The Sleeping Life (Eferum Book 2) (34 page)

They moved, repeated the exercise with all the same knotted-stomach tension, and then circled back to the entrance.

"Now we get to the guesswork and luck?" Kendall said, as Lieutenant Meniar flipped the slate and read over, for the half-thousandth time, the apparently tricky Sigillic Rennyn had come up with to get through the shield.

"I should think the Sigillic will work," Rennyn said.

"I wasn't talking about getting
in
. What do we do once we're in, when something goes wrong?"

"Well, don't sit in one place for an extended period of time, for a start. But that's why I've written the shield Sigillic on the reverse of each slate—any mage should be able to cast it, including you, Kendall, should it be necessary to run."

Kendall stared at Rennyn, then let her face show exactly what she thought of that. But there was no use pointing out that it might have helped if Kendall had even once been allowed to practice casting Sigillics before they stepped on the ant's nest.

"I agree that it's best to investigate the heart of the garden before working on freeing the mages," Rennyn was saying. "I've too many guesses on what we might find there to suggest an ideal approach."

"We will avoid conflict if we can," Darian Faille said. "But at this stage I would recommend responding to a direct attack decisively. We will attempt to take attackers alive, however."

Wondering if Captain Faille would try to fight while holding Rennyn, Kendall let herself be shuffled into a Sentene defensive formation, with Darian Faille and Sukata taking lead, and Tesin in the rear to catch any attackers coming up behind them. Unable to think of anything more useful, Kendall picked up a rock to throw if they did get to fighting.

She listened to the way the sound of the shield changed as Lieutenant Meniar cast, and made sure to step forward with everyone else when he was done, since the longer he held open the shield, the more tired he'd get. Her shoes crunched over something, and Kendall looked down to see glass, and had to push away a vision of Sukata, shattered into pieces and trampled upon. Even the first Kellian had been nothing like these bug-caterpillar-things. So far as Kendall could make out, once the Black Queen wasn't around to give them commands, the first Kellian had been a lot like babies—deadly, six-foot, clawed babies—who just needed some time to start wanting more than to be told what to do next.

They walked down the entry ramp and then paused, listening. The play of magic was distracting, making it harder to focus on ordinary noise, and the whole place felt heavy and a bit wet. A lot warmer than it had been outside the shield, too. It smelt like a hothouse.

"An experiment first, please," the Imperial Smugness said, and pressed his hand against a relatively clear spot on the nearest wall. "And you as well, Lieutenant, and perhaps Sukata and young Tesin."

No surprise that the ivy didn't even seem to notice Tesin, while almost immediately reaching out tiny little white threads toward Lieutenant Meniar and Sukata. Kendall stared hardest at the last hand, Samarin's, and saw that the ivy did react to him, but only after a much longer pause.

"You might want to mind your ankles," Rennyn said.

Kendall looked down and saw that the little filaments were reaching toward her feet. In one mutual shudder, everyone moved, even those who didn't have any mage ability. Even Captain Faille. It was like the place was trying to eat them.

"Let's not linger," Samarin said. "Direct to the centre."

'Direct' didn't mean all that fast, and Kendall's headache started back up with the thrum, thrum, thrum of the place. Corridor, fountain courtyard, corridor. The 'garden' wasn't really all that big, and with the glass bugs shut away like the mages, there wasn't anything but ivy and old stone. As they slowed near the open central space, everything felt like it was pressing down.

The last time Kendall had felt like this, it had been when the Black Queen had succeeded in her Grand Summoning, and a whole mountain of power had squashed down into the one place. This wasn't even a tenth so bad, but it was the strongest casting Kendall had felt since that time.

"Not an attack," Captain Faille said.

"Around what I'd expect of twenty or thirty strong mages in a joined casting," Rennyn said, sounding more interested than anything else. "I'm still not clear on the intent, though, yes, definitely not an attack. The focal point is directly ahead. Is that…?"

"Statue, not person," Darian Faille said briefly.

Another step or two made this less cryptic. In the middle of the next courtyard was a statue instead of a fountain. It wasn't nearly as worn as the ones out by the lake, though it seemed a similar enough shape. A tall woman with long braided hair, wearing a robe. She held her hands out before her, cupped together, as if praying to the Dawnbringer.

And nothing much else. A lot less ivy. The walls were almost clear of it, revealing swirling patterns etched in the stone, but there were roots growing neatly in channels leading directly to the base of the statue.

Rennyn murmured something to Captain Faille, and he took her up close to one of the walls.

"I shall be most impressed if you're able to read proto-Efanian, Duchess Surclere," the Imperial Smugness said.

"Unfortunately not," Rennyn replied. "But this, I think, is Nameen's Walk. It is strong enough, and has been used often enough recently, for me to make out the shape of the casting.

"What in the Hells is proto-Efanian?" Kendall asked.

"The name given to the casting language used by the Elder Mages," Sukata said, her whispery voice making clear she was impressed. "No-one knows how to read its written form."

"I could reconstruct this, I think," Rennyn added, sounding pleased. "Well, with a lot more strength I could." She paused. "I think my focus is somewhere in this room. I can feel it."

The Imperial Smugness fished his mask out from its big inner pocket, and put it on before surveying the room again. If he really couldn't cast, maybe the mask was the reason he seemed able to hear as well as a Kellian. Whatever the case, Kendall would still bet he was a liar.

He glanced her way, so she glared at him, then concentrated on finding Rennyn's focus. Not on a chain around the statue's neck, which would have been too convenient—and worrying. There were precious few places to put things in the open courtyard, unless there was a hidden cache beneath the paving stones.

They all looked a little ridiculous, pacing about while still acting like they expected the jaws of some trap to swing shut at any moment. It was the Pest, entirely out of place in his grubby bedclothes, who stooped and plucked a chain out from among the roots that filled the channels leading to the statue. From the chain, in a little wire holder, was a clear stone almost the size of a hen's egg.

"Belonging to one of the other mages?" Rennyn said. "Can this casting actually be able to make use of our focuses?"

While Darian Faille stood guard, and Rennyn continued to study the decorated walls, everyone else scrabbled about pulling focus after focus from among the roots. The first was joined by another, and another, and became a pile. Kendall shrugged off her jacket and they used it as a makeshift bag.

"How many mages did you say were missing?" Lieutenant Meniar asked, adding a medium-sized focus to the others.

"From Kole, twenty-two. Two verified as gone from Verisia. Another from Dunnesan, and that possible case from Fel Sparo. The numbers are rather complicated by false reports, the increasing panic, and those whose location is simply unknown. But these extras may be from the northern kingdoms—they rarely share information with Kole, particularly since the loss of certain of their mages would leave critical holes in regional defences."

"Or they could have been here a real long time," Kendall pointed out. "It's not like this place is new-built."

She had paused in her poking her way along one of the channels, and flinched when she discovered a little root-hair had burrowed into the back of her hand. She picked the thing out, grimacing at the red dot left behind, but then forced herself to keep working. Next time she started thinking Rennyn was soft, she'd have to remember that she'd actually climbed back into the vines and let them stick her all over. Kendall wasn't sure she'd have been able to do the same.

Kendall's persistence was rewarded by another focus. She slid it out, drew her breath for a pleased exclamation, and then paused. Standing, she trotted over to where Captain Faille was patiently holding Rennyn by yet another wall, and held out not one but two smoky-dark focuses bound to the same leather cord.

Rennyn's eyebrows lifted. "It seems my Wicked Uncle approves of my focus-summoning methods," she said, taking the cord. "And now we have a neat reversal of circumstances."

"Is he likely to come looking for it?" Lieutenant Meniar asked. He helped Rennyn work her focus free of the binding, and then pocketed the smaller focus and cord.

"He has invested far less time into that than I had in mine," Rennyn said, gripping her own focus tightly for a moment before slipping it into the little pocket on the front of her shirt. "Everything else being equal, he's likely to simply start again."

Rennyn had gone into the Eferum nearly three hundred times to summon her focus—and at the moment wasn't likely to survive a single transition. Getting that little black stone back was probably worth the entire trip.

"Now that you have your focus back, can we use it to remove the miscasting from you?" Kendall asked.

"It doesn't quite fit, symbolically," Rennyn said, with a faint sigh. "If I had the false focus that caused the miscasting...but that was crushed in the aftermath of the Grand Summoning. This, at least, may mean a little less fainting when casting. Unless of course it leads me to be over-ambitious."

Rennyn looked up at the sky then, and they all copied her. Clear blue, but the shadows cast by the walls marked the progress of the afternoon.

"There's a Sigillic divination I want to try," Rennyn said, after a moment. "While Fallon and Kendall mark it out for me, Lieutenant Meniar, perhaps you and the Dezart can make an examination of one of the trapped mages?"

Her voice sounded odd. Lieutenant Meniar frowned, then put a hand on Rennyn's forehead. She shook him off impatiently.

"No fever that I can tell. But yes, my throat is a trifle sore. Which, at this juncture, is simply another reason not to delay."

Along with being straightforward disaster. In the best of conditions Lieutenant Meniar would be able to nurse Rennyn through a cold, but stuck out in the middle of nowhere trying to rescue a whole bunch of other people, and it would be just the thing to push Rennyn onto the downward spiral of illness and exhaustion that they'd been at such pains to avoid.

No-one argued the point. After the briefest discussion Lieutenant Meniar, Samarin, Sukata and Darian Faille went off to look at the nearest flowering mage, while Rennyn dictated an endless Sigillic which became a double ring of squiggles around the statue. Tesin continued to search out focuses, and Captain Faille succeeded in being stonier than the statue at the centre of it all.

They'd reached the point of making tiny corrections to individual sigils by the time the second group returned—and Rennyn's voice had definitely gone croaky. Kendall could have kicked herself for not thinking to bring along something to drink.

"Any hope?" Rennyn asked, as Samarin paused to look over their chalk work.

He was still wearing the mask, so Kendall couldn't see his face, but his voice was crisp and businesslike.

"Two options seem viable. The first will take at minimum two casters—one to remove the growth into the lungs, and the other to cauld the holes left behind. And then immediate, more substantive repair work would need to be carried out. With the resources at hand, this approach would allow us to get one or even two down by nightfall. If we chose healer-mages—and they survived and recovered with sufficient speed—they could in turn assist us tomorrow. In…between five to eight days we could have them all down, though given the conditions of operation, we're likely to have a series of secondary issues. Infection. Blood clots. Collapsed lungs if the caulding doesn't hold."

"I do hope you're leading with the less desirable approach."

Samarin went on as if Rennyn hadn't spoken. "The second option will greatly depend on what this vine is doing, and whether we are free to interfere with it. A Symbolic casting—with all the consequent risks of imprecise symbolism—could be used. Instead of removing the mages individually and repairing the damage, we could treat the separation as a natural process and…ripen them, if you will."

It wasn't often that Herself looked startled by magic, but she gaped a little at that.

"I'd have to cast it," Lieutenant Meniar said, with the gloomiest expression Kendall had ever seen him wear as he looked down at a slate full of tiny Sigillic writing. "The survival chances of pulling these spikes out of them and patching the holes is not high. The…the possible results of option two scarcely bear thinking about, and it will require a very thorough knowledge of anatomy to manage."

"Anatomy or botany?" Rennyn said, and then offered an apologetic little grimace at Lieutenant Meniar's pained response. "Well, we can't make any decisions until we know more about the vine itself, and what all this power is being drawn off to do." She looked around at them, hesitated, then said: "And now we reach the point where we start hitting casting limits. I think this one is best left to you, Sukata. It's not so power-hungry I think it will put you at risk, and I've structured it to allow you to cut it off at any time, but it will leave you very tired. Please don't maintain it to the point of collapse."

Sukata, typically, went all very straight and upright, and keen to show that she would be responsible and reliable. Everyone else drew back to the archway they'd entered through, and watched her try.

The circle of sigils was so large Sukata had to walk around it—twice—to complete the casting, her attention never wavering from the chalk figures as they began to glow from the power she pushed into them. She staggered back a couple of steps as the thing completed and it began to draw on her in earnest. Kendall watched her worriedly, and then almost managed to forget her altogether as a bloom of green lifted from the circle like a curtain rising on a stage.