Darkening Skies (The Hadrumal Crisis) (46 page)

Jilseth reminded herself of that other staple of chimney corner wisdom; as soon as pride lifts the chin, the feet are apt to trip. She turned her attention from the dead corsair back to her magecraft. The Archmage stood at her side with Cloud Master Rafrid opposite them both. The Element Masters could make note of whatever had befallen the oarsman. Jilseth’s responsibility above all else was to sustain this spell.

She could already feel tremors of exertion in her thighs and across her shoulders. Gritting her teeth, she forced her hands to shape the swirling magic with steady care and tried to block her ears to the sounds forcing their way past her fingers.

Except in the corner of her eye, Jilseth could see that the Nahik islanders who had so solicitously crowded around the starveling corsairs were now all recoiling with cries of unmistakable horror.

‘They are saying that all these ships must leave and at once.’ Planir translated the Archipelagan shouts. ‘They are refusing them food and water. They say they must not make landfall anywhere else within the domain.’

Jilseth could hear the hapless corsairs’ protests being shouted down with fearful fury by the other islanders. With ominous speed, the cacophony turned savage; yells of hatred cutting across screams of pain and despair.

The crowd surged forward again, this time with raised fists. Jilseth wondered how the galley’s exhausted crew would ever be able to fight their way free. But clearly they had done so. This poor wretch had survived to be hacked to death on Relshaz’s dockside.

‘Courier doves.’ Rafrid jabbed a finger at the magecrafted vision.

‘Have a care!’ Jilseth said sharply as the Cloud Master’s finger came perilously close to the flutter of white wings disappearing into the blurred haze edging her spell.

Speaking was a dreadful mistake. The words rasped in her throat as the reek of parboiled flesh and the acrid fumes of the rock oil instantly filled her nose and mouth. Her next breaths came fast and shallow but offered no relief from the sense of suffocation.

She had already been feeling light-headed. Now Jilseth fought an impulse to gasp desperately for air. In that remote corner of her mind, calm consideration told her that sucking these fumes so deep into her lungs would leave her coughing uncontrollably. Worse she would be wholly incapable of sustaining her spell.

Nostrils flaring, she succeeded in forcing her breathing into a slow and settled rhythm. The thumping pulse of blood in her temples eased to a dull drum beat and only the ache in the angle of her tightly clenched jaw remained as evidence of her silent struggle.

‘More doves are being loosed over there,’ Planir commented. ‘That’s how the word spread so quickly.’

‘No great surprise.’ Rafrid clasped his hands behind his back. ‘He can have no understanding of the Archipelago at all if he truly believes they will pay him tribute.’

‘How far has that word spread?’ Planir mused. ‘Has Velindre had any word from Kheda?’

The spell flickered in Jilseth’s instant of surprise. She remembered the magewomen mentioning this Archipelagan but knew no more of him than that. In the next moment, she realised that Planir was asking Rafrid.

‘There’s no sight nor sound of him as yet.’ The Cloud Master’s reply betrayed his own exasperation.

‘Troanna,’ Kalion said sharply on the other side of the room. ‘We have seen enough for the present. We cannot risk alerting this villain to our scrying. You know how close we came last time!’

‘You need not tell me so,’ the Flood Mistress snapped.

Planir took a step away from Jilseth’s side. ‘What have you seen?’

Jilseth spoke before either Kalion or Troanna could answer. ‘What more do you need to see here, Archmage? Forgive me, I do not think that I can draw this vision back to its beginning,’ she added with bitterest chagrin.

If necromancy could only be worked once with any piece of dead flesh or bone, as long as the stone mage didn’t let the spell unravel, the vision would play itself out time and again in a circle of memory as endless as a serpent devouring its own tail. A scene could be watched and rewatched until whatever secrets it held had been learned.

But though she had gone so far and so deep into this necromancy, Jilseth could feel the strength of her affinity beginning to fail her, faster and more brutally than ever before.

Planir stood motionless, his eyes distant with contemplation. An instant later, he turned quickly to Rafrid. ‘Make a note of all the domain pennants represented on that beach. That will suffice.’

As Rafrid nodded and fetched paper and pen from the Archmage’s writing desk, Planir took a few swift strides across the room to look at Troanna’s scrying.

Jilseth looked after him. She couldn’t help herself.

The Flood Mistress ripped her hands away from the bowl, the curt gesture embodying her frustration. The perfume essences gliding across the water evaporated to fill the air with a riot of discordant scents.

Jilseth glimpsed Kalion clenching his fists as though something had stung his palms.

She hastily returned her attention to her own spell as it dimmed. Rafrid deftly copied the Archipelagan symbols fluttering in the breeze. For a moment, the scrape of quill on paper was the only sound in the room.

As the emerald magelight of her scrying faded, Troanna glowered at Planir. ‘We would learn a great deal more and a great deal more swiftly if we could work a clairaudience into this scrying.’

Her gaze shifted across the room. ‘Cloud Master?’ The emphasis she laid on Rafrid’s title turned her question into a barely veiled rebuke.

Jilseth tensed. Rafrid looked up from his sketching. His weathered face hardened but rather than turn to acknowledge Troanna, let alone reply, he flicked his upraised hand. A brief glimmer of sapphire magic sped across the room to open one of the narrow windows. Clean cold air obeyed the Cloud Master’s summons, carrying the cloying perfumes away to be lost on the winds curling around this high tower.

Rafrid returned his attention to the necromantic vision, making a few last notes before smiling at Jilseth. ‘We have all that we need. You may release your spell.’

Once again, Jilseth couldn’t help stealing a quick look across to Planir. At the Archmage’s barely perceptible nod, she spread her hands wide and let the glowing lattice unravel. Swirling threads of golden magecraft faded to amber and to dull ochre before vanishing entirely.

‘My compliments, madam mage, on a notable achievement.’ Rafrid’s gesture swept the noisome smoke and steam away to follow the perfumes out of the window. ‘I told you that your magic would return, didn’t I? Better than ever, it seems,’ he added with warm approbation.

Jilseth settled for a modest smile. If she tried to speak, she feared some quaver in her voice would betray her exhaustion to Kalion and Troanna. The Element Master and Mistress were looking across the room, no hint of sympathy and scant patience on their faces.

If only the Cloud Master had some spell to relieve the unpleasant atmosphere between these senior mages.

She swallowed her nausea at the sight of the pathetic carrion in the bottom of the bowl. As the roiling oil slowed, the corsair’s hand was revealed, as thoroughly cooked as some pig’s trotter in a vat.

Rafrid peered at it, his wrinkles deepening as he grimaced with distaste. ‘What shall we do with this, Archmage?’

‘Burn it.’ Kalion gestured and the dead hand rose from the oil’s surface.

The wizened fingers were as clawed as Jilseth’s own had been when she worked her spell. She found the sight oddly disquieting.

‘No.’ As Planir spoke, the hand sank back down out of sight. ‘The Archipelagans abhor such rites for the dead.’

‘They abhor all our magecraft,’ Troanna said with icy contempt. ‘In which case, wouldn’t the Aldabreshi insist on fire’s purification for any mortal remains which have been so thoroughly defiled by sorcery?’

‘This man had no say in the use we’ve made of him.’ Planir gestured and the hand vanished.

Jilseth saw Troanna and Kalion looking at each other. She needed no magic, elemental or aetheric, to foresee their criticism of his behaviour, when this morning’s work was laid before the Council of Hadrumal.

‘Hearth Master?’ Planir smiled courteously as though nothing untoward had happened. ‘Flood Mistress? What did you see the Mandarkin doing?’

Kalion answered curtly. ‘He has gathered them all together, these slaves or apprentices or whatever he considers them.’

‘We would know more on that score if we could hear what they were saying,’ Troanna interjected.

‘And if there is a single trinket there with clairaudience bound within it,’ Rafrid said instantly, ‘our own spell would immediately resonate with it and let this wizard know that he has been found.’

‘But not by whom,’ Troanna retorted.

‘You’ll wager against him having some means of pursuing such a resonance?’ demanded Rafrid.

‘Don’t you think we should learn all we can,’ Troanna countered, ‘before some ham-fisted Soluran scrying blunders against his affinity and ruins all our chances?’

‘No Soluran can scry that far,’ Rafrid scoffed. ‘They have no quintessential wizardry.’

‘You’re certain that they have no artefact that might overcome such deficiencies in their magecraft?’

‘The Mandarkin seems—’ Kalion shot both the Flood Mistress and the Cloud Master a sour look as he raised his voice to speak over them ‘—to be challenging his slaves to use their own affinity to stimulate the magic instilled into the artefacts which he has given them.’

‘We cannot be sure of that,’ Troanna objected.

‘What else could they be doing?’ Kalion retorted. ‘You saw—’

Planir interrupted. ‘What exactly did you see? Nolyen? Tell me what you saw, not what you think it might mean.’

Jilseth was as startled as he was by the Archmage’s command. She also saw that Nol would probably rather face the Mandarkin mage than Troanna and Kalion’s indignation. But he was equal to this challenge.

‘They were in the central garden of the mage’s pavilion,’ he said promptly, ‘gathered in a circle. The Mandarkin had them each stand up in turn and we saw magelight rising from the artefact which each one held or was wearing.’

‘Are they all there?’ Rafrid asked. ‘Including the women?’

‘Yes, Cloud Master.’ Nolyen nodded.

‘As untutored as they are,’ Kalion broke in, ‘I believe we can determine their affinities by their innate magelight.’

‘Though that’s no guide to the strength of their aptitudes,’ Troanna said acidly.

‘Obviously,’ Kalion glared at her.

‘What’s the tally?’ Rafrid asked Nolyen.

The water mage cleared his throat. ‘Four have an air affinity, five with the earth, six with fire and eight are born to water magic.’ His gaze slid sideways to Troanna.

She glowered. ‘Since we know this vagabond has a water affinity, we can assume he will find it easiest to teach them to master their talents.’

‘A dual affinity,’ Rafrid corrected her. ‘We’ve seen him commanding lightning to deadly effect.’

‘Indeed.’ Troanna’s gaze challenged Planir once again. ‘How do you propose to contain this threat?’

He shrugged. ‘The Aldabreshi warlords seem to be making their own preparations, given all we hear of them buying boatloads of slaves from Relshaz.’

‘I have no interest in Aldabreshin warlords. What do you propose to do, Archmage?’ she repeated. ‘Where we faced a single renegade mage, soon we will face thirty!’

‘They are not all mageborn,’ Jilseth said suddenly. ‘That lad with the injured face, the first one whom the Mandarkin bound with an artefact, he is a Caladhrian and doesn’t have a scrap of magic within him.’

Troanna looked at her, incredulous. ‘You think that makes a difference? One less mageborn? One more nameless slave?’

‘His name is Hosh.’ Planir said with quiet authority. ‘He was enslaved alongside Captain Corrain and the others, when the former Baron Halferan and the rest of his men were murdered. His mother, Abiath—’

‘Captain Corrain!’ Kalion’s fury turned the water in the scrying bowl to steam which heated further to vanish in the blink of an eye. ‘The man responsible for all this, defying Hadrumal’s edicts, summoning an unknown wizard from some nameless tradition—’

‘That’s hardly fair,’ Rafrid objected. ‘The man had no say in his own enslavement. What he’s done since may have proved catastrophically ill-advised but he has been striving to defend his home, his kith and kin—’

‘That means nothing,’ Kalion snarled. ‘He has easily as much to answer for as this Mandarkin.’

‘To this point, perhaps,’ Planir said drily. ‘I suspect Anskal will prove the greater threat from now on.’

‘And you believe that the Aldabreshi are fit to challenge him?’ Troanna demanded.

‘Perhaps they won’t have to. Perhaps the Mandarkin and his apprentices will manage to kill themselves with arrogance and indiscipline,’ Rafrid offered in a grim attempt at humour.

Distasteful though it was, Jilseth couldn’t help hoping the Cloud Master was right.

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