Mind of the Magic (Arhel Book 3) (23 page)

She shivered and wrapped her arms around herself. “You never heard such screaming, Bytoris. I hope
I
never do again.”

Faia closed her eyes. She was reliving that moment as she had experienced it far away, when the billowing emeshest went rage-red and came grabbing after her.

The magic ended when I refused the Dreaming God; when I broke down the barrier. But I only did what I had to do to save my daughter and my friends, she told herself. I only did what I
had
to do.

She could no longer doubt, however, that all of Arhel’s magic had died at that instant. In her mind’s eye, she could see Ariss on its magic-built hill sinking back into the swamp over which it had been built, and flying castles all over Arhel smashing into the ground. She could see the lights of an entire continent going out at once, while the darkness of an earlier, primitive time descended, perhaps never to be lifted again. She could hear the screams as clearly as if she’d stood there beside Renina.

Bytoris’s wife was continuing her story. Her voice was oddly flat while she talked, her face strangely expressionless, as if she were recounting things that had happened far away to someone she didn’t know. “—and we buried over three hundred people in a mass grave outside the city walls, and we only hope we’ve found all of them. Some of the things that came down took out whole houses—and everyone in them. It was…” She shivered, but still her eyes remained expressionless. “I never want to go through anything like that again. Ever.”

THE merest flicker of power, the tiniest thrill of magic, coursed through Faia’s nerves. She woke to find herself in a comfortable bed, in a warm but unfamiliar room, and for a moment did not recall how she came to be there. Then the murmur of a child who was sleeping on the floor brought the events of the previous day back to her. Bytoris’s house. She nodded and got up carefully. She stepped silently over the piles of children who slept on padded mats on the floor and slipped downstairs, where she found the makeshift hearth—this was a house once run by the most modern of magical conveniences, now less convenient and practical than a poor farmer’s sod hut. The embers of last night’s cookfire still glowed, and a bucket of already-used water sat next to them, warming.

Faia took a rag and sponged off—the city was short on clean water, though engineers were desperately working on a system of aqueducts that would someday provide it. If they didn’t get clean water into the city soon, the plagues would start. Faia, washing down from the tiny bucket of dirty water, shivered when she thought of that. If Renina never wanted to see a castle fall from the sky, Faia never again wanted to see the aftermath of a plague. She needed to get out soon—needed to get back to Kirtha when she could.

But first, she had to find Thirk. And the tiny promise of magic that had awakened her was her guidelight.

Faia heard people moving upstairs. She wanted to get out of the house before they found her and tried to talk her out of going alone. Alone, undistracted, she knew she could find the source of magic; if she had to deal with Delmuirie and her brother, she might not be able to concentrate.

Going alone would certainly be dangerous—but time was running out. Hundreds in Bonton had already died; thousands across Arhel were dead. And
tens
of thousands would die in the upcoming days and months, all because Arhel’s magic was gone; they would die from hunger, as fields full of magically augmented crops withered and failed; they would die from panics and riots when the cities ran out of food; they would die from diseases; or they would die from wars as one have-nothing city-state attacked another in the hopes of garnering anything that might help it survive. All those future deaths had in common two things. They didn’t have to happen. And Faia could, perhaps, prevent them.

If she could find the chalice, she thought she would be able to control it, and revive Arhel’s magic; that might stop the disasters that were coming. She believed she was the link between Arhel’s past and its future.

She dressed, strapped on her knife, tucked her sling into her waistband and borrowed her brother’s spear-tipped staff. Hers had been better, but it had gone down the throat of a Klog, and nothing would convince her that hadn’t been worthwhile. She wasn’t planning on leaving her brother’s home for good—but she had no idea how much time she would need in order to do what had to be done.

It will take until I find Thirk, she told herself. Until I figure out some way to make him give me the chalice.

Faia slipped to the front door and lifted the latch, which squeaked as it rose. She bit her lip and looked back—no one had yet come downstairs. Carefully she eased the door open and slipped out, into the cool grey dawn. A light rain misted the cobblestones, washing them but doing little to alleviate the stink of the effluvia in the gutters. The rain made the paving stones slick, too—the leather soles of her boots slipped and she nearly fell into the mire.

She strained the muscles of her right hip when she caught herself. The hip burned, and she swore softly as she limped out of the circle and down the twisting, dark back street.

The strength of the rain picked up as she walked. She pulled the brim of her hat down so that it kept the back of her neck dry, and kept the water out of her eyes. She slogged along—she didn’t want to think about what she was wading through.

She turned onto a main thoroughfare. Already the streets were crowded with farmers and traders and merchants—the early risers in every town and city. Faia didn’t want crowds, though—they would distract her. She closed her eyes for an instant, feeling again the tiny, warm flash of magic—she used that flash as a guidelight and aimed herself toward it. When she opened her eyes, she stood facing the entrance to a smaller street; she headed into it. It meandered as every street in Bonton seemed to meander, turning back on itself in big, twisting loops so that sometimes it led her toward her goal, and sometimes directly away. She looked for signs, but the few she found were written in the ancient and defiantly unreadable Bontonard ideographs instead of the progressive Hortag-Ingesdotte script developed by Arissonese mages. Her street intersected with another little street that veered off at a sharp angle to her left, and to her right became the entries to a dozen little alleys.

Faia had seen something like these streets before, though she couldn’t recall quite where. She took the turnoff that didn’t go into all the little alleys—she didn’t like the looks of those—and found herself switching back and forth up the side of a hill.

It clicked then. Cows. Cowpaths. She’d wandered along them when she’d been a small child, in the hills around Bright—and the streets of Bonton were nothing less than paved, glorified cowpaths. The city had been laid out by cows—and not nice, sensible ones that wanted to get home in time to be milked, either. These had been cows that had gotten into the corn mash and were weaving around after making a night of it, with no place in particular to go and plenty of time to get there.

Faia’s foot went down into a fresh pile of droppings, and the redolent stink wafted up to her, she thought further malignant thoughts about cows. The greatest advantage cities offered over small villages seemed to her to be that the livestock stayed on the roads, while the people kept to the walkways—but this city had no walkways; the townsfolk had built out onto them, and men and beasts were forced to share the streets.

“Idiots,” Faia grumbled.

She walked further, then stopped as she sensed a flicker of magic again. That way. She turned, following the tiny thread of power—and suddenly realized the tingle at the back of her neck had returned. She felt again what she’d felt in the mountains—that someone followed her. She felt eyes watching her, though of course that was ridiculous. No one knew she was out.

Then she thought, perhaps I should have been more careful where I walked. Perhaps this is not about the chalice—about magic. Perhaps this is simply a dangerous part of town.

She was so tall that with her hair tucked up into her hat and her heavy, baggy erda and sexless peasant clothes, she’d assumed most folk would mistake her for a man, and a big man at that. But even a lone, big man could be in danger. She loosened her knife in its sheath, and casually picked up her pace. She was still making her way up the same hill, though the road dipped and rose unevenly. She nodded to the rare passerby, who nodded back, and once stopped a woman in the street for the single reason that it gave her a chance to turn and look behind her.

She wasn’t sure, looking back the way she’d come, that she’d seen anything real. She thought she’d noticed a bit of movement at the far edge of one building that jutted further into the street than the ones on either side of it. The woman answered Faia’s question about a tanner with a vague shrug, then scurried off, and Faia headed up the hill again, moving even faster than she’d been before, but trying to make her increased pace look normal.

She listened. She could not hear anyone following her. The follower, if there was one, could be quiet if he wanted to badly enough.

Then the skies opened up, and what had been a miserable drizzle became a deluge that poured onto her head; rivers of rain sluiced off the roofs of the houses on both sides of the road and crashed and pounded against the cobblestones; the road became in an instant a river, and a fast, deadly one at that. Faia leapt for the stairs of the nearest house and clambered up them, then crouched, tucked back under the eaves where the storm couldn’t quite reach her. She looked down the road. A bedraggled form pulled itself out of the torrent of the street onto another front stoop.

She studied the form. Male, she thought. The man was too far away for her to make out his features—and most of his face was hidden by beard anyway. He saw her looking in his direction and turned his back on her.

The man was dressed in the same sort of Bontonard foul-weather dress she’d seen on the local merchants and tanners—wide-skirted broidered black coat; rain hood; high, wax-treated boots. Most of the Bontonard men were clean-shaven, or sported dramatic, bushy mustaches; perhaps the beard would help her identify the man should she have to describe him…

“Hey, tha’!” The woman of the house, plump and scowling, threw open her door; Faia jumped. “Hey, tha’! Get tha’self on, naow! Tha’ cannot be sittin’ on ma’ stoop! I don’ want tha’ here!” She had a stick in her hands, which she brandished at Faia.

Faia had no desire to attack a woman at her own front door—not even to stay out of the deluge. The road was still a river, but Faia thought perhaps if she pressed herself to the steep side, where once the walkway had stood, the water would be shallower and she would be all right. She jumped down into the flood and the current caught her legs. She fought to keep her balance, and moved up as close to the housefront as she could. Then she inched her way along.

She fought for every footstep of progress she made, and worried with every slip that washed her backwards that she would end up captive to the man who followed her. She had no doubt anymore that he followed her. When she jumped off the stoop, he did the same thing though no screaming, stick-wielding matron had come out of the house where he had sat to chase him away.

Perhaps he was some street thug who’d decided she looked to be an easy mark. Or perhaps he was a pimp, or a slaver—she’d heard such men existed in the bad parts of towns. This could be a bad part of town, though the houses were pretty—brightly painted and well kept.

The rain let up again, and became the faintest of drizzles. She heard voices ahead—a clamor of them, growing clearer and more shrill as she moved closer. A few moments later the river in the road shrank down until it roared only in the deep-angled center. Faia noted that the cowpies and other animal spoor were all washed away. She grinned. The stinking city had finally received the bath it so desperately needed. Faia ran the rest of the way up the hill to get away from the man who followed her—she thought she stood a good chance of losing him. Few were the people who could run for any distance uphill. She raced around a sharp curve, ducked down a narrow, dark alley, and ran out of that into a clearing, and almost into the center of disaster.

She threw herself back into the alley, behind the protruding wall of the nearest house, and prayed that she hadn’t been seen. In the square ahead, battle raged. Men, blood-streaked and wild-eyed, fought three of the First Folk, who launched themselves in tandem from the roofs of the houses surrounding the square and attacked, then retreated to the roofs again, screeching.

“Kill em!” the men bellowed. “Set fire to ‘em! Burn the houses they’re sitting on!”

“Nay! They’ll only fly away—then we’ll have burned our own houses,” one voice retorted. “Bring out their brother!”

The voices rose in assent.

“Aye, bring him out! Wheel him out!”

A storage door opened, and a handful of men pulled something forward—a statue, Faia thought at first—though if it were a statue, it had been carved by a genius. There were parts of it she realized were too perfect though; the translucent wings, unfurled and arched, the delicate rilles spread around the face, the perfection of the nubby hide—those were nothing created by the hands of artists. The beast had been as much a living creature as the three who screamed in rage as the men wheeled it out—only now it was dead, stuffed and posed on a cart for display.

The three First Folk went into a frenzy, and Faia had a hard time remembering that they were thinking creatures, like her. They seemed no more than animals as they dove and shrieked and killed. Surely the men they fought believed them to be beasts, for no one would stuff and mount the skin of a dead enemy, unless he thought it a trophy.

She thought, however, that the existence of the stuffed Klaue must have been at least a part of the incitement for their enraged attack. She tried to imagine a stuffed human being rolled out into the street to taunt its fellow humans—surely humans would react much as the First Folk were reacting.

One of the First Folk flew in a high, tight circle over the alley in which Faia hid, and Faia froze. She prayed that it wouldn’t see her; it screeched and plummeted to the ground just on the other side of the corner where she hid—so close she could make out the pebble-on-a-pebble texture and iridescent sheen of its skin. She held her breath, afraid the monster might hear even that slightest of sounds, and trembled.