Dangerous Games

by Clayton Emery

  He whirled. “Why can’t you just believe me when I tell you something? The knowledge I offer is the sum total of eons of study by the most learned mages of all time. Men and women so wise they transcend humanity to challenge the gods themselves! But if you question every little thing I tell you—”

  “I don’t believe anything I don’t witness myself.” Sunbright cut in. “I don’t believe half of what I witness anyway. The eyes can be deceived just as easily as the mind, which you would know if you ever hunted elk in a spring fog near the ocean at sunrise. You’d loose a quiver full of arrows into wisps of fog and come home with nothing on your shoulders. And where would you be then? Hungry!”

  “I don’t need to go hunting!” Candlemas shouted back. He was unsure when the shouting had begun. “If I want venison, I ring a bell and tell the cook’s boy. Hunting is for peasants! It requires no more knowledge than a cat pawing a mouse. It’s instinctive. Any fool—”

  “Fool? The hunters of my tribe are the smartest, fastest, toughest men and women on the tundra! The tribe counts on them—”

  “Will you stop nattering about that misbegotten clot of lunatics who hunker on the prairie and gnaw knucklebones by moonlight? I’m sick of hearing about them! Forget them! That’s in the past. You’ve been blessed by the gods, can’t you see that? You’re in Castle Delia, on the threshold of the entire Netherese Empire, with a chance to advance up the ranks of true nobility—”

  “Nobles who hunt men for sport?” the barbarian sneered. “Nobles who starve entire cities without conscience? Nobles who dump garbage on sacred groves—”

  “If you don’t care to associate with nobles, why the blazes did you come here in the first place?”

  “You invited me!” Sunbright jabbed a finger like a fireplace poker. “But I’ll admit I need help. I scoured the empire for any sign of Greenwillow and failed to trace her! I was despairing of what to do when you came along—”

  “I invited you here because I thought you showed promise! You’ve exhibited a natural flair for magic—or call it shamanism if you please—and I thought you could think! Instead you rant like a crack-brained child about birds and flowers, and clouds shaped like oysters!”

  “Oysters?”

  “Can’t you get this straight? Can’t you see your opportunity? The Neth are the greatest, most enchanted race ever to inhabit this sphere! We’ve learned all there is to know about magic, mostly. We’ve sweated and slaved to learn the rules of dweomer, to bend magic to one’s will! Based on that—”

  “But at what price! To lose your souls? To be heartless fiends, insensitive to suffering, like vampires come up from the ice holes?”

  “Damn your ice hole! Vampires come from dark caves, not underwater! How will you ever learn clinging to these foolish beliefs? Can nothing I say penetrate that stony barbarian skull? Open your mind and think!”

  “I’ll not bargain a bear for his teeth! I know what magic costs! I’ve seen the old ones with their bent backs, their very hearts and livers shrunk beyond endurance from practicing the ways of the shaman, from healing the sick and tasting the wind, warning of storms and tracking the seals under the ice. No one twists magic to his will. Magic twists the twister until it ties you in knots. No one takes up magic unless he’s willing to sacrifice their all for the good of the tribe. Yet you would have me believe that a wizard can reach out a finger and turn magic on and off like a spit-gut!”

  “Like a what?” Then the arcanist sighed. “Never mind. We’re getting nowhere. I had hoped this would be your first lesson, and we’d get through the elementary principles quickly. Instead I’m arguing the origins of magic!

  “The question has been asked before, you know,” Candlemas continued. “Wizards have sought the source of magic for centuries. Though the goddess Mystryl is certainly in control of a great deal of what comprises the weave, no one believes she controls it all. Certainly she didn’t create the weave.…”

  “Why not just say so, then?” retorted Sunbright. “I’d have accepted that answer!”

  “What?” Candlemas was suddenly tired, as if he’d conjured an elephant from the far southern deserts. He wished he had. A mad mammoth might prove less truculent than this hammerheaded barbarian. “What would you accept?”

  “That no one knows the source of magie!”

  “Oh, very well. Here, let me say, ‘No one knows what the source of magic is.’ How’s that?”

  Sunbright folded his arms again. “Go on. I’m listening.”

  “Good, good.” Candlemas dragged out a stool and sat down. But a leg was cracked, and he almost spilled onto the floor. “Uh, that’s all for today. I’m exhausted. Come back tomorrow morning.”

  “Very well.” The barbarian padded out of the workshop, sure and silent as a panther.

  Candlemas watched him go. “Ye gods. What a bargain I’ve struck … what else can go wrong?”

  A page, a young boy in a black-and-white tabard, scurried around a screen. “Master Candlemas? Lady Polaris wants you.”

  The pudgy mage stifled a groan. “That’s what can go wrong.”

  Threading his tables and stacks, Candlemas came to a black palantir mounted on an eagle’s claw stand. In the globe floated the shining head of Lady Polaris, his liege lord. Even Candlemas, who had lust for women but no love, felt a pang when he beheld her. Polaris had snow-white hair cascading around her face and shoulders. Her face was calm as a queen’s, only far more lovely. She was the most beautiful woman in the empire, and grew more beautiful every year, a beauty that bespoke enchantment, though no one knew her secret. Her mysteries were manifold and unfathomable. Her stunning beauty made her master of any scene, and rendered men all but dumb, even filtered by the smoky glass of the palantir. Even the page boy was awestruck.

  “Candlemas,” she said without preamble. “How goes the solution to the blight?”

  “Uh, well, milady.” Polaris disliked negative news. “We’re making progress—”

  “Good.” She dismissed the problem. “I need something.”

  Always, thought Candlemas. How many hands did she think he possessed?

  “You must fashion a device to move bones without my moving or blinking or having to chant. In the shape of a brooch, perhaps, but nothing that will attract attention. I need it by the new moon. Have you got that?”

  “Yes, milady. I’ll get—” But the palantir had gone blank.

  “Bones!” Candlemas swore. “What kind of fool does she take me for? The only bones she ever touches are dice! And while she’s gambling and demanding my help, whole villages will wither and die! Where will she get money then, eh? Where?”

  But Candlemas was ranting to himself while a wide-eyed page stared. “Get busy, boy.” The boy scooted away. Candlemas chided himself, “And me too.”

  * * * * *

  Sunbright didn’t go far. There was something he had to do, and he’d been dreading it, putting it off. Now was the time to face it.

  He stood in a stone-lined hallway cut by windows down one side. As with Candlemas’s airy tower, nothing showed outside but the purple slopes of the Barren Mountains. Tightening his gut, Sunbright stepped to the window, braced both hands against the window frame, and leaned out to look.

  The side of the castle dropped sheer for many stories, a dozen at least, all pierced by square or round windows. Far down showed the footings of solid granite. Below that …

  The earth and dark forest far, far below.

  Sunbright groaned involuntarily. His palms on the window frame were slick with sweat, trembling. He wanted to back away, but forced himself to stand firm. He’d known all along where he was, of course. He’d seen Castle Delia float over the southlands (for a tundra dweller, everything below the Barren Mountains was south), had known it was Candlemas’s home. So when the arcanist offered to bring him “to his workshop,” the truth had eventually dawned on him. Now he was here, and he’d have to adjust—

  It was no good. His legs shook so violently his kneecaps drummed
the stone wall. Stand here too long, and he’d pitch out the window like dice rattling out of a cup. Slowly, shuffling his broad boots, he crept away from the gaping space.

  “Is something amiss, milord?”

  Already spooked, Sunbright jumped at the girl’s soft question. Backing against the inner wall, he willed his heart to stop pounding. Sweat trickled down his cheeks, dripped salt onto his lips. He must look a fool, he thought, the greenest of country bumpkins. Humility was not helping his pride this day. Earlier he’d had to have a water closet explained. He’d rather face a pack of starving wolves than live through that embarrassment again.

  He didn’t belong in this place. Room lights, water closets, running water, even drains that magically whisked away garbage were alien to him, as was the inhabitants’ casual use of magic. Even the sweepers could nudge a dustpan along without touching it. Sunbright was here to learn magic from Candlemas, and he knew less than the slop boy who could spark a fire with a flick of his finger. Surrounded by magic-users, Sunbright felt like a trained raccoon at a market fair: it might wear clothes and do tricks, but it wasn’t human.

  The girl sensed the reason for his unease. Moving gracefully to the window, she peeked out, murmured softly, “It is high. Being in the clouds takes getting used to. I couldn’t even walk past a window for the first month I lived here.”

  For something to say, Sunbright croaked, “How long …?”

  “Have I been here? A year and some months. I work for my dowry. My family had all girls and little money.” She smiled, not to mock, but to comfort. Like many maids, she was small, pixieish, with short-cropped hair and natural curls now emphasized by dampness. She was one of the bathmaidens, and still wore a bulky black robe.

  “Where …?”

  “… is my village? It’s very small, at the headwaters of the Ger, but in sight of Patrician Peak. Frosttop, we call it, not that it needs a name. Not many come our way.”

  Sunbright nodded. His breathing had slowed, and he mopped his brow with his sleeve. He hated being up in the clouds. His land was the tundra, table-flat, where a musk ox looked like a mouse standing on the horizon.

  He’d been up high only once, and that accidently, on the back of a dragon, and he still screamed in his sleep when he recalled that trip.

  Patiently, the girl waited while he gained his composure. “You know, my lord—”

  “I’m no man’s lord. Or woman’s. Call me Sunbright. Please.”

  She bit her lip. “Very well, uh, Sunbright. You know, it’s not often we have a visitor so tall and strong, so handsome and dashing. You make a girl wonder what the future might bring.” As if scratching idly, she tugged open the fluffy black robe, revealing the soft upper curve of a modest breast.

  Dully, the barbarian nodded. Without knowing why, he reached for her, and she leaned to meet him. But his hand didn’t stray to her throat or breast. Rather, the knotty scarred brown hand stroked her hair along one side. She smiled shyly, confused by a gentle touch from such a fearsome man.

  As if speaking in a foreign tongue, Sunbright said, “One day a fine and simple man with violet eyes will ask a drink of water, then marry you, get you with strong children, a round half-dozen. But you’d best get about it soon. It’s unnatural to live here on high, suspended on naught but magic. T’will come a time when thunder tolls and these castles fall.”

  Surprise flickered in the girl’s brown eyes, then fright. Sunbright felt her fear, and sensed it within himself. How had he made such a pronouncement? He’d spoken like a seer, a prophet.

  A shaman.

  Dazed by his own behavior, his hand dropped from the girl’s hair. She bit her lip, excused herself, and bustled away, robe pulled tight around her neck.

  Sunbright shook his head, laid a hand on the inner wall for support. The rough stone tingled under his fingers, as if he felt stone for the first time in his life. The floor too seemed full of imperfections: dips and whorls, and huge cracks where before it had been smooth.

  Why was he seeing things so clearly, so brightly? Had someone cast a spell on him? Or had he cast one upon himself?

  What power? What knowledge?

  Why here?

  Why now?

  Chapter 3

  Even Sunbright’s nights were disturbed, for he dreamt of Greenwillow.

  Three nights now he’d dreamt of her, visions of love, memories of battle, miles of travel they’d made together.

  But tonight was different.

  A dark forest was rife with roots and rocks, a foot-tripping tangle impossible to see. Black boles surrounded him. But ahead, as if between prison bars, flitted his elven lover. Greenwillow of the Cormanthyr was tall and slim but with a woman’s curves, her face pale as milk, her eyes and ears slanted and exotic, her hair flowing down her back in black billows. This night she wore a sheer gown of white silk, embroidered all over with elaborate runes and vines, and that was strange, for Sunbright had never seen her in anything but emerald green and black leather armor. She tripped among the dark trunks like an errant bird, and he stumbled to catch her. Occasionally she cast a glance over her shoulder, but always tripped onward, eager to lead him. To show him something? What could it be?

  Hard pressed to keep her in sight, Sunbright thrashed through the woods. In the pitchy night, he banged his shoulder against rough bark, stubbed his toes on roots, conked his forehead and scratched his face on branches. But Greenwillow sailed on, light as a breeze. They ran for dream-miles. Sunbright gasped for her to slow down, heard only his own panting. “Greenwillow! Wait! Wait for me.…”

  The blackness began to change, to wane. A bright light like a single torch speared the night. It came from high overhead, gathering strength, banishing the blackness. Sunbright squinted, picked out Greenwillow only as a dark, slim silhouette against white light. Then it was too painful to look, so he plowed on blindly.

  He grunted as he fetched up hard against an up-thrust chunk of granite, skinning his knees. He slapped at the barrier to find a way around, found it rose only higher on each side. Cursing, shading his eyes against the fiery glare, he swung a knee on the stone to climb over. But the top surface felt strange: cold and very smooth. Too smooth to be natural. A quarried rock here in the forest? The wall of a ruin?

  Backing, he felt the wall. Square everywhere. How …?

  “Sunbright, wake up!”

  Greenwillow’s voice, the first time in a long time he’d heard it, clear and sweet as a lark’s warble.

  He opened his eyes, and his blood ran chill.

  The dreamer stood in the stone hallway of Castle Delia. The barrier he’d struck was the windowsill. Sleepwalking, he’d tried to mount it, climb over. With a gasp, he looked down. He’d have fallen a mile or more to the forest floor.

  Gagging, Sunbright stumbled back from the open window. He clawed sweat from his face and eyes. But he still had to squint, for the fiery glare out the window was no dream.

  High in the sky, slicing the night in an arc, was a shooting star. Even as he watched, it completed its journey from the heavens to the earth. The glare illuminated distant tall trees like twigs in a campfire—for just a second, then the light was snuffed out. Sunbright thought he felt the earth under his boots shake, but that was his imagination. He wasn’t on the earth, but floating a mile above it.

  On trembling legs, he staggered back to his plain chambers and tousled bed. He closed the bedchamber door and bolted it, then wedged a heavy chair under the latch.

  He collapsed on the sodden bed, tried in vain to recall Greenwillow’s face and sweet voice.

  * * * * *

  “What do you mean, you want to go down to the forest? There’s nothing down there but—but trees!”

  “I want to see a tree.” Sunbright sounded petulant. His head ached and he was dizzy. He wasn’t sleeping well, and never would until he stood on firm ground.

  “Walk in the gardens! We have nine of them! What about our agreement, our working together? Do you know how many artifacts I have
to interpret?”

  “No.” The barbarian’s tone suggested he didn’t care, either.

  “I’ll show you!” Candlemas ignored Sunbright’s reticence as he marched across the big workshop.

  Sunbright followed. Slowly he was learning his way around Castle Delia, or Candlemas’s small corner of it. The mage’s realm was mostly this tower on one corner of the floating mountain that supported Delia. The tower was a dozen stories high, big enough inside for a chariot race on any floor. Candlemas’s workshop occupied the topmost floor, a room bigger than Sunbright’s village. Tables and screens and partition walls split the chamber into smaller areas, but always the high windows loomed in all four walls. The floors below, Sunbright had seen, contained more rooms and workshops where some thirty lesser mages worked at dirty, complicated, and arcane tasks per Candlemas’s orders. The pudgy mage was an Inventive, he’d explained, one of the empire’s leading experts at creating and destroying artifacts, and so a favored employee of Lady Polaris. Secondly Candlemas was a Variator, but the barbarian hadn’t grasped that word’s meaning. There were more flavors of magic in this society than colors to the forest, and everyone from the mightiest archwizard to the dumbest stable hand practiced magic. Everyone except Sunbright.

  And this single tower was only a tiny fraction of the castle, for Candlemas’s other realm of responsibility was steward, overseer of the holdings of Lady Polaris. Below and far out of sight were farms and orchards, plantations and ponds, mills and mines that belonged to this one woman who, it was carefully explained by the maid who’d fetched his breakfast, was one of the supreme archwizards of the empire, but not the uppermost: merely the tenth or twelfth. Archwizards spent most of the time scrambling to one-up their rivals, to step upon their enemies while climbing the ladder.

  Like salmon hurrying to mount a cataract and spill into a fisher’s trap, Sunbright thought.