1 The Outstretched Shadow.3 (19 page)

 The ceremony was simple: the old Talisman went into one bowl, the new Talisman came out of another, was blessed by the Arch-Priest, and placed into the worshiper's hand. As the bowls filled (or emptied) they were taken away by Deacons of the Light, and new bowls were brought.

 Then you stepped aside, and someone else took your place. There were always a dozen young Deacons of the Light standing around to help make sure you could get your Talisman back onto its keeper-chain again without trouble, and to be sure you were wearing it when you left.

 It had always seemed like a great deal of unnecessary fuss, when keeping the same identification Talisman until it wore out, was damaged, or was lost would surely have served the City's purposes (so he'd once thought) just as well. He'd never questioned why—like so many things in the City, it was just the way things were, and custom was custom, not to be questioned.

 But now, after what Anigrel had told him, Kellen wondered if he could ever do it again, could ever face the Light-Priest and hand over his Talisman with the same calm acceptance, knowing that when he did so he was giving up a part of himself? How could he, knowing that the Mages fed upon him, upon all the citizens of Armethalieh, as if they were no more than a herd of milk-cattle?

 It was disgusting. No, worse than that. It was sick.

 And worst of all, Kellen didn't see a single thing he could do about it.

 Gritting his teeth, Kellen turned away from the Temple of the Light and strode up the steps into the Great Library.

 It was City Law that one copy of every book that came into the City had to be kept available here. Most people who used the Library had to go to one of the Reading Rooms, fill out a request, and wait for the books they wanted to be brought to them, but there were some advantages to being the Arch-Mage's son. Kellen was greeted personally by the Chief Librarian, and after a few vague comments about needing to do some research—Kellen didn't say for what, and if the Chief Librarian assumed it was for his magickal studies, well, he didn't say anything to correct the man's mistake—the Chief Librarian presented him with an "All Access" pass to the stacks.

 Kellen hung the square silver tag around his neck so that it would be plainly visible, thanked the man politely and profusely, assured him he would remember him to his father the Arch-Mage, and made his escape into the stacks.

 THIS was not the first time he'd been here—Anigrel had brought him once or twice before—but it was the first time Kellen had been here unescorted. Panels of Magelight illuminated the long shelves of books in the windowless corridors, and the faint hum of Preservation Spells, endlessly renewed, made the air sleepy and thick. Fortunately, the Great Library used the same cataloguing system as the smaller Student Reference Library at the Mage College did, so Kellen knew where to look for what he wanted.

 He began with travelogues. Surely there would be some information there about the lands beyond the City.

 But though he made a promising beginning—all the books in that section were marked "Do Not Circulate," which meant they must contain something interesting—Kellen discovered to his disgust that every single one of them was fiction. Tales of travel to the moon, beneath the sea, to ridiculous wondertale kingdoms at the center of the earth. None of them had anything to do with the real world.

 By the time he finished his investigations, the closing bell had rung— joined, he could hear faintly, by the echoing bells of Evensong sounding throughout the City. Kellen tucked his pass inside his tunic—he had no intention of giving it up just yet—and hurried out of the Library. He was far from finished.

 BUT his experiences the following day mirrored those of the first. As soon as his lesson with Anigrel was finished, Kellen returned to the Great Library—making sure the key to the garden was safe in his pocket, this time. Now he turned his searches to books of geography, to anything with maps, and was similarly disappointed. Either the books were missing entirely from the Library's shelves—although you really couldn't say they were missing, when it was obvious they'd never been there in the first place—or they were obviously fantasies. And even the fantasies were marked "Do Not Circulate," as if someone didn't want the citizens of Armethalieh—or at least, the ones who couldn't afford to buy books of their own—to even think about the possibility of a world beyond the City walls.

 Growing more frustrated—and just a little frightened, something he wasn't quite prepared to admit to himself—Kellen began delving into any book that might contain even a passing reference to the world outside the City walls. Each day, once his lessons were done, he returned to the Great Library—it was a safe enough destination, should Lycaelon ever discover he hadn't actually been at home. A little odd, perhaps, but scholarship was a respectable thing for one of the Mageborn to be engaged in, and there were a lot of perfectly reasonable things Kellen could have been looking up.

 As the days passed, he continued to return to the Library. Kellen consulted histories of the City, plays, popular fiction, looking for anything that even mentioned the fact that there was a whole world that didn't stop at the Delfier Gate and the harbor mouth.

 And he found nothing.

 At last, after a whole sennight of fruitless searching, he set the book he'd been looking at back in its place on the shelf with a disgusted sigh. There was no point in going on. He'd spent a sennight here, and if he spent a dozen sennights, if he read every book in the Great Library cover to cover, he knew he wouldn't find anything different.

 It was as if the world stopped at the City walls, and nobody cared. At least, nobody cared so long as the strawberries and beer came in through the gates in their seasons, and they had hot water and vermin-free kitchens.

 Nobody but Kellen Tavadon. Or those few people who were lucky enough to be parentless, or to have their parents disinherit them, so that they could get passage on a Selken ship out of the City.

 Well, if the Library couldn't help him, he had other resources.

 He had the Wild Magic.

 Kellen had done a lot more reading in his three Books while he'd been working his way through the contents of the Great Library—not only The Book of Sun, but also The Book of Moon, which explained a lot more about what he'd gone through with that first Finding Spell. He realized that he'd actually gotten off pretty easily, all things considered, and now that he'd actually done a Wild Magic spell, he understood a lot more about it than he had when he'd just been daydreaming about it during Undermage Anigrel's lecture.

 While High Magick and Wild Magic were alike in requiring a "payment" for their working, with the Wild Magic, the payment was not just the personal or group energy involved in setting the spell, but a further personal cost that could not be determined in advance. For the Wildmage, the more powerful the spell, the more likely that the price of actually getting what he wanted would require the Wildmage to act as a human agent of the Wild Magic's "desires."

 And whatever the personal price might be, there was a good chance it wouldn't be the same thing twice. He'd actually read that part before, but he'd been, well, careless. He'd thought that a Finding Spell was small enough to be exempt from that personal cost, but he'd obviously been wrong about that.

 That led to all kinds of questions, and Kellen had no one he could possibly ask. Was the Wild Magic alive? Did it "want" things—and if so, why did it "want" things—and even more importantly, what did it want them for! How could getting a servant-girl's kitten out of a tree be a part of anything, well, bigger? The Ars Perfidorum in his father's library talked about how dangerous and terrible the Wild Magic was, and Kellen hadn't really liked having his will taken away like that, but once he'd gone over the garden wall, he hadn't felt the compulsion any longer. He'd just acted naturally, and in the end he'd gotten what he'd asked for, and been able to help someone else, too, almost by accident.

 Except that this was magick, and in magick there were no accidents. So the Wild Magic had meant him to help the girl, while helping himself at the same time.

 Kellen shrugged, staring at the shelves of books that hadn't answered any of his questions, and shook his head. He didn't understand it, but nobody had gotten hurt, and so he was willing to risk trying it again. The Library had told him nothing—but somewhere in the City someone had to have the answers he needed! All he had to do was find them.

 With the Wild Magic. Finding answers was a Finding Spell, after all. How much could it cost him?

 He left the Library, stopping to turn in his pass at the Chief Librarian's office and thank the man for all his help. There'd been no classes—and no tutorial—today, so Kellen had gotten an early start at the Library. He still had most of the day before him. Plenty of time to cast a spell and see where it took him.

 He spent a short time searching for a secluded place where he wouldn't be disturbed; easy enough to find here in the center of the City on the Light's Day. As before, the Finding Spell took him only a little time to cast. This time he wasn't as specific: he wasn't asking it to find a specific object, only information—about life outside the City, or, failing that, why the information couldn't be found. The Books said that the less specific you made your goal, the lower the price that would be asked of you, and the more likely you would be to gain what you sought.

 This time, when the compulsion took him, Kellen didn't fight it, simply following where the pull led him.

 He was surprised to find himself drawn down into the Artists' Quarter, where the painters, poets, musicians, and writers of Armethalieh tended to gather. It was one of the oldest parts of the City—the streets here were narrow, with taverns, boardinghouses, printing shops, and kajfeliah-parlors all crammed in together. Music floated through the air as musicians practiced their craft or gave lessons in upper rooms, and the sharp smells of drying paint and turpentine were strong in the cool air.

 I could live here, Kellen thought hopefully. He didn't know what he could do to earn a place for himself here—he had no particular talent for the arts—and he wasn't sure he'd fit in, but at least these people didn't look as if they were spending their lives practicing for their own funerals and hoping to attend the funerals of their rivals first.

 Distracted from the spell-geas by the color and gaiety, he slowed down to peer into a shop filled with colorful pottery, but the pull of the spell drew him onward, and Kellen reluctantly obeyed, promising himself to return another time.

 Urged onward, he turned a corner, then another, and found himself on a quiet back street with fewer shops and more houses. This street wasn't as well kept up as the others he'd gone down, and large grey creatures scurried out of his way as he approached.

 Ugh. Rats.

 At last he felt the compulsion to move on lift as he reached the end of a dead-end street. He looked around. He was on a narrow street of shabby two-story brick houses that had seen better days. The City services that kept the better quarters of the City clean and orderly were less in evidence here—such services cost money beyond the house tax that paid for the City Watch and for the spells that kept house fires from spreading out of control, and those who lived in places like these rarely had the ready coin to pay for them.

 A scent of brackish water and rotting garbage assailed his nostrils, and he traced it to an old cistern in an empty corner lot beside one of the houses. Once it might have been used to catch rainwater, or even have been used as a communal well, but now it was choked with garbage and trash, and was obviously a clubhouse for the local rats.

 Kellen felt a sensation inside himself as if a key had turned in a lock, and realized exactly what he had to do. He didn't understand how cleaning the cistern out and rilling it in with clean dirt would lead him to the information he sought, but he had no doubt that this was the price the Wild Magic wanted him to pay.

 And me in my good clothes, he thought with a sigh.

 He stripped off his tunic and undertunic, folding them carefully and setting them to one side, and got to work. He couldn't finish this task in a day, and he'd be sure to bring tools and wear more suitable clothes when he returned tomorrow. But the Wild Magic had brought him here, so he'd better start now.

 Hesitantly, Kellen approached the cistern.

 "YOU! Boy! What are you doing there!"

 Kellen had become so involved in his task—he'd started by dragging away the heavy boards that were balanced precariously at the top of the trash heap that covered the cistern, and when he'd pulled the first of them loose, several rats had bolted out of the cistern, squeaking angrily as they ran—that the shout took him entirely by surprise. He dropped the board he was holding (narrowly missing his own foot) and turned in the direction of the voice.

 A man in a yellow tunic—he had the look, but hardly the manner, of one of the Mageborn—was leaning out the side window of the house, staring at him in surprise. Kellen stared back for a long moment before realizing he really needed to come up with an explanation. A good explanation. One that didn't involve the Wild Magic.

 "I'm, uh, cleaning out your cistern, goodsir. It's full of garbage, you see, and, well, there are rats…"

 "I know there are rats! Their squeaking keeps me up half the night— but will the Council do anything about it? No! They say it isn't on public property, so it isn't their responsibility! You're not from the Council, are you?"