Magician In Captivity: Power of Poses - Book Three

by Guy Antibes

  After consulting with a map, Kulara said, “Just as I thought, we’ve gone further than I imagined. We can spend an hour or so resting before taking off again. Will that suit you?”

  Valanna nodded. “I don’t need a nap or anything,” she said. “Are you going to show me how this isn’t a desert?”

  Kulara smiled. “All you need is a little magic. I will teach you a spell you probably didn’t know.” She stood and lifted an arm in the air and leaned over sideways, with her other arm pointing to the ground. “Risma.”

  After a minute, the ground began to darken and a tiny fountain of water reached up towards Kulara’s hand a few feet above the ground.

  “Do you want to try it?” Kulara said as she came out of the pose. “Water runs beneath the surface all through the Arid Lands, generally too deep to dig a well, but the pose brings it to the surface quickly.” She breathed a bit heavily. “It does take some strength. Tribeswomen jealously guard the pose, so don’t use it among my people. There were three such women in my tribe, so I wasn’t wanted. As a result of my exile, I wandered as a magician for hire. There is little more for unattached women with magical talent to do.”

  “Is this why you chose to be with Asem, while his first wife lived in the desert with his children?”

  Not responding to Valanna’s question became the answer. Kulara turned her head and kicked dirt over the wet ground. “It is better to let it sink back into the earth,” she said.

  “I’ll try it.”

  Kulara dug another hole in the ground. “We have vessels with a hole in the middle for the water fountain. One doesn’t go thirsty in a desert, right?”

  Valanna looked around at the landscape. It looked dry and sterile to her eyes, but, as Kulara demonstrated, the reality took a keener eye. She assumed the same pose that Kulara did. “It’s quite a stretch,” she said. “Risma.”

  She maintained the pose for a few moments when a huge fountain erupted from the ground, drenching both of the women. Valanna broke the pose and staggered back, trying to shake water from her clothes.

  Kulara laughed. “There is an art to the pose. You have so much power that you’ll have to practice adjusting your concentration and controlling the strength of the power word. Fill up my little pool again and then you can top up your waterskin. You ruined yours with all the power you used.” She laughed again and shook her head. “Control is a problem that I think you share with Trak.”

  “Does this only work in the Arid Lands?”

  “No, but then it isn’t needed in a land where the sky sheds tears.” Kulara smiled. “That is a Ferezan expression. The spell draws water from the ground. However, if a tribe spends too much time in one place, the local water can be tapped out. If that is the case, it may take minutes for any water to be drawn into the spell. I’ve never used it anywhere outside of the Arid Lands, but it should work.”

  Valanna hadn’t expected to learn new spells on her trip, but this one would definitely be added to Trak’s portfolio. She hoped he wouldn’t mind. As with most other magic, Valanna didn’t experience the same energy drain as Kulara, she thought, as she used less intent when she said the power word and let the dirt basin filled quickly with water before she stood up.

  ~

  Towards the end of the day, Valanna followed Kulara’s instructions and guided the flyer half a league or so to their next oasis in an area dotted with small rolling hills.

  “Throw some dust on me,” Kulara said, once she donned her cloak, “and I’ll do the same for you.”

  Valanna stomped on some dirt to make it finer and cupped her hand in the dirt and tossed it up in their air towards the Kulara. The tribeswoman stepped into the cloud with her eyes closed and her arms out. She shook her hair out. “Your turn.”

  Valanna closed her eyes and walked into the dust cloud that Kulara made. “I guess we can walk into the oasis now.”

  “Right. Half a league ought to make us sweat a bit, just like real trekkers. Let’s go.”

  Carrying some of their bags, Valanna followed Kulara up the first hill. The up and down of the terrain made the walk a bit more strenuous than Valanna expected, but soon they walked through the dirt street of the oasis.

  “If you can find water anywhere, then why do you need an oasis?” Valanna asked.

  “That is an easy question. What if you’re not a magician? An oasis always has water, or it will soon be just another empty spot.”

  Valanna schooled her mind to accept simple answers to her relatively stupid questions. Instead of buildings with thick walls, she observed something more like a tent city. From the looks of the tents, some of them had been in the same place for years. Kulara took her to a large tent that had a huge expanse of fabric stretched over a number of tents. An Arid Land inn?

  Stools, benches, and tables looked no different from any other inn she had been in, although the curving walls of cloth broken up by hanging animal skins or dirty silk seemed rather exotic to her tastes, as did the patchwork of carpet covering the floor. She imagined that they were laid right on the dirt. The difference between the first inn and this surprised her, but then Valanna had become used to surprises on her first trip to the Arid Lands. In some respects, it was exactly like she had been taught, and in others, like the tent oasis and the ease of obtaining water, her trip had been one continuous string of revelations.

  Following Kulara’s lead, she threw back her hood. Both of them would look a mess to anyone who served them, but then she saw others in as filthy a condition as their own.

  A woman stood at the end of a long counter. The surface looked like someone had made it of varnished animal skins. The innkeeper pointed at Valanna. “I’d like her eyes,” she said.

  Kulara turned around. “Your eyes look even more blue than normal.” Valanna noticed that she didn’t use her name.

  Valanna just shrugged. She hadn’t tried to master the accent common in the Arid Lands and thought if she looked bored and didn’t say a word, she might just get away with her silence. Kulara crooked her finger and led her out of the tent and into a courtyard of sorts covered by the fabric roof. Valanna looked up and saw that the roof consisted of many panels of the same color fabric, held in position by a myriad of poles connected with rope to create a more stable structure than what appeared from the outside.

  “Fourth tent on the left,” Kulara said.

  Valanna saw bedding and pillows stacked to one side of the tent they entered. Carpets littered the inside of the tent, just as they did the covered courtyard. She bent over and lifted the corner of a carpet to see waxed canvas beneath the carpet.

  “How long has this oasis been here?”

  Kulara shrugged. “As long as I can remember. I stayed in this very tent a few times in my earlier years, wandering around the Arid Lands as a magician for hire.”

  “Until you met Asem?”

  Kulara nodded. “Love of my life. Luck guided me to him in an oasis far from here. It was losing its water, and the villagers hired me to act as their water maiden. That’s the term for unattached women who draw water for a living. He had stopped on his way to the eastern edge of Warish, to trade with Pestlan farmers.”

  “Was it love at first sight?”

  Kulara laughed. “Absolutely not. Asem was rougher around the edges in those days. It actually wasn’t that long before, when his first wife had basically thrown him out of their tent. She’s not a nice woman, but we will visit her, since I have messages to her children from their father.”

  “Won’t that be awkward?”

  Valanna’s comment earned another shrug from Kulara. “Multiple wives is entirely acceptable in the Arid Lands. Although it’s not a desert, life can sometimes be cruel, and the tribes must continue.” She sighed.

  Valanna knew that both Asem and Kulara were disappointed they had no children between them. Valanna considered it a tragedy, since she thought both of them were very strong people and would make noble children, in every sense of the word.

  “Whe
n we meet her, continue your silent act. Don’t give the woman any cause to think you may be number three.”

  “You can rely on me.”

  Kulara smiled, and that made Valanna relax a little from the tension in the tent. “I know you can. Take whatever you don’t want stolen with you. I’m hungry, and it’s time to eat.”

  Valanna looked inside her bag and decided that she didn’t want anything stolen. She ran her fingers through her hair, and when a string of thick curly black hair came into view, it still startled her. “Let’s go.”

  Both women trudged into the common room under the roof of the main tent and found a table for two. They were just about finished with their meal when a four-person band began to play for the patrons. Valanna had heard desert music before, but it never sounded like this. She found the instruments were constructed a bit differently in the Arid Lands. The sounds were flatter, somehow, and the woman playing drums pounded out a rhythm that felt more primitive than what she heard in Balbaam. The drummer had a rack filled with instruments - chimes, tambourines, drums of different sizes, and gourds, probably filled with sand or other sound making material.

  She closed her eyes while she let Kulara order, letting the exotic music wash over her aching muscles. After listening to a few of the unfamiliar songs, Valanna felt a tap on her feet. When she her opened her eyes to look at Kulara, her body stiffened since she focused on the black eyes of a Vashtan.

  ~~~

  Chapter Nineteen

  ~

  AFTER HOURS OF MOVING BACK AND FORTH IN THE CASTLE, Trak decided to stop his activities as the waking population of the castle began to grow. He clutched his thin black cloak around him and teleported home.

  Tembul looked up from Trak’s desk. “What is this with all the notes?”

  Trak looked up at his companion. “I did something foolish.”

  “You didn’t—“

  Trak nodded and smiled. “I teleported into the castle about ten times last night to check on the map. Don’t worry, no one caught me, but I found that our friend Jojo didn’t give us an accurate map.”

  “That’s evident,” Tembul said pointing at all of the corrections. “You caught all these errors?”

  Trak pointed to an area of the map. “The plans were useless. If we had sneaked into the castle and relied on them as drawn, we wouldn’t have been able to find the princess, much less our way around. I only succeeded because I could teleport in and out.”

  “What about the rooms?”

  “I appeared in a lady’s room. Once I found the bearings, I teleported out.” Trak pointed to a section of the map. “I didn’t even look for the princess. A few more nights, and then I’ll be confident we will have a good enough idea of where things are to begin to explore.” Trak put the plans away. “Not a word to Mori.”

  “Or to Sirul,” Tembul said. “Not until we are ready to go.”

  Trak knit his brows together. “You don’t trust him?”

  Tembul pursed his lips and said, “Just the two of us for now. Since we are beset by enemies all around us, that’s one less person to make a slip. It is a matter of finding who is less of an enemy than another.”

  ~

  The two men pushed Sirul to spend his time getting the two flyers prepared. Trak kept up his late-night forays into the castle until he had the main part of the palace re-mapped. He hadn’t explored the very top where the Emperor lived or the cells at the bottom. While Trak slept, Tembul memorized the revisions.

  Trak decided to walk through the dungeon area and appeared at the bottom of a stairway leading down to the lower levels that he had verified. The lamps that lit the lower part of the castle had given way to greasy torches that created pools of flickering light. The dungeons reminded Trak of the mines he had worked outside of Peskoa where he first met Jojo, but these walls consisted of stone blocks. He wondered if any of the dungeons really went below ground, and suspected they were built within the windowless stone walls that made up the artificial hill leading up to the castle proper.

  He had to stop from time to time as he paced out the corridors and the doors. Where he had to, he spelled dim lights to assist him with note taking. When he confronted the occasional guard station, he teleported to the other side of it.

  Trak wished he could magically remove the smell of the dark passages. Mold and human smells mixed together made a constant stench. At this time of night, where daylight never reached, Trak realized that it didn’t matter if he walked the corridors at night or during the day. Teleportation was his only advantage. He didn’t dare take a weapon with him, since it might make enough of a sound should he bump it against a wall or an unexpected piece of furniture.

  The monotony of the dungeons wore at him, and he finally left. Once he reached his room, Trak began to make notations on the plans.

  Tembul slid his door open. “You stink. I smelled it from my bedroom across the hall. You’ll have to wash your clothes before you go down, maybe take a bath, too.”

  “A hazard that I never thought of,” Trak said. “Look over my work while I spend a little time in the bathroom.”

  Trak came back into the bedroom, toweling his hair dry. Tembul leaned over the map, obviously still intent on memorizing it.

  “Have you got it down?”

  Tembul looked up. “I imagine the plans are already fixed in that oversized brain of yours.”

  Trak nodded. “Tomorrow night, I’m going to poke around the two upper stories. They aren’t as big as the rest of the castle, so one night should suffice.”

  “That is a very large risk, Trak,” Tembul said. “You will almost certainly get caught.”

  “And if I do? I can just teleport back here.”

  Tembul clucked his tongue. “With two brawny guards hanging onto your arms? That is, if they even wait to capture you. You might return with a spear sticking through you.”

  “Then what do you suggest?”

  Tembul tapped his finger on the plan of the upper story. “Maybe it’s time to see what kind of genuine information we can get from Jojo or Nashi.”

  “Without lying?”

  “Confront them about the plans, just don’t let them know you’ve been through most of the castle.” Tembul folded his arms, and that usually meant straight talk from the Toryan. “All you need to tell them was that their plans were off in a spot or two. Call it a test or whatever, but we can’t sit here forever. Sirul has just about got the flyers ready.”

  Trak lay down on his bed. “I think you’re right, so I think it’s in our best interest to talk to Mori in the morning about a meeting with Jojo. Go get some sleep. That’s what I’m going to do.”

  Despite his advice to Tembul, Trak could only toss and turn, running over what kinds of implications the false plans had to his mission. He came to the conclusion that it was no longer safe to rely on Jojo for any more help than giving them a place to stay.

  After asking Mori for a meeting with Jojo, Trak went off by himself, shrouded in the ubiquitous thin dark cloak. Beniko Castle beckoned to him, so he found himself pacing around the outside, looking for entrances other than the main gate that led to the switchbacks up to the elevated main buildings. Where were other exits? None were noted on the plans. In a fire, all of the occupants couldn’t escape down a single, narrow, twisting road.

  Jojo would know, if he truly were a highly placed bureaucrat. After a single circuit without detecting an exit door, he stood across the square in front of the main gate, looking up at the towering castle. He had traveled in that castle. Where could the princess be?

  He walked towards the street that would take him to Mori’s house and stopped. Paka and Lenis had just emerged from a shop and strolled away from the castle. Perhaps Lenis knew more than Jojo. After pausing to see if guards accompanied them, Trak followed.

  The pair led him through areas of Beniko where Trak hadn’t been until they walked into a tavern. In this part of town, it appeared that people could wear the cloaks inside. Perhaps that was why
they traveled so far for a drink that they could likely get in the castle? He waited a bit more, and then entered, keeping the hood over his face, he sat at a small table in a corner away from the window. The lamps had not yet been lit, giving the tavern a deserted feel, although perhaps a quarter of the tables were taken by men and women talking in low voices.

  Lenis had eschewed wearing a hooded cloak and conversed with two other men. Their hoods had been thrown back to reveal Jojo and Nashi in earnest conversation with the Toryan, using Paka as a translator. Trak would have even more to discuss with Jojo whenever Mori set up a time to talk. Trak couldn’t hear much of what they discussed, but Paka spoke more loudly in Toryan than the two Benninese did in their native tongue.

  They spoke of tricking the Toryans; that meant Trak, Tembul, and Sirul, but Trak couldn’t make out how or why they would in the first place. If Jojo wanted them taken, he could just leak their location to Benninese guards. That meant Jojo must need Trak’s group to do something. Trak sipped at the rice wine that he had ordered and continued to listen, but the conference ended much too quickly, when Lenis and Paka abruptly left the tavern.

  Trak wanted to follow, but a server plunked down two bowls and a small pitcher of warmed wine in front of the pair, making Trak wait to leave so he wouldn’t be noticed. The two men muttered silently, like the rest of the customers, keeping Trak from learning anything.

  He rose and left the tavern, standing on a corner not far away, wondering which way to go. He decided to check out the shop where Lenis had emerged. Perhaps that was one of the castle’s hidden exit points. Trak kept to the side of the street and continually pulled on the hood of his cloak. He passed plenty of men and women dressed the same while he approached the square in front of the Beniko Castle.

  He made his way across the street and walked past the shop from which Lenis emerged. A weapons shop. Trak felt the weight of the purse that Mori had given him when they first arrived. Trak yearned for a sword at his side and decided he would have legitimate business to conduct as he slid the shop door aside and walked in.