Torchlight

by Theresa Dahlheim

  “It’s all right, dear. Close your eyes and go to sleep.”

  He remembered something. “My sister wants to meet you.”

  “I would like to meet her too.”

  His eyes fluttered shut, and his breathing deepened, and all faded out.

  Waking up again was worse, in a way, because he sensed immediately that he’d stayed motionless for many hours. Feeling very stiff, and the special kind of grungy that comes from sleeping in nice clothes, he put his hand over his eyes to shade them from the sunlight pouring through the window.

  Again movement drew his attention, and he propped himself on his elbow to peer toward the chair. Darcius grinned at him as he rolled up a scroll he’d been reading. “Good morning.” The welt over his eye had faded a bit, and he was wearing a plain shirt and trousers.

  “Good morning ...” He wasn’t sure why Lord Contare had wanted him kept attended, but it seemed too humble a duty for royalty. “What’s the hour?”

  “Halfway to noon. I just got up—it was a late night.” He leaned the chair back on two legs to reach a braided bell-pull on the wall. Though Graegor didn’t hear the bell, there was an almost instant knock on the closed door, followed by the door opening to admit a pageboy in Carhlaan green.

  “Get Prince Adlai,” Darcius told him, “and have breakfast for us brought here.”

  Graegor sat up fully, tilting his head to get the kinks out of his neck, then looked up at the trapdoor in the corner. The white glow of the spell was dimmed by daylight.

  “They won’t close now,” Darcius said.

  “The queen said the same thing. Are they stuck, or ...”

  “The ones that are still there.”

  Still there? Graegor stared at him, and Darcius’ expression soured. “Mother didn’t tell you anything, did she?”

  Graegor got out of bed, bending his knees slowly to get the blood moving again, and went to the wall with the trapdoor. “She said there was some damage ...”

  “Damage?” Darcius laughed. “She says that when the statuary gets chipped.”

  Vividly recalling the explosion of fire and water that he had seen in his mind’s eye before passing out, Graegor braced his hand to the wall. He wasn’t sure he wanted an answer to his next question. “What word would you use?”

  “Believe me, my friend, ‘damage’ is the understatement of this century and possibly the next few.”

  Graegor found his quarterstaff propped against the wall next to his bed. He gripped it for a moment, but didn’t pick it up. Lord Abban above, I wasn’t trying to do anything but open a door.

  He turned, about to grimly ask how many people he had hurt—or killed—when the door opened and Adlai came in at the end of what had obviously been a sprint. The soot was cleaned from his face but his hair across his forehead seemed shorter. “Did you tell him about the cliff?”

  “The cliff?” His voice squeaked like it hadn’t in years, and Darcius threw his younger brother a look of annoyance.

  “Let’s sit down,” he suggested, gesturing at the table and chairs under the window at the other side of the room. “Breakfast is coming, but I already got coffee.”

  Coffee sounded like a very good idea. Near the table, Graegor drew the gauzy inner curtain over the open window to cut the bright morning to a tolerable level. Darcius picked up the silver pitcher from the tray and turned two of the three remaining cups right-side-up. “Cream?”

  “No, thank you.” Graegor usually did, but this coffee smelled different and he didn’t want to alter its taste before he knew what it actually was. The taste turned out very good, and he drank down the entire cup before he realized what he was doing.

  When he put the cup down, Darcius and Adlai were looking at him with raised eyebrows. “Have some,” Darcius said with perfect seriousness. “I know it’s awful, but it’s good for you.”

  Graegor opened his mouth to answer, but then belched, suddenly and violently. Adlai choked with laughter in the middle of his sip and sprayed the contents onto the silver pitcher. Graegor started to apologize, his face reddening, but then Darcius also belched, drawing it out and down until it finally died with a froggy gurgle. “Top that,” he said with satisfaction as Adlai mopped the pitcher with a towel.

  “I’m sorry, your Highness ...”

  “No need,” the prince grinned. “I think we’ve moved past titles. Call me Darc.”

  “Adlai,” his brother added, nodding at Graegor to reintroduce himself.

  “Graegor,” Graegor said likewise, as his embarrassment faded. Again he decided that these two really weren’t very different from the boys in his village. And he was glad that he didn’t have to second-guess himself anymore over how to address them. “What I meant to say is that this is really good coffee.”

  “It’s Tolandish instead of Medean,” Adlai said, “so the beans aren’t as bitter.”

  “Really?—I thought that had more to do with how the beans were roasted than where they came from.”

  Adlai put down his cup and leveled a finger at his brother. “That’s what I said! But Darc insisted that it’s about where they’re grown, so I believed him.”

  “I don’t know for sure,” Graegor said hurriedly. “Maybe it’s both.”

  “Either way, it tastes better,” Darc said with a shrug, which seemed to irritate Adlai, who muttered something vindictive into his cup. “Calm down,” Darc told him condescendingly. “I’d rather talk about something important.” He looked back at Graegor. “Why don’t you tell us what happened to you?—Knowing what you were doing might help make some sense out of the rest of it.”

  “I didn’t think I was actually doing much,” Graegor admitted. “The door—” He gestured to the open trapdoor— “—was stuck, and the lever was broken. I really wanted to open it, since this room was Khisrathi’s.” He stopped. “Whose is it now?” He had assumed he had stumbled into an unoccupied room.

  “No one’s,” Darc assured him. “So you were trying to open the trapdoor?”

  “Right. I thought maybe I could use the spell. Since it let me in, I figured maybe it would help me ...” Said out loud, this didn’t sound like a very good reason to cause so much trouble. He told them about the purple-white glow racing through all the passageways, through the long tunnel, and the firestorm on the other end. “I felt like I’d been hit by lightning. That’s when I blacked out.” He didn’t tell them about the vision of the stars, the city lights, and the colors of the lifeforce of his people. He wasn’t sure he would ever want to talk about it. It felt very personal.

  “That’s close to what Lord Contare said probably happened,” Darc said.

  Something then occurred to Graegor that he realized should have occurred to him immediately. “Is Lord Contare angry?”

  The princes looked at each other. “Not ‘angry’, exactly ...” Adlai winced.

  “He’s had five hundred years to practice the art of appearing calm,” Darc said, “so it’s hard to tell. He wasn’t dancing with joy, I can tell you that.”

  A quiet knock at the door interrupted them, and the next few minutes were dedicated to the transfer of an enormous breakfast from a wheeled cart to the table. Once the servants had left, meat-thanks had been recited, and everyone had a full plate to attack, Graegor said, “Now you have to tell me what you saw happen.”

  Darc nodded, swallowing, but Adlai was between bites and got to start. “We came here, since you said you wanted to find this trapdoor next, but the room was locked up. We tried to force it, but it wouldn’t open, so finally we went back to Lady Mathilde’s room so we could shout down the tunnel and let you know. But then the trapdoor—the opening—it started glowing, that purple-white light you talked about. Then we heard a lot of slamming, and the floor started to shake.”

  “That’s when Adlai burned his hair off,” Darc put in.

  “You bumped my arm when we were running and the candle singed my hair,” Adlai protested. “I didn’t ‘burn it off’.”

  Darc let tha
t pass. “There were rumbling sounds from the floor, and the servants were coming out into the corridors. They were pretty scared, so I told the guards to seal off the royal apartments and to go downstairs to find out if anything was happening there. And to go get the king.”

  “Lord Contare must have known something, though,” Adlai said. “He and Father were already on their way when the guard met them.”

  “I got the key to this room from the castellan,” Darc said, “so we came back here and got the tapestry off the wall.”

  “The trapdoor was like you see it now,” Adlai said. “It was open, but we couldn’t see through it and couldn’t tell if you were there or not. The servants said that a trapdoor had opened in our parents’ room, so we started checking all the trapdoors in all the rooms, and yelling for you. Did you hear us?”

  “No—wait ... I think ... no. I don’t remember.” He shook his head, and his eyes fixed on the welt over Darc’s eye. “How did that happen?”

  Darc lightly touched the spot, wincing a little. “A bit of the ceiling fell on me.”

  “How many people got hurt?” Graegor demanded. “Was anyone killed?”

  “No one was killed,” Darc said. “Zero.”

  “A couple of people were close to it, but Lord Contare healed them,” Adlai said.

  Graegor put down his fork and braced his hand against the table. He’d never—God, what if ...

  “Keep eating,” Darc said. “It’ll help.”

  Be careful, Lord Contare had said. He had been careful, he had only tried to open one stupid door—why could he make such terrible and enormous things happen but couldn’t open just one door? It was like being able to lift a house but not a candle.

  “Seriously, Graegor, eat. Lord Contare said you should.”

  “Does he really want me to get my strength back?” Graegor muttered, but he picked up his fork again and started in on the eggs. After a few bites, he realized that they weren’t going to continue the story until he seemed all right, so, even though he actually wasn’t, he said, “How long was it before I came out?”

  “Not long,” Adlai said. “Father and Lord Contare hadn’t even gotten here yet.”

  “You scared the hell out of the servants,” Darc grinned. “You were glowing purple.”

  “I ... what?”

  “Purple,” Darc repeated. “Then you fell over.”

  “I remember that part.”

  “You weren’t glowing anymore, but we all stared at you like idiots for a while before we decided to put you on the bed.”

  “That’s when Father and Lord Contare got here,” Adlai said. “Lord Contare asked Father to send the servants away, and he stood in the doorway and told Darc to check your pulse and to make sure you weren’t feverish. He said he couldn’t touch you, or even come close to you, or your magic might react.”

  Graegor realized then that Lord Contare had never touched him, not once. He’d never shook his hand or patted his shoulder, and there was usually a table between them when they talked. “React? How?” Would his power rise to defend him against other magic?—Even if the other magic wasn’t actually attacking?

  Adlai shook his head. “He didn’t say.”

  “You seemed all right,” Darc said, “other than being out cold.”

  “Then Mother got here, with Magus Karl and some of the other magi,” Adlai said. “Lord Contare said none of the magi should go near you either.”

  “Then a guard ran in and said that the wall behind the throne had burst apart,” Darc said.

  Graegor had to put down his fork again. “Holy ...”

  “Lord Contare wanted someone to stay with you,” Adlai went on. “Mother said she would, and the rest of us went and checked all the rooms again. Nothing had happened in our rooms where the trapdoors were already open, except that glow they all have now, and they won’t close. But the further away from this room we went, the worse it got. In our parents’ bedchamber, once we moved the tapestry, we saw a crack in the wall that came down from the trapdoor and spread across the floor.”

  Graegor resumed eating, but shock had numbed his senses. He tried to listen as Darc and Adlai described which ceilings and walls had been reduced to rubble, but their voices came from further and further away. He didn’t react when Adlai said that two servants had been hurt in the storerooms below the palace kitchen when two trapdoors had taken down the wall between them; he felt only distant guilt upon learning that Lord Contare and the magi had spent hours in the throne room taking care of the wounded. Darc talked about how the castle residents, nobles and servants alike, had been panicked by the destruction, and Graegor knew he should sympathize with their fear, but his sympathy felt stunted. How could opening a door cause this?

  “At first I thought Father should have told people to go back to their rooms while we looked everything over,” Darc was saying. “But he didn’t. He talked to everyone, practically one at a time, to let them know that they were safe.”

  That last word pierced through the apathy stealing over Graegor. “Is it safe?—Did I shake everything up so much that the foundations are crumbling?”

  “No,” Adlai was quick to assure him. “Lord Contare says they’re stronger than before. In fact he said the whole city is probably stronger than before.”

  That made no sense either. “But you said something about a cliff.”

  At that, both of them immediately tried to swallow their food and talk over each other. From the mutilated collection of half-sentences that followed, Graegor was able to grasp that a passageway extended from the castle, under the city, to the south shore over a mile away; that the cliffs there were fifty to a hundred feet high; that the cliff base had exploded, carving a deep bowl into the earth; and that a section of the cliff face three hundred yards wide had avalanched into the sea.

  “We haven’t actually seen it yet,” Darc said, once he and Adlai had finished their barrage of information and Graegor had sat there for a long moment.

  “We’ll get to go later this morning,” Adlai said. “Lord Contare and the magi are making sure it’s safe first.”

  There was that word again. Safe. Graegor shook his head and got himself more potatoes and sausage. Darc passed him the gravy.

  “It’s a lot to take in at once,” Darc commented after a long pause.

  “Yes.”

  “Should we tell him about the basilica?” Adlai asked Darc.

  “Adlai ...” Darc sighed, while Graegor lifted his eyes from his plate.

  “Did the basilica collapse too?” he asked, very calmly.

  “You tell him,” Darc said to Adlai. “You brought it up.”

  “You were going to.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I know you,” Adlai retorted, and ignored Darc’s brief sneer to look back at Graegor. “The tunnel that goes beneath the city also branches off to the basilica. When your magic went through there, it—well, it snuffed out the Eternal Flame.”

  Enough. Enough. Enough. “The Eternal Flame ...” The shovel-men and ringless ones were called heretics. What would the priests start calling him, now that he had extinguished the most sacred light in all the L’Abbanist world?

  “Only for a few seconds,” Adlai said hurriedly. “It relit itself, but now instead of being ordinary fire, it’s that purple-white color.”

  “Tore a hole in the sanctuary, too,” Darc said.

  Graegor sat back in his chair and pushed his hands over his head as if to wipe his mind clean. Instead of unreal, this all felt too real now, and just as disorienting.

  Adlai said, “The Kroldon ambassador saw the explosion at the cliff, and then he saw the Flame turn purple. He keeps sending messages asking what happened.”

  Graegor had forgotten about the Kroldon ambassador. “Has anyone told him?”

  “Father decided to keep him in the dark,” Darc said. “The more desperate the man gets, the easier he’ll be to handle ... and after what he’s seen, he’s gotten pretty desperate.”

/>   “Did anything else happen that I should know about?”

  “Nothing important,” Darc said with a quick glare at his brother.

  “Are you sure?”

  “We’re sure.”

  “Terrific.” He tried to grin, but it didn’t come out well. “So, have you heard that I’m the new sorcerer?”

  “There was a rumor going around,” Darc said, his smile also faint.

  “What rumors are going around now?” He couldn’t pretend not to care.

  “Let’s see ...” Darc started ticking items off on his fingers. “You’re actually not a Torchanes, the spell rejected you, and now you’re lying near death. Or you are dead. Or you were dead and came back to life. Or you’re the One.”

  “I’ve heard that before,” Graegor muttered.

  “Really? From who?”

  “The white heralds. Ringless ones.”

  “Brandeis’ people?”

  “Right.” He stopped. “Are there any white heralds here in Chrenste?”

  “There aren’t supposed to be,” Adlai said.

  Then a tap at the door interrupted them, and they turned to see the door open to reveal Lord Contare. His expression was perfectly bland as the three of them stood, but Darc and Adlai quickly pushed back their chairs. “Good luck,” Darc murmured to Graegor as he and Adlai made for the door. They exchanged polite nods and titles with Lord Contare, and were gone.

  Graegor knew why they’d beat such a hasty retreat, and he would have done the same in their shoes, but he still felt abandoned. “Sir?” He gestured to the food. Lord Contare shook his head, but took a seat at the table, and Graegor sat as well.

  The sorcerer was dressed as an ordinary magus, in grey and green shirt and trousers with a magi badge on his cloak. His eyes on Graegor were like a bird’s, brilliant blue and direct. “Tell me what happened,” he said.

  Graegor thought that maybe the whole story would help explain his reasoning, so he told Lord Contare about exploring the trapdoors in Darc’s, Adlai’s, and Lady Mathilde’s rooms, and how the trapdoor to this room, Khisrathi’s, seemed to be stuck. “I really wanted to open it because I wanted to feel a connection with her,” he said. “It seemed important.”