The Outstretched Shadow ou(tom-1

by Mercedes Lackey

  It had always seemed like a great deal of unnecessary fuss, when keeping the same identification Talisman until it wore out, was damaged, or was lost would surely have served the City's purposes (so he'd once thought) just as well. He'd never questioned why—like so many things in the City, it was just the way things were, and custom was custom, not to be questioned.

  But now, after what Anigrel had told him, Kellen wondered if he could ever do it again, could ever face the Light-Priest and hand over his Talisman with the same calm acceptance, knowing that when he did so he was giving up a part of himself? How could he, knowing that the Mages fed upon him, upon all the citizens of Armethalieh, as if they were no more than a herd of milk-cattle?

  It was disgusting. No, worse than that. It was sick.

  And worst of all, Kellen didn't see a single thing he could do about it.

  Gritting his teeth, Kellen turned away from the Temple of the Light and strode up the steps into the Great Library.

  It was City Law that one copy of every book that came into the City had to be kept available here. Most people who used the Library had to go to one of the Reading Rooms, fill out a request, and wait for the books they wanted to be brought to them, but there were some advantages to being the Arch-Mage's son. Kellen was greeted personally by the Chief Librarian, and after a few vague comments about needing to do some research—Kellen didn't say for what, and if the Chief Librarian assumed it was for his magickal studies, well, he didn't say anything to correct the man's mistake—the Chief Librarian presented him with an "All Access" pass to the stacks.

  Kellen hung the square silver tag around his neck so that it would be plainly visible, thanked the man politely and profusely, assured him he would remember him to his father the Arch-Mage, and made his escape into the stacks.

  THIS was not the first time he'd been here—Anigrel had brought him once or twice before—but it was the first time Kellen had been here unescorted. Panels of Magelight illuminated the long shelves of books in the windowless corridors, and the faint hum of Preservation Spells, endlessly renewed, made the air sleepy and thick. Fortunately, the Great Library used the same cataloguing system as the smaller Student Reference Library at the Mage College did, so Kellen knew where to look for what he wanted.

  He began with travelogues. Surely there would be some information there about the lands beyond the City.

  But though he made a promising beginning—all the books in that section were marked "Do Not Circulate," which meant they must contain something interesting—Kellen discovered to his disgust that every single one of them was fiction. Tales of travel to the moon, beneath the sea, to ridiculous wondertale kingdoms at the center of the earth. None of them had anything to do with the real world.

  By the time he finished his investigations, the closing bell had rung— joined, he could hear faintly, by the echoing bells of Evensong sounding throughout the City. Kellen tucked his pass inside his tunic—he had no intention of giving it up just yet—and hurried out of the Library. He was far from finished.

  BUT his experiences the following day mirrored those of the first. As soon as his lesson with Anigrel was finished, Kellen returned to the Great Library—making sure the key to the garden was safe in his pocket, this time. Now he turned his searches to books of geography, to anything with maps, and was similarly disappointed. Either the books were missing entirely from the Library's shelves—although you really couldn't say they were missing, when it was obvious they'd never been there in the first place—or they were obviously fantasies. And even the fantasies were marked "Do Not Circulate," as if someone didn't want the citizens of Armethalieh—or at least, the ones who couldn't afford to buy books of their own—to even think about the possibility of a world beyond the City walls.

  Growing more frustrated—and just a little frightened, something he wasn't quite prepared to admit to himself—Kellen began delving into any book that might contain even a passing reference to the world outside the City walls. Each day, once his lessons were done, he returned to the Great Library—it was a safe enough destination, should Lycaelon ever discover he hadn't actually been at home. A little odd, perhaps, but scholarship was a respectable thing for one of the Mageborn to be engaged in, and there were a lot of perfectly reasonable things Kellen could have been looking up.

  As the days passed, he continued to return to the Library. Kellen consulted histories of the City, plays, popular fiction, looking for anything that even mentioned the fact that there was a whole world that didn't stop at the Delfier Gate and the harbor mouth.

  And he found nothing.

  At last, after a whole sennight of fruitless searching, he set the book he'd been looking at back in its place on the shelf with a disgusted sigh. There was no point in going on. He'd spent a sennight here, and if he spent a dozen sennights, if he read every book in the Great Library cover to cover, he knew he wouldn't find anything different.

  It was as if the world stopped at the City walls, and nobody cared. At least, nobody cared so long as the strawberries and beer came in through the gates in their seasons, and they had hot water and vermin-free kitchens.

  Nobody but Kellen Tavadon. Or those few people who were lucky enough to be parentless, or to have their parents disinherit them, so that they could get passage on a Selken ship out of the City.

  Well, if the Library couldn't help him, he had other resources.

  He had the Wild Magic.

  Kellen had done a lot more reading in his three Books while he'd been working his way through the contents of the Great Library—not only The Book of Sun, but also The Book of Moon, which explained a lot more about what he'd gone through with that first Finding Spell. He realized that he'd actually gotten off pretty easily, all things considered, and now that he'd actually done a Wild Magic spell, he understood a lot more about it than he had when he'd just been daydreaming about it during Undermage Anigrel's lecture.

  While High Magick and Wild Magic were alike in requiring a "payment" for their working, with the Wild Magic, the payment was not just the personal or group energy involved in setting the spell, but a further personal cost that could not be determined in advance. For the Wildmage, the more powerful the spell, the more likely that the price of actually getting what he wanted would require the Wildmage to act as a human agent of the Wild Magic's "desires."

  And whatever the personal price might be, there was a good chance it wouldn't be the same thing twice. He'd actually read that part before, but he'd been, well, careless. He'd thought that a Finding Spell was small enough to be exempt from that personal cost, but he'd obviously been wrong about that.

  That led to all kinds of questions, and Kellen had no one he could possibly ask. Was the Wild Magic alive? Did it "want" things—and if so, why did it "want" things—and even more importantly, what did it want them for! How could getting a servant-girl's kitten out of a tree be a part of anything, well, bigger? The Ars Perfidorum in his father's library talked about how dangerous and terrible the Wild Magic was, and Kellen hadn't really liked having his will taken away like that, but once he'd gone over the garden wall, he hadn't felt the compulsion any longer. He'd just acted naturally, and in the end he'd gotten what he'd asked for, and been able to help someone else, too, almost by accident.

  Except that this was magick, and in magick there were no accidents. So the Wild Magic had meant him to help the girl, while helping himself at the same time.

  Kellen shrugged, staring at the shelves of books that hadn't answered any of his questions, and shook his head. He didn't understand it, but nobody had gotten hurt, and so he was willing to risk trying it again. The Library had told him nothing—but somewhere in the City someone had to have the answers he needed! All he had to do was find them.

  With the Wild Magic. Finding answers was a Finding Spell, after all. How much could it cost him?

  He left the Library, stopping to turn in his pass at the Chief Librarian's office and thank the man for all his help. There'd been no classes�
��and no tutorial—today, so Kellen had gotten an early start at the Library. He still had most of the day before him. Plenty of time to cast a spell and see where it took him.

  He spent a short time searching for a secluded place where he wouldn't be disturbed; easy enough to find here in the center of the City on the Light's Day. As before, the Finding Spell took him only a little time to cast. This time he wasn't as specific: he wasn't asking it to find a specific object, only information—about life outside the City, or, failing that, why the information couldn't be found. The Books said that the less specific you made your goal, the lower the price that would be asked of you, and the more likely you would be to gain what you sought.

  This time, when the compulsion took him, Kellen didn't fight it, simply following where the pull led him.

  He was surprised to find himself drawn down into the Artists' Quarter, where the painters, poets, musicians, and writers of Armethalieh tended to gather. It was one of the oldest parts of the City—the streets here were narrow, with taverns, boardinghouses, printing shops, and kajfeliah-parlors all crammed in together. Music floated through the air as musicians practiced their craft or gave lessons in upper rooms, and the sharp smells of drying paint and turpentine were strong in the cool air.

  I could live here, Kellen thought hopefully. He didn't know what he could do to earn a place for himself here—he had no particular talent for the arts—and he wasn't sure he'd fit in, but at least these people didn't look as if they were spending their lives practicing for their own funerals and hoping to attend the funerals of their rivals first.

  Distracted from the spell-geas by the color and gaiety, he slowed down to peer into a shop filled with colorful pottery, but the pull of the spell drew him onward, and Kellen reluctantly obeyed, promising himself to return another time.

  Urged onward, he turned a corner, then another, and found himself on a quiet back street with fewer shops and more houses. This street wasn't as well kept up as the others he'd gone down, and large grey creatures scurried out of his way as he approached.

  Ugh. Rats.

  At last he felt the compulsion to move on lift as he reached the end of a dead-end street. He looked around. He was on a narrow street of shabby two-story brick houses that had seen better days. The City services that kept the better quarters of the City clean and orderly were less in evidence here—such services cost money beyond the house tax that paid for the City Watch and for the spells that kept house fires from spreading out of control, and those who lived in places like these rarely had the ready coin to pay for them.

  A scent of brackish water and rotting garbage assailed his nostrils, and he traced it to an old cistern in an empty corner lot beside one of the houses. Once it might have been used to catch rainwater, or even have been used as a communal well, but now it was choked with garbage and trash, and was obviously a clubhouse for the local rats.

  Kellen felt a sensation inside himself as if a key had turned in a lock, and realized exactly what he had to do. He didn't understand how cleaning the cistern out and rilling it in with clean dirt would lead him to the information he sought, but he had no doubt that this was the price the Wild Magic wanted him to pay.

  And me in my good clothes, he thought with a sigh.

  He stripped off his tunic and undertunic, folding them carefully and setting them to one side, and got to work. He couldn't finish this task in a day, and he'd be sure to bring tools and wear more suitable clothes when he returned tomorrow. But the Wild Magic had brought him here, so he'd better start now.

  Hesitantly, Kellen approached the cistern.

  "YOU! Boy! What are you doing there!"

  Kellen had become so involved in his task—he'd started by dragging away the heavy boards that were balanced precariously at the top of the trash heap that covered the cistern, and when he'd pulled the first of them loose, several rats had bolted out of the cistern, squeaking angrily as they ran—that the shout took him entirely by surprise. He dropped the board he was holding (narrowly missing his own foot) and turned in the direction of the voice.

  A man in a yellow tunic—he had the look, but hardly the manner, of one of the Mageborn—was leaning out the side window of the house, staring at him in surprise. Kellen stared back for a long moment before realizing he really needed to come up with an explanation. A good explanation. One that didn't involve the Wild Magic.

  "I'm, uh, cleaning out your cistern, goodsir. It's full of garbage, you see, and, well, there are rats…"

  "I know there are rats! Their squeaking keeps me up half the night— but will the Council do anything about it? No! They say it isn't on public property, so it isn't their responsibility! You're not from the Council, are you?"

  "Me? No, I'm just… me," Kellen said. "But I really want to clean it out," he added hastily.

  The man in the window stared at him for a long moment, as if attempting to judge just exactly how crazy Kellen was. "You ought to have work gloves," he said after a moment. "Wait there."

  He withdrew from the window, leaving Kellen staring after him, wondering what he ought to do. After less than a tenth-chime, the man returned with a pair of heavy leather work gloves in his hand.

  "I knew I still had these somewhere. Mind you put them back on the front step when you're finished for the day."

  He tossed them out the window. They landed at Kellen's feet.

  "Yes, goodsir," Kellen said meekly. "Ah, goodsir? I'm going to have to come back tomorrow. And maybe for a few days. To finish."

  "Well, see that you don't come too early," the man said, and closed the window firmly.

  Well, he's an odd one, Kellen thought to himself, going to pick up the gloves. They were a little small, but he was able to force his hands into them. They made the work go a lot easier, and he was careful to leave them just where the man had said when he'd done all he could for the day.

  I wonder who he is? Kellen thought as he left.

  THE next day Kellen came back just after Second Morning Bells wearing his oldest clothes, with a pick and shovel and some burlap bags he'd taken from the gardener's hut at the bottom of his garden. Even a garden that was home to nothing but gravel required constant tending, Kellen had discovered, and the tools were going to come in handy.

  The gloves were where he'd left them the night before, and he put them on and set to work.

  As Kellen dug, he sorted his "finds" as best he could—rotting garbage (which went into the bags), clean garbage (broken pottery, small bits of wood or bone), which he could use when he filled in the cistern again, and large unidentifiable things, which would have to be hauled away somehow, unless he could manage to break them up into small pieces with the pick or shovel. It was hot, dirty work that kept him stooped over, and he didn't dare step down into the cistern to work from there. Not yet, anyway. He had no idea how deep it went, and even though he was now wearing heavy work boots, he had no desire to slice his foot open on a piece of rusty metal or glass that had been steeped in rotting garbage.

  It certainly explained why the cistern hadn't been cleaned out before now. If the Council wouldn't pay to have it done because it lay on private land, the land's owner would have to pay someone privately to do it, and Kellen could hardly begin to imagine how much someone would charge to do this work. A lot, probably. More than someone down here had, almost certainly.

  At least most of the big stuff seemed to be near the top, where he could hook it with the pick and drag it up.

  "You! Boy!"

  Kellen heaved his latest "find"—a tangled mass of bailing wire—to the edge of the cistern, and looked toward the house. The man who had given him the gloves the day before was looking out the window at him again. This time the tunic was red, its sleeves spotted with old ink stains.

  "Yes, goodsir?" Kellen said politely. He assumed the man was a "good-sir," and not a "gentlesir," for all his aristocratic looks. It was not unknown for Mageblood to appear elsewhere in the City—that was where lowborn Mages came from, accord
ing to Mage Hendassar. Perhaps this man's sire or grandsire had been a Mage on the wrong side of the blanket. It did happen, though hardly as often as the wondertales claimed.

  "I suppose you're going to dig all "day?" the man said.

  "Yes, goodsir, I think I am," Kellen said, glancing down at the cistern. With the largest of the objects removed, he could now see that the cistern—a stone circle about six feet across—was full of an inky black sludge starting about three feet below its lip. Kellen had no idea how far down it went.

  "And I suppose you didn't bring any lunch with you?" the man asked waspishly.

  "No, goodsir," Kellen admitted sheepishly. He'd forgotten about that until just now.

  "Well, come around to the back of the house, then." The man withdrew and the window was shut once more.

  Kellen gazed at the closed window for a moment, then meekly did as the man said, picking up his discarded tunic—one of his most disreputable—on the way. The man was waiting at the door with a tin bucket and a towel.

  "Rinse yourself off and come in. You've done a good day's work so far; I won't have you fainting dead away from hunger before you finish."