High Mage: Book Five Of The Spellmonger Series (54 page)

Nor did I limit my consultations to human experts.  Onranion and Master Azhguri both lent their expertise.  They were both interested in the project for their own abstract reasons.  Onranion wanted to see how a human mage would go about designing a powerful magical weapon.  Master Azhguri was curious to see just how useful I could make the thing.  The Karshak value utility the way the Alka value aesthetics.

I didn’t stop with Imperial spells, either.  With Onranion’s guidance I used some of the Alkan spells within my sphere to enchant the thing in ways no human mage could have.  The old spellsinger delighted in offering some suggestions of his own I thought were elegant.

So did Master Azhguri.  At his urging I had the nodes at the junctures of the ornamental snowflake on the head set with a few of the special stones from my collection.  A waystone made the staff a portable waypoint, as well as lowering the magical resistance in the area to near nothing.  A pocketstone filled another setting, allowing me the ability to build the things in the field, if necessary. 

An
uliri
stone, which he got from gods only know where, facilitated energy projection from the staff.  A well-polished witchstone, a tiny globe of pure irionite, gave the staff a source of power independent of my sphere.  A pinch of blood coral bound the artifact to my bloodline.  And the last node was filled with a tiny sympathy stone from our stock.

Master Guri explained.  It was a security measure.  The other half of the stone was to be kept at Sevendor Castle, where spells could be cast directly through the connection.  I thought that was ingenious, and all sorts of possibilities opened up.

I spared no expense in building the thing.  I laced small pockets under the rails with various enchantments.  Knot coral, for instance, to assist with manipulating the pretty weapon with telekinesis.  It was impressive to watch it float across the room to my hand.  A tiny compartment hid a hardened lump of painkilling poppy gum.  Another concealed a keta nut from Farise, a powerful stimulant.  Yet another contained a long wire, enchanted to be near unbreakable.  In another I hid string.  Useful stuff, string.

Usually when one crafts a staff for battle, one specializes it.  My oaken staff had been good for simple concussive spells, back before irionite.  But with weirwood I didn’t have to specialize much.  I packed it with spells of devastating fury.  Bolts of magical fire, whips of pure energy, lances of power and rays of damaging sorcery were available to me.  I added a wide array of concussive spells, some large enough to level a castle.  A small castle. 

The staff seemed to have endless capacity to absorb the spells.  Some I affixed permanently to it through runes burned into the wood, or engraved into the steel.  A few enchantments I laid directly into thaumaturgical glass and embedded them into the wood.  Alya suggested I gild the thing, or plate it in silver, but I declined.  This was a weapon of war.  It was elegant.  It was not to be ornamental.

I learned a lot, building that staff.  I learned more about enchantment than I ever thought there was to know.  It was exhausting.  But it kept me busy. 

It took weeks of work, dozens of hours spent sitting over it, manipulating subtle magical energies.  It was the kind of work that can ensnare you, after a while.  You find yourself thinking about your project when you’re eating, or taking a crap, or talking to your wife, or watching your apprentice practice taking off and landing her gigantic hawk on the castle battlements over and over again.  It kept me distracted from the anticipation of war.  It also made me difficult to live with.

But as the winter months were drawing to a close, I ran out of ways to make it deadly. It was very impressive, and I practiced with it in the snowy yard of the inner bailey with Tyndal, Rondal, Lorcus, and whichever warmage I happened to be evaluating.  Each of them wanted similar staves, once I’d shown them my enchantments, and I helped them with the hard parts.  Their staves were powerful weapons, but toys compared to mine.

When I was more or less done with my staff I named it, in front of the Great Hall at dinner a few days before Briga’s Day.  I named it Blizzard, in keeping with my snowy motif, and gave a brief (but non-lethal) demonstration of what it could do.  It was an impressive weapon of especial power and elegance.  It was also perhaps the single most powerful magical weapon humanity had ever created.  Or I could just be flattering myself.  But creating it filled the long, dull days of winter while I awaited word from the west.

After I completed Blizzard, I enchanted a number of objects with small pockets to be given away as gifts just to explore the capabilities of my new toys.  What took me five minutes of spellwork turned an ordinary object into an obscenely valuable magical appliance.  The process of creating the warstaff had given me a lot of insight into the nature of enchantment and I wanted to practice. 

There was a real art to it, I began to realize.  Enchanting a chamber pot so that the contents vanished at a word into an extradimensional space until it was time to empty it might seem a foolish expenditure of magical power and understanding, but the result was delightful.  I had one sent to Pentandra as a surprise.  She thought it was the single most useful thing I had done in my career.  As an afterthought I made a matching set for Their Majesties.

It was during this time that I started reaching out to the enchanters for specific items I envisioned would be useful for the war effort.  I spoke longest with Master Cormoran, and ended up commissioning a few special weapons I thought would be helpful, and we tossed around some ideas for others. 

But I was killing time, and growing more anxious.  Every day I read the dispatches from the front, sent by way of the Mirror array and delivered to me at breakfast, searching for some hint of mobilization.  Our scouts were seeing little in the dreary depths of winter, however.  Not even the goblins pet bands of slavers were moving.  I kept thinking of those iron shoes and wondering when they were planning on striking.  If they were to be of use, they would be moving soon, I reasoned.

So why weren’t they?

It was frustrating.  Their inaction left me little choice but to sit around the castle, enchant stuff, brood, and enjoy my life.

Dranus proved to be a good companion for such times.  While Sire Cei felt compelled to offer me useful advice, Dranus was better about merely listening to me and reflecting on what I said without judgment.  When he did offer advice, or make a suggestion, it was casually worded.  He also played rushes, and we found ourselves locked in a fascinating long-term game for several days while I bitched about the problems with power.

“You should try to see these things in patterns,” he counseled, while we smoked and played in my workshop.  “You’re exercising power at many different levels at once.  Local lord, regional power, national position, and then your role in inter-species relations.  At every level you’re facing similar issues, just at different scales.  What are the commonalities of the experience, and what can you learn from one that can be applied to the others?”

“But governance, administration, and diplomacy are all very different, if related, things,” I countered, making a move on the lesser board.  “Kissing up to the Alkan lords is very different from dueling with the royal house or keeping my vassals in line.”

“Think about it as expressions of power.  In each case there’s pressure from above and below.  In the Order, for example, you are balancing the needs of the low magi with the requirements of the High, and managing to keep the midlevel wizards from agitating.  You are the fulcrum for that.”

“But what about the Alka Alon?”

“A less favorable position,” he admitted, finally moving a piece.  “But still a fulcrum.  You have this lovely mountain they covet, and between that and how elegantly useful you are as a foil for their stray gurvani, you have some leverage there.  The pressure in that case is coming from below – the King – and above.”

“That’s all very philosophical,” I agreed, “but not particularly useful. “

“Were you looking for advice, or solace?” he asked, amused.

“Why not both?”

“They tend to be mutually exclusive,” he said, wryly.  I made my move – I was playing a leviathan, and doing quite well for myself.  “You are in that most-envied of positions, the hub of everyone’s universe right now.  Everyone wants some of what you have, whatever it is.  And you have your own agenda – admirable, even, as it doesn’t involve making yourself a king or archmagi or something.  You’ve got a good heart, and it’s rare that such a person finds himself at the hub.”

“I’m not feeling particularly powerful,” I said, discouraged.  Particularly after what he did to my leviathan with his wizard.    I had not anticipated the move.  Ironic. 

“Let’s pause in our game for the evening,” he said after he took the leviathan off the board.  “I said your position was envied, not that it was enviable.   Regardless of your actions, the wheel will turn around you.  Every decision you make will uplift some . . . but others will be at the other end of the wheel.  Using leverage means that you are using force,“ he reminded me.

“So what do I do?” I asked, perhaps more emphatically than I intended.  We were drinking some very good Remeran red wine he’d brought from his estate in Moros.  “All of this power, and I can’t . . . act!”

“Relax,” he counseled.  “You’re being impatient.  The wheel turns whether you will it to or not.  When the moment occurs, you act.  Or choose not to act.  But until that moment comes, relax.  Because this pensive anxiety is starting to get on everyone’s nerves.”

I looked at him steadily.  “That’s a bold thing to say to a magelord.”

“There are so few of us, I’ll encourage you to think of it as advice from a colleague, not an employee.”

“I appreciate the candor,” I shrugged.  “I’m getting on my own nerves.  I need a hobby.”

“Don’t you have one?” he asked, gesturing.  I thought he was referring to the board.

“I rarely get time to play.  Or have a worthy opponent.”

“I wasn’t referring to the game.  I was referring to your
teka
.”

“My what?” I asked, confused.  It was very good wine.

“Your
teka
collection,” Dranus said, standing and crossing over to one of the many shelves that lined the workshop.  This one was collecting dust, as were the items upon it.  They were among the more interesting contents I’d taken from the cavern of the molopor, under Boval Castle when we left in the hope that there were some items of use .  A few were clearly gurvani fetish items, and some I’d even tentatively identified.  But there were others that were decidedly not gurvani.  I’d thought they were Alka Alon in origin, but the emisarries and Onranion had all disagreed.  I was leaning toward them being artifacts of the Iron Folk, with whom the gurvani were known to trade. 

Dranus picked up one of the larger of the strange, smooth little . . . whatever they were.  “They’re odd little things,” he mused, bringing it to the table.  “The Remeran nobility have been collecting them for hundreds of years.”

“What the hell are they?” I asked.  “Not even Gurkarl had any idea.  Nor the Karshak.  The Alka Alon seemed to recognize them, I guess, but insisted they were not Alkan.”

“Oh, they’re not,” Dranus assured me.  “They’re bits and pieces left over by our distant ancestors.  Pieces of Lost Perwyn, and the Early Magocracy.  No one really knows what any of them do, in particular, but some of them can be quite entertaining.”

“These are of human origin?” I asked, still confused. 

“That is what the legends say, and it’s borne out if you really apply yourself to the hobby.  Some of the teka are clearly built to function with human limbs and digits, not Alon.  And they are obviously crafted, not grown, despite how magnificently regular they are.  But they aren’t magical.  Not most of them, anyway.”

“What do they do?”

“Mostly?  Just sit on shelves and give the idle rich something to bargain away their wealth in pursuit of.  But some of them can display lights, numbers, letters, some babble in strange languages.  Some even sing and play music.  But most just sit there, inert.  My Uncle Lascus had a small
teka
collection at his country house when I was a boy.  One of them had the most exquisite moving parts, and another one would emit a green or red light, depending on what you did with it.”

“And people do this as a hobby?”

“Oh, Uncle Lascus would spend hours and hours with his collection.  He spent far more on it than he ever told my aunt.  He seemed to get a lot of fulfillment from it . . . but then, if I was married to my aunt I’d probably cultivate a few solitary hobbies, too.  In any case, I’ve seen these teka sitting over on the shelf for weeks, now, and have been meaning to ask you about them.”

I told him the tale of how we escaped from Boval Castle, and how I’d looted the goblins’ sacred cave before I went.  Dranus listened, intrigued.  He quickly came to the same conclusions I had.

“So what are artifacts from the Early Magocracy doing in a cave sacred to the goblins?  Were our ancestors colluding with them, somehow?  That, Minalan, is a very intriguing question!”

“Historically, perhaps, but how does that help us here?”

Dranus pursed his lips.  “Hard to say.  Perhaps the answer lies within the
teka
themselves.  I can’t see an obvious use for either of these,” he admitted, “but they both seem to have additional components.  A pity they don’t have them with them.  Sometimes that makes them even more interesting.”  He pushed it across the table.  “Try putting it in sunlight.  I don’t know much about
teka
, but direct sunlight can sometimes affect them.  Other times submersion will, but these don’t seem to be designed to go into water.  Idle curiosities,” he said, nodding sagely.