Enchanter (Book 7) (15 page)

But there were still plenty of details to work out, and as the Duke intended to reoccupy Vorone by Yule, he needed my help.  That afternoon, during the Spellmonger’s Trial, we hashed out a lot of the important details of the reverse-coup.

The military angle was, for now, taken care of.  The Orphan’s Band would serve the Duke until early spring, when they would march south to take a regular contract they had with a Castali count who was waging an interminable dynastic war.  Anguin and Salgo had until around Briga’s Day, next year, to secure loyal forces to replace them.

Paying for that – and all the other things that the broken Duchy would need – would take coin.  While I was rich, I wasn’t rich enough to save an entire Duchy, not unless it was my Duchy.

So I did the next best thing.  I pledged the security needed for the Temple of Ifnia to extend the Orphan Duke a loan of fifty thousand ounces of gold.  That should be enough to fix the serious issues with the Duchy and keep it running, with careful management, until revenues could begin to be collected more regularly.  It was a far more generous gift than the King had proposed.  From what I understood through my sources at court, Rard had been unwilling to pledge more than ten thousand ounces for the purpose, in a thinly-disguised effort to keep Alshar weak. 

My financial intervention not only gave Anguin a healthy line of credit, he could access it without paying the stiff penalties and interests that lords usually paid their lieges for loans.  I’d took a bit of a cut on my end to keep the rates low, but the Temple of Ifnia had title to one and a half tons of premium snowstone as collateral.  And they knew where I lived.  Securing the loan through the temple allowed me to avoid official scrutiny, as ecclesiastic records of such loans are protected by sacred custom. 

But I did the Temple one further: I suggested to Anguin that he appoint the Temple’s representative as his Minister of Treasuries, allowing the neutral, unbribeable monks to handle the accounting, instead of an opportunistic courtier.  I met the earnest little monk the temple had proposed, Coinfather Larso, and approved of his appointment.  He was just the kind of tight-arsed clerk a bankrupt duchy needed for the fair assessment and collection of taxes and tribute.

Before the afternoon was over, Penny and I had also selected Anguin’s three new ministers, of Trade, a Minister for Lands and Estates, and a Minister of Justice, from among the applicants we had quietly been gathering.  There were a dozen other portfolios left vacant by the time we were done, but the important positions had been established.  The Orphan Duke could return to Vorone with at least some chance of actually transforming it into a viable province again.

The Duke himself was ostensibly retiring for the winter to one of the intact estates he held in northern Gilmora, on the edge of the invasion zone.  The rich domain had survived and even thrived in the aftermath of the goblin invasion, as the refugees and the high cotton prices that resulted had enriched them.  I’m certain the castellans of the estates were taken aback to have their master arrive and claim his rightful portion, after so long an absence, but they were legally his.

What he was actually doing was quietly gathering expatriate Wilderlords and Alshari nobles in exile who were interested in returning with him. Landfather Amus made most of the discreet inquiries, but from what he reported to me there were nearly fifty gentlemen of reasonable loyalty to the Alshari coronet to base a campaign around.  After the Fair, Pentandra and Arborn and their party would join them, and then they would cross the border and journey to Vorone unannounced, just before Yule.

By the time anyone at the royal court in Castabriel knew about it, Anguin would be firmly established in Vorone, beginning to piece together his shattered realm . . . out of easy reach or influence of the royal family.  At least that was the plan.

It was a gamble.  A dozen things could go horrifically wrong.  Such a move could result in civil war or rebellion, if we weren’t careful.  Yet the benefits so outweighed the potential risks that we plunged on ahead. 

Wizards meddle.  It’s what we do.

By the time the green poop-stained young man triumphantly placed my pipe in my hands, the sun was setting over the western ridge, and I was genuinely tired.  I gave my usual congratulatory speech, magically cleaned the ordure off of him, and took his oath in front of the whole crowd.  Then I invited him back to the castle for the Champion’s Feast (after an opportunity to change his clothes), where the minor prizes of the Fair would be awarded to the other winners.  Tomorrow everyone would pack up and head back home, and my domain could start to get back to normal.

The winner’s name was Doran, and to my surprise he was neither warmage nor spellmonger.  In fact, he was a wiry footwizard from Wenshar who had used his wits as much as his magic to claim his prize.  After a terrific struggle to get to the top of the hill, he had witnessed a fellow contestant’s failure with the Shieldbeast and had elected to wait.  When the next entrant attempted to pass the unrelenting chelonian construct, Doran had used a thrown stick to knock the pipe off of the boulder, picking it up and springing away just as the alarmed construct blasted his competition to unconsciousness.

I couldn’t fault his ingenuity.  That’s one of the things I liked about the Trial, it wasn’t merely a test of magic.  It also tested your ability to think and plan and prepare.  Doran was just the kind of intelligent, clever wizard I wanted to elevate to High Mage.

I skipped most of the ball that followed the feast, allowing Dara to preside in my place.  Pentandra had already retired with Arborn for the evening, and Alya was exhausted and wanted to go lay down when she put the children to bed.  I started to relax, once I got confirmation that Dunselen and Isily passed through the Diketower headed home.  Tomorrow, I consoled myself, I would be done with events and meetings and would be able to do some real work.

It was late, and most of the castle was asleep.  I dimmed the magelight that hung over my tower when I was in residence. I wanted to curb nocturnal insects – and visitors.  I went to my tower for a little while, stared at the huge pile of work that had gathered during the Fair, and decided I wasn’t quite ready to delve into that yet.  I considered reading something – and I had a gracious stack of books, folios and scrolls to get through – but that seemed like too much mental energy.

I knew what I needed.  I needed to see the Snowflake.

The thought of standing in its presence in a state of quiet contemplation filled me with an eagerness nothing else.  I didn’t want people, either living ones to speak to or dead ones to read from.  I wanted quiet solitude and unimaginable magical power, a living arcane mystery that was mine alone to fathom.

I grinned to myself.  I had purposefully not scheduled anything until tomorrow afternoon, anticipating a morning of rest and repose before returning to business.  While it was late, it wasn’t
that
late.  I could spare a few hours to rest my mind in a living symbol of magic.  Enough with the rationalizations, I urged myself, let’s go see it!

I grabbed a bottle and a cup along the way.  I didn’t plan to get drunk, but it had been a very long day, and a glass of wine is a comfort.  Another rationalization, but I didn’t mind making it.  But rationalizations are like drinks.  Once you’ve had one . . .

The night was dark, only a sliver of moon to add a second shadow to the magelight’s glow.  I went to the gate in the wooden fence behind the castle waved to the Karshak sentry watching the entrance, and headed toward the mountain.

At night the great flat area in the stone floor that the Karshak had been chipping away at all summer glowed serenely as I passed through.  It was wide enough now to begin placing the cornerstones to the gatehouse.  The first two, along the back, had been placed while I was on the Great March.  They were nearly a bowshot apart, from end to end.  The rest of the foundation was being outlined in colored chalk, strings, and ribbons tied to stakes all over the site.  The entire area of the gatehouse was a third larger than the entire keep of Sevendor Castle.

I cut across the path through the tangle of lines and headed to the mountain, proper.  To the right the long, low lodge that housed the Karshak was quiet, but not silent. 

Once the entrance to the mountain quarry was opened and weather was no longer a hindrance, the lodge ran three shifts of masons, night and day.  Already the opening to the mine was forty feet across and the main tunnel expanded to half that as solid blocks of white basalt were carved with precision from the living rock and transported to the gatehouse.  Already a pile of well-trimmed stone blocks two stories high was prepared, ready to be placed this autumn to create the foundations. 

The entrance of the mine had a single magelight hovering overhead, more as a beacon than a light source.  One inside the Karshak preferred little light.  Their eyes could see splendidly in the slightest amount of gloom, and though they employed their version of magelights when necessary, they preferred cunning little oil lamps to magic, even here in the heart of a magical mountain.

The passage into the mountain was impressively long, now, and ten feet wide or wider in most places.  Karshak crews were at work every couple of dozen feet, hacking their way into the side of the tunnel, digging down, or even dropping cut stone from above their heads.  I made do with a Cat’s Eye spell, because nothing would piss me off more if I was a Karshak mason carefully lowering a ten-ton block of basalt down from above than to have some cocky asshole wizard blind me with his bloody magelight. 

Karshak are edgy enough, while they’re focusing on work.  A Karshak mason leading a team tends to become not just anxious, but even emotional if things are off by just a fraction.  Tensions were high, at this stage of the construction, Master Guri had reported.  One misstep and a cave-in could kill hundreds.

I gingerly moved past the Karshak, but in truth they barely noticed me.  As I went deeper into the mountain, the passage narrowed, and at the appropriate spot I took a right.  The steps dropped down a flight, then the passage continued to the . . . I don’t know, but I think it was around a forty-five degree angle from the main tunnel.  It narrowed to less than five feet for the next fifty or sixty, then opened into a small chamber the Karshak had cut at my request. 

At the end of the tunnel a single opening led into the snow-white rock vesicle, the Denehole, where the Snowflake hummed, hissed and glowed.

I felt better just seeing it . . .
feeling
it, really, down in my bones.

As if I was going to settle in and watch a fire for the evening, I pulled the chair I’d had brought there directly in front of the thing.  I poured a glass of wine, used the chamberpot in the corridor (I’d been spending more and more time down here, and I didn’t want to be interrupted at a crucial moment by my bladder) and then settled into my chair to watch the show.

Watching the Snowflake is always mesmerizing.  You don’t expect something that rigidly solid to move with such fluid grace.  You don’t think crystal can flow like sea foam until you see the six arms of the construct meld together or break apart with the single mindedness of a natural phenomenon.  And that’s just the visual element.  When you opened yourself to arcane energies, and extended your thaumaturgical awareness to include the Snowflake, then it really got interesting.

It was still largely a crystalline enigma, then, an unexpected gift from my inflamed brain and excited subconscious.  In a quintessential way it was a reflection of my mind, in abstract form.  After all, I had chosen the snowflake as my heraldic device, and my fortune and much of my power was built on the magical stone that came to be the night my son was born in a snowstorm . . . you could say the symbol had a lot of significance to me.

Now it stood before me, morphing from one perfectly complex hexagonal shape into another with absolute precision.  It had been forged in the flames of my soul . . . and I still had
no bloody idea
what to do with it.

I tried thaumaturgical assays, of course, because that’s what a thaumaturge does . . . but apart from telling me it was a supremely powerful artifact that radiated arcane energies like a glowing stove sheds heat, it had yet to be very useful.  I was working with more sophisticated spells, now, separating out my consciousness and delving into the outer perimeter of the Snowflake in attempt to gain entrance to its innermost workings. 

It was fascinating and frustrating at the same time, particularly as I examined the points of the thing.  With them constantly changing and evolving it was almost impossible to insinuate my consciousness within them.  But every assay I attempted revealed some new fascinating aspect of the artifact. 

That kind of intense thaumaturgic work looks an awful lot like sitting and staring, to the casual observer, and it’s quite easy to get so involved in the spell that you forget about the needs of your body.  When I finished a particularly long and intense survey, I shifted my feet, which had grown numb from inactivity, and they stubbornly refused to move.

I tried to shift in my seat to return some circulation to them, but my hands missed the seat of the chair.  Indeed, they felt like two lifeless clubs at the end of my arms.   I couldn’t feel my fingers at all, and they would not respond to my commands.

I started to panic.  There are all sorts of unpleasant physical side-effects to doing deep thaumaturgic work.  Usually a good thaumaturge will use an assistant (called a Famulus) to keep such problems from arising, but I didn’t think that I had been delving that deeply, yet.  It had only been around an hour – less, I realized.  Perhaps I was more tired than I thought . . . or still contending with the lingering effects of my nine-day magical coma, a few months ago.