Wintertide (24 page)

The fact that no one interrupted her wanderings, that doors were not kept locked or rooms cordoned off only attested to the power the Sorcerer exercised over those who resided in the castle. The price one would pay for violating his property far outweighed whatever meager gain the thief might, for a few seconds, grasp in his hands.

There was a chill apparent in the air as she entered the East wing. She remembered the Lord Chamberlain’s words. The Sorcerer hadn’t been at the castle for some time. Evidently, no one kept the hearths burning in anticipation of his return either. Still, Khamsin quickened her steps, urging Nixa onwards in search of the final staircase that would lead to the tower and the room with the golden mage circle.

The cat darted ahead, only to come back with the news that this hallway, too, came to an abrupt end like the two others they had traveled on below. The South wing had five levels and no tower. The access they sought had to be somewhere on the next two floors.

They climbed and they groped through the darkness. No torch lights here cut into the gloom. Rooms, unlocked, were empty of anything resembling a staircase or an irregularly shaped wall signaling that such an addition lay within. Khamsin was aware of books and map charts on walls and tabletops, carved figurines and vases and urns and just about anything else that could have been collected over a three hundred year span. There were musical instruments and costumes such as those worn during a Fool’s Eve Ball. In another room, a collection of weapons: swords, spears and things so foreign she couldn’t even recognize them, except to understand their placement in this particular location designated them as lethal.

The last room she came upon was lavish but its furnishings unfamiliar, save for a few items. It was a games room, like the Palace in Noviiya, with card tables and game boards, wheels of fortune and games of skill. Several decks of cards had been laid out on the tabletops in various patterns, as if the Sorcerer moved from one game to another at whim. She thought of the card game played by Egan and the others that night on the marsh. She wondered whom the Sorcerer played against, and if he ever lost.

Quietly, she pulled the door of the games room back into place and leaned against the wall, puzzled and dejected. Nixa sat on her haunches, her tail swishing, her eyes on her mistress. They found no staircase, not even a hint of one. But there had to be some way.

Of course. The answer was so obvious she almost laughed out loud. Of course there was no staircase. For what would a Sorcerer want with stairs? And what better way to insure he wouldn’t be disturbed during his conjurings than to build the circle room with only one means of entrance or exit. Ciro had said no mortal man had even been there. For no mortal man could dematerialize and materialize at will.

But Raheiran blood ran in her veins. And weeks of preparation with the aging mage in Noviiya had taught her how to use that gift, if nothing else. She swept the cat up into her arms, as she had so many times on the street in front of Ciro’s lodgings and stopped.

There was a slender window at the far end of the hall. Now the first rays of the morning sun slipped through its meager slot. Soon, the rest of the castle would awaken. Already, she surmised, the cooks and kitchen help bustled below. Someone might come to check on the lad, bring word of a hot breakfast awaiting him. If Camron were not to be found…?

Involuntarily, she glanced upwards. She was so close. She knew it, could feel it almost as if the walls around her throbbed. But she needed time, time.

Well, she had locked her door. Perhaps just one quick look.

With an audible sigh, she dropped her shielding and transported herself into the large round room directly over her head.

For all that Ciro had told her, for all that she had seen in her trespassings this very night, nothing prepared her for the opulence that fairly glittered from the walls and floor around her. Khamsin gasped and truly believed, for the moment, that she had fallen into an immense treasure chest.

The room was round and had four tall arched windows, one facing east, one west, one north and one south. A waist-high mantle ringed the wall. On it sat those objects long associated with the manufacture of magic: amulets and charms, tokens and chalices, wands and mortar and pestles. The striking thing about the collection, though, was that all of the objects were cast of the purest gold or platinum, encrusted with jewels and edged with feather-light filigree. Khamsin counted seventy-five chalices before she turned her attention to the center of the room.

The mage circle inlaid into the floor was just as Ciro had described it, though words did it no justice. At each outer rune point was a blue diamond; a smaller circle inside, made of rubies. The signs of the heavens formed even a larger circle outside the mage circle and Khamsin stepped carefully around until she found the month of her birthing. It was here she reached out and felt, rather than saw, the tenuous fabric that ran from floor to ceiling, through which only two beings could pass.

She ran her hands along its surface, sensing the spells and incantations woven together like threads. The skills it took to create something of that nature were beyond even her comprehension. For the first time a small knot of fear formed in her stomach. This was no shaman or trickster she was dealing with, like the one she had fooled in Noviiya. This was the Sorcerer of Traakhal-Armin.

The Orb of Knowledge beckoned from within the circle of rubies, its smooth round surface reflecting the pale light filtering in through the high windows. It was secured inside a cabinet fashioned of silver bars on top of a high, six-legged pedestal. The orb rested on a thin silken scarf strung between two carved handles, the way a large jug of water was often carried down from the stream. Khamsin stared, perceiving something liquid beneath its surface. But the light outside was increasing. She was wasting time.

She motioned quickly to her cat and, as the soft animal snuggled in a familiar way in her arms, she allowed herself one last indulgent glance around the magnificent room before dematerializing.

The next thing she saw was the broad wooden back of the door of her room. And someone knocked loudly against it.

Quickly, she shoved Nixa under the small bed and draped her tunic over her shoulders, thankful she had remembered to lock the door earlier when she set out on her explorations.

“A moment, a moment,” she called out in answer to the rappings, her voice carrying the thickness that comes with sleep.

A matronly chambermaid stood on the other side of the door as Khamsin opened it.

“Thought we might’ve lost ye, young Sirrah.” The gray-haired woman fluffed the short white apron bound around her thick waist. “But then, I allows ye’ve had a troublesome few days, out there in the cold. Overslept, did ye?”

“Aye.” Khamsin bowed her head slightly, ruffling her hair as she’d often seen Tavis do in the mornings and yawned. “Feel much better, I do now, Ma’am. Sorry if I gave you a fright.”

The older woman chuckled and reaching out, poked at Khamsin’s ribs through the hastily donned tunic. “A good hot meal ’tis what you need, lad. Fill up them skinny bones of yours. Come downstairs when you’re ready.”

Khamsin leaned against the doorjamb as the chambermaid ambled down the hall. She had been lucky, so lucky, in returning when she did. If the castle discovered an empty room, a locked empty room, she might not have fared so well. As it was, she had nothing more now to worry about than the good-natured chiding of the kitchen-help at having overslept.

At least, that was all she had to worry about until nightfall. Then, she would have to return to the room with the golden mage circle and take the Orb of Knowledge into her hands.

Her thoughts traveled no farther than that.

*

After breakfast, she made the expected inquires about her supposed traveling companions, lost in the mountains, feigning a believable concern. The lean-faced guards she spoke to were well-trained to keep the optimism in their voice, encouraging the young farm-lad that all was not lost and, by the grace of Tarkir, his friends would soon be found.

A twinge of conscience poked at her during the exchange. She knew that on her words alone, several Khalarian guards would have ventured out into the mountains, seeking lost travelers who did not exist. But more than that, she was bothered by her newfound ability to lie; to fabricate events and existences so completely that even the Sorcerer’s highly-trained staff were unable to see through her deception. She found herself expressing emotions she didn’t feel, reacting to events that didn’t exist until she began to question her own veracity.

What had she become, what happened to young Khamsin of Cirrus Cove? She was the one who was gentle with animals, upon whose outstretched hand wild birdlings rested. She was the one who had helped birth babes and healed the sick and cared so deeply for those in her small Coveside village that she had risked all to further her knowledge, in order to protect them. Even when they had shunned her and, at the worst, had tried to kill her, her only thoughts had been of them, of her village, of her people, and what she owed them. It was why she was here now, to avenge the atrocities that had given her life, and her friends, death.

It should be more difficult, she admonished herself, as she sat in the window well of her small room in the castle, watching the late afternoon sun cast long shadows across the wide courtyard below. Her physical discomfort, her personal losses, her tribulations in the mountains were slight compared to the devastation upon which she was now prepared to embark. To be the one responsible for the destruction of the Orb of Knowledge should carry more of a price than she paid. For all that the Sorcerer stood for, she still respected his wisdom and his skill;
had
to respect it. She’d touched the protective shielding at the perimeter of the mage circle and knew that this was something so far beyond her capabilities, so far beyond her imagination that she found herself in awe of the power that created it.

Almost, almost she wished she wasn’t the one to cause its end. Of all of those born in the Land in over two hundred years, Ciro had told her she was the only one besides the Sorcerer who could gain access to the Orb of Knowledge. The protective veil surrounding it insured that. But she was perhaps, also the only one who could appreciate it, understand it, revel in its depths and intricacies. She felt like a musician in a room full of deaf mutes demanding the death of the orchestra.

Khamsin closed her eyes and let her head rest against the hard stones behind her. This wasn’t the time for such soft and sentimental thoughts. Those were allowable when she was no more than Khamsin of Cirrus Cove, wife of the smith, and Healer of the village. But the smith was dead and the village, her village, was burned and abandoned. And she was just Khamsin now. No. Perhaps no longer even Khamsin, but Kiasidira.

Kiasidira had only one purpose in the Land.

And it was to be found within the Orb of Knowledge.

The hours of darkness this time seemed to move more slowly than they had only a day before. Khamsin prowled restlessly around the confines of her room as she waited for the castle noises to cease. The night before, much of her fatigue was genuine. She slept, confident in Nixa’s watchful eyes.

Tonight, though, she was thoroughly rested and well-fed. Sleep wouldn’t come. Even the gray feline seemed more agitated than usual. Khamsin wondered if the same thoughts plagued the smaller mind as well but was reluctant to share her concerns with the cat. To do so wouldn’t be reassuring to either of them.

The Sorcerer was due to return. Lord Tedmond said as much at Khamsin’s first and only meeting with him in the hearth room. And judging from the attitudes of the guards and the servants, it was their opinion as well. The only problem was when.

The few discreet questions Khamsin lay upon the kitchen help gave her little information to work with. It was not unusual, it seemed, for Master Ro to be absent from Traakhal for extended periods of time. It was also not unusual for him to reside in the great castle for months, even seasons on end without leaving. Khamsin began to realize that after three hundred years, any display of behavior was considered within reason.

But she had only tonight. The longer she delayed, the more questions would be asked about Camron of Tynder’s Hill. For now, she had enough to worry about with the comings and goings of the castle staff. The inexplicable appearances, and disappearances, of the Sorcerer could not even be taken into consideration.

If only she could convince herself of that! She winced now at her foolhardiness of the previous evening, when she had blithely traipsed around the East Wing of the castle in the dark. Her shielding may have protected her from him, if he sought her whereabouts. But it also hid the Sorcerer from her.

There was one other constant she learned in her conversations with the kitchen maids as she had helped herself to a thick slice of fresh baked bread earlier that evening. It was that the castle—save for the aging Lord Tedmond—seemed to operate on a much more efficient level when the Sorcerer was absent.

Not that it was said he ever interfered. In truth, there were those in the lower stations of service who admitted to having never even set eyes upon their Master. They were also the ones more willing to gossip about the Sorcerer.

The problem lay with those who had seen, or knew, their Master. They were the ones who said very little, who drew an almost inaudible breath when his name was mentioned.

Khamsin was familiar with the single-minded devotion and respect often accorded the lord of the manor by his people, as was his due. But at Traakhal, she wondered if it weren’t more than that.

If it weren’t unembellished fear.

And in the day and a half she had lived amongst them that same fear crept up into her spine, too.

She splayed her hands out in front of her in the darkness, raising them towards the window ’til they came between her face and the twin moons, now cresting high in the winter sky. The pale light filtered through, glistening in the depths of her eyes. She allowed herself to be drawn by the silvery ribbons, slowly, carefully, still maintaining contact with the nervous gray feline that was her watchdog. She sought out any strong emanations of power nearby. If he traveled, perhaps by horseback, or boat…but no. The emanations from the walls of the castle itself were too strong. Too much magic had been cast here over the centuries. The residue from the spells and incantations now laced through the air like smoke from an ever-burning fire.