I can only hope they don’t take it out on her, he thought, looking at Miranda’s lovely, sleeping form.
Ancestors knew it didn’t look good for him.
CHAPTER 14
For some reason, they chose to believe him.
He had explained what he was doing there—and his role in trying to prevent it—and the two denser-men had taken him at his word.
It almost made him suspicious.
Quiss removed both his palms from Caldan’s head. Caldan was still a bit unsure why that had gone so easily.
“You haven’t sustained any permanent damage,” the sorcerer pronounced. “You were lucky. Extremely lucky.”
“You checked an hour ago—”
“And I’ll check again in another hour. You could have fried your brain like an egg dropped into boiling oil. I’ve seen it happen—both the egg and the brain,” Quiss said with a wry smile. “Seriously: it’s not pleasant. The bones in the skull can’t take the pressure buildup. Your head explodes.”
Caldan swallowed and turned his ring on his finger nervously. Yes—sounds distinctly unpleasant. He tried to push the thought from his mind, to no avail. “I was desperate.” His voice sounded weak to him, small.
“So you’ve said. Do not do it again.”
“I won’t. I promise.”
Quiss looked sidelong at him. “If you do, you’ll most likely die.”
“I promised not to—what more do you want from me?”
“Other than not leading assassins to the First Deliverer’s cabin?” Another wry smile, but there was a bit more edge to it this time. “But maybe we can take some time to talk about what I saw in the camp the other day.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, now that you’re here, I have some questions about your automatons and how they work.”
And there it was. The reason they’d decided to help Miranda. And possibly the reason they were so willing to accept his story about Kristof. They wanted something from him, and it had to do with his crafting. What bothered him, though, was what he could possibly know that these sorcerers didn’t.
“Now, then,” Quiss continued. “I’d like to go over what exactly you did to shape the destructive sorcery you used on Kristof, then discuss your automatons. We, ah, . . . can’t seem to replicate what you’ve done.” Quiss sounded embarrassed, almost annoyed.
“First, tell me about Miranda. Where is she? What are you doing to her?”
Quiss sighed.
“I’m serious—I’m not answering any of your questions until you answer mine. I played that game enough with the warlocks, and look where it got me.”
“So little trust,” said Quiss.
“Do you blame me?”
“I suppose not.”
For some reason, Caldan felt he could at least trust that sentiment. So when Quiss continued, he tried to keep an open mind.
“We’re trying to help her, as I said we would. She’s had a nasty blow to the head as well. Our physikers are looking after her, the poor girl. How long has she been in such a state?”
“A few weeks,” Caldan said. “There was . . . a fight.”
“Coercive sorcery?”
Caldan nodded. “I didn’t know what it was at the time. Just that it damaged Miranda’s mind.”
“That’s what I feared.”
“I want to be there when you try to heal her. I . . . I want to keep an eye on what goes on.”
Quiss pursed his lips and frowned, looking like he was going to deny Caldan his request. Eventually, he nodded.
“All right,” Quiss said. “But you won’t understand much of what happens. Our sorcery is different from what you’ve learned your entire life.”
Caldan almost snorted. He didn’t believe they were so far removed. Quiss had shown him his well before, and if they had wells, then their sorcery still had to function in the same way his did. Perhaps through a different methodology, but the power of their wells had to be harnessed and shaped somehow.
He nodded, though, as if he agreed with Quiss. “When will you do it?”
“Try to heal her? Very soon. She’s sleeping now, but I thought it best if I tended to you first.”
“I don’t need tending to. Please, can you just heal her?”
Quiss gave him a sympathetic look, then nodded. “Very well. Come with me.”
“THE PATTERNS ARE the key. Each is ever changing. Some faster than others; some barely seem to move at all. They make shadows in the mind, dark and sharp. Each serves a function, the colored threads and the shadows they create. So when the threads shift, another pattern emerges: color and darkness. One the opposite of the other, yet two together, overlaid into a larger sequence.”
Quiss’s voice was soothing, almost hypnotic. An enclosed brazier designed for shipboard use gave off a welcome warmth, chasing the chill of the night away. The cramped cabin at the rear of the vessel had a window Quiss insisted on opening. Caldan felt suspended somehow between the comfort of the heat and the cold air’s bite.
He sat cross-legged atop a blanket on a narrow bunk, his back resting against the hull. Another of Quiss’s people had joined them after the sailors placed Miranda on the bunk opposite his. Unlike Quiss, the woman looked almost . . . normal. She did look denser to Caldan, but she was devoid of the half-starved look that seemed a characteristic of most of the sorcerers who followed Gazija.
The woman bent over Miranda. She was young, and her long red hair was tied in a braid. There were tiny embroidered purple flowers and blue birds scattered over her shirt and skirt. She placed a hand on Miranda’s forehead, shook her head, and tsked in disapproval.
“Can you do it? Can you heal her?” asked Caldan. He didn’t like the way his words came out, but he couldn’t help his emotions. “I can offer ducats, but not much else.”
The woman glanced at him, seemingly offended, then went back to examining Miranda.
Quiss took a blanket from the end of the bunk and covered Miranda’s feet and the lower half of her body. “Oh, I think you’ll find there’s a lot you can offer. Quiet now. We have some serious sorcery to perform.”
“Don’t scare the man, Quiss,” the woman said. Her voice was soft and husky. “I’m sure he’s worried enough.”
“My apologies, Adrienne. But he has to know this isn’t without its risks. Damage caused by coercive sorcery is hard enough to fix when it was used by a skilled practitioner. When it’s bungled like this, there are added complications. And it looks like someone’s tried to heal her with . . . I don’t know; what have they done? Made a mess of things.”
Adrienne crinkled her nose. “Worse than a mess.”
Caldan twisted the ring on his finger and bit his lip. “Joachim. I mean, one of the warlocks. He tried to heal her. I watched, but . . . all I saw was a jumbled mass of threads. There was no order I could see, and if I looked too long, it made me sick. He created a string of his own, a white one, and inserted it into the mess. He teased a few of the tangled threads away from others. To me, it looked like the threads became less chaotic.”
“More rigid, you mean,” said Adrienne. She shook her head. “Simpletons. Toying with what they don’t understand.”
Quiss snorted. “They’re using what they’ve worked out so far. All sorcery starts that way. Experimentation and verification.”
“A false path.”
“One they don’t know is false.”
Adrienne gave a slight shrug of her shoulders. “They’ll learn, eventually. But let’s focus on this lovely young woman here. It distresses me to leave her like this. Come, Luphildern.”
She knelt in front of Miranda and held a hand out to Quiss. He took it in his own and joined her, kneeling on the floor.
Caldan leaned to his right and saw they’d both closed their eyes. He fingered the crafted bell in his pocket and opened his well. A mere thought and he linked to the crafting’s anchor. The colors of the cabin drained away, leaving a scene of washed-out grays. The only color came fr
om Miranda’s mind: a seething, tangled mess of roiling threads. Like it had the last time, Caldan’s stomach rebelled, and he felt nauseated. The sense of wrongness was even greater than before.
Previously, he’d sensed that if he could bear to study the threads for long enough, a pattern would reveal itself. And Quiss’s words confirmed his feeling. There was a complex arrangement in front of him; he just couldn’t discern it yet. Caldan steeled himself and pushed away his queasiness. He hugged his knees to his chest, rocking back and forth. And waited.
As with Joachim’s attempt, there was a movement at the edge of Miranda’s mind. Two threads. Not white, but multicolored, like fish scales shining in the sun. Not altogether unlike the improved shield he was able to generate. Multicolored meant multiple threads from a well, at least three or four. He couldn’t tell, and he didn’t want to brush across Quiss’s and Adrienne’s wells to find out, for fear of disturbing their concentration.
Their threads were far thinner than Joachim’s had been. They were delicate, and Caldan wondered how they’d be able to tease apart the tangled mess if they weren’t strong enough. But Adrienne had said that wasn’t the right way.
So what were these sorcerers going to do?
There was further movement, and two more multicolored threads joined the first. Then two more. Caldan pursed his lips and sucked in a breath as another two appeared for a total of eight. That had to be twelve strings at a minimum for each sorcerer, but could be much more—a feat they managed with what looked like relative ease. On that side of Miranda’s mind, her colored threads twitched slightly, and the gap between them and the intruding threads grew minutely. It was as if they were repelled, like iron was from certain types of lodestones.
The multicolored threads moved together, weaving in and out and around each other. As Caldan watched, they formed patterns, almost like crafting runes, shapes he could nearly identify but not quite. Two threads formed an outline, until there were four configurations. Then the four came together, joining into a vastly more complex pattern, a weave of threads.
Caldan held his breath. For long moments, he sat there, waiting.
Then two more of the coercive sorcery threads appeared on the other side of Miranda’s mind. Again, two became four. Then six. Then eight.
Caldan suppressed a groan. Twenty-four strings, he guessed. At least. Each of them.
The immense power and control shown by these sorcerers astounded him.
“Who are you people?” he muttered in wonderment, but Quiss and Adrienne remained silent and unmoving, engrossed in their work.
For the second time, the sorcerers guided their threads into an intricate pattern, identical to the first. And again, the coercive sorcery damaging Miranda’s mind retreated. Now those threads took up half the space they had before. The roiling tangle in the center became even more chaotic and agitated.
As he watched, their two patterns stretched, elongating, until they formed hemispheres almost totally encasing Miranda’s mind. Two of the edges touched, emitting a spark of energy, which quickly fizzled away to nothing. The joining grew, infinitesimally at first, then with increasing rapidity. Soon both patterns had merged into one multicolored sphere. Pulsing in the center was Bells’s coercive sorcery, compressed even further into a tight ball as it pulled in on itself, away from the sphere.
Runes and patterns of pure energy. In one, Caldan thought he could discern an anchor; the shaping was foreign to him, but it would serve the same purpose. What interested him more than that, though, was that this was sorcery without a material crafting to weather the corrosive forces of the well. The similarities with what he’d divined of the warlocks’ destructive sorcery didn’t escape him.
The similarities to what he had done to Kristof startled him.
In this case, Quiss and Adrienne were creating a crafting inside Miranda’s head, a place where they couldn’t use a physical object. Yet, somehow, they seemed sure it would not destroy her mind, the way Quiss had warned Caldan his own attempts might.
He worried anyway.
The ball began to shrink, and as it did, the tangle of coercive sorcery compressed further.
Miranda moaned. Caldan drew his attention away from what the sorcerers were doing for a moment as Miranda’s body twitched underneath the blanket. Her hands reached up to clutch at her head, twisting her hair.
“Don’t move,” Quiss whispered.
Caldan realized he’d leaned forward, and his hands were on the edge of the bunk. He’d been about to leap to Miranda’s aid. He struggled with himself for what seemed like an eternity before heeding Quiss’s command. He forced himself to lean back against the hull.
Miranda screeched. Her back arched, and the blanket was flung from her body.
“Don’t!” barked Quiss.
“I . . .” Caldan swallowed as he once again moved to help her. He clenched his fists, then slammed one into the wooden hull beside him. The pain didn’t help, and besides, he had to remain still, lest he break the sorcerers’ concentration. One misstep might shred her mind beyond repair.
Ancestors, give me strength . . .
Caldan forced his gaze away from Miranda, who was now lying still but emitting a faint keening sound from her slightly parted lips. He closed his eyes and compelled himself to concentrate his senses on the coercive sorcery being performed.
He regained his perspective and saw that the sphere had shrunk even further. But its effect on the coercive tangle had faded. It was as if the sorcery in Miranda’s mind couldn’t compress any more. The web of multicolored threads surrounding it drew closer . . .
There was a flash.
Caldan frowned. What had just happened?
Then another.
Something had moved from Bells’s sorcery across to Quiss and Adrienne’s.
Knowing what to look for now, he could see the next movement with more clarity. The arrangement of the sphere was changing. They were trying to match the pattern of the damaging sorcery. And when they managed to do so, one of the harmful threads was sucked out, as if drawn to the other pattern. When they matched, the sorceries didn’t repel each other, they attracted.
One by one, Quiss and Adrienne were dismantling the tangled remnants of the coercive sorcery.
Caldan couldn’t be sure how long it took. An hour? Longer? All he knew was that he couldn’t look away. He could see Miranda’s consciousness reorganizing itself as the knot in her mind was removed, little by little. There were breaks, pauses in what the sorcerers were doing. He couldn’t work out why, but after each, Miranda’s mind regained more of a sense of normalcy. Perhaps they were allowing it to reclaim itself, to restructure back to familiarity.
Caldan willed himself not to hope, but he knew it was wasted energy.
Finally, the last of the colored threads joined with a multicolored string and disappeared. The sphere expanded to its original size, then, before Caldan could blink, it dissolved. Threads vanished as Quiss and Adrienne closed their wells.
Miranda’s mind was clear of any influence.
Adrienne groaned and levered herself to her feet. Quiss wiped his face, which was beaded with sweat, and rubbed the back of his neck. He rose, stumbling slightly, and met Caldan’s eyes.
“She’ll sleep for a time,” Quiss said. “We did what we could. She should recover almost fully.”
“Almost fully? What do you mean? I thought you cleared it all out.”
“That we did. But it’s not so simple,” replied Adrienne. “Her mind will need time to sort itself out. It’s spent a long time in a confused state. Some things, well, she may not remember. She will be unsteady on her feet for a while as well. You should stay here with her. If she wakes in the dark, not knowing where she is, she’ll be frightened.”
“Is that it, though? Just some confusion and disorientation.”
“We can hope,” she said.
“But—”
Quiss stepped to the door. “We’ll send some food and water. Perhaps some wine as
well? You look like you need it.”
“Yes. Thank you. And thank you for healing Miranda. We’re . . . in your debt.” The words tumbled out of him, and he meant them. If Miranda was healed, there wasn’t much he wouldn’t do for these people.
Quiss smiled, not smugly, but with an expression tinged with sorrow. “We know.”
Without another word, Quiss and Adrienne left the cabin, closing the door behind them.
Miranda’s struggles had pushed the blanket lower, and it bunched around her knees. Caldan rearranged it to cover her up to her neck and closed the window. The air had turned even chillier, and the brazier was now struggling to hold the cold at bay.
He found himself kneeling beside Miranda. He brushed her hair over her ear and listened to her breathing. For the first time since Anasoma, she looked peaceful.
Caldan’s eyes burned, and he wiped at them. The pressing weight he’d carried since Miranda was injured left him. It felt like he was released. A heaviness so great he’d become used to carrying it just vanished. His whole body shuddered at the sensation.
He shook his head despairingly. He hadn’t realized how Miranda’s condition had clouded his judgment. Looking back at the decisions he’d made since fleeing Anasoma, he knew there were some bad ones. Compromises and resolutions that now seemed flawed or downright stupid.
Things you would only do . . . for someone you loved.
He stood and tucked the blanket in. Miranda stirred, but she didn’t wake.
Positioning himself back on his bunk, he contemplated his next move. Now that he could stop worrying about Miranda, it was time to look after himself. The problem was that he was in the middle of a war. Jukari and vormag on one side, the Indryallans on another, with the emperor’s forces in the middle. And somewhere, seemingly lurking about the periphery, were Gazija and his people.
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