The Silver Sorceress (The Raveling Book 2)

by Alec Hutson

  He caught the emphasis she put on her last words. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean, Keilan,” she said, the passion now clear in her voice, “that I have been waiting for you for ages. I hoped Vera would be a Talent, so she could help me with my great work. Yet it was not to be. But fate is a fickle goddess, and now here you are, Vera’s son, returned at last. And just in time. Together, we can do great things.”

  “What work are you doing here?” he asked softly, but she dismissed his question with a wave of her silver fork.

  “Not yet, Keilan. First, I will help you to bring forth what is inside you. I can feel it—no doubt fragments of your power have squirmed loose in the past, yes? But you must learn how to summon your sorcery whenever you wish. At first it is like reaching into a basket of eels and trying to pull one out. There will be times, and do not be dismayed, when the strands of your power wriggle away and you are left clutching at nothing. But it will get easier, until it becomes as natural as breathing.” She offered him a crooked smile. “You will be my apprentice.”

  “Niara… there is nothing I want more than to learn from you. But first I must tell you why I’ve come. It is of tremendous importance.”

  The sorceress sank back on the divan, studying him with guarded eyes. “Tell me, then.”

  And so he did. He told her how the servants of Dymoria’s ruler had kidnapped him from the Pure, how he had come to study for a short time in the Scholia of the Crimson Queen, and how, when visiting Lyr, he had been summoned to the coral temple of Lyr’s Oracle. He spoke of the twisted children—the ones the Shan scholar at the Reliquary had named the Betrayers—and how he had seen her, Niara, alight upon the ruins of Menekar’s imperial palace and challenge the demons. He did not speak, though, of how he had seen her before, in the memories of the sorcerer Jan, as she and others fashioned immortality from the souls of the countless dead. It was not the time to reveal that he knew she was connected to the cataclysms that had shattered the world.

  When he had finished describing his journey from Lyr along the Iron Road, and the scattered clues that had led him and his companions to the manse of the pirate lord on the island of Ven Ibras, Niara stood abruptly and went over to a cabinet of golden wood. From a drawer she pulled forth a carved box and then returned to her divan. Her fingers drummed a pattern on the lid as she placed the box on the low table between them.

  “What is that?” Keilan asked as she continued to stare at the intricate patterns decorating the lacquered red wood.

  “Tell me of this dagger you say I wielded,” she said.

  Keilan strained to recall the details of that terrible vision. “The blade was curved and black, and there were red runes down its length.”

  The calm certainty in Niara’s face never wavered, but Keilan thought he sensed the briefest of hesitations before she slid back the lid to reveal the dagger he had just described, nestled among folds of purple cloth.

  Its hilt was plain silver, unornamented with any decorative flourishes, though a single line of strange characters spiraled above the circular pommel. But the blade… it was not a metal Keilan had ever seen before. Gleaming and black like obsidian, but slightly translucent, and beneath its surface darker lines like veins or roots threaded the metal. Runes that looked similar to the tiny spidery characters that wrapped the hilt were incised along the blade, glimmering red as if they had been coated with some special resin.

  “The vision was true,” Keilan whispered, unable to tear his gaze from the dagger. There had always been some tiny niggling doubt that the Oracle had pulled the sorceress from his memories and fashioned what they had experienced because of some unfathomable madness. He wasn’t sure whether he should be relieved or terrified.

  “It would appear so,” Niara said, lifting the dagger from its box. “This was created to be their doom,” she said softly, twisting and turning the dagger so that the morning light caught the blade and ran like water along its curving length.

  “Those children?”

  “Yes,” said Niara softly. “I forged it, centuries ago.”

  “Then you knew they would come?”

  “No,” the sorceress said, laying the dagger down again in its bed of cloth.

  “Then why…”

  “You are not the first visitor to my island, Keilan. Some have washed up along the shore by chance, others have heard of my legend and come to beg for something. Your own grandfather was one such shipwrecked sailor.” She pushed the lid closed with a click. “A Shan warlock came here long ago, searching for me. He brought with him a pouch of bone dust and dried blood flakes scraped from the edge of a knife. The last remnants of the Betrayers from before they had brought down the Raveling upon the ancestral lands of Shan. Pai Xin was his name. An ambitious man who wanted to make a name for himself in the bone-shard towers by finally banishing the spirits of the Betrayers into the beyond. He had been told about me by another of his order as that warlock lay dying, a man I had once saved when his ship foundered in a storm. Pai Xin wanted to use the blood and ashes of the Betrayers’ physical form to forge a weapon that could destroy the demon children, but such an act was far beyond the abilities of the warlocks now. Once, they had their own Talents, but just as in our lands none had been born since before they fled across the World Ocean.”

  “And that is what you made?” Keilan breathed, staring at the box.

  “I did. The blade is infused with their essence, and if my sorcery is true it can slay them—it might be the only way to forever end their cursed existence.”

  “But he did not take it back to Shan?”

  Niara’s mouth twisted. “He tried to, along with a few other items that had caught his fancy during his stay with me. In the end, he did not depart these shores, and I kept the dagger I had made.”

  “Then we have a weapon against them! We have to find them before –”

  Niara held up her hand to quiet him. “And where are they, Keilan? Pai Xin told me the spirits of the Betrayers were bound within a chest that is protected by ancient wards in the bone-shard towers of Tsai Yin. Should we try and sneak inside, past these mysterious defenses and an entire order of sorcerers, and open the prison that has kept them locked away for a thousand years? Then hope this blade can truly dispatch them forever? What if I am wrong? Perhaps such an attempt is how they escaped in the Oracle’s vision to bring doom down upon these lands.” Niara sighed. “Prophecies are tricky things, Keilan. Sometimes, by trying to avert what has been foretold, the seeds are sown for that very future to come about.”

  “Then what shall we do?”

  With her finger, the sorceress traced the patterns carved into the box’s lid. “I will think on it. In a few days, you will have your answer. Until then, I want to begin your instruction in sorcery.”

  “Your schooling until now has been lacking,” Niara said, after they had finished their lunch of flat-bread and dates drizzled with honey.

  “In the Imperium, a student would have been given a foundation of knowledge about the nature of sorcery long before it ever manifested in them. But here you are, nearly a man grown, and yet ignorant of the simplest facts.”

  Keilan thought back to those days along the Wending, listening as Vhelan had tried to explain how the magisters of the Scholia believed sorcery to work.

  “I was told that within all sorcerers there is a connection to another place. And along this thread sorcery travels, and gathers within us, and we can twist this power to do wondrous things.”

  “Wondrous and terrible,” Niara amended, and for some reason those words tickled at his memory. Where had he heard them before?

  “But you have the basics of it. Sorcery is an energy from elsewhere, a realm beyond our conception. It is sometimes referred to as the Void, though I doubt its inhabitants would use such a name. The Void implies emptiness, and this place is most certainly not empty.” She took a quick
sip from a silver goblet. “Now, the simplest use of this energy is to project it outside of ourselves and make it manifest in the world. That is why all sorcerers, even if they have just a glimmer of the gift, are capable of summoning light and fire. Wards—defensive shields formed from hardening this energy—are also one of the most basic uses for sorcery.”

  “What about other spells? Like seeing into another’s memories, or the sinking of these lands beneath the Broken Sea?”

  “Only the most powerful among the gifted, or a Talent, can shape sorcery in such ways. But if you are that strong, then nearly anything is possible. Sorcery is infinitely pliable—it just requires enough imagination and will.”

  “And strength,” Keilan added, remembering what Niara had said earlier.

  “Yes,” the sorceress agreed. “And strength.” Niara twisted a strand of hair around her finger, something his mother also used to do when she was thinking.

  “One of my old teachers,” she continued, “once described the difference between Talents and the merely gifted as being analogous to a master metalworker and a man who just wanders into a smithy. Give the man a heated piece of metal and a hammer and he can pound it into a simple shape—a sword, say. It may not be beautiful, but when he swings it the edge will still split open flesh. Most sorcerers are like this, wielding sorcery with the clumsy skill of the untrained man. But a master metalworker could take that same lump of metal and fashion something wondrous. A sundial that can track the watches as the sun moves across the sky. Or a delicate piece of filigreed jewelry. Or even—if the smith is very highly skilled—one of those automata filled with gears and wires that stumble about when a key is wound in its back.”

  She reached out to pat his arm. “You are many years away from crafting that kind of sorcery, Keilan. We shall start with the simplest of spells.”

  Niara raised her hand, and blue energy coruscated like lightning along her fingers. It came and went in the briefest of glimpses, but Keilan thought he actually saw the lines of sorcery as Niara lashed them together.

  She seemed to notice this. “Good, Keilan. You saw what I did?”

  “I think so… but how could I see it?”

  “It means you have come of age. It is one of the things that makes Talents different than the merely gifted, along with not needing gestures or incantations to shape spells. The sorcery so saturates our very being that at about your age it actually becomes visible, and we can learn simple manipulations of energy from merely observing.”

  “Yes!” Keilan said excitedly, remembering the Kindred he had encountered along the Iron Road. “I met an old man who could shape fire, and as he was doing this I could see the spell being formed! I was able to imitate what he had done later, though I could not control it very well.”

  Naira extended her hand towards him, palm upraised, and a sphere of crackling wizardlight flared into existence. For a brief moment Keilan again could glimpse the lines of sorcery twisting together, but they flickered past too quickly for him to see clearly.

  “Did you notice what I did?” she asked as the wizardlight vanished.

  “No,” Keilan admitted. “It was too fast.”

  “Watch carefully,” she told him, summoning the glowing sphere again. This time she seemed to have slowed the twisting of the sorcerous strands… but still he couldn’t quite tell what she had done.

  “How about that time?”

  He shook his head, frustrated.

  Niara frowned. “Concentrate, Keilan. Pay attention to what I do.”

  Again, the wizardlight appeared. He thought he could see now how she had managed it…

  Keilan reached down into himself, into the churning sea where his power waited. He grasped at the roiling sorcery, feeling it flood him with cool strength, and tried to twist it the same way as she had just demonstrated.

  Light swelled in the air before him, and Niara smiled, applauding. The shock of seeing the wizardlight form from nothing except his will and what he had drawn from within himself made his concentration slip, and the light dissipated into a few glittering motes.

  “That is good, Keilan. You are ready to learn.”

  “Will you teach me more?” he asked softly, watching as the last few drifting sparks winked out of existence.

  “I will.”

  Among all the tasks on the farm that Sella hated, churning butter was by far the worst. Half a day or more of standing over a barrel of cream, moving the plunger up and down and up again, until her back ached and her arms felt like they were about to come clean off. And always on the days her ma had grabbed her to do some churning the sun would be shining, maybe poking out after a storm had come and gone, and Sella just knew there’d be all sorts of things to find down on the beach or in the forest… if only she had been able to escape her ma’s quick hands. And as she was standing there in the barn her thoughts would wilt away like flowers at the end of summer, nothing but numb emptiness inside her as she churned and churned and churned and prayed to Ama and the Deep Ones and every forest spirit Mam Ru had ever told her about that this cream would hurry up and magically turn into butter.

  Sella didn’t like waiting.

  By the fourth day on the island she’d done near everything she could think of: she’d thrown rocks at the strange colored birds that roosted in the trees near the huts, till they finally flapped away and hadn’t returned; she’d placed twigs and rocks among the hanging vines and watched them curl and grasp like the hands of babies; godspit, she’d even pulled out Keilan’s books and leafed through looking at the few pictures. When she did that, she knew she was bored beyond all reason.

  The angry woman and the quiet paladin didn’t seem to be enjoying the waiting very much, either. Senacus spent most of the day inside his hut—she’d peeked inside, once, and saw him sitting there on his knees, his head bowed and his hands on his legs. Praying, Sella guessed. For Kay, maybe? Or his home, which Sella had overheard he’d seen all ruined in some dream. Or perhaps he was just asking Ama how he’d ended up the guest of a sorceress on an island in the middle of the sea. Sella had listened to enough mendicants to know that this was probably gnawing him up from the inside. They didn’t like sorcery at all.

  Nel, on the other hand, was always moving around, restless as a cat trying to get inside a cupboard. She’d pace back and forth, flipping those daggers to herself and muttering, pausing every once in a while to scowl up at the buildings Kay disappeared into every day. She’d look more and more haggard and nervous as the watches passed, until the time when he’d come tripping down the path in the evening. Sella had started to look for that shiver of relief that would cross her face when she caught sight of him, though it would be gone by the time Kay arrived—the anger would be back then, and it would stay the rest of the night while she talked to him crossly about what he should have been doing all day. More important things than learning magic, apparently.

  On the afternoon of the fourth day Sella decided to go have a look around. That sorceress had said there were dangerous things on the island, but Sella hadn’t seen anything that scared her. Except for that big cat, maybe, but it looked like a pet, not something that hunted and ate people. Well, and the robed things, but they didn’t seem so fast. Sella was pretty sure she could run away if one happened to see her out and about. She wasn’t worried. And anyway, Niara was Kay’s grandma. She wouldn’t let anything bad happen to his friend.

  The rear of the huts brushed up against the edge of a rocky slope, and at its bottom was the beach where they had arrived. No one seemed to be paying attention to her, but still Sella made sure the paladin was busy with his praying and Nel with her worrying before she slipped around the back and half slid, half scrambled down to the black sand. Then she followed the curve of the beach, keeping to the shadows thrown by the higher places so that no one up above could see her. Eventually Sella came to the spot she’d picked out—a steep bit of cliff that
soared up to a higher ledge than where they’d been staying. She couldn’t see it right now from so far down below, but she knew there was a building up there, too. As she’d hoped, the rocky wall looked pretty easy to climb. Lots of crevices and ledges to hold onto—really, it didn’t look much harder than the rocks she and Kay used to climb out in the bay, and those had been slicked by the sea.

  She gave a final glance at the huts where she’d left Nel and Senacus, hoping not to see them pointing and screaming at her—they weren’t—and then she started to climb. It was easy going, so long as she didn’t look down. She did once, and then she’d felt dizzy and had to hug herself a bit closer to the stone. But she was never in any real danger of falling. Her mother had called Sella her ‘little gibbon’, after those forest apes, since she had gotten to the top of every tall tree round their farm. Felt good, actually, to climb again. The sun on her shoulders, the feel of being up high, going somewhere and doing something.

  By the time Sella pulled herself up over the ledge, her hands were scraped up and her hair dirty from when she’d managed to knock a bird’s nest onto her head, but still the exhilaration of the climb was rushing through her like lightning. She did feel a bit of disappointment, though, when she saw that the ledge she’d climbed up to wasn’t all that interesting—just another hut, not much bigger than the one she was sleeping in. She’d just have a quick look inside and then hurry back before Nel realized she was missing.

  The door looked rotten and about a thousand years old, but it didn’t budge when she pushed. Sella circled the building—there had once been windows, but someone had piled rocks in them pretty tight. There were a few little gaps where the stones came together, and so she stood up on her toes and tried to peek inside. Shapes loomed in the darkness.

  One corner of a wall had crumbled, and there was a hole Sella thought she might be able to squeeze through if she sucked in her tummy. Pushing down that little nagging voice of caution she got down and wriggled her way between the jagged bits of stone.