Arm Of Galemar (Book 2) (40 page)

“Do?”

“Make a physical shield.  It doesn’t sound like any of
the shields I know.”

Celerity studied him anew, this time with surprise. 
“Hasn’t Tollaf taught you shields?”

“I know some!” he replied with force.

Muttered curses escaped beneath her breath.  “I’m
amazed you’ve been apprenticed for over a full year.  I never would have
guessed.  But we don’t have all day, so I’ll need to use the shortcut.”

Memories surged when she stepped behind and reached
for his temples.  “Wait a minute!” he shouted, leaping to his feet.  “Couldn’t,
uh…couldn’t he do it instead?”

He loathed it whenever Tollaf reached into his body to
assume control over his mage talent, and never wished to experience it again. 
But the idea of Celerity doing it sparked a wild panic in him.  Tru seemed
less…cold.  Maybe it would not be so bad.

Tru shook his head.  “No way I can,” he said.  “I’m
not a mage.”

“You’re not?”  Confusion wrapped its fingers around Marik.

“Nope.  My talent’s as a magician.”

Marik leaned away involuntarily.  His every experience
with magicians had gone badly.  Given the way the day seemed to be progressing,
he might come off less abused this time,
perhaps
, but he felt his record
would remain, essentially, consistent.

 Glancing at Celerity, who grew increasingly impatient
by the heartbeat, he noticed several pouches laying atop a table.  Undoubtedly
those would be Tru’s spell components.

“Sit down and look ahead!” she snapped before clamping
her fingers to his temples.  A familiar, gut-wrenching sensation spread
throughout him.  He watched with his mage senses while she reached into his
talent with her own to withdraw a portion of his energy.  She formed it
quickly, creating a thin wall between him and the mirror.  Though his
intestines insisted they were spilling out through his navel, he noticed this
particular shield’s details were similar, while slightly different, from the
rest he knew.

“There.  Don’t disrupt it,” she ordered when she
released his head.  “It will shield you from the glass shards if the mirror
shatters.  Get started and begin with the west first.”

What?
 
Rather than ask, he studied his reflection in the mirror.  He had no idea what
she meant by that either, and chose not to inform her of the fact. 
The
west?  I guess that means I can focus the working.

Since intention formed a great part of the working’s
framework, he thought that if he concentrated,
west, to the west,
when
telling the magic what to do, it might perhaps begin there, rather than
randomly starting elsewhere.  Unfortunately, as he learned anew every time he
attempted a new working, simply wanting a specific thing to happen was no
guaranty.  If he did not know beforehand
exactly
what it was he wanted
to happen,
how
he wanted it to happen,
how
the energy would be
shaped
or
allowed his thoughts to wander, the working’s inherent purpose
would be contaminated.  It was a wonder that any mage had ever figured out how
to accomplish anything more complicated than lighting a candle with his power.

He remained keenly aware that Celerity waited for him
to start.  Marik held back a sigh and opened his magesight to the etheric
place.  To date, he’d had no reason go looking for etheric lines flowing near
Thoenar.  Surely there must be one.  Thousands of people residing in the city
must result in a torrent of cumulative life energy spilling over from the
physical plane despite all the paving stones denying plant growth.

Letting his
self
drift from his body, he
dropped rapidly through the tower floors until he hovered within the
insubstantial etheric ground.  The most tenacious mole had never delved so deep
as he went.  He found it far easier to search out lines while floating below
the ambient glows of surface life.  Starry sparkles from worms and insects
spread above him, so closely resembling the night sky in the physical plane
that at times he pondered the nature of his own world.

Within his view, three separate lines ran beneath the
streets.  Marik drifted to the one flowing closest to the surface.  He had
never seen two lines so close together before, let alone three, each separate,
existing at different depths.  Tollaf often compared the etheric energies
flowing through the lines to water, so shouldn’t they merge into one, larger
stream?  And how could there be three when he remembered the thin diffusion in
the warehouse district?  There were still so many mysteries related to
magecraft.

He felt the heat baking off the topmost line at a
distance further than he’d ever felt from the line running beside Kingshome. 
At twice the diameter of his familiar line, the flowing power felt wilder,
dangerous.  Marik dipped his mental fingers into the flow cautiously after
erecting a small shield to protect him from an exposure headache.  His
siphoning channel drew the energy easily enough.  It flowed into his reserves
much faster than he’d ever dealt with.  Staying open to the line for a
prolonged time would burst him like dropped water skin.

Marik left the link open and returned to the waiting
court mages.  A mild throb from his cut arm greeted his return to physical
senses.

Was blood truly the easiest catalyst to scrye with? 
The last time he performed this working, it had required all the energy he
could hold and siphon for candlemarks.  Tru’s capabilities with multiple
scrying methods suddenly made the black magician far more imposing.

That’s why I always scoffed whenever you demanded I
teach you right off, boy,
Tollaf’s
voice abruptly sneered inside his mind.  Irritated, Marik buried his attention
in the task at hand, desiring not in the least to listen to an old fool half
the kingdom’s length away.  It was odd, though, how lifelike his voice had
sounded.  No doubt if the old man were present, the same words would have
emerged verbatim from his scowling lips.

One time, his father had told him that the friends
he’d fought beside who fell in battle never truly left him. 
They sit around
up here
, he had laughed while tapping his head. 
Most of the time they
wonder why, by Vernilock’s measure, I’m still alive!  The rest of the time they
usually comment on the choices I make.

Only six years of age, understanding had eluded the
younger Marik.  He recalled that afternoon for the first time in years. 
Perhaps he could relate with his father.  A shade of sadness darkened his
emotions that Rail’s voice, the one voice he wished to hear most of all, was
also the one voice beyond his summoning.  Too much time had passed.  Marik
could recall very little of its specifics.

A better reason than any to get on with his task.  The
desire to see his father, a desire he could usually keep caged behind the
problems facing him in the present, rose strong.  Celerity and whatever she
might be keeping from him no longer mattered.  He wanted to see his father!  He
wanted answers to the questions he’d been struggling with for years!

His reserves full, Marik formed the raw energy ring
around the mirror’s frame.  Every previous working he had learned became easier
with each subsequent forming.  This time, that was not so.  Keeping the energy
pure without tainting it would always be challenging.

Once completing the ring, he formed the link between
the bowl, concentrating, telling the power matrix what he wanted. 
To the
southwest.  Start to the southwest and rotate north!

From atop the mirror, at the oval frame’s pinnacle,
the etheric serpent shot out like a startled bird.  Marik briefly sensed an
unwinding coil of thin rope attached to a grappling hook hurled by an expert
thrower.  As before, it stopped without warning, the movement as it slowly
circled imperceptible.

A raging thirst soon overwhelmed his other senses. 
Marik blinked and found Tru already standing at his side with a goblet and
water pitcher.

“I know that look.  Seen it every time I look in that
mirror after I start a long one.”

“Thanks,” Marik replied, and accepted the goblet.  It
was heavy and unadorned ceramic.  In barely a moment, he drained half the
pitcher.

A sweeping glance revealed Celerity sitting in a
luxurious chair across the room.  She said nothing and appeared to be watching
from the sunken recesses of overstuffed leather.  He was glad his mage working
had obeyed his desire.  Whatever she might have said about his serpent starting
in the wrong direction, he would be spared from it.

He hoped the serpent would find his father soon.  His
mother had died almost three years ago.  In all that time since leaving the
town where they had lived, he’d made no serious progress in his search for
Rail.

While they waited, he reviewed the details he had
uncovered, each standing as a signpost in the road, marking a single step
closer to the goal.  His arrival at Kingshome.  Learning Rail had last been
seen leaving Spirratta to the north.  Asking questions among a bare few
northern towns, but discovering nothing.  Studying scrying, convinced that no
other course would bear answers.  Briefly summoning his father’s image, proving
that Rail Drakkson indeed lived, yet not where he might be found.  Seen from
this vantage, Marik supposed he had made progress of a sort after all.

At last, today, with the help of King Raymond’s court
mages, he would find the truth. 
Today
, he might finally take that last
step off the road, or at least come within sight of his destination.  Who cared
what a bitch Celerity was if she could give him that?

Elation slowly filled him, the last emotion he
expected to feel after receiving her summons.  What might Rail be doing?  How
would he catch up to Rail once he knew where to find him?

The constant energy drain through the working’s link
quickly used what he had drawn.  This scrying effort was much tougher since the
line he drew from infused him too quickly with raw power.  Any tricks to
regulate the flow into him remained beyond his capabilities, so he could not
reduce the flow to match the rate of expenditure by the working.  He spent the
morning opening and closing the channel to the line.  It rapidly exhausted
him.  With that and thoughts of Rail on his mind, time passed at a warped rate.

Much later he glanced up, noticing the position the
serpent’s tail had shifted too.  He could not recall where all that time had
gone to, but…

“Huh?”

Celerity moved, spurred by his mild comment.  “What is
it?”

“Nothing, but…look at that.”  He pointed at the
serpent’s tail.

Tru was digging through his pouches.  Celerity gazed
at nothing.  A moment later he felt a shift in the etheric energies when she
performed a working at his side.

“It has shifted ninety degrees.  Has it moved
smoothly, or has there been a disturbance of any type?”

He had been lost in his own thoughts but he believed
he would have noticed anything strange happening.  “Smooth.  Or, it hasn’t
acted any differently than last time.  Slow would be a better word.”

“That’s normal, I think,” Tru said, stepping closer. 
He held a pinch of sand between his fingers and muttered soft words that made
no sense.  Curious, Marik quickly focused his magesight in time to catch a
faint stirring in the etheric mists around Tru when his spell tore the sand’s
astral form away from its physical existence.

“You think?” Marik asked and switched mostly back to
normal vision.  He still used enough of his mage eyes to see the serpent’s
short tail protruding from the mirror.  The sand, destroyed, drifted away from
the magician’s fingers in ashy residue.

“I’m a magician.  I don’t use mage workings.  But from
what Celerity keeps telling me, I think that’s the normal rate of working for
this working, if it’s working.”

“Rate for working for…work…what?”

“He means rate of progression,” Celerity snapped,
exasperated.  Tru glared at her.  “Are you sure nothing different has
occurred?”

“As sure as I am about anything.”

She stared at him before replying.  “It means
nothing.  Your father might have moved since last you called his image months
ago.”

“It has been a long time,” Marik allowed, sounding
unconvinced.

“So let the working continue.  Likely, he will turn up
soon.”

Marik held his tongue on what he thought about that. 
If his father had been in Tullainia, but was there no longer, then only two or
three possibilities remained.  Rail would have to become a swimmer the likes of
which the Arm of Galemar could only dream of to have left Tullainia to the
south or west.  North would take him into the sands of Perrisan, a kingdom
noted for its harsh welcome of strangers.

East, then?  Has he come back to Galemar?
  Well, as Celerity said, he would soon be found. 
Marik leaned back into his chair before changing his mind.  He rose to claim
Tru’s other water pitcher before sitting down to closely watch the mirror.  If
the magician wanted water, he could refill the one he originally offered to
Marik.

The serpent’s tail continued its slow rotation while
the morning progressed into afternoon.  After it passed the northern compass
point, Marik’s concerns both expanded and shrank.  That the serpent had failed
to find Rail in Tullainia or Perrisan meant that his father must be closer than
ever!  Yet at the same time, the longer the serpent sought his father without
success, the tighter his nerves wound.  A premonition that something had gone
wrong persisted in his gut.