Changespell Legacy (18 page)

Where's the Council? Why haven't they done anything about this situation? Why can't anyone tell us what's going on?

He wished he didn't know some of the answers . . . just as he simultaneously wished he knew them all.

"Mohi asked me," the man said, recapturing Arlen's attention and making his exaggerated patience as plain as the awkward features of his face, "if you came here, to make sure you got a horse."

"Did he?" Arlen murmured. "That was a kindness."

"Said you were a big help on the road yesterday." The man shrugged narrow shoulders. "So I held this one back a while. Not that I'll have any trouble getting rid of him if you don't want him. But it's going to be a while before the road coach crew scouts clear the road for the alternate route. You don't like the looks of the horse, you're free to wait."

"Not a luxury I have," Arlen said. "But I'd be glad to return him at the next livery ring instead of buying him outright."

The man laughed, a barking sound. "Think you can do better, do you? Didn't I just tell you to take a look around? The coachers're lucky they've held onto their harness horses—that horse won't make it back to me no matter what . . . so I'm selling him, not leasing him, and when all this is over people'll be dumping horses cheap. I'll stock up again easy enough."

So Arlen had his horse, complete with sale document, rough gaits, placid temperament, and distinctly gassy nature. And as he looped the reins over the animal's head and considered the narrow streets of the outlying area he approached—the first precinct city he'd come to and a river community that still had the reputation for the most finely ground flours in Camolen—he realized the blunt little man at the livery ring had told him the right of it. Even here, in Tyrla's precinct city—or what had
been
Tyrla's precinct—any number of people gave his horse furtive, covetous glances.

Arlen hesitated, ignoring his body's saddle aches and taking better stock of his surroundings . . . wishing Carey were here with him. Carey was the one used to taking note of every nuance of a journey; the one who had not only traversed Camolen in Arlen's stead, but another world as well. Arlen . . .

Arlen was more accustomed to traversing inner worlds, to tracking ideas and not strange city-ways.

Now the close-set buildings loomed over him; long and narrow, they backed up to the river, each claiming a precious spot at the water's edge and the ability to launch a waterwheel. The buildings on the opposite side of the street took more width—warehouses, mostly—but jammed together just as tightly to take advantage of the prime river territory. Some of them still bore the muddy waterline of the most recent flood several years earlier, soaked into every crevice of the brick where even diligent scrubbing couldn't reach.

At the end of this street, if he'd been told right, was a road inn with a room or two left; barring that, he'd have to venture further into the city to find an independent city inn—and that, he didn't want to do. The people of a precinct city were accustomed to magic, to its uses . . . and to its users. Arlen's was not an unknown face, even without its mustache and accustomed length of hair. He'd been here often—Council business, with Council travel booths and preferential Council accommodations.

No, best to stay on the working edges of the city, even if his horse drew the envious eye of every stranded traveler here. Travelers who wouldn't recognize him—but who consequently wouldn't accord him the respect of a man with power at his disposal.

Including travelers desperate enough to pace alongside him as he headed for the road inn, too tired to care about the churned muck he walked through. Or perhaps they were just common thieves, knowing they could make good gold with the sale of his horse. Not far ahead, he spotted the livery ring building, where he went not to turn in the horse, but to seek a night's stabling—near the hotel as was the pattern of most cities. Not far from either would be a road coach station . . . probably closed.

One man to his left, one to his right, easing closer to him; they were husky, confident, hidden in clothes entirely without style . . . meant only to keep them warm through the winter and no more. Between their hats, scarves, and hair, Arlen could see little of their faces, nothing of their expressions.

But he saw people getting out of their way.

"The horse," he said casually—if plenty loud enough to be heard—"is spelled. Unless you want to be as gelded as he is, you won't try to take him from me."

One of the men snorted, making no effort to pretend he didn't know just what Arlen was talking about.

Definitely after the horse, and bold in these disturbed and uneasy streets. "Never heard that one before."

"Bootin' nice try, though," his partner said from the other side, but closer than he'd been just an instant before. "Quick thinking. Think quicker, and you'll hurt less by giving him up to us."

Their skepticism came as no surprise. Arlen, precinct wizard, Council member, the most powerful remaining wizard in Camolen, had never heard of any such spell.

But if pressed, he thought he could come up with it.

He stopped, held out the hand through which he'd looped the reins—an offering. He said, "It makes no difference to me. You'll bleed badly, so be prepared."

They glanced at one another in wary surprise. Arlen could see their faces now—rough men, but not necessarily tough ones. Taking advantage of a crisis . . . as if people weren't having enough trouble without this kind of activity. And while
he
could take care of himself if he had to . . .

Grim temper, habitually slow to rise, made its way toward the surface. He'd gotten their attention; he'd gotten everyone's attention. He gestured with the outstretched hand and its rein, impatient. And though the men hesitated, one of them quickly made a sneeringly dismissive gesture, and they both took a step toward him, closing him in.

The inertia spell was a marvelous thing.

Just a subtle twitch of it, nothing like he'd used on the coach. Enough to use their own movement to send certain body parts opposite the direction of the rest of them.

Enough to hurt.

It got their attention.

They froze, horrified—afraid to move even to look down at themselves. The fear didn't stop their eyes from rolling in that direction, though in the next instant they looked to Arlen most beseechingly.

"Back up," he suggested gently, as if talking to idiots. At the moment, they probably were. "Back up, and go away."

Slowly, they did so. Carefully. One step, a pause, then another—until after three steps they simultaneously broke and ran.

Arlen watched them go with a wry and twisted smile, but quickly squelched it. A man less well-armed with magic than he would show more relief than that, and he'd already been memorable enough for a man trying to avoid notice. He walked briskly for the livery, knowing the story would probably reach it before he did. Already he spotted a well-bundled child sprinting along the building shadows, and a tense-looking pedestrian eased casually over to the other side of the street to avoid walking near the horse.

No doubt using the tiny spell had been a mistake. No doubt someone on this street knew the lanky traveler with no business in this section of the city had created the magic on the spot, and not simply been standing next to a triggered spell. No doubt he should have simply surrendered the horse.

Except he had to get to Anfeald. He had to reach Jaime; he had to reach the safety of his own hold, of his workroom and his trusted dispatch crew and his only chance to protect himself and the people he loved while he figured out what had happened to the Council . . . and what was happening to Camolen itself.

Moments later, with the horse tucked away and the livery ring owner's honesty secured by a combination of bribe and threat—unspoken threat, for the woman pedestrian had witnessed the thieves' flight and the wide-eyed boy at her side, cheeks still flushed with cold, matched the size of the child who'd run down the street ahead of Arlen—he stopped in front of the road inn. At first distracted by the scrawled placard in the inn's window that declared common room lodgings only, he noted only in passing that the street news carrier—one of throngs of young dispatch apprentices who relayed the most recent breaking news to those on the street—had climbed her short pedestal at the corner of the road inn. Since the interruption of services days earlier, the street news pedestals had gone abandoned, turning into bird perches and something for children to climb.

This girl, her coat flapping open and her expression too bright, a flush of fear and excitement instead of cold, didn't wait for a customer to approach her with precinct script, and didn't relay her news in discreet murmurs to select ears. Her voice, flung to the street, cracked in her effort to project . . . or maybe just with emotion. "Breaking news!" she cried, the traditional attention-getter, making Arlen realize that today, after days of painful wizardly static, he'd failed even to try the general dispatch service. Like everyone else, he turned to look at her, drawn by her urgency, drawn by her appearance after so long a silence.

"Breaking news!" she said again, and then hesitated; for a moment Arlen thought she would burst into tears rather than find the words to relay the news. Finally she blurted, "The Council of Wizards is dead!

They're all dead!" Her voice steadied slightly, lowering as her audience moved in closer. "They've been dead for days. No one knows how."

Arlen thought she went on to mention the Secondary Council, to say that the disruption in services would be handled as quickly as possible, to mouth obviously crafted phrases of reassurance from the Secondary Council itself, to repeat that no one had survived the mysterious attack other than a palomino stallion, no one knew what had happened—other than the palomino stallion.

He couldn't truly have said for sure just
what
she relayed. For as much as he'd known from within that the Council had met with disaster, he'd been unprepared to hear it confirmed; he closed his eyes and turned away, twisting inside with the enormity of the loss. Personal loss. Tyrla. Darius. Zygia. How many years had they worked together? And Camolen's loss . . . the intensity of effort it would take to recover from this, the very real potential that the Secondary Council
couldn't
. That Camolen itself would collapse into a country of panic and violence. And while the other members of the gathering crowd shouted astonished disbelief, Arlen realized anew that Camolen and its Councils—both Wizard and Lander, with their respective supportive enforcement services of peacekeepers and precinct guards—had to do more than survive their loss.

They had to survive that which had caused it.

Melting, bubbling, distorted landscape. Distorted reality.

Oh, yes. He had to get to Anfeald.

Jaime stared out the huge window of Arlen's asymmetrical office, soaking in all the things about the room that spoke of him. As much as he liked to keep potpourri simmering, he regularly let it cook down enough to burn; she could smell the faint bitter odor of the black herbs glazing the bottom of the pot on his workbench without turning her head from the snow-covered fields visible through the window.

The wall held his favorite old needlework piece—not his best, but one he'd done years earlier as a distraction from his first major spell construction. The spell that had alerted the rest of the wizard community to his true potential for spell creation and theory exploration, and had set him on the path to the Council.

She'd asked him the nature of the spell, and he'd only laughed and tickled her neck with his mustache.

Something boring and intricate in the checkspell category, she thought he'd said. She remembered the touch of his hands better than the words of his reply.

Cesna and Natt had been working in here so as to leave the dispatch wizards more room, and had moved Arlen's belongings to the side—his scribbled notes, his stones waiting for the spells he would impress upon them, the tall, carved stool that suited his lanky build. His current-projects cabinet—covered with tooled and dyed leather, filled with carefully organized papers—had been moved to make way for the apprentices' plainer, light-wood cabinet with small turquoise tiles marching around the drawers.

Arlen's workroom, so full of the feel of him and yet changing around her. Moving on, somehow.

Jaime turned away from the workbench and the view beyond, clenching her jaw in sudden anger. It was too
soon
to move on, dammit, even driven by crisis. This had been Arlen's private sanctuary, a place he had literally carved out of nothing— That's it. Get mad. Stay mad.

Then maybe it wouldn't hurt so much.

Cesna's timid voice came from the doorway. "Jaime?"

"What?" Jaime snapped, deep from her exploration of mad. She looked up just in time to see Cesna flinch, and gave herself a mental kick, giving up the mad for now. It was already evident to her that Cesna had sustained an emotional injury the day the Council had been killed—contributing to it was her last intent. So she sighed and said to the girl, "Never mind, Cesna, I'm not upset with you . . . it's just . . . a bad moment. What can I do for you?"

Still warily timid, Cesna flipped her thin blond ponytail over her shoulder . . . and her expression shifted to puzzlement. "There're two people here to see you," she said. "They say they're here on behalf of Chesba"—the Lander of Sallatier—"and they want to talk to you."

"But . . . ?" Jaime said, voicing the doubt when Cesna did not.

Cesna frowned, shaking her head. "I don't know," she said, relaxing a little. "It's reasonable that Chesba might ask for advice; his precinct wizard is dead with the Council, and Forrett, his own hold wizard . . . well, Natt is more skilled. And everybody's couriers are running ragged, so he might have decided to send some advisors."

"But." This time Jaime said it with more certainty.

With a shrug, Cesna said, "They just don't seem like Chesba's type."

Jaime rolled this little nugget over in her thoughts a moment; it didn't seem like much, although Chesba was easy to characterize—a charismatic older gentleman who didn't hesitate to do what he considered right. Then again, Cesna was the sensitive among them. And Jaime herself, once she stepped out of Arlen's quarters or the stables, was far out of her league.