“Nowt’ll go wrong, Dath,” he said. Trying to ease her. Trying to ease himself. “Ain’t I the Innocent Mage?”
“Don’t,”
she said fiercely, her voice low for Deenie. “Don’t you throw that at me. And you’re
not
innocent any more, Asher. Neither of us is. We know things now. Dreadful things!”
“Dath…” Abandoning the safety of shadows, he crossed to the bed and dropped to his knees beside her. Pressed a finger to her lips. “You
know
I got to do this. So why go on about it? Arguin’ hard fact be like a dog chasin’ its tail. Round and round and round, and nowt to show for all that effort but sweat.”
She turned her head away. “And if you die? What am I supposed to tell our children?”
He used the same finger to turn her face back again. “I ain’t goin’ to die, Dath. How can I die? I ain’t battlin’ Morg this time. Just his leftover magic. And I got Barl on my side, ain’t I? All her magic, sleepin’ inside me. Me and Barl, we won’t let that bastard win.”
“What are you going to do?” she whispered. “Break the last hold Weather Magic has on this kingdom? Turn back time to the days before the Doranen came? Or will you try and put things back the way they were before Morg interfered?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know what be possible, Dath. I don’t know what I
know
.”
“You can’t make another Wall,” she said, her eyes hollow with fear. “You
can’t
. That
will
kill you.”
“We don’t need another Wall, Dath,” he said, gentling her cheek with his hand. She pressed against him, seeking comfort. “These past ten years have shown us there ain’t nowt beyond them mountains we need savin’ from. Our troubles be right here at home.”
“And you have to fix them. I know.” Her hand came up to cover his. “Barl’s
tits,
I know. And I hate it, Asher. You’ve no idea how much I hate it.”
Somehow he found a smile for her. “Oh, I d’know. Reckon I might have an inklin’.”
They clung to each other then, beside their drugged, sleeping daughter, and kissed as though they’d never see each other again.
“Keep Rafe home from school tomorrow,” he said, as they held each other pressed forehead to forehead. “Keep him here in the Tower. No gallivantin’ round the countryside on his pony. Send word to Pellen first thing that Deenie’s poorly, so Charis don’t come. If I ain’t back from the Weather Chamber by this time tomorrow night, send Pellen to look for me. Don’t you do it, Dath. Don’t you leave the sprats alone.”
“No, Asher, I—”
“
Please,
Dath.” He couldn’t bear it, the thought of her finding him dead if what he was about to try turned into a sinkin’ great disaster. “I did what you wanted, last time. You can do this for me. Say you’ll do this for me.”
He felt her breath warm against his skin as she breathed out, hard. Felt her fingers tighten on the back of his neck. Heard her swallow a sob. “All right. All right, sink it. I’ll do as you ask.”
He kissed her. “Aye, but you be a fine, slumskumbledy wench.”
Pulling away from him, she slid off Deenie’s bedside stool and turned her back, arms wrapped around her ribs as though they were broken, and paining her. “So you’d best go, hadn’t you, seeing you’re so eager to throw your life away.”
Feeling helpless, feeling lost, he rose from his crouch. “Dathne—”
She flung up a hand.
“Go.”
He kissed his sleeping daughter, and went.
After feeding Rafe’s pony its supper apple, almost amused at its crossness that he weren’t Rafe, he made his way through the darkness of the palace grounds to the Weather Chamber. Closed its bottom door behind him, summoned glimfire, climbed the one hundred and thirty stone steps to the glass-domed room at the top and closed that door behind him as well.
Alone, his heart pounding from more than the steep stairs, he brightened the glimfire he’d conjured and stared at Barl’s blighted Weather map. To his ordinary eye it seemed unchanged from the other day. Dropping to one knee beside it, he rested his fingers lightly on the tallest peak of Barl’s Mountains. Felt the black stirring of Morg’s meddling, sickened… and beneath that felt the stirring spark of Barl’s cruel and complicated magic. It was still there. Still struggling to be heard. Barl and Morgan, battling yet.
He bumped his backside to the parquetry floor and crossed his legs. Rested his elbows on his knees and dropped his chin on his knuckles, perplexed.
Fine. So what now? Don’t s’pose someone’d like to give me a hint?
Unhelpful silence. The chamber was cold. He’d pulled on a warm coat before leaving the Tower, but even so the chill air beneath the glass dome ceiling nipped at his skin. Pushing discomfort aside, he bent his thoughts to matters magical.
With the Weather Orb’s destruction, Barl’s magic lived in only two places now. His blood, and her Weather map. And when he touched the map he could feel that magic stirring in both of them. But what did it mean? Were they connected, somehow? Could they—mad as it sounded—
talk
to each other?
Tentative, apprehensive, he reached out his hands. Laid them palm-down to the Weather map, his left on the Dingles and his right—’cause why not?—smack dab on Restharven.
Look at me, Da. Muckin’ about with this malarkey again.
Within heartbeats he felt the sizzle of Weather Magic in his blood. Felt the stirring of power, the call to wind and rain and snow. Could almost see the spells’ tongue-twisting words rise before his inner eye, feel his fingers twitch to trace their burning sigils on the cold chamber air. Morg’s left-behind foulness stirred too, shuddering through him, waking hard-buried memories of torment, recalling the whisper of a loathed and loathsome voice. His flesh crawled, his belly heaved. Against his will he remembered his Guard House imprisonment and Morg the sorcerer, sheathed within hateful Conroyd Jarralt, ripping through his mind in search of people to kill. Ripping through his mind with pleasure, ’cause the bastard knew how much it hurt.
Panting, Asher snatched his hands off the Weather map. Felt himself topple until he struck the parquetry floor. For a long time he lay there, little shudders running through him. Framed by the chamber’s glass dome ceiling, the indifferent stars shone down. Spark by spark his sizzling blood fell quiet—but in its place rose a high tide of fear.
Sink me bloody sideways. I can’t do this. I can’t.
Except he had to. For Rafel. For Deenie. For every child in Lur. If he did nowt here this night, just let Lur’s turbulence run its mysterious course, well, true, things could well settle ’emselves just fine. But just as easily the world could turn upside down. How could he take that chance? If something went wrong, there weren’t no place to run. Even if they could get thousands of folk over them mountains, there weren’t nowt on the other side ’cept a slow, stinkin’ death. And remembering how Tollin had died… how could he begin to think that were a choice? It never was. Pellen were right. This small battered kingdom was the only home they had.
So. Morg might be defeated, but nowt else had bloody changed.
He sat up. Scrubbed a hand across his face. Stared at the Weather map with sour dislike.
Barl, Barl… I’ll tell you this for nowt. Dathne ain’t the only slum-skumbledy wench I know.
His breathing hard and harsh, he flattened his palms a second time to the blighted Weather map. This time didn’t fight the sickness roiling through him, the memory of Morg, but instead sought what little remained of Barl’s miraculous magic.
Aye, there it was, a feeble candle-flicker in the dark, valiantly struggling against Morg’s creeping malaise. Sweet where the sorcerer’s touch and taste were poison bitter. Flavoured with hope and not despair. He heard his breathing falter, for as hard as ever he tried to deny it he’d missed this. He’d missed it. And so, for the first time in more than ten years, since he’d let the fury of UnMaking flood through him, Asher surrendered himself to magic.
And shouted wildly as the sleeping power in his blood caught fire.
Twice before—when he took the Weather magics into himself, and the time he stood before Matt in the Black Woods, so angry—he had felt the same kind of breathless unfolding inside himself. Had felt this soaring invincibility, as though he had wings and were suddenly made a new man. Even as he fought against its seduction he laughed, because now he felt whole again. For ten long years he’d been incomplete—and now he felt whole. He didn’t want that to be true. He wanted that to be a lie.
But it ain’t. It ain’t. Barl bloody save me, it ain’t.
It was the reason why he denied his power. He knew that. He’d always known it. It was why he fought so hard to make sure that power stayed sleeping in his blood. Because even in the instant his magic burned through Gar, killing him, he’d felt its savage glory. Felt a kinship with Morg.
No. No. I ain’t him. It’s Barl in me, not him.
Except they were both in him now. As he shuddered over the Weather map, his scarred hands roaming its ruined surface, he could feel both Doranen sorcerers battling in his blood. Every time he touched a patch of Morg’s blight he felt his belly heave and bile rush into his throat. Felt Morg, vile and gloating. But when he touched an unblighted part of the Weather map he heard a different voice whisper in his mind, striving to be heard over Morg’s rotten mutterings. A sweet voice, a young voice. A woman’s voice he’d heard before, in his dreams. But not Dathne.
It was the voice of the Weather Orb, carving secrets in his bones.
I be here, Barl. I be listenin’. Tell me what I’m s’posed to do
.
Opened fully to her Weather Magic, feeling it dance like a dagger through his veins, he could feel as well the wounds in the Weather map, more keenly than ever. Its screaming shuddered through him, slicking his cheeks with tears. His labouring heartbeat thundered in his ears. Buried beneath its pain he could feel something else, some unravelled, unravelling link between the map and Gar’s kingdom. The connection between Barl’s magic and Lur’s earth, not severed yet. Not quite yet. But it trembled on the brink of breaking…
And he knew then, without knowing how he knew it, that the power was in him to save the Weather map. To pour fresh life into it, fresh magic. To beat back, if not defeat, the worst of Morg’s ravages and sing Lur’s distressed earth back to painless sleep. He had the power to buy the kingdom some brief, precious time.
But sink me bloody sideways… this is goin’ to hurt.
All restraint abandoned, all doubts and fears and resentments discarded, Asher drowned himself in magic. Drowned the Weather map, too. Everything the Weather Orb had poured into him in that long-ago moment of Transference, spells and sigils he had never looked at, let alone used, they flooded to his tongue and the tips of his fingers. Flooded out of him in cataracts of heat and light and pain.
Time melted like butter. It dripped and poured around him, golden as glimfire.
For hour after hour he shouted the ancient words, over and over and over again. Shouted their syllables and his suffering.
Aravnakai te ramakari
. His fingers burned the air.
Shas’o shas’o ahani
. Blood dripped down his face.
Tolnek rusta. Rusta tolnek. Ta rastu. Ta rastu ne.
His carved bones were dissolving. His throat was worn away. His voice grew ragged. He was shouting it to shreds.
Beneath his left hand he could feel the Weather map shaking. Overhead, through the glass dome, the stars grew shy, then one by one vanished as night fled before the approaching dawn. Hours of magic, and still he hadn’t finished. Still the link between Lur and the Weather map was in danger of breaking. Morg’s dark-hearted corruption was not defeated. For all his shouting and sigils, the Weather map’s wounds were not cleanly healed.
He couldn’t see for the blood in his eyes. He had to breathe through his mouth because his nostrils were clogged red. There was blood on his coat-sleeves and his trembling hands. Barl’s Weather map was daubed wet and scarlet.
Am I bleedin’ to death?
he wondered.
Is all my blood on there?
He thought it might be, but he couldn’t stop. Not now. Not when he was close enough to taste victory, salt and iron mingled bitter on his tongue.
If I die doin’ this I reckon Dath’ll bloody kill me.
His senses had long since blunted beneath the unrelenting onslaught of magic’s pain. The worst calling of rain had been nothing compared to this.
This
magic sliced him like a razor, like pitiless Dragonteeth Reef. He could almost believe he was being UnMade just as he’d UnMade Morg. Thought he was being pulled apart to specks and flecks of blood-soaked dust.
At last… at long last… as the climbing sun spilled warmth and golden light through the chamber’s glass dome and onto its floor… emptied, exhausted and battered to a pulp he slumped across Barl’s Weather map. Dragged his crusted eyelids open and saw, blurred and bleary, that the map was almost healed. A smear of blight here… a touch there… Hardly enough to notice. Practically nowt, compared to before.
We did it, Barl. We bloody did it.
The Weather Chamber swirled around him, and headfirst he fell into the fast fleeing night.
“Asher… Asher… for the love of Barl, man, come to your senses! Come on!”
Irritated, he tried to swat aside the wet cloth dripping on his face. “Gerroff.”