A Young Man Without Magic

A Young Man
Without
Magic

 

 

 

Tor Books by Lawrence Watt-Evans

 

THE OBSIDIAN CHRONICLES

Dragon Weather
The Dragon Society
Dragon Venom

 

LEGENDS OF ETHSHAR

Night of Madness
Ithanalin's Restoration

 

Touched by the Gods
Split Heirs
(with Esther Friesner)

 

THE ANNALS OF THE CHOSEN

The Wizard Lord
The Ninth Talisman
The Summer Palace

LAWRENCE WATT-EVANS

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK
NEW YORK

 

 

 

 

 

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

 

A YOUNG MAN WITHOUT MAGIC

 

Copyright © 2009 by Lawrence Watt-Evans

 

All rights reserved.

 

Map by Rhys Davies

 

A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010

 

www.tor-forge.com

 

Tor
^®
is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Watt-Evans, Lawrence, 1954–

A young man without magic / Lawrence Watt-Evans. — 1st ed.

      p. cm.

“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

ISBN 978-0-7653-2279-1

I. Title.

   PS3573.A859Y68 2009

   813'.54—dc22

 

2009031654

 

First Edition: November 2009

 

Printed in the United States of America

 

0    9    8    7    6    5    4    3    2    1

Dedicated to the memory of Rafael Sabatini

A Young Man
Without
Magic

The rain had finally stopped, and the public coach's sole occupant was able to roll up the blinds and look out the unglazed windows without getting soaked. The countryside was still green, even this late in the summer and in the gloom of a heavy overcast; the passenger wondered how that could be, when so much of the talk in Lume for the past few seasons had been of crop failures and famine.

The coach jolted over some unevenness in the road, and Anrel Murau braced himself against the window frame as he gazed out at a harvested field. He could not tell what had been grown there, or how much the land had yielded, but the rain-darkened earth certainly looked rich and fertile—as it should. After all, this was Aulix, one of the richest provinces in the Walasian Empire. A famine in Walasia, the heart of the Bound Lands—could that really be possible? This was the realm where the forces of nature had been brought under control, where the Mother and the Father looked kindly upon humanity and its sorceries. It wasn't some wild hinterland like the outer reaches of Quand, or the Ermetian mystery lands, where days might be different lengths from one to the next, or monsters might prowl the fields, or snow might fall in midsummer, if the seasons were even regular enough to
have
a summer. No, this was a land of order and stability, where farmers had been feeding the population reliably for centuries, where sorcerers regulated the weather, where most of the wild spirits and negative forces that
plagued the Unbound Lands had long since been banished. What could have changed, to allow food shortages to occur?

Nothing he saw from the coach window gave him any hint. The fields rolling by, whether still green or stripped bare, all
looked
fertile enough.

They also looked simultaneously familiar and strange. He had spent his entire childhood in this region, but after his four years in the capital the countryside seemed vaguely unreal, like a nostalgic dream rather than a present reality. The placid, rain-washed green hills and brown fields, virtually empty of human life, were so very different from the crowded, stone-paved streets of Lume. Here there were no pleading beggars, no hungry men clustered around notice boards looking for work, no coachmen with whips clearing the way for their vehicles, no scowling watchmen patrolling their elevated walkways.

Here in the country sorcerers looked after their subjects, as they ought to—or at least, that was how he remembered it, and he hoped
that
had not changed while he was studying history and law in the court schools. The most powerful magicians were the landgraves who ruled the empire's sixteen provinces, but every town or village was under the benevolent rule of a burgrave, every border was guarded by a margrave, and lesser sorcerers served as magistrates and administrators, devoting their magic to the public good.

At least in theory. Anrel knew all too well that sorcerers were merely human.

Some of Anrel's fellow students had insisted that discontent was widespread throughout the empire, that high taxes and tariffs were ruining trade, that sorcerers were too caught up in their own magic and their intrigues to attend to their duties, but Anrel chose not to believe it. People had always complained, and young men, he knew from his history books, always thought they were coming of age in a time of crisis and impending collapse. They wanted to save the world, and that meant the world had to need saving.

Anrel had no interest in saving the world, and did not think anyone needed to. He merely wanted to find a place in it.

He
hoped
the world didn't need saving, but matters did seem to have deteriorated in Lume during his time there. The burgrave of Lume's
guards and the Emperor's Watch had been called out to put down riots more in the past season than in the entire previous year, which had already been an unusually violent one.

Surely, though, that was a temporary aberration.

Temporary or not, it had nothing to do with matters here in Aulix. The coach had taken him from the unhappy ferment of Lume through Beynos, where the streets had been only slightly troubled, and then Orlias, and Kevár, and all the other villages along the route, each calmer than the town before, until finally Kuriel had appeared so placid that Anrel had wondered if the inhabitants might have been enchanted. It was as if the coach had been carrying him back into his childhood, when he was blithely unaware of any political issues or unrest at all.

Not that his childhood had been unmarked by tragedy. He remembered the first time he had ridden a coach along this road, eighteen years ago; he had been a child of only four, but the memory was indelibly fixed in his head. He had been newly orphaned, on his way to live with a widowed uncle he had never met; of course he remembered it! He had been frightened and lost and alone, mere days from the horror of discovering what was left of his parents after a spell had gone wrong, and he had known, even at that tender age, that the coach was taking him to a new and different life, that he would never return to the house where he was born.

That new life had been pleasant enough. Lord Dorias Adirane, burgrave of Alzur, had been kind to him, and Anrel had spent fourteen happy years in his uncle's home before being sent off to Lume to complete his education.

Now he was once again on his way to his uncle's mansion.

He wished he could be more certain of his reception. Uncle Dorias's letters had not seemed very enthusiastic about his nephew's plans—what few plans he had, as he had to admit he was somewhat vague about his future. Anrel hoped to find some employment appropriate for a young man of his station, a young man without magic but with the best education the court schools of Lume could provide. As for the precise
nature
of this employment—well, he had not satisfied his uncle on that account.

He had not satisfied himself, either.

In truth, it was unlikely he would find a suitable post in Alzur; the village had no use for a scholar. Anrel had the impression Lord Dorias had expected him to find a position in Lume, or perhaps one of the other cities of the empire, rather than returning to his uncle's estate, but the old man had not come out and said so, and no such employment had manifested itself, as yet.

Uncle Dorias had made plain that he had no intention of supporting Anrel's studies beyond the customary four years, and with no prospects in Lume Anrel had had little choice but to return to Alzur, but he did not regret that in the least. For one thing, he had a notion that his uncle's fosterling and former apprentice Valin—
Lord
Valin—might have found himself a position where a skilled clerk would be useful. Settling down as his childhood companion's aide had a great deal to recommend it, Anrel thought. A few quiet rooms somewhere working for his friend, and eventually a wife, perhaps children—that was a life that would suit Anrel well. He had no desire to change the world or achieve great things.

He looked out at the countryside, and hoped his modest ambitions could be realized. He could see from the scenery that the coach was nearing the village of Alzur; he leaned out the window and peered at the hills ahead, trying to make out his uncle's house.

He spotted it readily enough. Although Lord Dorias was burgrave of Alzur, he did not actually live inside the village's iron pale, as a burgrave should; his manor stood instead atop one of the higher hills in the vicinity, roughly two miles south of the village square.

Anrel recalled that he hadn't known that when he had first come to Alzur as a child. He had mistaken the far larger estate of Lord Allutar Hezir, a mile north of town, for his uncle's home, and had been confused when he was instead taken back across the bridge to the southern bank of the Raish River.

Even now, eighteen years later, he didn't understand why Lord Allutar, the landgrave of Aulix, chose to make his seat at a village like Alzur, instead of at Naith, the provincial capital. Alzur was a modest collection of shops and homes stretching along half a mile of riverbank between the two sorcerers' mansions, while Naith, a dozen miles farther
west, was a thriving city that seemed a far more sensible place for the landgrave to live. All the other provincial officials, from the lowliest clerk to the Lords Magistrate, lived in Naith, but the landgrave himself dwelt in Alzur.

Anrel would have much preferred Lord Allutar to live elsewhere, but it was not up to him. He pulled his head in and settled down in his seat to wait, leaning back against the worn leather.

He hoped that his uncle would be there to meet him; Anrel had said, in his last letter, which coach he would be on. If Lord Dorias was waiting for him, that would be an indication that the coldness Anrel had thought he'd perceived in recent correspondence was merely a figment of his imagination.

Then the coach was across the bridge and rumbling up the streets into Alzur proper.