The Fire Mages (13 page)

“Are you all right?” I asked. He looked very tired.

“My eyes hurt,” he said plaintively. “May I hold your hand? Would you mind?”

“Of course not.” I knelt on the floor in front of him and took both his hands. “Ah,” he murmured. “That’s better.”

We sat for some time, and he seemed more peaceful. “Do you feel it?” he asked.

“Feel what?”

“The energy flowing out of you into me. My eyes have almost stopped hurting.”

“Are you serious? Am I healing you?”

“That’s what it feels like.” He opened his eyes, and smiled at me. “Could you do it deliberately, do you think?”

I had no idea what to do. I tried to remember what Cal did when he healed. Firstly, he waved his hands around, while he concentrated on the spell, then he laid his hands on the patient, usually on the injured area, then there was more hand-waving. That wouldn’t work for me. There needed to be physical contact. So, feeling foolish, I closed my eyes and concentrated while I held Drei’s hands.

Nothing happened. I could hear noises clearly. A servant clinking a bucket, perhaps, in the corridor. Male voices drifting up from the yard below. Some small rodent scrabbling behind the wooden wall panels. I tried focusing on Drei’s hands. I could feel the energy oozing through them, bubbling lethargically from my body to his.

Then something odd happened. As soon as I became aware of the magic inside me, my mind somehow opened up and I became aware of Drei in a quite different way. I could see his golden aura – not with my eyes, but in my mind. It seemed to emanate from inside his chest, with long tendrils into his arms and legs and a small concentration in his head. I could see a little trickle of gold flowing through my hands and into his. But there were other colours too. A greenish colour around his stomach. Swirling red a little below that. A long black line on his back. White with a couple of small purple blobs in his head. And a deep reddish brown around his eyes.

Some I didn’t understand but I knew at once the colour round the eyes was his pain. I didn’t have to think about what to do, or concentrate any more than I already was. As soon as I recognised the problem, energy gushed out of my hands and raced to his eyes. Within a few heartbeats the colour had gone.

My eyes flew open. Drei looked shocked too. “Well,” he said. “Well... That was – weird.”

“For both of us, I imagine. So am I a healer?”

“A healer? Kyra, my dear, you’re a mage.” He began to laugh, setting me off too, and it was a long time before we sobered up. That night we both slept like babies.

I woke late the next morning, tired and lethargic. Drei was already up and dressed, fizzing with energy. He had a pot steeping, so he brought me a hot herby drink, heavy with fruit flavours. He sat on the edge of the bed, bouncing a little in enthusiasm, so that I had to hold my cup carefully to avoid spilling it.

“This is so much fun, isn’t it? You’re a mage and a healer and who knows what else. All those colours! We must find out what it all means. But you’ll be so useful to me. I get terrible headaches – you’ll be able to get rid of them for me. And winter chills and fevers, I get everything there is. I won’t need to suffer now.”

He rattled on while I sat and sipped my drink, letting my head clear.

“It’s no good if it wipes me out like this every time,” I pointed out.

His face fell at once. “True. But I suppose your energy levels will replenish themselves.”

“I don’t know how, though.”

He’d had time to explore our apartment while I slept. There wasn’t much to it, just a bedroom with a small dressing room, a single large general purpose room, and a door concealing a narrow corridor to some functional rooms – a kitchen, scullery, store-rooms and sleeping rooms for the servants. Outside the front door was an alcove where two guards stood watch. We had brought a troop of ten guards, plus a captain, and six servants, and were given two local servants as well. It seemed excessive to me, but I suppose it was normal for the Kellon’s son.

Morning board was served in the apartment, a collection of fruit, meat and cheese, nothing hot except for the inevitable pot of some herbal brew. After that, Drei showed me round my home for the next few moons.

The King’s Keep was one of the few places I’d seen a picture of in one of my mother’s books, so I knew of the eight octagonal towers and the solidly impregnable outer wall. A picture gives no idea of scale, however, and it was another matter to be inside it. Each tower was several times larger than the Kellon’s hall, and the inside of the joining walls was filled with rooms too, so that the whole inner wall was speckled with windows, with washing hanging from lines and blankets set to air.

Around the inside of the walls squatted stalls and low buildings - bakeries, stables, shops, board houses, craft workshops and much more besides. A smooth road circled through the middle of it, with runners pulling wooden carts to convey people swiftly from place to place. The centre of the Keep was given over to gardens, both pleasure and productive, so that a walking path leading to a statue or fountain would be edged with fruit trees or nut bushes or neat rows of vegetables. In the very centre was the well that gave the town its name.

I walked around with my mouth hanging open as Drei showed me wonder after wonder. The Keep was a town in its own right, housing many thousands of people and providing for them so well that they need never leave it. Many of its inhabitants lived their whole lives within these walls, and never even saw the outer town.

Eventually we came to the base of one of the towers. “Is this ours?” I asked. I had completely lost my sense of direction, but I knew we had reached our apartment through one of the massive tower doors.

Drei was amused by my bewilderment. “No, we live in the South East Tower. This is the North Tower, one of the ones kept for the Drashon and his all too large family. But we can go into some of the rooms to look around.”

“He won’t mind?” I squeaked, imagining guards tossing us into dungeons for entering the Drashon’s domain uninvited.

“They’re public rooms, anyone can go in, unless the Drashon wants them for something. Come on.”

He took my hand, smiling at the little burst of magic, and led me up the stone steps to the entrance. The great wood and metal doors were closed, but a human-sized door stood open and we passed through into an entrance hall. I would have been overwhelmed by the size of it, but it was an exact match for the one in our own tower. I supposed they were all built to the same pattern.

An obsequious servant showed us through a series of antechambers into a long rectangular hall with high windows down one side. The opposite wall was covered with tapestries and paintings, and marble plinths arranged in lines displayed various items – a sword, metal cauldron of some sort, some rocks, a full-sized marble statue of a man on a horse, arrayed for battle and frozen in the act of spearing something – a barbarian, perhaps, missing from the ensemble. A history lesson, I realised.

The servant left us, and we walked slowly down the room, and then into another, up some stairs into a third and then a fourth room – the same types of displays, different eras of history – and Drei pointed out the most interesting objects, letting me read out the description attached to each one, and then correcting it. As we walked, we gradually passed further back in time. The era of the Drashon first, then the time of the One King, and then the Three Princes who first founded Bennamore somewhat to the north. Before that the land was the home of barbarians and savages, no better than animals. That was the beginning of history, as far as I knew.

But we had not exhausted the final room. “ 
‘The Catastrophe and the Changing of the World’,
 ” I read. “What catastrophe? And how could the world change?”

Drei spun round, looking at me quizzically. “Are you joking? Oh, you’re not! You really are the most uneducated child. Did your tutors teach you nothing?”

“I had the best education a village teaching room could provide,” I said defensively. I was beginning to realise just how limited a teacher my mother had been.

“I’ll get you some books,” he said. “You really must learn. The Catastrophe was a long time ago, and to be honest no one truly knows what happened, or even if anything happened at all. Maybe it’s all myth. But the story is that there was some disaster which was only narrowly averted.”

“And how did it change the world?”

He was silent for a long time. “Actually, I don’t know the answer to that. But perhaps when we get into the Imperial Library, we’ll find out. They do say that it predates the Catastrophe.”

“It must be pretty old, then.”

He laughed very hard at that. “Old. Yes, you could say that. It is a bit old.” More laughter. His mood shifted abruptly. “Come on, I’m hungry. Let’s go and eat.”

We ate noon board at a crowded board house, hot and pungent, near one of the Keep’s eight gates. After that, he took me out into the town to buy clothes. There were shops and tailors enough within the walls of the Keep, but when I asked why we didn’t buy there, his face darkened. “They overcharge, and they’ll treat us like scum.”

“But you’re Bai-Kellonor!”

“I am
one
Bai-Kellonor from
one
of the Kell-Durshalons. A very small fish in this pool, but I will
not
be treated as if I’m nobody, certainly not by tailors and shopkeepers!”

As we passed under the archway with its metal gates standing open, he suddenly pulled me to one side. “Here! Touch it, tell me what you think.”

He took my hand and placed it flat on the red stone of the wall beside one of the massive hinges. At once I was aware of it, some trace of magic. I wasn’t drawn to it, as I was to the pillar of energy in the renewals room. It wasn’t even the glowing hint of power in an enhanced quill. It was a more passive form of energy, sleeping perhaps, waiting for something to waken it.

Drei was practically bouncing with excitement. “You can feel it, can’t you? It’s spelled, of course. If it gets damaged – if any part of the Keep is damaged – it will repair itself. Then there’s the hot water, it just appears in the water pipes, no one knows how.”

“No smoke! That’s why there’s no smoke here. I thought there was something odd about it.”

“Yes, no need to burn wood. The hot water is pumped all over the town, and keeps everyone warm.”

“And clean, I daresay.” I thought of the hours I’d spent in the scribery laundry shifting wood by the cart-load to keep the cauldrons boiling. How much easier with hot water always available. “So the whole Keep is spelled? That must keep the mages busy.”

He laughed. “This building predates any of our feeble mages.”

The town of Kingswell, or the part of it I saw that sun, was a clean, respectable place, with wide paved streets, stone buildings several storeys tall and a bustle of well-dressed residents in well-made, colourful clothes.

We didn’t go far from the Keep, just a little way down the street leading away from the gate, then a short distance along a side road to the premises of a prosperous looking tailor. She was expecting us, and had a table in a private room already laid out with an array of exquisite silks for my azai, and some soft velvets for what Drei described as informal wear, although to me they seemed too sumptuous for that.

I was expertly measured and, after much discussion of fashions and styles between Drei and the tailor, orders given for a number of outfits. I took no part in this. Drei seemed to know exactly what he wanted me to wear, and talked knowledgeably about the fabrics, the cut required and even such matters as undergarments. The tailor and her staff were suitably deferential, and Drei seemed to mellow in the respectful attention. I was glad to escape much notice.

The second shop we visited was very different. Several twists and turns brought us to a market square, hot and noisy, populated by what I took to be respectable merchants and craftsfolk and the like, dressed in simpler versions of some of the fashions I’d seen on the main street. The wooden stalls sold a variety of small items, and Drei purchased soft felt hats for each of us, and the sort of plain wool scarves worn by almost every one I could see.

“What are these for?” I whispered, as the stall-holder was wrapping the items. “We already have plenty of scarves.”

“Disguise.” He grinned mischievously. “You’ll see.”

We walked back to the Keep by a different route. I had our parcels from the market under one arm, and Drei was holding my other hand. A turn brought us to a wide square fringed with imposingly colonnaded buildings, and the open space gave us an unrestricted view of the Keep to our right, and ahead of us Candle Mountain and the golden splendour that was the Imperial City. It nestled between two craggy arms of the mountain, so that it was protected on three sides. The fourth side facing us was a curving wall rising higher than the Keep, without a single window or door to be seen.

And it glowed. I’d heard of the effect, but I’d always assumed it was just a trick of the light, or a quirk of the rock it was built from, but no, it really glowed.

Even though we were some distance away, I could feel the power emanating from it. I was astonished I hadn’t noticed it earlier.

“The Imperial City is a very strange place,” Drei said when I told him. “They call it the Shining Wall, you know. No doors, and impossible to climb. You can’t even rest a ladder against it. I’m not sure it was built by human hands.”

“Then who...?”

“Magic, what else?” His eyes gleamed.

~~~~~

For evening board, Drei took me to a common room within our own tower.

“Our own Durshalona lives here for part of the year,” he told me, looking around eagerly, “and a couple of my father’s cousins are permanently posted here as his representatives, so we’ll see a few people we know.”

“No one
I
know,” I muttered, but he didn’t hear. That night we didn’t see anyone he knew, either.

After we’d eaten, he whisked me back to our apartment, and selected some clothes from my box – a well-worn tunic and trousers, the cloak I’d had since I was twelve and the new hat and scarf from the market. “Here – put these on. We are going to disguise ourselves as servants.”

Drei’s version of servant attire was far more stylish and unpatched than mine, but we looked suitably anonymous. Once we had left the tower and were mingling with the crowds thronging the walkways, we blended in rather well with the servants and junior administrators and off-duty guards enjoying the evening. The Keep’s shops were closed, but the board houses were doing good business and plenty of taprooms were open. Drei ambled about for a while, occasionally peering through a doorway, before selecting a taproom that was quite full but not yet rowdy. We went in, found seats against one wall and ordered ale.

I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of asking what he was up to. Maybe he just liked pretending to be ordinary, or perhaps his love of gossip drove him to sit in common taprooms, who knows. He would tell me what it was about in his own good time. Or not, as he chose. I’d long accepted the eccentricities of the nobility, and Drei was more eccentric than most.

I had to admit that the disguise was very effective. We attracted no attention whatsoever. Drei had left off his rings, and the hat and scarf covered our earrings, so there was no indication of our rank. I no longer wore my scribe’s necklace – there was little point, now that my precious gold chains had been replaced with plain silver. Drei’s dark hair was hidden, too, and in the shadows he looked far less exotic than usual.

He sipped his ale, then set the tankard back on the table. “Now,” he said quietly, “tell me every time you see the blue light.”

Ah, so that was it. For an hour or more, I reported every occurrence I saw, together with the degree of blueness, in a whisper that wouldn’t attract any notice from the other patrons, and we tried to work out what it might signify. Just once, Drei saw it too, a particularly spectacular vivid blue that almost hurt my eyes. He was quite excited to find he had something of the same capability, and insisted on holding my hand, which served to enhance it a little, so that he could see the blue flare more often. But despite our efforts, we were no nearer working out the significance of it, if any.