A Mage Of None Magic (Book 1) (17 page)

19

A closer look at the subterranean room revealed two passageways heading deeper into the earth—one to the south, the other to the east. The group agreed to wait until dark, split once more into teams, then see where the corridors went.

“Why wait for night?” Niel asked, slipping on a clean jerkin. “Why not go now?”

“That’s so if something with lots of teeth decides to chase us back out again,” Arwin explained, “we won’t be running into the brightness out here from the darkness in there and need time for our eyes to adjust before we can turn around and fight whatever-it-is off our collective backside.”

It made sense, but Niel couldn’t help wondering why all their hypothetical dangers had to involve things wanting to leap out and eat them.

Arwin told Jharal to stay behind and serve as lookout. The narrow tunnels meant someone his size would have difficulty maneuvering, which could be troublesome if they needed to defend themselves or make a hasty retreat.

“Niel, you and Peck take the east passage,” Arwin said. “Cally and I will take the other. Until then, let’s have an early supper and get some rest.”

He walked off to where they’d put the gear. Cally followed.

Niel was relieved at not being paired with Cally again, who had avoided eye contact since they’d pulled him out of the hole. When Peck flashed him a predatory grin, he wondered if he’d be better off staying with Jharal than going with either of them.

***

After the evening meal Niel sat away from the others under the pretense of giving the Light spell he’d been asked to learn one last going-over.

He’d actually committed the spell to memory after only a few hours of study—quickly enough that at first Niel was convinced he’d missed something, though supposedly even a novice magician could distinguish the satisfying snugness of a spell whole in one’s mind from the muddling distraction of a spell uncompleted. Since they had torches, Niel planned to incant the spell before going into the tunnels but leave off the gesticulated component. With three quick taps of his right hand on whatever he wanted to illuminate, the spell would be cast.

He hoped.

The truth was he simply wanted some time alone before his first expedition as an adventurer; a few quiet moments to consider and acknowledge the unexpected bend he’d reached on his life’s path.

A voice somewhere within told him not to worry, that actions alone did not define the person taking them. A similar voice came a short distance from behind.

“Apprentice? Are you ready?”

Unsurprised, Niel peered over his shoulder to see Arwin standing a few paces away, pack slung and an unlit torch in hand.

“Actually,” he replied, “I believe I am.” He stood and brushed off the backside of his trousers. “Let’s go.”

Night had spread with unexpected haste. Thick shadows swallowed the forest in a black, silent flood. By the time the group walked the hundred or so paces back to the tunnels, it became necessary to light the torches.

Peck produced a spool of rough twine for each team to track their way down into the passages. When they ran out of string, they’d turn around and come back, compare notes, then decide what to do from there.

Niel shouldered the small pack he’d been given. Other than his spell book it contained only a few supplies: water, a length of rope, a piece of flint, and a tiny vial of healing potion for emergencies— a revelation which had surprised and impressed Niel. He appreciated the practicality of having the potion on hand, but he also knew full well its scarcity and cost.

That Arwin would think enough of his companions to retain such a thing as healing potion almost offset the emphasis its presence placed on the nature of their task.

At the edge of the opening loomed Jharal, his axe standing blade-down and his hands folded on the end of the stock. The dancing shadows cast by the torches gave him a grotesque and ominous appearance, letting Niel appreciate his effectiveness as a sentry. He couldn’t imagine anyone being happy to come across Jharal’s monstrous shape in the middle of the night.

Jharal gave a slight nod as he met Niel’s eyes, to which Niel opened his fingers from the shoulder strap of his pack in a casual wave.

“All right, folks,” Arwin said. “Last one out buys the next round at the Gus.”

With that, he and Cally disappeared into their tunnel. Niel watched until their torch light faded away.

Peck tapped Niel on the shoulder.

“Is there a spiritually significant moment you’re waiting for, Lord Elder,” he asked, “or do you and your minstrel friends have a ballad in honor of the occasion?”

“If only I’d prepared something,” Niel replied.

He took firm hold of the torch Peck handed to him and crossed the threshold of the east passage. After few paces, he noticed Peck was no longer behind him. He turned and poked his head back outside.

“You are coming, aren’t you?”

Peck smiled. “Of course not. This is all an elaborate scheme to do away with you, because we find you unpleasant and awful.” He made a brushing motion that told Niel to go back into the tunnel. “So off with you, if you don’t mind. Arwin and Cally are waiting to come back out so we can all run off without you seeing. You’re spoiling our plan.”

Niel knew it was joke, but at the same time his feet remained unconvinced.

“Peck has really good eyesight,” Jharal said from his post atop the opening. “He can see in the dark. Your torch’ll get in the way of that, so he’s going to follow after you.”

“Then why doesn’t he go first?” Niel asked.

“Because you can’t watch my back if you can’t see it,” Peck said.

“But you have the spool,” Niel pointed out, “how will I know when it runs out?”

A throwing knife appeared in Peck’s hand. “When you feel this sticking out the back of your head, that means I’m out of string.”

Jharal let out a deep chuckle.

“It warms me to think how you worry over my well-being, Good Reverend,” Niel said.

With that, he turned around again and began his descent.

In the shuddering amber torchlight, Niel took note of the stones comprising the passage walls. They looked similar to the ones where he’d first fallen through, but smaller like tiles. A few bore engravings just as the floor had. He knew none of the Galiiantha’s written language, and only two spoken words Biddleby had taught him:
ghesalt
, or “greetings,” and
austa
, which meant “water.”

An adjoining corridor appeared on the left. Niel held his torch out at arm’s length and peered down the passage, which seemed identical to the one in which he stood. Not wanting to risk getting lost by forgetting a turn, he continued straight. Cool sweat formed on his forehead and back. Some of which, he thought, might even have been from the heat of the flame.

After a short while the tunnel’s downward angle became steeper, as did the increasing monotony of his surroundings. Beyond the single intersection, the corridor’s distinctive features dwindled to none. Soon neither the tiles on the floor nor on the walls bore any marks of any kind, other than the occasional crack or bit of mold. The slow, ambient
dripdripdrip
of water from somewhere ahead had grown sharper, and the temperature seemed to fall with every step—of which he had long since lost count. He wondered how far underground he’d gone. He wondered whether Peck had much twine left on his spool and when it would be time to turn around. He wondered how childish it made him, just as when he stood on the bluff overlooking the sea, to grow tired so easily of something that should have left him enthralled.

Niel stopped, considered, and with a sigh decided to head back on his own. As he turned, a gloved hand snaked out over his shoulder and smothered his torch. Another hand mashed hard against his mouth. In the sudden blackness he made a frightened, clumsy attempt to defend himself, but in one smooth motion his attacker pinned him against the wall.

“Be still, Lord Elder,” came Peck’s barely audible whisper. “We’re not alone.”

“Where?” Niel mouthed against Peck’s fingers.

The thief pressed his lips against Niel’s ear. “Behind us.”

Niel doubted his ability to restrain the panic now charging through his body. His heart raced so hard he could feel the tiled wall thrum against his back.

Peck gave Niel a quick pat on the stomach then took the apprentice’s hand and placed it behind him on his belt. The two moved quickly, descending further. Niel did his best to match Peck’s unseen stride in the dank underground chill. After a short distance, Peck once more pushed Niel against the wall and jerked his shoulders which meant to stay put.

And then he was gone.

In the absolute black of the passageway, Niel struggled to rein in his thoughts, and strained to hear beyond the loud rush of the blood coursing fast through his veins. Peck might have spotted Arwin and Cally. Perhaps they’d found a connecting tunnel and ended up behind them. If so, why had Peck gone forward, not back?

A thin gust cooled Niel’s sweaty face. Someone had dashed past him, heading in the direction where they’d come in.

“Peck?” he whispered.

Countless invisible hands seized Niel’s arms and neck. He screamed in mindless fright, scuffling against his attackers, flailing at whatever he could. In the struggle, his fist made contact with flesh. He lashed out again and again, hitting once, twice—

—brilliant blue light exploded from the face directly in front of Niel’s. Piercing beams of magical energy burst from the eyes and mouth as the person released his hold on Niel and clawed at his own head, shrieking in pain.

The passageway filled with more shouts, with more hands, and more fists.

A blow to the back of Niel’s head scattered them like leaves, and he drifted away with them, taking nothing but the image of that face, contorted in agony as it burned.

20

Beyond an initial childhood wonderment, Canon for Ennalen had rarely amounted to more than mundane exercises in academia and ritualism. Effort outweighed reward far too often in formal magic-making for her tastes, and never had seized her imagination as it seemed to for others—reason in large part why she preferred the swifter currents of criminal investigation.

Her cantle, however, was proving an entirely different matter. While to say she had been eager to explore the possibilities the stone represented would have been profound understatement, Ennalen also had been confident that her exhaustive preparation, coupled with her inherent self-discipline, had sufficiently readied her for the experience.

She could not have been more wrong. And she could not have been more grateful for it.

Only a halfmonth had passed since she acquired the cantle. Just as during her experiment with the nectarine, Ennalen at first had found herself helpless amidst the sensory onslaught brought by contact with the stone. Each subsequent interaction, however, let her keep her feet a little longer in the face of that ferocious gale.

Her equilibrium grew, and she soon discovered that prefacing her requests of the cantle with a spoken phrase had become unnecessary; merely touching an object to the gem garnered the knowledge she wished.

Within days after that, she required no buffer at all; placing one hand on the stone while holding an object with the other yielded breathtakingly vivid and intimate results. From a hawk’s feather came the poetic emancipation of soaring high above the Peridehn Mountains; a tiny yellow conch shell filled her mouth with brine as she herself was swallowed whole by a monstrous gold-speckled fish; a broken-off arrowhead brought the instantaneous, excruciating horror of having her throat pinned to a wall by a distant enemy.

Working with the stone infused Ennalen with a sense of potency more delicious than she had ever imagined, sustained an emotional resonance that satisfied like nothing else before, and simultaneously appeased and deepened both those appetites.

Rewarding as those monumental leaps forward were, one maddening exasperation persisted: physically affecting any of the objects involved in her trials. No matter how forceful her attempt, regardless how many times her intense concentration left her on the floor trembling and bleeding, Ennalen could not commute her accomplishments from the abstract to the corporeal.

That particular bar of lead simply would not budge.

To alleviate frustration, and to preserve her sanity, Ennalen increased her walks about campus, even setting aside her dislike of venturing out during normal school hours. On those days, like this day, she made for the very outskirts of campus where plenty of isolated nooks provided both diversion and seclusion.

Ennalen moved along the slender stone avenue to the Eastern Observatory, near which lay all but hidden a marvelous little arboretum of small, delicate trees whose perennial blossoms flourished despite the growing cold. When she arrived at the entrance of arced branches, Ennalen stepped off the main walkway onto a brick footpath that snaked through the miniature forest and was immediately gratified by the spicy, tropical aroma of countless flowers. The thick air within the arboretum warmed her. Her pace slowed. Her breathing deepened. And she smiled at the welcome solace.

This,
she thought,
is real magic.

She dared not carry her cantle with her. Not only would such stupidity defeat the purpose of respites from her work, but obviously she could not risk the cantle being noticed, directly or otherwise. Thus, when Ennalen went out she triple locked the cantle in a thick steel box, which itself was permanently anchored within a vault hidden in the floor beneath her workbench, which itself was protected by a charm that produced a vile but entirely phantom stench to overpower and repulse anyone who might happen near. Still, even those extensive measures left Ennalen ill at ease, forcing constant self-reassurance that she had taken every practical precaution.

She willed away any further thoughts of her experiments—something becoming ever more difficult to do—and continued into the soothing greenness of the sanctuary.

In actuality the arboretum covered a modest area, but the tight back-and-forth parallels of the footpath, with dense walls of flora between each, ingeniously convinced the eye of ample space in which to wander. Ennalen strolled a long while in relative bliss, clearing a dead stick from the path here, rolling a leaf between her finger and thumb there, enjoying how it seemed she could feel the pulse of water and minerals coursing inside.

“Here, let me try.”

“No, give it back!”

The whispers came from off to her right, somewhere farther along the path, and stiffened Ennalen’s spine. The fact that she was not alone annoyed her, certainly, but something about the voices other than their sudden presence fired a deep-seated yet strangely disconnected sense of violation. She hiked the hem of her robes to keep them from brushing the ground and crept forward.

“Give it back, I said!”

“Let go, you’re gonna tear it.”

Urgency gripped her muscles more tightly with each step, insisting she forgo stealth and rush to confront whoever was there. She shoved the idea away, tempting though it was, and focused on the voices themselves.

There had been two, young and male, but because she had heard only two people did not mean there weren’t more. As a Magistrate, especially on College grounds, Ennalen enjoyed immunity from any risk of physical assault, but there existed no guarantee she would be recognized or even believed by all parties upon announcing herself. She could offer a considerable defense magically, and physically if need be, against a single, moderately-skilled attacker, even a pair, perhaps. But fending off more was doubtful, despite the odd impulse to attempt exactly that. So she kept stern focus and inched her way along the path, listening as hard as she could.

“You’re not doing it right.”

“I can see that, but you didn’t do any better, so hush.”

Ennalen stopped moving when she could tell the whisperers were around the next turn. There still had come no third voice; no cough or shuffle of feet to indicate anyone other than the two she had already discerned.

“We’re gonna get caught.”

“Not if you shut up, we won’t. Now hold this.”

“Fine. Hurry up, though.”

“Just grab a few and take them back with us.”

“You know that won’t work. They have to be in the ground.”

In the ground?

Ennalen barged around the leafy divide.

“Hold in the name of the Lord Elder!” she roared.

In the center of that next lane, not ten strides from where Ennalen came to a stop, two young boys jumped up from their knees and stood wearing expressions of pure terror.

One was a full head taller than the other, each was dark-haired, and both wore the dingy robes common to freshmen. Familiar-looking bruises lined the smaller one’s neck and arms. Despite being undernourished—also common to freshmen—and a pallor that gave them each a bluish tinge in the thinning light of early evening, both carried in their eyes the familiar bright fervor of student magicians.

The small one twitched as though to make a run for it, but the taller one grabbed his sleeve and held him in place.

Ennalen approached, aware not only of how perfectly frightened they appeared, but also of how palpable their fright felt. The scent of it enticed her, as well as stoked her anger hotter. All at once she felt like someone wracked with hunger catching the aroma of her most hated dish, or more aptly, like a famished predator smelling the blood of her least favorite prey.

“What are you doing here?”

“Nothing, Magistrate,” the tall one replied.

“No, nothing,” the other corroborated.

“Whispers about being caught rarely mean ‘nothing’. So I’ll ask one last time. What are the two of you doing here?”

Neither spoke, but they stirred Ennalen’s thoughts to a frenzy with a fresh wave of panic. Her eyes closed of their own accord until the surge ebbed, but she opened them in time to see the smaller boy attempting to conceal an item in his cuff.

“What is that?” she demanded. “Hand that to me.”

The child glanced at his companion, then slumped his shoulders and shuffled toward Ennalen.

“Stop,” she said. He did.

“Drop it there and back away.” The boy obeyed.

When he had withdrawn, Ennalen retrieved the object—a slender wooden tube, highly polished and intricately carved with the images of flowers and vines. She had no need to remove the contents; the warmth from what was inside crawled up her hand the moment she picked it up. But her courtroom training pushed past the roiling of anger, and for nothing more than the sake of showmanship and prolonging the boys’ fright she emptied the tube into her palm.

She unrolled the tiny scroll that fell out.

Sloppily—and very likely, hastily—scribbled on the rough brown paper was a spell of restoration, an incantation used when a magician wished to abort an experiment without sacrificing expensive components or ingredients. The spell undid all progress back to a predetermined point; a sophisticated and dangerous tool neither intended nor appropriate for novices.

Ennalen’s stomach turned at what the spell implied.

“Explain the meaning of this,” she said, teeth clenched. “Right now.”

After some mutual hesitation, the taller boy took an unsteady step forward. “It’s mine, Magistrate. Geral here had nothing to do with it.”

“What’s your name?” Ennalen asked.

“Willam, Magistrate.”

“Willam,” she said. “Do you know how severe the punishments are for using magic beyond one’s station? Stolen magic, at that?”

“Yes, Magistrate.”

“Then tell me why you have this, or you will both suffer each and every one of those punishments.”

Willam hung his head. “Last spring I took a course on botany, as one of my herbamancy electives. Professor Varey had me postulate ways in which one might—”

“Apprentice!” Ennalen shouted, which intensified the vicious pounding in her head. “I do not require a recounting of all that’s happened since the Ever died. I want to know what the two of you were doing here, now, with
this!
” She shook the fist which held the scroll. “Now speak!”

Willam’s eyes filled with tears; the flesh on his chin rumpled as he fought not to cry.

“He was trying to fix the flowers!” Geral blurted.

Fix the flowers?

“What does that
mean
?” Ennalen all but shrieked.

Willam flinched at the question, then opened his mouth and let his explanation spill.

“There’s this girl, from outside, from Fraal. I met her, and she told me how much she liked Golden Julias. But you’re not allowed to pick Golden Julias because there just aren’t very many of them. So I tried to grow some, on my own. But that’s really hard to do. So I came up with a charm to make the pollen stronger, so I could grow some in my workshop. But the pollen didn’t work right. It made all the new flowers male, and they only lived a day or so, so I was going to get rid of them. But I left the window open, and some bees got to the ones I picked. And I’ve been trying ever since to trace the pollen I changed, but it’s all over, and not just on the Julias, and if I can’t stop it then all the Julias will die out, and maybe more, and then they’re going to find out it was me, and I’ll be thrown out, and—”

Sobs made the rest of Willam’s words an unintelligent mush. Not that it mattered; fury quaking within Ennalen had deafened her. She threw the scroll and its case to the ground in disgust.

Magic. Loose on the campus. Eating at the landscape. Two thousand years of tradition and painstaking care brought to an end, and by whom? For what? A snot-nosed freshman hoping to get his wick waxed when no one was looking by some young harlot for a handful of pretties.

Ennalen covered her face with her hands and groaned. “Do you realize what you have done?”

Neither of the boys responded.

The same compulsion that drove her to confrontation took Ennalen fully in its grips. Incensed by the utter, obscene stupidity at hand, her arms locked stiff at her sides and she screamed with what even then she knew to be more might than which her body should have been capable.

“Do you realize what you have done?”

“Magistrate,” Geral said, wringing his hands. “We should have never—”

“NO!” Ennalen bellowed. “You most
certainly
should have never! You should have
never
been so mindless! You should have
never
meddled with magic beyond you! You should have
never
dared use the campus as your personal workshop! You should have
never
tried to fix what you did not understand! You should have never BEEN HERE AT ALL!”

A tremor as though from the center of the world lurched up through Ennalen. From nowhere a grating squeal like overtaxed metal filled her ears, while a sudden wash of either blistering heat or searing cold scalded her outside and in. And then someone screamed; quite possibly herself.