Stones Unbound (The Magestone Chronicles Book 1) (8 page)

It was said that one of the Emperor’s mythical sky citadels
guarded the pass from Goralon; a fortress in the sky.  He would love to see one
of those someday; if they even existed.  Tomrin, one of the other boys in town,
had said he had seen one once, but everyone knew Tomrin lied more often than
not.

Niala came running up the hill, out of breath.  Keela jumped
up, knocking her down in a tangle of limbs and then began licking her face. 
“Can we give it to him now?!” she asked Vanda, still giggling, rolling on the
ground with the hound.  “Can we?”

“Give me what?” he said excitedly, sitting up.

“Your birthing day gift,” said Vanda as she sat up also. 
She was almost fifteen, and tried to match the maturity of the older girls,
usually quite successfully.  She was failing right now, however.

“You didn’t have to get me anything,” he said, with even
more excitement, but he didn’t really mean it.  He was ten.  Ten!  It was a
special year, and he
should
get presents.

Vanda reached into the small rucksack they had brought their
lunch in.  The adults were glad to send them on a picnic, getting them out from
under foot.  She brought out a small item wrapped in a bright cloth and
presented it to Hoyle.

He opened it reverently, and saw a small silver firebird
earring. It had flecks of red stone for eyes and its wings spread as if in
flight.  He was speechless.  This must have cost Vanda all her chore money for
the past year.

“The merchant said it was a charm to keep one safe,” said
Vanda.  “And mother helped out.  She knows how much trouble you get into.”  She
smiled as she said it.  Her smiles lit up her face, and made others wants to
smile too.  She had dark hair like his, but bright green eyes that sparkled.

“And it’s really pretty too,” added Niala, who was eight.

Hoyle looked at the hook on the end, and became
apprehensive.  How was he going to wear it?  It was supposed to poke through
his ear, but that was going to hurt.  He turned to Vanda, who wore an earring
in each ear.  She noticed his look, and took the earring from his hand.

“It only hurts for a second, and is sore for a day or two. 
You have to make sure you wash your ear every day for a week, or it will get
rotten.” She instructed.  “Agreed?”

“Okay Vanda, I will.”

“Promise.”

“I promise,” he said as solemnly as any ten year-old had
ever said the words.

“Which ear do you want it in?” Vanda asked as Niala sat up
in the grass beside them, looking on intently.  She did not have any earrings
yet, their mother would not allow it.

“The left,” Hoyle decided, after thinking it through for a
short time.  He often went to sleep on his right side.  He gritted his teeth as
Vanda held his head steady and poked the earring gently against his ear to
position it.

“On three,” she said and started counting, “One... Two...”
And then a sharp pain shot through Hoyle’s ear as she pushed the hook through
his earlobe.

---o---

Hoyle woke to the large man tugging on the earring, causing
sharp pain to lance across the side of his head, “you said on three...” Hoyle
accused his sister, waking from the dream.

“Awake now are you?” Robart asked as he let the earring
go.  He stalked to the water pitcher and poured more into the goblet he had
allowed Hoyle to drink from earlier.  He walked back and splashed it in Hoyle’s
face.  “There, that’ll help.”

“What was the question?” Hoyle asked groggily.

His only answer was a slap across the face.  He could feel
blood running down his chin from his split lip.  He looked up at the large man
looming over him.

“You hit like a girl,” he responded.  This time the punch
broke his nose and sent tears tumbling from his eyes.  Blood now flowed freely down
his face and dripped from his chin.  A small, dark form was beside him then,
wiping up most of the blood with a wet cloth.  He thought he recognized the veklian
as the one who served him the meal earlier in the day, but his vision was
blurry and his head spinning.  “Okay... maybe not a girl... more like a barmaid
swinging a wet rag.”  Hoyle braced himself for another blow, but nothing came
immediately.

Suddenly, a booming laugh burst from the larger man,
startling the guards at the door.  “I must admit,” Robart said as he finished
his laugh, “you do have a backbone... and grit.”

“I’m glad you’re impressed,” he replied, spitting out blood
into the rag the veklian held beside him.  “That was always my goal all along –
impress the torturer...”

“I prefer to refer to myself as an artist,” came the
response from behind him.  Robart stepped quickly in front of him and with a
swift motion drove a dagger down and into the meat of his thigh.  Hoyle gritted
his teeth as the immense pain swept through his body.  The blade was in to the
hilt, so the tip must be through and out the bottom of his leg.  He could hear
more blood dripping on the floor.  Robart leaned in front of him, staring into
his eyes, and asked for about the eighth time in the last day, “What did you
find for them?”

Hoyle stayed silent, more because he was starting to fade
again due to blood loss this time more than the pain.  Robart glared at the veklian,
and the creature retreated to somewhere behind Hoyle.  Hoyle's head started to
droop as his vision started to tunnel.  He saw Robart motion out of the corner
of his eye, and then he heard the soft voice of the priestess.

“Be still,” she said as her hands touched both sides of
Hoyle’s head.  “I cannot heal him with the knife still in his leg,” she
chastised his torturer.  A sudden tug at the blade in his leg, and Hoyle lost
consciousness.  For at least the fifth time in two days.  Not that he was
counting...

It was the second full day of petitioner duty, mid-afternoon,
when Celia looked up to see that the line was done.  She sighed, stood and
raised her arms above her head and stretched her back.  She felt several pops
up her back as things realigned.  The only thing she hated more than the
helplessness she felt being unable to help most of the petitioners, was the
hard wooden chair she had to sit in all day, with only a short break for lunch
as a repreive.

Zazaril had assigned it as a punishment, but she felt it was
more of a duty, which is the only thing that had gotten her through the last
two days.  As it was, she had had a hard time focusing, her mind wandering back
to the feelings of the trace spell she had cast on Salrissa.  She had spent the
first half of the day before in the southwest quarter of the city, the trade
quarter, at the Red Rooster Inn, Celia assumed.  After that she had moved
around the far side of the city until well after dark.  The first time she
‘jumped’, it caught Celia off guard, causing her to spill her tea on the tome
she had found in the library.  One moment Salrissa was in the southwest, the
next she was in the southeast.

That must have been how she had gotten them out of the guild
tower, but Celia was still not sure what it was Salrissa had done.  She had
‘jumped’ again several times that night, seemingly stepping from one end of
Tala’ahar to the other in an instant.  Celia still shuddered at the memory of
what that trip had done to her body.  She was not eager to repeat that event
anytime soon.

This afternoon, she was still in the southwest quarter of
the city, most likely the trade quarter.  It seemed she was more active at
night, and Celia understood why after spending that time with her.  It was as
if the night was her natural element.

Celia gathered her petitioner notes, mostly names and
requests that would go on to Zazaril.  Most would have to be ignored, but
sometimes the notes taken revealed something of interest to her mentor, and the
people were summoned and their requests granted.  She placed these in the
cherrywood box at the end of the table. She nodded to the other wizard on
petitioner duty, an older man named Theus, with greying hair, a strong chin,
and thoughtful eyes.  He had the habit of wearing deep red robes, and today was
no exception.  He nodded back to her.  She slipped out the back door and made
her way to the dining hall.

It was early, but she could smell dinner being prepared in
the large kitchen off the dining hall.  It smelled of roast ham and warm
bread.  She took a seat by one of the windows and settled in to wait.  She
pulled out the tome she had found in the small archives vault the embassy kept
in the basement two nights before.  It was titled
Treatises on Modern Magic
and contained over a dozen essays written well over a hundred years ago; one by
Widune the Wise, one by Sarisha’ala of the Emerald Court, one by Vicalas
Ardasha; all respected wizards of their time.

Turning to the passage she had marked the previous evening
in the essay titled
The Comparisons Between Ancient Goralonian Blood Rituals
and the Not-So-Modern Magic of Magestones
, she read the passage by Widun that
had caught her interest. 

To compare Goralonian blood rituals to magic created with the
quafa'shilaar, is to compare a mule with a tree; neither will move, but for
different reasons; the mule, because it is stubborn and set in its ways, and if
you’re not careful it will kick you; the tree, because it follows the laws of
nature, and will bend when required, but only so far before it will break.  The
mule, if cajoled or beaten may move, but if your concentration wanders you may
find yourself someplace you did not wish to be.  From the tree, you may take
small branches, and burn them in your fire, but if you’re not careful, your
fire may consume the tree, leaving you without a source of warmth.

Celia thought this through, but came to the same conclusion
she had the night before; blood rituals were dangerous and possibly
unpredictable, which she already knew from her studies of ancient magic while
at Mahad’avor.  This passage also indicated the quafa'shilaar had limits. 
Celia was not that strong in her sorceress’s magical power, but she also had
not tested her limits beyond what was required at Mahad’avor to gain her
magestone.  This passage seemed to indicate that one could burn out the
magestones. 
Was that true?  What did it truly mean? How? Or was it the
wizards who burned out?

She continued to read until the server brought her dinner to
the table at least a full bell later.  She was so engrossed in the tome she only
noticed the other two that sat at her table when she looked up to her meal. 
She looked around the room, shaking the chill off from the last passage she had
read, by Sarisha’ala of the Emerald Court, a respected elven sorceress:

Based on the magical entropy the elvish race has experienced
in its inherent magical nature since the spell-storms of the great Elf-Orc war
from 526 to 534 PC (post cataclysm), it begs to question if the magic of the
entire world is in jeopardy of decline, or complete entropy – if so, is the
result a null-state or a Apocalypse event?

Based on her knowledge of history from her classes, Celia
did the math quickly and determined that the great war mentioned by the elven
sorceress was just over two-thousand years ago.  If the elvish people were part
of the inherent magic of the world, and they had caused some sort of imbalance
in nature that had caused the entropy that was affecting their entire race, and
that had grown worse over the last two millennia, how hard was it to believe
that you could burn out a magestone, or the wizard wielding it?

“What is the matter deary?” asked one of her table mates,
who, as it happens, turned out to be Mindeela.  “You look a little pale.” 
Celia looked at the small woman, who was in a bright yellow dress, and thought
that though she meant well, that she shouldn’t be commenting on that particular
fact.  The yellow dress just accentuated her own dreary skin and drab hair.

“Nothing important.” Celia finally replied when the other
woman waited patiently for her response.

“Do you truly be certain?” asked the other woman at the
table.  Arandella was the opposite of Mindeela in about every way.  Heralding
from the Seven Isles in the Southern Sea, she was tall, with rich, glowing
tanned skin, dark mischievous eyes, long black hair, and a presence that
generally uplifted an entire room.  She was wearing a multi-coloured floral
dress with gold trim and a deep neckline to ample cleavage, several gold
necklaces that drew the eye down to said cleavage, as well as several more
bracelets of various types that jingled when she gestured.  “It do be looking
like you have seen a spirit.”

“It was nothing,” Celia asserted as she buttered her warm
bread and took a bite to stem more questions, or at least having to answer them. 
The steaming ham slice on her plate was covered in thick vakirberry sauce that
added a pleasant sweet yet tangy taste to the meal.  She realized how hungry she
was.  She put the most recent passage out of her mind and dug into her meal
with more gusto.

Mindeela and Arandella began to chat quietly about their
several areas of study, Mindeela on trying to recreate the healing magic of the
priesthood through magic, Arandella regarding the transport of people and goods
across long distances.  She had managed several sub areas of study, including
creating sustained wind to speed transport ships, but her passion was to try
and replicate the magic of gatal'shilaar - magegates, by spell alone.  She felt
that the gatal'shilaar were limited due to their small size preventing wagons
from traveling through.  Because the Seven Isles were really comprised of seven
large main islands and multitudes of smaller islands in a full archipelago
containing islands as large as a three-day walk across, to those that a person
could throw a good-sized stone from one end to the other, she was concerned
about how to get goods or medical help to those distant locations.

Celia tuned them out after she had finished her meal,
as
had apparently become her habit
she thought wryly.  All her research over
the past days had not brought her any closer to the reason why the Goralonians
would steal the magestones.