Meghan narrowed her eyes at Sulana and answered with irritation in her voice, "I believe I know what you are looking for, but I don't know why it would be worth taking this man's life."
Sulana's face flushed and she looked down at the man with a frown. She sighed and looked up at Meghan. "Just let me see what he had with him, please." Meghan stared at Sulana a moment more, nodded once, and started out of the room.
I stepped aside to let Meghan and Sulana pass, and I followed them back out into the main room. After we passed him, Daven moved away from the fireplace and over to the doorway to keep an eye on the comatose thief.
Meghan crossed the room to a shelf, upon which sat an odd-looking box. Peering at it more carefully, I realized that the box looked odd because it seemed to be made completely of stone. The healer turned a clasp on the front and opened the lid. She reached inside and removed something. When she turned around, she was holding a small gold ring that was set with what looked like a ruby. The red gem sparkled in the candlelight as she held it out to Sulana. "Is this what you are looking for?"
"Yes!" Sulana said as she quickly but carefully took the ring from Meghan. "Thank you."
Surprised by the simplicity of the item, I blurted, "That's it? All this excitement over a ring?"
"Don't be foolish," Sulana said. "This is no ordinary ring." She narrowed her eyes. "Assuming this is the right ring," she added with concern, glancing at Meghan. "Well, there's one way to find out," she said, and she slipped the ring onto her finger. Sulana walked over to the fireplace and muttered something I couldn't hear.
Instantly, a slow pulsing sound came from Sulana's direction. She raised her arm, the hand with the ring extended in a fist. She slowly turned in a circle, and the pulsing sound picked up in speed. She lowered her arm. "This is it," she said with relief, and pulled the ring from her hand.
Meghan had watched with interest as Sulana completed her little performance. She nodded to herself as Sulana put the ring into a leather pouch and stuffed it into a pocket under her leather breastplate. "I suspected it was enchanted. May I know what it does?"
Sulana shook her head. "I appreciate your safeguarding it, but I'm under orders to divulge as little as possible about our mission and this artifact," she said apologetically.
"I understand," Meghan sighed, and then she added with a grimace, "The work of the Archives is always important and secret."
"So you know something about who we are?" Sulana asked, narrowing her eyes at the old woman.
Meghan spread her hands and shrugged slightly, "Who else but the Archives would send an armed team lead by a Sword Sorceress to retrieve a vaetric artifact?"
Meghan's familiarity with the Archives surprised me, but I guess it shouldn't have. The Ward had to have come from somewhere. And I suspected that some of her healing talent involved more than just knowledge of herbs. She had never said anything about sorcery or the Archives during the time I had helped her. But then again, she would have had no reason to speak of such things with me.
Sulana chuckled once and said "I see you do know something about us." She looked over at the bedroom doorway and turned thoughtful. "Our thief is in no shape to travel, and I doubt we can wake him to question him, at least not without killing him in the process."
Daven appeared in the doorway. "Not a problem. He's already dead."
Meghan rushed into the room to see her patient. I turned to Sulana and asked, "Sword Sorceress?"
"Later," she promised dismissively. She made no move to follow Meghan into the room.
Meghan returned to the main room with a look of sad disappointment. "Your man is right I'm afraid. He's gone."
Sulana considered the new circumstances. "That both simplifies and complicates our mission. I had hoped to get information from the man."
"Shooting him was probably not the best way to accomplish that," Meghan said sourly.
Sulana's eyes flashed. "You're right, but when the thieves split and ran, they left me little choice. It was getting dark and I couldn't let them escape into the woods. A man fleeing on a horse presents few non-fatal target options."
Meghan glared back at Sulana and took a deep breath. She seemed about to argue the point, but stopped herself. "Well, there's nothing to be done for it now," she said instead.
Sulana lowered her voice. "I'm sorry he's dead. I shouldn't have shot at him, but at the time, it seemed like the only way to end the chase."
We all stood awkwardly for a moment. Daven stepped up behind Sulana to place a comforting hand on her shoulder. Meghan looked into Sulana's eyes and seemed to accept what she saw there. She nodded her head once and folded her arms.
Sulana walked over to take a closer look at the stone box. "This is a lovely piece of work. How did you acquire it?"
"It was a gift from my husband," Meghan said quietly but with pride in her voice. "He loved to work with stone, and that box was the last thing he gave me before he died."
Sulana turned to Meghan and asked, "Did you know it would hide the ring?"
Meghan looked up sharply at Sulana. "No I did not," she replied. "What do you mean by hide?"
"I have a Seeker that is tuned to the ring. But while the ring was in the box, the Seeker was unable to find it," Sulana said, watching Meghan's reaction closely.
"How delightful!" Meghan clapped her hands together and smiled. She moved over to the box and caressed the lid, a wistful look on her face. "My Jon protects me even now," she muttered.
Sulana glanced toward the front door. "We should get going. We'll take the body with us along with anything he had with him." She reached under her cloak and pulled out a purse. "I can pay you for your care of him. If he had a purse, I'd like to take that with me along with its contents."
Meghan held up a hand. "I don't want your money. The knowledge you have given me about my precious box is worth enough to me. But there is one other thing I would ask of you." Sulana motioned her to continue. "I would like to see for myself how the box defeats the Seeker."
Sulana considered her request and shrugged. "I'd like to see that proven myself."
She took the ruby ring out and handed it to Meghan, who placed it back inside the box. She then produced the Seeker and went through the same routine I'd seen in the clearing. She placed the chain ring on her finger and dangled the Seeker. This time, I was close enough to distinctly hear her say, "Seek." Once again, it emitted a faint, high-pitched tone. The Seeker rotated once on its chain, but nothing else happened. She then said "stop," and the Seeker fell silent.
Sulana removed the Seeker's chain from her finger and looked closely at the device. "I suppose it may have just stopped working for some reason. We'll see."
Meghan retrieved the ruby ring from the box and passed it to Sulana. Sulana looked back and forth between the two objects in her hands, and then up at me. A mischievous smile appeared on her face, and she carefully handed the Seeker to me. "Here, you try it. Just please don't drop it."
I accepted the Seeker from her and held it away from me as if it were a live snake. "What do I do?" I asked uncertainly.
"Just put that ring at the end of the chain on a finger and dangle the Seeker like I did." She said.
Confused by the rapid turn of events, I did what she asked without questioning it. I put the Seeker's ring on my finger and dangled it as she had. Nothing happened. "Now what?" I asked.
"You have to tell it what to do," she explained. "The Seeker does all the work. Just tell it to seek."
I stared at the Seeker and said "seek," as I had heard Sulana do. But nothing happened. "It's not working," I said.
"Think about what you want it to do. Its purpose is to find this ring. Think about that and ask it to seek again," she instructed as she stepped a few paces away toward the fireplace.
I stared at the Seeker again and thought about the ruby ring. Find the ring, I thought, but aloud I said, "Seek."
To my surprise, the Seeker made its high-pitched whine again and started to rotate at the e
nd of the chain. If it had not been attached to its ring on my finger, I think I may very well have dropped it. When the colored end pointed toward Sulana and the ruby ring, it stopped rotating and the volume of the whine increased.
In that moment, I felt a disorienting shift inside me. It was like something long dormant had awakened and shaken off the cobwebs of disuse. When the Seeker located the ruby ring, a tingling sensation of power flowed through my mind. The feeling was dizzying, as if I had drunk a bit too much wine.
I heard a gasp, and I looked over at Meghan. She was staring at me like I had sprouted antlers; her mouth had literally fallen open. I looked at Sulana to find that she was grinning triumphantly at me for some reason. Then I looked over at Daven, but he just rolled his eyes and shook his head.
"I thought so!" Sulana cried.
"What?" I asked a little too loudly over the Seeker's whine.
"Just proving a theory," Sulana said with satisfaction.
"How do I turn it off?" I asked.
"Just think about making it stop seeking the ring and say stop," she replied.
I did as she suggested and the Seeker fell silent once again. A sense of relief washed over me as the dizzy feeling went away. I removed the Seeker's ring and held the device out to Sulana. She took it back from me with an amused smirk.
Meghan had regained her composure and was considering me now with interest. She looked at Sulana. "I never imagined he was a Sensitive," she commented.
"Oh, he's more than that," Sulana said. "He's a Channeler."
"So I see," Meghan murmured, looking back at me appraisingly.
It was frustrating to feel left out of a conversation about me while I was standing right there. I gestured at the Seeker. "Would someone care to explain what just happened here?"
"You made the Seeker work," Sulana replied in a matter-of-fact tone. She seemed to be enjoying my discomfort and confusion.
"So what?"
"So, it means that not only are you sensitive to vaetra, you can also channel vaetra. I don't understand how you couldn't be aware of that."
Meghan interrupted. "You grew up among sorcerers, did you not?" she asked Sulana. Sulana nodded in reply. "Out here among the mundane, one is taught at an early age to fear and avoid sorcery. Showing an interest in it or fraternizing with those who practice it can have unpleasant consequences."
Sulana turned her attention back to me. "So you never tried to find out why you could hear manifestations? You never wondered if you could do more?"
I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders. "When would I have done that? Every time I've been in the presence of magic, sorry, sorcery, I've been with people who were suspicious of it, afraid of it, or hostile to it."
I looked at Meghan. "I gather that people who cannot sense vaetra are the mundane?" She nodded.
I looked back at the Seeker in Sulana's hand. "Anyway, I figured the sound sorcery makes is one of the things that unnerves people about it. And nobody wants to talk about it, so I had no idea that others don't hear it too."
"That's incredible!" Sulana exclaimed with a laugh. "I wonder how many other Channelers are out there who have no idea of what they can do?"
Meghan frowned. "Probably not many. Sensitivity often runs in families, and those families are often more accepting of sorcery, although they keep quiet about it. Many even test their children for the ability to channel and apprentice them to a sorcerer when it's practical."
Sulana nodded. "Yes, that's how we get most of the initiates at the Archives. A parent brings them to us for training. I never realized just how unusual that was."
"So what do I do now?" I asked, more than a little uncomfortable with my new status as a Channeler, and whatever that might imply.
"Nothing," said Sulana. "Unless you want to do something about it. You can just go back to your life and pretend all this never happened. Or you can travel to the Archives and learn how to use your gift. It's up to you."
It was too much to think about right then. I had a life. It had its frustrations, but I was busy enough already just trying to get back on my feet. The idea of running off to become a sorcerer held little appeal. I knew nothing about that world, and wasn't sure I wanted to.
Then again, operating the Seeker, even without realizing what I was doing, had been...interesting. No, more than that. In spite of it being a bit scary and disorienting, it had been exciting to make the Seeker work.
Chapter 6
Talon and Barek bundled up the dead thief in the blood-stained sheet he was lying on, and took him outside to be tied across his horse. It was an ignoble end to an ignoble life. The horse shied and sidled away when it scented the blood on its former master, so Talon held the reins and calmed the animal while Barek secured the corpse.
Meanwhile, Sulana negotiated with Meghan for a few samples of healing herbs and tonics that the healer was willing to sell. The two of them seemed to have settled into an unsteady truce, although I suspected Meghan was charging a premium, which Sulana accepted without haggling. Sulana seemed to have mastered the art of human relations through commerce.
I stood away from the others. My eyes wandered unfocused over their activities while I grappled with my first sorcery experience and tried to decide what I was going to do about it. Part of me longed to understand and explore the sensation that the Seeker had stirred within me, but I'd been taught to fear and avoid sorcery all of my life.
When I was seven years old, my mother took me home after a visit with a group of her women friends. Night had fallen, and the dark buildings lining the street loomed over us. Our lantern did little to fend off the darkness, and my little hand gripped hers tightly. We turned a street corner and saw an eerie red light moving down the street toward us. My mother stopped short and pulled me closer, her hold on my hand tightening so much that I squirmed with pain. As the light got closer, I could see it was bobbing at the top of a walking staff being carried by a man in a long, black, hooded cloak. Most of his face was hidden by his hood, but I saw him nod to my mother as he passed us. A small globe at the top of his staff gave off a high-pitched sound in addition to more light than a lantern could possibly produce. I stared in fascination as he passed, watching him continue down the street in a radiant halo of crimson luminosity.
My mother started walking again, pulling me along as fast as we could go. I tried to ask her about the man and his glowing staff, but she shushed me. She then told me something that has never left my mind. "You just stay away from people like that. Trafficking in magic will only bring you grief."
As I grew older, I learned that sorcerers had once tried to rule the world and that their rule had resulted in widespread death and destruction. After the Wizard Wars were over and the sorcerers were defeated, the Sorcery Accords ensured that sorcerers would never again hold dominion over mundane affairs. But now even centuries later, fear and distrust ran strong, and everyone believed that given the opportunity, sorcerers would try to rule again.
The idea that I might have the ability to work with magic, or "vaetra" as Sulana called it, made me feel a little ashamed and dirty. I even felt a little nauseous, but I couldn't tell if that was because of my concerns about this new discovery or because of a reaction to channeling.
Besides, the very idea of dropping everything and going off to the Archives for training was ridiculous. I had responsibilities at the Snow Creek Inn and issues to work out with Dela. I didn't want to miss opportunities with Raven Company either. If work came in, I had to be there to take it.
Nevertheless, I found myself drawn to the idea of spending more time with Sulana. I liked being near her. What that meant for my relationship with Dela was uncertain and probably not good.
Daven leaned on the outside wall of the cottage with his arms folded and watched me in bemusement as I paced back and forth considering my future. I finally stopped pacing and sighed.
"What have you decided?" Daven asked me. His tone was casual, but his words had an edge to them that hinted at more
than a passing interest in my response. His gaze didn't waver from me as he waited for me to answer.
"Nothing," I finally said. "My life is complicated enough already without adding sorcery to the mix. As disturbing as the revelation is, I don't see how I can do anything about it right now."
Daven nodded, his lips pressed into a serious line. "I don't blame you. It's a lot to take in all at once. You've lived your life so far just fine without sorcery, so what's the point of changing that now? Even if you did decide to pursue it, you'd be starting pretty late in life and you'd have a lot of catching up to do."
I agreed with him completely, but for some reason, hearing it from him rankled a bit. "I'm a fast learner, so I think I could pick it up quickly, but you're right. Now isn't the time."
As the last words came out of my mouth, Sulana emerged from the healer's cottage with an armful of bottles and pouches. She headed over to her horse to add them to her saddle bags. As she walked by me she said, "It's up to you, of course. But I wouldn't waste your gift or the opportunity to develop it lightly. It could be a tremendous help to you in your work with Raven Company."
I considered her point. "That might be nice in the end, but I'd have to abandon my responsibilities for however long while I developed those skills."
Sulana finished lacing up her saddle bags and turned back to me. "Every goal has a price. It's up to you to decide if the price is worth achieving the goal."
I snorted. "How very philosophical of you. But from where I'm standing, the decision is far from easy."
"Life-changing decisions are never easy. I just think you should know what you may be giving up. I can probably answer the questions you must have about sorcery so you can make an informed decision."
Daven rolled his eyes and grunted. He walked off to where Barek and Talon were finishing their grisly task. Sulana watched him walk away and waited until he was out of earshot before turning back to me.
She lowered her voice and continued. "If you went to the Archives for training, it wouldn't take long to find out if you had a knack for sorcery and if you liked it. Within a month or so, you'd know if you wanted to continue. If you didn't think it could improve your life, you could just leave."
The Vaetra Chronicles: Book 01 - Vaetra Unveiled Page 6
