Perhaps I nodded off, because suddenly, as it seemed, Mother and Cal were gone. The cellar was profoundly silent. Ly had stopped crying, and his breathing was too low to hear. But his eyes, huge in his thin face, were fixed on me.
The first overwhelming effects of such a massive influx of magic were wearing off a little. I began to feel energised. Demons, I wished Arran were there. How I needed him! I’d forgotten about that part of it. And he was only at the fortress, not an hour’s walk away, and no time at all if I flew. I jumped up, calling to Sunshine, but there was no response. Sleeping, no doubt. I called more strongly, and caught a hint of her consciousness before she sank back into sleep.
Perhaps it was just as well. I’d look very foolish if I arrived at the fortress in the aftermath of battle, panting for some bedplay. That would look wonderful, the war leader unable to control her own desires. And what if Arran were injured, or worse? I might jump on some random stranger.
No, better here where there were no temptations. I needed to concentrate. Breathe in. Breathe out. Be calm. The magic would wear off, in time. Focus on something else.
“Princess.”
I spun round. I’d forgotten about Ly.
“Princess, are you all right?” He was standing not five paces from me, at the limit of his chain, his face a picture of anxious concern. “You look… agitated.”
Agitated. Interesting word for it. “I’m full of your magic, Ly. I… it makes me restless.” Restless. Another good word. More accurate to say that it made me burn up with desire. It ate me from the inside until I gave in to its cravings. Gods, I was weak, and foolish, and powerless to resist. I paced across the cellar and back, across and back, and each time I was a little closer to him. Even though a part of me hated myself for it, and knew I would regret it, I couldn’t help myself.
When I was near enough, I stopped and waited for my doom. He hesitated at first, uncertain how I would react. But he couldn’t resist, either. He lifted his free hand to my face and ran one finger down my cheek as softly as a moonrose petal, and I closed my eyes and surrendered myself utterly to him. And by all the gods, it was amazingly good.
Afterwards I curled into a miserable ball, as far from Ly as I could get, and wept for my weakness, and for Arran.
~~~~~
I must have slept a little, for the next thing I knew, Cal and Mother were back, faces flushed, holding hands like children.
“What’s going on with you two?” I said, narrowing my eyes in suspicion.
Mother giggled. “We’ve just been topping up our magic, dear.”
“Topping up—? What—?”
“This place is a scribery,” Cal said. “One of the missing ones. We always knew there were more, but no one had any idea where they were. This is a wonderful discovery! We need to build a town here, to make use of it.”
“So there’s a pillar full of magic? May I see it?”
“No!” Mother said sharply. “Drina, can you imagine what would happen if you got anywhere near such a powerful source of magic? You’d try to suck it all in, and… well, you’d probably explode. No, really, you mustn’t.”
I could see the sense in that. But at least it explained the hand-holding, and a certain disorder in their clothing, now that I was paying attention. They’d taken in a large amount of magic, and it had had the inevitable effect. So they’d been doing the same as Ly and me.
“You look better, Drina,” Cal said. “Have you had some sleep?”
I avoided his eyes. “A little.” He grunted, but said nothing more. He must have guessed what had happened, and perhaps he’d intended it all along, knowing how the magic would take me.
“Well, it’s getting dark already, so I’m afraid we’re going to have to stay here for tonight.”
“No! I have to get to Arran. To the fortress. I need to know…”
He stroked my hand, sympathetic. “I understand, petal, but not tonight. All those beasts and riders have been released from any control. They’ll be wandering all over the place, heading home. You slept through the last time, but believe me, you don’t want to be out there. We’re safe here, and we still have plenty of dried meat and cheese, enough for the prisoner as well.”
Ly leaned forward eagerly. “I can do better than that, if… if you permit, kind mage.”
Cal frowned. “What did you have in mind?”
“A hot meal. Something fresh.”
I perked up. “Will it be that yellow fish that you cooked on your island, the stuffed one?”
His face lit up like a lamp. “You enjoyed that.”
“I did. Oh, but there are no fish here. The water is bad. Isn’t that what you said?”
He flushed. “The water is not bad. And there are fish, not like the emperor fish, but good tasting.”
I squeaked in outrage. “So when you told me—”
“That was a lie, yes.” He lowered his eyes. “To keep your people away from this island. I have told you many lies, Princess. I am sorry for it. But no more. Eat tonight with me, and I will show you why I approached your country for help, why I wanted your mages to come here. Will you do this?”
I looked at Cal. “No tricks. You are still our prisoner,” he said.
He held his hands up in surrender, the chain rattling. “No tricks.”
Cal nodded. “He’s being honest with us now, anyway. But it’s up to you, Drina.”
“If we have to stay here, then yes. He’s a good cook.”
Ly beamed at me.
Mother refashioned the chain and wall-ring into a pair of heavy manacles for his wrists, with just a short chain between them. “There. Now, I won’t bind your legs if you promise to behave well.”
“I promise.” He made a respectful gesture, touching one hand to his forehead, although the weight of the manacle made it an effort for him.
She nodded. “Very well, then. Lead the way. Cal, we may need the lamp.”
Ly looked around, as if unsure, until Cal pointed to the door, with the stairs beyond. Poor Ly. He’d been there for so long, sunk in his magic, that he barely knew his surroundings. His steps unsteady, he made his way to the foot of the stairs and began to climb. Every step was a struggle for him. His own withered muscles, combined with the heavy manacles, made him painfully slow. But he made no complaint, and reached the top without needing to rest.
Now it was easier, for the passage was wide enough for me to walk alongside him. He smiled at me, then shyly reached for my hand.
“Is this acceptable, Princess?” he whispered. “I would not presume…”
“It’s all right.” If it kept him happy, I didn’t object to holding his hand.
To tell the truth, despite all the horrors he’d inflicted on us, I bore him no ill will. We had started the war, after all. I could hardly blame him for fighting back. And Ly himself was not evil. The quiet, thoughtful man who preferred to live in solitude and enjoyed spending hours cooking fish, that was someone I could like very well. Already liked, I realised. I had no quarrel with him.
So I held his hand as we walked along, and from time to time he lifted his head and looked at me with a little smile on his lips, before blushing and looking away again. I suppose he thought we were lovers. Well, he was wrong about that, despite the past. Friends, perhaps. Yes, I’d say he was a friend, of sorts, one I might take advantage of, when I needed to. But nothing more, as he would find out soon enough.
Our footsteps echoed hollowly as we walked through the empty rooms – sitting rooms, a library, store rooms, a kitchen. Upstairs would be bedrooms, and the scribing rooms. A scribery. Once this place had been filled with mages and scribes, scuttling about on their important spell-making business, eating and laughing together, arguing about whose turn it was to top up the ink bottles, loving and sleeping and dreaming. All of them turned to dust now.
We turned into a side passage. After a short distance, it made a sharp turn, then continued on, but Ly stopped, looking searchingly at the wall. It looked completely blank to
me, with not a sign of a door anywhere, but Ly placed one hand flat against it. Nothing happened.
“Oh.” His face was a picture of bewilderment.
“Your magic has gone,” Mother said.
He looked so crestfallen I thought he might cry again. “Of course,” he murmured, lowering his head. “And I do not have my pendant.”
“Pendant?” I said. “Oh, the amber necklace?”
“Yes. It opens the door. My mother has it now. So she can bring me food.”
Mother squeezed past us and placed her hand on the wall. There was an audible click, and a door opened a crack. A narrow beam of light pierced the gloom. “There. Now we can go through.”
“Interesting,” Cal said. “I wonder if all the scriberies have a hidden door like this one.”
Ly pushed the door fully open, panting with the effort, and led us through into another corridor. It could not have been more different. After the dark stone walls and bare rooms, we were bathed in light, glowing softly from all around us, walls, ceiling and floor.
The walls were inlaid with carved wooden panels. Dragons. Always dragons. Our long-dead ancestors had had a terrible obsession with them. The panels all depicted men riding the great beasts. No, there were women, too. Some of the beasts carried several people on their backs, in complicated arrangements of baskets and straps. Very strange. The scholars said that the dragons were all dead, but there were some amongst the coastal folk to the south who claimed to have seen them. I liked to think that somewhere in this extraordinary world of ours there still existed a remote corner where they lived on.
We walked for some distance downhill, but then, abruptly, an archway and we were into some kind of living space, with furnishings in soft shapes and warmly coloured draperies. Another turn, another archway and—
A vast, high-ceilinged room, with fires and cooking pots at one end, and low sofas at the other end. The walls glowed almost as brightly as summer, and instead of carvings on the walls, there were painted pictures, beautiful seascapes or mountains. As I gazed at them, thinking how lifelike they were, they moved – grasses blown by the wind, clouds shifting, the endlessly moving sea. Just a trick by the long-dead mages who built this place.
From the kitchen end of the room, the smell of roasting meat wafted. The middle of the room was filled with tables. And people.
The murmur of conversation died away as a hundred or more faces turned to us, open mouthed. Hard to say who was more astonished, us or them.
Behind me, Cal hissed with displeasure, grabbing one of Ly’s arms and pulling him round to face him. “And you never thought to mention that half your army was here with you?” He gave Ly a shake. “Well? Well?”
“Not my army,” Ly whispered. “My people. My children.”
Before we could absorb this odd statement, a figure emerged from the throng and sped towards us. “Little-Ly! What are you doing here? What is that sodomising whore doing here? Why are you—”
She stopped, noticing the manacles for the first time. Her eyes narrowed, flicking to me then back to Ly. “You sodomising stupid boy! You’ve been fucking her again, haven’t you? You’ve destroyed everything, don’t you realise that? You—”
There was more, but no sound emerged from her throat. Her mouth continued to flap for some time before her brain caught on. Then she just stared at us, her jaw slack.
“Kyra?” Cal said, but his voice quivered with amusement. “Did you put a silencing spell on her?”
She shrugged. “Well, that was very tedious. It will wear off in an hour or two.”
“And such language from a lady,” I said in an undertone.
“Is she a friend of yours?” Cal said to Ly-haam.
“She is my mother,” he said, and the resignation in his voice almost made me laugh.
I tapped him on the shoulder. “I like my mother better.”
He looked puzzled, so I tipped my head towards her. “Oh!” He looked at her, then back at me, then at Mother again. “Oh, but—”
I smiled. He was quite right. No one would look at my mother’s pale skin and red-blonde hair and imagine that I grew from that stock. I was rounded like her, and perhaps I had some of her stubbornness, but little else. “I take after my father.”
Then Ly looked round at Cal, who smiled and shook his head.
“No,” I said. “My father was Icthari.”
Ly looked at Mother again, and then at his own, red-faced and mute, and his lips twitched. “I like your mother better, too, Princess.”
Cal gave a bark of laughter. “It’s unanimous, then.”
Mother tutted at us. “By the Moon God, who are all these people?”
Ly hung his head. “My children,” he said again, his voice so low I could barely make out the words.
Children? Now that I looked, there were a lot of children there, from babes in their mothers’ arms to those about five. His children? Had Ly sired all these babes to found his future army?
Yet… there was something wrong with them. Almost at my feet, a tiny child crawled, pulling herself along by her arms. My stomach turned over as I realised the reason why – her legs were no more than stumps. A baby gazed at me with one beautiful blue eye and one empty socket. Another child looked perfect, but his mother held him with her one remaining arm. A man holding a cooking pot had a livid red scar running right across his face.
Fully a third of those in the room had suffered terrible injuries. I turned a shocked face to Ly.
He nodded. “My children.” And his face crumpled in distress.
43: The Kingswell Road
“Oh, poor things!” Mother said. “Let’s see what we can do. Who is the worst?” She strode forward, pulled out an unused chair and plumped herself down. “Come along, now. I can fix some of this.”
They looked at her blankly, not understanding.
“She is a kindly mage,” Ly-haam said, in a louder voice. “She can heal your hurts with her magic. She will not harm you.”
He must have spoken in his own language, for his words triggered a buzz of discussion. Gradually, they stepped forward, first one or two, then more and more, until I couldn’t see Mother at all. With a cluck of annoyance, Cal dived into the throng, although whether to help out or to keep order, I couldn’t tell.
“Whatever happened here?” I said to Ly.
“Come,” he said, waving both manacled hands towards an unoccupied table near the wall. “Sit with me and I will explain.”
His mother had been standing in silent outrage the whole time, petrified into immobility, but now she rushed forward and grabbed Ly’s sleeve, mouthing angrily at him. He pulled out of her grasp and, ignoring her, walked away, holding a chair for me.
“Sit, Princess.”
A boy of fifteen or so limped across with food and drink for us. It was only bread and fruit, but it was fresh and wholesome. The drink was cloudy and yellow, yet served in a crystal decanter with matching glasses.
“Isn’t there meat?” Ly said to the boy, who shook his head and scuttled away.
“I am sorry the meat is not quite ready yet. Or the fish,” he added with a twinkle in his eyes. He picked up a pear and began to slice it. “Here – will you have some of this? It is very sweet.”
I nibbled a piece to please him, and drank a little – it was sweet, too – but his magic still sustained me and suppressed my appetite.
He sat with his back to the room, and it struck me again that he always seemed so alone. Only his mother, still silently impotent, had followed us to our quiet spot. The rest of his people ignored him, going about their chores or waiting for the meal as if their leader – their god – wasn’t even there. But perhaps they didn’t see him that way. Was he just a boy to them, who would grow to manhood and be worthy of respect in time? Or was he a failure now, a god reduced to mortality by foreign magic?
“All the children here are mine,” he said, with such desolation in his voice that I could have wept. “My blood. My power in them. They are born
with their full capability, so they do not have to wait until they reach fifteen, and undergo the ceremony. And for those that bond with a blood-spirit, there is twenty years of growth, not the five that follow when I give my blood to an adult. The animals they create – they are a marvel, Princess! You think the ones you have seen are abnormally large, but the creatures these children create will be bigger by far.”
Dreadful thought. We would have no chance against such monsters.
“When I first became byan shar,” he went on, “I thought it was a wonderful idea. All I had to do was to give my seed to any woman who wished for it. And… you know the effect of it, it kept the power in my blood at manageable levels. I felt normal, like myself. And I had all the women in my bed I could dream of. I was so happy! At fifteen, I thought the gods had smiled on me indeed.”
I smiled, too. No wonder he was happy! What boy of that age wouldn’t be?
“But then as soon as the children were born, there were problems. They have full power at birth, but they are still babies, with no understanding. They began to bond with blood-spirits, but without any control over their own emotions. When they grow angry, their blood-spirit is angry also. If they want to kill, so does the blood-spirit. Many people died or were grievously injured.”
“But this must be well known to your people,” I said, appalled. “You must have developed ways to deal with it, surely?”
He sighed. “The mothers are sent to a special clava-dorn—” He frowned, lips pursed. “A protected village, I suppose you would call it. It has a high wall all round it, to keep the blood-spirits out. They all live there, the babies are born there, it is remote enough that perhaps the blood-spirits will not find it, not until the babies are old enough to control them. But they find it anyway, and prowl all round the walls. And the eagles and white-wings…” He shrugged. “There are… accidents. And some of the mothers are foolish. They think their babies have no blood-spirit connection, so they go home to their clan…”
The Fire Mages' Daughter Page 40