Fire Within: Book Two of Fire and Stone (Stories of Fire and Stone 2) (31 page)

“Really, you don’t get it?” Erizen asked.

“If this is something you planned…” Esset said threateningly.

“Oh please, really?” Erizen said scornfully. “Think about this.
Look
at what Moloch has done.”

“I am looking. He’s undone all our work,” Esset growled.

“
Exactly
,” Erizen replied. Esset didn’t get it. Tseka just stood back and watched, keeping her poker face on.

“What happens if we destroy the castle again?” Erizen asked Esset.

“He rebuilds it again,” Esset replied, still not getting it.

“Yes. And why will he? Because he has to. He has set a precedent. He has
made a mistake.
If he doesn’t keep rebuilding them now, the other Dark Mage Lords will come to one of two conclusions: either he’s giving in or he
can’t
rebuild them because he doesn’t have the magical resources anymore. Either result is very bad for Moloch,” Erizen explained.

“Okay, so I suppose that’s good, but we can’t keep this up indefinitely, especially at this pace,” Esset replied.

“You’re still not seeing the beauty of this,” Erizen replied, shaking his head in wonder. “The only reason he’s capable of this is because of the Greymaker.” Esset blinked as he finally realized what Erizen was getting at.

“So if we leave the castles for now and destroy the Greymaker…” Esset said, leaving the end hanging. This changed everything; even Toman would agree to go after the Greymaker now.

Tseka was smiling too. “Then after the Greymaker is down, we destroy the castles again. Either he rebuilds them and destabilizes himself magically, or he doesn’t, and he’s destabilized politically,” Tseka finished.

“Beautiful,” Erizen drawled; Esset didn’t even mind the phony accent this once. “What do you say we blow this one up again to celebrate?”

Esset grinned.

“Sure.”

Toman, Esset, Tseka, and Erizen were all gathered in the meeting room again.

“So let’s say we take the Greymaker down. What’s to stop him from putting it back up?” Toman asked.

“It’s true, he probably could put it back up, but it takes time and power to get a Greymaker working,” Erizen explained. “The spell is very finicky and costly in the beginning, and especially if Moloch doesn’t know what went wrong, he probably won’t want to put it up again right away. Especially if we keep him under enough stress that he doesn’t have the time and energy to put into it—namely by us destroying all his castles again.”

Erizen formed a steeple with his fingers and rested his elbows on the table. “No, the problem will be taking down the Greymaker to begin with.”

“Why don’t you just take the Greymaker down like you did last time?” Esset asked, rubbing the bridge of his nose at the headache before them.

“I can’t. Moloch is smart,” Erizen explained, as if to a small child. Esset resisted the urge to set the mage’s sleeves on fire and let him continue. “Last time he hadn’t had much time to learn how the Greymaker works, so he was fairly dependent on me still. Now he’s had plenty of time to study it. Besides, he safeguarded the Greymaker. If I could just take it down, I would. And even if I could pull it off, he could trace the spell right back to me.”

Esset looked thoughtful. Maybe they could get Moloch to finish Erizen off that way. It would sure be more relaxing without him around.

“Maybe we could use that,” Tseka said.

Esset blinked. “That’s what I was thinking,” he confessed.

“If we decide to try to lure Moloch into a trap, that could be ideal,” Tseka continued. Esset refrained from chiming in this time, since that
hadn’t
been what he’d been thinking.

“Just how angry at you are these mages?” Tseka wanted to know. Erizen inspected his nails.

“Well, let’s just say that they tried to make me dead, and I partially convinced them that they’d succeeded. They suspect I might be alive, but I’ve given them no hard evidence to suggest such,” Erizen replied haughtily.

Esset laughed—he’d pay for that later, in barbed comments and condescending remarks, but it was worth it.

“What did you do?” Tseka asked, genuinely curious.

“I was trying to play them off one another. I’d been doing it for years, but they never knew. They only found out about the most recent time I did it, but they were rather angry when they found out. I’d almost gotten them to war, too,” Erizen explained idly, as if this were all of no consequence. Esset refrained from making any unhelpful comments at the moment, since Erizen was actually being forthcoming, and that was a rare event.

“And Moloch? If he were to discover you were alive, do you think he’d come after you?” Tseka asked.

“Hm, difficult to say. I rarely tried to play him—too risky—but even so, he was always a cooler head than the rest. But when he gets mad, he gets even. I think he would probably come after me, but I can’t guarantee that,” Erizen replied.

“That’s definitely something to keep in mind, but we need to take care of the Greymaker first,” Toman said, calling the meeting back to the topic at hand.

“Indeed. The good news is, we can still destroy it; we just have to go after the foci, the physical components of the spell. Now, I imagine he’s changed the foci since I built the first Greymaker for him,” Erizen said. “Crystals of some kind work best as foci; I normally use topaz—it’s relatively inexpensive and therefore not targeted by folks who just want something shiny to make a profit. The foci need to be laid out in a particular pattern. It actually complements the spell-structure, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be easy to find them. There are two ways to protect the foci—hide them, or guard them.”

“I imagine Moloch will use a combination of both—some hidden, some guarded, with both done well,” Toman remarked.

“Likely,” Erizen agreed. “Now, there are key foci and supporting foci. Probably half a dozen of the former and a couple dozen of the latter. Technically, if we took out enough supporting foci, the whole thing would collapse, but I imagine Moloch built his like mine, where there are so many redundancies that such an approach would take a ridiculous amount of time and effort to find them all. No, we’re better to go after the key ones, for all that they’re bound to be better hidden and guarded. If we take out a few foci and one or two supporting ones nearby, we should destabilize the Greymaker enough for it to go down.”

“Should?” Toman asked.

“Assuming Moloch hasn’t made any changes to my designs. He understands the theory now, you know, and he’s a brilliant mage. He could have made any number of changes. He could have made changes that make the power output larger but leave the Greymaker less stable. Or he could’ve changed it so it’s more stable. I don’t know. I’ll know more when I see one of the foci, I imagine,” Erizen replied.

“Great,” Esset muttered.

“How do we find the foci?” Tseka wanted to know.

“Well, finding the first one is going to take luck and persistence,” Erizen replied off-handedly. “After that, I can make educated guesses on where the others will be, based on the location of the first one we find.”

“And then how do we take out these foci?” Tseka asked.

“Any number of ways. Your creatures could blow it up,” Erizen gestured at Esset. “Or we could simply remove it, although that has its risks. I could also set up a spell to try to destabilize the Greymaker earlier, and further, although that has risks as well,” Erizen finished.

“What are the benefits of these riskier ones?” Toman asked.

“Well, simply destroying some foci is only less risky for the first couple foci,” Erizen replied. “It would be extremely risky for the final foci to be destroyed, since the Greymaker could collapse violently.

“The risk of removing the foci is that the spell could realign to some other structure with unforeseen consequences—I can’t even begin to guess, but trust me, it’s possible. The gain is a very valuable artifact—tuning a crystal for magic is difficult and tedious, and ones modified by masters are valuable.

“The gain for using a spell to destabilize the Greymaker is that we could possibly go on for a while without Moloch even knowing that the Greymaker is being tampered with. We could also, theoretically, direct any eventual backlash at him, or even steal the fruits of the Greymaker. The risk comes if Moloch discovers the tampering through error or chance—it would be easy for him to undo, and all our hard work would be for nothing. We’d have to start over.”

“How likely is he to discover any changes?” Tseka asked. Erizen shrugged.

“Impossible to say—at least without having had a single look at his Greymaker,” Erizen replied. Esset frowned—he didn’t like the sound of the last option. The risks were too great.

“Can you draw out this spell structure you keep talking about?” Tseka asked.

“None of you are mages. I don’t see how that could help,” Erizen replied.

“Humor me,” Tseka said.

“How tedious. The structure can also vary, as I said, but I’ll outline the basic one. Pass me that blank scroll.” Erizen began sketching as Tseka watched.

“That looks familiar,” she said, to everyone’s surprise.

“Unlikely,” Erizen responded, finishing the sketch.

“Esset, look at this,” Tseka said, pushing the document across the table towards him. He reached out and pulled it closer. He was surprised to find that she was right.

“This—Tseka, this looks familiar because it looks an awful lot like Jionar Atah’s drawings of the spell-structure of a geas,” Esset said.

“A
geas
?” Toman said disbelievingly, looking at Erizen, who shrugged.

“They do work on similar principles,” Erizen confirmed. “Although they’re far from identical. Who’s this Atah?”

“A scholar… He found ways to undo magic without actually using magic,” Esset replied distractedly.

“Impossible,” Erizen replied, forcing Esset to pay attention for a moment.

“Well, without having the ability to use magic,” Esset amended. “It was how we got the geas off Toman.”

“Really?” Now Erizen looked intrigued.

“Yeah. Atah thought all magic was evil, so he used mundane things to manipulate the natural energies of the world to undo magic. He created a lot of strange devices to do it, most of which were never recovered, so some of his work seems like nonsense. But his work did enable us to undo a geas with only the help of an elementalist and some salt by using a particular counter pattern,” Esset explained.

“Which should be impossible. Fascinating. Do you have these works here?” Erizen asked, actually showing eagerness. Esset was surprised by his enthusiasm, and for once, it was a pleasant surprise.

“All I have is a page from his work that I copied so we could break the geas. The rest is in Sedina. Do you think it will help us here?” Esset asked.

“I would have to see the scrolls for myself to know. And I’d still need to see the Greymaker,” Erizen replied. He seemed to have reined in his enthusiasm and hidden it away, which Esset thought was a pity.

“I’ll send a message to Andarus—he’s the Head Librarian in Sedina’s royal library—and get him to copy the scrolls for us,” Toman suggested. “That way we can keep looking for the foci without interruption. Hopefully we’ll have found the first foci by the time the scrolls arrive.”

“Sounds like a plan. Give it to me to sign before you send it though. Andarus has always had a soft spot for me and my father,” Esset said.

“True. Now: the Greymaker. Where do we start looking for the first foci?” Toman asked Erizen, tapping the map. Now the guesswork began.

A week later, Toman burst into Esset’s room. Esset tossed his book aside without a second thought at the look on his brother’s face.

“You got something?” Esset asked eagerly.

“Might be nothing. Might be something,” Toman said. Esset didn’t need further prompting.

“Thank Hyrishal, let’s go check it out,” Esset replied.

“We just have to tell Tseka and Erizen,” Toman said, grinning.

Esset pulled a face at Erizen’s name. “Well, hopefully, since you’re the first to find something, Erizen will shut up about deserving compensation for all his ‘hard work.’”

“He has been whining a lot, hasn’t he?” Toman asked. Esset pulled another face.