Mind of the Magic (Arhel Book 3) (7 page)

Evidently those boundaries hadn’t been stable at all. Now the light spread to encompass much of the lower city, including the places where Medwind and Kirgen and Roba lived and worked. Her grip tightened on her staff.

Now perhaps I know why I haven’t heard anything from anyone here in the past few months. Faia clutched Kirtha tight and stared down into that beautiful, frightening light.

I’m stronger, she thought—but so is that. Damn Delmuirie! How in all the heavens am I going to get through that?

She turned to Witte. “That light shouldn’t be there!” she shouted over the wind. “That’s what surrounded Delmuirie—”

“The cage of light?!” Witte interrupted. He stared down over the cliff at the unmoving sheet of light. “But I thought you told me it was a little pillar of light beneath the library! That’s enormous.”

Faia nodded. Strands of her hair, blown loose from her braid, whipped into her face and clung, damp with snow. She brushed them back—a futile gesture, for the wind never slackened—and shouted, “We can’t go down there. If you move into that, it swallows you and freezes you. We’d never get out. We’re going to have to find shelter though! We can’t stay out here.”

She started toward one of the few intact First Folk domes that remained on their level of the city, up above the encroaching wall of Delmuirie’s magic. Witte, though, tugged at the leg of her breeches and pointed toward the side of the mountain that backed them. “In there!” he yelled. “Cave will be warmer than one of those stone domes!”

She nodded and followed him. It was then that she realized she didn’t have her big pack. She’d slung it over one shoulder when she left Omwimmee Trade… but it wasn’t on her shoulder anymore. She looked around the plateau, and still didn’t see it.

“Witte! My pack isn’t here! What happened to it?”

Witte looked around, his face both puzzled and worried. “I don’t know. I thought my magic was strong enough to transport all of us and our belongings here, but maybe it wasn’t. The transport spell will drop inanimate things before animate ones—that’s a safety feature. It might have gone over my mass limit!” He turned and headed for the tunnels, leaning into the wind.

An especially vicious gust, screaming down through the mountain pass, hit Faia broadside as she turned, and she staggered. She scooped Kirtha into her arms and hurried after Witte.

Into the tunnels, she thought. She knew they weren’t caves—they were the labyrinthine lairs of the long-extinct First Folk. They wandered down through the mountains, their long, uncharted passageways honeycombing the whole of the ancient ruins. Into the tunnels—and perhaps she could find a way
through
those tunnels, using magic and intelligence. Or perhaps not. Perhaps there was no way through. None of the scholars had gone more than a few rooms into the maze in any direction or from any opening. No one knew how the rooms linked or where the tunnels led.

The wind cut instantly as she ran into the opening after Witte. The dark of outdoors did not begin to compare to that of the lightless tunnel. Faia stopped. She could make out none of the details of her surroundings—her eyes refused to adjust. She stood still and held them closed a moment, then opened them. Still she was blind.

“Faljon says,
’Only fools walk in darkness/ When light is at hand,’
“ she muttered. She conjured a faeriefire. The bright spot of light cast long, dancing shadows, and showed her a rounded little cave with tunnels leading in three directions.

Witte seemed to have vanished. She worried that he might be lost, or that she might not be able to locate him if he wandered too far. “Witte!” she shouted. “Where are you?”

“Stay where you are!” Because of the echoes in the tunnel, Faia couldn’t tell where Witte’s voice had come from, but he was nearby. She waited, and before long, he popped out from a side passage, his own faeriefire following him. “I’m right here. I was beginning to wonder if you’d fallen off the side of the mountain.” He grinned at her. “I was exploring a bit,” he said. “Trying to figure out how this place is put together.”

Faia nodded. “I have an idea about that. I can cast a seek-and-find spell—I used to do something similar when my sheep scattered. I can call hundreds of faeriefires that will seek through all the passageways, looking for a tunnel that goes where we need to go. When one finds the way, the others will follow it back. The spell is difficult, but I’ve done it before, and I think it will work here as well as in searching for sheep.”

“That seems reasonable, but what will you send your spell in search of?”

Faia thought. “One of my friends, I suppose. Medwind, perhaps. I know her best, and can give the faeriefires the best description of her.”

Witte smiled. “That should work just fine.”

Faia closed her eyes and summoned the magic—easy, when the whole of the ruins thrummed and crackled with it. But while the summoning was easy, the control was hard; harder now than it had ever been when Arhel’s magic was weaker. Still, she focused. She’d learned control in the past years—never again would she accidentally melt a stone village into glass.

Thousands of faeriefires appeared and swarmed for a moment around Faia, Kirtha, and Witte. The faeriefires coalesced suddenly and hung in the air. Then they burst apart, as if they were a flower budded and bloomed and gone to seed in an instant. The individual fires raced away in all directions.

“Just wait,” Faia said. “This will take a while.”

For a few moments, only Witte’s and Faia’s faeriefire lights lit the cavern. Then Faia noticed flickers along some of the cavern walls, and in a rush, the faeriefire swarm reformed. It hung in front of the three of them again, and after an instant, took off down one passage. Witte, faster than she would ever have imagined, turned and raced after it.

Faia shifted Kirtha around to ride on her back, and hooked her arms beneath her daughter’s legs. Kirtha wrapped her arms around Faia’s neck and shouted, “Go, horsy!”

“Not so
tight
,” Faia grumbled. She took off through the labyrinth of connected stone caverns, all carved out of the living rock by the First Folk. Each domed room had three or four arched paths leading to other rooms. All of them looked exactly like every other one.

How could even the First Folk have found their way through this place? she wondered. Perhaps they had done it the same way she had—with magic. No simpler solution occurred to her.

Witte abruptly shot around a corner and dropped out of sight, chasing the faeriefire swarm that plunged ahead of him into a low, wide tunnel that twisted downward, spiraling into blackness. Faia dashed after him and nearly toppled; the tunnel was uncomfortably steep. Just more proof that the creators hadn’t been anything like humans—people would have built stairs. She found the sensation of chasing shadows in circles, with darkness riding hard on her heels, dizzying. Occasionally she’d catch a glimpse of Witte’s braid bouncing as he ran down the steep grade ahead of her, but she never had more than that tiny reassurance that he was still ahead of her before he raced out of her line of sight again.

She passed one exit—she assumed it led into another layer of connecting chambers, but had no time to peek out of the tunnel to see. Witte and the faeriefires raced downward.

Finally, the tunnel leveled out into a sand-floored chamber. The rooms and tunnels there did not curve in the winding stone web of the upper layers. Instead, corridors ran off in four directions, perfectly straight, with the dark arches of carved doorways lining the corridors at regular intervals that ran on to the vanishing point.

Faia no longer needed her faeriefire light. The corridor that led straight in front of her and the one that ran off to her left both gleamed with the same warm golden light she had seen from the promontory.

The cluster of faeriefires hung in the air at the periphery of this golden wall, swarming and flickering. Those individual fires that at any instant were closest to the barrier darted into it and back out again; it was obvious to Faia that the faeriefire swarm was waiting for Witte and her to move forward. Faia looked around for Witte; she found him sitting against the arching far wall, wearing an expression of intense concentration on his face. His breathing was steady, though Faia gasped for air after her run. She considered that fact for an instant and found she didn’t care for it. Witte had returned to remarkably good shape for someone who had been begging passage to Father Dark’s domain only weeks before.

The little man twisted absently at the tip of his braid. “We have a problem,” he said. “We can’t get through here. Our way out is blocked.”

“I noticed that, actually.” She couldn’t keep the edge from her voice. She tried to figure out why her spell had failed—and wondered why the faeriefires could go in and out of the barrier of light that she dared not touch. Even standing near Delmuirie’s light, Faia found the energy of the magic wall almost unbearable. It thrummed through her bones from her head to the soles of her feet, and pulsed in time with her blood. Her skin prickled and her breath came fast. She felt as if she were going to explode.

She slipped Kirtha off her back and crouched on the sand floor beside her. “Sit right here and don’t move. Mama has to find a way through this.”

Kirtha nodded solemnly, eyes round and lips pursed.

Faia formed the image of Medwind Song in her mind. The young, sharp-featured face, skin sun-darkened, hair white as light itself from a Timeride of heroic distance; eyes pale and cold as ice—warrior eyes. Faia held that image and recalled the feel of Medwind’s magic. While she struggled to clarify the image and the feel, the faeriefires flashed in front of her, dancing in and out of Delmuirie’s wall of magic and trying to lead her forward when she didn’t follow, they came back for her like well-trained sheepdogs trying to lead a recalcitrant shepherd to a missing lamb. She ignored them and focused, until her picture of Medwind Song was as clear as she could make it. Then she focused outward, using her magic to locate a match for her memories inside of Delmuirie’s wall.

She failed. That endlessly surging current swallowed every tendril of magic she sent forward until she started to feel feedback as the barrier magic followed her magical paths back to her, hungry for a new source of food. Faia broke off contact and stood, shivering and gasping, wondering what she could do next.

Witte said, “What’s wrong?”

“I can’t find Medwind in that mess, and I’m afraid to try again. The magic of that barrier acts like a living thing—and a hungry one. It tried to absorb me just now. I broke off contact before it could, but I don’t dare touch it again, or it will swallow me.” She wrapped her arms tightly around herself; tears welled in her eyes, and she swallowed hard, fighting the lump in her throat “My friends are in there, and I don’t know how I can get them out.”

He nodded. “Let me try. I don’t have the magic you do, but maybe that will just mean I won’t look as tasty.” Witte frowned and stared down at his hands. After a long, tense moment, he stood and gestured, muttering something Faia couldn’t quite hear. A shimmer of silver appeared in front of Faia, like a window into the golden light. At first she saw nothing in the window at all—then Medwind Song appeared, somehow even more beautiful than Faia had remembered her. The Hoos woman stared upward, her lips curved in a smile of unimaginable bliss. She sat at a table with First Folk tablets in front of her, frozen—Faia couldn’t even see a sign that she breathed. Golden light surrounded her.

“That’s Medwind,” Faia told Witte.

“Oh, dear,” he murmured. “She looks like she’s in a bit of trouble, wouldn’t you say?” He waved a hand at the magical mirror he’d created.

The scene in the mirror shifted. Medwind vanished, to be replaced by Roba Morgasdotte, who knelt in the burial chambers. A wax tablet and stylus lay in her lap, evidently dropped at the moment the golden light had overcome her. She was hugely pregnant, and frozen in place; her expression was identical to Medwind’s.

“Oh, Lady! That’s Roba Morgasdotte,” Faia said “She was supposed to have had her baby months ago.”

Witte frowned. “Tsk, tsk. This doesn’t look good. Not good at all.”

The view shifted again, this time to Thirk, toppled on the ground where Faia had last seen him. He’d fallen when Roba pushed him while saving Kirtha’s life—he’d been trapped in that wall of light ever since. His equally blissful expression grated on Faia’s nerves, but she was pleased that he, at least, remained frozen in place next to his idol, Edrouss Delmuirie. And Delmuirie—

Thirk’s image faded, replaced by Delmuirie’s. His was a face that would have looked at home in any back-country village—his heavy cheekbones and sharp nose should have made him homely. His eyes, staring upward with that same cowlike expression of contentment, didn’t improve his looks either. He had, however, the most perfect smile Faia had ever seen. She wished she could punch it off his face. She stared at him, glowering. The entire mess was his fault. “Idiot,” she snarled.

Witte looked up at her, his expression hurt “Me? An idiot?” he asked. She pointed to the form in the mirror. “No. Delmuirie.”

“Oh.” He nodded. “That almost goes without saying.” He waved a hand again and the view once more changed. Now the mirror showed Kirgen, who sat with a stack of drypress beside him and a scritoire in his hand, stopped in the middle of the translating work he had come to love so much. Faia bit her lip hard enough to taste blood—if she didn’t love Kirgen, he still remained one of her dearest friends, and the father of her daughter. Somehow, she had to save—

“My da!” Kirtha shrieked, and leapt to her feet before Faia could stop her. The child bolted across the floor of the chamber and leapt through Witte’s window, straight into the enveloping golden light.

“NO!” Faia screamed and lunged forward after her daughter. She, however, didn’t reach the light. Suddenly her feet seemed to grow to the floor. She couldn’t move—couldn’t take a single step.

Kirtha ran as if moving through deep water, one step, two steps, and then a third—and then she froze, just inside the wall of light, one foot still lifted as if she were going to complete her next step at any instant. As she came to a stop, the light of Delmuirie’s wall grew even brighter and more intense, and billowed out again, coming to rest after a moment only a few finger’s breadths from the place where Faia stood, trapped.