Survivors: Book 4 Circles of Light series (46 page)

Chevra digested this
information, his skin growing cold in spite of the humidity. He
glanced at Harrip.

‘Summon the College
Administrators if you will. They must work harder now than they’ve
probably done for years.’

‘I went only briefly to
the north,’ Grek told Chevra when Harrip had gone to pass on the
message to a servant. ‘The farmers are surprisingly well organised.
The raids they have endured for so many years have led them to take
ingenious steps to defend themselves. But the numbers of fighters
still pouring south from the desert give the villagers no
respite.’

Chevra leaned back in
his chair. ‘I know. My wife used to complain that the patrols were
too infrequent and that I was wrong to reduce the garrisons. We had
problems in the Tooman province which necessitated the use of more
armsmen than I’d expected to put the insurgents down.’

‘Your wife and
children,’ Grek changed the subject abruptly.

Chevra looked
surprised. ‘I have ordered them to return to the palace,’ he
said.

‘Send them to
Wendla.’

‘Wendla?’ Chevra sat up
straight. ‘Why should they be sent away?’

‘They must not be
risked here as hostages.’

Chevra gaped but Grek
continued inexorably.

‘The boy must be kept
clear at the very least, but it would be best if your girls too are
in safe keeping.’

Chevra’s thoughts
whirled: one daughter was older than Merkas and distressingly like
her mother in temperament in his view. The other daughter was
barely past her fifth birthday. He had set eyes on neither of them
since Eorlas had left the palace three years ago. She would have
got Merkas away too if Harrip hadn’t had her watched so
closely.

In the great scheme of
things, Chevra had no illusions that he was an outstanding ruler.
He had kept things running in Malesh, curbed the exigencies of
outlying provinces such as the Tooman uprising, and made sure that
no one merchant became too much more successful or powerful than
any other.

‘Will you help me
explain to the Administrators?’ Chevra asked in a humble way such
as none of his Councillors would have recognised.

Grek considered the
request. ‘I will,’ he agreed finally. ‘I have already assessed your
two Administrators and their minds are both strong and sharp. It
will not take long to convince them of the peril facing
Malesh.’

It was as Grek
predicted: Dersu and Fenelon listened without interruption while
first Chevra outlined the situation and then Grek filled in many of
the gaps with frightening clarity.

The older of the
Administrators, Dersu, sniffed. ‘We have had our suspicions for a
very long while Grand Harbour Master. Taseen sent warning two years
ago of things worsening and we always heed Taseen’s words.’ He
mopped his forehead: corpulent as he was, the speed with which he’d
been rushed from the College through the palace looked to have
exhausted him.

Fenelon paced
restlessly. ‘Many of us have been worried by Vorna’s ambitions for
much longer than you might think,’ she said. ‘My predecessors left
reports of their suspicions and we have tried to monitor her
activities. As our invisible friend has said, Vorna has built a
myriad of defences.’

‘Can you break them?’
Chevra interrupted.

‘Some of them yes,
quite easily,’ Dersu replied. ‘But we are fairly sure that once
such warding is broken, another is activated.’

‘And whatever is
activated may well be aggressive rather than defensive,’ Fenelon
put in. ‘The entire region around Vorna’s estates – a circle
between one and two leagues across – is virtually impenetrable to
any of us now. And believe me, I have people working constantly on
this. It isn’t a massive shielding – the air is somehow wrong, the
very particles are misshapen and so far seeing is impossible.’ She
bit her lip, glancing at Dersu.

He sighed. ‘Four mages
of the third rank have been unconscious for over twenty days since
trying to penetrate Vorna’s estates.’

Chevra was deeply
shaken. Mages of the third rank were extremely strong – for four of
them to be incapacitated to such a degree boded ill indeed for any
direct attempt on Vorna.’

‘The Wendlans know of
her. They call her the witch woman.’ Grek sounded
pensive.

Fenelon followed his
line of thought. ‘Witches and wizards were more common in the Time
Before.’ She frowned. ‘Most of them were solitary, individualistic.
That was why the College of Mages was founded if the histories are
accurate: to bring those individuals with powers into a community
where they were encouraged to develop and use those powers for a
common purpose.’

Dersu began to nod.
‘But it took a long age to gather in all the talented ones. There
are many records of solitary wizards causing untold damage to
further their own personal desires – wealth, control of an area,
control of a section of the population.’

‘What happened to
them?’ Chevra was curious although he had a good idea what Dersu’s
answer would be.

Dersu mopped his
forehead again. ‘If they refused all overtures from the College
they were either stripped of their powers or destroyed.’

Chevra leaned forward
eagerly, his hopes rising. ‘You can strip a mage of his powers? I
didn’t know that.’

Fenelon gave a harsh
laugh. ‘It isn’t something we talk about too often but yes, it can
be done. And it is done today if a student is unbalanced or wayward
in his use of power.’ She gave Chevra a lop-sided smile. ‘We would
never stand a chance of doing such a thing with Vorna.’

Chapter
Twenty-Six

Bajal sat in a shadowed
corner of Vorna’s library and workroom in an annex of the main
building. Vorna’s estates lay some twenty four leagues north west
of Harbour City and two leagues from the west coast of Malesh.
Bajal’s hands gripped the arms of his chair, the knuckles white. He
stared unblinkingly across the large cluttered room at Vorna. The
Mage Councillor half lay upon a couch, her eyes closed, a smile
flickering across her face. Bajal felt sick but dared not move. A
headache had begun to niggle behind his eyes as he and Vorna
approached the estate boundary six days ago and had grown steadily
with every heartbeat since.

Now, his eyes burned,
his throat felt too tight to allow air into his lungs and he knew
his head would explode if he moved it too quickly. The very air
felt too thin; smelt as though it was somehow burnt, its acrid
taint scratching and stinging his skin. He had lost track of time:
whether he’d been sitting here for the morning or for several days
he had no idea.

Vorna had quite
forgotten that Bajal was even in the same room. The Bound One,
Valesh, was awake and talking to her. As Vorna had expected, poor
Valesh was only saddened by her long imprisonment, not angry,
crazed, or vengeful as Taseen and those other fools had predicted.
There had been no one left to help Vorna finish her training after
the final battle a millennia past and so she had sought a way of
her own. No senior mages survived with any power left to speak of –
Taseen’s case was not unique though he was the most senior to have
survived.

Vorna had searched the
unscathed library in Xantip palace and had learned much that she
should have remained ignorant of. With no one senior to guide her,
she put her own already skewed interpretation on most of her
readings. The title the Wendlans gave her – witch woman – was in
fact far more accurate than any might have guessed. Vorna had no
feeling for any such abstract ideas as community, society, or
morality: what she wanted, she went for and got. She had never
formed close ties with any other person; regarded the awed respect
given her by her students and apprentices through the millennia as
only her due.

And she was so close
now, she was within reach of gaining control of the phenomenal
powers of a Bound One. It never occurred to her that in fact the
opposite was true of course. Vorna spent longer and longer in
mental communication with Valesh. Valesh had lain Bound and
silenced deep beneath the sea since the last battle, until she’d
found a way here. She had been Bound after her brother Qwah was
trapped in the desert. The human mages had been strong enough to
bind her but they were weary from their long struggle and several
tiny errors had crept into the spells they cast.

Valesh had been Bound
and cast into dreamless, endless sleep – or so the mages believed.
But her sleep was not dreamless nor was it eternal. Her dreaming
mind had soon found Vorna and immediately she’d recognised the
human female’s power, and also her weaknesses. Chief among the
latter was Vorna’s overweening sense of her personal
superiority.

Valesh struggled hard
to rein back her fury: that she should need this pathetic human’s
aid enraged her every time she thought of it. She knew her brother
Qwah would never have found such patience as she had needed to
exercise over these years. She was so close to freedom! She was
desperately tempted to force the issue right now but Vorna still
had not discovered how to untangle the spell which would keep
Valesh tied to this one place. She was sure her mind was nearly
loosed enough to lift her essence up through the layers of
ensorcelled rock and earth, but until Vorna could undo the
placement spells, she would still be trapped in this little part of
the world.

Valesh had grown
cunning during her imprisonment but cajole as she might she had
been unable to persuade Vorna to approach other mages, seek other
minds in her quest to free her. Valesh had suggested that others
might have access to forgotten knowledge of which Vorna knew
nothing. Vorna had been offended by the very idea and Valesh had to
waste a great deal of time soothing the woman’s ruffled self
esteem.

No other mages came to
Vorna’s estates through the years except her favoured apprentices.
Valesh had been both amused and annoyed at the dreadful lack of
talent these apprentices had. She recognised Bajal now, he was in
the room with Vorna, but his mind was collapsing, folding in upon
itself. And it had been a weak mind to begin with.

Since the time she was
Bound, Valesh had no communication from her siblings. She did not
even know if they had been destroyed completely or were Bound as
she and Qwah had been. When she first stirred she found herself
within a fissure of the world’s crust far beneath the sea between
Malesh and Wendla. The mages must have believed it would be
impossible to escape such a place. Vorna smiled on her couch in the
library as Valesh’s amusement swept through her mind. The heat of
the magma had obliterated some of the spells cast to keep her deep
below and so she had risen, moving with the molten rock as it
seeped through the fault line to end in cooling basalt under
Vorna’s estates. Valesh continued to murmur her seductive
blandishments to Mage Councillor Vorna with a tiny fraction of her
mind. The by far larger part of her essence swelled and writhed,
flexing incessantly at the holding spells and snarling for
release.

The Tower rising above
the sprawling College of Mages in Harbour City had four floors and
a deep basement. For many years now only the top floor had been in
frequent use: for annual Conclave of the highest mages and at
midsummer for the induction of students to the ninth and lowest
rank of mage. The floor below the Chamber of Conclave was a
library, filled with parchments and books, journals and letters,
accessed only by mages who had achieved fifth rank status or
higher.

Once a mage had been
raised to the fifth rank he or she usually paid ostentatious visits
to the Tower archive. However, only half a dozen such visits were
made at most: the apparent confusion and the quantities of dust put
off even the most assiduous mage. Vorna had managed to search only
a small section of the Tower archive while Taseen lay unconscious
after the final battle. She didn’t expect to find anything of worth
and was distracted by many other things at that period. She’d found
herself the only mage left in the College with real ambition to do
more to make her desires become reality.

A few old men and women
remained – mages of third and second rank who had chosen specialist
study and teaching rather than playing active parts in the ruling
of Malesh. The damage sustained by all of them meant that although
technically they lived, in fact they were mere ciphers. Taseen
surprised everyone by recovering sufficiently to be transported
back to Harbour City and his apartments within the College. His
mind regained its astuteness and he became a much appreciated
lecturer and tutor while freely admitting he could teach theory
only. He always admitted to his classes that he could no longer
exercise any power: a confession which was always received in
appalled silence. These ninth rank mages were too newly come to
their talent and the thought of losing those gifts was beyond their
comprehension.

Taseen was often to be
found in the Tower archive in the years after the final battle, but
once he had secretly transferred many volumes from the Tower to his
own apartments, dust gathered ever more thickly on shelves, desks
and window sills. In her careless belief in her own invincible
strength, Vorna had failed to see that certain volumes had threads
of warding along their spines: she, as most others, merely noticed
a gap where a book appeared to be missing. Since Taseen’s discreet
“borrowing”, the gaps on the shelves were exactly what they
seemed.