The Fire Mages (27 page)

If he had run towards me, I might have got to him in time, but he didn’t. He took no more than five steps before one of the birds caught him and he was lifted, wailing and thrashing, into the sky. Then he was gone.

The other mages stood, rigid with fear, but the birds were satisfied. They flapped once, twice, then lifted up and away and out of sight.

Nobody moved. Krayfon took a long shuddering breath. Then he lifted his vessel a little higher, raised one hand with a finger pointing at me. “Sleep!” he yelled.

I have to give him credit for trying. Any normal person would have melted into a puddle of incoherence after an experience like that, but he was smart enough to try something snappy while I was distracted. It rolled off me, of course.

“Sorry, but you’ll have to do better than that. Would you like to try something else?”

He glared at me, but he kept his composure. “Well, entertaining as this is, young lady, I think we will continue this discussion another time.”

“As you please. Come any time, I have no other engagements.”

He almost smiled that time. “We will succeed, you know.” He tried to project confidence but it wasn’t very convincing.

I laughed. “That remains to be seen, Lord Mage.”

~~~~~

“They’re just going to keep coming back, aren’t they?” Cal said, as we lay in bed that night.

“Yes. The Drashon can’t let me get away with it.”

“It’s going to be a real nuisance. Especially now they know how to deal with the birds.”

“An inconvenience. But I’ll know where they are, so we can avoid them if we want to. And they don’t seem able to do anything against me.”

“They were badly prepared this time, but they’ll devise more sophisticated spells. Krayfon’s very smart. And sooner or later, they’ll catch us asleep or something, or hit on a spell that works. A death spell, perhaps.”

“We can get more sophisticated, too. But don’t you think it’s odd? They said nothing to you at all. Didn’t even seem very surprised to see you.”

“They don’t really know me. I met Krayfon briefly when I first arrived, but the rest – I didn’t have much to do with them. I was left to the lowest ranked mages. I suppose they’d guessed I was here with you. You were my drusse once, after all. But don’t change the subject. We have to find a way to stop this.”

“I know, but for that we’ll have to go to the top.”

“Krayfon?”

“Higher than that. The Drashon. He’s the only one who can call a halt.”

“And how are you going to persuade him to do that?”

“We’ll have to talk to him.”

“Oh, so you’re going to walk out of here, stroll past his guards and demand an audience, is that the plan?”

I didn’t have a plan, as it happened, but one began to formulate in my mind as we talked. “No, I think he’ll have to come to me.”

“Even better. ‘Most Powerful, do please come for afternoon cakes tomorrow, dress informal, respectfully Kyra.’ ”

“Oh – d’you think that would work? I wish I knew how to ask the servants for more interesting cakes – I’m sure the Drashon won’t like those ones with seeds that weasel their way between your teeth.”

“Idiot,” he said, nibbling my ear. “You don’t have a plan at all, do you?”

But I did.

When I explained my plan to Cal he was horrified.

“Kyra, you’re insane! Here you are, accused of improper use of magic and facing execution, and your solution is to
spell
the Drashon?”

“How else am I going to get to talk to him, face to face, without all the protocol of hearings and law scribes and mages and guards hanging about waiting to whisk me off to the dungeons?”

“Write to him. I can put together a convincing case. I’m a law scribe, after all. People like you weren’t always executed, you know. It’s not your fault. You shouldn’t be killed just because you have magic in you. It’s not as if you’ve ever hurt anyone.”

I was silent, thinking of Deyria, sterile because of me. The Asha-Kellon was dead because of me. Then there was poor Den – I hadn’t heard if he was all right after hitting his head when he fell. And Marras and the guards and now the mage – all turned into mindless servants because of me. Even though I hadn’t intended any of it, I’d left a trail of havoc behind me, just like Drei and his fires. I couldn’t explain that in a letter.

Cal saw my face, and his voice softened. “It’s not your fault that things have happened around you. If they’d just leave you alone...”

“But it’s such a waste! I can do so much, I can help people, I can heal much more easily than trained mages can.” I remembered the sick baby at Ardamurkan; I’d written a spellpage that shouldn’t have worked, but it did. “I want to be useful,” I said quietly.

“Then ask him to allow you to be trained,” Cal said.

First I had to bring him into the city, and the spells to do that were horrendously complicated. Cal hovered over me as I scribed, cracking his knuckles and muttering, “But you can’t
do
that!” until he drove me half demented. I liked Cal a lot better than I used to but still his moods irritated me beyond endurance.

In the end I got rid of him by setting him to watch the servants, to see if he could find out where they all went to. He didn’t have much success; he followed them to doors that led to the lower levels but he couldn’t open them, and even if he tried to scuttle through just behind one of the servants, there was some kind of magical barrier against him. Probably he could have gone through without his belt or the stone vessel, but then without magic he might have become a servant again himself, so he never tried it.

While he was distracted, I devised my spellpages. It took me three suns to create them, but in the end I was pleased with my efforts.

Cal read them over in silence, several times. “This is clever, very clever. Mind you, I don’t understand all of it. What is this variance here?”

“I’m not sure exactly. I was thinking that the Drashon might get cold, might need a wrap or something, and that hook appeared on the paper. My quill seemed to know what to do. So I think it’s a dressing warmly variance.”

“You’re inventing variances now?”

“I don’t think I invented it. I discovered it, perhaps.”

“Hmm. Well, otherwise it all looks fine. So we’re ready, then?”

“There’s just one problem.” I gestured towards the large pile of practice spellpages, half-written or modified or abandoned efforts.

“Oh. At the scribery, they burn them.”

“Which we can’t do, because they might actually work. They’re not properly formed spellpages, who knows what might happen? And I can’t leave them lying around in case the servants get hold of them and toss them into the cooking fire.”

He frowned. “Shit. Can we tear them up?”

“If they all got burned together, the spells might still work.”

“Hmm. Difficult. I wonder...” His face lit up, as he shifted instantly from gloom to delight. “You can put magic into things, can’t you? Like for healing, you transferred energy to me. The spellpages – that must be what you do to make them work. Well, maybe you can draw it out again.”

“That seems too simple.”

Yet that was all it took. I held each practice spellpage in turn and pulled all the magical energy from it. The letters shimmered and vanished, and at the end each paper was blank and unenhanced.

We settled on midnight for burning the spellpages. It was late enough that the Drashon wouldn’t be surrounded by hordes of people – one of his drusse, perhaps, and the night guards, people who would follow his orders implicitly. Since we had to bring him through the sewers, we needed a mage as well, and that was more difficult. Neither of us knew any of them very well, and there was a risk they would be somewhere public at midnight and might arrive with a trail of curious spectators. There was a real possibility that I wouldn’t be able to spell a mage at all. In the end, we had to take a chance. We decided on Krayfon because we felt the Drashon would be safest with him, and he’d already proved himself unflappable in a crisis.

The scribery was the only place we could find a crucible – none of the houses seemed to have one, which was odd. We placed the two spellpages in the crucible, one for the Drashon and one for the mage, and Cal insisted on reciting the summoning and then igniting them with fire from his own fingers. It amused him to be able to do that. Then we went to the library.

It was the first time I’d been there since Drei and I had found the pillar, and Cal had never got round to going at all, so it was a little strange for both of us. The lights were low, the great expanse of room slumbering at that time of night, but as we entered the walls slowly increased their glow. We arranged a table and some chairs in the middle of the open space, and set out the supplies we’d brought – wine, and cakes, and a few little pastries I’d saved from our noon and evening board. It wasn’t much to put before the Drashon, a man whose palate must be jaded with every exotic flavour his expert cooks could devise, but I thought he might be hungry from being dragged from his bed. If I woke in the middle of the night, I always needed something to eat before I could sleep again.

The great stone ball loomed over us, mysterious and impossible to ignore. Cal was fascinated by it just as I was, feeling the deep vibrations of power from within it.

“Can I touch it? It’ll be ages before they get here, I have to see what it feels like. It won’t take long.”

“Later,” I said. “Let’s not get distracted.”

“Where’s the harm? It doesn’t do anything, does it?”

“How can you stand there, feeling the power in it, and say that it doesn’t do anything? We don’t know how it works yet, that’s all, and I don’t want to trigger anything now. Not tonight.”

We stood and waited. We had no way of knowing whether our spellpages had been successful. Perhaps the Drashon slumbered on, unaffected. Perhaps he and the mage had woken, agreed that going to the library was a silly idea, and gone back to bed. Or – more worrying – perhaps they’d set out and got lost, somehow. I couldn’t detect anything in the tunnels below us. The five mages I had just about been conscious of, dimly, on the very edge of awareness, but a single mage and someone with no magic were below my threshold.

So we waited, feverish with nerves, near the top of the stairs leading up from the sewers, trying very hard not to think about the things that could have gone wrong. And eventually we were rewarded. Voices first, a gentle murmuring. Then silence, a long nerve-wracking silence. And then two heads, one after the other.

They were clad in night attire, with thick wraps, but bare feet. I was horrified. The ruler of Bennamore had walked barefoot through the sewers at my command. I should have thought of that.

They were surprised to see us, but they didn’t stop or even slow down, marching in step up the final few stairs and straight past us into the body of the library. There at last they stood still, gazing round them in awe, not in the least afraid or angry or even curious. I’d expected more of a reaction.

We followed them and skirted round so that we were in front of them, making formal bows.

“Good evening, Highness, Lord Mage,” I said. “Will you please sit down? Would you like some wine?”

“Well now, what are you doing here, Kyra?” the Drashon said, beaming at me. “Amazing place, is it not? However, I hardly expected to see
you
when I thought to take a little stroll.”

“I’m here to talk to you, Highness.”

I could see them struggling to reconcile conflicting ideas. They clearly believed that the idea to visit the Imperial Library unaccompanied in the middle of the night was their own, a perfectly sensible and pleasant one. Yet they were also aware that there was something wrong, and they decided it was me. When they registered Cal’s presence, they began to look very confused.

I pulled out a chair. “Will you not sit here, Highness? You must be tired after your walk.”

“Actually, I am. Will you fetch my body servant? Someone? Or send a guard...? I think I... Krayfon, why did we come here?”

“I am not sure, Highness.”

“You’re here because I brought you here,” I said crisply. “To be precise, I scribed spellpages to bring you here. I apologise for that, but I could find no other way to talk to you.”

“You
spelled
us?” Krayfon said in outraged tones. “How? A command summoning, I suppose.”

“No, a conditional waking first, then an incompleteness to create the desire to come here, then a dependent following, with some variances – secrecy and urgency, mainly. And a few conditionals, to ensure you came together and so on.”

“It was a lot more complicated than she makes it sound,” Cal added proudly. “She had some very clever variances. There was a new one, to be sure you wore wraps.”

“But I forgot about shoes,” I said. “I’m so sorry about your feet.”

They stared at me in bewilderment, and at each other, and then at their bare feet, not quite sure what to make of it.

Krayfon was the first to reach a decision. “We should leave, Highness. No good can come of this.”

The Drashon looked appraisingly at me, and then, frowning, at Cal. “Lord Mage, I do not believe I recall your name.”

“I am Cal from Ardamurkan, Highness. I was presented at court, but I daresay you meet a great many people.”

“You came here with some problem for the mages to address, I recall.”

“My vessel, Highness.”

“I remember. And your role here, Lord Mage?”

“To support Kyra. I don’t think it’s right that she should be penalised, perhaps executed, for something that’s part of her nature, a gift from the Gods. Will you not hear her?”

A long pause. We all waited, Krayfon shifting nervously from foot to foot. Then abruptly, the Drashon sat. “Now that we are here we will stay, and hear what Kyra has to say.”

“Highness, I must advise against it. It is for the mages to deal with her, not someone as valuable to the realm as yourself. She is very dangerous.” I almost laughed at that.

“My dear friend,” the Drashon said, eyebrows raised, “if Kyra had wished to harm me, no doubt I would be dead in my bed already.”

“Hardly, Rannassor. She is only a contract scribe, she cannot know any death spells.”

I said nothing, but the Drashon laughed. “I think she knows far more than you suspect, Krayfon. And if she does not, her mage friend certainly does. She has brought us safely through those appalling tunnels, so I hardly think she has any intention of harming us.”

“It is not her intentions that concern me, Highness. With wild mages, there is not the discipline, the training! A half-remembered or misunderstood spell is the very worst – anything might happen.”

“That is exactly why I wish to talk to you,” I said.

The Drashon nodded. “I will hear what you have to say, without commitment. Besides, these cakes look delicious.”

Krayfon sighed. He waved me to a chair, and then stood beside the Drashon, as if to protect him. Cal stood further back, watching us but a little apart.

I told the Drashon everything, starting with my first knowledge of my own power and everything that had happened since, including the full story of my escape from the locked cellar, and about Cal’s disappearance. I even told him that I thought I’d killed the Asha-Kellon. I held nothing back, except the small detail of Cal’s jade belt.

I couldn’t avoid mentioning Drei, because I would have known nothing without him, and would never have been at Kingswell without his involvement. It was a calculated risk, though. If the Drashon decided against me, then Drei would find himself in exactly the same position that I was now in – accused of an offence with a possible penalty of execution. I was fairly sure that the mages wouldn’t be able to bind him any more than me, but he would hate me for disrupting his life. On the other hand, Drei was about to marry the Drashon’s daughter, and surely that would weigh with him?

The Drashon listened impassively, as always. As I talked, he chewed his way through most of the food, and drank some of the wine. Krayfon stood at his shoulder, eating and drinking nothing, although he asked questions from time to time. He exuded disapproval, but gradually he became interested, especially in my sleep spell, and, eyes twinkling, remembered his own comments about the ability of anyone who could have done such a thing.

At last I felt I’d covered everything. The Drashon was inscrutable. What more could I say to convince him? “I know I’ve done some bad things, Highness, but that was never my intention. Lord Mage Krayfon is right, without knowledge and discipline this kind of magic is dangerous. It’s also very powerful, and could be useful to you. Isn’t it better to teach me to do some good rather than execute me and lose my abilities altogether?” I wasn’t used to pleading, but it was difficult not to, under the circumstances.