The Awakened Mage (68 page)

“At least we
had
our visions!” she retorted. “Six hundred years ago Jervale knew you and yours were a mistake, but your precious Barl shouted him down! How better might we be prepared for this day if—”

His fist thumped the tabletop. “You can’t know that! Dathne, finger-pointing is pointless. What’s done is done. My people came, yours accepted us, and so your fates were bound to ours. It’s history and unchangeable. We have to focus on the future … and hope against hope for a miracle.”

“We have a miracle,” she said fiercely. “His name is Asher.”

“I hope you’re right,” he said, suddenly tired. “I hope he’s everything your Prophecy claims him to be. For if he’s not, this kingdom’s doomed and every soul within it damned.”

“I’m right,” she said, then nodded at the tray with its burden of half-drunk soup and partly chewed bread. “Are you finished with that?”

He nodded. “Yes. Thank you. I’m sorry I couldn’t do it more justice.” As she moved to take it away, he held up a hand, pausing her, and sifted swiftly through his haphazard pile of papers. “Here,” he said, and slid three sheets under the bread plate for safekeeping. “More spells for our miracle to practice.”

She looked at them as though they might bite. “When will you have finished all of them?”

“By tonight sometime, I think. I hope.”

“I hope so too,” she said, and glanced at the curtained window as a fresh wave of hail rattled the glass. “Matt says the Weather Magic’s unravelling faster by the hour. The Wall won’t stand much longer now.”

He pulled a face. “Then I’d best get back to work. Thank you for the soup.”

“You’re welcome,” she said, and left him to his papers, and Barl’s diary.

Cowering behind a pile of old boxes in her weatherbeaten shed, Veira raised her voice above the wereslag’s howling screech and shouted, “Kill it!
Kill it!”

Panting, Asher slashed a sigil through the air and uttered the words of banishment. The wereslag’s writhing orange tentacles burst into heatless flame; its eight clawed arms withered; it shriveled and died, leaving only a ring of smoking dirt on the shed floor where its acid slime had dripped and boiled.

“Sink me bloody sideways,” he muttered, and sagged against a handy post. “How many more, eh?”

Sidhng out from safety, Veira shuffled through the sheaf of papers in her hand. “That’s the last of the spells Matt brought out before.”

“Then how many are left to come?”

“You’ll have to ask Gar,” she said tartly, eyebrows lowered in a challenge.

He curled his hp and looked out of the shed at the drowned garden. At the fringe of the Black Woods, and the trees flogging themselves to death against the leaden sky. He was exhausted. Had lost count of the monstrosities he’d called forth with just a few words and the power of his mind.

It was a mighty uncomfortable feeling, knowing that things like wereslags and trolls and horslirs and gruesomes lurked just beneath his skin. If Da could see him now…

Unsettled, still glooming at the lashing forest, his fingers crept up to his chest and rubbed at the hard little lump of crystal nestled in his flesh. Every time he summoned his power—a feat that came more and more easily, something else he didn’t much care for—the crystal tickled. Buzzed, as though woken from shallow sleep.

He’d asked and he’d asked, but Veira wouldn’t tell him any more about its purpose. Just: “You’ll know when the time comes. Stop fratching me, child.”

She said now, close enough to swat his shoulder, “Leave it be! We’ve more spells yet to conquer and it’ll be too dark soon to go on.”

He groaned. “Let a body rest a moment, Veira. I been at this for bloody hours.”

“And hours are all we have left before we must head back to the City. I—”

“Sorry,” said Matt, slopping into the shed from outside. He was festooned with oil-dark horse harness, head and shoulders soaked with the ceaseless rain. “Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“You ain’t,” he said, frowning. All Matt’s color was bled from his face, leaving it drawn and pallid. “You all right?”

Matt let the harness slide free onto a cluttered bench. “The unbalance of magic is getting worse. I’m feeling it more with every hour that passes.”

Asher nodded. “Aye.” He could feel it too, like sharp fingernails digging into his brain. Scraping over his skin. “You got to block it out, Matt, else it’ll tear you apart.”

Matt pulled a face. “I’m trying. But I’m not you.” He looked at Veira. “Can you spare a moment to help me strengthen this harness? I’ve grown more used to needles and waxed thread than bindings—and I never was much good at them to begin with.”

“Course she will,” Asher said cheerfully. “She ain’t got nowt better to do just now, since I’m for a breather.” And he made his escape before Veira could shout, or slap him again.

He ran over the squelching grass to the cottage, shoved open the kitchen door and escaped inside, dripping.

The kitchen was full of more cleaned harness, cooking smells and Darran. Who took one look at his face, rummaged in a cupboard, pulled from it an anonymous bottle of something that looked promising, at least, and poured him half a glassful.

He swallowed it in one gulp then staggered around for a while coughing and wheezing and banging his chest.

“You’re welcome,” said Darran. Flour daubed his weskit, his face, his hair. He was in the middle of rolling pastry. It looked suspiciously lumpy.

Asher held out his emptied glass and waited. Pinch-faced, Darran poured him a stingy second splash, ostentatiously recorked the bottle and returned it to the cupboard.

He wasn’t a slow learner. Sipping this time, not gulping, he emptied the glass again and put it in the sink. Glanced at Darran, sighed, rinsed it and set it upside down to dry.

Darran returned to his pastry. “Gar never meant to hurt you.”

Another sigh. He had no strength for this. “It’s been said before and nowt’s changed. Let it be, ole man.”

Bang went the rolling pin onto the table. “He saved your life!”

“You mean Matt’s.”

“And yours. Don’t you even care how? Or is hating him more important than knowing the truth?”

Asher looked at him. The ole crow’s eyes were blazing with unfair hope and accusation. He didn’t want to see that, so he slouched over to the window. Looked at the rain instead of this pleading old man who’d been nothing but a trial and tribulation to him from the first day they’d met.

“Aye,” he said, surly. “Hate’s a lot more important.”

Darran seized him. Pushed up his jacket and shirt sleeve to reveal the ragged scar from his madcap Restharven childhood with Jed. “The other man’s arm was scar-less. But Gar said it was your body burned in the glimfire. He knew it wasn’t and he lied, though he could’ve died for it then and there. He said it so they’d believe you were dead. That
must
be worth a little forgiveness, surely?”

“No,” said Asher baldly. “It ain’t.”

“Why not?” demanded Darran, pleading. “Have you never done anything you’ve not been sorry for after? That you did because you had to, even though it led to someone else’s suffering?”

Jed.
He skewered the ole crow with a scathing glare. “I never went back on a promise. And if Gar’d done the same there’d have been no body to identify at all, now would there? Someone still died, Darran!”

Darran flinched as though he’d been struck. “I know. The prince is most—”

“Good. Then maybe you can ask Rafel to forgive Gar,” he said bitterly, “Just don’t ask me again, Darran. You’ll only be wastin’ your time and mine.”

Darran picked up his rolling pin and attacked the pastry. “Yes,” he said, clipped and cold. “Yes, I quite see that I would.”

Furious he’d been goaded into saying more than he’d intended, Asher headed for the inside kitchen door, thinking to change his wet clothes. He hauled it open—

—and Gar was on the other side.

“What?” he said roughly. “What d’you want?”

From the stricken look on his face Gar had been eavesdropping. Mute, he held out his hand. In it was another sheaf of papers covered in his quick writing. “More spells,” he said, subdued.

“Fine,” Asher said, and snatched them. He’d worry about dry clothes later. Turning on his heel he stalked out of the kitchen. Into the rain. Back to the business of killing with magic.

Shaken, Gar ignored the pleading look on Darran’s pale face and returned to the sitting room and Barl’s diary. He had only a few more pages left to examine. Relief warred with a sharp, unexpected sorrow at the thought. With the diary wholly translated he’d be leaving Barl behind. Saying goodbye. It hurt, to think of that.

Barl… Barl… how glorious she was. A woman unmatched in the history of their people. Brave… dedicated… consumed with integrity. He could read her handwriting now as easily as his own. She spoke to him intimately, mind to mind, a whispering of desperate confidences. Betraying to him, and only him, the secret torments of her heart. Her doubts. Her fears. Her passionate longings. He understood her as no one ever had; certainly not her faithless lover Morgan.

Pulling the diary towards him he turned to the next page. Blinked a couple of times to clear his fuzzy vision, then focused on the hastily scrawled entry.

Being an incantation I shall call the Words of UnMaking. This is a terrible thing, and only my overwhelming fears have led me to it. The seeds of this monstrous spell grew out of my work with Morgan, though it shames me now to admit it. I do believe that the Wall I labor to bring forth will protect us from him. I believe we will be safe behind it forever… but if my belief proves false, yet will I prevail against him. For the dread words recorded hereafter will undo him utterly. Yes, and they will undo the speaker also… undo me, for no one else shall have them.

If I must use them …if I must die.. . I shall be justly punished.

Silence, as the carved wooden clock on the wall ticked away the seconds and minutes of what might be Lur’s last days.

Mouth dry, hands sweaty, he read the diary entry again then looked at the recorded incantations. Noted the syllables and the sigils and the rhythms of the words and saw, his heart hard-beating, that victory was held here in his hands.

Victory … and death.

There were no more spells in the diary after Barl’s Words of UnMaking. The spell that would ensure Morg’s death, and Asher’s with it.

He read it again. Again. Again. Marveled at the simplicity of its structure, its exquisite elegance, so quintessentially Barl. Recognized its triggers and why without question it would work. With magic a fading memory in his blood he could barely feel the incantation’s power. Faced with the potential of such dreadful destruction he felt briefly, guiltily relieved the burden of its utterance would never fall upon him.

And then—as he read the incantation for the eighth time—his disciplined, scholarly, educated mind went
click.
And suddenly he saw Barl’s spell in a whole new light. Saw it for what it was … but also what it could be. Still victory. Still death.

And yet entirely different.

He slammed the diary shut. Shoved away from his makeshift desk and roamed Veira’s small sitting room, banging from mantelpiece to sofa to window and back again. He was sweating. Could he do it? Did he even dare try? If the memory of magic wasn’t enough, if his vaunted scholarship were faulty. If he misplaced just one single syllable…

He could kill everyone. Even perhaps leave Morg alive.

No. He couldn’t do it. Shouldn’t. The risk was too great. It was arrogance inconceivable to think of altering Barl’s final, perhaps greatest work. How long had he been a magician? Mere weeks. It wasn’t enough. If what he believed was true, if the powers he’d manifested had never been his but were part of Morg’s plan, then he’d never been a real magician. Had never been anything but a magickless cripple. A pawn, used and discarded on a whim.

And yet—and yet—he could
see
it.
Feel
it.
Taste
the changes to her incantation, if only in his mind. He knew Barl as well as he knew himself, now. Knew how her mind worked, how it saw and shaped the world, as completely as he knew his own. He could do this.

He flung himself back to the makeshift desk. Opened the diary. Pulled a fresh sheet of paper towards him and re-inked his pen.

“I can do this, Barl,” he said aloud, as though she was nearby, listening. “I must do this. I know you want me to. And it’s the only way to repay my debts. Sweet lady, help me…

Outside the cottage the last of the daylight-was washed away and a rain-soaked night fell. As the cottage clocks struck seven, Veira shepherded everyone into the kitchen for dinner. Just as they sat down to Darran’s lumpy rabbit pie one of the villagers, braving the dreadful weather, came calling at the back door to see if she was all right. She shooed the others into the corridor where they hid and held their breaths until Gavin was persuaded she was coping just fine, thank you, and went away.

“Is there news from the Circle, Veira?” said Dathne, as they resumed their seats at the crowded kitchen table. “What’s happening elsewhere in the kingdom?”

Veira sighed. “Nothing good, child. I’ve heard from everyone and every story is the same. Storms rage from coast to coast. There’s flooding. Fires. Tremors that tear the earth apart, just as when King Borne was ill. Fear riots unchecked in village and township streets alike.”

“And what of my people?” said Gar. “Are there no Doranen attempting to help?”

“A few,” she said, shrugging. “But what can they do?

They have no Weather Magic. I’m told most of them have gone into hiding on their country estates, panic-stricken like the Olken.”

As Gar looked at his plate, clearly distressed, Darran cleared his throat. “What about the Doranen in the City? The kingdom’s strongest magicians sit on council, surely—”

She shook her head. “Morg’s suspended council business. Barlsman Holze has sent out orders for everyone to pray.”

“So not even he suspects Jarralt isn’t Jarralt?” said Matt, stabbing his fork into a potato.