. I, a bodiless being, can embody nothing, only personify in song what is beyond all veils, the mask and ultimate visage of Truth.” Tamrel bowed, and held up his hands, which were now unblemished, purged of any wound. “As you have requested, I shall sing no more songs of you. But I shall not cease to write them. I see the potential of all beings, the contours of their masks if you will; yours is cracked, my lady, but mending. With a few simple songs I could speed that mending.”

  Nuir frowned, tossing her sable braid. “You talk too much,” she said. “I thought you were eager to play? Instead you stand there blathering like some roadside prophet. Kelrob, grab that harp up on the third tier, to the left of the didgeridoo display. The one without any strings.”

  Kelrob obeyed, climbing up the circular stone tiers and removing the instrument from its pedestal. It was a hand-harp cut from amber-colored cherrywood, the grain enhanced with abstract carvings whose subtlety was pleasing to the touch. He knew upon lifting it that it was an enchanted object; there were no visible strings, but threads of energy ran between the sharping levers and the soundboard, invisible to the naked eye. As he tucked the harp under his arm Kelrob contemplated Tamrel’s words, wishing that it was not necessary to destroy or defeat the bard. He yearned to sit at Tamrel’s feet — Jacobson’s feet, he reminded himself — and simply listen, not to songs but to words. He allowed himself to perceive the world as a parade of masks, some grinning and jovial, some calm and contemplative, some glowering with sadness or rage or cunning, all reflections and permutations of one universal face, which was Truth; and as he reached the oval of chalcedony at the room’s center and held the harp out to Tamrel, he almost crumbled with the desire to give himself over to the bard, all loathing forgotten. But a sudden realization struck him, quelling the renewed temptation: anything Tamrel could reveal he would need to immediately discuss with Jacobson. A warmth welled in Kelrob’s heart, followed by a sharp coldness, a fear that he would never have the chance to simply sit with Jacobson and talk mysteries and mundanities over a few pints of ale. Tamrel reached out and accepted the harp from his hands, fingers trailing over the cherrywood frame, and Kelrob’s perception of the bard as an abomination renewed a thousandfold, almost caused him to be ill. He watched as Jacobson’s stolen body bent over the harp, watched as his purloined fingers sensed out the presence of the ethereal strings, and for the first time truly and completely understood that he yearned for the simple pleasure of Jacobson’s presence more fiercely than he craved the deepest and most forbidden secrets of arcane lore.

  “Well now,” Tamrel said, his fingers fluttering at the air, “this is a most curious creation.” He tried plucking at the unseen strings, was rewarded with a discordant twangling. “Very curious indeed. A product of human sorcery, quite advanced for working with such crude tools. I was not aware that the Isdori boasted luthiers amongst their number.”

  “Wonder-Worker is the technical term,” Kelrob said. “They occupy the Seventh Circle of specialization in the Arcanum. Not all work with music, but those that do are very, very skilled.”

  Tamrel’s fingers moved with gentle patience, sounding out the inchoate strings, harsh discordance quickly supplanted by a simple, gentle melody. “Ingenious,” he said. “The energy can be manipulated not only by physical action, but by the player’s will. It took me a moment to perceive the interface. Sound manipulated by pure intention...perhaps you creatures are not as lost as I thought.” With a laugh of joy Tamrel raised the harp and plucked with masterful dexterity over the energetic strings. His eyes shone a jubilant azure, and the harp answered, the etchings in the wood flaring with sapphire light.

  The music was a wave, a swell, the shift and movement of seaweed in the fluid grip of the ocean. The strings wailed into tumbling crescendos, vast waves wearing a mountain into sand. Kelrob closed his eyes against his own will, hearing in the thunder and fall of the those waves the steady, plodding beat of his own heart, the hungry-but-patient persistence of his mind. An image formed before his sealed eyes, and he flew to it, settling on the edge of an alien ocean as it roared and gnawed at a bow of pearlescent sand. A figure stood on the shore, naked save for a coil of living vines that draped his body, the water boiling over his feet and leaving traces of foam on his ankles. His frame was willow-thin, taut with subtle musculature; in his right hand he held a silver goblet engraved with curious sigils, in the left a struggling, bleating lamb. Moving slowly, methodically, the man set the goblet on the sand, then took a curved dagger from its bowl, holding it up against the lamb’s squirming breast. He called out in an unknown tongue, his words melding with the crash and growl of the waves; then, drawing back the dagger, he sunk it deep in the soft, curling wool of the lamb’s chest. Blood spurted, and the man bent beside the chalice, letting the effluence flow until it had almost filled the silver bowl. The lamb twitched, bleating softly as it surrendered to death; at last it was still, and the man laid it down at the water’s edge, the waves quickly claiming the body and washing it out to sea. Taking the chalice, he rose, the living vines draping his body rippling in the fierce sea-wind, and crying out words in the same unknown tongue he tossed the blood into the hungry maw of the tide, where it swirled and eddied and dyed the foam a frothing crimson. The man watched silently as the blood lapped against his ankles, and then, with a jubilant cry, he raised his arms to the sea and spoke in the ancient tongue, which Kelrob now recognized as a language of high magic. Above the sea vast clouds boiled, swirling like egg yolk distended in water, but as the man cast his spell they parted with a great billowing, revealing the twin moons of Dephon and Ilian glowing full and gravid in the late evening sky. The man raised his hands and twisted them, a harsh motion of command; Kelrob gasped as the moons moved in tandem with the gesture, drawing closer together, the bloodied light of Dephon melding with Ilian’s bone-pale glow. The vine-draped man continued to chant, the reddened surf boiling at his feet, and the moons obeyed his command, drawing closer and closer in the darkling sky until they collided with a great, shuddering groan that blasted the remaining clouds from the firmament. Cracks appeared in their cratered surfaces, expanding to great rifts that spilled forth wellsprings of silver-crimson light. The man began to dance in the waves, his limbs flapping and contorting, driving the great bodies into mutual destruction. Kelrob watched in horrified awe as the moons ground each other into trails of luminous dust, red and silver lambency commingling into a cloud of glowing particles. Then — Kelrob fell to his knees in the sand, overwhelmed and weeping — the cloud coalesced into one vast glowing orb, a New Moon, nameless and swollen with feral radiance. The man stepped back from the rolling of the sea, which was already quieting, his arcane declamations falling into a faint, repetitive mutter. The vines hung in sodden ropes on his thin body, and Kelrob realized that there was something achingly familiar about that gaunt frame, in the way the man’s bones poked from his taut sheath of muscle. Then the man turned toward Kelrob, and the mage could do no more than stare, a blast of sea air scouring the tears from
his cheeks. The man was him, older and taller certainly, more raw and hale in body, but undeniably himself. There were streaks of gray in his long raven hair, and his spidery fingers were knotted at the joints, but the face was unmistakeable, hawk nose and full, downturned lips, black eyes staring from the recessed orbit of his skull, long unblemished neck streaked with sodden vines. He looked at Kelrob, and Kelrob looked at himself, Tamrel’s music a distant, almost unheard strain, drowned by the celebratory crash of the waves. In tandem they stepped towards each other, stood looking into each others’ selfsame eyes. Kelrob saw a familiar fire burning there, not distant and smothered, but seething brightly, stoked and fed until its radiation eclipsed that of the sun. He could not meet that gaze for long, and instead looked to the firm, hairless jawline of his double, only then realizing that the face he saw, his own face, was nothing more than an immobile mask, its edge clearly visible against the chanter’s sun-browned skin. A desire overwhelmed Kelrob, to reach forward and remove the mask; trembling, he raised his thin hands and reached out, touching the cold, concealing countenance of his simulacrum. By the glow of the New Moon he began to peel at the corners, to strip away the skin of his own false self, the fire in his double’s eyes swelling with invitation.

  Suddenly Kelrob was wrenched away from the beach, the ocean, the New Moon, the imploring eyes of his own self. The song was over. The mage’s eyes opened to find his hands ripping at the skin of his own throat. “No!” he cried, falling forward, his knees striking the chalcedony with a sharp crack. “I want to see, I need to see,” he said between gasps of grief.

  Tamrel plucked a few chords from the chromantic harp before lowering it and releasing a deep, longing sigh. “That song was written for you,” he said to Kelrob. “There are words to accompany it, but thirty seconds is hardly enough time to do you proper justice.”

  22: The Fate of House Azumana

  Kelrob raised his head, stared through streaming eyes at the smiling, taunting face of the mask. “You lied,” he said, his voice a strained shiver. “You said you would show me no more until I yielded to you.”

  The mask grinned. “I felt that the hook required further baiting. What did you see?”

  Kelrob released his throat, crossed his arms over his chest, fists bared. “I won’t tell you anything,” he said, rocking forward and staring down at the joints in the stone floor. “Nothing.”

  “My dear child, I only ask out of formality. I stood with you on that beach, and watched as you worked your True Will.” Tamrel plucked a few more nonsense notes, his head cocking to one side. “This world once had many moons, many satellites, each the dwelling-place of a different deity. In times so distant as to have been legend when I was born, great wars were fought between the Moon-cults. For centuries blood was shed as the devotees of the various spheres slaughtered each other in praise of their patron orb, until the still-youthful land was ravaged, and the First Ones crawled into deep holes in the earth to shield themselves from the devastation. In this time magic was a force in tandem with all the laws of nature, and even the youngest babe could summon fire or call down spirits from the wind; but the First Ones had learned to channel it, to control it, to mingle it with their own Will. And so, as the land continued to burn in the heat of withering sorcery, a meeting of twelve shamans was held deep in the root of a high mountain called Aesthnir. They were the most powerful of their fledgling breed, the true First Ones; long they conferred over what should be done to cool the hearts of their kindred and stay the hexes of the Moon-cults. At last, knowing that even their combined power was not enough to heal the earth or dim the warlust of their people, they left their deep chamber and crawled upwards into the blistering night wind and the overpowering light of the twenty moons. For twenty there were, of all hues and sizes, some mere pinpricks of madness-inducing red, others vast and bloated spheres of blue or green or bilious yellow. Each held sway over the blood of the First Ones, each contended for mastery of their primal hearts, and the shamans knew that as long as twenty gods peered omnipotent from the sky, their race would be divided in worship and in war. So, summoning all their might, they spoke words to the moons and their respective gods that had never before been uttered, and ever afterward were forgotten. It was a spell of surpassing potency, the first Great Working, never to be equaled by that race or any other; and as they spoke those nameless words the moons altered in their course, hurling together with great tumult and fury. It is said that the spell took nine days to complete, nine days of twenty gods battling in the sky, and at the end, when the shamans collapsed dead of their great exertion, two great moons burned where twenty lesser had glittered. These are the moons we know, Dephon of the Mad God Whose Lidless Eye Is Ever Emblazoned, and Ilian of the Great Goddess Who Weeps Ever In Both Joy And Sadness. Or so they were called in my time, at least, when their powers were properly revered; Man, it seems, has done away with the need for gods altogether, choosing to worship the material over the immaterial.” Tamrel struck a few more chords, cocked his head to the opposite shoulder, and said, “Have you ever heard this legend, Kelrob? Did you ever find it scribbled on a moldering scrap of parchment, left to rot into oblivion?”

  Kelrob shook his head. “No,” he said in a dry voice, arms still clenched over his chest. “Never.”

  “Ah. I thought not. And yet your vision hints at an intrinsic knowledge, possessed in spite of your ignorance.” Tamrel came forward, reached out a hand, and laid it on Kelrob’s shoulder. “What you saw, my dearest child, was your own truth, or at least as much as I could convey in the miserly thirty seconds allowed. I will confess I would rather you split the moons, speckling the night with gods and the earth with fresh madness; I appreciate the work of the First Ones, but I have always found their enforced duality irritating, and a monothestic moon sounds duller still.”

  Kelrob made no effort to shrug off the gripping hand. He dared say nothing, do nothing, for his fingers still yearned to peel away the mask of his own self. The lure of utter self-revelation — it galled him and seduced him, almost compelled him into surrender, but his deeper thoughts fought against the temptation, warning him of the seeming ease of Tamrel’s offer. Master Kenlath always cautioned against ease, lamenting what he perceived as the chromox-induced idleness of humanity: “Work is the true magic,” he said frequently, always in the same precise, brittle tone, his rheumy blue eyes burning with the conviction that had driven him from all respectable circles of study. “Without the Work there is no basis for the Result.” Could a song, no matter how potent, slice cleanly and sanely through the myriad bonds of misperception? What would happen if one’s limits were not transcended, merely removed? No work, no thought, no understanding, no context. Only pure Self. The concept was repellant. Looking up into the bard’s smiling face, Kelrob said, “This is what you offer? The ability to know myself completely?”

  The mask bobbed in assent, the grip tightening on his shoulder. “That, and all it entails.”

  “But how can you offer such a thing? One can’t know oneself from without, only from within. That’s why people go mad when you free them from their delusions. You give them reward without agency, revelation without the means to comprehend it. You destroy with truth, Tamrel.” As Kelrob spoke his eyes hardened, and Tamrel’s hand darted back from his shoulder as if burned.

  The mask’s smile twisted into a grimace. “Now who is lost in philosophistical quandary? Truth is truth, regardless of the source.”

  Kelrob stared unflinching into the mask’s distorted face. “I disagree.”

  Tamrel sighed. “You disappoint me again, mageling. Ah, but it matters not. Resist me all you wish. I will peel the film from your mind now, or in thirty days’ inconsequential time.” Turning to Nuir, who had stood silent and immobile throughout their exchange, the bard smiled at her and said, “And what of you, my lady? You have seen yourself struggling over fields of ash, blistered and broken. Do you not long for the sweet water at the end of t
hat endless trek?”

  Nuir raised her head; she had been staring at her leather-clad feet, veil hanging limp over her bowed face. “There is an old Jeneni fable that tells of a man who sought an oasis in the depth of the desert,” she said in a thin, cutting voice. “He struggled towards it for days, growing increasingly parched with thirst. Then, when only a few miles remained, a great humped camel came walking over the sands, and offered to bear the man the rest of the way. The man assented, swung gratefully onto the camel’s back, and fell asleep to the lurch and sway of its stride. When he came to he lay at the water’s edge, but the oasis was dry, for the camel had drank it into nothingness while he slept.” Nuir raised her hands, looked at her palms. “I feel the living coals beneath my hands,” she said, “and can smell the water in the wind. I must pursue them, seek them, but my own legs must bear me, no matter how weary or trembling. I do not know who Nuir is, but I know who she is not.” So saying she held out her hand, motioning for Tamrel to relinquish the harp.

  The bard sighed deeply, then passed it into her keeping. “I would be most cautious in destroying that device, my lady. Its enchantment is strong. It desires to persist.”

  Nuir held the harp in her hands. Without a word she turned over the instrument, drew out her bloodstained dagger, and raked the blade over an angular sigil carved into the underside of the sweeping neck. There was a pulse of blue light, and a moan as of a hundred strings detuning at once. The cherrrywood lost its luscious sheen, and with a final desultory twanging the body warped into an unplayable grotesque. “There is nothing you cannot play,” Nuir said, dropping the distorted instrument to the ground, “and there is nothing I cannot destroy. I am your sworn enemy, Tamrel. That is the only truth you can teach me, the only truth I need to know.”