The Innocent Mage (53 page)

So Barl’s magic sang for him, and him alone.

Unhurried, maintaining his air of scholarly distraction, he eased himself into the small, book-lined space and conjured glimfire to banish the shadows. The light danced along the spines of leather-bound journals pressed cover to cover in the awkward alcove. He trailed his fingers along them and felt the magic sizzle beneath his skin.

Somewhere in here … somewhere …

Finding the book was like kissing a lightning bolt. He bit his lip to blood to stop from crying out.

It was a slender volume. Cloth-bound, and tucked I between the pages of some obscure text on falconry. I Trembling, he freed it from captivity and opened the cover. I k diary. Handwritten, the ink faded but legible, a collection I of notes, a recitation of deeds accomplished, and yes! oh I yes! a listing of incantations, pages of them, and they were I completely new, had never been heard of before in this I kingdom. And all in a handwriting he knew so well, from I the WeatherWorking notes and strictures she’d left behind.

This was Barl’s diary. These were her secrets. This was I what had called to him.

He could have moaned his excitement out loud.

Beyond the alcove, the prince was saying,’— a lifetime’s I work, Father. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.’

[ believe I am familiar with the feeling, boy.

‘It’s certainly a miraculous collection of books, Gar,’ Borne agreed. ‘I must say, given the wide range of subject matter and its relative mundanity, I’m at something of a loss to understand why Barl and her followers made such efforts to take this collection with them when they fled.’

‘Oh, but Father!’ the prince said. ‘Don’t you see? They were trying to preserve an entire civilisation. To encapsulate untold centuries of lore and learning in a single haphazard collection of books. It’s an extraordinary ambition. When I think of them struggling to decide what to take and what must stay behind … it breaks my heart.’

Borne laughed. ‘Spoken like a true historian. And you’re right, too, about how much work it will take to properly catalogue and translate what’s here. It must be done with care, and reverence, and most importantly with an eye to the potential dangers such knowledge carries with it. It’s not a task to be awarded lightly.’

‘No,’ the prince said, his voice sober. ‘You’re right, of course.’

‘So when can you begin?’ his father added.

‘Sir?’

‘Yes, Royal Curator? That is, if you’d like to be.’

As the prince stammered his delight, his surprise, his protestations of faithful duty, and the queen laughed, and the king laughed too, which was good to hear, and Fane muttered sarcasms under her breath, he held Barl’s diary in his trembling hands and gave thanks.

‘Durm!’ the king called, and stood behind him. ‘The afternoon fades and WeatherWorking time draws near. We should go.’

Half turning his head, keeping the diary hidden close against his chest, Durm said, ‘By all means, Majesty, you go. I am happy to stay working unaccompanied.’

T know,’ Borne said affectionately. ‘Given the chance you’d work yourself to a collapse searching for anything remotely magical. I’d rather you didn’t. Aside from the deleterious effect on your health, I’d prefer we didn’t draw any more attention to this place than is absolutely necessary. Besides, there’s always tomorrow.’

Argument, however mild, was too dangerous. ‘That’s true,’ he agreed.

‘We’ll leave the place warded. It’ll be safe enough. And tomorrow we’ll finish what we’ve begun, then decide what next to do.’ With a glance that encompassed them all, Borne added, ‘Apart from ourselves, the only person who knows of this place is the servant who discovered the breach in the courtyard. When she told me what she’d found I commanded her to hold her tongue. Tonight I shall fuddle her to make sure she loses all recollection of her little adventure. This library must remain a secret. Not a word is to be said to anybody. Is that understood?’

The others nodded and murmured obedience. ‘As you say, Majesty,’ Durm agreed again, and slipped Barl’s diary inside his robe where it could lie against his ribs, hidden and protected. He loved Borne like a brother but that didn’t . blind him to the sober truth: the king could not be trusted with this discovery. Not tonight. Perhaps not ever. The thought pained him … but never before in his life had pain stood in the way of duty. Nor would it now.

‘Durm?’ said Fane as she stood back to allow him and ker parents to lead the way out of the library. ‘Is everything ill right?’

He smiled at her, Barl’s diary a warm and promising weight against his skin. ‘Foolish girl,’ he said, and shook his head indulgently. ‘Of course it is.’

Much later that night, after dinner, having eased Borne down from his WeatherWorking jitters and wrapped him safe in a robe before a roaring fire, with the rest of the palace retired to bed and only a handful of servants scurrying like mice about the corridors, Durm locked himself into his private study and opened Barl’s diary.

The book-lined room was hushed. A modest fire crackled in the hearth, scenting the warm air with the spicy freshness of pine. Candles scattered shadows. He’d left one window uncurtained; the glow of Barl’s Wall splashed prismed gold light on the carpet as it filtered through Borne’s soft rain and the thin glass panes.

Comfortable in robe and slippers, a tankard of mulled wine by his side and his belly groaning pleasurably with food, he crossed his ankles on a hassock, propped his elbows on the arms of his chair and held the book as tenderly as he would a lover, had there ever been one.

‘Speak to me, brave lady,’ he breathed, and began to read.

Hours later, he stirred. The candles were burned down almost to their sockets. The fire had dwindled to ash and cinders. His half-drunk wine sat cold in the tankard, and the remnants of Borne’s rain barely trickled down the windowpanes.

‘Barl save us,’ he said aloud; the sound of his voice was astartlement.

The contents of the diary were … unspeakable. Borne had been right about one thing: were it to fall into the wrong hands the potential for catastrophe was limitless. Appalling. All their lost powers, in one slim, innocent-seeming volume. Spells of war. Spells of enslavement. Incantations to sear the guarded truth from a captive’s mind. Enchantments to suck a soul from its body and trap it for all time in crystal. Summonings to bring forth beasts the like of which he’d never imagined could exist as flesh and blood: dragons, horslirs, trolls, werehags. Incantations of death and destruction that would see Lur laid waste within hours. She had even recorded the most terrible words of all, the words of UnMaking, designed to unknit a man’s flesh from bone and undo his place in the world as though he had never been. A desperate spell that would undo the speaker, as well as his victim. Until this moment that incantation had been mere myth. Passed down in secret whispers from Master Magician to Master Magician and never spoken of beneath an open sky. What breed of magician could labour to bring forth such horrors? What man could bend his gifts to birth such monstrosities? Would want to?

Morg.

Praise Barl he was dead then, his like never to be seen again.

The diary wasn’t all horror, though. Threaded through the incantations of insanity were more useful applications of magic. Ways of translocating animate matter. Methods of transmuting base metals to gold. Tricks of transcendence. Devices of enhancement.

And a way to see beyond the Wall.

In the Old Tongue, Barl had written:

So it falls to me, as I knew it would, to keep this place safe for all time. I have made a beginning, with the banishment of all dark and greedy magics from my people’s hearts and minds, but that is not enough. There is still Morgan. His shadow has not touched us yet but I fear it will come, sooner rather than later, and only I can prevent it. There is a way. I believe the natural harmonies in this land, combined with our more militant magics, can be fused into a barrier that will never be breached, so long as it is nurtured most diligently and forevermore. Using some new magics that I have devised I will anchor this Wall in the mountains and a reef around the coastline. Sink its strength into the bowels of the world and feed it daily with the weather magic I will create. I will make this place a paradise, so that our children need cry out in fearful dreams no more.

Rereading the hastily scrawled entry Durm felt unexpected tears prick his eyes. The heart of her. The passion, and the courage. The mastery. She was the last of the great magicians, the last to create new magic out of old. For six centuries the Master Magicians of Lur had followed the strictest guidelines, first and most sacred of which being No new magic. It was too dangerous. New magic, untried and untested, might disturb the precarious balance between the Weather and the Wall. Might bring it down and so unleash chaos. In the early days, according to judicial records, certain magicians had thought the rule did not apply to them.

Their deaths had been slow and spectacular and were recited into memory and repeated in a litany unto this very day by the new generation of Doranen magicians in their schoolrooms.

No new magic.

He agreed with the rule, of course he did. But sometimes ike dreamed, he wondered, of what freedom would be like. I To experiment. To risk. To create that which had never I before existed. To be another Barl. But for that he would I need to stand on soil that was not of Lur.

Mouth dry, heart tolling like the Great Bell on Barlsday, j lie opened the diary again and continued to read what she id written.

But while a locked room is safe, without a key it is also a trap. So I have fashioned one and in time I will use it to open a window in the Wall, that I may see what has become of the world beyond. And if it be safe, then we will go home. I swear it, I swear it on my life. One day we will all go home.

‘Poor Lady!’ he cried to the glowing barrier beyond his window. ‘You didn’t know the making of your Wall would you!’

Home. Somewhere out there, beyond the mountains, lay home, Dorana, the birthplace of their race. Their true I cradle. Somewhere beyond the mountains there was a land where magic flourished, where incantation was an artform and not a survival mechanism or a toy, where great men could labour their lives in its mysteries, untrammelled by rules and dire punishments in the breaking of them.

And in his hands, his trembling hands, he held a way to find it.

Six centuries ago Morgan, become Morg, had plunged his people into bloody war. He was dead now, dust and ashes on the wind. A frightful phantom, a legacy well remembered, a lesson never to be unlearned. But he was dead. And the living cried out to be set free.

Hesitantly he turned to the next page of the diary, and looked at the sigils and syllables of the incantation that would allow him the first glimpse beyond the Wall in more than six centuries.

If I tell Borne of this, he will say no. He will burn this book for fear of what might be. The crown has clipped his wings. For him the sky is forever out of reach.

For him. But not for me.

And when it is done and we stand atop the mountains and survey the world made new, he will know I did the right thing, and thank me.

With the spell committed to memory Durm stood in the middle of his study. Prepared to start the incantation — and hesitated.

What he was about to do was extremely dangerous, even for a magician of his talent and experience. There was a chance … a small, slim, unlikely chance … that something might go wrong. And if it did, and his study’s sanctum was invaded by strangers, or even friends, they would discover Barl’s diary.

Which would be a disaster, for many reasons.

His study was full of books. He selected one remarkable for its age and loosened, misshapen leather binding, summoned a narrow-bladed dagger from its drawer and carefully unpicked the back cover’s stitching. Slid Barl’s slender diary between leather and backing, conjured a needle and painstakingly stitched it whole again.

There. Should worse come to worst, nobody would suspect the book had been tampered with. No magical residue would adhere, and there was no sign of fresh stitching. Barl’s secret diary would remain a secret.

Misgivings allayed, he put the book back on its shelf and returned to the business of making history.

Raising his left hand, he traced the first sigil in the warm air. Trailing fire, burning with promise, it hung before his face, waiting. And so, turning half a pace to the left, the second sigil. Another half-pace, and then the third. All with the left hand. With the right, he traced three more, with a half-pace turn between each so that at the end he stood within a wheel of burning sigils, each and every one foreign and thrilling to his eye. Now for the next step.

‘Elil’toral’

In the marrow of his bones and the running of his blood, magic stirred. The sigils bloomed with fresh fire and he felt his skin scorch with the heat.

And the next step.

‘Nen’nonen ra’

The sigils quivered. Then, incredibly, began to drift counterclockwise, pirouetting midair like dancers freed from bondage. Slowly at first, then faster, and faster still, until their single shapes were lost and all were a unified burning blur.

And the last. ‘Ma’mun’maht’

The spinning wheel of fire snapped in two. Unfurled. Plunged into his chest and transformed him into a living pillar of molten magic. Mouth wide and soundlessly screaming, eyes staring, he glared transfixed at his reflection in the window overlooking the Wall. His bones were melting, his blood boiled, it was pleasure and pain and fear and wonder and power the likes of which he’d never dreamed, never dreamed …

And then he was streaming out of his body, leaving it behind, an abandoned ramshackle of excess flesh. Riding the arrow of fire he plunged through the windowpane, flew over the City, through the gently dwindling rain, above the fields beyond and the Black Woods at the foot of Barl’s Mountains … and through the impenetrable Wall as though it were nothing but mist.

It was dark beyond the mountains. A darkness not just of night but of something else as well. Something unseen, yet palpable to his questing mind as it flew over tangled forests and heath-land. In the small distance, lights. Dim. Sallow. But lights, all the same.