The Outstretched Shadow ou(tom-1

by Mercedes Lackey

Much as he would have liked to disobey, Kellen knew better than to try. Reluctantly, he walked across that vast expanse of black and white marble until he stood just below the dais.

  Lycaelon glared down at his son for a moment, looking as if he'd never seen him before, then pointed a monitory finger at him. "Kellen Tavadon! Three forbidden Books were found in your quarters. Do you deny that they are your possessions?"

  Lycaelon's voice boomed and echoed in a most imposing fashion; even though Kellen knew it was all a trick of acoustics and clever architecture, it still made him want to grovel.

  But he was too overcome with the nightmare feeling that his worst fears were about to be realized to even make the attempt.

  For the offending Books were brought forth by another golem, a smaller one this time. It was scarcely six feet tall—about his own height— but it was no less intimidating for all that; its feet clattered like steel-shod hooves against the marble floor, and he could see the chessboard reflection of the floor against its highly polished grey skin. In its hands were three small shabby books. Kellen felt himself grow sick with dread; he had no difficulty in recognizing the Books that the golem carried. The Book of Sun, The Book of Moon, and The Book of Stars, his three finds, that had hidden their nature from all eyes but his.

  Or at least, they had until now.

  Father searched my room. And he used magick to do it.

  Just as Kellen had feared.

  "I see by the guilt and shame on your face that these are yours," Lycaelon said with disgust and utter contempt. "Where did you get them?"

  Kellen clamped his mouth shut. There wasn't much he could do right now, but at least he wasn't going to get that poor old fellow in the Low Market in trouble—not when he knew very well that Lycaelon would make some sort of scapegoat out of him.

  Instead, he just stared at the marble at his feet. He would have liked to have stared defiantly into his father's eyes, but he knew that if he did that, his father would know just how to get every bit of information he wanted out of him.

  "Speak!" Lycaelon roared, his voice echoing in the chill room. "Be aware, we will find the criminal that supplied them to you! Was it Perulan?"

  Kellen stared at his own boots. That was a thought that hadn't occurred to him. And they couldn't hurt Perulan any more than they already had. He was Mageborn too. That'll stick in their throats. He recognized most of the faces behind the dais from his father's infrequent entertainments: Volpiril, Lycaelon's particular enemy; Isas and Harith, who his father considered spineless allies; and the other nine, any of whom would be glad to step into the Arch-Mage's seat and probably saw today as a stepping-stone to that end.

  "What if it was?" he replied sullenly, still staring at the floor. "What are you going to do? Dig him up and use necromancy on him?"

  A gasp from his left told him that he'd struck a nerve. Necromancy was as forbidden as Wild Magic, if not more so. He wondered if they would have tried it, maybe one or two of them, in secret… if he hadn't said something about it. Now they wouldn't dare. Not with the other ears in the room, their aides, and servants, and the ears that were probably outside, pressed to the door.

  "If you hurry," he added nastily, "he probably won't smell too much or lose too many body parts while you question him. Of course, in this heat, you never know—"

  "Enough!" Lycaelon roared, going red and white by turns. "Wretched boy! Do not presume on our patience, and confine your speech to answering our questions! Have you been practicing this foul perversion called Wild Magic?"

  He could claim that he hadn't, and unless they had someone using a Truthspell on him, they'd never know any differently. He could claim that Perulan had given him the Books at their last meeting, and that he hadn't had time to look at them yet.

  But if he did that, they'd just take the Books and destroy them, punish him anyway, and aside from being punished, nothing else about his life would change. Aside from being punished? What was he thinking? From this moment on, he'd probably have a watcher with him every moment, waking and sleeping! But if he didn't—

  You wanted something that would make your father disinherit you, didn't you? Well, this is probably it. Your one chance to get on a ship and escape.

  And besides, they probably had someone casting a Truthspell on him anyway.

  Better to remain silent about it, though—not confess, but not deny it either.

  He raised his eyes to his father's face and summoned as much defiance as he could. "What do you think?" he asked, keeping his voice even with a great effort.

  Lycaelon began to turn a striking shade of cerise.

  "Boy," interrupted Lord-Mage Vilmos, "Wild Magic is anathema for a good reason. It is totally unpredictable. It offers you your desires, but grants them in its own twisted fashion—affecting not only you, not only those you know, but innocent parties who have never met you and certainly do not deserve to be caught up in your spells and have their lives ruined by your foul meddling."

  Perulan, Kellen thought, and suppressed a wince. Was it his fault that Perulan was dead?

  "It is a perverted form of true magick," Vilmos continued, managing to sound both angry and pompous at the same time. "It requires no study, no discipline, no thought at all, thus appealing to inferior persons of inferior intellect and no sense of proper responsibility."

  That stung. And Kellen, goaded, replied just as angrily. "Inferior by your standards, maybe! Just because they don't want to waste their lives learning to lick your boots for a taste of what you've got! I don't think so! And I don't think that the mere fact that Wild Magic isn't predictable was ever a good reason to outlaw it then, or to ban it now! This place could do with a little less predictability! Maybe it would stop being a stagnant suck-hole that chokes the life out of anything that's new and good!"

  The startled and offended glares he got from every live creature in the room would have been funny if the situation hadn't been so serious. This was not what the Mages in general and his father in particular wanted to hear from him—they had expected him to be terrified and penitent.

  Well, I'm not! And they can damn well deal with it! He felt energized and alive in a way he hadn't been for longer than he could remember. He felt ready to take them all on, singly or together! Stupid, hidebound old fools, it was their fault Perulan was, dead, not his, and how many other people did they kill or ruin every day, refusing to change, refusing to see what was right in front of them? A fire built in his gut, and he matched them glare for glare, prepared to say and do anything to wipe those looks of smug superiority off their faces.

  "Maybe I haven't done much of any kind of magick," he snarled, "but I've read all three Wild Magic Books from cover to cover. Have any of you? Do you really know what it is that you've outlawed, or are you just flapping and squawking like a lot of mocker-birds, repeating the decisions of a bunch of people afraid of their own shadows, people dead so long that you don't even remember their names?" He snorted derisively. "Mocker-birds! You aren't even that! You're a bunch of old hens, cackling and shrieking about nothing because every other old hen is cackling 'Danger! Danger!' at the top of her lungs!"

  Mage Isas was sitting there with such a stunned look on his face that Kellen wondered if he was about to fall out of his chair. Harith worked his mouth, but no sound came out.

  The rest were various shades of interesting colors, from white to purple, his own father included.

  "And just what is wrong with being unpredictable, with change, with innovation?" he flung at them. "Just why is it that everybody has to be protected all the time? Last time I looked, the rest of the world didn't need all of that protection, and they were getting along just fine!"

  Finally Mage Breulin managed to get to his feet, his stiff silver beard waggling with the force of his indignation. "You don't see any reason, do you, you mutinous young puppy? And of course, you are so very learned, you who cannot even produce an adequate understanding of the history of the City, much less that of the world!"

 
How am I supposed to have an understanding of the history of the world when you don't let me see it? Kellen thought angrily. "You—" he began.

  "I have an answer for you, insolent brat—Wild Magic is the magick of chaos and anarchy; using it brings down the darkness of confusion, and there is no room for anarchy and confusion in a civilized world!" Mage Breulin had the wind in his sails now, and was prepared to run down anything in his path. "Where there is chaos, evil finds a way in, as it did before. No one who dares to practice Wild Magic can remain untainted by evil!"

  And you've got every incentive to lie to me, and none to tell me the truth. "You don't know that!" Kellen shouted back. "There's a whole world out' side the City, and I bet some of them know Wild Magic! And most of them don't give a toss about High Magick—look at the Selken-folk! They do without you just fine, and they can't all be evil, or you'd never even allow the little trickle of trade with them that you've got! You're just afraid that if you let people see there's a different way possible, they'll decide they can do very nicely without you, and you'll all be left to have to make an honest living for a change!"

  "Enough!" Lycaelon bellowed, the acoustics of the place giving his voice far more strength than Kellen's. "We aren't here to listen to the ignorant nonsense of children. Kellen! You will either make a public apology, personally burn the books, and renounce your wayward behavior, or—you will face Banishment! Not mere disinheritance, you miserable, ignorant brat—though, by the Light, I swear I should disinherit you no matter how sincere your apology—but Outlawry, you puling whelp! To be cast out through the Delfier Gate into the forest with nothing but the clothes on your back and provisions for a single day!"

  Lycaelon's face was so suffused with anger it had become a mask indistinguishable from the golems' carved faces. "Light save me, would that I had never had a child at all, would that you had died with your mother, would that she had died in infancy, rather than spawn youl"

  Kellen could hardly recognize his own father in this rigid, unyielding, intolerant demagogue, thundering down judgment as if he thought he was a god—

  Right, then, Kellen thought furiously. You wish I'd never been bom, well so do I! I'd rather starve to death in the forest than eat another bite of food at your table!

  "Kiss my foot," Kellen sneered, in a voice he hardly recognized as his own. "You don't want me? Well, I don't want you, old man. I'd rather have a wolf for a father." He thrust out his chin, and crossed his arms over his chest. "Go ahead. Banish me."

  Lycaelon barked a single word in the tongue of the High Magick, and before Kellen could wonder what it meant, his arms were seized from behind. And in the next moment, he was pulled off his feet and dragged out of the Council chamber by two of the stone golems.

  And behind him, as the doors closed, he could hear the chamber erupt into a tumult of noise as all the members of the Council began to shout at once.

  KELLEN staggered forward, thrown off-balance as the golems thrust him through the open doorway. He'd thought the room beyond would be larger, for some reason, and as he fumbled against the far wall of the cell, too stunned to quite understand where he was, he heard the door of the cell close behind him with an awful finality, cutting off most of the light.

  There was no point in crying out in protest. The golems lacked the power to answer him.

  In fury and outrage—the only things keeping his growing despair at bay—Kellen whirled and stared at the six-inch square opening in the door. Its grill admitted the unwavering pale blue Magelight of the corridor, providing the only light in his cell.

  He stood as rigidly still as if he were made of stone himself, listening to the clatter of the golem's footsteps as they walked away, slowly rubbing his arms where they had gripped him. Hard enough to bruise, not hard enough to break bone. Not quite. But it had hurt, and the pain had shocked him in a way that nothing else had, not even hearing about Perulan's death. No one had ever manhandled him before; not even his father. Punishment had always meant being confined to his room on a diet of nourishing gruel and water. The implied violence in the golems' treatment of him caught him right in the gut.

  The footsteps faded away, and slowly Kellen became aware that the only sound was his own shallow frightened breathing. He forced himself to move, to take a step, to breathe deeply, and to see what he could of his surroundings.

  The cell was even smaller than he'd thought. Smooth grey stone, a cubicle a bit less than eight feet square, a stone bench at one end, all with the perfect seamlessness of Magecrafting. When Kellen looked up, the ceiling was lost in darkness, too far away to see. A cell—and not a Mage's meditation cell, either!

  This was a prison cell. So there were cells beneath the Council House to house people the Council deemed inconvenient. Another thing to mar the pretty picture the High Council painted for the people of Armethalieh of how things worked. How many people before him had stood in this very spot? Kellen wondered. What had been their crimes—and what had happened to them?

  Reflexively, his hand sought his golden City Talisman for comfort, but when he touched it, he recoiled as if he'd been burned. No. Not after what Anigrel had told him about the Talismans and their real purpose.

  He forced himself to take a step, to turn his back on the door. The Council—his father—wanted him to recant, to humiliate himself in public, to help them destroy the first breath of fresh air the City had seen in a thousand years, to say he'd been wrong to study the three Books of the Wild Magic. To go back to them and be a good little Kellen-golem and do whatever he was told, and believe whatever they told him to believe.

  But he hadn't been wrong in what he'd done. Kellen knew he hadn't. And he wouldn't say he had. Lycaelon searched my room. He used a spell to find those Books —he had to have! If anyone's done something wrong, it's him! Wasn't he, wasn't everyone entitled to privacy? Wasn't he old enough to make up his own mind about the world? Everyone says that Armethalieh is a city of Law — but where's the Law in the things that the Council's done lately? The Mages live off the citizens like leeches, they destroyed Peruktn, and even if they didn't kill him they put him into a state where he went where he would get into trouble and they probably knew he would! How many other people have they destroyed? They do what they want to because they can, that's all. That's the way it's always been.

  Let them Banish me if that's what they want now. I won't play their games anymore.

  It was an easy vow to make, and a harder one to keep in the forefront of his mind as the time stretched on, seamlessly, and with no way to mark its passing, down here in the dark. Did the Council mean just to leave him down here and forget about him? He couldn't even hear the City bells, and he hadn't thought there was anywhere in the City where you couldn't hear the bells of Armethalieh.

  He paced until he got tired, then he sat down in a corner with his back against the wall. How long had he been here? Did the Council mean just to leave him down here and forget about him so that he could just vanish quietly? Somehow that frightened him more than the idea of Banishment. The cell was just chilly enough to be uncomfortable, and Kellen could stand and think, or sit and think, but either way he was as much a prisoner of his own thoughts as of the stone around him.

  If he had wanted a demonstration of the absolute power the Council could wield when it chose, he was receiving it now. Everyone at the College had seen him receive the summons. No one would be surprised if he simply disappeared, not really.

  And nobody would talk about it, either, at least not openly. That wasn't the way the citizens of the City did things. After all, the Council knew best, didn't they? They only acted for the good of all citizens. If there was no announcement that he had been Banished—and Kellen suddenly realized just how embarrassing such an announcement would be for his father—well, everyone knew how rebellious he was, and what a poor Student he was. There might be some idle speculation, but most of it would be around the suggestion that Lycaelon had sent him away to someplace where he'd "learn proper discipline." And
in time, people would forget about him.

  He was so wrapped up in his own thoughts and fears—with very little sense of how much time had passed since the golems had shoved him roughly into this dark, chilly stone box—that at first the renewed sound of footsteps didn't penetrate Kellen's gloom and self-absorption. But he was quickly summoned to full awareness by the sound as it came nearer: not the heavy impact of stone-on-stone, but the softer sound of leather City-boots on stone floors.

  Someone—a person—was coming.

  Despite his best intentions of standing up to his captors and showing a defiant face, Kellen backed away from the door as far as he could, his heart beating faster.

  The door swung open, filling the cell with light from the corridor, and a robed Mage, accompanied by a hovering ball of Magelight, stepped into the cell.

  "Kellen," Arch-Mage Lycaelon said, inclining his head. He made a small gesture, and the blue ball of Magelight soared up to hover several feet above their heads, bathing the whole cell in its even unchanging brightness. Somehow that made the cell seem both larger and smaller, all at the same time. The height of it made Kellen feel insignificant; the length and width so small as to give him a feeling of claustrophobia.