“What is it you seek, traveler?” He eyed Gorel’s guns with interest. “The Lower Kidron?” he said.
Gorel said, only a little exasperated, “Is everybody in this city a weapons expert?”
Kay smiled. “It is something of a speciality of ours, yes,” he said. “Armaments and weaponry are both the trade blood of Uzur-Kalden and the focus of its scholarship. The Zul–Ware’i war—or possibly wars; the current argument places the number of conflicts at either three or seventeen—is almost unique in the history of the world. If you are interested, I can recommend Abbot Dvir-Ling’s treatise on the subject—a classic in the field—Some Observations and Conjectures Regarding the Zul–Ware’i, or Ware’i–Zul, Engagement, Complete with Illustrations of Notable Finds, published in a limited edition through the offices of—”
“Thank you,” Gorel said, interrupting him. “But what I am looking for does not concern this place.”
“It does not?” Kay blinked at him, looking surprised. “Then what is your interest?”
“Tell me about the collection,” Gorel said, leaving the question aside for a moment. “Does it not contain the knowledge of Ware’i?”
“Well, yes…” Kay said. “At least, in a manner of speaking.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m afraid that the Ware’i script—that is, you see, many of the books had been rescued from remaining Ware’i libraries and so on—well, the truth of the matter is—” He shrugged. “We have not quite been able to decipher them completely.”
“And partially?”
“Well, no.”
“Let me see if I understand you correctly,” Gorel said to the unhappy apprentice. “You have an enormous library of books you can’t actually read?”
“Well…yes. If you put it that way.”
“How would you put it?”
“Well…an enormous library of books we can’t actually read—yet?” Kay said hopefully. “But of course, there are many more books here than just Ware’i,” he said. “Though we do tend to focus on, well—”
“Weaponry and armaments?”
“Yes.”
“I am searching,” Gorel said carefully, “for mention of Goliris.”
“Goliris?” Kay said, and his eyes opened wider than before.
“You know of it?”
“Many know of Goliris,” Kay said. He looked troubled. “There are stories…”
“I am Gorel of Goliris,” Gorel said, “and I seek my homeland, though it has been lost to me for many years.”
“Gorel of Goliris?” Kay looked at him closely, and suddenly grinned. “I’ve heard tales of a gunslinger wandering the world in search of a mythic land,” he said. “Gorel of Goliris…Is it true you had once killed a god?”
The question took Gorel by surprise. “How do you—?”
“So it is?” The boy grinned again, though this time there was a touch of nervousness in the smile. “Word travels,” he said. “I recently had conversation with an emissary of the dark mage who has risen in the Black Tor—”
“Kettle?” Gorel said, surprised again.
Kay gave him a look and said, “I do not know his name. But his men have been traveling to and from Uzur-Kalden for a long while now, and they carry gossip and news with them just as they take back their cargo of Zul devices.”
“That explains a few things,” Gorel said, thinking of his former friend and onetime lover, the Avian who had called himself Kettle, whose armies now overran the lowlands from Der Danang to Falang-Et and beyond.
“He has given much to the abbey,” Kay said, “devices of decipherment that are greatly speeding up our work. Perhaps the Ware’i writings contain references to your land, Gorel of Goliris. And perhaps…”
“Yes?”
“There are answers elsewhere,” Kay said, and looked away.
Gorel stared at him for a long moment. There was something on the boy’s mind, it was clear, yet it was equally clear he did not want to discuss it…at least, not yet.
“What’s this?” he said, pointing to a glass disc that sat, with other exhibits, under a secure display.
The boy brightened at the question.
“That’s a corona bomb,” he said. “They’re really quite pretty when they go off. You can still see their mark on the high peaks, sometimes. Oh, and this one is quite rare,” he said, pointing to another item on display. “It’s a Ware’i mind-scream cannon, or at least that’s what we think it is, but no one’s been able to make it work. And that’s a Ware’i ground-to-dragon missile—you can still see the skeleton of one of the Zul war-dragons up on the high peaks…” He sighed and Gorel at last turned his attention back to the boy.
“The peaks?” he said. “You have been to the upper reaches of the mountains?”
The boy wouldn’t meet his gaze. “I was raised high above the snowline,” he said reluctantly. “In the…But it doesn’t matter.”
“In the upper reaches?” Gorel stared out. Through the large windows he could see the foreboding mountains rise, clothed in ice and snow. And more than that, for everywhere upon the mountains lay the unexploded ordnance of the Zul and the Ware’i—not a promise of death as much as a contract, guaranteeing it. “And you live?”
“I was sent here as a child…I often dream of going back.”
“Would you? If you could?”
“They would not like it…” the boy said, dubiously. Then he smiled, and there was genuine longing in his eyes. “Yes, man of Goliris. I would like nothing more.”
“In that case,” Gorel said, “I may just have an opportunity for you.”
5.
They set off for the mountains at dawn. A sickly red sun, the color of an infection. A large party, with the porters behind carrying Lord Khalen’s copper bathtub, his tent, and his supplies.
“Can you smell it?” Orven said. He took a deep breath of cold morning air and shuddered, his eyes closing in delight.
“Smell what?”
“Sorcery!” Orven said. “Up there, so much pure, unadulterated magic…Wizardry, and, well, wild romance.”
“I doubt you’ll find romance up there on the peaks,” Gorel said, and Orven opened his eyes and leered and said, “Well, you never know, gunslinger.”
Gorel resisted the urge to shoot the wizard. The man’s robes were covered in stars and amulets—he wore rings of power on his bony fingers—talismans hung from his scrawny neck, and books of wizardry poked out of his many pockets. Gorel had met his kind before: hedge magicians, the rats who came into a battlefield only after the dying took place, who robbed and schemed and then claimed credit for the victory.
“The stars are favorable,” Orven said complacently.
Gorel refrained from answering. There were no favors to be had from the stars, he knew. They were immutable and distant, sentient sources of sorcerous charge who cared nothing for the tiny creatures, whether human or Avian or Merlangai or Zul, who lived like mites upon the flesh of the world. The world was infinite, it was said. And the stars were legion. Even gods were dwarfed by their power.
That first day the journey was easy, the road clear-cut through the low rising foothills. At nightfall they came to a village and there Lord Khalen and his pet wizard slept in comfort at a way inn, while Gorel and the porters bedded down in the yard. Fires burned between their tents of furs. The boy, Kay, sat apart from the others, his eyes on the distant peaks; he spoke little since he’d joined the expedition.
Gorel, too, kept to himself. He felt uneasy below the mountains. The war of Zul and Ware’i had been one of total annihilation, not even their gods—if they had any—survived. The warring races had elevated death beyond art, to the realm of hard science. On the fringes of the region, archeo-necromancers worked diligently to try and uncover some of the
vanished foes’ more arcane thaumaturgy. Gorel dozed by the fire, but his sleep was light and restless.
In the night he woke, or thought he had. Moonlight bathed the sleepers all around him and the dying fires seemed suspended, frozen. He stood, or thought he had. He left the gates and urinated noisily into the bushes. Tiny insects buzzed overhead. He thought of taking another pinch of dust, but his supply was meager and there’d be no more priests to sell him the drug once they began the climb into the ice.
It had happened long ago and far away, in the place where the ghouls of the bush haunt the unwary, in a small village fetid with the smell of rotting leaves…where the twin goddesses Shar and Shalin cursed him forever with their Kiss, before he killed them.
He needed faith the way others needed water or food. He needed gods the way others needed companionship or love. The need was always in him, fight it as he might. He had done terrible things, had murdered, had sold himself…and he would do it all again without a second thought.
Gorel stepped away from the inn, down the dirt path that led through the sleeping village. The village seemed suspended in enchanted sleep. A dark carriage came rolling down the road, unhurriedly, toward him. it was a beat-up old thing, driven by a dark shape, pulled by an ordinary mule.
“Ironmonger! Pots and pans! We straighten nails!”
Gorel watched it approach. Not even a dog barked. The carriage stopped and its driver climbed down, as Gorel knew he would. The ironmonger was in shadow.
“You’re not really here,” Gorel said. “You’re beyond the deadlands, beyond reach, holed up in the Black Tor.”
The ironmonger unwrapped the shadows from about himself. In the moonlight he resolved into a small, slight figure, with an elongated face, two eyes like dark bruises, and a pair of powerful wings now folded about him.
The Avian smiled.
“Gorel,” he said. There was a mixture of affection and exasperation in the voice.
“Kettle. Why are you here?”
The Lord of the Black Tor, the dark mage whose armies had overtaken the ancient cities of Ankhar and Tharat, whose forces even now marshalled to march across the world, said, “I missed you.”
“Why are you here?”
“As you said—I’m not.”
Gorel looked at the sleeping village. Everything was suspended, still.
“You come into my dreams?”
“Only if you dreamed about me.” The Avian’s familiar, mocking smile caused a hard knot to form in Gorel’s heart.
“You should turn back,” Kettle said. “There’s nothing up there but death.”
“A job’s a job.”
“Gorel…”
“Why?” Gorel said. “Why do you do what you do? Do you amass power for the sake of power? Kill for the sake of killing? You have destroyed so many lives…”
“Gorel…” An old pain in the Avian’s eyes. “I have my reasons. Turn back from the peaks. I beg you.”
“No.”
“Then take this,” Kettle said. “For protection.” He brought out an object from the folds of his thin clothes. It was a metal bracelet, etched with runes.
Gorel made no move to oblige.
“Please.”
“Why do you care?”
“Because I…” He stopped. “Please?”
Gorel, with the inevitability of a dream, allowed the mage to slip the bracelet over his wrist. It felt so weightless. Kettle’s fingers applied light pressure on Gorel’s skin and he felt a rush of desire rise in him, but resisted.
“It’s enchanted. It isn’t much, but…It might help.”
“Is it that bad? Up there?”
“I don’t honestly know. You’ll have to find out for yourself.”
The moonlight waned. The village darkened. Somewhere, a dog barked. Kettle was nothing but a shadow. Gorel yawned.
“Gorel? Gorel!”
“Yes, Kettle, what do you want now…”
“Wake up, you oafish fool!” A booted foot kicked him painfully in the ribs. Gorel sat up, groggy. Over the distant peaks, the first rays of dawn could just be seen, spreading like an infection.
“What?”
“Useless piece of…” Orven said. Gorel blinked. He had been fast asleep on the ground, and the embers in the fire were dead. “We leave in ten.”
“All right, all right,” Gorel said. He stood up, shoved the other man roughly until he stumbled. “Kick me again and I’ll shoot you.”
“I’ll conjure a fireball up your ass if you push me again,” Orven said—but he backed off. All about them the expedition was rising, preparing for the trek into the ice. Gorel reached for a pinch of dust and snorted it up his nose. It was only when he lowered his arm that he saw the thin metal bracelet, covered in graceful, indecipherable runes.
Gorel stared at the bracelet.
“Well, fuck,” he said.
6.
Higher and higher into the mountains, a thin line of men along the path, like ants crawling upon the edge of a straight razor. For the first few days there were still villages, sparsely populated, and farther and farther apart, then they were no more. Beyond the snowline they hit an old, abandoned camp, built and then added to by successive and now vanished expeditions, and there they stopped to rest. This high up the air was thinner, and magic thicker. It was in the air, in the land, embedded in the snow. Gorel hated it.
They set off again. Higher and higher into the mountains. From up there Gorel could look down and see the green slopes below the snowline, and the tiny villages like dark flowers, and the city of Uzur-Kalden shrunk to the head of a pin. Beyond the slopes, he could look out over the whole of the deadlands, until the vast unending plains faded into the horizon. Somewhere beyond them lay the Black Tor. Somewhere on the plains was the vast cemetery of Kur-a-len, which Gorel had inadvertently destroyed…
On and on they went. Then into the icy ravine where they lost Pitong Narawal to a strip-mine. Coming out of it at last, shaken by the first of the deaths, they continued the climb, though the peaks above seemed as distant as ever. The worst of the ravine had been its icy walls. As Gorel turned to look at them, faces stared back at him: Ware’i bodies, frozen behind the sheets of ice. Their faces stared out at him, frozen in expressions of fear and despair. Behind them he could see low houses, dirt roads; a dog frozen in mid-waddle; a stationary fire, the very flames caught in midlife. They filled him with a horror he couldn’t quite articulate, and instead he pinched a minute amount of dust from his pouch, his gloved fingers struggling not to lose a single grain of powder, and snorted it.
At the approach of night they made camp. Lord Khalen had his retainers erect his tent for him separate from the main camp’s enclosure. Fires were built and food cooked. Yet the small fires could not banish the dark.
The darkness brought with it the spectral illuminations of Zul ordnance. Far away a scream erupted, and a column of colored lights rose into the air, reflecting for a moment from thousands of icy surfaces, before the scream ebbed, the lights slowly faded, and the rumble of a distant ice shelf collapsing could be heard. Turnir Gerad and his men sat around their own fire and did not raise their heads at the sounds of the ice. They looked withdrawn into themselves, unheeding of the strangers they were carrying. A second explosion sent a flock of spectral white ravens into the air, who dispersed in all directions before breaking up themselves into soft white snow that fell down. Gorel knew that, had the company been under it when it happened, the snow would have melted their faces and eaten their skins, and he shuddered inside his heavy clothes. He sat on his own and looked away from the mountains, and his heart longed for home.
Goliris, that greatest of kingdoms to which he was heir; from which he had been exiled and flung far away, across the world: yet always it remained beyond his reach.
&nb
sp; The memory came to him of a spring day long ago. He had been a child, visiting his mother at the labs that rose, immense and mysterious, beside the Royal Palace of Goliris. His mother the queen had rushed to him and embraced him, and then took him in hand, through great cavernous halls, where women and men worked silently at long tables, building, testing, scribbling notes, assembling and disassembling devices. She had showed him some of the work that day, the endless display of machinery and witchcraft, of knowledge distilled in the service of war.
“Not war, Gorel,” his mother had corrected him, as they stood and admired a long tube of metal being assembled, eldritch writings on its sides, blue lightning crackling around it as a demon from the deep jungles of Goliris was being bound inside it. “The prevention of war. None dare fight Goliris, and so we bring peace to the world, and prosperity with it. No,” she said, and for a moment her voice was low and urgent, and though he did not understand her words then, he did now. “Our only danger comes from within.”
Then came the night, so long ago now, yet burned forever in his memory. The night they came for him, and he, a child, could not fight them. The traitors, wizards of Goliris grown fat with hate and power.
He remembered the last night of his childhood. The candles burned in his room, and outside the autumn wind blew with deceptive warmth, and the torches shuddered as it passed, and the air was filled with the smell of the sea, and of the gardens, and of the things that grew and died in the forests. It was an ordinary day, and so was the night. Until the screams woke him.
There were guards outside, shouting, and the clash of swords, and someone, far away, crying, and he crouched in his bed, frightened, and something crashed against his door and slid to the ground. That was the last thing he could remember—the sound of a nameless guard dying against his door—and after that there was a haze. Sorcery. And when he awoke his room was gone, and his parents, and the air smelled different, it was suffused with unfamiliar scents, and when the old couple found him their language was strange, and it took him months to learn enough to ask, and then he was horrified: they had never heard of Goliris.
The Book of Magic Page 38
