Shanakan (The Fourth Age of Shanakan Book 1) (16 page)

“I take your point, sir.”

Serhan sipped his wine and wondered if he had.

“Now, I hate to dine alone, Alder, so would you please ask Bullen to prepare a meal that will demonstrate his skills without testing mine, and send a message to Captains Grand and Bantassin that I would very much appreciate their company tonight in about two hours? We’ll need another two bottles of wine, I think.”

“As you wish, sir.”

Alder turned and left. Serhan relaxed into his chair and sipped the wine again. It was probably the best he’d ever tasted. He was beginning to expect that the food would be of a similar standard, and the crockery, and the bed. Life was starting to look very comfortable, and he was not altogether sure that this was a good thing, but he was determined to enjoy it, at least for a while.

He called for more oil lamps, and when they came he took them into the study, closed the door carefully and opened Corderan’s book. He studied it for over an hour, but was only able to glean the smallest hints of what it contained. After that noises alerted him to the fact that the table was being prepared, and a short while later Darius and Cora arrived.

The meal was as good as he had hoped. The wine was excellent. His efforts to treat his friends as just friends were probably mostly successful.

After they left he spent two hours drawing up what he wanted from Delf, then finally he went to bed.

The bed was as good as he’d expected. He slept deeply and woke up thinking about Mai.

Delf was gone to Sorocaba, and there were no reports of bandits anywhere in the domains of White Rock. For the first time in nearly a quarter of a year Serhan had time to do as he pleased.

He had quickly grown used to the presence of the servants, and they obeyed him without question, so he was able to preserve his privacy. His lessons with Alder were progressing quickly, and his knowledge of the old language was developing far more rapidly than his makeshift tutor had expected. His memory freed him from the effort of learning vocabulary, and the rest came quite easily.

Bullen had lived up to his promise as a superb cook, and Serhan was sure that he had gained a few pounds. He alternated his evenings between the messes and his own rooms, inviting a selection of officers to dine with him, but always Darius and Cora. All seemed to enjoy it, with the exception of Colonel Stil, who he had invited a few times against his own inclination. The colonel had not been talkative.

He felt that he was developing a real rapport with his secretary, Mai. He enjoyed her company, and found her intelligent and quick to understand what he required of her. He found her very attractive but did not feel that it was an issue that he had to deal with. She seemed to feel the same way about him, and that mutuality manifested itself as a private manner that existed between them, no more than that.

The puzzle of the ring, the key to White Rock, was something that he had not had the time to pursue. What Rollo had told him still preyed on his mind; that it was sometimes called the soul of White Rock, and that the fortress was supposed to somehow be alive. He had been reading Corderan’s book with increasing ease, and some passages hinted at the possibility of taking a person’s awareness and transferring some portion of it into an inanimate object. He wondered if the sword Shadow Cutter was such a thing. He also wondered about the castle.

It was quite late one night that he decided to wear the ring for the first time since he had come back. He was seated in his study, and the castle was very quiet around him. He had been worried about trying it. There was always a chance that Gerique would sense that some power was being used, but he had enjoyed a good dinner, and a few glasses of wine, so his normal caution was a little blunted.

He slipped the ring on and sat with his eyes closed, trying to feel or hear something. There was nothing at all. He sat still for several minutes, and gradually he became aware of something at the very edge of hearing, or perhaps he wasn’t hearing it at all. It was as if the castle, the entire stone mass, was breathing. He opened his eyes and looked around, but nothing had changed. He stood and pressed his hands and face against the stone.

The wall opened in front of him.

He jumped back, and the opening was gone, as if it had never been there. He slowly pressed the hand that bore the ring against the stone and again the opening appeared. He looked at it carefully. It was comfortably big enough for a man, but no larger. It did not look as though it led anywhere.

So why was it there? Clearly there was some intent behind it. An alcove would not appear for no reason. A place to hide things? But he had chosen no special place to touch the wall.

He withdrew his hand and moved to the other side of the room, touched the wall again. Another identical alcove opened up. He tried it in a third place, and again the alcove appeared. So it worked anywhere.

On impulse he stepped into the alcove. It was the oddest sensation. Looking back into the room it was as if he was looking through a faint mist, and he felt sure that he was no longer visible from the room he had just left. He tried to move to the right and to the left, but was not able to. It must do more than this. Perhaps he was too tired to think clearly. It was very late.

He stepped out of the wall and sat down on his bed. Perhaps after a few hours sleep it would be clearer to him. He began to unbutton his shirt, and then stopped. He sat for a moment absolutely still. He had been sitting in his study, trying out the ring. Now he was in his bed chamber. Somehow he had walked through the wall.

He put the ring against the wall again and stepped into the alcove that appeared. The thought of his study, the desk, the chair, and there it was in front of him. He stepped out again.

Once more he stepped into the alcove and thought of the kitchens, many tens of yards away through the stone walls, several floors below and to the north. He was there instantly. One of the kitchen workers was cutting vegetables at a bench, facing him. The man didn’t register his presence at all, although he was only a few yards away.

On impulse he thought of Gerique’s chamber, and again he was shifted in the blink of an eye. He was looking out of the wall at the Faer Karani’s private chamber. Gerique was there. His huge black shape was curled around a book in a circle of oil lamps. Serhan stood in the wall and watched him. The pages of the book turned at regular intervals, but apart from that and the guttering of the oil lamps the room was silent.

Gerique slowly closed the book, but didn’t move. What now? The great head turned, the yellow eyes blazing like searchlights, until it was pointing directly at where Serhan was concealed.

“Corderan?”

Serhan forced the image of his study into his mind and stumbled out of the wall, pulling the ring from his finger. His hands were shaking and his heart beating so fast and hard that he put a hand to his chest. Gerique had sensed he was there, but not who he was. Serhan had felt the force of those yellow eyes, as though they could bore into the stone itself and rip him from it. But Gerique had sensed the master of White Rock. Serhan had never felt such fear in his life. Gerique had even known where he was. Was he safe, even now? His hope was that Gerique was unsure of what he had sensed. He imposed the control of his mind over his body, and as he calmed he recalled from the accounts that Rollo had read to him at Sorocaba that Gerique and Corderan had never been in White Rock at the same time. They had met outside the fortress, and the pursuit had been away to the south-east. It seemed likely that the ring had been sensed, remembered from centuries ago like the taste of a rare delicacy.

He could do nothing about it. The morning would bring what it would bring. He hid the ring in his desk and walked back to his bedchamber the normal, human way.

*              *              *              *

The following day nothing seemed to have changed. No messages came down from the Faer Karan, and things went along pretty much as normal in White Rock. There was no guarantee that this was a good sign. The Faer Karan acted in ways that were unpredictable to men.

In spite of the threat of discovery Serhan was keen to try one more experiment. He had not slept well, but it had not been fear that kept his eyes open. Half the night had been spent considering what he could do with the new abilities that the ring gave him, and the other half what he would have done if it had be he who had built White Rock with this wonderful feature.

There had to be a room.

It made sense to him that if you could travel anywhere in White Rock just by thinking of the place, then there had to be a place that you could only get to by such means. There had to be a secret room. He would certainly have built one, and he couldn’t see how Corderan could have resisted it. It was the most obvious application.

Late in the afternoon he finished the few tasks that he had committed to for the day and retired to his chambers, pleading a headache. He told his servants that he was not to be disturbed, shut the doors and went into his study. Placing the ring on his finger he touched the wall and stepped into it.

Take me to Corderan’s room, he thought. Nothing happened. He had been afraid of this. He needed to have an image of the room, and the last person to see it had probably been dead for four centuries. On the other hand he might be wrong, and the room might not exist.

There was one other thing to try. He allowed himself to build up a picture of how the room might look. He felt sufficiently familiar with Corderan through reading his book that he might make an adequate guess. It would be a comfortable room, but not too large. It was, after all, a private place and not for show. There would be a desk, a comfortable chair – just one, a bed, perhaps. Books and bookshelves would be close to the desk. The image formed in his mind, becoming clear and quite detailed. He opened his eyes from the imagining and found himself looking into blackness. There was nothing at all.

At first he was disappointed, thinking that it had failed, he would have to try something else, and then realised that, after four hundred years there would be no light at all in Corderan’s private room. He pictured the study again, stepped out into it and picked up a couple of oil lamps. He lit one and went back into the wall, bringing up the same image as before, the desk, chair, bed, shelves, books.

He stepped out into the darkened room, and it was exactly as he had imagined it.

But that was ridiculous.

It was impossible for him to have imagined the room exactly the way it was the first time he attempted it; unless something else was happening.

What if the castle itself had suggested the image to him; had placed it in his mind? It was possible, he supposed. Not everyone had his perfect memory, and small mistakes in the image might be understood and corrected. The other possibility was even more bizarre – that White Rock had created the room to his specification.

Rollo had said that the place was rumoured to be alive, and he had already proven that it would take him where he wanted to go. Was it possible that the stones could reconfigure themselves as he wished? He sat at the desk and held up the oil lamp so that he could see around him. He would probably never know the truth of it.

The desk was a heavy oak thing; the surface of it was polished by much use, but quite empty. He ran his hands over its silken surface, probably as Corderan had done a thousand times. He imagined the great mage sitting here, in this seat, writing the book that he was now reading. It was so many years ago that it felt like history, and yet sitting here it felt like yesterday, too.

He turned and looked at the books on the shelves, pulled one out and looked at it. The cover was brittle, and pieces flaked away in his hand. He put it down carefully on the desk and teased it open at the first page.

The title: On the Nature of Magic as Determined by the Great Mage Brunofis. The title alone suggested a different age, freedoms, customs, people and places that were gone; lost forever. He felt that loss.

He carefully opened another page and looked at the densely written script. What stood out was a note in the margin, written in a different hand. It said: imaginative rubbish. He touched the writing gently with a finger, traced the loops and lines of the script. This was in Corderan’s hand, like the great work hidden in his own room.

He closed the book and took down another. A brief investigation told him that this too had been annotated, and that the comments were not complementary. It seemed that Corderan had his own strong opinions on the nature of magic. What impressed him most was that this magician, acknowledged to be the greatest of his age, and possibly the greatest ever, was still learning, still exploring, and still looking for the truth. Even Gerique, the greatest of the Faer Karan, was always reading, trying to learn more than he already knew. It was a lesson that he absorbed sitting in the long-deserted secret chamber. There was no end. The truth eluded even the greatest minds, the most diligent searchers, but there was always a step to be taken, a secret to be learned.

As he sat in the chair carefully turning the pages of ancient books he found a note written inside the cover of a book entitled “moy Impan”: The Great Truth.

There is no great truth, the note said. Searching for the truth is like cutting up a loaf of bread. Keep cutting in half and you will end up with pieces that are very small; so small that you may be unable to cut them. They are still divisible however, and you may have to search for a sharper knife, develop a keener eye. And then you discover that you have cut the wrong half at some point, and have to go back and start cutting again. You will exhaust your abilities long before you run out of bread.

It seemed to Serhan, reading all the scattered notes, the questions in the margins, the terse comments, that Corderan had been a man bursting with ideas and thoughts. He had written them down as they came to him, wherever, but the book, the one that he had taken with him when he fled the Faer Karan, had been his distillation of what he considered his finest ideas.

Even this man had failed.

But he had been taken by surprise. Corderan had been starved of time. Unable to learn anything about the nature of the Faer Karan he had fought them as though they were men, and that had been a mistake; unavoidable, but still a mistake.

I must make myself more like him. It is not enough to recover knowledge that was lost. I must go further. I must find a sharper knife and a keener eye. I have the time that he did not.

The question that remained was his ability. He had never doubted it until now, but doubt now blunted his confidence. What he must do had never been done, and what he must learn had never been known.

It does not matter. If I fail or if I succeed it only matters that I will have tried by best.