Sorcery Rising (59 page)

The
seither
’s lips curved upwards into her sweet smile. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘But in a way only you might hear.’

Katla frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

The woman pressed the dagger into Katla’s hand and again the light shone, brighter this time, as if the metal were lit by an inner fire. Katla gasped. She watched lines of flame lick up and down the patterns in the blade, illuminating each gorgeous detail. When the woman withdrew her hand the light faltered for a moment and gained a bluish tinge; then it flared out again, brighter than ever.

Festrin laughed delightedly. ‘Your heart knows more than your head, my dear. And it was with your heart that you worked this blade. Just think what you might achieve now, with the magic awakened. I wonder if it is just metal with which you have this affinity,’ she mused. ‘I’d be curious to see how you worked with stone or wood.’

Katla, shaking, placed the dagger back on the board. Her knees felt weak. Little tremors of aftershock ran up and down her arms. ‘It’s hard to work anything one-handed,’ she said dully.

‘Then let us try to remedy that situation,’ the
seither
declared. She took Katla’s right hand in both of hers.
Pick up the dagger, Katla
.

Katla’s left hand went to the hilt before the thought had completed itself. Light flamed out, red and white; and then, without knowing what she did or why, Katla found she had poised the point over her injured hand and was cutting down. The
seither
placed a guiding hand on top of Katla’s. ‘Don’t falter,’ the woman said aloud. ‘Trust yourself. Trust me. Trust the magic.’

The scar tissue began to part, but there was little blood. Katla stared disbelievingly. Again the dagger descended into the clubhand and she watched it with awe, as if it moved of its own accord, or as if it were an entertainment performed for her benefit by others. A piece of dead flesh fell to the floor, followed by another and Katla watched with a kind of fascinated repulsion.
Much more of this
, some part of her mind thought,
and I’ll have nothing left there but a bloody stump
.

The glow from the dagger was so bright now that it hurt her eyes, leaving a jagged white after-image even when she looked away, and the whole of her left arm was abuzz, hot vibrations chasing one another through the bones and up into her shoulder joint; then spiralling around her ribs, down her pelvis and into her legs. The soles of her feet tingled and burned; the energy flowing out into the flagstones. She could feel them absorbing it all; she could feel how it was sucked away into the veins of the ground below, only to gather itself and rebound to her anew.

The
seither
’s face was awash with the light: her single eye gleamed like a moon.

Another cut and Katla ‘saw’ the image of her forefinger and thumb, limned by a red glow, but separate and true.
I could pick up a spoon now
, she thought incongruously.
I could hold a pair of tongs
. . . Another release of pressure, followed by the urgent wish to flex her hand, but the resistance was still there. She bore down again with the knife, feeling the incursion of the blade more deeply than ever, and had to bite her lip to prevent herself from screaming out her fear and horror. Remarkably, there was still no pain – just a sense of applied weight and coercion. She became aware of another finger being freed from the club.

The buzzing got stronger, the light blinding.

Suddenly she was conscious of another voice amongst the vibrations: deep and low and a long way off – more of a rumble in the earth than a voice, in truth; more like the deep heart of the ocean, beating and retreating. The sound was hard to distinguish, but it was not the
seither
, not this time. She closed her eyes so that the light could not distract her and reached after it, down and down, through the flagstones, down into the rock beneath. Then:
Hear me!
the voice rumbled.
I feel you: even in my prison of stone I hear you: hear me! Sirio calls you, through the veins of Elda, I call you to free me. I have been incarcerated here for three hundred years and none have heard me. Come to me
—

‘Katla!’

Her eyes sprang open. In her shock at this new invasion, her hands fell away, leaving Festrin in sole control of the bloodstained dagger.

‘My god! What are you doing to her?’

Wild-eyed in the blazing light, his hair a blood-red corona, Fent snatched up the carnelian sword and rushed at the
seither
. ‘Leave her alone, you witch!’ he howled, and with a single vicious lunge spitted the one-eyed woman on the perfect blade.

Festrin stared down at where the hilt had come to a violent halt against her ribs. Her eye blinked furiously. Then one long hand floated up and wrapped itself about Fent’s throat, the fingers tightening convulsively so that his eyes bulged and his hands came off the Red Sword.

‘An . . . evil deed . . . to interrupt . . . a healing . . .’ She coughed and dark blood bubbled out of her mouth and ran down her chin. ‘May all . . . your ventures . . . meet with . . . disaster . . .’ She smiled sweetly, grotesquely; then crumpled to the floor, where she lay canted at an odd angle, half-propped up by the sturdy hilt.

Katla, jarred out of her inertia, pushed Fent aside and dropped to her knees beside the
seither
. ‘Festrin, hear me!’ Her voice felt odd to her, deeper and more sonorous. She turned the woman over with surprising ease, and laying both hands on the hilt, withdrew the carnelian sword. A gout of blood shot into the air, striking Katla in the face, but she barely registered the fact beyond noting the unaccustomed warmth on her skin. The weapon blazed like lightning in her hands, and she became dimly aware that Fent had staggered back, shouting something incomprehensible. Behind him, another figure appeared as a blur, but Katla’s attention was on the dying woman. She laid aside the Red Sword, but the light continued to pulse up and down her arms. Without a thought, she plunged her new-made hand into the hole in the woman’s chest, and the light went out like a doused fire. Heat surged and ebbed inside her; and ebbed again and again. She felt the tide of power draining away and something inside her mourned it.
Let go!
came a voice in her skull.
Let go!
It reverberated back and forth, a miserable, tiny thing like a bat in a cave, echoing until her head ached. It was all too much.
I am dying
, she thought desperately, feeling the last of the fire go out of her.
Here and now, I am dying
.

With a gasp, she fell backwards, and felt the cold night claim her.

Twenty-three

The Use of Magic

E
xhausted after a long day’s work for his new master, his hands stinking of tin and other cheap alloys, Virelai stood at the window of his room in the High Tower and stared out at the city of Cera. No matter how long he spent here, he thought, he would never get used to the idea of there being so many people in the world. It had become his favourite pastime whenever he was able: watching them scurrying to and fro along the narrow streets with their baskets and carts, their pack-animals and their slaves, all so busy, so preoccupied, each with their own lives, anxieties and dramas.
Why did the Master never tell me about all this?
he wondered, as he had wondered every day since Lord Tycho Issian had brought him here. But he knew the answer; just as he had known it as soon as he had spied the Rosa Eldi in the Master’s chamber: Rahe kept the world secret from him because he knew Virelai would be tempted by it, that he would be unable to withstand the lure of its secrets. And now he had exchanged one master who sought to keep him cloistered for another. For the view from this elevated window – like the view from an eyrie on an inaccessible peak – was the closest that Virelai had come to the world’s temptations: Tycho had seen to that as soon as he had managed to work the shaping spell on the base metals he had been brought, creating for the Lord of Cantara a fortune in what appeared as perfect silver to all eyes except those of a trained mage. And to begin with, Virelai had hardly cared for the world, so thrilled had he been at the success of his magic. Twenty-nine years he had been apprenticed to a mage; yet in all that time Rahe had taught him only the most rudimentary spellcraft, keeping him ever distant from the magic that changed nature or even the appearance of nature. In truth, his apprenticeship had amounted to little more than slave-work: fetching and carrying, cooking and skivvying. He ground the powders for the Master’s alchemical experiments, heated the crucible and polished the retorts; he cut the hearts from the little birds that Rahe conjured for his darker magic, and burned them with blood from his own finger. He had felt nothing for the tiny fluttering things: for they were spellborn and shortlived, given life only at the Master’s whim; but he was beginning to experience odd pangs of remorse, especially now as he watched the small blue-and-black swallows swooping beneath the eaves of the villas on the hill below the castle. Suddenly he found himself wondering if he had been in some way cruel to deny the tiny magic-made birds the same freedom to find mates and make nests and raise young.

‘Every creature has the right to its own life,’ he said now, aloud, ‘no matter how they come into this world.’ Even as he said it, he knew it to be a deep truth. Behind him on the bed, Bëte the cat stirred and yawned and a moment later he felt a voice tickle the inside of his skull.

At last
, it said.
At last he wakes
.

Two days later, Rui Finco strode down the Amber Parade in Istria’s capital city, hardly noticing how elegant the avenue of poplars looked this year, nor how the fountains played at the intersection with the Great West Road; nor even how the sunlight made a golden curtain of the wall of the Duke’s palace at the top of the hill. A trader carrying a pitcher of wine on his shoulder jostled him as he entered Market Way, but rather than roundly chastise the man as he would usually do, the Lord of Forent hurried on grimly, his handsome face set in a scowl. Ever since the fiasco at the Allfair – when he had lost the northern king, his most useful piece of blackmail evidence, the services of the best shipmaker in the known world (let alone all the funds tied up in their many and various projects) and the trust of the other lords in his cabal, all in the space of a single evening – Rui’s plans had been going further and further awry. He owed money to Lords Prionan and Varyx, and Prionan had been less than understanding about the loss of his investment. Varyx, of course, had been witness to the proceedings; more, it had been through his stupidity that Ravn Asharson had armed himself and escaped; even so, that did not seem to have prevented him treating Rui with unwonted familiarity, where before he had been all suitable deference and submission. Losing face amongst his peers had been the worst of it, he admitted to himself. It would require a bold move to win them back to him; and win them back he must, if he were ever to proceed with his overarching strategy. And so he walked the capital, desperate to escape the stifling confinement of the palace, with its whisperings and snide laughter, the little knots of men who fell silent or broke apart as he entered a room; the sense that he had fallen irrevocably into that social quagmire from which it was impossible to crawl alive.

Forcing his busy mind to quietude, he made his way through the early afternoon traders and customers, stooping beneath awnings and stepping around crates of oranges and limes, in and out of great skeins of herbs, ropes of garlic and hot peppers, bundles of wind-dried chickens and Jetra ducks, between stalls selling confectionery in the most lurid hues, jars of spice, silver jewellery, gemstones and tapestries; rolls of silk and lace from Galia; rugs and carpets and huge bronze vases; ornamental braziers, censers and garlands of safflower; flasks of wine and araque and the bitter, resinous spirits of the deep south; he passed them all with barely a look, beyond registering a slight surprise that it seemed easier to make his way through the market than it usually did at this hour of Fifthday.

Emerging from the agora into the backstreets beyond, he found the city even more deserted. Two bony, striped cats lying in a pool of sunlight between the fish shop and the grain store darted away so swiftly at his approach that all he saw was a movement in his peripheral vision; and a moment later he was out into the wide avenue bordering the gardens below Speaker’s Mount.

Here – where there was usually only sporadic traffic and the occasional recitation of self-penned verses – the place was heaving with humanity and a great hubbub of noise. Hundreds upon hundreds of folk seemed to have gravitated towards the Mount and were surrounding it for fifty yards in all directions. Rui Finco stopped still on the outside of the crowd in amazement. It was not like the citizens of Cera to gather for any reason other than to celebrate feast-times and fire festivals; but this, this sounded like some religious ranter holding forth at the top of his voice, and religious fervour was a rare thing indeed in the decadent Istrian capital, where everyone made dutiful but unen-thusiastic obeisance to the Goddess and went on with their usual business of fleecing their neighbours and visiting the bordellos without a qualm; or turned the very worship into a public ostentation, to score social points and win political favour.

He craned his neck to view the man who had generated such interest, and was horrified to find that he knew the speaker.

It was Tycho Issian, the Lord of Cantara.

Behind him, standing slightly to one side, and taller by a head, stood the pale man Rui had seen accompanying the Lord of Cantara to the Gathering; and curled in his arms there appeared to be a small black cat all tricked out in a fancy red harness and muzzle. Rui frowned. What bizarre entertainment was this? He pushed his way into the crowd until he could better hear the proceedings; which proved easier than he had expected, for the assembled crowd was as rapt and silent as if held under a powerful spell, hanging – against all likelihood, for, even if he had suddenly come into some huge and extravagant fortune which he was spending left, right and centre, was the man not a low-born upstart? – on every word that Tycho Issian uttered.