Second Kiss (21 page)

Prisoner

X
emion
's arms and legs felt as cold and brittle as twigs. He could just barely move the tips of his fingers and breathing took great effort, but he summoned the strength to swivel his eyes around and see where he was. Something tore inside him and he winced. He had a sense of some impending catastrophe, but he didn't know what it was. Outside, seabirds called to one another and, far off, he could hear the slow retreating pulse of the tide. His sense of dread deepened as the images of the day came back to him: his sword arcing toward Saheli's neck, him down on his knees in the crowd speaking that accursed spell.

“No!” His freezing fingers twitched into fists. “No!” he cried again. How could he have been such a fool? And Saheli — the way she looked when the helmet was stricken from her face and everyone in the crowd gasped at her beauty. Her lips, which had touched his lips. All this time he had just been living until the next time that would happen, but now how could there ever be a next time? He had saved her from Montither, and he would never regret that, but at what terrible cost?

It was dark and cold in this place, and for a long time Xemion just lay there with an intense, bereaved sense of loneliness that almost made him want to die. Someone had wrapped Vallaine's cloak about him, but he was still so cold he might have already been a cadaver on a block of ice. Nor did he move when vibrations suddenly came up through the bare stone floor. Someone had entered the building. Upstairs. He both heard and felt the closing of what sounded like a heavy gate and he knew where he was: one of the old towers at the end of the Lion's Paws. Without moving his head he could see a horizontal, slit-like window, which would have given him a panoramic view of the bay if he were standing, but from this prone position only revealed a dark ribbon of night sky — mostly the curve of the bone-white moon and that red planet, larger than he had ever seen it.

He rolled his head over to the right. The dim light from the window reflected off the iron bars of a door, locked and bolted against his escape. He must be in the storage room. This room, which had originally been the receiving area for any cargo from those ships not granted entrance to the inner harbour, was one floor below the part of the tower looking back along the docks and toward the city. Xemion could hear a shuffling sound on the stairs. But was it one or two pairs of footsteps?

He turned a little more so he could just see past the barred door and into the stairwell beyond. He wrapped the cloak around himself and ducked his head into it. First a yellow glow and then a figure carrying a lamp emerged from the stairwell. It was Veneetha Azucena and there was someone else behind her but he couldn't quite make out who it was. When she got to the bars she shone her lamp right in on him.

“Ah, there you are,” she said in a voice much softened from earlier that night.

Xemion couldn't even grunt in reply. He could see just the edge of what must have been a bandage wrapped about her head, but she had covered most of it with a green copper helmet. He detected a slight swelling at the left side of her face, but other than that there were no signs of the injury the sword had inflicted.

“I've brought you some blankets,” she said gently. “I'm sorry we didn't think of it earlier. You must've spent a chilly few hours in here.” She passed two thick blankets through the bars and, using her staff, pushed them across the floor to where he lay. Still peeking out from under Vallaine's cloak, Xemion tried to get a glimpse of the other figure that was lurking in the stairwell. “I'm sorry to have accused you of betraying us,” she said with that slight edge of sand in the honey of her voice. “Now that I know the full story, I realize you were only doing your best for all of us. You'll be happy to know I have sent word out to apprehend Mr. Glittervein, and if he's anywhere in Ulde, I assure you we will find him.”

“Greetings, Xemion.” Vallaine now stepped out of the darkness of the stairwell and stood beside her, his gaunt face lit on one side by the flickering lamp. Somehow Xemion wasn't surprised.

“Yes,” Vallaine said, smiling, “I survived.” He held up his hand to show Xemion that it was once again dark red, but Xemion could also see the hollow cheeks and look of strain on his face. “It took me much less time to recover than I thought it would.”

Xemion again gave the most minimal of responses.

“We owe you a great debt of gratitude,” Vallaine said. “I don't know where you got the strength to accomplish all that you did in so short a t—”

Veneetha Azucena interrupted. “Xemion, you must wrap those blankets around you. You look so terribly cold.”

Xemion eyed them helplessly. “I can't.”

“It's that second spell he bound,” Vallaine told her. “I would think it's really taking a toll on him right now.”

“Well, I for one cannot bear to see him suffer like this.”

Veneetha Azucena took out a set of keys and opened the storage room door. Xemion felt the warmth of her hand in his own and then the two of them wrapped him all round in the blankets. “Here, drink this,” Vallaine said, tilting a flask of some warm, sweet liquid between Xemion's cold, blue lips. “It will help with the spell-shock.”

Xemion recognized the taste.

“It is ambrosia,” Vallaine said. “It will give you strength.”

“I know.”

“You've had some before?”

“From your cloak.”

“In truth?”

Xemion nodded and once again a look of suspicion crossed his brow, but Vallaine gave a little laugh.

“Why, I searched all over for that wafer,” he said. “So that was what gave you such strength!”

“You see,” Veneetha Azucena said cheerily. “You never know when you lose something who might find it and what good it might do them.”

“Do you feel that warming you up?” Vallaine asked in his most empathetic voice. Xemion nodded. The drink was not as powerful as the wafer, but slowly its effects made their way through his system. For a while there was silence as Vallaine continued rubbing Xemion's hands and Veneetha Azucena took his frozen feet into her lap and did her best to warm them with her hands and body heat.

“I'm afraid we have something quite difficult to tell you,” she said at last, looking sideways at Vallaine.

“Xemion,” Vallaine began, “it is miraculous that you managed to save Saheli and destroy the book of spells. But I didn't know when I told you about the spell book that you would use it to cast a spell of your own.”

Somewhat energized by the ambrosia now, Xemion replied, “I didn't want to bind a spell. It was the only way to save Saheli.” His voice came back to him, brittle and angry. He hardly recognized it as his own.

“Yes, but do you realize what you cast your spell upon?”

“A stick.”

“No, Xemion. That was so much more than just a stick.”

Veneetha Azucena cut in almost curtly. “Vallaine has examined your sword and he claims it was not originally a sword at all. It was —
is
the staff of a mage.”

Xemion looked back in disbelief.

“I'm afraid it's true,” Vallaine said, shaking his head and nervously twirling one side of his moustache. “I did advise you to rid yourself of that stick, did I not? But I had no idea it was a spell staff or I would have taken it from you myself. I told you how a spell staff is made. Do you remember? It is a long scroll of spells handwritten by the mage who makes it. When you cast your spell upon that so-called sword of yours, you cast it upon a thousand other spells at once — all of them the work of a master mage.”

Xemion was too stunned to say anything.

“His name was Shalaminsar,” Veneetha Azucena said. “The last of the Nain mages. Vallaine says he was slain in Ilde by the Pathans, but before he died he must have cast his last spell upon his staff to draw someone like you to it, so that it might bind to you and work through you.”

“But he would never have dreamed that you would turn it into a play sword and then cast your own spell upon it.” Vallaine spoke with soft regret. “Do you see what has happened? You have cast a spell upon a thousand spells. Can you imagine a thousand cross-spells all manifesting at once?” Vallaine's voice rose in a way that revealed his anguish at this thought. “And now, yes, the Great Kone is turning and the magic is rising again — but to what new chaos and confliction? I … I sought to end this era of cross-spells that's been upon us, make the world anew, pure and simple, but this, if we let it go forward, will only make matters infinitely worse.”

“None of this was known to me until last night.” Veneetha Azucena's tone verged on anger. Indeed she couldn't help shooting an accusatory glance at Vallaine. “I would've stopped it somehow if I'd known. Please be assured of that. But now the damage is done and all our efforts are in great jeopardy because of it.”

“We do understand that it's in no way your fault,” Vallaine added with a slight frown. “But unfortunately this spell sword of yours is very dangerous, and now that it has been made you cannot destroy it any more than it was able to destroy you. Even now, as the Great Kone slowly takes up its revolution, the spell you cast on it must be working on the spells written on the staff. All those spell-crossed creatures whose pain you witnessed in Ulde will be nothing to what these thousand crossed spells may inflict on us. We can't take the chance. There is an isle across the eastern sea known as Wizard's Isle. On the entire great globe there is no other place farther from the Great Kone. Its power is so weak there it has almost no effect.”

“It will be so much safer for everyone if you should just go and stay there a … a while,” Veneetha Azucena said.

“For how long?” Xemion asked. In the ensuing silence Vallaine and Veneetha Azucena briefly caught each other's eye before looking away.

“Aside from the dangers of the innumerable cross-spells you have likely instigated, there is also, according to Mr. Vallaine here, the danger of you and what your power may turn
you
into,” Veneetha Azucena said, a slight quaver in her voice.

“What she means is,” Vallaine continued, “in the previous era we had seven great mages on the Phaer Isle, each one balancing out the others. But as of now, in this era, Xemion, there is only one. You. You, who though wise and compassionate, have not even one equal, let alone six to balance you out.”

“And?”

“And when there is only one mage and that mage has as much power as you do — there is nothing to prevent the possibility of him becoming a war mage.”

At this Xemion saw an image from his childhood. A vision of himself upon a great horse in full gallop, his sword held high, an army at his back. But he shook his head adamantly. “No!” The warmth of the ambrosia radiated into his core, and as it melted the ice within, certain wild emotions were beginning to be freed.

“I'm afraid so,” Veneetha Azucena countered with a sad but determined look on her face.

“I've spun my tell-kone on this seven times, Xemion,” Vallaine said, “and seven times it has come up deep seven with an
X
.”

“Did you not feel an unseemly rage when you fought with that sword?” Veneetha Azucena asked. “Were you not ready to slay a young woman whom you held as your own beloved?”

Xemion winced. “But I stopped it!” he said. “I turned it away at the last second.”

“Just barely,” Vallaine countered. “What will happen next time?”

Xemion hung his head and the great grief of his life flowed into him. Vallaine nodded toward Veneetha Azucena, his face also drawn in sadness.

“I'm so sorry, Xemion.” Veneetha Azucena spoke gently and sincerely. “None of this is your fault. You have given us so much and done your utmost for us and it is grievous to have to send one with such a great heart away from our gathering, quite likely forever.”

The inevitability of what they were telling him began to sink in, gripping Xemion's heart. He thought of Saheli. He pictured her again in that moment when she kissed him outside the Great Kone. The scent of her hair. The heat of her skin.

“It is a long journey across the sea,” Vallaine said, clearing his throat. “Tomorrow, soon after dawn, I have had word that the
Mammuth
is returning. It will sail in to this harbour and you and I must travel to Wizard's Isle, off the northern coast of Arthenow, where the blood magic runs strongest. Who knows, you and I may perhaps go travelling in those realms and do a great deal of good there someday.”

Xemion flinched, remembering the taste of his own blood when the Pathan had forced him to drink.

“This is what they did in the days of the Elphaereans when there was trouble with mages,” Vallaine said. “It is exile. But it is honourable and it is at least not—”

“I don't want to go. I want to stay here and be part of this.”