Sorcery Rising (2 page)

Virelai stared and stared. He saw: a mountain village overrun by soldiers, women and children pierced by spears; a man hanged from a tree; people and animals with their throats cut and shrouded women catching the spurting blood in great dishes; he saw a group of folk adorned like the old woman with shells and feathers and silver chains being stoned to death by an angry mob; he saw naked women burned on pyres and men pinned to masts of wood in the baking heat; then the view changed and he was on a ship far out at sea, watching as a speared whale was hauled in close to the waiting boats and men made the water run red as they hacked it to death.

‘No more!’ he cried and tried to move away.

‘Why do you think I came here, boy?’

Another twitch of the levers and there was a tiny island, serene and white against dark-grey seas ringed about with drifting ice and veiled by swirling mists.

‘To get away from all that. Sanctuary, I named this place, and sanctuary it is. You should thank me for bringing you here and saving you from all that greed and horror.’ He sighed. ‘It all decays and falls away, boy: life, love, magic. There’s nothing worth saving in the end. May as well break it all up, let nature take its course.’

Rahe gave the levers a vicious twist, and images of the stronghold tumbled around the bowl: Virelai watched as a view of the kitchens was replaced by one of the ornamental lake with its ice swans and statuary, which in turn was displaced by a vista of the inner courtyard, then by a maze of corridors. A moment later there was a sudden blaze of gold amid the cheerless greys of the ice walls and he caught a glimpse of a naked woman, her long pale back all rosy in the candlelight, a swathe of silver-blonde hair veiling the curve of her buttocks as she slept – on the Master’s bed.

Rahe swore, pulled a cord and abruptly plunged the chamber into darkness once more.

Virelai, about to question the mage as to the identity of this miracle, was distracted by the sense of something unfamiliar stirring in his breeches. He reached down to investigate and was horrified to find that a previously innocent part of his anatomy had become hard and misshapen. Alarmed, he pushed it away between his legs, but the image of the woman returned again and again, so that no matter what he did the offending item sprang back up, throbbing and insistent.

It plagued him all day as he went about his tasks; that naked flesh, his unruly member. But what plagued him worst of all was the realisation that there was a world out there – other people, other places, endless possibilities – and that Rahe had kept it from him, as if he owned no more life or will than any other of the mage’s exhibits. He felt like apparatus in one of the Master’s experiments, stuffed full with volatile substances, ready to explode at any minute.

As soon as he was able, he made his way back to the secret tower-room, counting every step: third turn out of the east corridor, fifty-nine paces, then the hidden door; followed by the one hundred and sixty-eight winding ice stairs. He had memorised the route with grim determination, even though on the way there and back he had felt the Master try to maze his mind. It took him some time to understand the workings of the levers, but soon, in a fever of excitement, he found himself able to conjure all manner of images of Elda, and he fed upon them until he was dizzy and intoxicated. At last he turned his attention back to the matter of the woman he had glimpsed in the Master’s chamber, but no matter how delicately he manipulated the pulleys, he could find no sign of her.

He was just about to abandon his attempt when he came upon a view of Rahe himself standing in the middle of the hearth of the great hall with his robes on fire. Poisonously-coloured smokes billowed up from floor to ceiling. It was an arresting sight. Virelai held the lever still and watched. On the rug before the fireplace sat Bëte, her head cocked, her green eyes wide, studying the old man intently as, with a great shout (though no sound reached Virelai), the mage flung wide his arms. The smoke, which had been escaping lazily along the beams to collect in the hollows of the roof, was sucked suddenly backwards into the Master’s mouth, leaving only a few tendrils of purple and green to wisp gently from the old man’s nostrils.

Virelai frowned.

An instant later, the cat was in the Master’s arms and nose to nose with him. The mage opened his mouth and, a distorted mirror-image, Bëte did likewise. As if triggered by this action, smoke began to pour from man to animal until at last the cat’s eyes flared once with fiery light. Then she leapt down from his arms, made herself comfortable once more on the hearthrug and began to groom her posterior with overstated care.

Rahe stepped out of the fireplace, leaving behind him embers as cold and black as ancient lava, made, with a rudimentary gesture and a scatter of words, an incantation Virelai thought might be one of the eight Parameters of Being, and brought a huge oak crashing into the centre of the room. Its boughs creaked and swayed dangerously in the enclosed space. Bits of the ice roof crumbled and fell, but the Master took no notice of any impending disaster; rather, his face creased with concentration, he called the tree towards him as he had called the smoke and flame, and the tree obeyed, flowing like an ocean of leaf and bark across the chamber. Great braids of green and brown made a maelstrom around him, a maelstrom with the mage’s mouth at its vortex. Down it went, leaf and branch, bark and root, till there was no trace of it in the room.

Bëte, who during this latest display, even with her fur blown this way and that by the force of the spell, had not moved an inch, now considered the old man expectantly. He squeezed his eyes shut and coughed. With a muted plop, an acorn fell at the cat’s feet. She nosed at it curiously, then at the Master’s hand as he retrieved it.

He pressed the acorn to the cat’s face; but she made bars of her fangs. The Master pressed harder. A second or two more of resistance; then the sharp teeth sprang apart and Bëte had the acorn in her mouth, one of the mage’s hands clamped over her muzzle, and the other rubbing at her throat. Her eyes bulged, as if in panic; then she swallowed.

Rahe smiled distractedly and said something soothing to the cat. Then he bent and picked a speck of dirt – or else something indistinguishable – from the floor. After inspecting it minutely, he muttered over it, turned twice upon his heel and cast it aloft. The chamber seemed to ripple before Virelai’s eyes, then, where the oak had previously been there abruptly appeared a great winged creature, twelve feet tall and covered from spiny head to clawed foot in luminous scales.

Even in the relative safety of the tower-room, Virelai gasped in terror. Unbelievably, it seemed that the beast had heard him, for it turned its head ponderously and regarded him with eyes as multifaceted and unreadable as any bluebottle’s. It opened its monstrous jaws.

Then it seemed that the mage addressed it, for the appalling creature swung its head away. Released from that terrible scrutiny, Virelai pulled back the focus of the crystals in time to see the beast begin to dwindle, then to spin and rush towards its creator. A moment later the Master stood untouched and alone. Protruding slightly from his mouth was a small white object, which he gingerly withdrew and held out to his familiar. Upon his palm lay a single leathery white egg. Bëte showed considerably more interest in this than she had in the acorn. Her nose twitched, then she carefully set her teeth around it and, leaping light-footedly down from the table, carried the egg back to the rug, where she ate it slowly with the side of her mouth.

Something the Master had said in the tower-room came back to Virelai then. He had been so distracted by the visions of Elda that it had not registered at the time, but now it all came into clear focus.
There’s nothing worth saving in the end. May as well break it all up, let nature take its course
. Rahe was reversing his spellcraft, destroying all his magic.

A red mist boiled in Virelai’s head . . .

The Master straightened up, passed his hand across his exhausted face and began to pace the chamber. Avoiding his feet nimbly, the cat sprang up onto a table upon which a large crucible held a pile of ashes and what looked like a pair of charred brass hinges.

Virelai stared at the hinges. His head itched. He knew them; he
knew
them . . . His hand made a minute adjustment to the lever and the vista skewed around the chamber. Where was the great leatherbound volume in which the Master recorded each of his procedures and findings, adding to the wisdom of his predecessors? Where was the Grand Register of Making and Unmaking?

The terrible suspicion hardened into certainty.

Virelai abandoned the tower-room and, taking the stairs three at a time, hurled himself down into the familiar corridors of the stronghold.
Such a waste; such a stupid, senseless waste!
Anger surged and flowed inside him.
The old fool! The old monster!
A fount of lava bubbled under his pale skin; yet over the years he had learned to control his temper. No trace of his fury showed in eyes as cold and pale as a squid’s. Twenty-nine years: twenty-nine years of unreasonable demands, of useless tutoring, fetching and carrying and general humiliation; twenty-nine years of being beaten on a whim and called ‘boy’. And now Rahe was eradicating all those paths to magic that Virelai had been so patiently following, eradicating them and storing them out of his reach in the blasted cat, and just as he was beginning to gain some understanding of the processes, some mastery of magic’s complex structures. It was too much to bear.

By the time he reached the chamber, both the Master and his familiar were gone. Virelai crossed to the long table and stared down into the crucible. It did indeed appear to contain the last remnants of the Book of Making and Unmaking. He fished out the two hinges and weighed them in his hands. They felt lumpen, bereft of magic, useless without the great tome it had been their purpose to enclose. He put them down again, his heart as heavy as the cold metal.

On the floor beneath the table a couple of torn and crumpled pieces of parchment lay abandoned. He picked them up. The first had lost its top third and started midway through a sentence. He scanned it rapidly, recognised it as the charm for making a charging horse dwindle to stallion’s seed, and cast it down again. The second piece was almost entire and he could remember the missing words; and while he could think of no immediate use for a spell to remove rockfalls from choked caverns he pocketed it anyway. The third scrap of the Book contained a rather fiendish recipe of the Master’s own devising, that and a grim description of its effects. Virelai read it through once without much interest, then stopped.

His head came up. His eyes narrowed. He read it again. A sweat broke out on his brow and his heart began to thud. Clutching the parchment in his hand as if it were his pass-key from hell, he scurried to the kitchens.

Sanctuary had been carved so deeply out of the ice and into the rocky bones beneath that its walls were like the stone of unvisited caverns: dark and ungiving, ready to chill you to the marrow. Even the torches burning in the sconces lining the dim passageways in the heart of the stronghold seemed to make little impression on their surfaces. They barely flickered as Virelai passed them at speed later that the evening, carrying the Master’s meal on a tray. It would be the last time he did so. The chill he felt as he walked the corridors that encircled the mage’s chambers was not just a physical temperature, for the Master’s magic bore its own cold with it.

Where the ice gave way to rock strata, minerals glittered in the flickering candlelight: feldspar and pyrites; cristobalite and tourmaline; greywacke and hornblende and pegmatite. To Virelai, taught to respond to natural harmonics, each one bore a different resonance to its fellows, each a different voice. He liked to think of the voices as the souls of the earth: bound in its crystals, trapped there for millennia: and perhaps they were. Virelai had seen the Master speak to the walls; even before he had thought him mad.

Towards the heart of the labyrinth, the walls gleamed gold and silver. Virelai had learned from his reading that although many of the minerals had little worth in the lands beyond – the world he now knew as Elda – others were considered as ‘treasure’; though it had to be said that if this were the case, the peoples of Elda must confer most arbitrary value to the different rocks, for some of the so-called worthless ones (which were extensive in the tunnels) were remarkably close in appearance to those that men fought over in the old stories.

Fourth passage: dead end; take the first door past the hanging icicle; go down three steps; press the wall behind the tapestry
.

Once in the vicinity of the Master’s suite of rooms, Virelai became furtive. He lifted the metal dome that covered Rahe’s meal and sniffed it again, although he was careful not to take the vapours too deep into his lungs for fear that even in steam they might do their damage. But despite the virulent ingredients he had added to the stew from the old parchment’s recipe, he could sense none of them, through any of his senses, natural or attuned. He smiled.

When he reached it, the door to the Master’s chamber was slightly ajar and he could hear voices within. His heart hammered.

Balancing the tray carefully, Virelai applied his eye to the door-crack.

What he saw almost made him drop the dishes. The blood rushed to his head, his chest; his loins. His jaw sprang open like an unlatched gate. He stared and stared, taking in detail after detail of the scene. Then he grinned wolfishly.
To the opportunist shall be granted opportunity, and he who takes Destiny by the throat shall be rewarded threefold
: was that not what the books said? Virelai counted his blessings. Threefold indeed.

He knocked smartly upon the door.

‘Your supper, lord.’

There was a hush, followed by a soft scuffle, the rustle of heavy fabrics. Then: ‘Leave the tray outside, Virelai,’ came the Master’s voice, a trifle querulous. ‘I am somewhat engaged just now.’

‘Indeed, lord: may you have pleasure of it.’