3 When Darkness Falls.8 (25 page)

Untidy or not, Cilarnen did have to admit that it took far less time: He'd never seen a Wildmage cast a spell that took more than half a chime, if that. As for him, it was mid-day when he began working, and five bells later when his preparations were complete.

It lacked a bell of midnight, the second half of which was Metwoch's time, so Cilarnen allowed himself a chime of rest before beginning the last series of invocations and prayers. By now his workspace shimmered with the wards he had set, and he was feeling the tug of exhaustion, for he had used up nearly all his own personal reserves of power as the bells moved from Dediau to Shanbe and on to Metwoch.

* * * * *

THE glyphs he traced hung before him in the air. He whispered their names under his breath, and the air was so cold that steam rose to swirl amid the traceries of colored light.

Soon. It would be soon.

He had never done anything like this before.

The High Magick taught that any creatures the Mageborn might see in their spells were only hallucinations — one of the first things a young Apprentice studied was the types of Illusory Creatures he might expect to see during his working life, and how to ignore them. They were, so he was told, only the symbols of the power he commanded by right of his training in the High Magick.

But Cilarnen knew now that they were not symbols, but
real.

And he had not come to command, but to
ask.

I ask not for myself, but for the good I might do with any Power You would loan me,
he recited in his mind. It was only the truth, but he wondered if, when the time came —
if
the time came — he would be calm enough to say the words aloud.

"Come to me, Powers of the Elven Lands. I co — I
ask
that you come to me. In the name of those who rule these lands, I summon you — I request that you come before me to hear my words."

He drew the last of the sigils in the air before the eleventh brazier. It was the most complicated of all, and he was sweating before he had finished. For a moment it hung in the air, perfect, and Cilarnen let out the pent-up breath he had been holding in a long sigh of relief.

But then it began to blur and change, swelling and growing brighter. If it had been badly done, it would simply have faded away. Something must have gone dreadfully wrong.

He clutched his wand tightly, scouring his mind for some counterspell to contain the damage. But he had stretched his resources to their uttermost simply to cast this spell. He could not do so much as light a candle now.

The glyph became a ball of light, then an oval, then a cylinder. All its colors faded into a pale blue-white, as it slowly settled to the ice, balancing on its end. It began to melt into itself as Cilarnen watched in horrified fascination, slowly taking on something like a human form.

By the Eternal Light. It's worked. I called it here.

And now it's going to kill me.

He'd done nothing to protect himself from what he'd intended to summon — he'd had barely enough energy to cast the most basic of wards and then to cast the Summoning Spell itself. All he could do was watch.

It was like seeing something come from far away, as the manikin took on form. The glow resolved itself into flame — blue flame — facing all over its body. It was small and slender, the humanlike form inches shorter than Cilarnen himself, and somehow Cilarnen could see eyes, a nose, a mouth in that burning face of flame, although he was not certain of how he could make them out.

He had not known what would come to his Summoning — the land-wards which protected the Elven Lands were made up of a blending of all four Elements — but it seemed that the Powers themselves had chosen.

And what they had sent was a Salamander, creature of Elemental Fire.

"You have Called Me, Cilarnen Volpiril. For what task?" Its voice was blurred and hard to understand, like the roaring of a large fire, and he could smell an odd scent that he could not quite describe. Something burning, he decided. But not wood. It smelled like fire itself, burning without fuel.

"I need your help. The Elves need your help."

"We already aid the Children of Leaf and Star."

Cilarnen sensed rather than saw the strange drawing-inward, as if the Salamander was preparing once more to depart. And he knew he did not have the strength to cast this spell again.

"No! Wait!"

He did not know what he said then. He'd had a speech carefully prepared, but he'd forgotten it. He babbled like a fool, telling the creature things he was certain it already knew — about the Demons, and the war. About the High Mages, and their ancient source of power, and what they had taken to use instead. And how he hoped to fight the Demons, but he needed…

"Help," the Salamander finished for him. "Our help."

He felt the creature look into him, as if only now was it seeing him for the first time. A terror he had not known he had the energy left to feel gripped him. Cilarnen had not felt so afraid when he and his friends had been discovered by the Stone Golems in the City, or on the night he had thought his Magegift stripped from him. He had thought he had been afraid when he had seen the Scouting Hunt for what it truly was, or when he had seen the Demon's face in Stonehearth.

All those moments were pale echoes of this. Each of those times, Cilarnen understood now, he could only have died. The force he confronted now was raw Magick Itself: It had the power to unmake him, as if he had never been at all. No one would remember him — that he had been here, that he had cast this spell… in Armethalieh, his family would forget his very existence…

The Salamander smiled sadly, and Cilarnen's terror faded. No, it would not do that. It had such power, yes, but for all its inhumanity, it was a Creature of the Light. It had come at his call.

Did he have the courage to accept the help it might offer?

He'd thought he'd understood what that would mean. He'd had no idea. This was Death, as certain as any a warrior faced upon a battlefield. Yes, he could gain the power to cast any spell he needed, but it would be like carrying the sun itself within the marrow of his bones. Such power would waste him as surely as if he consumed a slow-acting poison, and in the end it would kill him. "
The life of a Battle-Mage is bright and brief,
" the old books had said. Well, now he understood why. The Mages had not changed their ways for no reason. They had changed in order to live.

"Help me," he whispered.

"Take my hand, Cilarnen Volpiril," the creature of blue flame said, "and be one with the land."

He hesitated at the thought of plunging his hand into that conflagration. The ice-pavilion was filled with heat. His clothes were steaming with it. The only oddity was that the wards and the circle stopped the heat precisely, so that the circle itself was wet with water, but the ice outside it was dry with cold.

But he had called it, and now it had agreed.

And if this did not work, he did not know what else to try.

He reached out, and took its hand.

The Salamander flowed into him through their clasped hands. Fast enough that Cilarnen didn't have time to think of ways to stop it, slow enough that he knew what was happening and had time to think of the precise word to label the sensation.

It was intolerable.

That was what it was.

It was intolerable.

He was being stretched from within, his lungs pressed against his ribs so hard he could not take a breath, and the same cloying unclassifiable burning scent was all around him now, except now it was coming from inside: It was on his breath, in his nostrils, on his tongue. He felt light filling his brain and shining out through his eyes, blinding him; he gagged on thick radiance filling the back of his throat and he tried to cough it out, to empty his throat and his stomach and his lungs, but he couldn't. It was there, stretching him until he thought his skin might tear like a too-tight glove. But what would spill out?

Slowly all of it faded away: the light, the smell, the gagging pressure. He was alone in the ice pavilion, and suddenly he was shivering with cold.

He felt a faint numbness in his hands and lips, like frostburn or poison, but in a few minutes that faded, too, and Cilarnen realized he was cold because all of the braziers in the ice-pavilion had gone out and he was standing in four inches of cold water.

The Salamander was gone. Cilarnen felt as if he'd just suddenly awakened from an odd dream. As if the spell had been a dream. It had all seemed very logical and even compelling at the time, but now that he was awake, its events seemed peculiar, even absurd, and the more time that passed, the more the events of the dream became vague and unreal.

He knew from his reading that the Great Spells were often like that, but he had never cast one before and didn't know if this experience was what it ought to feel like. He simply felt as if he ought to be terribly frightened, and for some reason his body wouldn't cooperate.

He stepped carefully to the edge of the circle — there was more ice beneath the water, and a scrum of ice was already re-forming at the edges of the circle — and stepped out onto the ice. As he walked toward the braziers, his shoes began to stick to the ice as they froze.

With a gesture, he lit the braziers.

All of them.

He shouldn't have had the power to do that after the ritual, but he did.

He felt the Salamander's ghostly presence as it shifted beneath his skin. It wasn't there, not of itself. That would kill him in truth just as he had feared during the ritual. But he was now linked to the land-wards of the Elven Lands, and through them, to the Elemental Powers that gave them life: sylph, gnome, undine, Salamander.

He had the power he needed.

* * * * *

HE completed the ritual — the prayers and glyphs that ended it were simple, compared to the preparations — and spent the rest of the night reinforcing the

wards around the ice-pavilion, making them as strong and complex as he could. Now that he could practice —
really
practice — there was a lot more potential for disaster than ever before.

Warping a Mageshield, or… some of the spells for summoning lightning, or a rain of fire… I don't want to even try those without the best damping wards I can possibly cast. Layers of them.

And if he meant to go viewing over a distance, the most important thing was that no one he chose to look at be able to look at him.

Cilarnen knew that both Idalia and Kellen thought that the High Magick contained no spells for seeing things at a distance. He smiled. As if no High Mage had ever wanted to see something on the other side of the City without leaving the comfort and privacy of his own chambers! The City might not be as vast as the Elvenlands, but it was the whole world to its inhabitants, and contained the world in miniature. Of course, the spells of Far-Seeing were not made available to every Apprentice or Journeyman who might be tempted to misuse them. It would be as unfortunate to look in the wrong window as to look beyond the bounds of Armethalieh, and it was much better for all if the Lower Grades were not tempted. But that didn't mean such spells didn't exist, and they were in the books that Kindolhinadetil had provided him with. It would be simple enough to adjust the parameters of the spell to compensate for the increased distance from the place he wanted to view, and he could visualize
where
he wanted to see very clearly.

The Council Chamber of Armethalieh.

But not now. Now he needed rest, and sleep, and food. The sun was rising, the traditional signal to the end of the labors of a High Mage.

Cilarnen doused the braziers, wrapped his cloak tightly around himself against the morning chill, and headed for his own tent.

The Sword of the City

IF ARMETHALIEH WERE known anywhere outside her own walls — a matter of supreme indifference to both her inhabitants and her rulers—she was known as the City of Mages. Wildly inaccurate tales were told about Armethalieh in the lands beyond the sea, but one thing known about her was the simple truth: Mages had built her and Mages ruled her, for Armethalieh was a city of magick.

The ultimate authority in Armethalieh was the High Council: twelve High Mages ruled over by the Arch-Mage, the ultimate authority in the City. At least, that had been true once.

Three High Mages — Lords Breulin, Isas, and Volpiril — had left the Council under mysterious circumstances to retire into private life.

One had died during a ritual that he had been far too old and frail to participate in — Lord Vilmos.

Two — Lords Arance and Perizel — had been murdered by evil Wildmage magic, that much everyone in the City knew.

Only one of the six empty seats had been refilled, and that by the Arch-Mage's own adopted son, Anigrel Tavadon.

The High Council had once debated strongly and at endless length over every facet of the numerous laws that governed every facet of life in the Golden City, for as well as being a city of Mages, Armethalieh was a city of Law, and the High Council was the ultimate expression of that law. Now the only voice heard within the Council Chamber was Anigrel Tavadon's.