Scott J Couturier - [The Magistricide 01]

by The Mask of Tamrel (epub)

  “I stole nothing. That food was from my own blighted wedding feast.” Nuir’s voice trembled as she spoke. Tightening her grip on her knees, she snarled, “I will not abide Jacobson giving me orders. He is a nithing, infected with a dark spirit. You shouldn’t have let him out of your sight.”

  Kelrob endured the chastisement in silence, snapping off a thick, dead root from the loam. He gathered more kindling, then settled the fuel in a pile in the middle of the clearing. Nuir watched him like a cornered animal, rocking gently, chewing on the tip of her bedraggled braid. The wind was rising, a chill breeze from the north, heavy with the first true bite of winter.

  “So,” she said at last, just as Kelrob was fumbling with the coarse unfamiliarities of a flint-and-tinder, “what is the plan? Where do we go? What do we do?”

  Kelrob struggled to produce a spark, gathering up several handfuls of dried moss to aid the process. “There is no plan,” he said, leaning forward and blowing on a nascent flame. “Where we go matters little – at least until I can figure out a solution to my own quest-riddle. I think we should head deeper into the countryside, hide out for a while, keep Tamrel away from cities and towns until a solution presents itself.”

  Nuir laughed hollowly. “I know little of quests, but doomed causes are quite familiar to me. A solution! You have none, will have none. How many days are left before you make yourself Tamrel’s willing slave? That is what you want, I think, though you deny it even to yourself.”

  Her words struck close enough to the truth that Kelrob fumbled with the tinder, dropping it into the mound of kindling. Nuir shook her head, uncurled from herself, and snatched the fire-maker from the bed of smoldering moss. With a black look at Kelrob she quickly ignited the fire, blowing from beneath her veil until a curl of yellow flame sizzled among the moist branches.

  “Honestly,” she said, tossing the tinder back to him, “didn’t they teach you anything at the Rookery?”

  Kelrob watched the flames grow, and smiled bitterly, the tinderbox hanging limp in his hand. “I’m beginning to wonder that myself,” he said.

  “I had no idea magisters were so clueless. You are almost like infants.” Nuir coaxed the flames higher, working until she was satisfied that the blaze could sustain itself. Rocking back on her heels, she stared straight at Kelrob, who had borne her scornful words without retort. “You may not have a plan, but I have been doing some thinking. How long do we have before Jacobson returns from his sulk?”

  Kelrob glanced off into the forest, saw and heard no sign of the big man. “I’ve no idea,” he said faintly. “Some time, I should think.”

  “Good. Let me show you something.” Nuir turned from the fire and fetched her pack. First she drew out the stolen food (bound in a shred of priceless, grease-stained tablecloth) and set it beside the fire. Then, with a sidelong glance at Kelrob, she pulled out a small, glistening orb of polished metal. Kelrob’s heart quickened at the sight; without thinking, he exclaimed in rapturous relief, “An air-missive!”

  Nuir nodded and held up the sphere, which glowed faintly between the cage of her fingers. “I have only the one. We can send a single message.”

  Kelrob nodded, held out his hand. “I can tell my father we are safe,” he said.

  Nuir made no motion to hand over the orb. “That would be a lie. We are far from safe. And anyways, why waste our sole resource on such a triviality? I told you I had a plan. You will listen to it.”

  Kelrob’s teeth ground together, but he said nothing, merely acquiesced with a downward flick of his eyes.

  Nuir lowered the capsule. “Have you heard of an archmagister named Madame Heretia?”

  “Should I have?”

  “Depends on your acquaintances in the Order, I suppose. She is a magister of Second Circle, a Binder.” Reaching into her pack of meager belongings, Nuir withdrew a bauble of clear glass strung on a thin golden chain. Lurid red light streamed from within the glass; Kelrob bent forward in professional fascination, seeing a ball of perpetually agitated magma sealed in the fragile sphere. No leak in the binding could be detected, and the mage was incapable of sensing any magic emanating from the object.

  “True containment,” he breathed, half-reaching out a hand.

  Nuir smiled at his wonderment, drew the bauble back. “Madame Heretia gave this to me three cycles ago during one of her visits to my father, part of her payment to my house for some very peculiar goods. You perceive the depth of her art; this is only a paltry sample. Some say she has been able to crystallize time, though her experiments have put her at odds with the teachings of the Gyre Itself. Thus she lives in exile in a small wayside called Single Spire. I take it you have not heard of that either.”

  A flicker of memory stirred in Kelrob’s mind, gleaned from some obscure text. Not taking his eyes from the bauble, he said softly, “I know the name. A small village, unincorporated and undefended, save for an enchanted bell that hangs in a high tower. Those who hear it and are not accustomed to its charm fall into an unrousable slumber.”

  Nuir nodded. “I knew there was something practical rattling around in that daft skull of yours. Single Spire is situated on a little-used trade route about seventy miles east of here. I know some seldom-traveled roads we can take, with little threat from bandit or gendarme. If we travel hastily we can get there in five days. Faster, if we can find some horses.”

  Kelrob blinking as he digested Nuir’s words. “To what end?” he asked, thin fingers curling until his nails bit into his palms. “Regardless of Heretia’s mastery, to involve her at all would shatter my bargain with Tamrel. He’s threatened to kill Jacobson and seek another host if I alert the Order to his existence.”

  “I know. That is why I will write Heretia a message and send it ahead, explaining the situation. We can tell Tamrel we are taking him to a master luthier, seeking further instruments to test his skill. Instead we will lead him to Madame Heretia, who will trap the beast within her magic before he can flee or pipe a note.”

  Kelrob shook his head, the idea inducing a deep repugnance. “No,” he said firmly. “It’s too risky, far too risky. We have no guarantee her sorcery can bind Tamrel, regardless of its strength. Besides, he’s capable of detecting magic. I think he sees the threads of enchantment as easily as we perceive the weave of cloth.”

  “Very well. I will tell her to lower her wards and temporarily disenchant her amenities. Quite simple.”

  “I said no.”

  Nuir returned the bauble to its hiding place, her eyes narrowing with disdain. “And what makes you think I require your permission, my lord magister? It is not your city that has crumbled to ruin, not your kindred that lie slain.” With an imperious gesture she threw a branch on the laboring blaze.

  Kelrob drew in a steadying breath, tinged with the smell of burning. “We all need each other on this journey, Nuir. The quest hangs strung between us, excessively delicate. Maintaining it is the only thing keeping Tamrel from traveling on to the next city, and the next.” Kelrob flushed as he spoke; surely it was dishonorable for a traitor to make such speeches? He had a dim flash of his outstretched hands summoning immolating fires from the sky, streaks of brimstone descending upon the slender towers and vast palaces of the Seven Cities, a cleansing and cauterizing rain. So close.

  Nuir’s thin eyebrows drew together. “You speak the truth. We must act together, you and I. Jacobson obviously can know nothing of the plan.”

  “There is no plan! We retreat into the woods, bide our time, and think.” Kelrob closed his eyes and ran his hands down the length of his face, palms scraping against stubble. “Listen. If I can just get a good night’s sleep, let my indigestion settle, and spend a few days without buildings exploding in my vicinity, I’ll be able to think more clearly, start teasing at the knot. We have almost a month in which to take action.”

  Nuir laughed hollowly. “The quest was
merely a means of buying time. You said so yourself. I have thought of a means of stopping this creature; it is the only plan proposed, the only suggestion of action other than retreat. I fail to see how lounging about in the forest is a viable alternative.”

  Kelrob started to reply in anger, but stayed the words, instead falling into a brooding silence. What right did he have to reject Nuir’s plan? He recognized his desire to flee, to hide, to ponder and consider, as a delaying mechanism, devised to allay the inevitable, or perhaps even to allow further temptations. Tamrel must be confronted, if he was not to be embraced; Kelrob suppressed a shiver of self-loathing, appalled as always by his own stunning weakness. “Let me see that bauble,” he said to Nuir, his voice emerging in a near-whisper. “I need to examine it more closely.”

  Nuir complied after a moment’s hesitation, drawing out the enchanted trinket and passing it to Kelrob. The glass was warm against the mage’s skin, but not unpleasantly so; he closed his fingers around it, the heat sinking into his bones, nerves tingling at the proximity of chromox. The bauble was a working of immense and flawlessly guided will, the chromantic matrix sealing the magma while simultaneously subjecting it to immense gravitational pressures, ensuring endless agitation. It would have been a severely dangerous object if unstable, but Kelrob sensed the purity of the artificer’s intent, bound up in a skein of enchantment so intricate that even his honed senses could scarce perceive the particulars in the aspect of the whole. It was the working of a true archmagister, one who had achieved perfect symbiosis with the chromox, will and ring made one. Kelrob wondered at this Madame Heretia, a mage powerful enough to craft such a wonder yet so magnanimous as to offer it in trade. Briefly he wondered what ‘peculiar goods’ Lord Azumana had procured for the Madame in exchange for so priceless an object. Either the services rendered had been of monumental stature, or Heretia was gifted far beyond the wonder he now held in his hand. Indeed, a mere bauble, the playing of a will bent on far greater exploits, as Nuir had said.

  How, how was it he had never heard her name spoken among the wise?

  Accompanying this question came a revelation, the true reason for his desire to thwart Nuir’s plan. Quite simply, it required him to deceive Jacobson. The big man’s eyes flashed in Kelrob’s mind, bright with the realization of betrayal: must I become a traitor again so soon?

  But it might be the only way to save Jacobson’s life.

  Kelrob held the bauble for several speechless minutes, lost in internal debate. Nuir began to shift uncomfortably, casting searching glances into the trees. “I urge you to decide on the inevitable quickly,” she said, her voice hot with impatience. “He is likely to return at any moment.”

  Kelrob raised his eyes. “How can you be sure this Madame Heretia will be willing to help us?”

  Nuir’s eyes disengaged from his, fell to study the forest floor. “She will help us. The Madame is very interested in...oddities. Moreover she and I are somewhat close. Heretia will know the letter is genuine the moment she sees my script.”

  A deep sigh welled up in Kelrob’s chest. Slowly he held the bauble out to Nuir, and she snatched it back, tucking it deep into the recesses of her pack. “Well?” she demanded, holding out the air-missive and cracking it open, exposing the capsule’s red-velvet interior. “I have paper and stylus. All we must do is agree on this, together, and it can be done.”

  Kelrob peered down into the flames. Slowly, reluctantly, he nodded. “She is as powerful as you say,” he admitted, “but we must be sure to impress on her the seriousness of the situation. Fetch me the pen.”

  Nuir’s brow knotted. “I take no orders from you. I will write the letter.”

  “Out of the question. I need to impart some very specific details.”

  “She knows me. She will trust me.”

  “The only way I go ahead with this plan is if I write the damn letter!” Kelrob thrust out his hand, fingers twitching in a demanding gesture.

  Nuir glared at him, but complied, fetching the stylus and a sheaf of vellum. Kelrob braced the paper against his knee and began to write, instructing Nuir to keep a watch for Jacobson’s return. He wrote briefly of his initial meeting with Jacobson, of the loss of his chromox (glossing over Salinas’s betrayal), of the encounter with Tamrel, of the subsequent events in the House of the Setting Sun and later in Tannigal, every stroke of the stylus sending a pulse of shameful blood into his cheeks. It was possible, even if the plan was successful, that Jacobson would refuse to forgive him for his actions; still, it was a far lesser risk than allowing Tamrel to rove free. Kelrob provided several observations on Tamrel’s previous interaction with chromox, and stressed the absolute need for Madame Heretia to disenchant her dwelling, perhaps even to temporarily decorate it as a luthier’s to fully bait the hook. He completed the letter by cautioning Madame Heretia to absolute secrecy, signed his name with full magical credentials, then called Nuir back from her post and had her sign her own name alongside a few hastily scribbled verifications. Nuir seemed to be on very familiar terms with the archmagister; she signed her name informally, dotting it with a fat blot of ink.

  A distant footfall sounded in the forest, a wet crunch of leaves beneath a heavy tread. Kelrob quickly folded the letter and placed it within the capsule, regretting fiercely that he hadn’t had time to properly prepare the message. If he had had a day, or even an hour...but the task was done, the plan committed to. He watched as Nuir secured the chrome-plated capsule, raised it over her head, and spoke a single programmed word of command. The air-missive hummed faintly, then rose from her palm, bobbing in the air for a moment before gravitating above the skeletal trees and streaking off into the east. Within moments it had vanished, devouring the distance with a speed unmatched by the most rigorously-bred kestrel. Kelrob breathed a commingled sigh of relief and trepidation, then turned towards Nuir. Silently, with grave countenance, he nodded.

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