In the same tongue, she replied, “Farther, I think, than you have ever had cause to travel. I do not believe that Handernesse had routes to the North, and even had they, the journey by land is unpleasant for all but a few months, and the journey by water is . . . unfriendly.”
“Your land of birth is not commonly known.”
“It is known,” she said with a shrug, wanting very much to take her seat again. “By those who are curious enough to ask; I make no secret of it.”
“How did you make your way to Averalaan—to Averalaan Aramarelas? It is seldom that the Order seeks the mage-born in the North.”
“It is seldom they seek the mage-born at all,” she replied with some asperity. “But when we are summoned to test those suspected of being mage-born—often at the behest of a local Priest—we travel in haste. And we can.”
He nodded; this much, he knew.
“You have, perhaps, heard of the Ice Mage?”
Rath frowned for a long moment. When the moment passed, the frown had deepened; his eyes had narrowed. He nodded. “I believe he was called by other names.”
“He was called many. In my youth, he was called Lord; we had no other.” She felt the cold of the coming Winter less clearly than she now felt the Winters of the past. She would have turned away, but his gaze held her.
“Sigurne,” he said quietly, “I am aware of the difference between our respective ranks. I am aware of your power and the threat it poses if you find me wanting. Nothing you could say or do to either emphasize or deny the truth of this knowledge will have any impact on it. Will you not sit?”
Her smile was wan. “My age is no act,” she said quietly. “And my pride is misplaced. Yes, Ararath, I will sit if you will promise to remember those differences.”
“In this tower, I am unlikely to have difficulty.”
She took the seat with some gratitude—and some regret. In spite of herself, she found herself liking this wayward man. “What did you hear, in the South, of the Ice Mage?”
Rath shrugged. “Little. A small army was sent, and with them, the warrior-magi. He was not born to the North, although no history records the place of his birth. He is said to have arrived in one of the outlying villages, where he first killed the village elder, and then began to build a tower using the labor of the villagers he had not been forced to kill.”
She nodded. “That much, at least, is true. What else?”
“That he was a rogue mage, of course; that when he was finally discovered—and confronted—he killed many of the Kings’ men before the Magi destroyed him.”
“Many good men—good mages,” she added, “were also killed in that attempt; he had prepared many years for just such an encounter. Had it not been for the presence of Member APhaniel, I am not at all certain that he would have lost his battle.”
“Member APhaniel?”
She watched Rath revise his estimate of Meralonne’s age; it amused her for a few moments, and the amusement quieted her. “They took the tower down, stone by stone, and they destroyed what they found within it.” She paused, and shook her head. “Almost all of what they found.
“I was one of the few things they did not choose to destroy.”
“You?” His brown eyes rounded; his well-waxed brows—a conceit she despised—cracked slightly as they followed the curve of his eyes. “You were there?”
“In the tower. I was . . . much younger then. I was not without power. And I was not without anger. But as I had played no small part in the summoning of the Kings’ men, they could not find it within themselves to dispatch me. Some argument was made for my death,” she added, speaking softly and without hesitation or resentment. “Had I been among the surviving Magi, I would have argued in just such a fashion.”
“Why? You couldn’t have been more than a girl—” He lifted a hand. “You learned,” he said quietly.
“Yes. By his side. I learned what he studied. I aided him when I had no choice. Forbidden, all. All of the knowledge. All of the lessons.” She could, in this tower, see the ghostly echoes of the other tower she had occupied. Feel the presence of the Lord in her room, her many rooms; she could hear the echoes of his voice. Had she been a different person, she would have let them go, dispersing them over decades, into the stream of murky past, where she would at last slip the tight bonds of memory.
But they steadied her now, in ways her master had never conceived of in the certainty of his power.
“But Meralonne APhaniel spoke for me.”
“He holds you in regard,” Ararath told her quietly.
“Perhaps. I do not think it was regard that moved him, then. He knew nothing of me, save that I was somehow thought to be responsible for the message that had drawn the Kings to the North. He could not know what I knew, and I did not lie; not then. Now, I lie far more frequently, and with greater ease. I had no desire to die,” she added bleakly. “But no expectation at all that I would live beyond the battle. My only regret is that mine was not the hand that killed my master.”
His eyes were narrow now, but not with suspicion.
“Do not think to offer pity,” she began.
“I would not insult you, Sigurne. I am not unhappy that you did not die in the North. But you did not remain there.”
“They chose to heed Member APhaniel’s plea on my behalf—”
“I am attempting to imagine Member APhaniel pleading,” Ararath said wryly, “but my imagination is not up to the task I set it.”
“—and having made that decision, they did not execute me. Nor,” she added quietly, “did they feel they could, in good conscience, leave me in the village that had been my home.”
“Why?”
“I would not have survived it. I had lived in the tower for several years,” she added, the emphasis she placed on the dwelling making, of the structural word, a thing with weight and substance that this distant mockery of history could not give it. “It was known to be my home, by the villagers.”
“You were born there?”
“No. I was born some leagues beyond, in a village that was not dissimilar to the one the Ice Mage ruled. He did not dwell in the village of my birth, but he exacted tribute from it, and they paid.”
“They sent you?”
“No. I was found and taken.”
Rath, silent, watched her; she watched him. At last he said, “You were mage-born.”
“I was.”
“And the Ice Mage knew it, somehow.”
“He did.”
“May I ask how?”
Had it not been so cold, she would have abandoned the chair again. But even magical heat did not deny the chill of the wind that broke itself upon the heights of the Magi’s towers. “You may ask,” she told him. “And I will answer because it has bearing upon your question. But the answer to your question is not a matter of a handful of words, and in other circumstances, I would apologize in advance and beg your indulgence for the reminiscences of one old woman.”
His eyes narrowed as the sentence drew to a close; he was shrewd, and missed little.
“It is not entirely an act, Rath. I am not young, and I am not particularly ferocious; I forget much these days, and such forgetfulness was not mine in youth. As a child, I would have considered myself a wasteful dotard.”
“Children are often harsh critics,” he replied, again with consummate care. So like, she thought, his sister in that unexpected kindness, that certain wisdom.
“You have encountered creatures that were once commonly known as demons. What impression did they leave upon you?”
He shrugged, the gesture both economical and automatic. “They seemed like men, to me,” he said at last. “And were it not for your daggers and your insistence otherwise, I would have said they were mages. Rogue,” he added carefully. “They looked neither more, nor less, terrifying than men do. In the stories commonly told to children demons are creatures out of nightmare; they have scales, or horns, or elongated jaws; they have wings, they spit fire, and t
hey—” He paused.
“Yes?”
“It is said they can take a man’s soul.” He shrugged again, this time more slowly. “I confess I have given such tales little thought since my coming of age.”
Sigurne nodded. “Most men—and women—do. They outgrow their bedside stories, conquer their fear of them, and move more freely in a world larger in all ways than they imagined when those tales had the power to frighten them.
“But there is always some seed of truth—no matter how twisted it has grown—in the oldest of tales.” She closed her eyes; felt the hard curve of wood press into her shoulder blades. For a moment, she thought better of continuing, but the moment passed in the wind’s howl. “The demons do not call themselves demons, of course.”
Rath’s brow rose slightly. “Then where does the word originate?”
It was not entirely the question she had been expecting, but Ararath had professed an interest in Old Weston, and she was not unaccustomed to this type of interruption; had she been one to take offense, she would have either died of frustration years ago, or would have strangled any number of the members of her Order. “We believe it has roots in Old Torra, but we are not entirely certain; it is not—quite—a Weston word. Nor for that matter,” she added, “is angel.”
“Are there?”
“Angels?” She shrugged. “If there are, they guard their names so well none has ever been summoned. Or perhaps the summoners chose not to write of their experience; history is a matter of both record and story, and of angelae, we have only story.”
“And demons?”
“More,” she whispered. “They are not men; there are some among their kind who can take on the shape and form of man, and some who can create and sustain the illusion of mortality. The latter are more common; they cannot bend flesh to their will, but they have the power to bend minds to suggestion.
“The former are more dangerous.”
“Why?”
“We are not entirely certain. But the more human a demon appears, the more powerful it is.” She paused. “Demons do not learn language in the way that we do; they appear to absorb it from their summoner. Nor do they appear to require sustenance; they neither eat nor sleep unless ordered to it by their master. They don’t fear drowning because they don’t need to breathe. They seldom fear fire or cold; the seasons are an echo of the elemental forces, and they can pass through the bitterest of Northern Winters untouched.”
Rath lifted a hand. It was perfectly steady.
“Yes?”
“I fear to hear more,” he said quietly. “I know your edicts, Sigurne. And I am aware—as perhaps few others are—that you have killed greater men than I for exercising their curiosity about this particular subject.”
She nodded genially. Felt the smile that drew creases around the corners of her mouth. “You are not a member of the Order,” she told him wryly. “There is not one among them who would seek to stop me from speaking at this juncture.”
“I have learned, in the past few decades, to temper curiosity with caution; it is why I am now called old.” His smile was fuller than hers, but his eyes were darker. “How much about demons must I understand to understand the answer to my question?”
“It is hard to say. Less, perhaps, than I have said. Or more. Judge for yourself, in the end, as you must.” She gestured, placing one hand on the surface of the table. Rath was frowning.
It was often said that honest men could not be lied to, and she had often wondered why people believed this. It was men—like Rath—who skirted the edges of truth, mixing just the right amount of falsehood into the blend, who were adept at spotting prevarication; men, like Rath, who were capable of hoarding expressions, and offering them only where they might have the most effect, as if they were genuine.
“The Ice Mage studied the forbidden arts.”
“He did not come to their study in the North.”
“No. He was a full member of the Order of Knowledge; he claimed to be of the First Circle, and as that is an internal matter, I will neither confirm nor deny. But he lived some years upon the Isle, in this building, and while he learned to master the arts of the warrior-mage, his researches must have led him, in the end, to information that we have since eradicated.
“He was not discovered while he began to develop mastery of this particular craft within the halls of the Order; he was not discovered while he worked—as many of the more powerful mages do—under the auspices of the Houses. But he must have felt that discovery was inevitable; when he at last chose to abandon the Isle, he left in haste, and took with him only the most damning of the evidence that would have been used as justification for his execution.
“We have no records of how he traveled; we presume, given later investigation, that he chose to cloud-walk. It is a colloquial term,” she added. “And for the purposes of this discussion, it means he traveled quickly by aid of magic. It is not an instant form of travel, but to travel instantly from Averalaan to any point, be it in the Empire or no, would be to invite investigation; the power required would leave a signature that could be read for miles by even the least talented of our students.
“He arrived in Brockhelm when I was perhaps eight years old. He had ruled in Dimkirk for two years before Brockhelm was subject to his whim, and we little suspected his existence until that day; in the far North, travel between villages is not common, at least not by those who dwell within the villages themselves. When he came, many died, and those that did not, chose to accept his rule. From us, he demanded little, but we were no longer free to travel. He expected pursuit, and he wished no warning of his whereabouts to escape before he felt himself ready.
“That pursuit was late in coming.” She lifted a hand to her brow. “When I was twelve, I met the first demon. I did not know him as demon; I would have said he was a tall man with cold eyes, no more and no less. He wore clothing in the Northern fashion, and seemed little affected by the cold; were it not for the rule of the Ice Mage, we would have thought him a merchant far from home.
“But he came with the men who served the Ice Mage—and by this time, they numbered perhaps a hundred strong—and ordered the villagers to gather in the village center. There was some anxiety,” she added, “but no thought of disobedience. We gathered. He came.
“And he left, after giving us each the barest of glances.”
“He was looking for the talent-born?”
“Yes, but I did not know it at the time. He came once a year, after that.”
“When did you leave the village?”
“I left Brockhelm at his command in my sixteenth year; I had turned fifteen two weeks before. I did not, at that time, understand why I was being taken from home; I understood only that I had no choice. The Winter makes us harsh,” she added softly, “a harsh people for a bitter clime. My mother and father were silent; I was silent. My brother, younger, was only barely silent, but he understood that any word, any action, on his part would mean the loss—in one day—to my parents of both their children, and he said nothing. We accepted the inevitable.”
Rath did not speak. He had no words to offer this woman. No words of comfort, no words of sympathy, no words of admiration. By her simple statement, her flat, uninflected voice denied him even the effort of finding them.
“Were there no Priests in your villages?” he asked at last, for the silence demanded something.
No. We had perhaps three before the Ice Mage came, but none of them god-born. Had he found the god-born among the villagers, I believe he would have fled farther North; what the god-born see, the gods know, and what the gods know, the Kings, inevitably, will come to know. He was no fool. He desired power, but he was patient and cautious.
“Cautious in almost all things.”
“But not the demons.”
“Not the demons, no,” she said softly. “Their first love is terror, primal terror; their second love is pain. For those creatures who look as if they stepped out of the rhythm of childhood story, the g
ratification of their desire is a simple—but bloody and messy—affair. But those who are more human in seeming are not without subtlety, and even in captivity, they are powerful.”
“Is it not for their power they are summoned?”
“Ah, I forget myself. The past always makes an uncertain country of the present. Yes, it is for their strength or power that they are summoned, but even leashed, they can be compelling, and if they cannot satisfy their desire for fear or pain quickly, they will find another path to it; they think of it as a type of ripening. You are not talent-born,” she added softly, “but with both words and weapons forged by men who were, likewise, born without such power, you are dangerous.”
He nodded.
“Understand, then, that these creatures can see the darkness of even so slight an evil as thought almost before we can think it.”
“They can hear your thoughts?”
“Nothing so concrete. They sense the darker thoughts the way sailors sense the storm. But sailors avoid the storm; the demons thrive on it. If they can find the seed, they will grow it; if the seed does not exist, they will plant it. And they will do so with subtlety, where subtlety is required.
“Where it is not, they will do so with glee and malice.” She could not help herself; she rose. Her hand drifted away from the tabletop, and a web of light came with it, invisible, she knew, to Rath’s eye.
“Understand that I was young,” she said softly, “and away from home for the first time. Understand that I knew, from the moment the tower became my home, that I was never to return. I was not expected to be servant to the Ice Mage; he had those in abundance, although servant is too kind a word.”
“They were demons?”
“He was not a fool. Where people would do, he used them. In the early years,” she added softly. “In later years, he grew arrogant, certain of himself and his control, and in those years, he dismissed—often fatally—his household.
“To contain one demon is difficult. And the one that he had never released—the one who could sense talent, and find it—was a danger to him. He was, as demons are, arrogant; he was proud of bearing. But he was also almost human in seeming. He wore the clothing of the North as if he was born to it; he spoke the tongue. Where the lesser kin—for they are called, among other things, the kin—seemed almost bestial in their savagery, he appeared to consider such wildness beneath him.
The Hidden City Page 49
