The Archmage Unbound (40 page)

I couldn’t help but admire her reserve
and I wished I had done half as well when I first found out. Slowly,
carefully, I began the tale, leaving nothing out. If she was impatient for the
important details I couldn’t tell, for she never interrupted me or uttered a
single word.

Not until I was done and my story ground
into an awkward silence did she finally speak again, “Thank you, Mordecai.
That was well done.” She stood slowly and nodded in my direction. “This is
still fresh news for me, if you don’t mind I think I’d like to be alone for a
while.” She had hidden her hands in the folds of her dress but my magesight
could still see them trembling.

I took a step in her direction, “Rose…”

“No Mordecai, please,” she interrupted.
“You may call upon me tomorrow. I need some time to collect myself.” The
trembling in her hands had moved on to become a more generalized tremor
throughout her body.

Her conviction gave me pause and I
considered leaving. It seemed a lot easier than facing the storm she held
tightly shuttered behind her eyes. Then I remembered my own night, alone in my
room, after I had nearly committed murder to quench my thirst for revenge,
rather than face my own sorrow. I took several more steps toward her.
You
won’t face this alone.

“Please go, Mordecai. You don’t
understand, that’s not how my family deals with things like this,” she spoke in
a tone of command, but it was undermined by a sudden gut wrenching sob as her
voice broke in mid-sentence. Her balance wavered and I caught her before she
could fall.

“No Mordecai!” she screamed into my
shirt. “That’s not how we do things!” She was crying as she yelled at me.
“I’m a Hightower, we don’t mourn in front of others…,” she was sobbing and
beating my chest at the same time.

I held onto her firmly, until her
violence had lapsed into a more subdued weeping. “Then your family needs to
find a better way,” I told her softly. She cried for an unknown span of time, and
the afternoon shadows grew long and vanished into dusk before she had
finished. Eventually she lapsed into silence and I simply held her and stroked
her hair. Outside the sun had dropped below the roofline and the city seemed
to be holding its breath in expectation of the night.

“I’d better return home,” I told her.

She nodded and I noticed her eyes were
swollen and puffy. With her hair askew and her red face I couldn’t help but
think it was the first time I had ever seen her so disheveled. Another day I
might have laughed. She walked me to the door herself, while Angela watched
disapprovingly. I couldn’t imagine what her maid-servant might be thinking.

As I stepped out she grabbed my hand,
“Don’t go too far. I’ll be looking for you tomorrow. Make sure I can find
you.”

“I need to find Marc still. He hasn’t
heard the news.”

She released my hand. “I can help with
that.”

I smiled weakly, “Tomorrow then.” I
turned away and began walking back toward my own city home. The door closed
behind me briefly before opening again.

“Mordecai,” she called.

I looked over my shoulder at the unkempt
Lady Rose, peering from her door, “Yes?”

“Thank you,” she said and then she shut
the door again.

I walked on, into the deepening dusk.

The next morning found me still abed
when Rose showed up at my door. Actually that statement isn’t quite true. The
more accurate statement would be that Rose found me still abed when morning
showed up at my door. At least morning had the decency to knock first, for she
had not.

I stared blearily at the red-clad woman
who stood at the foot of my bed, “Damnitt will you stop shaking the bed!”

“Fine I’ll be back in a moment,” she
replied unconcernedly.

That woke me up further as my suspicious
instincts kicked in, “Where are you going?”

She smiled wickedly, “To get some
water.”

I sat up, “Fine, I’m up. Get out so I
can put some damned clothes on!” She left promptly and I did indeed rise,
though I wasn’t about to ‘shine’ so early in the day. I had stayed up late the
night before trying to understand the ‘stasis field’ enchanting schemata. It
was either that or go burn down the royal palace, but Penny’s note had been
very explicit that I should save the king for later. That was alright, I knew
where his majesty lived and it wasn’t as if he’d be moving soon.

The enchantment still frustrated me,
which was a large part of the reason I hadn’t gone to bed early. I had trouble
letting go of a problem once I had started on it. In this case I had figured
out how to construct the rune structure without problem, it was intricate but
the pattern was repetitive enough that I had no trouble memorizing it. I just
didn’t understand what it actually ‘did’.

In the end I had constructed a working
model using the stylus and small wooden box. The field was supposed to
permeate the interior of the box when it was activated, that much was clear.
Still, nothing seemed to happen to anything I put into the box… either before,
after, or during the time it was activated. I had gone to bed puzzled and
frustrated.

I found Lady Rose downstairs in the
kitchen. She had brought a basket with her and was laying items out on the
small breakfast table. “You look awfully domestic,” I mumbled.

She looked at me sharply, “You look
thin. How many meals have you eaten since you found out?”

“None of your damned business,” I told
her self-righteously as I sat down and began eating the scones she had brought.
I couldn’t remember when I had eaten last.

“Those taste better if you put some of
the jam on them,” she suggested.

I was in no mood, “I prefer them plain,”
I said around a mouthful of scone. I doubt any of the words were
intelligible. Then I picked up the tea and promptly burned my tongue.

“Take your time, the food won’t escape,”
Rose said with a slight smile.

I swallowed and took another sip of the
tea, this time without burning myself. “I didn’t expect you to bring
breakfast.”

“Penny wouldn’t like it if you starved
to death and… well you can think of it as a thank you,” she answered.

I snorted, “A thank you? For what?”

“Yesterday,” she said simply.

“That’s what family does.”

“Family?” she said, raising an eyebrow.

I raised my own eyebrow, just to show
her she wasn’t the only one with witty brows. “I’ve never had a large family,
so I’ve been adding my friends to it since I was very young. Congratulations,
you’ve been adopted. Would you like to be my little sister, cousin, or aunt?”

“Aunt? I think sister would suit
better,” she said crinkling her nose.

“Little sister it is then,” I said in a
final tone.

“I am a bit older than you though,” she
reminded me.

“Don’t worry I won’t tell anyone.”

She laughed a little at that. It was
clear neither of us would recover our brighter spirits anytime soon, but I was
determined not to give in to despair. “Do you know what else family does?” I
asked.

She had just filled her mouth with tea
so she merely shook her head in negation.

I narrowed my eyes, “Family gets even.”

She raised that lone eyebrow again, “Why
do you think I wore red today?”

***

Half an hour later we were walking
through the city, heading toward the temple of Doron the Iron God, if Rose was
to be believed.

“Can you explain to me exactly why he
thought he should be staying with the Iron Brothers?” I asked her again.

“He thought they would be easier to
fool,” she replied.

That didn’t go far toward explaining the
entire scheme to me, “But you said he was planning to examine the archives of
Karenth the Just. Why is he here?” By here I was referring to the large
brooding structure looming over the street on the right hand side. While most
of Albamarl was constructed of local rose granite that hadn’t been good enough
for the Iron Brothers, they had felt the need to import a lot of drab grey
granite to face the walls with. It probably hadn’t been cheap to achieve the
depressing look they had wanted. I was also willing to bet that underneath the
surface most of the bulk of the building was built with rose granite.

“He’s taken on the identity of a
visiting priest of Doron, who is interested in viewing the Karenthian
archives,” she explained.

“And he thought disguising himself as a
priest of Karenth would be more difficult? Doesn’t actually staying here among
the Doronites increase his chances of detection?” I had a lot more questions
where those came from, but I was pacing myself.

Rose sighed, “Talk to him about it when
you see him.”

I grunted and then replied, “Let me see
if I can find him first.” Closing my eyes I focused on my other ‘sight’ and
extended my mind to a much greater extent, so that I could search the temple in
front of us. It was larger than it appeared; the building actually had been built
on top of an extensive underground complex. Some of it even extended
underneath our feet. There were cells and storerooms, and a variety of living
quarters. There were also quite a few people. At a rough count I would have
guessed at least three hundred people were within the building at the moment,
and they weren’t holding services currently.

“There’s a lot more Doronic clergy in
there than I expected,” I said at last.

“Doronic?”

“I know they prefer ‘Iron Brotherhood’,
or ‘Doronite’, but I like ‘Doronic’. It sounds a lot more like moronic.”

Rose groaned, “Did you find him?”

“Not yet, it’s more difficult when there
are more people. I have to examine each one,” I closed my eyes again. Several
minutes later I had found him, though his situation confused me. He was in
what appeared to be one of their cells for visiting clergy, but he wasn’t
alone. I had initially passed over him because I had assumed he would be by
himself if he was in the living quarters.
That was my mistake.
“I
found him.”

“What is he doing?” asked Rose.

I was torn between my desire to keep my
friend’s private business, well… private, and the desire to snicker. Trust
Marc to find a priestess with an ‘itch’. I looked at Rose and scratched my
head, “He’s discussing matters with one of the other clergy members.”

She watched my face carefully, “He’s
only been in there a few days and he’s already bedding the women?”

I was embarrassed by proxy, “That’s a
long time for him, and how did you know it was that?”

She held up a finger, “One, I can tell
he likes women. Two, your eyes darted off to the side right before you spoke.”

I was curious, “How can you tell he
likes women?” As far as I knew he hadn’t had any lady friends that she knew
about.

“You watch the eyes,” she replied.
“That and posture tell me all I need to know.”

“Posture?”

“People lean toward you when they’re
interested.”

I filed that information away without
looking at it too closely. I didn’t want to know what Rose might have read in
my eyes over the past few years. “Well you guessed correctly,” I told her, and
then added, “about Marc’s activities in there.”

“So do we wait for him to emerge?”

“I’d rather not. Let’s go in and find
him,” I replied.

Lady Rose shook her head, “If you
weren’t a wizard I’d think you were mad. How do you plan to accomplish that,
without exposing him?”

“Do you trust me?”

She looked up into my eyes, “More than
anyone else still living.” Then she looked away. Even with her self-control
some things were just too painful to say, and neither of us could afford to
start crying in the street.

“There’s an empty storeroom under the
street over there,” I said pointing to an alley running alongside the temple.
“We can enter there without anyone noticing us and it should be a short walk
from there to the cells the priests sleep in.”

A minute later we were standing beside
the building, in the alley I had indicated. “I don’t see an entry,” commented
Rose.

“There isn’t one. It’s directly
underneath us,” I informed her.

Her eyes widened as she looked at me,
“How far beneath us?”

“Fifty feet or so, would you like to
come with me or wait up here?”

“I’m coming with you. What do I have to
do?” she asked.

I was surprised at her easy acceptance.
“Shouldn’t you be warning me not to do anything stupid?”

Her face softened, “I’m not Penny dear.
I expect you to make your own judgments regarding magic, but if you damage this
dress I’ll take it out of you in blood.”

Her remark made me want to laugh and cry
at the same time, so I ignored it and moved on. “I’ll need you to get close to
me for this to work.”