Angel Isle (11 page)

“It’s got a ward on the inside too!”

Chanad looked at her, eyebrows raised.

“Indeed it has,” she said. “But I’m surprised you’re aware of it. A ward that betrays its existence is as useless as no ward at all.”

“I’m not,” said Maja. “I mean I can’t feel the ward itself. But I can just feel all that stuff going on outside it, so I guessed it was there. It was like that coming. Everything’s got a bit of magic in it, rocks, trees, animals, streams—it’s so gentle you don’t notice it, but I noticed when it wasn’t there, so I knew there had to be something.”

Chanad stared at her.

“I have heard of such people,” she said. “Magicians, of course, can sense the presence of magic, but they need to create the means by which they do it, and then to learn how to use it. A few people are born with your ability, as a natural gift, but they very seldom survive infancy. The magic around them—the magic in everyday things, and simple hedge magic—is too strong for them to endure at that age.”

“There wasn’t any magic where I was born,” said Maja. “I never felt it till just a few days ago, when I watched Saranja putting Rocky’s wings on. That really shook me. I’m getting used to it, I think, but just coming across your bridge—I couldn’t have done it without Saranja.”

“You will meet far stronger than that where you are going, if you are who I think you may be. If I am right, I will provide you with what help I can. I am the last of the group that called ourselves the Andarit, the Free Great Magicians. I knew Fodaro, and grieve for him. A good man to the last—a very good man. Too good to be a good magician. Benayu’s mother and father were my colleagues. When we made our move against the Watchers we knew that we might not succeed, and I was chosen to survive until another chance should come. Ancient tradition told us that if it came at all it would be from the north.

“So between us we devised this tower, where I am able to ward myself from the corroding power of my own magic, which, with nothing else to practice upon, would otherwise have eaten me away over the years. I have an unwarded workroom at the top of the tower, but I perform no magic anywhere else within these walls, and do not even step onto my bridge if I can help it. We made all the area around into a magical blank space, as seen from elsewhere in the Empire, large enough to absorb and dissipate any magic I might perform from this center. If the Watchers in Talak were to concentrate their attention on the area they would find me, but they rely on their Seeing Tower, which is not designed to respond to an absence of magic.

“From here I watch the roads leading east and south out of Mord, and bring toward my tower any travelers who interest me. Almost all I return to their road fairly soon, taking from them any memory of where they have been.

“You were unusual, in that one of you—Benayu, I now know—became a bird and began to explore in this direction, so I laid a path for him to find, and you followed it. Later, to my surprise, you seemed to become aware of what was happening. When Benayu tried to take bird form again I stopped him, but nevertheless you came on. Finally I put a barrier of terror in your path, to see how you would react before I let you through. You not only overcame the barrier but came directly to my place of hiding. Only when Saranja told me your names did I understand who you are and why you are here, and know that my time of waiting is at an end. So welcome again.

“First, you can tell me your story while we’re eating. Easiest, perhaps, if we all fetch our own food and carry it through. Since I knew you were coming I’ve had time to prepare something. I like to cook, and I seldom get the chance to do it for anyone more than myself.”

They helped themselves to a pungent-smelling stew, hunks of coarse fresh bread, and green beans. There was sharp pale cider or water to drink, and a creamy mix of honey and brandy and soured goat’s milk and spices for dessert.

“I think you take more pride in your cooking than you do in your magic,” said Ribek.

“I suppose I do,” she said. “It is one of my ways of staying human. Now, tell me what brought you here. Perhaps you’d better start with what you know about our ancestor Tilja Urlasdaughter. Everything begins with her.”

They took it in turn, first the story from the Valley, then what had happened since they had all met, and then their own plans. She stopped them only once, to ask them, just as Fodaro had done, about Faheel’s time-controlling ring, of which she too had never heard.

“Yes,” she said when they had finished. “All that fits in with what I already know. It is astonishing how remembered truth comes down through time. As I said, the only major exception is Faheel’s ring, on which your story hinges. You tell me it stopped the movement of the sun across the sky, the march of the waves across the sea, the breath in the mouths of all the living creatures in the world, for the length of time it took for the roc to fly Tilja and himself from his island in the southern ocean all the way to Talagh. And yet when Tilja, with her gift of annulling magic, closed her hand around it, in that instant the sun and the waves moved on and the creatures of the world went about their business, unaware that there had been any interval between one breath and the next.

“That must be an object of prodigious power. I have never heard of anything remotely like it. I wonder if the Ropemaker ever used it again, after that first time. It sounds as if he may have been a bit afraid of it.”

“That’s what Fodaro thought,” said Benayu. “He’d never heard of it either. And he was a scholar of magic, he used to say. He knew it all, but he couldn’t do it all. Do you think the Watchers know about it?”

“If they do, and if they can find it, then there is no hope,” said Chanad. “That brings me to the chief thing that I have to tell you, which is that the nature of the Watchers has changed from that in your story. Those had been set up by Faheel to police the use of magic throughout the Empire, but they failed in their task because as time went by they became savagely competing powers. Such is the corrosive effect of strong magic. Even among the Andarit I could see this beginning to happen. I could feel it in myself.

“Very few of us are free from it. Faheel had known it in his youth, but had put it aside, and in the end was forced to destroy his own creation because he could not control it in others.

“The Ropemaker was different. He was never interested in power. His passion was knowledge. He would far rather have remained a free agent, wandering the Empire at his own will, seeing and hearing. Until you told me your story I had not known how he was forced to take control, and begin to sort out the chaos that followed the fall of those earlier Watchers—other magicians warring for power, in their ignorance and frenzy releasing forces they could not control, demons roving the land unchecked, sand dunes threatening to engulf whole cities for ransom, and so on. He could not do this without helpers, so he chose those who came to hand and whom he thought he could trust.

“To begin with they worked as an informal group, but when the first urgent tasks were done some decided to leave, while most agreed to stay and help to maintain the order they had achieved, each with their own responsibilities in a more formal structure, though they did not then call themselves the Watchers.

“Knowing how the original Watchers had become corrupted, he persuaded them to bind themselves into a magical covenant to cooperate for the general good of all the peoples of the Empire. This worked well enough, thanks—I now realize—to his mitigating presence in the covenant, since they did not feel him to be in competition with any of them. Then, some two hundred years ago, he told them that he would be away for a while. He gave them no explanation other than that there was something he must do, and do alone. Months went by, and seasons, and years, but still there was no word from him. They searched by all the means at their disposal, but he seemed deliberately to have left no trace.

“So the covenant remained in being, and their natural urge for power was constrained into a joint urge of ever-increasing force, until the time came when they put their individual selves aside and became what they are now, a single entity, a single shared nature and thought system. What one knows, they all know. What one desires, all desire. Their joint mind creates a single purpose. They cannot be destroyed one by one. They replace a missing member with a fresh recruit who cannot help but join them and then becomes identical with all the others. And thus conjoined they are far more powerful than the Ropemaker, or even Faheel, or any of the other master magicians in their prime. The Emperor and his officials function as they have always done, only where Watchers allow them to do so.

“Elsewhere they ruthlessly adapt the system to their own needs. It is still the case, as it was in the time of your story, that nobody can die within the Empire without a license to do so, in order that the Empire should not be flooded with the natural magic released into the world at every human death. Those who could not afford the license and the cost of the rituals to control that magic had to travel to Goloroth, the City of Death, in the far south, where they boarded rafts which were floated out on the Great River and were carried out into the ocean. There they died and their magic was harmlessly released. The first part of this system remains as it was, but now when they pass through the inner gate of Goloroth their lives are simply taken from them, and their personal magic is funneled back to feed the power of the Watchers in Talagh while their lifeless bodies walk on into the Great River and are carried away.”

“That’s the nastiest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Saranja. “I’ve always thought the system in our story was bad enough, but that’s obscene!”

“I suppose they say they haven’t broken the covenant,” said Ribek, “because they exist for the good of the peoples of the Empire, so the greater their power the greater the good?”

“Exactly,” said Chanad. “But it is the general good, remember. They will ruthlessly sacrifice any number of individual citizens of the Empire, just as an individual Watcher will sacrifice himself or herself, in order to achieve it.

“They are like the demons of old. Demons are, as it were, embodied lusts, rage, greed, cruelty, spite, brains without minds, terrible. The Watchers are an embodied lust for domination. Limitless domination, first of the Empire, then of the other nations of this world, then of worlds elsewhere in this universe and universes beyond it, if any there be. Somewhere along that course they will meet their match and destroy themselves, and the Empire, and perhaps the whole world with them. They must be stopped. You set out to find the Ropemaker, three of you for the sake of your Valley, and Benayu to take his revenge for the death of Fodaro, but you are here for greater purposes than that. Even the Ropemaker cannot stop the Watchers on his own, but somehow, between us, we will achieve it.”

Maja looked at her friends, appalled. She had simply not thought about it like that. At the start she had just been running away, as she had done all her life in her dreams. Only by accident had she found that she was now looking for the Ropemaker, and then by further accident that she was going to help Benayu destroy the Watchers. Even at their most frightening their adventures hadn’t mattered much to anyone except themselves. Who else cared all that much about what happened to a miller and a farmer’s daughter and two children?

But now there was a world to save. Finding the Ropemaker would be only the start.

Ribek must have had the same thought. For several moments he looked unusually serious, then shook his head in disbelief.

“It’s a bit more than we bargained for,” he said, smiling slightly, as if at the absurdity of the enterprise.

Saranja flushed and tilted her head defiantly.

“Well, if it’s what we’re here for we might as well get on with it,” she said.

“I’m going to destroy the Watchers,” said Benayu firmly. “When I’ve done that I’m going to go back to shepherding, and a bit of hedge magic. Anything that happens after that—someone else can deal with it.”

“I wish you well, Benayu,” said Chanad. “But you will find that you are unable to do as you wish. Your own powers will either compel you or destroy you. But first, as I say, you must find the Ropemaker. Where do you propose to start? You have some kind of plan, or clue?”

They looked at each other, uncertain.

“We have a plan of a kind and a clue of a kind, but I’m afraid we’ve been told not to tell anyone what they are,” said Ribek. “Not even someone like you. All I can say is that we need to get to Tarshu.”

Chanad actually laughed.

“Let me guess,” she said. “Benayu has some major magic to perform, connected with your search, and instead of attempting to hide it from the Watchers in some remote province you are taking the risk of disguising it as part of the explosion of magic that will erupt when the Watchers try to repel the coming Pirate invasion. I agree with you. It is much your best chance. But you will need to hurry. Tarshu is almost a month’s journey from here.

“It is no use my coming with you. My presence would betray you almost at once. I dare not even watch your progress for fear of leaving a trace. The best I can do for you is to open a road for you to leave here, and to give the two horses you bought greater speed and strength, and fetch you way-leaves to allow you to use the Imperial Highway to Tarshu. You will need a story to account for your journey. Suppose you older two are brother and sister, taking your half-sister and her brother to her betrothal in Tarshu. This is a common practice among the great trading clans. It is a way of keeping the bloodlines pure when the clan is scattered throughout the Empire.

“I’ll also prepare an amulet to shield Maja from the effects of magic. What she has faced so far is already wearing her out, and she certainly won’t survive the storm of battle magic you’re going to find around Tarshu, not to mention whatever Benayu will be up to. Even my amulet may not be proof against such shocks, but it will be a lot better than nothing.

“Now, out of curiosity, I would like to know how Saranja and Maja came so easily through my barrier of fear. You were holding hands, and I think you were carrying some kind of magical object between you. Is that right?”