I towed it behind us as Bronze carried me back to the place with the riven rock. Here, I told the spirit, would be the place it would come back to—its lair, if you will. Here it would find a supply of more chlorine as it used up some itself in killing victims. In the meantime, get in there and start killing anything that lives underground and dares to venture into your territory!
It flowed away from me, deep into the ground, and I nodded in satisfaction.
The next couple of hours saw me lay more spells on the area. One would draw chlorine from the salt in the seawater—just a trickle, not enough to be useful as a salt-gathering spell. Maybe as part of a larger salt removal process…
Anyway, another spell, well inside the cave mouth, would keep the gas from dissipating under normal circumstances, but it wasn’t strong enough to keep the gas from being dragged away by the… hmm. The air elemental? The gas elemental? The chlorine elemental?
Hungry for life to restore its vitality, it would hunt. Hungry for chlorine to restore the gas it used up in killing victims, it would always return here. And with the need to stay underground it would stay away from the road. It would serve very well as a curse on the underground area in this region.
I would still be keeping an eye on the road in the near future, though.
The Morning Meeting went well. No fresh disasters, reasonable progress with everything else, and guests: Malana and Malena were sitting at the table, looking uncomfortable, while Brother Terrany sat off to one side with Sir Sedrick, just observing. I wondered what he was thinking.
Seldar reported on the progress of our physique-enhancing spells. None of the cadets could be called soft or weak, now, and he was working diligently on always improving the worst of them. Even those guys were looking pretty impressive. Going hand-over-hand up a rope is always impressive; it’s even moreso in armor.
Torvil, on the other hand, wanted to know more about what I’d done for the twins, and could I do it for anyone. I agreed that I probably could.
“The problem is,” I told him, “while it seems to have worked, it might also be killing them. It may already have damaged them pretty severely. I’m waiting for them to recover before I can tell if it’s going to be useful or not.”
“Killing them?” he repeated, questioning. Malana and Malena both developed a sudden case of Wide Eyed Syndrome.
“It might give them a case of twitching, shivering convulsions,” I clarified. “I’m pretty sure that they’re fine, but I want to make absolutely certain that it
isn’t
killing them, first.”
“Ah,” he said, glancing at them. They did their best to look calm. “I’ll wait, Sire.”
“Good man.”
He also took the opportunity to ask if there was anything his father or brother could do to earn a knighthood. As much as I disliked the idea of nepotism, the question was a good one. Not “can you please lean toward knighting them?” but “is there anything they can
do?
”
I allowed as how I’d think about it and let him know if anything came to mind.
Kammen, meanwhile, had two things. First, there were a lot of people who wanted to make their sons squires to my knights, and I had, what,
five?
What should we do with them?
I agreed to let them squire for knights and cadet knights, just so we could see who showed promise. But we were going to have a discussion about this, so assemble everyone, please. He asked Torvil to take care of that.
The other point was one I did not expect. Kammen is, at best, an indifferent wizard. I didn’t think he could master the Ribbon. Apparently, though, he practices it daily; it’s the one spell he does exceptionally well because he keeps using it. He’s fascinated with interpreting the threads and lines and how they intertwine.
In case I haven’t mentioned it, mortal wizards can look at their lives through a visualization technique that looks like, well, a ribbon. It’s a multicolored thing a couple of feet wide and appears to stretch out underneath the wizard as he meditates. The individual strands of the Ribbon form out of the silver-grey fog of the future in front and flow together. Some strands seem to extend a long way ahead; others vanish quickly in the fog. The various strands are things that influence your life—thick for major influences, thin for minor influences—all weaving together as it goes by under you.
At major moments in one’s life, there is usually a
pinch
, a sharp narrowing of your Ribbon. It’s a time when events will be uncertain in some fundamental way. It’s a cusp where your future can make a drastic change—or not—based on how things go at that critical moment. Nothing beyond that point is fixed, or even predictable.
Normally, you’re not going to just up and decide to completely change your life; it goes on largely as before. But at a pinch, things may force you to decisions—or things may occur—that fundamentally affect your future. It doesn’t mean you’re going to die, but sometimes it’s a possibility. It does mean that there may be some serious changes, depending on how you handle it.
As I understand it, Kammen’s mother was a wizard and wanted him to be one, too, while his father wanted him to be a warrior. When his mother died, he kept up his practice of what she taught him—mostly the Ribbon, because it could have provided warning about her life-cusp—but his father refused to let him join the Wizards’ Guild.
And he’s
fast
at it, too. The few times I tried looking at the Ribbon of Fate (or the Ribbon of Time, or whatever), it took me an hour or more to get into the proper state of mind. Kammen does it in minutes. I doubt the Guild would have him; he’s kind of a one-trick pony. But the one thing he does well, he does exceedingly well!
How does one get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.
“I looked at the thing yesterday,” he said, “and I thought there might be cusp coming, so I checked again this morning. Now I’m sure; there’s one coming soon, maybe today. Looked like your thread, Sire, with Torvil and Seldar, too.”
“Any ideas what it might be about?” I asked.
“Nope. Didn’t see anyone else I recognized.”
“And it’s today?”
“I think so, yeah. Maybe in the morning.”
“Torvil? Seldar?”
“Sire?” “Yes?”
“If you can look at your Ribbons, please do; we can at least see if you share that pivot-point.”
They nodded agreement and left immediately; it takes a while to get into the trance-state required for precognition.
“Can you tell us anything else?” I asked Kammen.
“I don’t like it. I look at the thing a lot and I never seen it pinch like this. I don’t see nothing after it, not even the shadows you sometimes get of maybe futures.”
“All right. What do you want to do about it?”
“I’m thinking I’ll just sort of hang around with you, if that’s okay. Your thread’s pretty much straight-on into the pinch, so it means you’re big in it.”
“Are you sure that it’s my thread?” I asked. Kammen gave me a look that spoke volumes, none of it complimentary or even polite. I let it drop and went on.
“But we don’t know if it’s something you’ll have to do, or I will. My thread running through your pinch. We’re just both involved, somehow.”
“Yeah. Sire. And maybe Torvil and Seldar. Could be others, too, but I dunno who they are; I don’t recognize the threads.”
“Got it. All right. Anything else? Good. I’ll be down in the communications room. Thomen, if you would be so kind, get together a pack of supplies like you were going to stay in a cave for a day or two. I’ll need it for my next gate trip. Tort, please help him with that.”
I stood up before she or Thomen could say anything.
“Thank you all. Kammen, with me.”
We went down to the room with the mirrors and the sand table. Kammen looked puzzled as we went. I refrained from asking until we were in the room and the door was shut.
“What’s with the puzzled expression?” I asked.
“I just don’t get what’s wrong with those two.”
“Tort and Thomen?”
“Yeah. Sire.”
“What do you think?” I asked. He snorted.
“I think they need to crawl back into bed together and not come out until the moaning and thumping stops and they’re talking to each other again.”
“Ah. I take it that everyone knows?”
“They’ve been like that for years. Leastways ’til you showed up again. No offense, Sire.”
“None taken. How many years?” I asked. Kammen thought about it.
“Six?” he guessed. “Might not be six, but about six.”
“Hmm. Yes, I suspect you’re right.”
“About what? Sire.”
“About me waking up. I’m just not sure if Tort was passing the time with Thomen, or if she was really interested in him and her sense of obligation to me is overruling that interest.”
“Could go either way. Sire. ’Course, she could want the both of you.”
“Huh. I hadn’t thought of that,” I admitted. Kammen shrugged.
“If Thomen’s good with having nights while you get days, it could work. Sire. If legends are right.” His eyebrows went up, plainly asking without asking whether or not I was capable of performing at night.
“It’ll need to be sorted out,” I said, not answering the unasked question. “I’ll work on it. Tort’s happiness is important to me.”
“I could say something to one or both, but I guess I should keep my mouth shut?”
“You can talk to either of them, if you like. Pick the one less likely to turn you into something.”
“Got it, Sire.”
While Kammen stood guard, I walked around the sand table, picking up my work. I still wanted to get that third sensor aligned and calibrated in the spell matrix, but it was being
difficult
. I think the problem is that the spell designers have binocular vision. Having only two eyes, it isn’t all that easy to learn to see through three. Admittedly, we usually use only one sensor, but it’s still buried in the design that we only have two. It’s kind of like trying to do math in hexadecimal. We only have ten fingers, so our usual math is in base ten. We can do any base lower than ten just by ignoring fingers, but for hexadecimal, we need
extra
fingers.
On the other hand, I can already put the sensors in a triangular formation and focus them all in. That’s built-in, a part of the spell itself. You cast it, you get three sensors. But if it can only use two at a time, I can change the angle at which I seem to view something.
Now, if I set up a module of my spell to switch between sets of two—A and B, then B and C, then C and A, then A and B again—around and around the triangle… that could work, if the switching is fast enough. A human eye usually has a visual fusion effect starting around sixteen hertz, but movies usually use at least forty-eight hertz. If I can get the spell to make a full cycle around fifty times a second, it should produce a sand-sculpture image that appears to be perfectly synchronized.
The switching module was relatively easy; coordinating it with the image-producing portion of the sand table was not. The trouble was that the table would have to take snapshots instead of a continuous feed, which meant that sand particles would tend to fall when not part of the current viewpoint. That required a little tweaking, too.
I was almost done with that when Torvil and Seldar came in, Malana and Malena in tow. Kammen greeted them and they spoke together for a bit. I paid no attention, being occupied with a stick of chalk under the table, like a mechanic under a car. Or, maybe a plumber under a sink is a better description; if I just dropped what I was doing, everything would leak out.
They waited until I finished tacking everything back together and slid out from under the table.
“Okay,” I said, sitting up, “what’s the story?”
The three visions agreed; something was coming up in the very near future, possibly in minutes, possibly in hours. It was, potentially, a major point of decision in their lives—something that could alter the course of their future in a major and fundamental way. A cusp where a decision could alter destinies.
And my thread ran straight through each of them.
“I think,” Seldar said, “that Your Vulnerable Majesty should wear armor, today.” The other two nodded.
Well, they’re my personal guard. I should listen to them. It’s not like they were asking me to hide in a bunker and point a gun at the door. Armor wasn’t too much trouble. Hell, it’s usually a toss-up whether I wear it one day or the other.
“Okay. Let’s head up to my chambers. Then we’ll see about lunch.”
They agreed and pushed open the door again. Torvil and Kammen went out and stood to either side of the opening. Seldar accompanied me, while the twins stood behind him, watching. Good guys. They take that whole guardians of the king’s person rather seriously, especially when there’s a prophecy of doom in the air. I don’t, but that’s probably because I tend to think of myself as immortal.
To be fair, I
am
. Just not invulnerable.
My assumption is that, upon hearing about the armor, the assassin decided things would just get more difficult from there. The whisk of a knife being drawn wasn’t enough warning for me or for anyone else. I got stabbed near the left shoulderblade, neatly between the ribs—a lucky shot, I think. If it hit a rib, I’m not sure it would have gone any farther. I don’t know what my bones are made of, but they aren’t any sort of normal bone. The weapon was a long, thrusting blade, and he stuck it deep, too; I felt the point lodge on the inner face of a front rib. I felt my heart trying to beat
around
the thing.
I reacted by grunting and falling to my knees. It seemed the thing to do. The difference between immortal and invulnerable, you know.
Seldar was staring at me and shouting something; Torvil and Kammen, swords out, occupied the doorway into the hall. The twins flickered and had weapons drawn. I looked around for my assassin, but didn’t see anyone.
Right. Invisible. I should have guessed that from the knife in my back. It had to come from somewhere, after all. Only, invisibility is a really tough spell to do. It’s complicated to get it right and requires real masterclass artistry to do without a telltale shimmer or ripple or some other obvious visual distortion.
Seldar took a blow across the face that almost knocked him down. The twins instantly whisked razor-sharp blades back and forth around Seldar, themselves, and me; we weren’t attacked again. Torvil and Kammen, still holding the doorway, started it swinging closed while they whirled their blades in complex patterns, keeping anything invisible at bay. Whatever it was, it wasn’t likely to risk approaching anybody until a lot of arms got tired.
I wondered if there was anything I could do to help. At the moment, I had a hard enough time staying upright, so I doubted it. There was also a nasty feeling of weakness in all my limbs.
Aha. That would be shock.
On the other hand, I felt it was my responsibility to do something. I waited until the door was closed, then told the sand table to eject the sand; I could always get more sand. The sand exploded outward into a choking cloud, filling the room, scattering everywhere. It blinded everyone for a moment—including the invisible assassin—and left a smooth, even layer of sand all over the place.