Gaspi came back and helped him pick up the books he’d spilt. “You caught that old man’s disease?” he asked quietly. Rimulth choked on a laugh, trying to keep from annoying the library’s other inhabitants even more than he already had. “Come on,” Gaspi said, pulling him to his feet.
They found the girls in the fifth petal. Lydia was frowning intensely at a scroll she had propped open in front of her, and Emmy was staring out of the window, looking bored. Seeing them as they approached, she sprang out of her seat and hurried over. Loreill took off across the floor, joining Lilly and the fire spirit where they lay curled up by the window. Emmy gave Gaspi an enthusiastic kiss and Rimulth a hug, another plainsdweller habit he was struggling to get used to. The elementals were chirruping their own greetings, earning them loud tutting sounds from nearby tables.
“Keep it down please,” a gruff voice sounded from round the corner.
Emmy grinned and pulled Gaspi into the alcove, holding a finger to her lips. The elementals had finished greeting each other, and quietened down too. Rimulth pulled up a chair next to Lydia and Gaspi sat down with Emmy.
“So how’s it going?” Gaspi asked.
Lydia leaned back from the scroll in disgust.
“Not good,” she answered in hushed tones, clearly frustrated. “I don’t understand why Professor Worrick can still see but I can’t.”
Rimulth didn’t know what to say that might help, so he just kept quiet.
“When was the last time you saw?” Gaspi asked.
“Months ago!” she whispered in disgust. “I saw a couple of things about me and Taurnil,” she expanded, and then stopped, flushing beneath her dark complexion. “There’s been nothing since then.”
“Have you stopped doing as much magic?” Gaspi asked. “You said you were going to cut back on spell casting in case it helped you start to see again.”
Lydia grimaced “I tried but how can I? I’m training to be a magician!” she said, frustration making her raise her voice above a whisper, earning her another loud “shush” from round the corner. Everyone fell silent, not knowing what to say.
Suddenly Rimulth
did
know what to say.
“Perhaps this is happening for a reason,” he said quietly, pausing uncertainly in case Lydia didn’t want to hear his opinion. He still felt awkward around the girls, and particularly around Lydia, who was quite formidable!
“Go on,” she said, looking at him intently.
“If Professor Worrick can still see despite using his powers regularly, then that should be the same with you. Maybe your gift will come out again when the time is right.”
“Maybe,” she echoed doubtfully.
“I know it’s important to you to be a seer,” he continued, gaining in confidence. Somehow he just knew he was speaking the truth. “Just like it’s important to me to be a shaman, but maybe the magic uses us as it knows best. I can’t return to the mountains as soon as I’d like because I’ve been chosen by the air spirit, and maybe it’s the same for you. The magic is working its way through you in the best possible way right now, and perhaps you could just give in and let it happen.”
Lydia was looking at him incredulously, and he instantly regretted being so forthright. “That’s pretty profound,” she said at last, and Rimulth breathed a sigh of relief.
“Yeah that was pretty good mate,” Gaspi said, looking at him speculatively. “How did you work that out?”
“I don’t know,” Rimulth answered honestly. “I just suddenly knew it was true.”
“Fair enough,” Gaspi said, and Lydia stood up, packing up her scrolls with a much lighter expression than she’d had previously.
“Thanks Rimulth,” she said, a smile lighting up features that struck him in that moment as being extraordinarily beautiful.
“Does that mean we can go?” Emea asked, like a child who couldn’t quite believe she’s being let out of school early.
Lydia laughed quietly and kissed her on the cheek. “You’ve been very patient Emmy. Consider it payback for all those games of koshta! But yes, I’m done now. Let’s go,” she said, and they pulled on their cloaks. Rimulth, who didn’t generally wear his cloak, put his outer furs back on. The elementals, seeing them getting ready to depart, clambered to all fours and stretched, Lilly’s chirrups and the fire spirit’s snort earning them further unwanted attention. A tall boy stepped out from behind a row of shelves. Rimulth recognised him as Everand. There had been some kind of issue with him and Gaspi but no-one had explained it to him properly and he hadn’t thought to ask.
“Some of us are trying to study,” the broad-shouldered boy said haughtily, making no attempt to lower his voice.
“Shut it Everand!” Gaspi snapped. “We’re going now anyway so we won’t disturb you any longer.”
“Don’t you tell me to shut it!” Everand said angrily. Gaspi looked like he wanted to punch him.
“Forget it!” Gaspi hissed, stalking past Everand as he headed for the exit.
“That’s right, get out of here,” Everand announced, “and take your demons with you!”
Gaspi wheeled back. “You what?” he snarled, taking a step back in Everand’s direction.
“Gaspi, leave it!” Emea said. She whirled back to the larger boy, whose chest was rising up and down rapidly, his face flushed with anger and something else Rimulth couldn’t identify. She took three long strides up to him, looking up into his face with cold eyes.
“Why are you acting like this? You’re better than that,” she said. Everand didn’t say anything, his gaze slipping to the elementals, eyeing them with dark distrust. Emmy’s face hardened as she saw his reaction. “Just so you know,” she said. “If you call them demons again, I won’t be asking Gaspi to hold back.” With that, she turned her back on him and walking towards the plinth.
She grabbed Gaspi’s arm as she passed him, anger evident in her every movement. Rimulth followed with Lydia and the spirits, who gave Everand a wide berth. When they all stood on the transporter, Gaspi spoke the word of command and they appeared moments later in the entrance hall.
“How dare he?” Emmy asked incredulously as they stepped off the plinth. “Demons!”
“He’s an idiot,” Lydia spat with uncharacteristic venom. Rimulth noticed that Gaspi didn’t say anything, but if he wasn’t mistaken, he looked more frustrated than angry. As they stepped out into the open air, a loud cry sounded from above, and the air spirit came spiralling down from the sky in hawk form. Rimulth stretched out his arm and it landed, curling its talons around his thick furs.
Rimulth could tell the spirit was disturbed. During the confrontation in the library, it had sensed the agitation of the other spirits, and now that it was reunited with them, they were conferring noisily, flooding their bond-mates with their emotions. Rimulth looked at the others and could see that they were feeling it too. The spirits were angry, especially the fire spirit, but as they communed the emotions flooding through the bond slowly changed from fury to resignation and finally to cold indifference. The fact that some humans saw them as demons was deeply offensive to them, but if they became agitated by it, it would distract from what they were here for. All four spirits seemed to agree with that, and soon the emotions of the bond reverted to their usual steady background hum. Rimulth and his friends exchanged looks that all said the same thing – none of them would be so passive about it if it happened again. Emea still had fire in her eyes.
“Gaspi, if he says it again, or anyone else does, you can do whatever you want,” she said flatly.
“Whatever you say,” Gaspi said, but Rimulth thought that he looked troubled.
Ferast and Bork rode side by side towards West Farthing. They were drawing ever nearer to the Ruins of Elmera, and in the last few days, villages and homesteads had become increasingly sparse. As the miles passed, Ferast’s sense of excitement had grown. There was clearly something to the ruined city’s reputation. No-one wanted to live anywhere near it! Just that morning they had come across a lone traveller, who’d informed them that West Farthing was the closest settlement to the Ruins, and beyond that it was just open country. While answering Ferast’s questions, the traveller had become increasingly uncomfortable, unnerved by Bork’s intimidating appearance.
Ferast smiled sourly at the memory. If he hadn’t been so focussed on finding Shirukai Sestin’s lair, he’d have stopped to show the traveller exactly who he should be scared of, but an instinctive sense of urgency had persuaded him to let the traveller journey on unmolested. Stopping to torture and kill him would have taken at least an hour or two, and the delay would have prevented them from reaching the village by nightfall.
As had become his habit, he patted the internal pockets of his robes, reassuring himself of the presence of his Darkgems. There were more packed away with his things too, but he always liked to keep a few within his clothing in case they were needed. The power they gave him was mind blowing, amplifying the smallest release of his own magical strength into something much more destructive. He’d discovered that it wasn’t necessary to smash a Darkgem to release its power. That was the easiest way to harness its entire force in one go, but if he wanted to draw only a part of its power, or have it released more slowly, he could thread it directly from the gem without breaking the casing.
He snorted with derision when remembering the way he’d laboured over the choice of his first human victim, earning him a sidelong glance from Bork. It had seemed so important at the time to choose the most useless, down and out wine sot, but he couldn’t understand why anymore, however hard he thought about it. The power a single Darkgem gave him made it more than worth it, and he never took the time to select specific victims anymore. The truth is, he’d come to enjoy taking life, and more than once he’d become so lost in the frenzied orgy of pain that he’d forgotten to form a gem with the tortured energies of his victim.
Bork’s victim too, he reminded himself. Bork was the perfect slave for him. The mute was under no illusions of equality and he had a natural affinity with violence. Ferast suspected that he enjoyed inflicting pain as much as
he
did, and often, after a killing, his eyes would glitter with a strange light for hours.
Night was falling just as the lights from West Farthing flared into being on the horizon, letting the two travellers know they were near their destination. They would bed down in an inn for the night and set out for the Ruins the next morning. They rode on in silence until they passed the last of the farmsteads and entered into the village proper. West Farthing turned out to be surprisingly large, with thirty or more dwellings, a smithy, several workshops and a large inn. Perhaps the villagers thought there was safety in numbers so close to the Ruins.
They rode up to the inn, where a stable-hand emerged from behind a stack of hay bales, rubbing his eyes sleepily. They dismounted, handing him the reins of their horses. The stable-hand peered at them blearily, standing still for long moments with his hand extended. When he realised they weren’t going to give him anything for his services, he pulled a face and led the horses into the stable. For a moment, Ferast boiled with anger, consumed with the desire to teach the ignorant serf what it meant to be rude to his betters, but he’d already decided not to perform any magic within a day’s ride of the Ruins. If, as Ferast hoped, Shirukai Sestin had made his home in the Ruins, he might sense the use of magic and mistake him for an enemy, which would make approaching his hideout suicidal. However he approached Sestin it was going to be risky, but he figured the best way was to do so openly and without using magic, in the hope that the renegade would give him a chance to explain himself.
With some difficulty, he swallowed his ire, and felt
Bork relax beside him. As Ferast had come to expect, the killer was tuned into his mood and had been ready to strike. Turning his back on the second person to come within a hair’s breadth of their own death that day, he led Bork into the inn. As usual, Bork’s appearance was enough to silence a roomful of strangers - something that Ferast found irksome. Once again, it was
him
they should fear more than Bork, but he supposed most people were too stupid to look beneath the surface. It was some kind of compensation that when they finally worked out who to fear, the result was always gratifying. He ordered some food, a small glass of red wine for himself and a pint of ale for Bork without exchanging a single unnecessary word with the innkeep, and retreated to the darkest corner of the common room.
The food and drink were
deposited on their table by a nervous looking barmaid, who departed as quickly as she could, leaving them to eat their meal in silence. With nothing else to do, Ferast decided to go to bed early, anxious to be up as early as possible the next morning. Normally he left Bork to his own devices at night, but as the mute was under strict instructions not to draw attention to them, he went to bed too. The final indignity was having to share a room. Ferast normally slept alone, but there was only one room available in the inn, and it was tiny. Jammed into a small cot, Ferast tried to fall asleep, but Bork beat him to it, his snores sawing away at his sanity. After a few minutes he’d had enough.
“Bork!” he snapped loudly, waking the mute from his slumber. “You’re snoring. Go and sleep in the stables.” Bork sat up and looked at him expressionlessly for a long moment. For a second Ferast thought he might actually be rebelling, but then the mute rose from his cot and left the room. Satisfied, he lay back down and closed his eyes, but sleep pro
ved to be elusive. He had successfully subdued a feeling of desperate anxiety throughout the day, but in the quiet and the dark, it came back in full force. After all he’d been through on his search for Sestin, he just
had
to be right about the renegade’s lair this time. If the Ruins turned out to be yet another dead end, he didn’t know where else to search. Angrily forcing away the unwelcome thought, Ferast focused on the hope that he would meet Shirukai Sestin tomorrow, but that thought too left him tingling with nervous energy. He berated himself silently - there was no need to be nervous! As soon as he explained himself to the renegade and showed him the Darkgems, Sestin was bound to welcome him with open arms. If tomorrow went as planned, he was finally going to have a great magician for a mentor; someone who would understand his greatness and teach him what he wanted to know. When he did eventually fall asleep, he did so with a smile on his lips.