Moon Dreams (The Jeremy Moon Trilogy Book 1)

by Brad Strickland

  “We have been discussing the case,” Tremien said. “It is a most unusual one. Indeed, we can recall nothing quite like it.”

  “There was,” Barach said in a rusted-hinge voice, his eyes still on the orange he was devouring piece by piece, “an instance in the ancient writings of Metterin of Finarr—”

  “Yes, yes,” Tremien said. “But that was legend, Mage Barach.”

  The shaggy gray eyebrows lifted. “And we are not?” Another orange slice disappeared into the beard.

  Tremien sighed. “We have considered,” he began again. “Kelada, your case is first: from the beginning some of us doubted the justice of your banishment. Now, on second thought, we believe the punishment was too harsh, since you were innocent of the blood of Niklas File's victims. However, you still must earn your freedom.

  “Melodia, you were guilty of nothing more serious than unwise love. But we cannot permit you to hold this mirror any longer, for it is a dangerous thing. It must be destroyed.” Tremien paused, looked hard at the young healer, and then continued in a gentler tone: “It may be that you too will wish to make some form of restitution for the evil which, unknowing, you helped to foster. But that will be your decision.”

  The old wizard sighed deeply. “That brings us to you, Jeremy Sebastian Moon. The hardest decision of all.” Looking around at the other council members, Tremien demanded, “Is it not as I said?”

  “His aura,” Wyonne murmured, “is indeed strange. I have seen nothing like it.”

  “Great power,” growled bald Altazar beside her, “but untapped. Perhaps uncontrollable.”

  Tremien said, “Great spells do not seem to affect him—only small ones, like minor healing or language.” A buzz of interest arose as the others added comments, none of them intelligible to Jeremy. A silence fell. It went on so long that Jeremy became conscious of the light sound of the wind against the windows, of the tangy scent of the orange across the table from him as Barach devoured the last piece. At last he said, “Well?”

  Tremien looked hard at him. “We have a great need,” he said. “Ours is to destroy the unholy mirrors created by your double. All of them, you understand. This one, and the one held by the Hag, and most of all the one in your world. That is our need. Yours is to return to your former home.”

  “Yes?”

  “The two are hard to reconcile. The one who destroys the last mirror must remain in your world forever, a world without magic.”

  “I'll do it,” Jeremy said. “Just send me there.”

  “No,” Barach murmured. “A bird does not fly through the seas.”

  Jeremy blinked at him. “What?”

  Mumana tutted. “He is trying to say that only a magician could hope to pass through from Thaumia to your world. A magician of mage level, one whose powers have been used and tested. Not a young man with no magic whatever.”

  “Then I'm a prisoner here?”

  Tremien leaned forward. “Not quite. There is a chance. But we have little time. We all feel the increase of the Great Dark One's powers; they grow moment by moment. In less than a year he will be invincible. But if in that time you could master the great potential you have—if you could become magician enough to make the transference—then you have some hope, as do we.” The bony hands spread, brown as the walnut wood of the table. “But we shall have to do something soon. If you cannot learn the magic by the next time of exaltation, one of us will have to attempt to destroy the mirror. That will put two Thaumian magi in your world, Sebastian and whoever makes the journey. It is a great imbalance in the worlds, and very dangerous for both. We fear even trying it.”

  The old man leaned back in the chair, the light from the window making his cloud of hair glow almost like a halo. “You must know this: using magic changes a man or woman. You have a talent, the most intense I, or any of us, have ever seen. What that talent will do for you, or to you, none of us can predict. Then, too, you will have to work hard, harder than you have ever worked in your life. It takes most people an ordinary lifetime to reach mage status. You would have to do that in months.”

  “What is the alternative?” Jeremy asked.

  “To reconcile yourself to a life here in Thaumia. To pray that one of us can indeed destroy the mirror in your world, and that the results of the destruction are not catastrophic for both our worlds. If you choose this course, you cannot, you must not, use the mana we sense within you. You would have to be a mundane in a world of magic, an exile and an outsider forever.”

  “It's that dangerous?”

  “Magic can burn a man up,” Altazar said in his high-pitched, querulous voice. “I fear that you, an outsider, stand in more danger than one of us would. And I would not dare use such power as I sense in you. You must know, young Jeremy Sebastian Moon, that should you undertake to learn it and tame it, you will never again be the same person, not in any measure or in any way.”

  “A pomminut tree,” Barach murmured behind his beard, “does not grow backward into seed.”

  For some reason Jeremy's throat was dry. “Could I"—he croaked—"die?”

  An uneasy glance went around the table. Tremien bowed his head. “Yes,” he said. “Or worse.”

  Jeremy looked from side to side. Melodia, her wonderful eyes wide and deep and green, sent waves of sympathy to him in a rush he could almost feel. Kelada gave him a ghost of a smile, wry beneath her ruined nose. Nul winked one orange eye at him.

  He took a deep and unsteady breath. “Teach me magic,” he said to Tremien, “and I will try.”

  Across the table, the mirror cracked from top to bottom. Shards and tinkling spears of glass clashed to the stone floor. Melodia stood, unsteady on her feet.

  “Thank you, my dear,” Tremien said to her.

  “But I did nothing!” she protested.

  “Search your feelings,” Tremien said.

  Melodia blinked. “Oh!” She turned and rushed from the room.

  “What happened?” Jeremy asked.

  Mumana smiled at him. “As long as Melodia held any love, however small, for Sebastian still in her heart, the mirror could not be broken.”

  “Yes,” Tremien said. “Melodia no longer loves Sebastian.” His old eyes regarded Jeremy steadily. “She has just realized that she loves you.”

  Chapter 8

  “Twenty-two ... twenty-three ... while you're doing this, you could be reciting the laws of thaumadynamics.”

  Jeremy, naked to the waist in the cold, thin air of Whitehorn, gritted his teeth, pulled his chin over the bar a twenty-fourth time, and grunted, “I might, if you'd ever told them to me.”

  Barach, warmly swathed and comfortably seated, said, “Once a fisherman caught a very small fish.”

  “Please,” groaned Jeremy.

  “Twenty-six, good. The fish was too little to eat, but instead of throwing back the only thing fate had given him that day, the fisherman used it for bait instead. On the next cast he caught a fish big enough to feed his whole family. Twenty-eight. Two more, I think.”

  Jeremy's upper arms screamed at him in pain, but he dragged himself up a twenty-ninth time, then, just barely, a thirtieth one. He dropped from the bar—it had been set up between one wall of the stables and a stanchion—and reached for his tunic. “I don't understand,” he said. “About the fish.”

  “One day you will. Do you mean you've never heard of the three laws of thaumadynamics?”

  Jeremy's head popped through the neck of his tunic. His beard, now more than two weeks old, had stopped tickling him, but the individual whiskers still had a distressing tendency to get caught in buttons and painfully extracted while he dressed himself. “Never heard of them,” he said.

  “I always forget your background.” Barach smoothed his own beard, without visible effect: it still looked like the ruins of a singularly uncomfortable mattress. “Let me tell you a story—”

  “Please,” Jeremy begged, collapsing to the courtyard. He sat with legs bent, back against the stable wall, protected from
the icy breezes off the mountaintop, trying to soak in a little heat from the afternoon sun. “No story. Just tell me the laws.”

  Barach, leaning back in his chair, made a tent of his fingers. “Very well, apprentice. But you must understand that these laws came late to the study of thaumaturgy. They were first formulated nearly two hundred years ago by a very great mage of Belimor Island, and they were the first truly systematic expression of the nature of magic. We have modified them since, but still we must recognize their importance in magical thought—”

  Jeremy nodded. “I understand. But what are they?” His tolerance for absorbing lectures had worn thin since college.

  “So impatient.” Barach held one finger up. “The first law of thaumadynamics is that all energy and all matter are simply different forms of magic.”

  “So everything is made of magic.”

  “In a manner of speaking. Magic may not be created or destroyed, only transformed. Since matter is merely a form of magic, it follows that, with the proper approach, matter itself may be transformed. All this grows out of the first law.” Barach scooted his chair around a bit to take advantage of the stable lee. “The second law is somewhat frightening if one dwells on its implications. In any closed system, magic tends to decrease and mundanity to increase.”

  Jeremy frowned into the distance. Since the curtain wall of Tremien's stronghold was only yards away, the distance did not amount to very much; still, his gaze was absent. “I've heard something like that before. Entropy? I think that's what we call it. The tendency of things to run down?”

  “It could be expressed that way, yes. One corollary of that is that magical lines of force tend to dissipate after use. Fortunately, they are all but infinite; still, one can foresee a time when the universal magic has been utilized, when the universe will starve, figuratively speaking, of a dearth of enchantment. Practically, that means that great spells will work only once. In primitive times a person could, oh, move a mountain by looking at it and saying, ‘Move, mountain.’ But the next person could not move the mountain back by repeating the words. Some variant had to be found—'Take a walk, mountain,’ or ‘Be out of my way, mountain,’ or some such. By now, great spells are arcane, difficult, and taxing. All a result of the second law.”

  “When do I learn magic?” Jeremy asked. “Kelada off somewhere, Melodia back in her cottage, me stuck here—I thought time was important.”

  “It is, apprentice. But time without knowledge is like a song without a bird. Or a bird without a song. Or—”

  Jeremy groaned. “The third law?”

  “Perhaps it would be better stated thus: time and magic are images of each other. Without the one, the reflection would not exist.”

  “Master,” Jeremy said, “the third law?”

  “Master,” Barach murmured. “I like that better. Yes, ‘Master’ is very nice. The third law, apprentice, is that nothing in the universe can ever be made absolutely mundane. At least, as long as the universe endures. Some magic, however small, however latent, must forever exist in any disenchanted object; for without that tiny quantity of magic, the object itself would cease to exist.” Barach leaned forward in the chair, arms crossed, and said, “Let me ask you a question, apprentice.”

  “All right.”

  The wind lifted tufts of Barach's beard, stirred his eyebrows. With a twinkle he said, “A man lies in a room with his eyes closed tight. He sees only darkness. The man knows if he opens his eyes, either one small candle will be lighted, or the room will be utterly dark. The man cannot move. It is vitally important for him to know whether the candle is lit or not. Indeed, it is a matter of life or death for him. The question is: how does he know without opening his eyes?”

  Jeremy thought hard. “He smells the—”

  “Odorless wax.”

  “He feels the—”

  “The room is too warm.”

  “He calls out to the—”

  “The elemental would only ignore him.”

  Jeremy shook his head. “Then I give up.”

  Barach rose from the chair. “Too bad. When you can answer, we will begin tutoring you in the use of magic. Now, run from here to the front gate and back again. Twelve times today, I think.”

  Glaring at Barach, Jeremy took off his tunic. “This is more like football practice than a magical apprenticeship,” he said. “This and the diet you have me on—nuts and berries. I must have lost ten pounds.”

  “To work great sorceries, one must be strong in body and serene in spirit. Twelve times. Go now.”

  And Barach wasn't satisfied with an ordinary jog. Oh, no. Jeremy had to sprint full-out, the whole distance and back, a matter of a quarter mile or so. By the eighth lap his lungs were afire and his legs beneath him were dead. But he stumbled through another, found his second wind partway through, and finally collapsed after the last leg, gasping and wheezing. Barach prodded him with a toe. “No. Get up. Walk it out, or you'll cramp.”

  They ascended a stone stairway to the parapet of the curtain wall and began to stroll the wall walk. The wall reached all the way around the mountain, running a distance of something greater than a mile, Jeremy reckoned. On it he was dizzily aware of the height of Whitehorn: in every direction the mountain walls fell away from him, and the nearest neighboring mountains, seeming close in the thin air but really miles away, barely came to Whitehorn's shoulders. Today the western horizon fell under the shade of thick clouds, their forerunners already dimming the sun. “Snow later,” Barach said. A guard standing in one of the western machicolations of the wall gave them a brief glance as they passed.

  “What is the answer?” Jeremy asked when he had enough wind to talk.

  “It is my task to think of the questions,” Barach reproved. “Yours is to think of the answers. Tell me, Jeremy, do you know how to read?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Good. I think it time you began to study some basic books of magic. I will give you one to read this afternoon. We will discuss it tomorrow.” They paused at the westernmost bend of the wall. Far away the hills rolled into deep shadow beneath the clouds, and the wind bit their faces with bitterly cold teeth. “Tremien is working a great wonder for you.”

  Jeremy gave his teacher a look of surprise. He had seen little of Tremien, and had assumed that the old mage had turned over the whole of Jeremy's education to garrulous old Barach. “What is it?” he asked.

  “You will find out this evening. Tremien is no longer a young man, Jeremy. Such an act will greatly exhaust him. I want you to appreciate it.”

  “I'll try.”

  Though the mouth was invisible, the eyes, brown as two shiny acorns, crinkled in a smile. “That's what I like about you, apprentice: you are always willing to try. Come.”

  They moved on, completing their circuit. “Where is Kelada?” Jeremy asked.

  “Why should I tell you?”

  Jeremy stifled an irritated answer. Instead he said, “Let me tell you a story. A baby eagle lived on a mountaintop, and the old eagles fed him. Once the baby eagle was very hungry, and a grandfather eagle landed nearby, making sounds as if he were feeding. The baby eagle approached and found the old bird had been teasing him. The baby eagle pushed the old bastard right off the mountain. Now. Where is Kelada?”

  Barach chuckled. “You are not entirely without hope. Kelada is doing a part of her penance. Far to the north and west of here, in a cold land, is the countryside of the Meres, thousands of still, cold, deep lakes. There dwells a great sorceress, the Hidden Hag of Illsmere. She is one of the Great Dark One's chief lieutenants, and, as you know, she is thought to possess one of the mirrors fashioned by Sebastian. Kelada, Nul, and a few others have gone to test the way. They seek to learn if the shadow-shapes actually are her servants, and how much they know of you. You see, it may be that with you dead, the mirror in your own land will become unbreakable. We don't know. Kelada, though, is a good thief, and she should be able to bring back some intelligence of how things stand.”
/>
  “She's been gone a week.”

  “And should be gone for many more. She is well, don't worry.”

  “How do you know?”

  The eyes this time held no mirth at all, but a great weight of care. “We do know. Trust what I tell you. We do know.” Barach wore a heavy cape, but as clouds slid across the face of the sun, he huddled a little deeper in it and shivered. “Let's go inside now. I want to give you a book.”

  The book was in the study, centered neatly on Tremien's bare desk. Barach picked it up, opened it at random, and handed it over. After an initial puzzled glance, Jeremy closed the book, studied some golden hieroglyphics on the cover, and looked up in despair. “I can't read this. I don't even know the alphabet, let alone the language!”

  Barach raised his bushy eyebrows. “Of course you know the language. You speak it!”

  “I'm speaking English—” Jeremy broke off. “No, I'm not,” he said, surprise raising the pitch of his voice. “I haven't been since I first met Kelada.”

  “Of course. The other world would have a strange speech. That may be an advantage, you know. Often a great spell will repeat itself if merely translated to another tongue. Tell me, did Kelada use a spell on you?”

  Fleetingly, Jeremy recalled being held down as Kelada sat astride him, as she snarled down at him. “Yes. I think she did.”

  “Ah. Devalo's understand spell, no doubt. Very minor spell—that may be why it affected you when major magics do not. Can you speak some of your original tongue?”

  In English—which felt strange in his mouth after so many weeks—Jeremy said, “Hello, folks, I'm Jeremy. Testing, testing, testing. What's your sign?”