Sagaria (52 page)

They walked along a broad, straight path, appeared to be fashioned out of a single slab of white marble, toward the tall gray stone doorway of the temple. The splashing of the fountains was like music to Sagandran’s ears. Brightly feathered birds, unconcerned by the proximity of human beings, wandered calmly among the neatly tailored flower beds and ambling magicians. He recognized peacocks and lyrebirds, but these were among the very drabbest in their plumage. The feathers of one bird in particular shone with the metallic gleam of multicolored aluminum burnished to a high polish; looking at it for more than a few seconds almost made Sagandran’s eyes sting.

Shano held up a hand when they were in front of the huge temple doors.

“No one but magicians of the highest ability are able to enter this place as well as those under their immediate protection,” he announced solemnly. “There are fields of magical flux inside the temple that could tear your soul apart, not to mention your body, limb from limb. Be careful to stay close until I leave you in the presence of wizards far greater than I.”

Samzing raised an eyebrow. “You’re standing right next to one, young sprig,” he said.

Shano gave him a condescending smile. “Why, yes, I had indeed forgotten, and you’re quite right to remind me. Ol’ Fishface, is it not?”

He had turned to open the door by the time Samzing’s glare hit him, so he was spared the full impact of it. Even so, he staggered.

Samzing saw Perima and Sagandran looking at him and winked.

With a slow scraping noise, the doors eased themselves back and the interior of the temple was revealed.

Stillness. That was the first sense Sagandran got from it – stillness and an immense air of timeless tranquility. As they followed Shano over the threshold, their footsteps seemed muffled, as did the sound of their own breathing. Sagandran had the feeling that he could shout as loud as he wanted to and the sound would come out as no more than a murmur.

It was a little darker inside than it was in the bright sunshine outside, but only a little. Enormous windows of stained glass stretched from floor to ceiling on every side; they made the ones in Queen Mirabella’s throne room look
like poky little portholes by comparison. The temple windows were paralleled – mirrored, Sagandran wanted to say – by tall, fluted silvery pillars that seemed less carved from stone than spun out of cobwebs. The floor was made mainly of the same gray stone as the doors, but it was highly polished. When he looked down, he could see his own reflection gazing up at him, but he didn’t look downward very much; he was too busy staring around him, drinking in the grandeur of the place.

It took him a few moments to realize that, interspersed among the windows, there were wooden doors. He wondered where they all led, if not directly, into the gardens, for they seemed to be set in the temple’s outer walls. As he watched, a yellow-robed wizard emerged from one of them. Sagandran could see another large room beyond the woman’s shoulder as she turned to close the door behind her.
Perhaps,
he mused,
if they can tell the clock hands what to do, they can do the same with the dimensions of space as well.

At the far end of the mighty hall, two staircases spiraled upward and Shano seemed to be leading the companions toward them. In the center of the floor, the young wizard paused again. Here there was a large circular mosaic made of countless tiny stone chips in as many colors as the birds outside had feathers. Sagandran looked at the designs, but none of them made any sense to him; they weren’t pictures, and they didn’t appear to be any form of writing. Some of them seemed to scuttle out of his gaze when he tried to focus on them.

“Rather than make you climb all those stairs,” said Shano easily, “I’ll transport you to the top of the temple myself. I was told by Grand Master Fariam to bring you into his presence as swiftly as possible, and this will be much quicker. Please make sure you’re all standing inside the perimeter of the rune disk.”

The rune disk,
thought Sagandran.
That must be what they call this mosaic. The way Shano’s talking about it, he sounds exactly like an elevator operator telling us to stand clear of the doors.
He grinned secretly to Perima. She didn’t respond.

Samzing nonchalantly stepped onto the very center of the mosaic, right next to Shano; what their blue-robed escort was about to do was obviously nothing new to the old wizard. Perima and Sagandran weren’t slow to follow, but Flip and, perhaps surprisingly, Sir Tombin, looked uneasy and reluctant.

“Don’t worry, dear chap,” said Samzing reassuringly as the Frogly Knight dithered on the edge of the disk. “It’s perfectly safe. You won’t feel a thing.”

“Not a thing?” said Flip doubtfully.

“At the very most, a tiny lifting motion, and even then, only if this young whippersnapper’s clumsier than I think he is.”

Samzing treated Shano to a broad smile. He got a stony look in return.

“Don’t antagonize him, Samzing, for heaven’s sake,” mumbled Sir Tombin, putting one foot experimentally inside the circle and then, after a long pause, following it with the other.

“Come over and stand by me, Sir Tombin, if it would make you feel safer,” said Perima sweetly.

“There are times, young lass, when I …” Sir Tombin left the sentence unfinished. Trying to make it look as if he were doing anything else but, he walked over and stood beside her.

Shano spread out his arms and began to speak in a whisper, a long fluid stream of words that Sagandran recognized as language, even if he didn’t know which language it was. It was as if the sense of the words was somewhere tantalizingly beyond the fringes of his ability to comprehend them.

The rune disk began to give off a pale glow, then suddenly its symbols were dashing around in a million different crazed motions, like the sparks rising into the night air over a crackling campfire. Sagandran felt a warm gust of wind sweep over him and a bizarre, but not unpleasant, sensation in the pit of his stomach, as if tiny fingers were stroking him there. The warmth of the wind seemed to not just brush his skin, but also to fill his vision, so that he could see but not see at the same time.

He was just beginning to puzzle out how this could be so when the mist cleared and the companions found themselves standing alongside Shano on the rune disk but now in a grandly decorated room. Sagandran was reminded of pictures he’d seen back on Earthworld of the palace of some crazed Bavarian monarch, where every chamber, every surface, every stick of furniture was covered in embellishment upon embellishment upon embellishment, all gilded or painted until no sign of their original material remained.

The battering of the senses by the gross over-ornamentation was quite overwhelming, and he looked around for somewhere he could sit down. Having finally identified something that looked like an ironmonger’s nightmare as a chair, he decided to stay standing.

“This is the Grand Master’s antechamber.” Shano spoke in a reverential whisper. “I must go and tell him you’re here for your audience with him.”

He walked across the room, dodging past an ornately chiseled occasional table that seemed to want to tackle him, and disappeared through a small and incongruously humble door.

Sagandran let out his breath. “How come there’s a place as kitsch as this in the middle of a city so, well,
elegant
as Qarnapheeran?” he said, fixing his eye on Samzing as presumably their resident expert on all matters to do with Qarnapheeran.

“It’s a reminder,” said Samzing solemnly. “A reminder of the folly of human self-aggrandizement. However you choose to look at it, the Grand Master here in Qarnapheeran is the most powerful person in all Sagaria. If he were some petty monarch, he’d surround himself with supposed splendor, thinking that by doing so he’d be telling all the world how grand and important he was. But in reality, true power is humble and modest. Successive Grand Masters have kept this antechamber like it is, in all its hideousness, to remind themselves of that fact.”

Sagandran stared numbly up at a chandelier that was strongly reminiscent of a squad of octopuses having a wrestling match, and shuddered. “One of those reminders you can never forget,” he said.

At last Sir Tombin was beginning to relax a little, having checked that the upward transportation hadn’t left most of his innards back in the main hall. “You’ve been here before, have you?” he asked Samzing.

The old wizard became shifty. “Well, yes I have, as a matter of fact. Myself and Fats, whose fault it had all been, were summoned here to—ah, Shano, my good chap, you’re with us again.”

Unnoticed by the others, the young man had slipped back into the room. The expression on his face was one of deep humility.

“The Grand Master will see you now.” There was a faint quiver in his voice.

“Fariam, you say, eh?” Samzing knotted his fingers. “Don’t recall the name. He must have come here after my time. Probably just as well.”

Something in the glitter of his eyes told Sagandran that the old wizard was not telling the entire truth.

Shano led them into a large, circular room. Here, the furnishings were sparse and plain, a blessed relief after the claustrophobia of the antechamber. There were no windows; the only sources of light were candles mounted in a score or more of sconces. Their soft flickering made the big shadows of the companions dance along the walls. Half-a-dozen wooden chairs had been placed in a semicircle facing them; the central one was little more than a milking stool. Sagandran guessed this was where the Grand Master would sit to be reminded yet again of the humility he should embrace.

Even though the chairs were empty, Shano bowed deeply toward them.

“Oh, Grand Master and Councilors, here are the travelers of whom Queen Mirabella of Spectram sent you word.”

“Who’s he talking to?” Sagandran mouthed to Perima, next to him. “There’s no one here but us.”

A soft voice answered him out of the empty air. “That, young wayfarer, is the difference between a wizard and an ordinary mortal. The wizard knows that just because you cannot see something does not mean that it isn’t there.”

But I know that perfectly well,
thought Sagandran.
Atoms for a start.

There was a sudden change in the quality of the air, and he realized that all this time, the newcomers had been being watched by people sitting in the chairs. None of them were young; they had faces wrinkled like crabapples. The most ancient-looking of all was the man sitting on the stool in the center. His robe had the purity of freshly fallen snow, or maybe it was just that his long white hair and beard surrounded him like a robe.

“And perhaps you do,” said the ancient wizard who was surely Fariam, the Grand Master. The voice was the one that had spoken to Sagandran a moment earlier out of nothingness. “It is always my sin to presume too much of my own wisdom.” He bowed his head slightly in apology. More loudly, he added, “Welcome to Qarnapheeran, travelers. Queen Mirabella has told me much about you and why you have come here. I am glad to be assured by my own eyes that you have survived your hazardous journey. The world outside this city of ours is growing more dangerous each day.” He sighed, a sound like the breeze playing among dried fallen pine needles. “Arkanamon is on the march. We knew the day could not be postponed forever, but still, it is sad to see it come at all.”

“Don’t exhaust yourself, Grand Master,” said the wizard seated next to him solicitously. Sagandran instantly decided that he didn’t like this man. He seemed a little younger than the others, though this was only relative; his clean-shaven face was perhaps creating a false illusion of youth. He, too, was dressed in a white robe. “I can handle this matter.”

“Oh, do hold your peace, Deicher,” snapped Fariam, waving away the man’s fussy attentions. “The only thing that’s wearying me is your constant insistence that I’m over the hill.”

Deicher withdrew a little on his chair. Sagandran could have sworn that he’d pouted, except that surely wizards of the most advanced levels of attainment would never do such a thing.

“Now,” said Fariam more mildly, “Queen Mirabella has told me that you carry the Rainbow Crystal with you, Sagandran. Can this be true? Could she not possibly have been mistaken?”

“I have it here.” Sagandran began to fumble with the collar of his T-shirt.

“Will you show it to us?”

As Sagandran withdrew the glowing crystal on its golden chain, the gathered councilors began to murmur agitatedly.

“This is a sight I believed that I would never see,” said the Grand Master, his voice filled with wonderment. “I had thought perhaps it might have been some other jewel, that Queen Mirabella might have misidentified it. I should have
known better. She would make no mistake about such a portentous matter.” He reached out his hands. “May I hold it?”

“Sure,” said Sagandran, slipping the chain over his head.

Without thinking, he stepped smartly toward the Grand Master, holding the Rainbow Crystal out in front of him.

There was a gasp of consternation from the councilors. The bossy one, Deicher, half-rose from his chair, looking as if he were prepared to grapple Sagandran to the floor.

“Stay where you are, Deicher,” came a menacing growl from behind.

Samzing
, thought Sagandran.
How does he have the nerve to speak like that to one of the councilors of the Elemental Orders, no less?

To Sagandran’s amazement, Deicher subsided.

Sagandran laid the gem gently in Fariam’s outstretched palm.

The old man regarded it as if it were his own long-lost youth.

“The legend comes alive,” he breathed. His voice barely disturbed the air, yet all in the room could clearly hear it. “The boy with the sacred stone is among us, the boy who is destined to walk the path of night.”

Sagandran felt a shiver run up his spine at these words.
The path of night. The place where perils lurk unseen. It’s my destiny to go there, he says. Is it also my destiny to return?

“Surely that is all it is, Fariam?” Another of the councilors was objecting: an elderly woman garbed in the red of blood and fire. “A legend? Of course, I don’t mean the power of the Rainbow Crystal is a legend; we can feel it, here in this room. But the part about the boy of destiny? The Boy Whose Time Has Come, as they call him? Isn’t that just a story made up to keep the children happy? Wouldn’t it be much safer if the Rainbow Crystal were kept here among us in Qarnapheeran, safe from the hands of the vile Arkanamon?”