She scowled down at her sandals, struggling to make sense of the situation. This palace, made of material that only existed elsewhere as ruins—the tiny capital held up by magic equally impossible to mages now—Chwahirsland so very vast, located on the other side of the continent across the sea. Instinct insisted she was missing something important.
“The Chwahir must have set sail during the Siamis enchantment,” Erai-Yanya said slowly, considering what she’d learned about the Chwahir from Gwasan, the runaway Chwahir princess she and Murial had been close to during their years at the northern mage school. Until Gwasan was hunted down and killed by assassins sent by the head of her own family, this very same king.
“Murial, what could Wan-Edhe possibly want here? If we know, maybe we can form some kind of plan to thwart him, or at least get the right kind of help.”
Murial rubbed her forehead in slow circles. “The Shadowland army has tried a couple of times to take our east provinces. They could feed all Chwahirsland if our people were forced to labor for them, growing crops to ship back to their homeland. You know Chwahirsland is ruined. But I don’t think Wan-Edhe is after farmland. Why come halfway around the world for that? I think he’s after the palace.”
Erai-Yanya turned her gaze upward, toward the asymmetrical towers shimmering in the pale predawn light. Knowing that distracting herself from an impossible situation wasn’t going to improve it, she still spoke. “When we were girls, you said you lived in a marble palace. And every time I leave here I remember it as marble.”
Murial stared at her old friend, fighting impatience, because she’d had this conversation before. At least twice, if not more. And Erai-Yanya never remembered it. “We were told it was marble. By the time I found out it wasn’t, I’d learned not to talk about it.” She sighed. “Erai-Yanya, it was here when the first Mearsiean refugees reached this shore, seven hundred years ago. It could be it . . . wasn’t here, before that. There are rooms up there that come and go. We never thought much about it, having grown up with it, and furthermore, every visitor, including you, goes away and forgets about it. But right now, here is what’s important, Wan-Edhe doesn’t seem to forget. When he overran this kingdom a few years ago, he was not able to get past the second floor.”
“Your wards?”
“No.” Murial’s thin fingers pressed against her temples, her eyes closed. “I don’t know that much magic! Something so old I have no record of it, and so powerful I can’t perceive what type of spells, only that they exist.”
“Is it possible to extend something off that spell?”
“That’s what I was thinking right before you came. But it’ll take two of us.”
Both found a semblance of relief in talking about what they knew was possible. In cryptic conversation honed over the years, they discussed the intricacies of magic as they hurried inside and upstairs to the library, where Murial began hunting through old tomes.
From long habit, Erai-Yanya reached for the end of her sash and tied a knot, whispering to herself as she did it. She was going to remember this old palace and its mystery, and research it as soon as she got home.
The tall glass windows in the hall outside the library were open to the air, through which came the high sound of young voices. Murial paused in the act of thumbing through an ancient text.
She said with annoyance, “Your Hibern doesn’t seem capable of passing on a message,” as they hurried out of the library to the window.
They looked down on the tops of three heads: Clair’s white, Hibern’s dark, with CJ’s shiny blue-black locks between them.
Erai-Yanya retorted, “That niece of yours doesn’t seem capable of following orders either. Just like someone else I remember.”
Murial sighed. “She got my sense of duty, and my younger sister’s impulses for poking her nose into trouble, always with the best intent. Let’s get back to work before they come inside.”
* * *
—
She was right about Clair’s sense of duty, and where Clair went, the girls had to go. On the floor below the mages, CJ complained with a graphic list of which muscles and bones hurt worst after that long transfer, and Clair winced and swung her arms.
Hibern breathed away the nausea and ache as she gazed in witless amazement at the palace. The three started up the shallow, wide terrace stairs. When they got inside, Hibern walked to a wall to examine it. She knew this strange material, not quite stone. It was more like ice without the cold—ice and stone mixed with a hint of metal, only with a pearlescent sheen. It was the very same material as the broken building she lived in with Erai-Yanya.
“Oh, no!” Clair cried, and uttered a soft, breathy laugh. “Now I know we’re in trouble.”
In ran a tall boy, saying breathlessly, “Thought I heard CJ crabbing. I just got here from below. Did you know the Chwahir are marching up the old road right now?” He jerked his thumb toward the window.
In answer, Clair held out her aunt’s note, and he bent over it. He was so tall that at first Hibern took him to be older than he was, until she noticed the still-round cheeks over a square jawline, and the gangling proportions of a teen. Though he had brown hair, his face so resembled Clair’s he had to be related.
“It’s Clair’s cousin,” CJ whispered to Hibern, as they mounted the stairs. “He doesn’t actually live here. He’s always on the Wander.”
The Wander wasn’t a tradition in Marloven Hess, for whatever reason, but along the rest of the vast Sartoran continent, and even on other continents, underage people often traveled the world, working their way along in ships or caravans. Most trade cities and harbors had Wander Houses, where young travelers could bunk. A lot of businesses offered food or goods in trade for the sort of enthusiastic but unskilled labor expected of the young.
CJ went on, “Puddlenose seems to have this . . . this weird kind of sixth sense, where he’ll be somewhere traveling around, then he suddenly gets this idea that he has to come home, and it always means trouble.”
Puddlenose? Hibern repeated to herself, then shrugged it off, attributing the unfortunate name to CJ’s penchant for creating nicknames—whether the recipient liked it or not.
“. . . had to come by transfer, and I hoped you’d be here,” Puddlenose was saying. “I think Wan-Edhe has ordered up every sword in the Shadowland, and they are on their way up the mountain.” He pointed at the floor.
The air stirred, bringing an eye-watering whiff through the open windows. It smelled like rusty metal placed too near a fire.
“Dark magic,” Clair breathed, then glanced up as the two mages came running down the stairs. “Oh! Aunt Murial—?”
“I sent that message to keep you safe—” Murial started, before both Murial and Erai-Yanya stilled, gripping the bannister, as greenish light flared outside the windows. Everyone felt the hairs on the backs of their arms lift.
Then the building shivered all around them.
As one, they moved upstairs to broad windows. Hibern glimpsed another terrace made of the same iridescent material as the walls around her. Beyond this terrace a formation of men gathered. They wore uniforms that looked black in the aggregate, but the strong sunlight revealed some grayish with age, and others’ dye tended toward rust or green.
The biggest group surrounded a tall, stooped old man in a night-black robe, with unkempt white hair and beard. He and a slug-pale man stood beyond the terrace on a grassy sward between the palace and the town, the houses mostly whitewashed with colorful tile roofs.
“The Chwahir king,” Murial breathed. “Here himself. All right, we’re going to have to take a stand inside this palace.” To the girls— “Don’t go anywhere. Watch him. Let us know when he moves. Erai-Yanya, we might be able to get Clair and your student to help us chain a deflection ward . . .”
The two mages dashed back up to the library, talking fast, as Hibern and the Mearsieans hung out the
window, too terrified to take their eyes away.
The building trembled again, a significantly stronger rattle.
“Is he doing that?” Clair asked.
No one answered.
“Look.” Puddlenose pointed at the Chwahir warriors below.
The ranks shifted, pale Chwahir faces looking around fearfully. Hibern’s stomach tightened when she saw their eyes. There was no color, no white, even, visible. Their eyes were all black, as if their eye sockets were empty.
That had to be illusion, she reassured herself, as Clair said, “I think . . .”
Another tremor rumbled through the building, and the warriors below reacted with wild looks and raised hands as if they felt it as well. Hibern’s knees locked, and her insides swooped in an odd way that she had not felt since her older brother had pushed her in a tree swing, before their father’s spells had made Stefan crazy.
Clair’s face had blanched nearly as pale as her hair. “I think we’re sinking,” she whispered.
At the same moment, inside the library, Erai-Yanya set down her useless book, saying, “Murial? Is this normal?”
“No.” It was said on an outward breath.
They rushed back to the windows in time to see another weird flash of magic, more powerful than the earlier flicker: beyond the edge of the terrace the air shimmered with thundercloud green.
Hibern’s teeth buzzed as she tried to blink away a blurring shadow in the air. But it did not blink away. The shadow coalesced into a writhing line extending from the sky to the ground, and as they watched in horror, it began to widen into a lightless fissure.
The Chwahir below began to edge away from that pulsating darkness, their voices rising in fear.
“That’s a Norsunder rift,” Clair cried, leading them back upstairs.
“It can’t be,” Erai-Yanya said sharply. “Norsunder cannot make rifts anymore. Evend died binding that magic.”
CJ gasped in horror as a slim young man with short, black, curly hair emerged from that darkness. He stepped onto the grass a pace away from the King of the Chwahir. “That’s Kessler!” she hissed, hands pressed to her mouth.
“Who?” Hibern asked.
“Villain.” CJ’s blue gaze was stark with terror. “Descendant of Wan-Edhe, got away. But they got him in Eleven-Land. And now they’ve opened up one of those rifts!”
Eleven-Land was a euphemism for Norsunder, Hibern remembered as she shook her head in disbelief.
Murial breathed, “It’s illusion. We’re to think it’s a magical rift.”
“They are to think it’s a magical rift,” Erai-Yanya muttered.
Prince Kessler Sonscarna spoke in a soft voice, barely above a whisper, yet it carried distinctly on the air. “Come along, uncle. You made a bargain with Norsunder, and I was sent to collect you.”
“Kill him!” The old man waved at the big guards surrounding him, his protuberant eyes wild with rage.
The guards shifted, some with hands to their swords. The renegade Chwahir prince smiled, and the guards looked at one another as they pulled their weapons. But no one dared to take the first step.
The king’s face mottled with fury as he raised his hands. Dry old lips muttered behind the yellow-stained mustache, and light glowed around his fingers, but Kessler ignored the magic as well as the guards closing in.
Prince Kessler reached with his left hand and gripped the skinny arm of the King of the Chwahir, who stared aghast. No one had touched him for over fifty years—his formidable personal protections were gone.
“Right hand,” Erai-Yanya muttered. “See that?” Something in Kessler’s palm glinted in the pale light, too quick to catch.
The prince’s teeth showed in a brief laugh as he performed a circle gesture, his fingers wide. A scintillating magical fog curled outward to swallow the slug-pale dungeon master and Wan-Edhe’s personal guard and commanders; they appeared to be drawn into the rift, but the experienced mages saw the truth past the illusion: they dissolved into enchantment, not transfer.
And were gone. Prince Kessler and his prisoners vanished less than a heartbeat before the massive transfer spell closed with a snap like a blow to the chest. The stench of burning metal torched the air. Nothing made sense, except one fact that the two elder mages clung to: no one would be able to make a transfer in that spot without burning to ash, maybe for years.
And the danger was not yet over.
The ground jolted again, rumbling through the city. The quake caused Mearsieans hiding inside the houses to creep outside, looking around fearfully.
The grinding rumble seemed to come from everywhere at once, but the towering spires above did not creak or grind. It was more like a deep, uneven hum, punctuated by a shivery tinkle, like a silver hammer tapping on glass.
A man called out orders in Chwahir, a phrase picked up by others. Puddlenose said, “The company captain just ordered the mainlanders back to their ships. Ah, did you do that?” He turned to his aunt. “If not, who did?”
The floor jolted underfoot again, sharper, causing the ground to roll. “No,” Murial said. “The city beyond the terrace is sinking. It’s not the prince’s spell. This is something else entirely.”
“The entire city?” CJ said, her voice high. “I thought you didn’t have earthquakes here!”
Puddlenose pointed out the window, beyond the Chwahir, who were stampeding away in barely controlled order. “Look. People are coming out, now that the Chwahir commanders are gone and the rest are on the run.”
Another quake caused a loose tile here and there to clatter down from roofs. People began to cluster in shrill groups, asking questions no one answered, while others ran around without apparent purpose. A few started toward the palace.
Erai-Yanya said, “If the cloud top is sinking, we need to get out.”
Hibern said quickly, “Will you need help transferring people?” At last, something she could do!
Murial turned to them. “Everybody in the city wears a transfer token. It’s always been that way, at least since the Chwahir chased our ancestors to these shores to carry on the old war, and established themselves in the Shadowland under us.” She pressed her hands against her eyes, then brought them down. “We have to warn people to get out. We don’t know how bad it’s going to be.”
Erai-Yanya turned to Clair and Hibern. “You two do that.” She drew Murial back into the library.
Clair grabbed Puddlenose by the arm. “I want you to go warn the Chwahir in the Shadowland that the city is coming down on top of them.”
Puddlenose and CJ exclaimed at the same time, “What?”
“You speak Chwahir, Puddlenose. I think the Shadowland people should be warned if the city is really coming down,” Clair said. “They are directly underneath. It will crush them.”
“Oh, sure, I guess you should warn the ordinary people. They can’t help being Chwahir. But not Jilo,” CJ said.
“Jilo?” Hibern asked.
CJ scowled fiercely. “Kwenz’s heir, our age, and a complete and total villain! If you ask me, he deserves what he’ll get.”
“He’s a person.”
“A villain!” CJ shrilled.
“The villains are those who told them what to do. Who kept them living in the Shadowland, and made them act that way. That includes Jilo, who has to do what he’s told,” Clair said. “You know that. You know what would happen to him if he didn’t obey Wan-Edhe. Puddlenose, go.”
Puddlenose made a comical grimace. “Do my best.” He vanished.
“You watch. Jilo will be busy plotting something nasty, with Kwenz the Fumbler gloating around right behind him,” CJ said. “And if Puddlenose warns him, he’ll get a knife in his ribs as thanks.”
“Jilo never killed any of us,” Clair said over her shoulder as she ran toward the stairs. “CJ, we can’t do an evil thing just because they did.�
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“It’s not evil, it just makes sense,” CJ muttered not quite under her breath as Clair led the way downstairs, followed by Hibern.
“Who is Puddlenose?” Erai-Yanya asked, distracted as the building shook around them, loose books falling from their shelves. “Why do you call him that?”
Murial’s tense face tightened into hatred. “That horrible name is from Wan-Edhe. I told you he suborned my brother after he killed Gwasan.”
Erai-Yanya remembered something about Murial’s brother going to the Chwahir. Willingly, Erai-Yanya thought, but kept it to herself. She had never liked Murial’s brother, or her whiny, sullen youngest sister, Clair’s mother.
Murial looked around wildly as the building trembled again. The weird tinkling seeming to come out of the air around them. “Puddlenose is my middle sister Malenda’s. We don’t know his real name. Malenda was killed before we even knew about the boy. Wan-Edhe apparently uses derisive words instead of names, and—” She slapped her hands together. “Never mind that,” she said as another tremor ran through the building. “I’m babbling.” She gripped her head with her fingers as if to hold her skull together.
“When did you sleep last, Murial?”
The hands came down, revealing ravaged eyes. “I don’t know.”
“Breathe.” Erai-Yanya said with a calm she didn’t feel. “Think. You know what Gwasan would tell us if she were here. If you can’t do anything about this building shaking, whatever the cause, then we must act where we can.”
“Here?”
“Chwahirsland.”
Murial’s eyes widened. “What?”
“Think about it, Murial. Wan-Edhe, who has ruled over eighty years, which should be an impossibility, is now completely out of reach. He probably transferred straight to his flagship this morning when they docked. Nothing in his history indicates he would risk himself away from his citadel for a four-month ocean journey, or however long it takes to get from the other side of the Sartoran continent to here. So whatever his intent, well, is there a chance we could discover something back in his citadel, if we act now? No one knows that he’s gone, except that young Prince Kessler.”
A Sword Named Truth Page 4