The Unconquered Mage

by McShane, Melissa

  Then everything happened at once, soldiers shouting and racing out to meet the enemy. Things had gotten bad enough for the mages that we could only manage one attack before we had to stop and wait for—all right, I called it the magic coming back to us, like it was a herd of sheep and we drove them away every time we pulled a sheep out of the flock (I don’t know which is right, herd or flock) and had to wait for them to come running back. I don’t care if Terrael thinks that’s stupid. I wish I’d had enough magic to soak his head.

  Anyway. We could each do one blast of fire, or hurl one projectile, and then we had to wait ten or twenty minutes before we could do it again. I ended up not doing any magic, just going down the line of mages and reassuring them. Not something I ever imagined myself doing, but then none of that was something I’d pictured for myself. But all the time I kept looking out at that banner with the falcon head and the glyphs, and picturing the God-Empress directing her troops.

  And I realized we were thinking about this the wrong way. I’d thought about killing the God-Empress before and decided against it not only because I’m not a killer, but because it wouldn’t have made a difference. Her generals would still be in a position to choose a new God-Emperor and continue to attack. But the point wasn’t just to win the war. The reason we were fighting was so Renatha Torenz couldn’t rule both countries.

  And she couldn’t rule anything if she were dead.

  I turned that thought over and over in my head for a couple of hours, waiting for my brain to decide it was a ridiculous idea and get rid of it. But it never went away. Yes, I wanted us to win because I think Cederic is the best choice for Emperor. But what I really wanted—what I was increasingly convinced we needed—was a guarantee the worst choice couldn’t take the throne. Even if the God-Empress’s death didn’t throw her army into confusion (and I wasn’t totally convinced it wouldn’t do this) it would eliminate the one outcome that would be fatal for the new Empire. And once I realized I was right, I also knew I was the only person who could make it happen. Not even Nessan could make it across that battlefield unharmed. Just me.

  The idea made me so sick I couldn’t eat lunch. I went off by myself and stood where I could see the banner. I’d convinced myself I couldn’t deliberately kill anyone else with the see-inside and mind-moving pouvrin; I’d even come to think of them as healing pouvrin rather than for assassination. But the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that if I were able to do it at all, it would be to save my country. All those people, even the ones who didn’t give us allegiance yet, didn’t deserve to be ruled by a woman who thought of them as things, and when I was crowned I’d sworn, as Cederic did, to serve the people.

  It felt so stupid, thinking in such grand terms, so I looked out over the fighting at the soldiers, to where there was a knot of stillness in the middle of the battle. It was too distant, and too muddled, for me to make out individuals, but there was a place where no one was moving, and it looked strange against the turbulence of the battle. I don’t know why those men weren’t fighting there, but I thought I can just about manage to remember I’m doing it for them and that gave me the resolve I needed.

  So I went back and wrote Cederic that letter—I haven’t decided yet whether to tear it out, since on the one hand, he never had to read it, but on the other, he did think I was almost dead…I don’t know. But I wrote the letter in our tent, and then I left the books on our bed so he’d see them right away, and went back through the camp to the south, where the fighting hasn’t been as heavy.

  (Speaking of heavy, I didn’t realize how much those books weighed until I wasn’t carrying them anymore. They’re not big, not more than the size of my hand, so maybe it’s their emotional weight I was feeling.)

  Then I concealed myself, which took forever and I was really afraid someone would notice what I was doing, and followed the forest around and to the west.

  Maintaining concealment turned out to be easier than I’d expected, which suggested to me that this pouvra, at least, used magic when you first worked it, but then didn’t require any extra magic to maintain. I didn’t think too much about it because I was afraid the magic might change its mind and I’d be left completely visible in the middle of the God-Empress’s camp. But it didn’t, and I passed the fighting and kept on walking until I reached the place where they’d set up the big tents, including the God-Empress’s traveling palace.

  At that point I had to depend on my thief’s skills, because I was afraid if I tried to work the walk-through-walls pouvra while concealed, I’d lose control of one or both of them. And it was hard. I don’t know why there were so many people there in the camp instead of out fighting, and yes, I probably should have been grateful for that, but with my fingers and toes numb from the concealment pouvra I was mostly just frustrated every time I had to duck out of someone’s way. I had to crouch behind a couple of barrels for about fifteen minutes because two soldiers were flirting just far enough apart I couldn’t duck around them. Stupid soldiers. But finally I was outside the command tent and trying to find a way to see inside.

  The door flaps were open, but too many people kept going in and out for me to stand in the doorway and look to see if the God-Empress was there. So eventually I stood to one side and listened. She was inside, talking to some of her officers, and I had begun to despair about how to kill her without being instantly captured myself when I remembered her traveling palace. It made far more sense for me to wait in there for her, since I doubted any of her officers were allowed inside. So I (taking the long way around, stupid soldiers) went to her tent, waited for a lull in the traffic (because her tent door was shut) and quickly ducked inside.

  It looked exactly the way I remembered, down to the ridiculous marble statue, and I nearly dismissed the pouvra before I realized I’d want to stay concealed so she wouldn’t raise an alarm when she entered. So I sat down on the chair and waited. For a long time. I don’t know how long it was, but my hands and feet were really numb by the time the flap opened and the God-Empress entered.

  She was as beautiful as ever, even though her roots were showing. She wore a pink satin gown embroidered with black roses that was completely out of place in a war camp, with glittering pink topazes set in silver bezels dangling to her navel and more of them woven through her hair and pinned to the silver coronet she wore. The first thing that went through my mind was It’s too bad she doesn’t look crazy or all of this would have been over years ago. I wonder now how much people put up with in her because they couldn’t believe anyone that beautiful could be evil. Or maybe not. It doesn’t matter anymore.

  I tried to work the see-inside pouvra as she came toward her dressing table—I had to get out of the way quickly—and sat down, but I felt the concealment pouvra shake and gave up. She didn’t seem to have anything in mind, just played with her hairbrush, shifted a few things around. Then she swiveled in her seat, looked at me, and said, “I wondered when you’d come, Sesskia.”

  I was so startled that she’d seen through the concealment—and apparently with no difficulty—I couldn’t think of anything to say. Her words had the same archaic structure they always did when she spoke to me, which added to my confusion. When I didn’t say anything immediately, she added, “I missed you. We always have such fun together.”

  “Fun for you, maybe, but not so much for the people you order killed,” I said. I dismissed the pouvra and wrung feeling back into my hands.

  “God dislikes waste,” she said with an understanding nod, “but God cannot allow blasphemy and disrespect. You should understand that.”

  “I don’t understand anything you do,” I said. “I’m here to stop this war.”

  “No one can stop it,” the God-Empress said. “It is a cleansing war. It will wipe away sin and disobedience. Even yours, Sesskia.”

  I went to stand next to her and worked the see-inside pouvra. “If you were the true God, it would be disobedience,” I said. Her heart and lungs looked like anyone else’s. I
’d have thought they would be blackened, sooty lumps. “But it’s not wrong to protect what you love from someone evil.”

  The God-Empress stood up. “No one understands me but you, Sesskia, and that’s why you’re my favorite sister,” she said, reaching out to grasp my hand. Reflexively, I pulled away, and her eyes went from being vaguely unfocused to being acute and very, very aware of me. “I swore I would see you die,” she said, “and die slowly, like all our other sisters.”

  This was where I realized how stupid I’d been. I knew I had to wait a while after working the see-inside pouvra for the magic to build, and I was prepared for that. But I’d thought I could work the see-inside pouvra while I was concealed, which would have given me plenty of time to wait. I also hadn’t counted on not being able to keep the God-Empress from attacking me during that time. She opened her mouth to call for soldiers, and just as I had months ago in the palace, I grabbed her, stuffed my arm into her mouth, and bore her to the ground.

  I couldn’t conceal us both the way I had that time, but since she didn’t have any minions around, it didn’t matter. What mattered is she fought me like a crazed shark, thrashing and biting my arm and flailing at my face. The only thing that kept me from losing control of the see-inside pouvra were the hours I’d spent practicing it until I could almost do it in my sleep. I tried the mind-moving pouvra, felt my vision go blurry, but nothing happened. Too soon.

  I tried to keep her pinned, but she got in a lucky blow to my head, and while I was dizzy she managed to roll out from under me. Her mad eyes were blazing, and she struck me again and again while I defended my face with my free arm and tried to keep her from getting on top of me. She seemed to have forgotten about getting help. I was sure she was going to batter me until I was dead.

  I kept trying to use the mind-moving pouvra and coming up with nothing. It was like trying to scoop water with a sieve, because I could feel the magic there and it just kept slipping away. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to manage the assassination pouvrin before she either got free or knocked me unconscious. So I began casting about for some other solution.

  I remembered what I’d done the night before in Terrael’s kathana circle, working the mind-moving pouvra to attract magic into the circle. Except I couldn’t work that one, I already knew that. So I bent my will to the binding pouvra instead. It was one I knew well, it was simple and basic, and I figured even if it absorbed some of the magic it attracted, there would still be plenty left over for me to stop the God-Empress’s heart.

  Without the revelation pouvra, I could only tell the binding pouvra was working when the sensation of being pulled at increased, slowly, as it gathered the local magic together. I pictured its angular, impossibly curved shape as hollow glass pipes filling up with those muddy blobs that moved faster as more of them entered the shape and started repelling each other. I released the pouvra and immediately worked the mind-moving pouvra—and nothing happened. The magic I’d “collected” was gone and there wasn’t anything else to hold onto. It was confusing and discouraging and I wanted to scream at how stupid it all was.

  So I did it again. I was so tired I was conscious of the God-Empress’s attack only as a series of blows to my face and shoulders and a tension in my hands and arms where I held her fast. This time, I made myself maintain the binding pouvra until I thought my whole body might come apart under those invisible hands tugging at me. My whole body was burning with the effort, as if I were running and running and had passed the limits of my ability and had to keep going. The God-Empress had one hand on my throat and was squeezing, and I knew if I didn’t kill her soon, all of this would have been pointless.

  Then my vision blurred, and the see-inside pouvra slipped away. I snatched at it, but all I could see was the neck of the God-Empress’s pink gown instead of the heart and lungs pulsing beneath her skin. I cried out—I couldn’t help myself—and tried to work it again, because I couldn’t work the mind-moving pouvra on her heart if I couldn’t see what I was doing, but I couldn’t remember how, as if the shape had been completely driven out of my memory.

  That was the closest I’ve ever come to true despair. Cederic hating me, Bridie dying alone, those were nothing compared to how I felt rolling on the ground trying to keep the God-Empress from killing me, knowing I’d wasted my—our—only chance to ensure the Empire wasn’t ruled by an evil, insane woman who would corrupt it to suit her whim. I decided I had only one option left to me: I would have to turn the fire pouvra on her and hope I could maintain it long enough to kill her with it. It would mean my death as well, and that terrified me, but I didn’t think I had another choice. Maybe if I’d had time, I could have come up with something else, but I was exhausted and in pain and barely able to focus on my enemy. So I released the binding pouvra and groped about for the other shape.

  Except I couldn’t. The binding pouvra felt as if it were locked into place inside me, pushing and pulling and putting me under such enormous tension I thought I might shatter. I tried again to release it and the tension increased. I could almost feel the magic being pulled into me, vibrating with the effort not to touch any of the other pieces.

  I fought it, exerting my will on it so it would fall apart, and the tension increased again and I screamed, not even thinking about the attention that would draw. Distantly I was aware of the God-Empress tearing herself out of my hands and grabbing my hair and throat to drag me upright, but those pains were so small compared to everything else they were like pinpricks. I was blind No, that’s wrong, I remember seeing the God-Empress’s face contorted into a snarl, but it’s like my mind made a picture of that moment, like Audryn’s magic notebook th’an, and my memory of it is at a remove. It’s more as if I was so consumed by the pouvra my senses couldn’t behave normally.

  The ground tilted—I don’t know if this was real or not—and I grabbed the God-Empress’s shoulders to keep my balance. Spots appeared in front of my eyes, crowding together so I could barely see the spaces between them, and even though I knew they should be invisible I also knew they were the magic, forced closer together by the constraints of the pouvra even as they tried to push each other away.

  The God-Empress could see them too, I could tell by how her snarl of fury turned into confusion and then fear. She raised her hand and her fingers began to move in that strange th’an she’d used to flee Colosse before the convergence. I let go her shoulders and wrapped my arms around her chest, pulling her close to me and binding her arms to her sides. If the magic were going to kill me, and I was sure it would, I was taking her with me.

  The God-Empress screamed and thrashed in my arms, and I tried to work the see-inside pouvra again, hoping there was enough magic to let me kill her, or at least subdue her. Pain shot through me, worse than before, as if I’d managed the fire pouvra and immolated both of us. I screamed again, and someone took hold of my shoulders and tried to pull me away from the God-Empress, and then two of the blobs of magic touched each other and I exploded.

  Again, I’m not sure if that actually happened, or if it was the only way my mind could comprehend a pressure beyond anything the human body is meant to endure. I wasn’t conscious of having a body at all, just wave after wave of magic coming into contact with more magic and bursting apart into infinitely long strands of color, like flowers blooming at high speed, like fireworks over the main harbor at Thalessa. It spread outward from me faster than I could perceive and at the same time slowly enough that I could wonder at the brightness of the color and the way each strand had its own thickness and texture.

  They wrapped around whatever was left of me, and I felt—I can’t explain this well, but it was as if I were glowing, and I could feel I was glowing rather than see it. I wondered how I looked to everyone around me. Then I wondered why I couldn’t see anyone else when I knew I’d been clinging to the God-Empress and someone else had taken hold of me. And only then did I think to wonder if I was dead.

  I mean, it’s not as if anyone knows what the true God doe
s with the part of us that is immortal. Maybe (I thought) what I was seeing was the afterlife. But then I remembered all these strands had appeared because of the pouvra, and if it really were death, it wouldn’t have just come into being because of me. Even so, I didn’t seem to have a body, and that frightened me.

  So I began looking around for something that wasn’t colorful magic strands, and I found…well, pieces. Not as if I’d been dismembered, ew, but—segments of memory I recognized as belonging to me. Memories of people, of my parents and sisters, of Cederic and all my friends. Memories of places—so many places I’d been in my travels. Memories of awful times and pain and loneliness, memories of joy and laughter. All the secrets I keep inside, ones I try to forget and ones I cherish and, astonishingly, a secret I didn’t even know I had. Everything that made me who I am surrounded me, and I—the core of me, the part that knows and observes and understands how those memories fit together—began twitching at the strands to bring those pieces together.

  They came together the way the magic had, only drawn to one another rather than repelled, and as they did I came to understand the way the strands worked, how they could be shaped to do anything you could imagine. I worked the strands again and felt my body settle into place around me.

  (I’m looking at my hands now and they look perfectly normal. There’s even the scar across the fleshy part of my palm where I carelessly sliced my hand with a scaling knife thirteen years ago. So I don’t think my body is made of magic. But I could be wrong.)