Winter Be My Shield (46 page)

‘Control, madame?' Isidro said.

‘Oh, it's not as ominous as it sounds. Sympaths are immensely valuable to the empire. Large works — bridges, dams, aqueducts and the like — can be built in a matter of weeks with a Sympath providing the raw power for their construction. If built by hand, they can take years
or even decades. An ordinary mage can assist but they are still limited by the rate at which they can generate power. A Sympath, however, removes that constraint from the equation. There seems to be no real limit on the amount of power a Sympath can generate. The constraining factor appears to be simply the level of energy of the participants.'

‘Participants?' Isidro said. ‘I'm afraid I don't understand.'

Delphine laughed in a puff of mist. ‘In Akhara this is considered a most indelicate subject. Certainly not fit for discussion between a mistress and her slave. But I doubt you native folk would see it the same way, given your marriage traditions. Sympaths feed off sensation. They generate power from sexual energy and activity. In Akhara they have a residence attached to the Collegium. To us it is the House of the Sympaths, but everyone just calls it The Palace. It's a den of licentiousness and fornication — quite endearingly so, actually — given over to the pleasures of the flesh. There are generally several hundred inhabitants whose only duties are to eat good food, to give and receive innumerable forms of pampering and to participate in … other various activities. It's all perfectly scandalous, you realise. Everyone in polite society pretends to be quite horrified by it all, while they secretly wish they could join in, if just for a little while.'

Trudging through the snow beside Delphine's pony, Isidro tried to imagine such a place — tried to imagine Sierra at its heart — and simply could not understand how such a place could work. ‘Are the participants slaves, madame?'

‘Actually, no. Most people imagine it as simply a glorified brothel, but that's very far from the truth. Most of the girls in a brothel
are
slaves. They never chose to be there and that would be utterly intolerable in The Palace. Sympaths feed off pleasure but they are exquisitely sensitive to pain. If any of the participants were not enjoying it or didn't want to be there, the Sympaths would sense it. Not only would they be unable to draw any power from it, but the sensation of suffering is damaging to them. Sympaths are far too valuable to allow anything of the sort to happen, so participants are screened very carefully before they are admitted. Some of them are slaves of course, and participants with a modicum of talent are often preferred, but they are never forced to enter or to remain and are often granted their freedom in return for service.'

‘It must cost a fortune …' Isidro mused.

‘Oh, it does, but it's worth the price to have a constant supply of power. The Sympaths can travel with a suitable entourage to provide power on hand for major construction outside of Akhara.

‘Other than supplying power, they are quite limited. No Sympath has ever become a great mage. Power comes to them so easily they never have to learn the discipline necessary to hone their skills. A Sympath is a little like the queen of an ant nest — essential to the survival of the colony but ultimately helpless on her own and dependent on others to care for her and supply her needs.'

Isidro bowed his head, staring at his feet as he trudged on so that Delphine couldn't read his thoughts in his face. This news simply did not add up with what he already knew. ‘So … a Sympath can
only
feed from pleasurable sensation?'

‘That's correct.'

‘But  … I'm certain I've read of Sympaths being stalked by Blood-Mages, and the other night, madame, you suggested a Sympath might have been involved in the rout of the Seventh. How is that possible?'

‘It is possible for a Sympath to be … corrupted,' Delphine admitted. ‘That's one of the reasons why unenthusiastic participants at The Palace are evicted. As I said, prolonged exposure to suffering is damaging to a Sympath. We believe Sympaths are very rare, but it's possible there are more of them born than we realise and it's just that some of them are, well, crippled by early exposure to pain and suffering. They experience an echo of the sensations that feed them power, so in these cases many of them simply shut down their talent entirely and are left with no more power than an ordinary person.

‘Unfortunately, that isn't always the case. The power brings a certain pleasure of its own and for some that's enough to outweigh the echo of pain. If corrupted thoroughly enough a Sympath can lose the ability to derive power from pleasure all together. Or perhaps they simply choose not to. There's a limit to how long a body can experience mind-numbing pleasure, after all, but there are no such limits on how long a man can be kept in pain, as you have experienced for yourself.'

‘So a corrupted Sympath is a Blood-Mage, madame?'

‘Not quite. What Blood-Mages do with their rituals is an attempt to do artificially what Sympaths — corrupted Sympaths, I mean — do naturally. Given the opportunity, a Blood-Mage will enslave a Sympath
to boost his or her own power. It is difficult to achieve, as a Sympath will usually close off his or her power in self-defence, but if they do manage it the Blood-Mage is well-nigh unstoppable. Sympaths will likely never gain enough control of their power to challenge and kill their masters. If that happened it would be a disaster of epic proportions, but realistically? I think it highly unlikely in a nation as primitive as this for a Sympath to survive with his powers intact for long enough to be captured by a Blood-Mage.'

Delphine shifted in her saddle. It was considered beneath the dignity of a mage and a member of the elite to walk like a slave or a servant, but Isidro knew from experience she would be cold from inactivity and he didn't envy her the privilege. ‘Why all the questions?' she asked. ‘Have you even heard of a Sympath other than that night?'

He had an answer ready for her. ‘There was a mention of a Sympath in one of the texts Barranecour collected. Apparently there was a Sympath in Ricalan prior to the War of the Mages. One of the factions had a Blood-Mage and it seems he set out to capture the Sympath, but she committed suicide rather than be enslaved.'

‘Ah, yes. I read of that in one of Barranecour's translations. It seems to be something of a tradition among your folk,' Delphine said dryly. ‘But there you have a classic example of the class. Sympaths are quite incapable of defending themselves. Barranecour noted his intention to offer the woman shelter in Akhara, but he was unable to get word to her in time. To be honest it strikes me as unlikely she would have accepted, given the information she would have had about the empire. The point you raised earlier is one that many have raised before, Aleksar. There are folk who find the service required to repay their education onerous and who choose exile instead. It requires a certain kind of personality to make such a choice, and the tales the Ricalani mages would have heard of the empire and how it treats its mages undoubtedly had a rather skewed perspective. I have no doubt the Ricalani mages viewed the exiles as troublemakers, likely with good reason.'

‘Yes, madame.'

Isidro had now been a slave for longer than the span of time between his rescue from the king's men and the morning Cam and the others had left him behind in Drysprings to heal. It struck him as a supreme irony that in that time he'd learned more about Ricalani mage-craft and
the war that had destroyed it than he had learned in all his previous quarter-century of years. Every Ricalani child knew the story of Well-of-Poisons, but now Isidro had read the contemporary accounts compiled by Barranecour in the log that had brought the Akharians here to the north in search of Vasant's treasure.

Milksprings was a hot spring housed in a system of caves carved from the rock by millennia of flowing water. Like all hot springs it was considered a sacred place and became a temple, named for the colour of the water. For centuries it was renowned as an oracle and a place of healing.

That had all changed in the early days of the War, following the first battle Queen Leandra had led to avenge the death of her daughter. One faction of mages, led jointly by a Ricalani woman named Sofera and an Akharian exile, Delcarion, had swept in and taken control of the temple, driving out or killing the priests who lived there. The temple was in the lands of the Marten Clan, but Sofera and Delcarion declared the surrounding land now belonged to Milksprings and claimed the folk living there as serfs. When the clan objected, the mages simply slaughtered them.

Taking control of Milksprings had been a measured decision. The caves were unbreachable, especially when defended by mages. Leandra had realised this at once and turned her attention to other factions without wasting her men. Instead she set about cultivating allies among the folk who were now beholden to the temple and was eventually able to place an agent within Milksprings itself, supplied with a quantity of poison.

On the night of a celebratory feast attended by most of the mages under Sofera and Delcarion's command, Leandra's agent spread the poison into everything he could reach, the food, the wine, even the springs itself. Nearly every mage in the temple was struck down, along with many of the slaves and servants. The poison was a slow-acting one, however; and once they realised they were dying Delcarian went on a rampage, killing serfs and servants he blamed for the betrayal, while Sofera wrung the story from Leandra's spy.

Leandra and her followers rode in a few days later to find the caves full of the rotting dead. They hauled the bodies out and burned them, except for the few mages who had survived the initial dose and were
too weak to leave the caves or to fight back. Leandra had them chained within sight of food and clean water and then filled in the entrance of the caves with rubble, leaving them to starve in the darkness and the silence. Afterwards, it was known throughout Ricalan as Well-of-Poisons.

The history Isidro had been taught described Vasant as the greatest villain of them all, a mastermind who tricked the other mage factions into fighting Leandra and her allies while he himself sought some means to escape his doom. The reality, he discovered from Barranecour's records, was quite different.

For most of the war Leandra had barely been aware of Vasant's existence. He had been part of a small school of mages devoted to scholarship and seemed to have no interest in politics at all, until the situation grew so severe he was forced to acknowledge it. While Sofera and Delcarion lay dying, Vasant was already gathering the books and records Leandra's followers had set out to destroy. A few months after Leandra's men filled in the entrance to Milksprings, Vasant and his followers opened it again, and spent months sequestered there while they came up with a plan to preserve the knowledge Leandra and her allies were so determined to destroy.

The version of history Isidro had been taught said Vasant had tried to escape Ricalan, but he knew now that this was untrue. Vasant had had the opportunity to leave. He'd certainly been aware Barranecour was in Ricalan and would have known that a life of comfortable exile in Akhara was his for the taking, but Vasant had chosen to stay, even though it would mean his death.

For all their power, mages could no more survive alone in those days than they could now. Life in Ricalan depended on other people and Leandra had slowly but inexorably turned the common folk against the sorcerers. The actions of Sofera and Delcarion were held up as just one example of the demands and depredations mages made against the common folk, who were helpless to resist them.

After leaving Well-of-Poisons Vasant and his followers set out for the other great sanctuary of the north, the place now known as Demon's Spire. He had spent so long here in the caves there was no doubt he had left some form of treasure there. Even Barranecour had been certain of it.

After Vasant fell, Leandra searched the caves. Isidro had always been told she found the books and destroyed them, but then she could hardly admit the Last Great Mage had defeated her from the afterlife. Afterwards she sealed the caves up again with rubble and rock. Why would she have done that if the books had been found?

In all the weeks since he had agreed to help Delphine as the price of his sanity and his life, Isidro wasn't sure just what he hoped to find. Though Delphine was pleased to finally have a translator, he hadn't yet provided them with anything of value. He could still decide that aiding the enemies of his nation was too high a price to pay. He could perhaps still escape this situation with his honour intact, but that choice would be beyond his reach once they found the mouth of the caves.

 

The Akharians didn't know precisely where Milksprings was located. They had started out with Barranecour's century-old map, scrawled in a page of his notebook and based on information gleaned from various guides and informants. Once in Ricalan, temple raids had given them native-drawn maps, but they were difficult for foreigners to interpret. Rivers and watercourses shifted from year to year and were of dubious value as landmarks, so instead Ricalani mapmakers relied heavily on cliffs, hills and outcrops.

Still, the maps gave the Akharians a rough idea of where to look. Under the general's orders a camp was established near the base of the long ridge of cliff face said to hold the caves, and teams of Collegium scholars and Battle-Mages set out to begin the search.

All the records said Leandra had taken pains to conceal the entrance to the caves and at this time of year it would be hidden under snow. Isidro was mystified as to how the Akharians would find it without waiting for the thaw, until Alameda mentioned a device that was being carried along the top of the cliff with a rota of mages to power it, which could apparently sense the open space of a cave beneath. When the search began, Harwin and Delphine and her students were part of that rota, and spent so many hours at their duties that they returned to the camp only to eat and sleep.