The Sah'niir

by Kim Wedlock

  "It's as if the country has the pox."

  "The pox," he grunted humourlessly, "or a red-tail spider bite?" He chuckled drily, detachedly aware of the enchantments protecting the room from spells gone awry. "If only we could amputate the infected limb..."

  "It's certainly a thought."

  The room moved in a heartbeat. The very instant the two mages snapped around, Teagan and Salus stormed inside, and all eyes turned sharp against the gloom in search of the source of the voice. Not one looked at the other. The voice had been female.

  Balls of light bloomed into existence, no patience for eyes to adjust to the dim, isolated glow of the fire, and their glimmer slipped immediately over a fifth figure - one who made no effort to escape discovery.

  Instead, she melted out from the shadows where she'd been fiddling with a vase of flowers. She was already fixated upon Salus. With a slow, leisurely stride she approached him, her pale eyes sharp with scrutiny. They immediately sparked a rage behind his ribs.

  She'd taken not even two steps when the mages sprung, forming the signs to snatch and immobilise her hands behind her back long before she was near enough to harm him. But the moment her left had been dragged back to join her right, her right rose to thoughtfully tap her chin. Another cast pulled it back around, and her left was suddenly resting upon her hip. It was as though the spell over her was as water over a duck's back. And she was still walking, leisurely, carelessly. Superiorly.

  Salus's blood boiled, but as his hands rose to cast her back in her place, she was suddenly standing right in front of him, and grasped his wrist with a light and easy movement. Her grip was steel. She smiled at him far too cordially.

  Seized entirely by keen, unreadable lavender eyes, a tangle of rage and irritation ran loops in his stomach, churning up a nausea that froze him. And...fear?

  Cautiously, his gaze travelled over her shoulder towards Erran and his apprentice, both of whom were struggling against the bonds that had ensnared their hands. Then around to Teagan, who similarly battled against whatever had rooted his feet to the floor, just out of reach of the intruder.

  His eyes crashed back upon her. She was still smiling. And still unreadable.

  But then she dropped his hand and continued wandering, as though suddenly bored of him. Only then did he find his tongue. He kept his fingers loose while his fixed stare tracked her. "How did you get in here?"

  She peered around at the wall-mounted trinkets, but merely shrugged in her distraction. "I was always here." There was an all-too familiar lilt in her voice. "I came in through the window. The wall. I wished myself in. I didn't 'get' anywhere, 'here' came to me." Her hand rose towards him at lightning speed as she peered passively up at a golden half-face mask. Salus flinched, but she cast nothing; instead she caught in her bare fingers a sliver of light.

  Her gaze shifted sideways and eyed Teagan with amusement, then the light dropped to the floor with a soft thud. A small throwing knife, the length of a finger and the thickness of a nail. Her gaze slipped back to the mask. "Whichever you prefer."

  Cautiously, his eyes narrowed. As she turned, he caught a hint of almost pure white skin and very dark hair. He glanced towards the others, but though they'd ceased their struggle, and Teagan's arms, it seemed, had also been immobilised and frozen to his sides, their hawk-like stares intensified. They'd each seen the same thing. But where they displayed clear mistrust and vexation, Salus found himself considered with curiosity. His attention slipped back onto her. "Who are you?"

  She smiled again, inscrutably. "Liogan."

  "Liogan?"

  "That's what I said."

  "Why are you here?"

  "Oh just full of questions." She turned in what was almost a flourish, one that sent her dress and raven-black curls sweeping out around her. For a moment she appeared both wondrous and terrifying, and the room seemed to flinch at her presence. But Salus also saw the confidence in her bearing - the arrogance.

  He suppressed his disgust along with his certainties and focused himself instead on the intentions of the person before him.

  "I was just passing by and I overheard your troubles. Well, not literally overheard - not until I was in here - but I sensed your woes. And here I am."

  "You speak as if you're a jinn."

  "Well, if you prefer that interpretation, then I am a jinn." Suddenly she stood directly in front of him, just an inch taller, slight but noticeable, and her skin shone unnaturally ashen for a human. Her eyes, too, were bright, and the extent of their pale colouring was only revealed when his glowing orb struck her from just the right angle, a requirement which itself was also abnormal. They studied him critically for a very long moment. Then she returned to her wandering. "Turunda is in danger."

  "From magic?"

  "Among others."

  "You still haven't told me why you're here."

  "Mmm." She paused to lift from a pedestal a fine glass chalice enrobed in golden filigree, then a knife from another, equally ornate but certainly of human craft. Salus felt the room tense as she turned the steel in the firelight. A moment later, they were both returned carelessly to their stands. "Why do you keep all of these?"

  She blinked as Salus suddenly stepped out in front of her. He, it appeared, had not been rooted like the others. Did that mean that she didn't see him as a threat? Or...that she saw him as an equal? Or did she simply want something from him and didn't wish to burn the timber before the bridge had been built? But...what could she possibly want?

  What had Denek wanted?

  Untroubled, she turned away from him and wandered slowly towards the fireplace. Salus followed cautiously.

  "Magic, internal strife, foreign threats... You should move out of harm's way."

  "I'm not the one in danger."

  "Are you so sure?"

  His footsteps stalled at her smile.

  "Anyway, I was referring to your people."

  "We won't be chased out of our own country!"

  "I didn't say 'leave the country'. I said 'move out of harm's way'." Liogan pursed her lips in thought. "Magic is a powerful thing. It can build, and it can destroy - I'm sure I don't need to tell you. But magic isn't black and white."

  "You don't need to tell me that, either."

  She spared him a curious look. "...How is your training coming along now that Denek's out of your little picture?"

  He stiffened. "Slowly."

  "Mm. Well, keep at it. It'll come." She leaned against the mantle and peered down into the flames. They seemed to writhe in the otherwise darkened room, yearning to leap from the logs, to be free and spread their light and heat across the floor and up the walls, unstoppable by anything but their opposite. No one could rush in with bare hands on a whim and push them back, or they would be consumed like everything else that stood in fire's path. Fire had one purpose, and it was zealous in its execution. Fire, though violent, cleansed.

  "Magic," Liogan spoke at last, her alien voice soft and entranced, "can do more than create and destroy. It can affect and influence."

  Despite his own rapture, Salus couldn't help a stab of dubiety. "...What do you mean?" The firelight dimmed before him, though the flames were unchanged. His eyes flicked towards the mysterious woman but her gaze hadn't shifted. Neither had her body. Her arms remained folded, fingers relaxed.

  "You cast a barrier around the flames," she said, no less softly, "filtering the light to your advantage - a distraction, or to mask your approach." The light intensified, and exceeded its original strength. Salus was forced to look away from it. "Or magnify it with a conjured lens for similar means."

  Liogan turned away at an unspoken thought and resumed her flighty wandering. "But these are shortcuts, trickery cast by mages without such...purity."

  "Purity?"

  "She didn't cast--"

  "Barriers?" She glanced suddenly towards Erran, who watched her with open and guarded confusion, and smiled. "Magnifiers? No, I didn't. As I said: trickery. But magic is not so black and white.
It is far more than creation and destruction - as long as you have the pedigree to use it." She stopped beside the flowers she had been fiddling with, and though their stems had just begun to droop, their white and blue petals just begun to thin, they suddenly bloomed more vibrantly than they ever had in their prime.

  She turned and squared herself towards Salus, ignoring the calculating stares of the others, and beset him with powerful eyes. For a moment, her skin flashed silver. "Fendale, Halen, Regiton, Loggerhead - the magic in these places and hundreds of others has torn deep into the earth."

  "Why?"

  "I couldn't tell you. But they dig deeper every day, and reach further with every disruption."

  "What disruptions?"

  "If you wish to hear what I have to say, you will be silent." She ignored the sneer that pulled at his lip. "Every crack in the crust - every perforation - can be made worse, the chasms longer, deeper. But they can also be guided."

  "Away from cities?"

  "Away from cities - or towards each other."

  A dubious wrinkle marred Salus's face, already twisted in suspicion, and he analysed her even closer, searching for any hint of her true motives. But she remained unreadable.

  Though when a sudden distance befell her eyes, dark, poorly angled from the light, he fixated on it until her focus returned half a breath later. Then she smiled, warm and mysterious. "Surely you played with jigsaw puzzles as a child."

  "What does--"

  "Snap the borders. Pop Turunda out like a puzzle piece and carry it away."

  He growled as her hands fluttered about, but her gaze was unchanged. "This whole situation is a joke to you."

  "Is it? I suppose you would see it like that - after all, how could it possibly be so easy? Oh, unless..." She thought for a moment, tapping her chin and peering up at the ceiling in yet another demonstration of condescension. Her plump, silver lips pursed, and she shook her black-blue curls. "No. No, you're right. I apologise. It's impossible." Her hands dropped to her hips, and without a word began bustling past him towards the door.

  In a heartbeat, Teagan, Erran and the second mage were upon her. Whatever enchantments she'd cast upon them had been broken - or, Salus suspected, released - but their every attempt to restrain her - their snatches, their grasps, their spells, their barring - all slipped over her again. And as Salus began forming his own attempt at a freezing spell, she vanished in her stride, leaving the four of them staring at empty space.

  "Another elf?" Erran asked quietly, no doubt recollecting every detail of those few minutes, her every movement, her every word. Salus was doing much the same.

  His jaw tightened. He felt Teagan's eyes slip onto him when he failed to reply.

  "We can't trust her," the portian declared, his own voice equally hushed. "She could be another card in the Order's hand."

  "You thought the same of Denek."

  "She was speaking nonsense. She was trying to distract you."

  "And I want to find out why."

  "How? Denek remained here by choice. If this woman is another elf, she has made no attempt to conceal her power. She came and went as she pleased. I think it's a far higher priority that we raise some kind of barrier to prevent her from doing so again."

  "And then we'll never learn a thing."

  "And what is it you expect to learn?"

  "Keliceran," Erran spoke up, "forgive me for speaking out of turn, but the things she said - they're not possible."

  "...For mages without 'purity'..."

  The three exchanged silent looks, each more ominous than the last. But Salus didn't notice them. He weighed her words, measured her knowledge - her superiority was justified. She was steeped in arcane wisdom, as only an elf could be, and though it made his skin crawl, he knew he could put it to use. She'd presented an impossible option, but when weighed against recent events, personal discoveries and her own sudden appearance in the middle of their stronghold, it seemed almost reasonable.

  A smile that was nothing short of conniving momentarily pulled across Salus's lips, but he pushed it aside, straightened himself and turned purposefully towards Erran. "Don't we have some training to do?"

  Chapter 9

  An unnatural clearing pocked the edge of the village. Shaped by the violent collapse of Redgrove's outermost buildings and a swathe of the neighbouring forest blasted into splinters, little was left of either but scattered rubble and jagged trunks. Only the puddle of early summer rain that had gathered in the crater hid any degree of the wound in the road, feigning some small veneer of normality.

  But the vast, empty acres of the village became a scar that could be seen from the top windows of the furthest houses, and the atmosphere that rose from that flooded pit cast a shadow so monstrous it was almost tangible. Even as Aria peered out towards it through the final hour of the evening, she felt its cold touch seep into her skin.

  But it didn't rouse fear in her like it did in everyone else. Only sadness.

  Movement drew her gaze from that dense emptiness four rooftops away. The woman across the road had taken up a vigil at her top window. She spotted Aria and smiled softly. Aria waved in response, and though the young woman returned it, Aria could see that her fear was close to the surface.

  They both looked down to the road as a guard strode through the street, his hand on the hilt of his sword, head turning this way and that. But his presence meant little. When it had happened, there had been nothing they could do. Nothing anyone could. She hadn't been there, and old Ira wouldn't tell her a thing about it, but he didn't need to. It had surely been hopeless. Otherwise it wouldn't have been able to happen. And she suspected that she had a better idea of just what had gone on than anyone else in the village.

  Her hands wrapped tighter about the perfectly carved piece of wood, but her ears pricked at a muffled call before her world-weighted frets could ensnare her. She hadn't caught the words, but she knew what they'd said and her stomach gurgled in response, snatching her back to the present.

  She set the wood delicately upon the slender chest that stood beneath the window, filled, she'd discovered, with folded boy's clothes, blew out the lantern and hurried away through the bedroom, dancing between the shadows of strewn building blocks and leaping over the wheels of the wooden hobby horse that stuck out just a little too far across the floor. There was, of course, nothing she could do about that because he was in his stable, and if she pushed him any further against the cabinet he would bump his nose against the wall and be unable to reach his oats.

  Opening the door, she was struck immediately by the fragrant aroma of onions. Grinning, she hurried down the dark and narrow staircase to the light and warmth at the bottom, swung through the door on the right and on into the kitchen. All her senses tingled.

  The old man at the counter top waved her towards the table, one so big that five could have just about cramped around it. Only two chairs sat at it, though, which was preposterous, but she clambered eagerly into hers nevertheless, in front of which a glass of water and spoon were already set.

  A plate was shortly slipped under her nose with a serving of shepherd's pie twice the size of her splayed hand, along with a needless warning that it was hot. The steam was already condensing on her face as she leaned close to take a deep sniff. Her grin broadened. It was her favourite, almost exactly how her father made it - though it was missing one thing.

  The very moment she opened her mouth to declare it, a second plate with two toasted slices of bread were set down beside her.

  Ira's wrinkled old face broke into a smile as she beamed and clapped, but he said nothing, took his seat opposite and joined her in the meal she was already devouring. When she looked up, his expression had slipped back into his usual frown - one she suspected was partly due to the sagging of his skin, but one that always swiftly curbed her enthusiasm. There was a familiarity to the downward turn of his lips, the lines around his eyes, the creases in his brow that always caught her off-guard and summoned, if she let it, an imme
nse grief. It had come all too easily a month ago; every time she'd looked at him it had angered her. She regretted every one of those door-slamming instances now. She had since learned to push the familiarity away if just to find some comfort at night, and decided that it was not Ira's fault that he looked like her father. If anything, it was his fault that her father looked like him.

  "Tomorrow," the old man began carefully between mouthfuls, allowing himself a smile as she looked up with big blue-grey eyes and cheeks stuffed full, "a music troupe is passing by - pipes, drums, fiddles and such. If you'd like--"

  Her face lit up and she urgently swallowed her food. "I want to see them!"

  Again her enthusiasm softened his features, and he raised his fork to his mouth. "Then you shall."

  She grinned in excitement, but as she loaded her spoon with yet more mashed potato, Aria paused for a long moment and considered him as he ate. A silent debate began bouncing back and forth through her mind, should she, shouldn't she, but, as always, her curiosity was quickly victorious. She sat a little taller in her seat. "May I please ask a question?"

  His white, wiry eyebrows slowly drew together. "Go ahead..."

  "What happened to my daddy's mum?"

  Peas tumbled from her spoon's starchy mountain, which she was quick to retrieve for a more rounded mouthful, and so she didn't notice his hand fall still halfway back to his plate, nor the heartbroken rend in his expression.

  "She...isn't here..."

  Aria nodded, still engrossed in pressing peas back into the potato. "I know. She died. My daddy told me. But what happened to her?"

  "Aria..."

  She glanced up expectantly, but her fleeting attention was seized by the sudden and intense hurt in his watery eyes. What curiosity had brimmed within her a moment before was immediately erased by shame. She lowered her spoon, her interest in the arrangement of peas lost. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry - you don't have to tell me. I just...I wondered if what happened to her was the same as what happened to mine..."