Magesong (5 page)

He pointed to Reyin.  One of the older men turned away at
this, tapping his head with a forefinger.  The young man had never been in his
right mind.  All the others began to walk away.

"Jonn," Aksel said, "don't you think you —
"  He froze, the squint suddenly plastered across his face.  "What
did you do with the goats?"

"The goats," Jonn said blankly.

"Yes, the goats," he said, the words rising on the
heat of his growing anger.  "You know — the animals that are going to keep
us alive next winter.  Where are they?"

"I just left them there, but the dogs came with me.  They're
at home."

"You left them there."  Aksel stared at him for a
moment.  "You idiot!  You had a dream and up and ran off into the bush and
tore yourself to shreds.  Never mind your responsibility to your mother and
me."

He turned to Syliva.  "You were right.  I'm going home
to get a few things.  If I start out right away I can get to Hyerkin before
sunrise and catch a few hours sleep at the Svordens."

Syliva nodded.  She found a rag and dampened it, then began
wiping the dried blood from her son's upper lip.

"I don't know when I'll be back.  Send word if you need
me, but not by that fool we raised."  And he stomped away into the early
twilight.

Farlo moved closer, spoke quietly.  "You said that you
remembered
this sky boat?"

Jonn nodded vigorously.  "I saw it last year, just
before the first snow.  I was up on the west ridge at sunrise, and I saw it fly
up from the sea."

Farlo looked at Reyin then back to Jonn.  "Where did it
go, lad?."

Jonn pointed to the Skialfanmir.  The sharp, horn-shaped
peak stood black against the red afterglow of the western sky.  "Up
there.  The highest place."

"Why is it so important for you to tell the
stranger?"

Jonn looked directly at Reyin.  "Because he knows
secret things."

The man known to the society as Ephemeris told the mate to
anchor near the place they called the Sea Gate, and went to his little cabin to
pack his robes and ceremonial accoutrements.  It was considered rude to arrive
in travelling clothes, but he wasn't going to walk across the Black Tongue
wearing traditional dress.  His own heavily wrinkled eyes looked at him from
the tarnished silver mirror.  He would soon wear the white mask as one of the inner
circle if he played this correctly.

The two-masted felucca began rocking in the swells as
headway ceased and the anchor dropped.  Always gusty here, Ephemeris thought. 
He wished he could quickly perform the incantation for dismissing the wind, but
there was a rule against weather magic anywhere near the Temple of
Supplication.  Temple.  He rarely used that name when he thought of it — in his
mind it was still the Sardonyx Tower, the name he and his novice friends had called
it when he first came here.

He went back onto the deck, and looked across the lava field
to where the tower rose out of wind-carved desolation.  Not really made of sard
and onyx, still it had that appearance with its layers of white and reddish
brown.  It was rather large to have been a watch tower, large enough to house,
on three of its seven levels, a meeting hall, a library, and a set of
apartments for the inner circle.  No one knew why the builder, some
long-forgotten sea king, chose to make it from two different sets of stone, but
from far out on the ocean the tower stood perfectly camouflaged, disappearing
into the strata of the buttes and bizarre rock formations that formed the
backdrop to this volcanic coastline.

Twenty years had passed since the night he had stood on the
very top of the tower in a driving rainstorm and attained the essence of the
magician.  He remembered how lightning had struck the tops of the distant
cinder cones.  Calling the lightning — that was how he had forged his essence. 
"Any student of magic can learn to call lightning out of a storm,"
Cipher had told him.  "The real art comes in making it strike what you
want."  In an epiphany born of his impatience, in an ecstasy rising from
his desire, Ephemeris had called the lightning upon himself.

He was not killed.  And all who had the sight could see that
he was now connected to the Essa.  Before he had even recovered, the inner circle
awarded him the brown robes of the initiate, making him a true supplicant.  But
it was the lightning, being touched by the Unknowable Forces, that made him
believe that one day the final grammarie would be revealed.

The mate knuckled his forehead and said, "Your boat 's
ready, Cap'n."

They crew knew something of the truth about him, as much as
they needed.  But he had put the eye of glamour upon all nine of them,
including the cook — these types were simply unreliable without it.  And he
wanted to make sure they did their best to maintain the ruse.  When he went out
into the world he was nothing more than a trader captain from eastern Jakavia.

The jolly-boat pitched and heaved in the churning waves. 
Ephemeris climbed over the side and down into it easily, without much thought. 
He had been orphaned and sent to sea as a cabin boy at the age of ten, and
although only two years passed before he was noticed by a supplicant of the outer
circle and brought to the tower, he never lost his sea legs or the desire to
master a ship of his own.

After landing at the tiny beach just inside the sea cave,
the only place within thirty leagues a boat could get ashore, the crewmen
hauled the boat halfway out of the water, and Ephemeris stepped onto the black
sand.  The flow of the Essa was strong here, strong as it was in the tower; he
had forgotten how good it felt.

He sent the men back to the ship then found the crevasse at
the back of the cave.  A step up onto a boulder, a quick scramble up another
slab, and he was out, facing a gargantuan swath of undulating black rock.  The
pocked and pitted landscape looked like the surface of an enormous black
sponge, with every delicate flair of stone sharper than a sword.  Even the
smooth places hid tiny knife points.

There was no path across the ancient lava flow as very few
of his brothers and sisters ever arrived by the Sea Gate.  Ephemeris himself
hadn't come this way in years.  Like most of his fellows, he usually docked in
Port Toscarbi and made the three-day journey across the island, but this time
he wouldn't be staying long.  They all thought of him as more mundane, less
spiritual, for maintaining a private yacht.  They saw it as a weakness, as a
tie to the material, and not for what it really was:  an object of power.  Sure
as any enchanted ring or eldritch book or any great device made in the high age
of the magician, his ship gave him a power few others had.  The inner circle
remained defiant of this scientific age, but Ephemeris would seek power in the
unseen future as well as the forgotten past.

He came to the entrance of the tower a quarter league beyond
the edge of the Black Tongue.  A smaller, man-size door had been cut into a
huge iron-strapped gate blackened by age.  He waited there, chaffing slightly
at the affront because whoever was doorkeeper these days had certainly been
told of his coming by the novices in the watch windows.  This was his penance
for arriving in a worldly costume.

The little panel in the small door opened to reveal a
lovely, girlish face within a hood.  It was Anemone, in the white and yellow
robes of the outer circle no less.  Being of no great talent in the art, she
had climbed above the rank of initiate rather quickly, he thought.  The fanatic
types often did.

"Speak traveller," she said, demanding the ritual
from him.  If he said anything but the formal response, she had the right to
refuse him admission.  He could tell by the dancing light in her eye that she
would do it too.  Fanatic.  He would have to do something about her.

"I come as a pilgrim, to supplicate myself before the
Unknowable Forces."

"How are you known?"

"By the sign of the seventh essence," he said,
tracing the symbol on his forehead, "and by the name Ephemeris, of the outer
circle."

The panel slid shut and he heard the snap of the bolt.  The
small door swung open, Anemone standing there with the doorkeeper's staff in
one hand.  Ephemeris remembered when he had stood his year as doorkeeper.  That
staff could paralyze with one touch, and he had thrilled with its power each
time he admitted someone.  That had been ten years ago.  He had learned enough
since then to know how foolish he had been.

She looked at the glove tucked into his belt and cleared her
throat.  "Enter as a petitioner, Ephemeris."

He started to walk past her when she said, "You seem to
be in a hurry this time.  Some cause for excitement?  Important news?"

"I have no word of
it
, if that is what you
mean."

"I simply meant, is there anything a sister should
know?"

"No," he said, "there's nothing you should
know."

She looked hard into his eyes, trying to see the lie, and
found nothing but clear glass, no hint of camouflage.  His pursed lips formed
something like a smile, and he nodded curtly, walking past her and toward the
central staircase.

An empty cell lay next to the dormitory.  He tossed his
duffle onto the cot and quickly changed into his robes, hanging the ceremonial
bronze dagger by a silver chain from his wide silk belt.  In his younger days
he carried a fighting knife strapped to his forearm under the sleeve of the
outer vestment.  Now he openly wore the glove.  It was known as the Gauntlet of
the Ashen Hand, but it was more a glove than a piece of armor, napped grey
leather with a skeletal hand outlined in pearl studs.

He had caught wind of it in an old Drendusian jest that
mentioned a sorcerous assassin named Myrdas, who used an evil glove that killed
with one touch.  When he showed the passage to Logic, his old acquaintance said
that he didn't think a single name was enough of a clue.  But Ephemeris began
living in the outer library, and after two months of reading came across the
name of a baron that Myrdas had supposedly served.  It took him a few more
months to sail to Drendusia and find the old baron's estate, and there was
where he got lucky.  The town register recorded that a Voormin Myrdas had died
of plague there in the time of the story.  Playing a hunch, Ephemeris stole
into the estate's graveyard that night.  He could not locate a marker with the
name Myrdas on it, but he did find the tombstone of the old baron himself.  According
to the date, the baron had outlived the assassin.  He lay down on the grave and
dreamspoke right there with the dead baron, who told him that they had buried
the accursed glove along with Myrdas in a grave marked "Yeoman" in
the commoner's cemetery near the village.  Digging up Myrdas had been the hardest
part of the whole quest.

Now Ephemeris never worried about anyone laying hands on
him.  After all, what was the point in having art and sight and power if a few
hooligans could still bludgeon you senseless in a dark street?  Not that he
really feared such a thing; he knew a few tricks that would scare any ruffian
out of his mind.  But that was really not the way of the society.  If anyone
threatened him physically, he wanted to make them very sorry.  When at last the
final grammarie was revealed, he would be able to call down a rain of swords,
would have the power to level cities.  For now, he carried the glove.

After tying the elaborate collar he stepped into his sandals
and checked himself.  All that remained was the wand.  He took it out of the
travelling case, the golden headpiece of dragon's wings gleaming in contrast to
the black coral haft inscribed with the six symbols of the final grammarie. 
The wand had no enchantments upon it, but Ephemeris thought that it lent
elegance to the costume of the outer circle, and it showed everyone at a glance
that he had proved himself to be a formidable spell-caster.  Those of lesser
skill and power received the brass book.

Leaving his worldly things in the cell, he raised the hood
of his robe and made his way to the outer shrine.  At the door he paused,
slipped out of the sandals, and entered barefoot, passing an invisible barrier
that shut out all sound.

The room was six sided, and the altar, a huge dragon worked
in silver with emeralds for eyes, stood opposite the entrance, the great ribbed
wings stretching almost halfway around the room.  A parqueted floor described
the symbol of the seventh essence in gold and black woods.  Six times six
candles that never burned down threw light from alcoves in the marble walls.

Ephemeris knelt before the dragon idol, placing his wand
aside before prostrating himself fully on the floor, his arms spread wide.  It
took some time to properly enter the meditation . . . then he was there, face
down in the cavern of ice.  The frost dragon towered over him, he knew.  He
dared not look, but he could feel the creature's frozen breath.

"I beseech the Powers," Ephemeris said in the
dragon tongue, the only speech that could be used in that spirit place,
"restore the lost magic of the lost age and reveal to us the final grammarie,
that ultimate power which reigns over all others, the highest of all the
arts."

"
Time is long, and time is short
."  The dragon
spoke in a voice like high wind inside thunder.

"I have come to make a request.  I seek knowledge of
E'alaisenne
,
the sixth of the great elementals."

The dragon exhaled, covering him with a sheet of frost,
freezing the sweat to his back.

"
Seek then the symmetry of things
," the
creature whispered.

He gasped for breath then saw that he lay on the floor of
the outer shrine.  Chills racked his body for a moment.  The communion was
always hard, even if you kept it short, but he had been answered.  He felt
elated.  He didn't know what it meant — one seldom did when dealing with the
Unknowable Forces.  Yet it was a good answer, he felt.

In the evening, the present society met for a brief meditation
in the outer shrine, the seven faces of the inner circle hidden behind white
silk masks.  The initiates then went to the refectory and those of the higher
circles to their rooms, all to be served the evening meal by novices.  Later,
after the tower had fallen silent except for studious murmurings from the
dormitory, Ephemeris went to the private apartments and tapped at Cipher's
door.

His old teacher came to the door unmasked, his silver under-robe
a match for his silver hair.  Wisps of pungent smoke sneaked past him seeking
escape in the draft of the hallway.  Cipher waved him in with a bony hand and
closed the door quickly.

"How did you know it was me?" Ephemeris said with
a grin.  He crossed the thickly carpeted room, found a pillow and sat.

Cipher threw another pinch of incense into the brazier. 
"Your penchant for drama will see you undone.  The secretive and swashbuckling
Ephemeris, arriving by the Sea Gate as if he had recovered the final grammarie
itself.  Honestly, old son, I think the novices must soil themselves every time
you walk by."

Ephemeris fingered the headpiece of his wand.  "Yes,
that would be quite a coup, finding
E'alaisenne
."  He looked at his
old teacher through the scented haze.

It only took a second for Cipher to get his meaning.  His
overly-large eyes turned feral with the shock.

"What?  How could — "

"Wait," Ephemeris said, raising his gloveless
hand.  "I don't know yet; I have to go to Jakavia to be sure.  But I need
to do a little reading first."

Stunned, Cipher slowly lowered himself to his knees. 
"If this is so," he whispered, "then the lost magic of the age
of power is finally ours."