Fire in the Mist (11 page)

One of those spoken to groveled.
:Oh, yes. Yes—and is she not lovely? Surely you will find her fair enough, and young enough, and mighty enough—:

The first speaker regarded the groveler with disdain,
:I will find her all of these things
if this works.
If not, you will find me someone more suitable.:
The leader studied the intended victim with sudden displeasure.
:Why does she fight? Why have you not subdued her?
Why
, you snivellers?!:

:We have not the strength to control her mind. She is strong, and we are still weak.:

:If this fails, we will be weaker still.:

:There is still
mehevar
.:

The leader was suddenly thoughtful.
:There is. But we will try this first.:

The leader leaned over the student and stared into her eyes. The aura of wicked magic pervaded the area. The girl's eyes grew huge, then narrowed with concentration. After an instant, miniature bolts of lightning erupted from her body and leapt at her captor. The leader, however, fended them off without apparent difficulty. The girl appeared to realize she was lost, and struggled harder, fighting to free herself from her bonds, to rid her mouth of the gag—then abruptly, she lay still, staring up into the eyes of her tormentor. Her color changed to ash-white, and when she failed to blink, the leader backed off, swearing.

:She's not breathing,:
one of the observers mindwhispered.
:Look at her—she's dead!:

:She was defective,:
the leader noted bitterly.
:There was a weakness in her heart—she would have been useless, even for
mehevar
. Thank the gods the weakness manifested before I took her over. But now I have wasted all of that energy for nothing.:

The leader snarled at the followers and demanded,
:Nevertheless, some power may linger from her death. Glean off what you can, then use the energy to find me someone more suitable. When you are finished, dispose of her body in the woods. And hurry. I weary of this long wait.:

:COME here,: a gentle voice whispered into the minds of the students studying in their dorms and the library.
:Come here,:
it requested, so reasonably, so faintly that mages and students felt only a sudden slight tug, an impulse to go to the lake.
:Come here,:
it crooned into the souls of mages and hedge-wizards scattered throughout Mage-Ariss.

Several University mages looked up from their work, frowned as their concentration was interrupted by a sensation as slight as the whine of a stingfly heard from another room—and then, when the passing strangeness that caught their attention did not recur, turned back to their work. A few students went so far as to look out their windows toward the darkening sheet of water over which the sun set.

The pretty girl who ran the Aelere District herbal supply shop on Five Round Way put down her mortar and pestle and herbs when she heard the call. The fertility decoction she was making for the wealthy young wife of the district banker would wait. She looked at her bondmate, and with a puzzled expression, kissed him. "I'm going out for a little while," she said. "If the baby wakes up, I have some nut-milk already prepared. That will keep him happy until I get back."

Her mate looked at her, surprised. "Where are you going?"

Her expression became troubled, and she averted her eyes. "I don't have something I need," she told him. She knew it was an evasion, but still, it felt like the truth when she said it.

He nodded, not liking the look in her eyes, but not knowing what to say to keep her from going.

Out on the Sookanje periphery, in the little blue cottage beside the Woolcloth Makkenhaus, the neighborhood's new hedge-wizard wrapped her divining cards in the middle of a reading and told her client, "I'm sorry, but something has just happened in the spirit realm that requires my attention. Will you be able to come back—" she looked on her filesheet and made a notation, "about sixth bell tomorrow?"

The client nodded, bewildered. "Well, I suppose so. But couldn't you just tell me now about the man in my future—" She discovered herself talking to an empty room. The pretty young card reader was gone. "Well, I never—" the older woman muttered. Then she shrugged. The ways of the magical folk were frequently beyond explanation. Quietly, she left, locking the door behind her.

A child three weeks away from her adult initiation heard the call, quit floating objects around her room (a newly acquired talent she had not yet announced to her parents, since they were hoping she would take an apprenticeship in the weaver's makkenhaus, and since they had often spoken badly of the city's mages), and slipped out of her bedroom window. She ran through the city streets in her nightrobe.

A delicate ebony-skinned house-bruja, out tending her plants in the darkness, put down her watercan and followed the rich unspoken promises of the voice without a word to the family and friends who sat laughing and chatting in her house.

And walking from the wingmount stables to an appointment with a friend in the senior students' dorm, one apprentice heard the call, and felt it more clearly than any of the rest of her classmates. To her, it was a soft tickle at the back of her neck, a sudden rush of excitement, the promise of something—well, wonderful—waiting just over there.
:Come here,:
she felt—and having lacked much of anything wonderful in her life for a very long time, she complied. To the voice that beckoned to her soul, Amelenda Tringdotte responded by turning off of the path and drifting across the quad toward the woods surrounding the Kie Lake with a boneless, liquid gait. Her student robe flowed around her ankles, her hair lifted and danced around her face. She looked very young and very beautiful—but only Flynn, the cat with hands, was out on that part of the grounds to notice, and because Flynn was deeply involved in paying court to a round-eyed, jet-black queen, he paid her little attention. No one else noticed her at all her.

So when Ame entered the woods, she did so unremarked.

"Well, this is the room."

Yaji elbowed past Faia and shoved one of fifty identical doors on the long, narrow stone hall open and stomped in. Faia followed behind her in time to see Yaji flick her fingers in the air to set lamps all around the room blazing with cool white light. When she looked startled, the other girl smirked.

"Ghostlights," Yaji said. She didn't need to add
dimskull
to her curt remark. Her tone implied it.

It had been an exhausting day, and Faia felt drained. Medwind Song had grabbed her following midden for a whirlwind tour of the campus, a flurry of introductions, a mountain of paperwork, and then dropped her off in the tender care of her new roommate.

The new roommate was visibly unhappy with the news. The girls in the other room of the bath house had been right. Faia sensed impending trouble.

Medwind had not been willing to listen to any arguments when she went about confirming the rooming assignment for the two young women. Yaji had attempted to bargain a trade, Faia for any other student—an action that left Faia feeling very much like a wormy sheep at market—and when Yaji discovered Medwind was unshakable, accepted her fate with sour humor. And Faia had found herself toted along in the other student's wake as if she were carrion three days dead.

What she had hoped for more than anything was just to be able to drop into bed to sleep without any conversation.

That, obviously, was not to be.

Her new room bore heavy marks of its other occupant. All the walls were covered with papers, parchments, diagrams, and fancy scripts in brightly colored inks; the desks and the "spare" bed were equally inundated by beakers and athames, books, ledgers, odd jewelry, scrying balls and mirrors, candles, chalk, ink and jars of exotic ingredients. Projects in all stages of completion (except, Faia noted, for completion itself) littered the floor, the chairs, and the tops of every article in the room that didn't move. The doors of both of the room's wardrobes were open, displaying overflows of Yaji's brilliantly colored finery. A bell lute lay on Yaji's unmade bed.

Underneath the mess, it was a large, agreeable room. Pale wood paneling over one of the stone walls added warmth, and the desks and beds and wardrobes of the same pale wood were well made, and fancier than any Faia had ever used. The single window was glazed with tiny diamonds of pale rose glass, and was flung open to reveal, in the last shadowed stretches of daylight, a wooded park and the leading edge of the lake that lay across the grounds. There were two pentacles painted side by side on the floor, properly oriented with their leading apexes aimed north. Yes, she decided, it was a very nice room.

Still, Faia had never seen such an abundance of junk in her life. Tactlessly, she admitted as much.

"Do you never clean in here?"

"This is organized the way I want it. I like to have my work spread out and undisturbed."

Faia nodded. "Well, I like to sleep lying down, and unless you move this stuff, I will not be able to." She looked closer at the equipment that littered her bed. "Some of these things of yours are a waste."

Yaji glared at Faia. "Oh, really? You know so much about magic, do you?"

"I know what works. A bowl of water serves as well as one of those pretty crystal globes for scrying, and you can change the water's ingredients to suit your purpose. There is nothing wrong with dried herbs if you cannot get fresh—but this time of year, fresh can be had, and cheaper, too. And what in the Lady's Name do you intend to do with a jar full of butterfly wings?"

"It's a spell I'm developing myself. For beauty."

Faia snorted. "You misuse the Lady's creatures for your own vanity, and you will find the price high indeed."

Faia started shoveling Yaji's things without ceremony into a heap in the middle of the floor.

"Wait a minute!" Yaji yelled. "I didn't tell you you could move my things!"

"No, you did not. And I did not ask." Faia continued excavating through the mess in search of the bed.

"But that's all
mine
!" Yaji wailed.

"You are welcome to help move it."

Faia was not in the mood for any more of Yaji and was not, she thought, going to be able to tolerate any more of anything this day. She found the covers on the bed, pulled them back, then stripped to the skin.

"What are you doing?" Yaji asked.

"Going to bed."

"It's almost time for
nonce
, and afterward, evening studies. You can't go to sleep now. And you can't intend to leave all my belongings on the floor."

Faia crawled between the covers and pulled them over her. "Good night, Yaji."

"Look, you, I have an entire set of lessons I have to do tonight," Yaji mewled, "and I'm in no temper to work them while crawling over and around some slumbering giant."

"Pity. Then work them elsewhere."

Faia closed her eyes and feigned sleep. Yaji's voice nattered on, but the words drifted by without ever connecting. And soon, Faia wasn't feigning at all.

Nightmares crawled through Daane University that night—crept from student to student, slithered from instructor to assistant, until they touched, briefly, every single soul. They were weak and tentative nightmares, new-hatched dragonlets hesitantly breathing flames for the first time. But like new-hatched dragonlets, they held the promise of becoming much bigger.

The first tentative ray of sunlight fell through the rose-tinted window directly on Faia's face. She woke, pushing away the last clinging shreds of an unrecallable bad dream, and thought the sunlight and the breaking day pleasant—until her eye caught her new roommate, dressed in an obnoxiously frilly pink cloud of a nightgown, sprawled on the other bed.

Yecch. Here I am, then, and there she is, and things could only get worse from this point.

Faia rose and pulled her tunic over her head. She crept to the window.

Outside, it was beautiful. The endless rains were gone, and the sky had cleared, and promised sunshine. The lake that began on the other side of the campus greensward beckoned invitingly. In the still morning air, its surface reflected the silhouettes of the ancient, gnarled trees that dipped to its edge, and the horsetail whites of cirrus clouds high overhead. Boulders, worn smooth and round by near-eternities of passing time, stretched along the shore like a line of lizards crawling out of the shadows to sun themselves. Little blue hovies skimmed and dipped and circled in the pink dawn, chasing insects.

I'm sure I'm not supposed to wander around here without telling someone what I'm doing—but I don't care. Let the rest of the world find me if it can,
Faia thought.
I'm going to go see that lake.

The deed was as simple as the idea. Faia tugged on the rest of her clothes and her boots, shoved her rede-flute into her pocket, and sneaked out the door.

At the water's edge, she pulled off boots and socks and dropped them on the first boulder she passed, and stepped barefoot into the lake. She laughed as slippery, chilly clay mud oozed between her toes.

Faia reveled in the crisp bite of the morning air and the startling heat of the just-risen sun on her cheeks. It was glorious to wander, free of watching eyes and whispers and stupid curiosity and stupider bigotry. She squelched along the muddy lake edge until she was out of sight of the dorm and the tower. The tiny splashes of her steps stirred up clouds of clear-winged dew-flies; each misstep on the moss-covered rocks that alternated with the mud underfoot sent minnows and crayfish careening in front of her, disturbed by her passage.

Ahead, one huge flat rock cut far into the water; she had seen the point of it from the dorm window, but had not imagined how much more of it there was. To Faia, the rock looked like it had once intended to make itself into a bridge, before it had wearied of the task and quit partway. She clambered up on it, wary of snakes, and crawled along its length. From that vantage point, she could see that the lake was longer than it appeared from shore. It curved back on itself, and extended northeast into a wilderness of huge trees and tangled thickets—in the midst of giant metropolitan Ariss, that dark and secluded piece of forest sent a chill shiver down Faia's spine. For an instant, she felt terribly isolated, and imagined herself the prey of some great, deadly beast.