The Magic of Recluce (4 page)

J
UST BEFORE MID-MORNING
, when it became clear that I was going to be arriving in Nylan at least close to on time, my stomach began to protest.

After passing through Enstronn, I had also passed by Clarion, and a place called Sigil. Despite the elegantly-lettered sign, I had never heard of Sigil, and that meant it couldn't amount to much. Though I strained my eyes to the north of the High Road, and while I could sense that a few houses lay in that direction, I had been able to see nothing.

Beyond Sigil the road grew less traveled, and slightly more dusty. The sun continued to beat down on the dust and on me.

Ahead a blur appeared on the right side of the High Road. Even before I could see it clearly, I recognized it for a wayfaring station. A wayfaring station on the way to one of the main ports of Recluce?

Few citizens of Recluce travel that much, and the masters allow even fewer outside traders upon the isle. They always seem to know when strangers land on the open south beaches or sneak through the fjords punctuating the mountainous north coast. The mountains form a shield against the worst of the winter storms, but they also trap the warm damp winds from the south, which is why the highlands are so damp—almost a jungle in places.

The traders who have leave to travel Recluce are seldom young, and they always say little. Usually they are buyers of art, of pottery or other crafts. Sometimes they sell the southern jewels, the yellow diamonds and the deep green emeralds, that occur only in the far reaches of Hamor.

I wondered once why everyone used the same coins, before I discovered that everyone didn't. Most countries, except for the Pantarrans, use coins similar to the Hamorians—just like we did—copper, silver, or gold pennies. They all have different writing, but the weights are the same—unless someone's clipped the coins. Why? Probably because almost everyone sells to Hamor. Even the Austrans, for all their pride, use coins of the same weight. They call them different names that no one uses—even in Austra.

With so few people traveling beyond a few towns, I used to ask about the High Road, and why it had to be so grand. My father just shook his head. Uncle Sardit never even answered.

As my sore feet brought me nearer to the wayfaring station, the thought of a short break became more and more welcome.

The stations are all alike—tiled roof over four windowless walls, a door that can be barred, and a wide covered porch with stone benches. No furnishings inside, not even a hearth or chimney for a cook fire. Strictly for a quick rest or a place to wait out bad weather.

After pulling off my boots, rubbing my feet, and taking a sip of warm water from the water bottle as I sat on the back stone bench closest to Nylan—the coolest one—I opened the provisions my father had provided. The leftover duck was still good, and there were the last two flake rolls, one plain and one stuffed with cherry preserves. I finished up by eating one of the two sourpears and saved the other.

As I took the last bite of the fruit, I could feel someone approaching. So I looked to the west. Sure enough, a man was leading a horse and covered cart. While he looked to be a trader, I took the precaution of pulling my boots back on, wincing at the blisters I was developing. After that I replaced the provisions bag in my pack and tossed the few scraps out for the birds, out beyond the road.

The staff leaned up against the bench, where I could reach it easily, and my pack was ready to go. I just wasn't.

“Hello there,” he called from the wagon post. The man was young for a trader, younger than Uncle Sardit, but with black ragged hair, and a close-trimmed full beard. His short-sleeved tunic was of faded yellowish leather, as were his boots and his trousers. He had a wide brown belt on which he wore a brace of knives. Shoulders broader than Uncle Sardit, and muscles to match.

“Good day,” I answered, politely, standing. “Heading inland from Nylan?”

“Couldn't be from anywhere else, now could I?” He laughed as he said it, while he tethered the horse, a dark brown gelding. “And you?”

“From the east…”

He finished with the animal and stepped up the two stone steps. “Young for a myskid to be traveling, aren't you?”

For some reason, his tone bothered me, and I stepped back, ready to pick up the staff. “Some might say that.”

“Never seen a place like Recluce. Nobody travels.”

“Not many.”

“You're about as friendly as the rest, aren't you? Don't think much of the rest of the world, I guess.”

“Really don't know much about it,” I admitted.

“First one I've seen who's willing to admit that there is a world off this overgrown island.”

I didn't say much to that. What was there to say?

“Strange place. The women won't look at you unless you take a bath at least three times a week, and they don't talk to you anyway, except to buy or sell. Those characters in black, they have everyone scared, I guess. Even the empire doesn't mess with them.”

“Empire?”

“Haven't you heard of Hamor? The Empire of the East?” By now, the trader had put one foot up on the other end of the bench.

He was just like all the other traders. Boring. He'd seen something I had not, and that made him feel better.

“You don't like me, boy? Just like everyone else? If you want my jewels, or you want to sell something—Tira! You don't have anything worth selling, except maybe that staff. Good work, there.”

He reached for it, as if I weren't standing there.

The staff was somehow in my hands, although I didn't remember grabbing it, and I had brought it down on the back of his extended wrist.

Crack. Hsssss
.

“Another damned devil-spawn!…” He backed away, his unhurt hand on a knife.

I could tell he was deciding whether to throw it, and I could feel my guts tighten. I hadn't meant to hit him, or do whatever the staff had done.

“The masters wouldn't like it if you did.” It was a struggle to keep my words even, but I managed it.

“Devils take your masters…” he gasped. But he didn't use the knife. He took another long look at me.

I brought the staff down. It felt warm to me, as though it had been in the sun or next to the fire.

“So you're another one of them…” He was slowly backing away from me, although I had not moved.

“I'm nothing…yet.”

“Damned isle…” He was next to his horse.

I swung the pack onto my back and started toward the near steps, the ones closest to Nylan.

“You can stay. You need the rest.”

He watched me, but said nothing else.

I could feel his eyes on me, and the hate, deep as the North River in flood, and almost as wild. But I put one sore foot in front of the other, wanting to get as far from the waystation and the trader as possible.

Were all traders like that, underneath, when they thought people were helpless? And why had the staff burned his wrist? I knew woods, and some about metal, and the staff was just that—lorken and steel…wood and forged metal. Almost a work of art, and that was why the trader had wanted it, but no more than wood and steel, certainly.

I knew some staff-play, just because my father had insisted on it as an exercise. That had been years ago, before I had been Uncle Sardit's apprentice. I guess you don't forget some things, but even remembered practice and fear wouldn't make a staff burn someone.

Could it be that the trader was a devil? I couldn't believe that, much as the old legends spoke of devils that burned at the touch of cold iron.

I shivered as I walked, despite the sunshine, the heat, and the dust. Did all the reaction of the woman on the road and the trader have something to do with me? Or with the staff? But there was no magic in Recluce, and I was certainly no magician.

I shivered again and kept walking.

N
YLAN HAS ALWAYS
been the Black City, just like forgotten Frven was once the White City. It doesn't matter that Nylan has little more than a village's population, or that it is a seaport used only by the Brotherhood. Or that it is a fortress that has never been taken, and tested but once.

Nylan is the Black City, and it will always be that.

From the High Road, at first it looked like a low black cloud of road dust, then like a small hill. Only when I came within a kay or so did I recognize its size. The walls are not high, perhaps sixty cubits, but they stretch from one side of the peninsula to the other, with the one gate, the one that ends the High Road. I'd seen paintings of the walls and castles of Candar, Hamor, and Austra, but Nylan was different. The walls were featureless. No embrasures, no crenelations. And no ditch, no bridge, no moat. The High Road ran straight to the gate.

The other end of the High Road is at Land's End, nearly a thousand kays eastward. Land's End is just that—where Recluce ends. Once it was a seaport, before the currents and the winds changed the Gulf of Murr from a sheltered haven into the most storm-tossed section of the Eastern Ocean. Ships landed there occasionally, but not generally by choice. The only official port was Nylan, which seemed strange to me even when Magister Kerwin taught us that.

The walls are not the most impressive feature of Nylan. The cliffs are. Black as the stone walls, smooth as black ice, they drop two hundred cubits to the dark gray-blue of the waves that crash against them.

I saw both walls and cliffs at midday, with the sun full upon them. Even in full sunlight, they resembled shadows. I shivered, grasping my staff, which felt warm in my hands, as if it were trying to dispel that inner chill.

Just looking at the massive black metal gates, the black stone, and the cliffs, I could see why they called it the Black City. I could also see another reason to worry about what I was getting into. Except I didn't have much choice.

The gate was open, wide open, with no one in sight.

So I walked up the last cubits of the High Road and into the narrow band of shadow before the gate itself, looking up at the featureless walls.

“What's your reason for being here, traveler?”

The voice was pleasant enough, and I looked for the speaker, finally locating her seated on something in a walled ledge seven or eight cubits above the road and beside the archway. Where she sat would be covered by the gates when they closed.

She wore black—black trousers, black tunic, black boots. A staff, dark like mine, rested by her hand. Her hair looked to be brown in the shadow.

“Your reason for entering Nylan?”

“Dangergeld,” I answered slowly.

“Your name?”

“Lerris.”

“From where?”

“Raised in Wandernaught; apprenticed in Mattra.”

“Just about on schedule.” Her voice was polite, but bored. “Once you go through the gate, turn left and go straight to the small building with the green triangle beside the door. Don't go anywhere else.”

“And if I do?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all. Except you'll waste your time, and someone else's, if they have to go find you. Anyone who sees you will direct you back to the orientation building.” Her voice was so matter-of-fact that I felt chilled again.

“Thank you.”

She did not speak, but nodded as I passed beneath, through the archway that was another fifteen cubits overhead. The walls were thicker than I'd thought, perhaps as thick as they were tall. Up close, each stone looked like granite, but I had never seen black granite. Inside the archway, the shade and the breeze from the water were both a welcome relief.

Once back into the sunlight, I stopped at the crossroads for a moment to take in Nylan. One road went right, toward a squarish and massive low building. Another went left, and the largest split in a circle around a black oak and headed due west.

The city itself was a disappointment in some ways, fascinating at first glance in others. Trees, welcome after the featureless plains and fields that had led up to the wall, were scattered throughout Nylan. Some of them were apparently ancient, like the huge black oak lying directly before me that stood taller than the wall itself. I stepped several paces to the left and kept looking. All the ways were paved in the same black stone as the walls, and the low buildings, none more than a single story, were also of the same stone. The roofs were shingled with black stone, and although the color matched the rest of the stone, the texture seemed more like slate.

No building was closer than fifty or sixty cubits from another, although several rambled quite extensively.

The grass was emerald-green, brilliant, in contrast to the sun-faded grasses I had observed from the High Road and throughout Eastern Recluce. Few people seemed out and about, and most of those that were wore black.

Nylan stretched further westward than I had thought, easily another five kays before reaching the tip of the peninsula where, I presumed, existed the Brotherhood's walled and protected seaport. From what I could see, the ground sloped gently downward toward the west, allowing me to see that the pattern I saw close by generally continued further westward. The trees and areas of park land made it hard to tell for certain.

Outside of all the black, it looked pleasant enough, almost like an oasis of sorts. But the black was hard to ignore. It wasn't depressing. It was just there.

Finally I flexed my shoulders, grasped the staff, and walked down the black stone road. Why the woman had even bothered to say that the building had a green triangle by the door was a wonder. The narrow road ended at right angles to a much wider road heading westward. The only building there was the one with the triangle. I supposed that the colored shapes were used as some sort of identification. How else would you give directions when all the buildings, homes, and shops were the same color and construction? It seemed rather dull, almost boring. If you were as powerful as the masters were, why build everything the same?

The black-oak door was open, and I walked in. The door itself was well made, almost as good as anything that Uncle Sardit had done. So was the rest of the woodwork, although I could see I would be bored stiff if all the masters used were black oak and black stone.

“Another one…”

I looked up from my study of moldings to realize that I stood in an upper foyer. At the bottom of three room-wide stone steps sat five people, three women and two men, on two long benches.

I nodded and stepped down, realizing as I drew closer that, with the possible exception of one of the women, a muscular blond, I was easily the youngest, and the only one with a staff. Everyone else had a pack by their feet.

“Lerris,” I announced myself.

An older man, perhaps in his late thirties from his looks, stood. “Sammel.” He was balding and brown-haired, with deep-set circled eyes.

“Krystal.” She was black-haired, black-eyed, white-skinned, and thin, with fine hair that spun down to her waist.

“Wrynn.” Blond, wide-eyed, with wide shoulders and callused hands, she dismissed me instantly.

“Dorthae.” Flat-voiced, olive-skinned, with strawberry ringlets of hair, she flashed a gold ring from every finger.

“Myrten.” Sharp-nosed, with the eyes of a ferret, and hair like a shaggy bison, he spoke with a voice both high and cutting.

I nodded to all five of them and came down the steps, unslinging my pack and laying it carefully in the corner next to the empty spot at the far left end of the left-hand bench. I stood my staff in the corner as well.

“There is one more on the way, or so we have been told,” added Sammel in a quiet and deep voice. He reseated himself and sat down.

I did not sit down. My feet were sore but sitting down was boring, and besides, I hadn't had a chance to look around.

The foyer, waiting room, whatever it was, was maybe ten cubits wide and not quite that deep. There were three doors besides the entry, one in the center of each wall. The benches were backed up against the wall opposite the front doorway and the stairs, separated by a closed door. All the doors were hung to open away from the foyer. All were black-stained black oak, bound in black steel, and all were closed.

The walls looked to be timbered and covered with rectangular dark oak-veneered panels, each panel edged with a finger-width molding. The three interior walls were topped with a triangular crown molding. The gray-plastered ceiling seemed almost bluish against all the black.

A portrait hung above each bench—a woman on the right, a man on the left. Naturally, they both wore black. Black was getting boring.

Nobody wanted to say anything; that was clear. I looked at Krystal, with her dusty-blue smock and trousers. She looked through me. But she was too thin and distracted-looking anyway.

Wrynn wouldn't look at me at all, just kept looking at the floor. She had nice legs. Even the fringed leathers she wore couldn't hide that.

Dorthae kept looking at Myrten, the thin-faced man, who returned the look.

Sammel just sat there, sadly looking nowhere.

And I wandered around trying to figure out what kind of tools the woodworkers had used to carve the panels, because I still didn't know anything about the dangergeld except that I had to do it.

What a sorry bunch.

Click, click, click
.

Everyone looked up at the newcomer.

She carried a staff, too. Black as mine, but somehow more…
used
. Her hair was flaming red, and I could tell that her eyes were ice-blue. Dust covered a freckled face that made her look younger than she was. She could have passed for my age but was much older, at least five or six years.

“What a sorry bunch.” Her voice was cheerfully hard.

“Speak for yourself.” I hadn't realized I'd spoken until I heard the words.

“I am speaking for myself.”

“I'm Lerris. Who are you?”

“Tamra will do.” Her hard eyes scanned the others and ended up back on me. “Aren't you a little young to be here?”

“Aren't you a little presumptuous?”

“Tamra…Lerris,” interjected Sammel, standing up. “Whoever is here is here with the acceptance of the masters. Can we leave it at that for now?”

“Fine with me.” I was ready to throttle the red-haired bitch in her hard-heeled black boots and dark-gray trousers and tunic. She was wearing as close to black as she could decently get away with in Recluce, and flaunting it.

“The masters
this
, the masters
that
…what difference does it make?” Her voice was disgusted, but she took off her pack just like the rest of us as she came down the stairs. Then I realized she only came to my shoulder but she had carried a pack fully as big as mine, and while she was fine-featured and slender, she was not thin like Krystal nor muscular like Wrynn. She was about the same size as Dorthae, but she had a certain presence.

She didn't sit down either, but put her pack at the end of the right-hand bench, next to Sammel's stuff. Then she looked at the pictures, which outside of their somberness seemed unremarkable to me. She ignored the quality of the woodwork and kept comparing the pictures.

Since she was ignoring me, like the whole sorry bunch, I walked over and stood in front of the picture on the left, trying to figure out why Tamra felt it was so interesting.

The man in the picture was in black, but not in the official-type robes of a master, and his hair was silvered gold, much like my father's. Even though they didn't look much alike, the more I looked at the portrait, the more I could sense a certain likeness. I pushed that thought away and looked for the technical details.

A shadowed bar behind his right shoulder caught my attention next. The height and the positioning indicated that it had to be a staff of some sort, but unlike the detail shown in the man's face, none of the background was depicted clearly at all.

I looked around the room. Tamra was still studying the other portrait. Wrynn and Krystal were talking in little more than whispers. Sammel and Myrten looked at the stone flooring, and Dorthae sat on the bench with her eyes closed.

My eyes returned to the portrait. It was the only thing in the whole foyer, besides the other portrait, that had any detail. That had to mean something—but what? I shook my head. More riddles. The masters had more riddles than a world full of jesters, and no one wanted to ask them anything.

For a moment I thought the man in the picture had come alive and was looking at me, but when I concentrated on the picture, it was as lifeless as ever. Accurate, perhaps, but lifeless.

I glanced at Tamra. She was looking at me.

She wanted to look at the picture of the man. I could tell. I nodded and moved aside.

Not a word from her as she walked over and stood where I had been standing. So I walked back to where she had been and tried to concentrate on the picture of the woman in black. The portrait woman was not blond, but brown-haired, and the artist had caught a glint in her eyes though they were black. The only live black in that picture was that of her eyes.

I was no artist, but it seemed to me that the same person had painted both portraits. That would have been hard to do, painting a series of masters, if you knew that these were the people who controlled Recluce.

Enough was enough, and I looked away from the painting. Wrynn and Krystal had lapsed into silence. Tamra glanced away from me with a funny look on her face.

“Thoughts?” I asked, without thinking.

She grinned and shook her head. Her expression was so knowing that I immediately wanted to bash her with my staff—except it was sitting in the corner. And besides, I had no reason. I just knew I would have.

“Careful, Lerris,” boomed a deep voice.

I jumped. So did everyone else in the room, even Tamra.

How he had entered unseen bothered me, but the man's voice was bigger than he was. He had silver hair and broad shoulders, but he did not even reach to my shoulder. For Recluce, I was only a half-head above average, if a shade broader in the chest and shoulders.