“Yet you honestly desire the knowledge of the non-blood magical arts?”
Exasperated at being asked to repeat herself, the wolf-woman huffed. “So I say.”
“But I detect traces of blood magic use among you,” Varelle protested. “You—or some of you—already know the art and have used it recently.”
“I told you,” Firekeeper said, making no effort to hide her exasperation, “where we were before, blood magic is the only spell magic widely known. Even those who claim to use other forms often combine these with the use of blood. To open the gate, we must use what we have or stop before the hunt begins. So we use blood magic.”
“So it was, so it is, so it will probably always be,” Varelle said, so softly that she might have been speaking to herself. “Still…”
She held frozen in thought, one finger tracing a river of silver through her dark hair as if it would lead her through a maze. At last she nodded decisively.
“Stay here while I consult others of Rhinadei. At the very least, they must have confirmation that the ancient gate between here and the Nexus Islands has been forced open. As for the rest of what you ask…” Varelle shook her head, not in negation or even in disbelief, but as if by doing so she could settle new information to fit among what she already knew.
For Firekeeper, who had been required to adapt her own beliefs more times than she cared to admit in the years since she had accepted herself as human as well as wolf, the process was a familiar one. She felt only sympathy for Varelle—and appreciation regarding her willingness to attempt adapting.
“We stay,” Firekeeper promised. “For how long you ask us to wait?”
“A day. Two at most. You have food?”
“We brought ample supplies,” Arasan said.
“Even though the gate is right there?”
Arasan shrugged. “Theoretically, the gate means that the Nexus Islands are only a few steps away but, in our explorations of long-closed gates, we’ve learned that it is wise to prepare as if an immediate return may not be possible.”
Varelle looked tempted by the tale implied in Arasan’s words, but only sighed. “This time you might find you have difficulty reopening the gate. Rhinadei does not love blood magic. It is a good thing you have decided of your own accord to stay. You should be comfortable enough. There is a well holding pure water out in the gardens. If you stay close to this building and its grounds, you will be in no danger. If you go out further…”
The spread of the long, graceful fingers of her hands was eloquent. Then, without further speech, Varelle turned and walked briskly around the side of one of the massive pylons that marked the edge of the gate. She did not reappear and, when Farborn swept over to check if she had slipped into hiding, he found no trace of her.
“Was she even here?” Laria asked when Firekeeper translated the merlin’s report.
“She was,” Firekeeper confirmed. “We—especially Blind Seer—catch her scent. She was here, but now she is not.”
“You handled the discussion very well, Firekeeper,” Arasan said with a lopsided grin. “I felt almost useless. One of the reasons I was chosen for this expedition was my winning personality and diplomatic gifts. The other was because of my knowledge of languages, but Varelle spoke Liglimosh as well as any resident of the Nexus Islands.”
“Too well,” the Meddler said from the same mouth. “Her manner of speech was even idiomatically similar. Trust one who has seen generations go by: languages change. The Liglimosh of the Nexus Islands has changed more than most because of all the cultures that cross there, adopting words and terms freely. Varelle was certainly using some form of translation magic—and a powerful version as well, for she had no need to touch us or…”
He paused, showing unwonted delicacy for him, and Firekeeper finished for him, “Or ask for our blood.”
Laria offered a half-formed thought. “Varelle called herself the Gatewatcher. I bet that being skilled with this translation magic is part of her job. I bet she’s more like a lurker than just a watcher—that she listened to us talk until she had whatever she needed to make her spell work. I mean, what use would a greeter be who couldn’t understand what the new arrivals said?”
“Wisely spoken,” Firekeeper said. Beside her, Blind Seer gave his wolfish nod and panted approval. “I think you are right about her listening. Yet, whatever her spell, she did not make it so that she understood what Blind Seer or Farborn say.”
Emboldened by her elders’ approval, Laria rose from her seat on her bedroll. “I bet that appearing out of nowhere—or seeming to do so—has to go with the job as well. I wonder if I can find a trace of Varelle’s door? It’s possible that she simply vanishes, but if she could do that, why would she have walked away from us? Wouldn’t it be more impressive if she just vanished?”
“A good point,” Arasan said. “Why don’t you snoop around while I set up a proper camp? If we’re being watched, there’s not much we can do about it, so we might as well try to learn what we can about our hosts.”
“I doubt that Varelle is watching now,” the Meddler added. “Think about it. Unless this gate gets a lot more use than her reaction seemed to indicate, then her post must be largely ceremonial. If she’s raced off to report, we may have the first privacy we’ve had since our arrival.”
“Laria should sniff about,” Firekeeper agreed, adding, “I saw a hearth outside, not large but large enough. It is enclosed against the wind, with a chimney. A fire there is better than smoke here. We will go and make a fire, then wait for dawn. When it comes, Farborn says he wishes to fly out more and see if the uneasy land rises for a falcon as it did for wolves.”
Laria waited until the wolves and falcon had departed, and Arasan had busied himself burrowing through their packs. In addition to camping gear, food, water, and changes of clothing, there were also small boxes of items meant for trade or to serve as gifts. Doubtless he would look through these to find a trinket to offer Varelle when—if—she returned.
For a brief moment, Laria considered asking Arasan if he needed help, but she knew she was only stalling. The truth was, she was deeply conflicted about her own talent. It had awakened during the conflict between the Nexus Islanders and the forces led by King Bryessidan of the Mires. Most of the children had been evacuated via one of the gates to the New World. Laria, who at age thirteen and a half was considered on the cusp of adulthood by the harsh rules of the Spell Wielders, had asked to remain, saying that there were more than enough among the elderly, invalid, and children younger than herself to manage the refugee camp.
The forces defending the Nexus Islands had been spread thinly enough that permission had been granted. Laria had been assigned to run messages between the base and various scattered forces. It was upon returning from one such errand that she had encountered her father, Ollaris, being carried into the infirmary on a stretcher.
Laria didn’t need to see the despairing expression on the face of Zebel, the chief of the medical team, to know that her father was dying. She delivered her message, was excused from duty, and went to hold her father as Ollaris bled out his life. Then, numbed with grief, she had rejoined the messengers.
It was during those concluding hours of the battle that Laria’s talent had awakened. As she ran from place to place, she found herself experiencing brief visions of what had happened on the blood-soaked ground. At the time, she put these visions aside as imaginative artifacts born of exhaustion and strain. When the visions continued even weeks after, coming upon her with a suddenness that would leave Laria frozen within a reality more real than that which surrounded her, or bent over clawing at the ground, the fact that she had been changed could not be ignored.
Laria’s visions were not of possible futures such as tormented the jaguar Truth, but were instead linked to actual occurrences. Where Truth could read the future, Laria could sometimes touch the past. Given that much of the past of the Nexus Islands was not a pleasant thing, she found herself randomly bombarded with imag
es of events she would rather forget. Worse were those times when Laria was tempted to sink into images of happier days gone by, when Ollaris had been alive, when she had been safe—or so her child self had believed—within the protection of her family.
“Was it being bathed in Papa’s blood that did it?” Laria asked herself. “Is my ‘gift’—if you can call it that—a type of blood magic, then?”
She’d never asked and no one had ever offered this as an explanation. Talents did sometimes awaken in times of great stress. Ironically, now that the residents of the Nexus Islands were protected against querinalo, Laria could not even hope for a bout of fever to burn her “gift” from her. She must deal with it or let it deal with her.
With the practicality that typified the new Nexus Islands’ community, once Laria’s talent and the pain it caused her had been recognized, someone who could teach her how to handle it had been sought. The jaguar, Truth, was no help, for Truth’s gift as often ruled her, rather than her it, but Truth had suggested an unlikely tutor.
“Give Laria to the Meddler’s care. She may be helped—or not—but in many streams these two swim together to our greater benefit.”
Laria was not the only one who noticed that Truth did not say the association would be to Laria’s benefit but, by then, she hardly cared. Her mother and younger siblings had tried to help her. Sadly, their presence was among the hardest for Laria to bear. Like her, they mourned Ollaris but, unlike her, they were seeking to move ahead, where Laria’s every step contained snares binding her to the past.
However, the Meddler—whether because his vanity was pricked or because he wanted to prove his value to the still suspicious Nexus Islanders or for some mysterious reason of his own—had worked hard to help Laria. His first lesson had been forcing her to face the reality of her talent. With cruel bluntness no one else used he said, “Either you will master it or it will master you. Give up any hope that you’ll wake up one day and find it gone.”
Common sense as the words might seem, they were harder to accept than Laria could have imagined, perhaps because so much else had changed in the last year. Even with the Meddler’s warning, Laria fantasized about awakening to find her talent gone. Only when she accepted that this was because her talent being gone would also, somehow, mean that Ollaris was alive, that she had never felt him go unmoving and so terribly limp, only then could she begin to accept her talent.
Through long talks during which Laria told the Meddler much about her earlier years, Meddler deduced another reason Laria resisted accepting her talent. In the Nexus Islands ruled by the Spell Wielding Once Dead, Laria showing a talent would have promoted her out of the ranks of the Never Lived, who served the sorcerers. If Laria had survived querinalo with her talent intact she would have been promoted to one of the Once Dead—although lower-ranking, since talents were considered lesser than spellcasting. Thus, with the awakening of her talent, Laria felt on some level that she had joined the ranks of those who had oppressed her family and friends.
The Meddler didn’t try to reason with Laria about this—perhaps by demonstrating how not all Once Dead were terrible or how she hadn’t chosen her talent. He simply scoffed at her for holding onto such an idiotic idea, then moved into teaching Laria how to buffer her sensitivity to her surroundings so that she could choose what images she would receive, rather than being victim to any place saturated with significant experiences.
Although the Meddler—and eventually Arasan with him—had been a patient teacher, Laria still sometimes relapsed into her former depression. Thus, when the Meddler had insisted on accompanying Firekeeper through this particularly troubling gate—and when Firekeeper in turn had insisted on taking him with her—Laria had been included in their company.
Firekeeper had even welcomed the younger woman, saying, “This Laria should be a help, I think.” But Laria wasn’t sure exactly how Firekeeper and Blind Seer expected her to be any help. When she confided in her mother that maybe the wolf-woman was just being kind, Ikitata had shaken her head in violent disagreement.
“Kind? That one? Where life and death are concerned, there is no kindness in wolves. I would be less willing to trust you to Firekeeper’s care if there were.”
So Laria had joined Firekeeper, Blind Seer, the Meddler/Arasan, and Farborn. Now, as Laria placed her palm over the smooth tiles near where Varelle had vanished, she sent her extra sense forward as much from a hope that she would feel less useless than from the belief she would learn anything useful.
When Firekeeper and Blind Seer ducked into the domed gate building to report that a small fire had been lit in the outdoor hearth, and that dawn was pinking the horizon in a direction they could now call “east,” they found Laria slumped on her bedroll, her back against the wall. The girl smelled of exhaustion, but the shadow of depression that so often lingered on her rounded, still girlish, features had been replaced by bright interest.
When Firekeeper finished her report, Arasan said, “Excellent! Can you fill a kettle and put it on? I’d like to make tea for Laria. She’s beat—but she has learned something about this building’s history.”
Firekeeper dashed out with the fat-bodied kettle, returning a few moments later. “Is heating. The hearth even have a hook for such kettles. Laria, what have you learned?”
Laria spoke quickly, as if afraid someone would interrupt. “First, I found Varelle’s gate. It’s not at all obvious—not like that”—she swung an arm to indicate the gate through which they had arrived— “but there’s definitely a gate there.”
“How could you tell?” Arasan asked. “Are there markings you could show the rest of us, so we’d know where to find it?”
“No markings. It’s more like a feeling.” Laria shrugged. “There’s a sort of prickly feeling filling the area. I could mark the boundaries but, since I don’t think we can use that gate, why let them know we’ve found it?”
Blind Seer tilted his head in a wordless question, and Laria replied. “It feels as if the gate is keyed to one person.”
Blind Seer said, “That makes sense. Why protect this area with shaking earth and great fissures if anyone could leave through a gate that could be sniffed out by a sharp nose? Bears growl loudest when they have cubs to protect.”
Firekeeper translated for Blind Seer, adding, “Although we think that, without your gift, sniffing out the gate and how it is keyed would be difficult.”
Laria was obviously relieved at being believed. “But that’s not all I learned. This building may be deserted now, but it isn’t always. I could feel”—she waved one hand to shape a whirlwind in the air—“a great number of people parading or dancing around the span of the building. The parade went out the door, then came back in. When I probed deeper, I could feel layer upon layer of the same ritual—if it was a ritual, that is, a magical ritual—going back as far as I could touch. When I came around, back to now, I was actually surprised to find all this clean, polished tile. The emptiness is deceptive. This place is drifted deep in intent.”
“What sort of intent?” Arasan asked.
Laria fingered the violet ribbon in her hair. “That was harder to sort out. There was protectiveness, but also joy, but it was a joy all mixed up with defiance and even desperation.”
“So, if you sensed people working a magical ritual, it’s a complex one,” Arasan mused. “The ritual might serve more than one purpose. Perhaps it’s some sort of communal binding? Varelle spoke as if the philosophy of Rhinadei and the actual physical location were tangled up with each other. Maybe you’d better not probe too much more into that ‘drift’ you felt. It wouldn’t be a good thing if you triggered some sort of ward.”
The Meddler added, “Other than the wards we’ve already tripped, that is. Varelle didn’t appear by chance. Also, she didn’t have any opportunity to do the spell that chased Blind Seer and Firekeeper back here. If she could do something that complex without showing any strain, she’s more powerful than…”
“You?” Firekee
per asked innocently. The humans would only hear her teasing tone, but Blind Seer could smell the underlying tension in her sweat.
“Many, many are more powerful than I am,” the Meddler protested. “I was going to say ‘More powerful than any single spellcaster we’ve met to this point.’”
That sobered everyone. They’d all met some very powerful people indeed. Blind Seer had overheard apprehensive speculation as to what might happen when many of the next generation came of age without the moderating influence—or culling—of querinalo. It seemed completely possible that the horrors recounted in the grandmother’s tales he and Firekeeper had enjoyed so much—precisely because they were impossible—might one day become reality.
“The reality of those powerful ones is why,” Blind Seer reminded Firekeeper in wolf speech, “we need to find those who can teach me how to work spells without my needing to fall into the enticement offered by blood magic. If we cannot, I may need to follow a trail I dread could lead me to prey I cannot defeat.”
Firekeeper hugged him. Blind Seer could feel in the strength of her arms that she believed he could master any challenge—even the temptations offered by blood magic. But then she had never felt the seductive lure of using another’s power as he had. He was not nearly as certain how prudent he would be—especially if Firekeeper was endangered.
Sniffing the outside air, Blind Seer scented the freshening dew that indicated dawn. Without, the early light would be washing away that uncomfortable array of alien stars. From where he had been listening in the boughs of a tree near the open door, Farborn chuckled and chortled his confirmation that there was now light enough for him to attempt wider aerial surveillance. He added that the kettle had been boiling for some small time now.
Firekeeper sprang to her feet, darted out the door, and returned holding the steaming kettle by a thick rag wrapped around its curved metal handle.
“I am listening so hard, I forget,” she apologized. “Make tea while we go out to watch Farborn fly.”
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