by Jude Fisher
Praise for Sorcery Rising
A marvellous tapestry, deftly woven, with a masterfully colourful complexity. Sorcery Rising left me breathless and shouting for more.’ Janny Wurts
‘I enjoyed Jude Fisher’s debut book very much indeed ... a well-written work, leading the reader deftly on to fascinating scenes and unusual characters.’ Anne McCaffrey
‘Jude Fisher has conjured a world that feels both historically real and plausible: myth blows on the wind, spirit flows in the water, magic crackles in the fire but the characters are so vibrandy, sensually earth-rooted as to be ourselves far away yet the merest moment ago . . .’ Brian Sibley
‘Rich and ambitious, Sorcery Rising is a journey into a wonderful new world, in the company of a heroine surely unique in the annals of fantasy fiction. A spectacular debut from Jude Fisher.’ Clive Barker
‘This tale of magic, mystery, intrigue and feud works well, and the characters are so convincing (including a strong and appealing female lead) that I can’t wait to read the next instalment.’ Tim Cadman, The Times
‘My, but Sorcery Rising has a plethora of characters. There’s Kada, the rock-climbing swordmaker; Saro, the unwanted younger son; the lusty, vengeful Tycho; and dozens of others. The amazing thing is that author Fisher manages to make each of them integral to the plot. Fisher ultimately pulls it all together to form a compelling and intriguing whole that will have readers eagerly awaiting the next volume.’ Starlog
‘Fantasy is always at its best when its subject includes something real; Jude Fisher’s first novel Sorcery Rising is not just about the dangers of magic, about strange places and exotic peoples. It is also about how it is that people come to hate and to exploit; Fisher is shrewd about the lies people tell themselves in order to be able to do what they want without any sense of the consequences for others. We have here an impressive debut that works its own intelligent riffs on stock material.’ Roz Kaveney, amazon.co.uk
‘Fans of epic fantasy will enjoy reading Sorcery Rising, a novel reminiscent of the works of Terry Brooks and Tolkien. Jude Fisher infuses her novel with a sense of high drama so that readers will want to read on from the first installment of the Fool’s Gold series.’ SF Review
Jude Fisher is a pseudonym for Jane Johnson, publishing director of HarperCollins’ SF imprint, Voyager. She holds two literature degrees, specialising in Anglo Saxon and Old Icelandic texts, and is also a qualified lecturer. For the last seventeen years, Jane has been the publisher of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. She is the author of the official Visual Companions to Peter Jackson’s movie trilogy of THE LORD OF THE RINGS, and with M. John Harrison has had four novels published under the pseudonym of Gabriel King.
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2002
A CBS COMPANY
This eBook edition, 2014
Copyright © Jude Fisher, 2002
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.
The right of Jude Fisher to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-74344-040-0
EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-4711-4143-0
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
My thanks to Joy, Jim, Dick, Emma, Mike and Jo for their encouragement on this long road; to Henry Treece, JRR Tolkein and the saga makers, who started me dreaming; to Viggo and Iceland for ravens, words and warriors; to sea cliffs, gritstone and granite domes; and to John, Danny and Russ, for the care they take.
Contents
Prologue
PART ONE
One: Sacrilege
Two: The Footloose
Three: Charms
Four: Vanity
PART TWO
Five: Gold
Six: A Gift
Seven: Rose of the World
Eight: Rumours
Nine: Deals
PART THREE
Ten: Insights
Eleven: Affiliations
Twelve: Temptations
Thirteen: The Gathering
Fourteen: Madness
Fifteen: Prisoner
Sixteen: Holy Fire
PART FOUR
Seventeen: North and South
Eighteen: The Queen of the Northern Isles
Nineteen: Nightmares
Twenty: Homecoming
Twenty-one: Silver and Stone
Twenty-two: The Seither
Twenty-three: The Use of Magic
Interim
Prologue
The day the Master showed him the world was the day Virelai became a man, which was a dangerous thing indeed, and not at all what the mage had intended.
When the great ice door swung open before him, Virelai experienced a moment of pure terror. He felt the chill air inside reach out for him, as if the pitch-dark heart of the tower-room contained a sucking vacuum that might swallow him up forever. Rahe’s grim intonation as he ushered him inside – ‘Welcome, Virelai, to my world’ – had hardly been encouraging, either, for the mage had been acting very strangely of late.
Virelai had caught him on numerous occasions setting small fires – in the grounds, in the kitchens, and once in his own study; fires which gave off noxious fumes and left behind in their ashes scraps of charred hide and stinking hair; roots and tubers, claws and teeth and little bits of bone. Which had been alarming, to say the least; since the only other occupants of Sanctuary, to Virelai’s sure knowledge, were himself and the Master’s familiar, a black cat he called Bëte. And things had been disappearing, too: scrolls and parchments, tomes of magic, journals and notebooks gone from the library; collections of plants and vials taken from the herbarium, torn down in such a hurry that dried leaves and flowers were left scattered on the ground, smashed underfoot along with shards of pottery and dried smears of something that looked suspiciously like blood. And in the curiositar, the chamber in which Rahe kept his most prized objects – row upon row of specimens (fine crystals, cut and uncut; rocks of every size and shape and hue; ores and metals and gems, all labelled with their names and magical properties; artfully-worked figurines and jewellery, knives and swords, spearheads and arrows, as well as many items mysteriously unnamed and defying any attempt he could make to categorise them) all elegantly arrayed under the thinnest sheets of translucent ice (no doubt to prevent his clumsy apprentice from laying his grubby hands upon them) – where there had been the most exquisite order, now there was a chaos of destruction. Nothing, it seemed, had been left intact. The artefacts were broken and twisted; the stones and metals fused together into a horrible, misshapen lump with what must have taken an immense blast of spellcraft. Even the great wired skeleton of a beast that Rahe called the Draco of Farem had been torn asunder and strewn around the chamber as if in a giant’s fit of rage.
Virelai could only deduce that the Master had caused this terrifying destruction, but to what purpose, he could not imagine. And if the Master had at last gone completely mad, then how long could it be before he began to vent his
murderous spleen upon his companions?
So now, as he stood at the dark threshold, panting after the long climb up the narrow, winding stairs, feeling the cold air leaching his body-heat away and the hot breath of the mage on the back of his neck, Virelai thought seriously about taking to his heels. But just as he felt the first tremor of his intent to flee run through his thin frame, the Master clicked his fingers and a pale-blue fire limned the chamber, revealing the oddest sight Virelai had seen in all his twenty-nine years in this odd place.
In the centre of the chamber lay a huge oval bowl of light; and inside it lay what he could only describe as a world. Clouds floated over expanses of blue and green and brown – oceans and islands, lakes and continents. Sunshine – from no source that could be determined from this vantage point – lined the clouds with burnished gold and rose and cast moving shadows over land and sea alike. Virelai gasped. He took a step closer.
‘Touch nothing, boy!’ Rahe placed a restraining hand on Virelai’s shoulder.
For once, Virelai did not bridle at the term, so entranced was he by the sight before him. ‘What magic is this, Master?’
The mage made no reply. Instead he reached beyond his apprentice and pulled on a cord. There was an abrupt change in the light in the chamber and when Virelai stared up, he saw that a great contraption of levers and pulleys and crystals had been constructed around the open top of the ice tower. Where the sun struck the crystals, prismatic beams shot down at a myriad of angles into the bowl, and as the angles changed, so did the view. And where before there had been oceans and swathes of land seen from the greatest distance, now Virelai found himself staring down into a more intimate landscape – rooftops of wood and turf, cows and sheep dotted over steep pastures, people like insects scurrying about their tasks. A gull slid past in a flash of white and involuntarily Virelai shied away.
‘The island-kingdom of Eyra,’ the Master declared. He pulled another lever and the ground swarmed up towards Virelai with dizzying speed. Children ran laughing across a shingle beach, pursuing a small brown dog; women hung washing out on long lines across an enclosure. Boats bobbed in a sheltered harbour.
‘And this is the southern continent, wherein lies the empire of Istria and the great wastes—’
Now there was a city of towering stone and hundreds of people in bright clothing milling about its streets; then the light became harsh and bright and a broad sandy vista stretched across the bowl, its braided pattern of dunes undisturbed except for a single line of dark figures trekking across the sands. Another twitch of the levers and Virelai was stunned to be confronted by an old woman with a white topknot of hair adorned with shells and feathers and a dozen or more silver chains around her thin brown neck. She stared right at him and opened her mouth to say something he could not hear, and then he was whirled away, up into the clouds and over a range of magnificent snow-capped mountains.
‘It’s beautiful,’ he whispered, awed. ‘But I don’t understand.’
‘Virelai – Virr-eh-lay! Think, boy, think. It’s Elda.’
The mage pulled back the focus so that the view became once more a sketch for a world, all abstract shapes and blurred colour.
Elda.
Virelai thought suddenly of the maps he had pored over in the study – ancient, curled things all brown with age on which had been scrawled ideograms of mountains, crude triangles repeated over and again, little wiggly lines to denote the ocean’s waves, abstract patches of brown amid the blue to represent land; and the word ‘Elda’ emblazoned in a rayed sun at the top or the centre or off to one side; and something clicked in his head. How stupid never to have understood that those flat marks represented anything more than themselves. To think that Sanctuary was all there was.
‘Can I go there?’ He gazed back at the mage, his face rapt.
The Master laughed, not kindly. ‘Oh no, I think not. You wouldn’t last a minute. Look—’
The crystals realigned themselves and there followed another vertiginous descent. At a market, a woman wrung a chicken’s neck and reached for the next bird while the first lay flapping disjointedly. In a dark chamber a man lay upon a flaming rack and another applied vile instruments to his flesh. Somewhere else – it was impossible to tell the location, the images changed so swiftly – men fought each other on a blood-soaked field. Virelai watched in horror as a man’s arm was sheared off. Another pull of the levers and now he saw two men hold down a slight figure in a full black robe while a third rent the fabric to reveal pale flesh and a fourth man pushed the writhing figure’s legs apart and inserted himself with a grunt. Under a pitiless sun, chained men hacked stone and metal from a gaping hillside, watched over by mounted guards with whips and goads.
Virelai stared and stared. He saw: a mountain village overrun by soldiers, women and children pierced by spears; a man hanged from a tree; people and animals with their throats cut and shrouded women catching the spurting blood in great dishes; he saw a group of folk adorned like the old woman with shells and feathers and silver chains being stoned to death by an angry mob; he saw naked women burned on pyres and men pinned to masts of wood in the baking heat; then the view changed and he was on a ship far out at sea, watching as a speared whale was hauled in close to the waiting boats and men made the water run red as they hacked it to death.
‘No more!’ he cried and tried to move away.
‘Why do you think I came here, boy?’
Another twitch of the levers and there was a tiny island, serene and white against dark-grey seas ringed about with drifting ice and veiled by swirling mists.
‘To get away from all that. Sanctuary, I named this place, and sanctuary it is. You should thank me for bringing you here and saving you from all that greed and horror.’ He sighed. ‘It all decays and falls away, boy: life, love, magic. There’s nothing worth saving in the end. May as well break it all up, let nature take its course.’
Rahe gave the levers a vicious twist, and images of the stronghold tumbled around the bowl: Virelai watched as a view of the kitchens was replaced by one of the ornamental lake with its ice swans and statuary, which in turn was displaced by a vista of the inner courtyard, then by a maze of corridors. A moment later there was a sudden blaze of gold amid the cheerless greys of the ice walls and he caught a glimpse of a naked woman, her long pale back all rosy in the candlelight, a swathe of silver-blonde hair veiling the curve of her buttocks as she slept – on the Master’s bed.
Rahe swore, pulled a cord and abruptly plunged the chamber into darkness once more.
Virelai, about to question the mage as to the identity of this miracle, was distracted by the sense of something unfamiliar stirring in his breeches. He reached down to investigate and was horrified to find that a previously innocent part of his anatomy had become hard and misshapen. Alarmed, he pushed it away between his legs, but the image of the woman returned again and again, so that no matter what he did the offending item sprang back up, throbbing and insistent.
It plagued him all day as he went about his tasks; that naked flesh, his unruly member. But what plagued him worst of all was the realisation that there was a world out there – other people, other places, endless possibilities – and that Rahe had kept it from him, as if he owned no more life or will than any other of the mage’s exhibits. He felt like apparatus in one of the Master’s experiments, stuffed full with volatile substances, ready to explode at any minute.
As soon as he was able, he made his way back to the secret tower-room, counting every step: third turn out of the east corridor, fifty-nine paces, then the hidden door; followed by the one hundred and sixty-eight winding ice stairs. He had memorised the route with grim determination, even though on the way there and back he had felt the Master try to maze his mind. It took him some time to understand the workings of the levers, but soon, in a fever of excitement, he found himself able to conjure all manner of images of Elda, and he fed upon them until he was dizzy and intoxicated. At last he turned his attention back to the matte
r of the woman he had glimpsed in the Master’s chamber, but no matter how delicately he manipulated the pulleys, he could find no sign of her.
He was just about to abandon his attempt when he came upon a view of Rahe himself standing in the middle of the hearth of the great hall with his robes on fire. Poisonously-coloured smokes billowed up from floor to ceiling. It was an arresting sight. Virelai held the lever still and watched. On the rug before the fireplace sat Bëte, her head cocked, her green eyes wide, studying the old man intently as, with a great shout (though no sound reached Virelai), the mage flung wide his arms. The smoke, which had been escaping lazily along the beams to collect in the hollows of the roof, was sucked suddenly backwards into the Master’s mouth, leaving only a few tendrils of purple and green to wisp gently from the old man’s nostrils.
Virelai frowned.
An instant later, the cat was in the Master’s arms and nose to nose with him. The mage opened his mouth and, a distorted mirror-image, Bëte did likewise. As if triggered by this action, smoke began to pour from man to animal until at last the cat’s eyes flared once with fiery light. Then she leapt down from his arms, made herself comfortable once more on the hearthrug and began to groom her posterior with overstated care.
Rahe stepped out of the fireplace, leaving behind him embers as cold and black as ancient lava, made, with a rudimentary gesture and a scatter of words, an incantation Virelai thought might be one of the eight Parameters of Being, and brought a huge oak crashing into the centre of the room. Its boughs creaked and swayed dangerously in the enclosed space. Bits of the ice roof crumbled and fell, but the Master took no notice of any impending disaster; rather, his face creased with concentration, he called the tree towards him as he had called the smoke and flame, and the tree obeyed, flowing like an ocean of leaf and bark across the chamber. Great braids of green and brown made a maelstrom around him, a maelstrom with the mage’s mouth at its vortex. Down it went, leaf and branch, bark and root, till there was no trace of it in the room.