The Mirror After the Cavern

by Jeffrey Quyle

  “You are quite an addition to our crew,” Ruten sighed. “Can you show me this mirror? Will I be able to see this armament warehouse?” he asked.

  Silas twisted around to lift his pack and pull the mirror out. “I’ve never tried to show it to anyone before,” he explained nervously.

  He lifted the mirror to where they both could see it.

  It reflected their images back at them.

  “It’s a very good piece of mirror,” Ruten sighed. “Imagine what you could have sold it for if it hadn’t broken.”

  “Wait! There’s a trick,” Silas barked out. He pushed the mirror back into his pack, then pulled it out again. He held it up, and stared into it once again. Several women were sitting in the palace suite of the princess of Amenozume. Jade appeared to glance over at the mirror, but Silas hurriedly shoved his problematic piece of mirror back into his pack.

  “Did that do what I thought it did?” Ruten asked in a dubious tone.

  “That was the princess’s suite in Amenozume,” Silas hurriedly explained. He pulled the mirror out again. “Please Krusima, let it be right,” he breathed the soft prayer as he lifted the mirror up and looked within.

  There at last was the warehouse. And there still strolled the men who were gathering arms.

  Ruten whistled a low, long note. “Would you look at that,” he exclaimed softly. “There’s nothing good going to come from all of that. You say they’ve been doing this for days?” he asked Silas.

  “Something needs to be done,” Ruten said thoughtfully, after a long, considered pause.

  “We could warn someone to watch out for an attack,” Silas said. “I could use my Speaker powers to send a message,” he suggested.

  “Oh, that’s right! You could!” Ruten was energized by the realization.

  “We need to go talk to Prima. This is his level of information; I’m more of a facts-on-the-ground, local issues worker,” he said. “I’ll go fetch Prima, while you keep your mirror ready to show him what we’ve seen. Don’t switch back to watch the girls,” he warned, then he climbed off the wagon and back on his horse, and rode up past the line of wagons to reach Prima in the front.

  Minutes later, the head of the caravan set tongues wagging among the other workers in the caravan as he accompanied Ruten back to the rear of the wagon train to visit Silas.

  “Let me see this? How long have you had it?” Prima asked as Silas tilted the mirror to show the continuing line of men receiving weapons.

  “I realized what it was doing while we were in Amenozume,” Silas answered.

  “Why didn’t you say something then?” Prima asked sharply.

  “It didn’t seem important. There weren’t soldiers, just a building with boxes,” Silas felt both guilt and justified. Perhaps he should have reported the strange nature of the mirror, but it hadn’t seemed to concern anyone else. And there was no comfortable way to explain his window into the dressing room of the princess either.

  Prima studied the unceasing flow of men gathering arms. “And you’ve seen this for days, you say?” he asked. “Can they see you?”

  “It’s been days,” Silas agreed. “They probably could see me if they looked, but they must not care to look at a covered-up mirror,” he added.

  Prima nodded absent-mindedly.

  “Derith of Ivaric has hated Shouldteen since the dispute over the succession,” Prima mused. “If it weren’t for those impassable mountains – the ones where you were born and raised,” he mentioned to Silas, “Derith would have gone to war with Shouldteen long ago. The kingdom lives relatively isolated from the rest of the settled lands on the continent, and they don’t have much in the way of an army because they don’t have neighbors to quarrel with.

  “If I were to guess, and it’s only a guess, I might think he’s finally going to go over the mountains or ship his forces around the north coast and wreak his revenge on the fine folks of Shouldteen,” Prima opined. “But it’s only a guess. You ought to watch to see if there are any maps or any clues about how they plan to travel. If they have ropes and mountain climbing gear, or if they have waterproof slickers, they’re going at Shouldteen one way or the other.”

  “I’ll keep watching them,” Silas said as he lowered the mirror and returned it to his pack.

  “If you see anything interesting, let me know,” Prima agreed. He clapped Silas on the shoulder, then returned with Ruten to the front of the caravan.

  Silas sat and pondered Prima’s estimate of the situation. If Ivaric was intending to mount an invasion through the mountains, Brigamme itself – his own home village – would potentially be in the path of the invading force. Silas shuddered at the thought of Ivaric’s ruthless forces storming through the place where he had grown up. Brigamme was an independent village, a part of no nation, and widely noted for its reputation. It had never before been threatened by any outside force, but Silas didn’t doubt that the ruthless Ivaric would breach the peace if needed.

  He looked in his mirror when the caravan stopped again that evening, before he went to his sword lesson with Ruten. There was little activity in the warehouse, and no clear signs of any new equipment being distributed. Silas focused on imagining that he was fighting against soldiers from Ivaric as he fenced, and the veteran caravan guard complimented him at the end of the lesson period.

  “You showed real passion today. Fight like that every time, and you’ll always intimidate your opponents,” he praised.

  The next day was very similar. They reached a village and traded in the morning, then traveled in the afternoon. Despite Silas’s close attention to his mirror, he saw nothing to confirm where the Ivaric army was headed. He did see that the number of soldiers flowing through the warehouse was diminishing, and the emptying crates were being removed. The first steps of the coming war were coming to an end. Military action was likely to be next.

  Silas slept poorly that evening as he tried to imagine that he could have some way to help save Brigamme from suffering an attack. The next day, he decided there was something he could do.

  Chapter 26

  The next morning, Silas decided to spring into action. His plan was simple. He would send a warning to every pertinent Speaker he could think of, exposing Ivaric’s scheme for a surprise invasion of Shouldteen. Doing so would alert Shouldteen to the nefarious plan, and give the kingdom time to prepare its defense. Forewarning would hopefully shake Ivaric from its plan and preserve the peace, and thereby also happen to save Brigamme in the bargain.

  He spent time calculating how far he guessed the caravan had traveled east of Barnesnob, so that he could recalculate the trajectories of the messages he intended to send out far and wide. By noon, he felt he had all his information ready to go. He had even written his message out on a piece of paper, so that he could recite Prima’s reasoning when he explained why a war was pending.

  In the afternoon, as Hron calmly pulled the wagon, Silas began his mission. He felt frightened at the thought of interfering with international relations, and possibly changing the course of actions of entire nations, but he felt he needed to share his own secret knowledge in a useful way.

  “This is Silas, a traveling Speaker, calling upon Brean, the Speaker for the Guild of the Lightmakers,” he began by sending his very first message to his academy classmate and friend, who Jimes had reported was working at the headquarters of the Lightmakers Guild, located in the countryside of Shouldteen, not too far from the capital city of the endangered nation.

  “Brean, at the Lightmakers Guild in Shouldteen, this message is a warning for you, from Silas,” he slightly altered the opening, hoping to catch his friend’s attention.

  “I am in the countryside four days ride east of Barnesnob,” he gave his own location, in case there was any reply.

  He began to read the message he had carefully written on a piece of paper. He had thought very carefully about exactly what Prima had said, and he had written down a message that he hoped captured the precise concern that Prima had v
oiced. He thought as much about Prima as he did about the message while he sent it, knowing that though he wasn’t going to mention Prima’s name as a source, he relied on the caravan leader’s knowledge of the world. And he was focused on the paper itself, as well as Brean.

  As he finished his reading, the paper suddenly gusted out of his hand, rising up into the still air above the wagon. Silas leapt to his feet and shot his hand upward to grab the paper and pull it back to safety.

  He stood with a slightly puzzled look on his face. There was no more breeze than what the wagon had produced as Hron ploddingly pulled it along the way, and Silas had held the paper down on his knees, slightly protected from the head wind.

  Silas paused, then collected his wits and focused once again on the paper and on Prima’s intelligence, and he began to deliver the message to Jimes. It felt easier to send the message to Jimes – he had spoken using the Wind Words with his friend in Amenozume before, and his friend was a comfortable figure. He passed along his warning about Ivaric’s treachery, then rested.

  He couldn’t remember who was the Speaker in the palace at Shouldteen itself, but he did remember that at the previous Conclave he had met the Speaker at the Avaleen traders’ guild, and he sent a message there as well. He felt a greater sense of nervousness as he addressed a complete stranger, and so he focused once again on the paper in his hand, wanting desperately to make sure that he sent his message with complete, precise, and full delivery. Three quarters of the way through his transmission though, the paper whirled upward once again, making him gasp and involuntarily cease to speak as he jumped and grasped the independently-minded paper once more.

  He sat down, flummoxed by the incomplete message he had sent, his last words left dangling, leaving him to sound unpracticed and unprofessional, he feared. He would have little credibility with the Avaleen listener.

  He sighed, and launched his next set of missives, broadcasting to his acquaintances in Barnesnob, addressing Vertuco, then Grecco, then Charms. Each received his warning about the possibility of war arising if Ivaric attacked Shouldteen, and he made an impromptu addition by reporting that numerous soldiers were being armed, without revealing the source of his knowledge. The three messages were released without incident, giving Silas hope that his peculiar piece of paper was no longer feeling its independence.

  He owed a message to the leaders of the Speakers Guild itself, Silas concluded. He had debated the question since he had decided to offer his news to the world. The Guild would probably react as much to his ability to Speak with Wind Words as it would react to the substance of his message. But once they held the information, they would be able to distribute it more fully.

  Silas once again looked down at the message written on the paper. The words were extremely familiar after his multiple deliveries of the news, but he wanted to read it so that there were no mistakes or mispronunciations.

  “This is Silas, a traveling Speaker, providing a message to the Wind Word Speakers Guild in Heathrin. Heathrin, this message is for you,” Silas opened his message. He had not used any codes in any of his messages, for he had nothing to hide – on the contrary, he wanted his message to be as widely distributed as possible.

  He focused on the paper, he focused on the words, he focused on their meaning, and he focused on Prima’s credibility. The Guild would find nothing to fault in his message or the reasoning he had used to decide to send it.

  And then, as he was explaining where he was, the paper flew away again. He was just feeling relief at a successful finish to the message when the message finished itself. The paper flew upward and forward, away from him before he could grasp it, and forward and ahead. It reached the rear of the wagon in front of him as he stood gaping in surprise, and then it lurched even further forward.

  Silas jumped from the moving wagon. “Just keep going Hron! I’ll be back!” he called over his shoulder as he began to run forward. He could easily sprint faster than any wagon in the caravan was moving, and he began to sprint at his fullest pace, desperate to capture the wayward message that was still in sight, soaring high overhead as it lazily floated over the wagons of the caravan.

  The paper dipped and rose, fluttered and circled, and continued to move towards the front of the wagon. Silas caught up with it by the third wagon, aware of how odd he had to look to the drivers and passengers of the other wagons, but not concerned at the moment.

  The written message carried out an intricate loop, diving downward and forward in a way that boosted its speed before it lifted itself up again out of reach, though Silas grasped at it and nearly brushed his fingertips against it.

  “Come back down here!” he shouted angrily at the paper. It reached the top of its arc, and then floated downwards once more.

  Silas anticipated where it was going to reach the lowest point in its curving trajectory, and he stepped toward the spot, his arm extended upward. The paper fell down nearly into his fingers and he crumpled it tightly within his fist. He pumped his hand in celebration.

  The wagons continued to move, making Silas hastily stumble out of the path of the next approaching vehicle, and eliciting laughter from the driver. Silas grinned weakly and waved, then trotted back towards his own wagon, many yards behind him now after his frantic pursuit of the piece of paper.

  Hron placidly pulled the driverless wagon at the back of the caravan, heedless of Silas’s temporary absence. When Silas reached the wagon he climbed back up onto the driver’s bench in the front, then breathed deeply. He had to catch his breath after his headlong sprint to retrieve his paper message.

  And he had to think.

  What had just happened was unnatural. There was no earthly reason for the paper to move the way it had. But the only explanation that came to his mind was an old myth, an impossibility, a story of a legendary hero in the Wind Word canon who had done what no other Speaker had done in a thousand years since.

  Telekinesis.

  Could Silas have actually made the paper move? Was he the agent? There had been no discernable breeze, nothing else that seemed to explain the inexplicable.

  Yet there had not been a case of the ability to use telekinesis in a thousand years. Only the legendary McCane had been known to have the power. And he was only a legend, a story told to gullible youths to encourage them to study in their early years at the Academy at Heathrin.

  Silas had acquired the Wind Word power in a way like no one else – through the yellow and purple fumes of an unknown cavern, instead of the green gas that had been traditionally relied upon in the temple near the Academy. He hadn’t come to be a Speaker like anyone else. Perhaps, he clung to a dreamy new thread of hope, he might have a greater ability, an unusual power that could raise him above all the others, and allow him to attain unimaginable success.

  He needed to try again, to prove to himself that he had the power. The marvelous telekinetic power had taken longer than the other effects of the fumes in the cave to manifest itself, but it had finally emerged, he eagerly told himself.

  Silas uncrumpled the problematic paper in his hand, the paper that a minute before he had wanted to not fly. Now would be the test; now he would try to deliberately make it fly, as proof of his telekinetic ability.

  He stared at the paper, and willed it to fly over to Hron’s back. “Float, I command!” he murmured, trying to reproduce the voice he used to deliver Wind Word messages.

  The paper lay still. “Go now, to Hron,” he focused his attention on the short distance to the mule, but again nothing happened. He tried rustling the paper a bit, hoping to propel it to start, but it made no motion.

  He took a deep breath and gave a great sigh as he tried to reconstruct the steps that had levitated the paper before. He had tried to deliver an important message, the message on the paper, and he had focused on the message, he recollected.

  Perhaps, if he thought of the paper as a message, he could get it to move.

  He looked at the paper, and thought of it as a message to Hron, one t
hat would delight the mule. He needed to deliver the message on the paper, he told himself.

  “Let this message fly,” he spoke in his controlled voice, the Speaker intonation that resounded in his throat and chest and head and psyche.

  Still, the paper was still.

  “Curse it!” he exclaimed.

  “What’s going on back here Silas?” Minnie’s voice startled him. He looked up, and saw her astride a horse, riding beside his wagon. “There were reports of you running around like a mad man a few minutes ago. I heard all about it when I came riding back.”

  “I was just chasing a piece of paper that went flying away,” he improvised, holding up his message as proof.

  “Anything else happening?” she asked. “We haven’t talked much since you got back from Amenozume,” she said earnestly.

  “I’ve been good,” he replied, discombobulated by the sudden switch to conversation, coming immediately after the disappointment of not moving his paper, coming after the frenzied confusing of having successfully – but unintentionally – moved his paper.

  “So, there was a girl in Amenozume?” Minnie asked gingerly, her horse’s hooves clopping in a placid rhythm.

  “Which one?” he asked absent-mindedly. He didn’t know if she meant Jade at the palace, or Mata at the docks. He was still trying to move his mind away from the disappointment of the paper’s lack of flight.

  “Oh?” Minnie’s simple word, and expressive tone caught his ear. He hadn’t given the best answer, he realized.

  “They were both just friends. I hardly got to know them; we weren’t there that long,” he pointed out.

  “That’s true,” Minnie nodded.

  “They’re sisters, and they’re both good girls,” he tried to explain.

  “Amenozume women are different; they’re raised in a land where women have power and can be in control. I think it’d be good for you to have an Amenozume girl. As a friend, I mean,” she replied. “Let me know if you want to talk,” she added, then gave a wave, and chucked her reins, sending her horse back towards the front of the caravan.