Kelada looked away from him. “Melodia is beautiful.”
“Yes.”
“I wish—”
“What?”
“Nothing. Good night.” And she was gone. Jeremy went into his own room thoughtfully. His travel clothes lay draped across a chair, where he had taken them off. He straightened them, and in doing so felt the heaviness of the tunic. He had forgotten about the tinderbox and Smokharin. He took it out of the pocket, took, too, the broken tooth of Nul, and put both on a round table beside the bed, making a mental note to give the tinderbox to Melodia in the morning. An oil lamp, this one scented like balsam, burned on the table, its flame clear and friendly. Wondering if he were sending some other fire elemental into a doze, Jeremy turned the wick low, undressed, and climbed between the sheets. They were so soft against his bare skin that it almost hurt, and it occurred to him that this was the first time in weeks—more than six weeks, if time here agreed with time back on Earth, and if Tremien were right—that he had slept between sheets.
Six weeks. Christmas over and gone, and New Year's, if six weeks had really gone by. Brown-needled trees piled at curbside, forlorn aluminum icicles stirring in the exhaust of passing cars. Paper-cone hats in the gutters, stepped on and flattened, their colors bleached out, no merriment left in them now, no wishes for a happy new year. The new year, if it ran true to form, was already tarnished, all the new worn off, rubbed off under the friction of the same old problems. By now even Cassie would be writing the correct date on her checks, instead of backdating them a year as she did every January. January was gone, dead and gone.
Atlanta was into February by now, a dull month and usually a gray one. February tended to bring flurries of snow by night, sometimes gracing the city with as much as three inches of transforming magic, but more often dusting it with a powdery white coating like confectioner's sugar doled out by a stingy baker. February brought other delights, too. If it brought ice, it usually arrived in the early afternoons, ice that would turn the new overpasses and off-ramps of I-85 and I-75 to glass, that would tie up traffic bound homeward to Sandy Springs or Marietta or Peachtree City after a long day's work. Just one of February's little surprises, a thoughtful gift to fray tempers, ruin carefully tended trees, and cut electric power just in time for the cold of evening.
Or if the temperature happened to be above freezing, the precipitation would be rain, rain that lasted so long you began to think it had been raining forever, would go on raining forever, would rain until you drowned, then would wash your body away down the gargling storm drains. Rain would dance on your grave. Lawns became quagmires in that rain, side streets became tributaries, the main drags dirty brown rivers. Umbrellas were no good, for it was a cold, slanting rain that came at you horizontally, or lay in wait in flat brown puddles until a car helped it jump on you like a fond and foolish Saint Bernard to muddy your coat and ruin your day.
Flu, that was what February brought to Atlanta, aching joints and aching head, the world's worst hangover without benefit of the good time you deserved to feel this bad now. Runny noses, inflamed eyes, chests that felt as if vises were tightening inside them. Hoarse voices croaking frog calls over the phone, a chorus of coughs in the Fox auditorium, empty desks at work. Stomach cramps and diarrhea, pounding heads and soaring fevers. Illnesses to kill you and weather to make you happy to go, that was what February brought.
February in Atlanta was a bitch.
God, how he missed it.
Jeremy woke the next morning puzzled to find it so dark, remembered it was February, and figured the morning was overcast and—no digits shone red on the bedside table—the power was out. Yawning, he threw the covers aside, got up to visit the bathroom, and ran into the wall. Only then did he remember where he was. He felt along the wall to the bathroom door, then came back by the same Braille system. In the dark of the windowless room, he fumbled with the tinderbox until he had a small flame going, and with this he managed to light the lamp.
He turned the wick up and started to get dressed. The light died down, and a tiny, hissing voice said, “Where are we?”
Smokharin was a mere mite, a fingernail-sized creature balancing on the blackened edge of the lamp. “Tremien's castle at Whitehorn,” Jeremy said. “Melodia's here.”
“Take me to her.”
“I'll give your box back to her if you'll give me enough light to get dressed.”
“Hurry, then.”
The light flared up again. In its warm glow Jeremy saw his outfits, both of them, hanging neatly on pegs in the wall opposite. Somehow during the night they had been cleaned, sorcerously, he suspected, and they were both once again fresh and ready for wear. He donned the first one, the blue tunic and baggy trousers, opened the door for light, and held out the tinderbox. “Here you go.” Smokharin arced into the box, and the lamp went out. Jeremy closed the tinderbox, slipped it back into his pocket, and went in search of Melodia.
She was at breakfast, her hair done up and a tiara winking there like a constellation of stars on the darkest night of the year. She, like Kelada, had new clothes: she wore a subdued blue dress that shimmered with tiny jewels. Kelada, a later riser, was not yet up. Melodia accepted the tinderbox with amused surprise. “Smokharin has never before expressed any concern for me,” she said. “But I suppose we have grown close over the years, for a human and an elemental.” She snuffed one candle, struck a light from the tinderbox, and in a moment an even more minuscule version of the elemental stood on the tip of the candlewick, balancing precariously and essaying a clumsy bow.
“You are well?” it asked in a voice so small it was almost not there.
“Very well, thank you. You are kind to come at my need.”
“I will be ready when you call on me, Lady.”
“Thanks, gallant elemental.”
Another bow and Smokharin was gone, replaced by a clear yellow flame. Jeremy shook his head. “I'll never get used to a place where fire talks back to you. What has Tremien prepared for breakfast?”
“It's good,” she said. “Berries and melons from Southerland, brought here by magic. Brown cakes and butter, cheese and honey, and sweet milk.”
“No tea?” he smiled.
She returned his smile. “No, alas. I miss my morning tea.” She looked at him, the smile lingering, and she reached out to stroke his hair. “Your beard is growing in,” she said. “You look more like—like him than ever.”
He reached up to clasp her soft hand against his cheek. “You don't love him anymore, remember?”
“I remember,” she whispered. Her eyes gleamed with tears, and she turned away from him. “Sebastian was not an evil man,” she said.
Jeremy still held her hand. “He wasn't a good one. Look what he's done to me—to all of us.”
Her face averted, Melodia nodded. “Yes, I know. He was ambitious, even driven. But he felt so weak—”
“Weak? Tremien and all the others seem to regard him as a great wizard, a powerful magician. How was he weak?”
“Oh, I don't know.” Melodia sniffled, picked up a spoon, toyed with a few bright orange berries that remained in her bowl. “He was not born with sorcery. He had to earn it through hard study. He fought for every bit of knowledge, Sebastian did. I think—I do not know—I believe that Sebastian struck a bargain with the Great Dark One, that he became a servant of the evil, not evil himself. Is that possible?”
Jeremy let go of her hand. “I don't know. I do know that he's taken my place at home, and that I have to return there. Good, evil—I guess I don't really think in those terms very much. It's hard for me to decide.”
“Sebastian talked like that, too. What difference did it make if Tremien wielded great power or the Great Dark One? Power was power, an end in itself, neither good nor bad. I don't know if he believed it.”
Jeremy reached for a plate, helped himself to bread, butter, and honey. “Who is the Great Dark One?”
“A force,” she said.
“Like a demon or
a devil?”
“No, a real person. Or someone who used to be real.” As Jeremy munched his breakfast, Melodia tried to explain. Thaumia, it seemed, was a disk floating in space, its sun and moon circling around it. It was only one of billions of other worlds, all with their own suns, for these could be seen in the night sky as stars; but Thaumia, so far as humans knew, was the only inhabited world in all the universe.
Thaumia held four continents, two in the north and two in the south. The Great Dark One had risen more than fifteen hundred years ago in the more easterly of the southern continents, a land called Relas. From the beginning he had been obsessed with testing the limits of magic, and from the first flowering of his sorcery there sprang a terrible war. The Dark One lost that struggle, and most thought him dead as well as defeated, but this was not so, for he had retreated, wounded but living, to the icy fastness of the most southerly mountain range in Thaumia.
There he healed, brooded, and increased his knowledge. A generation after the first war—a generation of ordinary men and women, for through some hidden sorcery the Dark One lived an incredibly long life, even among wizards, who as often as not saw their two hundred-and-fiftieth birthday—the Dark One began to move once more, this time by stealth. On the continent of Relas were fifty-odd kingdoms, really colonies that had grown to independence over the years. First one, then another, fell to the Dark One, not by war this time but through subtle cunning, intrigue, and simple fear.
Before the magicians of the north became fully aware of his existence, the Dark One had made himself a habitation and a fortress in the continent of Relas, and for many centuries now it had folded into itself, a land unknown to others, wrapped in its own darkness and its own mysteries.
There the Great Dark One reigned still. And from there he reached northward to trouble the peoples of this continent, Cronbrach-en-hof, for in the council of magi who oversaw its magics the Dark One saw his greatest enemies. Their massed power, on their own grounds, would be too much for him; so the Dark One worked by proxy, corrupting and beguiling such wizards and sorceresses as he could, and probing always for a weakness. Even so, twice, once in the dim past when even Tremien was young in age and power, and then again about forty years ago, the Great Dark One had indeed sent armies into the north, only to meet defeat. Nowadays he worked in secret. The Five Countries of Cronbrach had always to guard against rebellion, their leaders to beware of assassination; and in the wild and unsettled outlands of the continent, places like the Northwest Shore or the Meres, the Great Dark One found willing aid.
What did he want, the greatest wizard of the south? “I do not know,” Melodia confessed. “Domination certainly, sway over all the world and all its magics. But that, I think, is in itself only a means to a greater end. What that might be I cannot guess.” She rose from the table, her gown rustling. “This only I know: the Great Dark One is evil. He brings with him despair and death and night without hope of end.”
“They say he eats souls.” Kelada, wearing yet another new dress, this one pink, had come in. “A thing which I cannot do. I'm hungry.”
“Help yourself to breakfast,” Jeremy said, rising. He pulled out a chair for her. She took one on the other side of the table, and he sat down again. “And how did you sleep?”
“Badly.” Kelada broke a chunk of bread, buttered it, and took a voracious bite. “Can't wait to get home again,” she mumbled around the food. “Place is too quiet.”
“I find it peaceful,” Melodia said.
“You would. No meat?”
“Excuse me.” Melodia left with a swish of her skirts.
“No meat,” Jeremy said, “but three kinds of cheese. What's wrong?”
“Melodia,” Kelada said. “I upset her.”
“How?”
The little thief scowled. “My mouth. I should have remembered about her. Didn't you notice at her home? Of all the food she had, she kept no meat at all. And here she eats none.”
“I don't see—oh.”
Kelada nodded. “She is a healer of animals. I'm so stupid. I'm not fit for such company.” But her appetite was not affected, for she took four great pieces of cheese and poured herself a pint of milk. “Better for all if I am banished. Or imprisoned.”
Jeremy toyed with his mug. “I will speak for you, Kelada. If you think it will help.”
She shook her head. “Who's to say?”
Nul came not long after breakfast to tell them the magi had assembled from all corners of the land and were in consultation already. They could expect to be called at any time. Jeremy sat bored and alone in his room for possibly an hour. Then, not knowing what to do with himself and not willing just to sit, he went to knock on Melodia's door. She did not answer, but next door Kelada came out. “She's probably walking in the courtyard. She does that.”
“Are you afraid?”
Kelada crossed her arms and leaned against the door frame. “Yes.”
“Good,” Jeremy said. “I hate to be alone.”
A crooked smile came to Kelada's face. “Then come in.”
He sat on the foot of her bed, and she took the chair. Around it was a litter of rags, vials of oil, and an unstrung bow somewhat taller than she was. “Like it?” she asked, taking up the bow. “I had to have something to work on.”
Jeremy took it. The wood was light and blond, lithe and springy, smooth under his hands. “You carved this?”
Kelada nodded shyly. “Most great archers have them done by magic, or at least make them and then have them blessed. I'm an amateur. I like to do my own work. Besides, it occupies my time.”
“I had archery lessons in college.”
“Oh? What is college?”
Jeremy handed the bow back to her. “It's a place to make friends, learn a little, and drink a great deal of beer.”
“Oh, I see. Like a tavern.”
Jeremy laughed. “Very much like a tavern, at times.”
“Then you are a good archer?”
“Not even passable. I took the course for only one quarter, twice a week, and got a ‘C’ out of it.” As he watched Kelada pick up a cloth and begin to work oil into the wood, he added, “I'm not much good at any activity, I guess. I run. Used to run, that is. I was up to seven miles a day, every other day. Had some karate in college, too, some weight training, fencing, swimming. I was pretty good at swimming, though.”
Kelada's face held a puzzled smile. “You swam at a tavern?”
“Well, a college isn't exactly like a tavern. It's a school, really, for adults. Or people who think they're adults. Wise men and women gather there, and the younger people sit in rooms, and the wise ones teach them things.”
“Then a college is like apprenticeship.”
“Yes, something like that.”
“How many years did you have college?”
“Five in all. Four for my B.A., then another four quarters for my M.B.A.”
“Then you must be an adept.”
“A what?”
Kelada left off working on the bow. “An adept. That is one of the seven degrees of magical ability: talent, apprentice, journeyman, adept, magician, wizard, mage. It takes four years of apprenticeship for a talent to become a journeyman, then at least another year for the journeyman to become an adept.”
Jeremy laughed. “I suppose I am an adept, in a way.”
“What do you do, back in your world?”
“I use words to make money for other people,” Jeremy grinned. “There's magic for you, huh?”
“You are not so different from us, after all,” Kelada said. The bow lay across her lap, incongruous against the delicate pink of her dress. She ran her thumb over it. “I like the beard,” she whispered to the bow.
Jeremy felt his jaw. He had a beard, sure enough, a short and stubbly one. “Thank you,” he said. “I like the way you look, too, Kelada.”
“This isn't me.”
Jeremy leaned forward. “Kelada—”
“Where the hell did I put the emery clot
h?”
He took the bow from her hands and kissed her. “No,” she said against his throat. “I'm ugly.”
He held her as she cried. They sat together on the foot of the bed like that for some little time. Nul opened the door without knocking, stared at them for a moment, and said that the council awaited them. His orange eyes went a little pale, and Jeremy wondered if that were the pika's way of blushing.
The Great Hall had been made ready for the council meeting. No dancers, musicians, or soldiers lounged there now: instead, a great, heavy round table had been put in the center of the room, a roaring blaze had been made up in the fireplace, and the enormous curtains had been drawn to let daylight stream in through a window facing north, facing a vista of snowcapped mountaintops and far purple distances. The day outside looked cold and almost clear, with fogs shrouding the farther mountains and a few streaks of gray cloud low on the horizon. One further change had been made in the room: between the table and the fireplace a great oval mirror stood on its stand.
In the light from window and fire, the magi of Cronbrach-en-hof had gathered: Tremien in a high-backed chair, his back to the windows; to his right a diminutive man, completely bald, long of nose and chin, puffing intently on a long-stemmed black pipe; to the right again, a tall woman, fair of skin and hair, wearing a hooded cloak, hood thrown back over what seemed to be a coat of mail; then a man about Jeremy's height but older, with an incredible mane of untidy gray hair, an impenetrable gray beard, and eyebrows like ragged birds'-nests; a motherly little woman in a simple blue shift and tight-laced black bodice containing an ample bosom; and a younger man, perhaps forty, or at least appearing so, with curly dark hair just beginning to show gray, a short curly beard, and gaunt cheeks. Four chairs had been left empty. Nul, Melodia, Kelada, and Jeremy took these.
“Kelada,” Tremien said without preamble, “I think you will remember the council. Melodia, Jeremy Sebastian Moon, permit me. Altazar of Green Dales.” This was the bald little man, who nodded carelessly. “Wyonne of Triesland.” The tall woman inclined her head, giving them a brief smile. “Barach Loremaster.” Barach separated a section of orange, somehow found his mouth in that wilderness of beard, and popped the fruit in. He did not look up. “Mumana, keeper of the heartlands.” The motherly little woman tucked a loose curl of gray hair under and beamed at them. “And finally, Jondan, newest of our group.” The dark-haired man looked steadily at them, the hollows of his eyes and those beneath his cheeks dark with shadow.
Moon Dreams (The Jeremy Moon Trilogy Book 1) Page 14