A Mage Of None Magic (Book 1) (10 page)

Peck ticked a concurring finger at no one in particular. “Now that’s an idea worth being toyed with.”

Caleen flicked the gem back to Peck, who again pinched it easily from the air without looking. “Why in the world do you insist on going to that hole in-the-wall?” she asked.

“Been awhile,” Arwin said. “Plus, I think we could use a night out.”

“I’ll pass,” Jharal said from the back of the room.

“Don’t blame you,” Peck replied, “frightening as your lady friend is.”

Jharal’s growl was a distant but advancing storm.

“Then it’s settled,” Arwin announced with a clap of his hands. “Tonight, one last hurrah at the Gus before flinging ourselves headlong toward peril and prize.”

Niel tried to seem amenable. But an evening of drink with a band of thieves just didn’t sound like all that much fun.

12

The feather scratched unassisted across the coarse parchment, wagging and twirling, nimbly recreating the considerable volume of Thaucian’s handwritten notes. Ennalen’s eyes followed the nib, seizing up each word as it formed, pausing only long enough to provide the quill a fresh sheet when it stopped at the end of a page.

For more than a week she had pored over the Lord Elder’s research, and while she detested being cramped up again amongst books and scrolls, Ennalen had to concede the information created a certain intrigue. It seemed the Lord Elder had managed to decipher several key passages from the writings of Herahm the Mad. An impressive achievement, but like the assignment given to her, also steeped in coincidence: Herahm’s writings lay at the center of her own recent explorations.

When Herahm returned to the College following his infamous encounter with Uhniethi, he locked himself away in his rooms and refused all visitors. There he remained in seclusion, accepting only the writing materials he demanded night and day along with what bits of food could be stuffed beneath his door. When he finally emerged eighteen years later, Herahm, filthy and skeletal, offered a large, rotten grin to the attendant standing guard, and then fell over dead.

The late Lord Magistrate’s chambers had been packed so tightly with sheets of parchment that for him to exit it had been necessary to tunnel like a rodent from his desk to the doorway. More extraordinary than the mountainous mass itself was how that sides of every single page had been filled edge to edge with tiny, precise script. Though a number neatly marked each sheet, the contents were a discontinuous mayhem of arcane mathematics, illustrations both sublime and grotesque, poetry and prose in languages either archaic or unrecognizable, and minutely detailed diagrams all but impossible to follow. Even with the concerted efforts of dozens of scholars, the hundreds of thousands of individual pages required years to be reassembled into their proper order. A popular joke at the time was if Herahm’s writings represented everything he might have otherwise said aloud in his final years, then thank the gods his tongue had been ripped out.

For a short while the intellectual community buzzed about Herahm’s great book. Back then, the College permitted academicians from all over the world access to its libraries. Professors, students, and artists made the trip to Fraal University to inspect Herahm’s work. But when the flood of pilgrims grew too deep and the accompanying scrutiny grew too uncomfortable, the Elders hid the books away and built College Gate to help cordon themselves off from the general public. The deluge of outside attention toward Herahm’s writings slowed to a trickle, and then practically to nothing at all.

In the centuries that followed, many within the Membership continued to grapple with Herahm’s work. Occasionally an especially resourceful or imaginative soul deciphered a minuscule portion, generating a temporary resurgence of interest that perhaps the key to unlocking the secrets of the remaining volumes finally had been discovered. However, over time the
Energumen
—as the tomes collectively and somewhat derisively came to be called—lost its intellectual allure even amongst magicians, relegating it to the status of historical novelty.

The pieces cited by Thaucian in his notes did seem to allude, albeit obscurely, to the Apostate. Most striking among them, a series of couplets written in an early, formal style Ennalen barely recognized from her literature courses:

Amongst you shall dwell a mage of none magic;

Amidst you shall ruin find retreat.

Upon you shall come a wielder of exile;

Upon you shall fall half his sight.

Behind one shall be bridged great chasms;

Behind many shall be bound leaf and sword.

From two shall spill the heart forever broken

From yourselves shall spill your undoing.

Thaucian observed that the meter of the poem, when counted out and applied to a formula concealed amongst the text, corresponded to coordinates on a crude map in a preceding volume. Those coordinates indicated the geographic location of the College. Along with myriad other excerpts and illustrations, the hand-picked clues in Thaucian’s research more or less supported his belief that the Apostate would soon in some unique way distinguish himself, expose the College as a decaying home to fraud and duplicity, and then be so inconsiderate as to wage war upon it. The Apostate would bring them all to their knees just as all the nursery rhymes claimed, and in the process somehow finish the task begun by Uhniethi a thousand years ago.

Storybook characters keep busy schedules,
she thought.

She smiled at that and stretched, stifling a yawn with the back of her hand, then mused with impish pettiness whether the Lord Elder resented being unable to garner accolades for having penetrated so deeply into Herahm’s enigmatic work.

So, a mage of none magic. A commoner? An apprentice?

Thaucian had concluded the former. She conceded it made sense someone destined to rise up against the College would be unindoctrinated by it, but to Ennalen it made more sense that a person posing any credible threat would require at least minor training as a magician.

That was where she would begin.

A few dozen freshmen arrived each semester, so conducting a meaningful person-to-person investigation without sacrificing discretion would be impossible. That meant the coin in the button barrel suddenly seemed a diamond in the snow.

Or a sliver of gemstone on the Black Plains
,
she thought.

The first principle impressed upon young Magistrates implored them never to ignore the obvious, no matter how inconvenient it might be to their preconceptions. Even with her robust doubts, Ennalen could not simply dismiss the coincidental timing of Thaucian’s request.

The Apostate, as proffered in the text before her, likely represented nothing more than the growing senility of a very old man. Then again, as she had earlier contemplated, the task put to her by Denuis might be a twisted ruse to distract her from her scheme.

Until she determined which was the case, if either, she would play the role expected of her and learn what she could. If she found Thaucian’s work had merit, then she would have acquired advance knowledge of the most serious conceivable threat to her intentions: to take the College by force and position it for the greatness to which it, and she, had been so long entitled. If she found otherwise, then at worst she would have bought time to fortify her own plans.

For the time being, it looked to Ennalen the quickest way out would be through.

She yawned again, stretched, rose from her desk, and despite the cold stepped barefoot out onto her balcony, taking up the ancient book she had left on the shelf near the doorway.

Leaning against the ledge, she brooded a short while until a tiny, dark shape appeared on the walkway below and approached the Ministry of Law.

Her pulse quickened.

Finally.

Ennalen clutched her book as every trace of her previous doubt and consternation suffered a swift demise. A wide smile pushed across her face from an uninhibited rush of genuine excitement, and a sing-song thought suddenly pranced about her head:

A mouse barely able to budge a weight was about to move the world.

***

As a whole the Membership detested, and thus willfully disregarded, the fact that nearly all humans, peasant and lord alike, exhibited at least some small aptitude for magic, much as most people cannot play a musical instrument but when the mood suits them can adequately whistle a tune. Even that unconscious capacity creates a detectable aura about a person, referred to by magicians as one’s shine.

As a magician grows stronger in Canon he becomes more adept at perceiving the shine of others; some elder Members were able to do so even without benefit of incantation. However, every so often the odd person turned up having not the slightest aptitude for magic, thus lacking even the dimmest shine—someone deaf to magic, as it were; one who cannot help whistling off key, provided he can whistle at all.

The utter absence of magical capacity in a person often had a convenient corollary for magicians: that individual’s higher sensitivity to ensorcellment. Rass was such an individual.

Ennalen happened upon Rass three years prior, during her return from a village whose appointed magician had been accused of some unpleasant business—none but a Magistrate could sit in judgment of a Member of the College. She discovered Rass splayed across an isolated dirt road, no fewer than three arrows in his back and suffering numerous broken bones. Given his pallor she’d been surprised and impressed to find him still breathing.

Surprise turned to amazed glee when she realized the reason she had thought him dead was because he did not shine at all.

To protect her find, Ennalen traveled at night for the remainder of her journey, literally dragging Rass back to the College. There she restored him to health and, through a complex regimen of potions and charms, carefully conditioned him so that by the time he recovered, Rass had been reshaped and bound as her willing, obedient servant.

Rass was no automaton, though; he required his own reasoning and skills to survive the extended amounts of time he spent away from Ennalen doing her bidding.

Nor was Ennalen’s hold on him unbreakable; during his travels Rass might encounter someone or something from his past carrying a heavy enough emotional resonance to undo her work. But until that day he would carry out her instructions to the best of his abilities, with little or no question, even if doing so meant dying.

Ennalen hoped it would not come to that. Which was by no means sentimentality; merely practicality. She had invested a great deal of time and effort in Rass, after all.

Neither was it sentimentality that brought delight because Rass had finally returned. And when Rass held out to Ennalen the item she had sent him to retrieve, delight moldered to perverse joy.

***

A revelation born of Ennalen’s recent cloister in the depths of the Main Library was that the Devastation unleashed by Uhniethi a millennium prior had been far worse than the College ever disclosed. In fact, the event left the College a mere breath from ruin.

Physical damage and death toll aside, with the Board of Elders decimated, senior Members spent more time squabbling over claims toward seats on a new Board than addressing reconstruction. The courtliness with which the College had once conducted itself degenerated into thuggery.

In time a fragile sense of order took hold, but the task of rebuilding and restoring the College forced a dire issue for its new leadership: How could something like the Devastation be prevented from ever happening again? To answer that, as well as to gain insight into how Uhniethi achieved the monumental feat in the first place the new Lord Elder, Bradias the Fourth, dispatched a secret expedition to the Black Plains, the territory that had once been Talmoor.

The excursion yielded an amazing find—a sliver of ebony gemstone. More remarkable than so small a thing being noticed amidst the scabrous wasteland of the Plains was the serendipitous—and in Ennalen’s opinion, quite humorous— discovery of the stone’s nature.

Two of the three members of the expedition deeply disliked one another. The young woman who discovered and held the sliver found the ceaseless bickering unbearable. She finally lost her temper, shouted for the others to be quiet, and was startled when they instantly did exactly that. Frightened further by their vacant, bewildered expressions the young woman demanded repeatedly that her companions tell her what was wrong—but neither responded.

Not knowing what else to do she bound the mute pair with rope and towed them back to the College. There Bradias’s personal physicians concluded the minds of the two had been so perfectly emptied of the capacity for language that likely neither could ever be retaught to speak, not even through magical means.

Bradias appointed a circle of advisors to test the fragment from the Black Plains. Rigorous scrutiny revealed the stone amplified the intent of anyone with even a modicum of magic-making ability. Nearly anyone in possession of the stone would be able to produce spectacular magical acts, whether or not he or she had formal schooling.

Ironically, all attempts by known means to detect the presence of magic within the stone proved fruitless. Furthermore, the advisors surmised that the sliver belonged to a much larger whole, and that its properties were directly related to its size. Citing historical texts, they concluded the College had acquired evidence the mythical jewel known as the Heart of the Sisters might actually exist.

Bitter debate had raged since the Devastation over what had granted Uhniethi the unprecedented powers he wielded that day, because nothing within Canon could account for it. As fantastical as it sounded, a fragment of the Heart seemed a feasible answer. Moreover, according to legend the Heart was enormous. Given the potency of the sliver retrieved from the Black Plains, logic held that if Uhniethi had possessed all of what remained of the Heart, the entire world might have suffered the same fate as Talmoor. That the world still looked much as it always had suggested the majority of the Heart still waited to be found—a theory Lord Elder Bradias made into his life’s work.