Enchanter (Book 7) (30 page)

The six specimens I was examining were all stilbite-prehnite hybrid samples about the size of your thumb, recovered from the first vesicle Azhguri himself had located after his prolonged stonesinging.  They were representative of several score of crystals that the Karshak lapidaries had selected out by class, trimmed, cleaned, and polished before handing them over to Dranus for distribution to various enchanters.  Master Ulin had devoted special effort to the project.  From what Ulin had detailed in his neatly-written scroll reporting on his assays, these six were all of a class of psychomantically active minerals, and each seemed to be able to perform slightly different feats of mental magic.

That may not seem like a terribly impressive thing, but when most of your real work takes place inside your head your mental abilities take on considerable importance, professionally speaking.  The ability to focus, to recall, to visualize, and then to manage your emotional energies are all vitally important for magic to work as it’s supposed to.  Some magi used herbs and psychoactive elixirs to help control their minds.  That was a dangerous road.

But these stones held real promise of aiding mental magic without the physical cost of drugs.  One of the stones simply allowed perfect recall of any memory – and when I mean perfect, I mean down to the smell of her hair and the taste of her sweat on your tongue.  It was a heady experience surveying my life with perfect clarity of recall, heady and fraught with peril.  There are some things a man shouldn’t remember too carefully. 

And other things that seemed beyond the power of the stone’s recall.  There were areas of my life that were fuzzy and indistinct to recall – no doubt a weakness of the stone.  But on the whole it was an amazing ability to be able to manifest.  Of course it was called the Stone of Recall, and I had about two dozen of them.

Another was more rare, but actually more useful.  Hold it in your hand, read a book.  Later, pick up the stone, recall the book, and you could read every word as if it were still in front of you.  Pass it to a friend and they, too, can recall the book and the pages.  Library Stones, naturally.  There were just over a score of them.  Invaluable.

One class of stone allowed a breathtaking sharing of emotion between people who touched it, though it had little use beyond that – Empathy stones.  I had a lot of them.  Another was more well-tuned, allowing actual thoughts to be transferred, just like mind-to-mind communication.  I only had nineteen of those, so far, but the possibilities were starting to pile up in my mind.

A smaller yellow hybrid comprised of two slightly different chemical examples of stilbite with a scattering of quartz and prehnite had incredible potential: hold the stone, find affinity to it, compose yourself, and relay a mental message.  Give the stone to someone else and when they do the same, they can experience the message just as clearly as if they were in your presence.  Message Stones, until I could come up with something better.  I had a trove of these, more than three hundred so far.  The possibilities were incredible.

The last stone in the series had been dubbed the Clarity Stone, and Master Ulin simply stated in his notes that it assisted the mage in attaining a heightened state of mental acuity and awareness, and cautioned against prolonged use.

I realized why the moment I accessed it.  Suddenly I was aware of . . .
everything.

Every noise in the room, every sound, every smell, every arcane emanation.  It was nearly overwhelming, and I recoiled from the sensation the first time I attempted it.  With more caution and a slower approach I was able to find a level of control that allowed me to understand the scope of the stone’s power.

There’s no adequate way to describe it, but it’s akin to forcing your mind to study every possible aspect of any particular thing you can manage to focus upon.  Take something simple, like the silver wine cup I was drinking out of at the time.  In seconds I knew every possible thing I could every wish to know about that cup, including glimpses of its history and the details of its composition.  I knew that cup so thoroughly and understood it so completely that forever afterward I could not sip from it without reflecting so strongly on it that I eventually enchanted it with a pocket large enough for a hogshead of wine and gave it to a vassal.

The Clarity Stones allowed for a frightening amount of insight into the subtleties of enchantment.  They brought not just perception, but understanding.  When my Tal maid, Daisy, came in to empty the trash and see if I needed anything, my brief regard of her under its influence revealed far more information about the girl than I had ever wanted to know.  I knew and understood Daisy at an utterly fundamental level after regarding her for but a moment.

“Can I get you anything, Master?” she asked, politely, in well-rehearsed Narasi.  But her words held far greater meaning, now.  By the subtleties of the tone of her voice, how wide her eyes were, and a hundred other factors I now knew how relentlessly her parents and the burrow elders had forced the Tal to learn the language with the proper Riverlands accent, so desperate they were to be accepted here.

There was more, a lot more – from the story the flecks of dirt on her feet told to the singed condition of her left arm, where the fur had curled and cracked and been brushed away.  The way she held her frame, the way her nose wiggled as she sniffed unconsciously, the musky odor the Tal couldn’t help but produce . . .

She was pregnant.  And she did not yet know it, yet.

I dropped the stone, and it clattered to the table as my senses returned to normal.  It made my head swim, and despite the sudden urge to do so I knew I could not stand.  Slowly I closed my eyes and allowed my awareness to recede back to the normal six senses.

“No, Daisy,” I croaked, as I struggled to regain my composure.  “I’m fine.  Why don’t you take the rest of the day off and go see that young . . . Tal of yours?”

“Master?” she asked, confused.

“You did nothing wrong,” I assured her.  “But my magic tells me you have something to discuss with him.”

“I do?” she asked, dully.  “It does?”

“It does, indeed,” I agreed.  “Perhaps you should speak to him.  And have him speak to your father,” I said, knowingly.

It took her a moment to catch on, and I got the rare pleasure of watching a young Tal maiden – well, maiden no more – realize that she is to be a mother.  It was an impressive spectacle, one I was grateful that I did not have the Clarity stone active for.  Some things a man was just not meant to understand.

“I will go speak with him, Master,” she agreed, reluctantly.  “You are sure?” she asked, turning around suddenly as she was preparing to leave.

“I’m certain, Daisy,” I nodded, with as much gravity as I could.  “Trygg’s blessings upon you.  Now . . . go take care of your business.  You have a lot to think about and discuss with . . . ?”

“Tanan, Master,” she supplied, a little reluctantly.  “He works in the herb sheds.  He makes only a little . . . but he is strong.  And nice,” she insisted.

“And poor,” I chuckled.  “No chamber maid of mine should suffer such a fate.”  I dug into my purse and pulled out two newly-minted bronze-ringed two-ounce gold coins, fresh from the mint at Genlasten Castle.  “Take this,” I insisted.  “You’ve provided excellent service.  And you will always have employ at the castle.  But go tell your young Tanan you’ve a mind to wed.”

She took the coins in trembling paws, more than she would make here in three years. There were tears in her eyes, and she thanked me profusely before she left.  I sighed and poured my own wine, just in time to receive a communication from Pentandra for the first time since Yule, mind-to-mind.

Are you at liberty?
she began.

From a really good maid, apparently,
I sighed. 
How goes the restoration?

Well,
she admitted, sounding surprised at herself. 
Anguin is more of a Duke than I thought he would be.  He has acted with utter confidence.  It’s almost scary, how determined he is to be a good ruler.  What the hells did you give the boy?

A challenge,
I answered. 
He couldn’t have done it without seeing it so.  He was primed to mope his way through his reign, and I convinced him it was more challenging to rule, and rebuild what his fathers left him.

Well, he took your words as counsel,
she said. 
Within a week of arriving he had the palace straightened out.  Two weeks after that he had the town in hand.  There have been a few executions, some exiles, and some imprisonments, and the Iron Band got about a hundred unexpected recruits . . . . but we’re making progress.  We’re working on the countryside now – there are bandits everywhere, mostly refugees turned highwaymen for the lack of better options.  And the refugees are starving, of course. 

Have you ever met a well-fed refugee?

I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that – if you’d seen what I have, you wouldn’t jest. 

I considered what she might have witnessed in Vorone and took her advice. 
How is married life?

I should have stuck with the starving refugees.

Married life?
  What
married life?  I see Arborn maybe two days in a week, as he’s hunting bandits in the woods most of the time.  Which is fine, of course, because we don’t really need bandits in the woods, but we’ve got bandits actually running large parts of the town and that’s where we need his focus. When he is here he barely speaks, we sit and stare at each other, and he hasn’t . . . it’s been hard, readjusting,
she said, miserably.

It takes time,
I soothed. 
You’ll settle in.

It’s even worse now that we’re living in the palace,
she confided. 
But I didn’t summon you to complain,
she said, catching herself from doing just that. 
This is business.  Of a sort.  I’ve run into someone you know, and she wanted me to give you her regards.

My heart sank.  I didn’t know how, but all I could imagine was that Isily had, somehow, found her way to Vorone and was now manipulating everyone in sight at the behest of Mother.  Or her own schemes.  Of course the urge to go snub Pentandra to her face would have been irresistible . . .

Really?  Who is that?
I asked, blankly.

The goddess of love, sex, and beauty?  Ishi?  She’s been hanging around the palace.  Hanging around Vorone.  She revealed herself to me, and spoke very highly of her recent dealings with you.

Oh.             

That’s what I said.  Min, do you care to explain to me how you’ve been consorting with strange divinities and not telling me about it?  Because that bitch has the entire town in an uproar, and I’ve just about had
enough!

Chapter Fourteen

Baking Muffins With Briga

It was long past midnight when I pulled rank and got the uninterrupted use of the Everfire.

The eternal flame that sprouted at one end of the commons last year had become the focal point of a beautiful new temple – even more grand than the main temple in Vorone.  It was architecturally striking.   It was built of imported red brick from Trestendor and topped by a gorgeous white dome that was still in the process of being built.  It would eventually have a hole to allow the heat of the effect to escape. 

The Everfire now stood at the exact center of the temple, a column of magical fire that went from ten to twenty feet, depending upon the capricious nature of the elemental goddess who created it.  There was no fuel, and very little smoke.  It just erupted out of the ground like a flower growing through cobbles in the road.

As symbols of divine favor go, it was pretty impressive.  The temperature ranged from the heat of a normal fire to so hot that the priestesses kept anything flammable from the main sanctuary – there had been a few accidents. That was an acceptable risk, considering how many pilgrims trickled in over the course of a week to witness the magically divine fire.  The dozen flamesisters and noviates who staffed the temple were doing quite well from their donations.

But my purpose that evening wasn’t prayer, it was progress.  Before the cold of winter froze the ground, Banamor had several hundredweights of thick white clay excavated from the deposit near the ruins of Genly, outside the castle wall, and stored in his warehouse.  He had detailed one of his servants to strain and prepare the clay, according to the instructions of the potter who had agreed to come to Sevendor, finally. 

I didn’t know much about clay – nothing, really- but I knew that snowclay or whatever it was had special properties, and after my experience with the Clarity Stone I needed a change of pace from rocks and sticks and playing with clay seemed harmless enough.

I mixed the absolute purest samples 4:1 with thaumaturgical clay, and added a few ingredients on a whim: ground knot coral, some enchanted quartz dust (I had almost a ton of it, residue collected from vesicles. It didn’t do anything that we could tell except lower the etheric density – a lot.), various powdered zeolites, and a few other things.  I wasn’t exactly experimenting, officially . . . I was screwing around by intuition to see what would happen.  Subtle distinction.

I’d made several small batches of these things (called boules, in the trade) in slightly different compositions.  But trying to fire them properly without a real kiln proved difficult, and I didn’t want the impurities involved with a forge fire or a wood fire.  I could have attempted to use thermomantic magic to do it, but in my experience attempting to control a spell with another spell adds a level of instability and potential for disaster that suggested I find another route.  And since I just happened to have this huge column of magical fire convenient to the castle, it seemed a shame not to use it.