Masques s-1 Page 24

  When the welcoming was done, Farsi, who’d led the party, told their tale. “We came upon a herd of mountain sheep and got two so we headed back. About halfway here we stumbled upon some tracks, as if an army were wandering around. We followed the trail, and pretty soon we could smell ’em and knew that they were Uriah. Since their path was the same one we were on, it was obvious that the things were coming here.

  “Figuring that we were too late to make much difference, we worked our way up the side of the mountain until we could see the Uriah. We couldn’t see the cave, but the way they were swarming around showed that you must have found a way to keep them out. We decided that there was nothing we could do but wait. Our vantage point was far enough away that the chance of the Uriah seeing us wasn’t considerable.”

  Farsi cleared his throat. “Late last night—just after the moon had set—I heard a cry like a swan makes, only deeper. I was on watch, and it wasn’t loud enough to wake anyone else up. Something big flew over us, but I couldn’t quite see it. Afterward, I saw a flash of golden fire down here and heard the Uriah step up their noise. Then it quieted down. I woke up a couple others, and we finally decided that we’d best wait until we had light to see what had happened.” He frowned, evidently still unhappy with that decision. “It was just that whatever it was—from the quiet that followed—it had already happened.”

  Myr nodded at him. “Sensible and smart to wait until you could see, especially with Uriah running around.”

  Farsi looked like someone had pulled a weight off his shoulders. “This morning, it looked like the Uriah had left, so we started home. The reason it took us so long to get here is that there are still a lot of Uriah scattered about. We were dodging two parties of the things, when we almost ran into a third. It’s a good thing that they smell so bad, or we wouldn’t have made it back at all.”

  * * *

  Over the next few days it became obvious that if the Uriah had been held in concert by the will of the ae’Magi, that was no longer true. It didn’t make them any less dangerous individually, but it did make it possible to kill them in small groups.

  Wolf, when appealed to, produced a detailed map of the area on sheepskin, which was hung on a wall of the central chamber. Aralorn suspected he’d made it himself, either with magic or by hand, because it was accurate, with very specific landmarks. At Myr’s command, any sightings of Uriah were recorded on the map, giving them a rough idea where the things were.

  Each group of hunters had a copy of the map, and if they ran into a group of Uriah, they would lead them to one of the traps Myr had placed in strategic places. The Uriah were slowed enough by the cold of the deepening fall that the humans could outrun them most of the time, especially since they were careful to go out only when it was coldest.

  Haris suggested an adaptation of a traditional castle defense and created a tar trap that was one of the most effective of their traps. The easiest way to kill a Uriah was with fire, so pots of tar were hung here and there, kept warm by magic. Ropes were carefully rigged so that they would not easily be tripped by wild animals. When they were pulled, the pots tipped over, and the motion triggered a secondary spell—something Haris cooked up—that set the tar on fire—dousing the Uriah with flaming tar. The spells on the traps were simple enough that everybody, except for Myr, could do them after a little coaching from Wolf and Haris.

  Aralorn watched the small group of refugees become a close-knit community, the grumblers fewer. Every evening, they would all sit down and talk. Complaints and suggestions were heard and decided upon by Myr. Looking at the scruffy bunch of peasants (the nobles, by that time, blended right in with the rest) consulting with their equally scruffy king, Aralorn compared it with the Rethian Grand Council that met once a year, and she hid a grin at the contrast.

  Having an enemy they could fight—and defeat—put heart in them all. Even Aralorn, who understood that the Uriah were in truth a minor annoyance. Their real enemy, the ae’Magi, was out there somewhere—and he knew where they were. She suspected he was biding his time. The snow wasn’t accumulating yet, but it had become common to see a white coat on the dirt most mornings. A smart general didn’t attack the Northlands in the heart of winter but waited for spring.

  Only Wolf was excluded from the camaraderie, by his own choice. He made them nervous, with his macabre voice and silver mask. Once he saw that they were intimidated by him, he went out of his way to make them more so. Sleeping somewhere deep in the caverns and spending most of his waking time in the library, he was seldom with the main body of the camp. Usually, he attended the nightly sessions with everyone else, but he kept his own counsel in the shadows of the caves’ recesses unless Myr asked him a question directly.

  Most mornings Aralorn spent entertaining the children. Occasionally, she went out with a hunting party—or alone to exercise Sheen and check the traps. The afternoons she spent in the library with Wolf, keeping him company and reading as many books as she could.

  The nights she spent in the library as well, for she was still having nightmares and didn’t want to wake the whole camp. Night after night she woke up screaming, sometimes seeing Talor’s face, alive with all that made him Talor, but consumed with a hunger that was inhuman and wholly Uriah. Other times, it was the ae’Magi’s face that she saw, a face that changed from father’s to son’s.

  Wolf didn’t know about her nightmares, as far as she knew. She had no idea where he was sleeping, but it wasn’t the library.

  Late in the afternoons, Myr usually joined them, talking quietly with Aralorn while Wolf read through books on rabbit breeding, castle building, and three hundred ways to cook a hedgehog.

  After discovering that the spell he’d been looking for wouldn’t work for him, Wolf had continued to look through the old mage’s books in the hopes of discovering a way to manage the spell more crudely. Most spells, he’d told Aralorn, were refined so they required less power. He had all the power he needed, and an earlier version might work for him. If he could find it.

  His temper was biting, and he didn’t rein it in for Myr, nor after the first few visits did he bother with his mask. Myr answered Wolf’s sarcasm with cool control—and sometimes a hidden grin of appreciation. Aralorn rather thought that Wolf’s lack of common courtesy was why Myr liked to visit the library. Here he was a fellow conspirator rather than the King of Reth.

  * * *

  “What’s he doing?” asked Myr, setting his torch to sputter on the stone floor, where, with nothing to burn, it would eventually go out.

  Instead of reading, Wolf had cleared the table of everything except a collection of clay pots filled with a variety of powders. When Aralorn had gotten there, Wolf had already been grinding various leaves in a mortar.

  She waved a lazy hand at Myr, but didn’t take her attention off what Wolf was doing. “He thinks he’s found a way to manage the spell. We’re going to try it outside when he’s finished. No telling what would happen if he worked it in here with all of the grimoires, especially since we don’t know the range of effect.”

  She caught Myr’s arm when he would have approached the table closer. “He doesn’t want us any closer than this,” she said.

  They both watched, fascinated, though neither she nor Myr could work this kind of magic or probably even understand half of what was going on. Wolf took a small vial from the leather pack on the table. Opening it, he poured a milky liquid into the gray powder mixture, which became red mush and gave off a poof of noxious fumes. He donned his mask and cloak, then, ignoring his audience, he put a lid on the pot and took it and an opaque bottle and strode toward an exit route that would take them directly outside rather than through the lived-in areas, leaving Aralorn and Myr to trail behind.

  “Won’t the spell be affected by whatever it is that restricts human magic in the Northlands?” asked Myr in a whisper to Aralorn, but it was Wolf who answered.

  “No,” he said. “It is a very simple spell—its complexity has to do with power manageme
nt. It should work fine here.”

  He led them to the old camp in the valley, where they were unlikely to have anyone interrupt them. Aralorn found herself holding the containers while, at Wolf’s direction, Myr paced off circles, each bigger than the last until the dirt looked like an archery target. The ground was muddy with last night’s melted snowfall and held the marks of Myr’s feet well.

  Wolf disappeared into the underbrush and reappeared, holding a handful of small stones. He set several of them in each ring Myr had shuffled off, though maybe “set” was the wrong word, because they floated about knee high above the ground.

  “This shouldn’t be a particularly powerful spell,” Wolf said. “If I can get it to work, it doesn’t need to be. If he doesn’t know that it’s coming, then he won’t know to block it. All that I need it to do is to throw him off-balance for long enough to turn our battle from magic to more mundane means. Aralorn, stand behind me. It won’t hurt Myr, but I don’t know what this would do to a shapeshifter.”

  “If I’m behind you, I can’t see what’s going on,” Aralorn complained. “How about if I stand over by the old fire pit?”

  It was well off to the side, a dozen paces away from the target range that Myr had drawn out.

  “Fine,” he said. “This should be a straight, line-of-sight spell, with a limited range.”

  He sat on the cold ground in the middle of the innermost circle.

  “How old is the ae’Magi?” asked Aralorn from the fire pit.

  Wolf shrugged gracefully and gave her a half smile. “You aren’t going to kill the ae’Magi the way that Iveress killed his master. His master was ill and near death, kept alive only by magic. As far as I know, the ae’Magi is nowhere near death, unfortunate as that may be—at least not from disease.”

  “What are our chances if the spell works as it is supposed to?” asked Myr. “Will you be able to kill him? I’ve seen him fight.”

  Wolf shrugged. “If the spell takes him by surprise, then the odds are about even. I used to spar with him often, and sometimes I beat him, sometimes not. This spell gives us a chance, but that’s all it does. If he recognizes the spell, it is easy enough to counter. That would leave us with only magic.”

  He looked at Aralorn. “I’ve learned some things about what I can do that he doesn’t know, but even so, he would easily best me that way. Without magic, at least we stand a chance of killing him. Perhaps.” No one, not even Aralorn, could have told how he felt about it from his voice.

  Aralorn and Myr watched as he emptied the contents of the bottle into the pot. He counted to ten, then poured the mixture onto the ground in front of him, where it gathered into a glowing pool of violet patterned with inky swirls. Dipping a finger into the pool, he used the liquid to draw several symbols in the air. Compliantly, the purple substance hung in the air as if on an invisible wall. Wolf repeated the procedure with his left hand.

  He picked up the pool in both hands. It swayed and oozed, never quite escaping the confines of his hands. He held it up in front of his face, then blew on it gently.

  Pain hit Aralorn hard enough to knock her to her knees. She fought to maintain consciousness for a moment, but she never felt herself hit the ground.

  * * *

  When she recovered, she felt the hard strength of Wolf’s thigh underneath her ear.

  “I don’t know,” said Wolf, sounding vicious.

  She blinked cautiously, and when her head didn’t fall off, she pushed herself up.

  “Fine,” she told Wolf. “I’m fine. My fault.”

  Sitting up, she could see what had happened. The spell was directional all right, but mostly in a forward and backward kind of direction rather than the direction of a loosed arrow. It had knocked down the floating stones in a wide “V” pattern, with Wolf at the apex. The stones directly to either side of where he’d been sitting were still floating, but every stone more than two feet in front of him was on the ground.

  She had been sitting on the edge of the path of the spell, but apparently the fire pit hadn’t been far enough away.

  “How long was I out?” she asked, noticing that her ears were buzzing and her balance was off. Even sitting flat on the ground, her upper body wanted to sway.

  She was propelled down again with a none-too-gentle hand, as Wolf answered, “Not very.”

  “How do you feel?” asked Myr, concern evident in his voice.

  “Like the entire mercenary army of Sianim just got through marching over my head.” She closed her eyes and let herself enjoy their concern. She loved sympathy.

  “Not too bad, then,” said Myr with evident relief.

  “Not horrible, but not fun.” Aralorn decided that her headache had subsided enough she could open her eyes again.

  “You need to try some magic,” Wolf said grimly.

  She would have whined at him, but the hand on her shoulder was shaking a little. For Wolf’s sake, she called a simple light to her hand, then dismissed it.

  “Wolf,” asked Myr, “do you think that the ae’Magi will let you complete the spell? It seemed to take a lot of preparation.”

  “I won’t need to,” answered Wolf, relaxing against the wall of Haris’s former kitchen. His thumb ran over her collarbone, then stilled. “With a spell this simple, it’ll be easy enough to re-create the effect.”

  His relief was more obvious in the amount of words that he was using to explain himself to Myr. “Once I see the pattern to push the magic into,” he said, “I don’t need the physical parts of the casting anymore. It really is something only a beginning magic-user would have created. Take all of the most common spell components mixed together, add the first five symbols learned in magic, and blow—poof: instant spell. What is really amazing is that it didn’t blow up in the apprentice’s face. It came uncomfortably close to doing that with me.” He tapped Aralorn’s nose in emphasis. “Next time I tell you to get behind me, get behind me.”

  “What’s next?” asked Myr.

  Wolf took off his mask wearily. In the bright light of the winter sun, Aralorn noticed the strain he’d been under written into the fine lines and dark shadows beneath his golden ambient eyes. “What else? I storm the castle of the ae’Magi and challenge him to a duel. Whereupon he engages me in best Aralorn-story-time fashion. Then either I win, and go down in history as the cruel villain who destroyed the good wizard, his father. Or he wins.” Wolf’s voice was coolly ironic.

  “If he wins, what happens?” Aralorn spoke from her prone position and showed no intention of moving. “I mean, what is he trying to do? Why does he want everyone to love him?”

  While he answered, Wolf played with a strand of hair that had worked its way out of her braid. “You asked me about that once before. I think I know the answer now.”

  Myr sat down beside Wolf. “What? Power?”

  “I thought that might be it at first,” Wolf said. “Maybe that was even the correct answer at one time. When I was his apprentice, that seemed to be it. He could link with me and use the power that I gathered for his own spells, much, I believe, in the same manner that he now uses the magic released by the deaths of the children he kills. But there was an incident that scared him.” For Myr’s benefit, Wolf briefly explained his destruction of the tower.

  Myr whistled. “That was you? I’d heard a story about that, I’ve forgotten who told me. They said that the tower looked like a candle that someone forgot to blow out. The stone blocks looked like they melted.”

  Wolf nodded. “He started to try using control spells on me, after that. I left before he had much success. But what surprised me was that he continued to try and get me back under his control. He’s been looking for me for a long time.”

  He looked down at Aralorn. “If all he wanted was to kill me, he could have done that easily enough. Or at least come close. If it were only my power he wanted, then he’s wasted a lot more of it trying to find me than he could ever get from me. I am more powerful than most magicians, but Lord Kisrah is very stro
ng as well, and the ae’Magi never attempted to tap into his magic. The magic that he gets from one of the children he kills is also probably more than he could get from me because my defenses are stronger.”

  “Revenge, then?” suggested Myr. “Because he thought that he had you under his control and you escaped?”

  “So I thought,” answered Wolf, “but then Aralorn told me that she thought that I was half shapeshifter and that some of the magic that I am using is green magic.”

  Myr started. “Are you? That’s why you have so little trouble taking the shape of a wolf. I thought it was unusual.”

  Wolf nodded. “Most of the magic that I use is human magic. Since I found out that I could use it, I’ve been trying to work with the green magic. It is bound by much stronger rules than what I’m used to; so, except for shapeshifting, I find it much harder to work. Even so, it might give me an edge over the ae’Magi.”

  Wolf paused, then continued, “The question still remains, what does the ae’Magi want from me? He is a Darranian, and the animalism of having sex with a shapeshifter might appeal to him, but I couldn’t conceive that he would raise the resultant offspring as his own. Not until I realized that it might be the green magic that he wanted. Green magic that I didn’t use until I left his control.”

  “But why green magic?” asked Myr. “I can’t imagine that he values shapeshifting that highly.”

  “Healing,” said Aralorn softly—for the sake of her throbbing heart. Because the idea that Wolf had been leading them toward was terrifying.

  Wolf nodded. “Exactly. As you told me, Aralorn, a shapeshifter can heal himself until he is virtually immortal. What I believe the ae’Magi hopes to do is to reestablish the link that he had with me and use green magic to give himself immortality. Until then, he can use standard magic to defeat the problems of aging, but that doesn’t make him young.”

  “No point in ruling the world unless you have time to do it in,” offered Myr.

  “Yes,” agreed Wolf. “There was another clue as well. Neither of you was particularly well acquainted with the Uriah as they were a few years ago. I was in the ae’Magi’s castle when he created the first of his, using his own spell. The Uriah that I knew then were barely able to function. They could not even understand speech as well as a dog can. Now, from what Aralorn says, he has some that even retain the memories of the person that they once were.”