Bond of Magic

by Trip Ellington

  “Nonsense,” he cried in his reedy voice. “The dawn is soon enough, surely. Come, I will show you to the guest quarters. I trust you’ll find the accommodations quite comfortable, yes, quite luxurious. Come along.”

  Ranyegar rose, turned, and walked out through the same door they had entered by. Once again, Mithris had little choice but to follow.

  Chapter 52

  An Uneasy Sleep

  After several minutes walking along the same narrow corridor, Mithris was surprised when they came not to the outside as he expected, but to a cozy bedchamber.

  Blinking, he looked around the room. It was simple quarters. A small but comfortable looking bed sat in the corner. There was a velvet curtain hanging from the ceiling which could be pulled around the bed for additional privacy. A chest of drawers stood opposite the foot of the bed. A dressing table sat nearby, and a washstand with pitcher and bowl.

  Thick rugs covered the stone floor. There were more of those ancient, frayed tapestries covering the walls. A standing mirror was tucked into the corner closest the door, its silvery reflective surface curiously turned toward the wall.

  There were no windows, no other doors.

  Mithris turned back to the door through which he had come. Ranyegar was already disappearing into the corridor.

  “I’ll come for you at dawn!” the ancient wizard called, and then he seemed to vanish as if the dimness of the hallway had swallowed him up.

  Mithris went to the bed and stood beside it. Shaking his head, he turned and sat down on the floor. He was careful not to lean back against the bed-frame.

  You take suspicion to new heights, observed Vapor.

  “I don’t trust this wizard,” Mithris replied in a whisper, not sure how far Ranyegar had gone. “Not at all, Vapor.”

  He seems perfectly hospitable, if a trifle…off.

  “Off?” Mithris smiled grimly. “That’s a way to put it, I suppose. What did you make of that hallway? On the way in, we passed no doors, no branching corridors. Yet we came back the same way we went before, and did not leave the tower. I’m sure this room wasn’t here before.”

  That is a strange thing, Vapor agreed. But we have seen far stranger. Some kind of enchantment. Perhaps there is only the one hallway, with two ends. You start at one end, and the hallway takes you where you want to go.

  “So, the far end of the corridor moves itself to whatever room happens to be your destination?”

  That could be the way of it, yes.

  “Then I could get outside, if I left this room and wanted to get out of the tower?”

  Vapor hesitated. Towers are attuned to their masters, the crystal said after a long consideration. The corridor might only work for Ranyegar.

  “That’s kind of what I thought,” said Mithris. He sighed. “Can you get any sense of Absence? Do you know where the crystal is? Is it even in the tower?”

  We’re…not sure, answered Vapor after another lengthy pause. I wouldn’t read too much into that, though, Mithris. Absence is the strangest of my brothers. I could be resting on a table right next to it, in direct contact, and still not get a proper sense of it. The void is like that.

  “We’ll just have to go searching for it, then.”

  That hallway could take you anywhere. Or nowhere. You might walk up and down it a thousand times and find only this room.

  “Then I won’t get lost, will I?”

  It is getting late, said Vapor. Why not sleep on it? Ranyegar will come in the morning. You’ll get your answers then.

  Mithris turned his head around to peer at the bed suspiciously. “I’m not tired,” he said, stifling a yawn.

  You seem sleepy to me.

  “Whose side are you on, anyway?”

  Why are you so convinced there are sides? Ranyegar hasn’t shown any hostility.

  “I don’t trust him.”

  You don’t trust anyone.

  Mithris shook his head. Then a thought occurred to him. Rising to his feet, he muttered a familiar incantation. The traveling spell was complex, and not so long ago it had taken all his concentration to master it. Now, he spoke it with ease.

  The soap-bubble formed, quickly resolving. Through the portal he had summoned, Mithris could see the jungle that surrounded the black tower. Nodding to himself, he dismissed the portal.

  See? We are hardly trapped here. Do you feel better now?

  “A bit, I suppose,” Mithris admitted. He yawned again, covering his mouth with one hand. He supposed he was rather tired. “All right,” he relented. “I’ll rest.”

  But before he could rest, Mithris decided to set up his wards. He began a series of incantations, each more complex than the last. He set up multiple layers of warding, laying one atop the other. He used every spell he could think of and when he had set nearly a dozen of the magical shields, he racked his brain to think of more.

  For someone who rarely uses them, and used to think wards were useless, you certainly are laying it on rather thick.

  “I’m just being careful,” argued Mithris. He remembered another ward, and quickly cast it. Then he closed his eyes and mentally reached out to check on his wards. They were all sturdy, solid. He nodded to himself, satisfied.

  Then he moved to a corner of the room opposite the bed and lowered himself to the floor.

  There’s a bed right there, protested Vapor, but Mithris ignored the crystal. Lying down on the thick rug, he curled up on himself and went to sleep.

  Mithris woke some time later. The room was in darkness. He had no idea how much time had passed. He summoned a flame as though lighting a candle, but held the fire. A flickering flame ignited in mid-air, burning without a wick.

  Stretching uncomfortably, Mithris sat up. It had been some time since he’d slept without a mattress. Shaking his head, he remembered all the times he’d slept on floors or on the cold, damp ground. It was just as unpleasant as he remembered.

  You’re not going to start complaining about it, are you?

  “Hush,” Mithris told Vapor. He closed his eyes and re-checked his wards. Nothing had disturbed them while he slept. Opening his eyes again, he asked, “How long was I asleep?”

  Less than four hours.

  “Long enough,” the wizard muttered to himself. He got up, stretching painfully to work the kinks out. He glanced at the bed ruefully, but there was no way he would climb between those sheets. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but something about Ranyegar had him on edge. He wouldn’t take anything the ancient mage offered for granted.

  Besides, he wanted to search the tower. Ranyegar was surely sound asleep by now, and daybreak was yet several hours off. Plenty of time to look. If he could find the voidstone before Ranyegar awoke, he could leave this black tower and be on his way.

  Mithris dismissed his various wards, allowing the energy to dissipate. Then he went to the door and listened for a long minute. He heard nothing.

  Satisfied, he quickly checked to make sure he wasn’t leaving anything behind. His willow casting wand was secure in its pocket. Each of the foundation crystals was in place. He had brought nothing else. Nodding to himself, Mithris headed out into the corridor to search the black tower.

  Chapter 53

  The Corridor

  Five minutes later, Mithris came to the end of the corridor and the same bedchamber he had just left behind. There was the bed, the dresser and table, the washstand and the turned-around mirror. Scowling, he turned and headed in the other direction.

  And came to the same room again in five minutes time.

  Why not just wait for Ranyegar?

  “Because he’s trapped me,” Mithris said in a whisper that was nearly a snarl. “I’m a prisoner.”

  It may not be malicious. It’s just the way this tower works. Wait and see.

  “I will not,” insisted Mithris. He knelt in the doorway and gripped the hem of his robe in both hands. Stretching and worrying at it, he worked a thread loose. Holding the robe in one hand, he pulled at the loose thread gent
ly with the other.

  When he had unraveled several dozen paces of the thread – undoing the entire hem of his robe in the process, he stood up and tied the end of his string to the doorknob. Then he turned and set off along the corridor, playing the string out behind him as he went.

  Five minutes later he stood in the same doorway, looking in on the same room. The thread from his robe stretched out behind him. An identical string was tied to the doorknob in front of him, running off along the corridor. The two threads lay side by side on the floor. Mithris tugged his string. The other string jerked.

  “This is intolerable,” he muttered.

  There is some kind of singularity in the exact middle of this corridor, said Vapor in a musing tone. A point where you turn around without having to turn around.

  Mithris screwed up his face at that. “Okay,” he said slowly. “How do you make a hallway that always takes you to the same place? More importantly, how do you change the destination?”

  Vapor did not answer right away. “You don’t know do you?” asked Mithris.

  No, came the rueful answer. I’m afraid we don’t, but Ember and Terra both agree that this is exactly the sort of thing Absence would tinker with.

  Mithris blinked, shaking his head. The information really wasn’t all that helpful. “We already knew the voidstone was here,” he noted.

  This would lend credence to the possibility that Absence is with Ranyegar.

  “Was there ever a chance that an ancient wizard and a foundation crystal were both on this island and somehow not together?”

  Even we have trouble detecting Absence, said Vapor. Even when it wants to be found.

  “And you’re sure it does want to be found, right?” Mithris asked, frowning.

  Quite sure, Mithris.

  “Okay.” The young wizard thought for a moment, gazing down at the string in his hand without really seeing it.

  Then he closed his eyes. Clearing his mind as best he could, he relaxed his awareness. With a sixth, magical sense he probed his surroundings. Mithris could feel the enclosure of volcanic rock, its weight and solidity. He felt the tiniest stirrings of air and the most insignificant fluctuations of energy. The ley line which lay most directly beneath this corridor, more than deep in the earth but also folded halfway into other dimensions, became a luminous cord of icy blue fire in his mind’s eye.

  He smelled the residue of spells lingering on the ether. He could almost taste them, an acrid tang on his tongue. Fresher magic, only recently cast, hovered somewhere far over his head and directly above. It made only a gentle disturbance in the fabric of this foundation. Something passive, Mithris decided, most likely Ranyegar’s wards.

  The ley line felt further away than it should have. It came to him unexpectedly, in a burst. Since entering the black tower he had climbed no stairs, nor descended any. But the ley was more distant than it had been when he was outside.

  With a start, Mithris realized he was on one of the black tower’s middle floors, perhaps halfway up the slender spire.

  He shouldn’t be surprised, he decided. On first entering, following the tower’s ancient resident to the feasting hall, he had noted the corridor seemed far longer than it should. He had been sure they walked further than the diameter of the tower could possibly allow in a straight hallway. And if the two ends of the hall could be in the same place, and whatever place the wizard who controlled it wished, how was vertical height any different from horizontal length?

  The ley line, suggested Vapor.

  “You’re right,” Mithris said at once, his eyes snapping open in realization. He snapped his fingers, grinning. “That’s it!”

  After a moment’s consideration, he nodded to himself confidently. It should work.

  He had spent months studying Master Deinre’s notes and conjectures, repeating his former teacher’s experiments. Deinre had found a way to manipulate raw magic, the unshaped power which bled through ley lines into the fifth foundation. The centuries-old wizard had only just begun probing the mysteries of shaping that energy when Eaganar murdered him.

  His apprentice had come much further. Mithris knew he had some innate affinity to the raw power. It must be why Deinre had chosen him. Somehow the old wizard had seen it in him, even as a babe. Deinre had known.

  Mithris reached out a psychic muscle. That was how he thought of it, anyway, though in truth the words to describe it did not exist. This was how he took hold of the energy; this was what Deinre had been unable to do, having instead to rely on spells to do the work of a sculptor’s hands.

  It was not a spell Mithris cast. It was not like the magical fishing line he’d used to retrieve Ember, or the spell which allowed him to push off the earth and fly through the air. This thing he did, it was a natural part of him. It required no magic. It was as though he had a larger, invisible body with many hands. Those hands were sculptor’s hands.

  They sank through stone and soil and slipped into the folded crevice in reality, the river of magic that was the ley line. Ethereal fingers curled and grasped. Holding tightly to the ley in several places, Mithris exerted himself.

  Before, he had been able to turn spells cast against him. By twisting and retying the threads of power, he altered those spells. The first time he had done so, it was an accident which could have killed him. There was far more power coursing through the ley than in even the most powerful spells, but Mithris held its pulsing, throbbing, burning, freezing essence confidently and began to pull.

  As he did, he imagined himself turning as well. The river of magic was like a straight pole laid across a table, the circumference of the tower being the table top. Mithris grasped that pole at both ends and turned it.

  It moved.

  The ley line was the narrow ridge across the round surface of a dial, and Mithris was turning the dial. He could not actually shift the ley line itself. That was embedded through the fabric of all realities. It was absolute. No, what Mithris did was merely move the foundation itself.

  He was exultant. He had never imagined something so…incredible. He was literally turning the world!

  Chapter 54

  The Prisoner

  When he had shifted the alignment of the hallway to the ley line perhaps five or six degrees around the circle, Mithris felt something new.

  It was somewhat akin to feeling a person’s pulse with his thumb against their skin. A single heartbeat, like a thrum against his flesh. It was like the feeling of a bolt sliding into a lock carried through the door to his hand.

  Mithris ceased turning the hall and opened his eyes. The string in his hand still fell to the floor and trailed off behind him. But there was no longer a second string coming out of the hallway. The door before him was not the same one. It was wider and taller and had a grilled window set at eye level.

  That was amazing, said Vapor. We’ve descended forty levels. Terra says we are below ground level.

  “It’s a dungeon,” said Mithris, examining the sturdy door. It was oak reinforced with iron straps. The bars in the grilled window were thick and criss-crossed too tightly for him to get more than two fingers through. He recognized a dungeon when he saw it. He’d spent some time in one.

  It certainly has the look of one.

  “And the smell,” added Mithris, wrinkling his nose at the fetid odors wafting from the small aperture in the door. “There’s someone in the cells. Has to be. An unoccupied dungeon wouldn’t smell so ripe.”

  Human or beast, said Vapor, the stench is not from Absence. The voidstone isn’t likely to be down here. But now you know the trick, you should be able to search out all the other possible rooms.

  “Plenty of time,” mused Mithris, scratching his chin. “May as well take a look.”

  It seems Depths and Tempus agree.

  “Just those two?”

  Correct.

  “So, it’s three to two?”

  Correct.

  “Why do Depths and Tempus agree with me?” Mithris asked. He had every inten
tion of opening the door and at least checking out the dungeon, whatever the crystals thought. Still, their advice had usually been helpful in the past.

  Depths says there has been much change here recently. It can’t be much more specific than that. Depths has an affinity for mutability, you know, but it’s not very good at interpreting changes. Vapor paused for a long moment. Ah. That makes sense.

  “What?”

  Tempus says the occupant of the dungeon is extremely old.

  “So?”

  Tempus also says that the wizard Ranyegar is not very old at all.

  Mithris shook his head. “I don’t understand. Ranyegar must be two thousand years old, probably older. Unless…unless he just looks old. Some kind of spell that makes him appear older?”

  I’ve changed my mind, said Vapor without explaining further. Let’s open the door.

  Now Mithris hesitated. A moment ago, he’d been ready to charge in, but now he was not so sure. Something was going on here, something he couldn’t quite get his mind around. He was afraid that, in coming to this island, he’d walked into the middle of something he shouldn’t have.

  “This tower doesn’t actually belong to Ranyegar, does it?” he asked slowly, putting it all together.

  You’ll likely find the best answer to that inside the dungeon.

  Sighing, Mithris pushed on the heavy, iron-banded door. It was not locked, and swung ponderously open on creaking hinges. The chamber within was dark and musty. Unlit torches hung in iron brackets on the walls, leaning diagonally out. Mithris cast a spell, lighting two of the nearest torches.

  A sizable stone chamber was thus illuminated. A rickety wooden table sat close inside the door, a matching chair pulled out behind it. A set of keys lay on top of the table, nothing else. Beyond this table, the far wall was lined with doors of solid iron.

  Third from the right, said Vapor.

  Mithris went into the dungeon, scooping up the keys as he walked past the rickety table. He went to the door Vapor had indicated and started trying the keys one after another. The fourth one he tried turned the lock, and he pulled the heavy door open.