Wizard (The Key to Magic) (31 page)

"You think that they will have problems?"

"No more than they had before they died."

Mar ate his own portion then got up and went to stand beside Truhsg. The legate had set Phehlahm and Sihmal to striking against each other's guard, turn and turn about, and the clack of their practice wands made an irregular tempo.

"You're making Sihmal into a legionnaire?" he asked the legate.

"He needed something to do, my lord king."

"How is his progress?"

"I can tell already that he'll never make an swordsman, my lord king. He's been too starved for too long to have the shoulders and the wrists for the sword, but the drills will instill discipline and not every legionnaire must hold the line."

"Phehlahm doesn't seem to overmatch him by very much."

"I ordered the ceannaire to move at one-tenth speed."

"Ah."

"My lord king, there is one thing that I thought I should mention."

"What's that?"

"I used to be right handed." Truhsg raised his sword, held in his left hand. "At least, I think I was."

Mar frowned. "Are you having difficulty with your dexterity?"

"No, my lord king. It feels natural to do things with my left. It just strikes me as odd."

"Did Llylquaendt explain to you why that might be so?"

"Yes, my lord king."

"Any other problems?"

"I am missing a number of scars and I think I'm as much as a fingerlength taller."

"Neither should cause difficulty."

"No, my lord king."

"Truhsg, you've fulfilled your duty to your prince, your city, and the Empire -- you gave your life for them. I would understand if you chose to retire from active service."

"The Monks must still be beaten, my lord king."

"Yes, they must. Carry on, legate."

"Yes, my lord king. You should have no doubts of that."

Mar retrieved only twenty-two more men from Number One. As he could not take anyone in plain view of his earlier self, he was forced to intervene only seconds before the pieces of the wreck smashed into the ground. Also, as there was but one
autodoc
, he had to extract the corpses in sequence rather than all together, which required him to travel to consecutive instants of time separated only by minute fractions of a second. Rather than catch glimpses of the multitude of his earlier selves -- a prospect that felt intrinsically
wrong
-- he cast wards to remain hidden from view. All of the bodies were in terrible shape and each succeeding recovery deepened the
medic's
now perpetual frown.

As he laid out the pieces of the final man, a marine whose name he did not know, Llylquaendt, in a voice tinged with memory, said, "The lives of men who die in defense of those they love and the things they believe in are not wasted."

"Is that my conscience speaking again?"

"No, it is the voice of my father. He was a
medic
before me and he told me that quite often. He died on a battlefield defending those he loved and the things he believed in."

After this, weary of the bloodied, the dead, and the words of his conscience, Mar found a village in the hinterlands of an unnamed region of Szillarn where neither Mhajhkaei nor the Empire of the North nor their king and emperor had ever had their names spoken and performed simple sleight-of-hand tricks while children laughed and skipped in the sun.

For a meal and a cot and lessons in a language that was only spoken in that village and a dozen more like it, he helped a group of neighbors dig a new well, working with his back and not once using his magic.

When the well was done, he went to the coast and discovered storied Lhorvhavhen. He walked through shaded markets, watched with a thousand other spectators as hulking men raced along a path of raised beams while opposing groundsmen tried to knock them off with thrown stones, and ate food so spicy that a single bite had to be washed down with a pint of water. One night, in a modest house built upon stone piers above an inlet where clear, emerald water washed a white sand beach, he stole a strongbox full of gold from a spice merchant whose only sin was keeping a strongbox full of gold.

In a boisterous a market in the largest city -- he did not bother to learn its name -- on Kh’ordhif, he used some of the gold to buy enough flour, cheese, dried beans, potatoes, smoked fish, apples, and citrus to fill a large cart. This he took to the lower cavern of Llylquaendt's bunker five minutes after he had left. Fetching food from the inn on Gh'emhoa, always intended only as a temporary measure, had begun to become tiresome.

Seated upon a stool to monitor the
autodoc
as it rebuilt the unnamed marine, the
medic
nodded in approval at the heaped cart and examined Mar with a practiced eye. "You have gotten some sun and rested. How long were you gone?"

"Almost a fortnight and a half.

"Perhaps there are some benefits to being a master of time and space. Are you going to fetch a cook to go with that?"

"You can't cook?"

"I can and I do, but I have taken a vow to never do so unless my life is at stake."

"One of the legionnaires or marines --"

"Armsmen's food? I would prefer to eat it raw."

"I could fetch your wives?"

"Not under any circumstances. I will not permit them to be drawn into the madness of wizardry."

Mar thought a moment. "Sihmal's wife can cook. At least, I know that she can cook beans."

"That would be a start."

FORTY

On the night of the disastrous attempt to rob the house of Patriarch Hwraldek's mistress, Mar squatted on the roof of a bakery on the other side of a narrow, unpaved street and studied Sihmal's hovel.

A read of the background ether showed the young woman and her children asleep on a single pallet near an iron stove whose sparse embers could scarcely emit any heat. Crammed between meager structures just like it, the crumbling house was built of plastered mud-brick and had only two cramped rooms. Sihmal and his family were squatters but none of their neighbors cared. The roof had a hole in the corner of the back room and neither the insubstantial front nor rotting back door could be locked. Mar would be able to enter through any of the three without making a sound.

To cause the accommodation that he had made with the ethereal torrent of undertime to encompass other objects, such as the food and the corpses, it had been necessary to maintain close physical contact by carrying them. Both food and corpses had not been minded to struggle or move about, as the members of Sihmal's family would no doubt do if he simply snatched them up and dragged them into a portal.
The Knife Fighter's Dirge
would not function in undertime and he was disinclined to use more violent methods of incapacitation on the three innocents. An attempt to convince the woman to allow herself and her daughters to be subjected to magic, which she would inherently fear and misunderstand, would be futile.

Properly structured portals had no visual or audible presence, only an ethereal one. To Mar, the openings and the surges of undertime beyond them were easily perceptible, but to a person with no magical sense they would remain undetectable.

A person could be drawn unawares into undertime, but -- if the experience did not immediately disrupt their natural ethereal modulations and extinguish their life -- he or she would have no way to control their movement and would be washed into the destructive core, as Beltr had been.

Oyraebos' text had outlined a theoretical method for linking undertime portals and had implied that these conduits would be safe for non-wizards to utilize. Of course, the text had also indicated that all recorded experiments had failed and further that the failures had frequently resulted in the deaths of the experimenters.

He stepped into undertime, maintained the portal behind him, and immediately opened another into yesterday. When he exited onto the roof, he turned back around and his magical sense showed him the tomorrow that he had just left. He released both portals and went back to tomorrow.

The process was, to his mind, both simple and stable and the dire warnings that Oyraebos had recorded seemed misplaced.

After a quick undertime-aided jaunt through several locations in the city to procure and change into clothes as similar as he could find to those that he had worn when Sihmal's wife had seen him last, he scouted a location, made preparations, then returned to descend from the roof and cross the dirt lane. Making sure to keep the raps light so that they would not carry very far, he knocked on the rattling door until the young woman, anxious, bearing a wane lantern, and with a thin blanket wrapped around her nightdress, opened it to peek out.

"Mar! What is it? Where's Sihmal?"

"He's been hurt. You must come with me right away. Bring the girls."

"But --"

"You have to hurry. It's not safe here."

"We'll have to dress! It's the middle of the night!"

"You only have a few minutes. The Guard will be here if we don't get away quickly."

With widened eyes, she shut the door and he made a pretense of watching the empty lane as he used his magic sense to monitor her actions. Trust was a rare commodity in the Lower City; she might just decide to bolt out the back and find out what was going on later. That was what Mar might have done in her circumstance.

She made no move toward the back. Through the door, he heard the complaints of the little girls when she woke them and commanded them to dress. It was less than fives minutes later that she opened the door again and chivvied the girls out. All three now wore threadbare trousers and jackets and the girls looked nervous and confused. The girls' mother had a blanket wrapped bundle under her arm that probably contained everything of any value that they owned.

"This way," he told them. "It's not far."

"How badly is Sihmal hurt?" she asked.

"He'll live, but he'll have to stay abed for a few days."

"What happened?"

"There isn't time to explain now. I think I heard a Guard whistle over toward the river."

He herded the three along the lane, made a right on a paved street that some called Stump Street and others Water Oak Road, turned again into a walkthrough that led to the back of a shop that sold dry goods, and then moved ahead of them to open a solid door into the back of the shop. Overly bright light flooded out from the magical lamps that he had sown all along the hallway within. The light hid the interior in a haze of glare.

"Don't stop," he warned when it looked as Sihmal's wife would do just that. "I have to get this door closed before someone sees us!"

After a brief pause of indecision, the young woman took her daughters' hands, strode firmly across the threshold, and stepped into a hallway on the barracks level of the bunker.

Knowing that he could not delay his most grim task any longer, Mar left it to the waiting Sihmal to explain and stepped back into undertime.

He spent a good bit of relative time refining his focus to capture the precise instant and only when he was sure that he had shaved the second down to the barest minimum, he cast his glamours, began humming
The Knife Fighter's Dirge,
and emerged onto the bridge.

He knew that his spells could not contend with the incalculable ethereal power of the blast. If he were to retrieve those who had fallen there, he had no choice but to intervene before Eishtren broke his bow. It was a risk, but he did not believe that his distracted earlier self would notice that the bodies had disappeared less than half a blink before the explosion.

The bodies stretched in a jumbled line from the head of the bridge. He took the Gaaelfharenii first.

Mhiskva took his return to life with predictable aplomb, rising from the
autodoc
slab to present Mar with the Imperial salute. His eyes flicked right and left to examine the scope of the cavern, then took in Llylquaendt and the quad of resurrected armsmen who stood by to assist.

"This is the bunker in the Great Waste?"

Mar nodded.

Mhiskva bowed to the
medic.
"My thanks, master Llylquaendt."

The ancient Pyrai shrugged. "I do you no favor."

Wilhm raged through the cavern until tackled by Mhiskva and given a promise that the pirate would soon rejoin him.

Lord Hhrahld, the only one who had suffered the
autodoc
before, expressed his opinion of death with a few pithy maritime curses, took charge of Wilhm, and went off to find something to eat.

Ulor, Bear, Scahll, Kyamhyn, and Taelmhon reacted with surprise, a grunt, curiosity, gratitude, and a shrug.

Dhem was not dead, but bleeding profusely and unconscious and Llylquaendt ushered him into the autodoc with a pleased smile that said,
At last, a living one!

When Mar brought in the body of Aelwyrd, the medic grew flushed and angry and berated all about for the idiocy of war.

After Aelwyrd, Mar had to stop because he had yet to figure out how to save the Quaestor. He could only take Eishtren after he had snapped his bow --
after
the convulsive release of trapped ether had begun -- and he still did not know what must be done to temper that explosion.

To ponder whether a decision that he had made was the best possible, he spent an afternoon on the west coast of Szillarn, swimming in a lagoon with water so warm that he had to lie in the sun to cool off. When none of the arguments that his imagination raised proved dissuasive, he returned to the bunker and called everyone together in the barracks.

He did not make a speech. He just told them.

"The Blood Oath is dissolved. My wizardry has undone it and you are no longer bound by its magic."

Of all the reactions that he had envisioned, the complete silence that ensued was the one that he had thought least probable.

Then Mhiskva spoke. "My lord king, you are and have always been our king by our choice. A spell did not make that choice and a spell cannot overturn it."

Mar looked at each man's face and saw that all reflected agreement. "I'll be your king, but only until the Brotherhood is defeated. After that, don't look for me in Mhajhkaei, because I won't be there."