by Mike Shel
Auric excused himself from the others and went to his room. He took the time to study the report on Gnexes written by the antiquarians, to see if there was something of importance he had overlooked. It yielded no more information than it had the first six times he had read it. Apparently, pedantic Arbena and Sulo had found little more of use than what they had told him the night of the assault on the Citadel.
“Sir Auric.”
Qeelb’s voice jolted him from the thin sheaf of papers. The sorcerer stood in the doorway of his room, leaning against the wall as though it propped him up. His dark eyes, watery and deep-set, looked as though they were trying to fix themselves on Auric, but not succeeding.
“Yes, Qeelb?”
“I would speak with you, sir. In private.”
Auric found the request unsettling, but he managed a nod and gestured for the man to take a seat at the bedside desk. A sudden hush replaced the amiable conversation of the others in their common room. The bruised sorcerer stepped in, closed the door, and sat in the chair Auric had indicated. Auric sat on the edge of his bed, attentive. The sorcerer was quiet for a moment, staring at his fingers in his lap, their flesh still bearing the marks of the witch-braces he had worn in the queen’s dungeons. Just as Auric thought the man might have changed his mind, he spoke.
“What I did at your Citadel,” he began.
Another pause.
“Yes?”
“It was not what I…chose to do, Sir Auric.”
“Not what you chose?”
“Strictly speaking, no. I was readying a sleep spell, one that would incapacitate everyone in the hall. But I felt a presence at the back of my…” He grimaced as though in pain, tapping on the shattered black gem beneath the bandage wrapped around his head. He closed his eyes and let out a long, slow breath. “It is impossible to explain sorcery to one who is not initiated into its labyrinthine logic, its demands of…well, best not to try. When the Azkayans broke my binding jewel, well…” He stopped again, looking up at the ceiling, exasperation on his wounded features.
Auric tried to come to the man’s aid. “You are struggling to find words—”
“The language. It’s like trying to speak words that cannot be translated from one language to another. Concepts that are too foreign for you to…comprehend. When the Azkayans did what they did to me, it broke restraints placed there by the College of Sorcerers, meant to prevent those inducted into our arts from employing their skills selfishly, in ways against the interests of the Crown.”
“Yes. Every Syraeic understands this.”
“Have you ever seen a sorcerer acting in defense of the crown? What they are capable of?”
Auric thought back a year, to the wooden planks of the deck of the Duke Yaryx, slick with blood. “I witnessed a woman no bigger than my daughter slay a dozen pirates all at once with smoky black spirits summoned from the Netherworld, and then saw her sink their warship single-handedly.”
“A Royal Navy vessel? Attacked by pirates? Those circumstances would suffice—an attack on the Royal Navy is an attack on the queen’s person. The woman…she had a black jewel in her forehead like mine?”
“Yes. Her name was Del Ogara.”
“Well, Sister Del would tell you now of what I speak. She did not choose the form. It chose her. She acted only as a conduit of power. That is what the practice of sorcery is, Sir Auric. The sorcerer serves to conduct power through her person. When it is small, restrained by our binding, we are better able to control and shape the form that power takes, whether we summon an otherworldly creature, or effect some spell, like the sleep spell I attempted at the Citadel. But when the restraint is broken—broken, mind you, not removed—the result is less predictable, wild. Captured western sorcerers like myself, aboard Azkayan warships or serving in their armies, are herded and directed by someone called a said-min kassir: it means ‘master of the broken.’ He, sometimes she, is a sorcerer of little personal talent. A said-min kassir would need to concentrate every fiber of his being to light a candle with sorcery. His many years of study are devoted instead to controlling the output of broken sorcerers. He shapes and directs that output…brings it to heel.”
Auric’s gut growled as the realization struck him. “But now…”
“Now I have no said-min kassir.”
“What does this mean, then, Qeelb?” said Auric after a quiet moment. “For you? For your role in our endeavor? That perhaps whatever power chooses you as its conduit may not be to our benefit?”
“No.” He closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose. For a moment, Auric thought the man might cry. But then he spoke again. “Choose…is not the right word. And to suggest that I as the caller of the power play no role in what comes through the opening I create, that is not accurate either. My will affects what is drawn to the breach.”
“Qeelb, I am not sure what it is you want me to understand.”
Qeelb rubbed his hands together, massaged the metal-formed dimples and creases in his fingers and palms. “Sir Auric, what I allowed through the breach at the Citadel was terrible, but it was necessary. No Syraeics were physically harmed, though I think you know no one left that hall unmarked by what they witnessed.”
Auric swallowed hard, nodded.
“I knew the form the power would take, seconds before it came. And I allowed that power through the opening I had effected. Your Citadel was saved, though a price was paid by all present. In the future, should something I deem too destructive come toward an opening I have made…I will do all I can to block its path. To the best of my ability, and at the cost of my life, if necessary.”
The man was trying to reassure him, Auric realized. He looked into the man’s dark, wounded eyes, blue and sick yellow bruising about the flesh of the eye sockets, an angry black scab across his upper left cheek. He thought then of Agnes’s words. I don’t know why, but I trust him. It seemed a mad thing, to trust this broken, dangerous man. But it was a mad expedition he headed. He needed to trust these five souls with him: his daughter, the painted actor, even this scarred husk sitting across from him. He had no doubt that in the coming days, many of those he would encounter would be far more deserving of mistrust.
Qeelb fingered a piece of jewelry that had slipped from Auric’s pack, sitting on the desk. He recognized it: an ivory cameo of Lady Hannah salvaged from the ruin of his manse. He had wrapped it in a cloth and brought it with him as an afterthought just before leaving Daurhim. He had forgotten it was there.
“Jasmine,” said the sorcerer, softly.
“Jasmine, you say?”
He didn’t answer for a moment, staring at the cameo with what looked like painful longing. “Jasmine. A girl I knew in Aelbrinth, before I entered the Spire. A girl I loved. She would be a very old woman now, if she still lives.”
“Perhaps you could find out. After all this, when we return.”
Qeelb looked from the cameo to Auric, his eyes far away. “I think not. I chose the Spire over her. ‘Sorcery or love,’ my preceptor said to me. ‘You cannot have both.’ How could someone ask a fourteen-year-old boy to make that sort of choice, Sir Auric? Youth is sweet, but we lack the wisdom to truly savor it, eh? And before we know it, the sourness of the world poisons our palates.”
The man looked again at the ivory cameo, smiled sadly, and put it back on the desk with a kind of reverence. He stood, kissing two fingers as he did, and touched them to the bauble, a sad smile on his cracked lips. He turned for the door then.
“Goodnight, Sir Auric. Sleep well.”
When Qeelb had closed the door again, tiredness washed over Auric. He picked up the cameo and looked at it, admiring Hannah’s handsome silhouette. He wondered then how she was, if she missed him, or if the duties of her rank occupied her mind. He wondered how Hanouer fared with Pala in the ground. He wondered about Daurhim, if the madness in the capital was reaching its fingers westward
towards the little town.
Sweet Belu, he prayed, closing his eyes, protect her and her people. Shield them from the darkness. Let it pass Daurhim by.
Auric opened his eyes and squeezed the ivory cameo in his palm. He set it again on the desk and laid down on his bed. “Goodnight, Hannah,” he said. “Goodnight, Jasmine. May all those we love sleep safely.”
22
Aretha Dell
Agnes leaned on the starboard railing, staring at the hypnotic frenzy of elementals stirring the waters around the barge. For a time, the labors of the extraplanar beings seemed playful, vibrant, bursting with joy. Then she sensed blind animal fury. There had to be a hundred of them propelling the flat-bottomed vessel along the Ironbell. She tried to count their forms, but just as a single entity nearly defined itself in the white foam—an elegant horse, a sinuous eel, a gliding hawk—it was lost in the chaotic churning of the waters.
The name of their transport was the Aretha Dell, and it was crewed by a dozen deckhands, making the rounds of the crates stacked from stem to stern, seeing to it all was secure. Walking along the port and starboard rails were a pair of water witches, corralling and cajoling the elementals summoned to marshal the barge north, against the river’s current. Qeelb had educated Agnes, unable to conceal his contempt.
“Water witches are, as a rule, washouts from the Spire in Aelbrinth: failed aquamancers, good for nothing but calling up water elementals for such mundane service. If they can’t secure employment on the rivers, they’ll wander from hamlet to hamlet, watering crops during dry spells or locating likely places for a farmer to dig a new well. It’s a dull business for someone who’s been initiated into the arcane mysteries. Teased with the power they might harness, only to find at last that they lack the talent to progress further. Very bitter fellows as a result.”
Bitter seemed the perfect term to describe the two who prowled the rails now. A man and woman, wizened, sour-faced, whose manner and appearance were so alike Agnes suspected they were siblings. Co-captains of the barge, they barked and growled at the deckhands and ignored their six unwanted passengers. The Syraeic expedition had been forced upon them by their paymasters at Oglewhim and Sons, back in Ralsea. The merchant company owned the barge and the two of them, a deckhand had informed her. They apparently lost their own barge to bandits a year before and were forced to contract with Oglewhim out of desperation. Agnes didn’t envy the deckhands’ fate either, subservient to the surly moods of two grizzled, scowling taskmasters.
The Ironbell River itself was as much as a half-mile wide in some spots, quick-flowing from its chilly source in the distant peaks of the Ironspur Mountains, that impenetrable range that separated the east of the empire from the Azkayan satrapies beyond. Traffic was heavy in both directions, with many other barges and smaller vessels making the journey to or from the north. The Aretha Dell carried crates of wine from the vineyards that dotted the rolling rocky hills of Bannerbraeke. Their cargo was destined for the Marburand river town of Balowy, not even half the way to the capital of Ironwound, their journey’s eventual end. Agnes had witnessed the Oglewhim clerk explain the assignment to them dockside.
“We travel the river empty-handed from Balowy all the way to Ironwound,” hissed the female water witch, “then sit at the docks ‘til this lot finishes their chores and ferry ‘em back? What a waste! What a bloody waste! On the River Rat we wouldn’t have taken tagalongs unless we were packed to the gunnels with cargo all the way.”
The River Rat was apparently their lost barge.
“Well,” answered the clerk, a pinch-faced man with a collection of warts on his chin, “why don’t you ask the eels along the way if they’ll give you your Rat back, eh?”
The woman had sneered and flexed a finger at the clerk. He began coughing and sputtering, a summoned mouthful of water spilling down his shirt front.
“How far to Balowy?” Agnes asked her father when he and Sira joined her at the railing.
“I don’t know the distance,” he answered. “Only that we should be there by late afternoon tomorrow. That’s what Yarbo says, at least.”
“Yarbo?”
“Our male water witch. Cantankerous fellow.”
“Qeelb informs me it’s the nature of their lot,” said Agnes, just as she thought she caught the shape of a human face forming in the bubbling white foam.
“One would think this fine weather would cheer them,” commented Sira, shielding her eyes with a hand as she looked up at the rich blue sky, cottony wisps of cloud and sunlight above. “It’s a lovely day.”
Agnes regarded the summer sky briefly and nodded, but her attention returned to the frothing waters beneath them. Sira smiled at her and walked away, towards the barge’s aft. Agnes admitted to herself that she found the cleric’s unfailingly sunny disposition cloying, though it was possible that the woman’s deferential treatment of her father might explain her emotions. Sira had been with him always since leaving the Siren’s Song, the two in quiet conversation for much of that time, conversation that seemed to trail off whenever she approached. They had a bond, of course, from their ordeal in the Barrowlands last year. Was Agnes jealous of that bond?
We didn’t reconcile so much as I laid down my anger, she thought, mind going back to those months immediately after her mother’s suicide. It had shaken her. For a time, she blamed herself for following her father into the League rather than seeking a husband, starting a family. Her father was grim, distant. He had shed no tears when they buried her. If her Aunt Lenda hadn’t been there, crying, Agnes might not have allowed herself to weep either. Afterwards, she returned to her training, her father to his League duties. He served as an occasional diplomat for a while, a senior field agent with a knack for gently but effectively pushing aside roadblocks to the League’s business imposed by officious bureaucrats and self-important nobles. He even lectured at the Citadel twice with Agnes herself in the crowded hall of eager students. But soon he and his Syraeic colleagues were taking mission after mission in the Barrowlands, without rest. She saw him rarely. It was after about a year at that manic pace before he emerged from a Djao ruin northeast of Serekirk—she had forgotten the subterranean deathtrap’s name. He was sole survivor of the expedition, bearing with him the head of his closest Syraeic companion, her beloved godmother, Lenda Hathspry.
He arrived back at the Citadel emotionally shattered. For a time, there was whispered talk that her father would end up committed to Saint Kenther, the asylum-hospital island where the League sent those of its number whose minds were broken. He took to drinking, holed up in a Citadel cubicle, chasing away well-meaning priests and old colleagues with profane rebukes. He allowed her to see him only once during that awful sojourn from the world, and what she witnessed shook her to the core: her loving father, a brave, intelligent, resourceful man, well respected in the League, sought after for his insight and experience, reduced to a red-eyed wreck with the stink of alcohol oozing from every pore. He had been her idol; she had beamed with pride when preceptors identified her as Auric Manteo’s daughter. Now, this…ruin.
He refused her entry after that disturbing encounter. At last, six months or more later, he came upon her in a courtyard, sparring with a classmate. He was gaunt, but sober and clean-shaven, and announced that he was resigning his commission with the League and retiring to the little town of Daurhim in the country. He had bought a small manse there. He left Agnes the family’s Boudun cottage and a more than adequate portion of the wealth he had accumulated over the length of his career. She was shocked by what seemed like his surrender, but also relieved that at least he seemed cured of the wild despair that had so pitilessly ravaged him.
Agnes completed her novitiate training and turned eighteen later that year. She began receiving field assignments, all of them in the Busker sites that littered the Duchies of Bannerbraeke and the Karnes. Life in the field was every bit as exciting as she had imagined when she was a young g
irl. One of her early forays was into an untouched crypt-complex of a minor Busker named Hanisham the Tin-Eared; she had written her father in Daurhim, recounting the adventure in breathless prose, craving his praise for what she had accomplished, for her daring and bravery. Instead she received a long harangue scolding her for rashness, for her failure to take the threats she faced with the seriousness and sobriety they deserved. He addressed her as “my girl,” an endearment that felt anything but endearing.
She lashed out at his stern letter with a poisoned response. He had apologized, and the two of them corresponded for a time, at least until she discovered that he had been using his influence to retard her career, keeping her from choice but dangerous assignments for which she was qualified. He was seeking to protect her from harm, yes. But she was no longer his little girl, who needed someone to shield her from risk. Indeed, it was as though he had abandoned her after Mama’s death. Now he wanted to keep her safe, after his retreat from the world? She had poured all her anger and resentment into a final letter. Had her words been a toxin, the letter’s contents would have felled every beast in the queen’s menagerie. She remembered blaming her mother’s suicide on him and asking that he remove himself entirely from her life. The memory shamed her now, stinging as she recalled the venom in the words she had penned. He had his own pain, she knew now. But still, in that pain he had forgotten his girl.
“Any idea how long we’ll be on the river?” asked Kennah, coming up beside her.
His approach caught her unawares. “No idea, Sir Kennah,” she replied.
“Don’t do that,” he grunted.
“Do what?”
“The ‘sir’ business. It feels…” His words trailed off with a sigh. He leaned on the railing. The wood creaked as it accepted his weight.
“You’ll need to get used to it, brother. Having that ‘sir’ before your name will open doors in your career, and with bureaucrats.”
