Touched by the Gods

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “Good, good,” Rebiri said, concentrating on plucking the duck. “Was there any news in the market? Has Beretris dropped dead, perhaps, and started a war of succession?”

  His tone was sarcastic, but Aldassi knew his father's moods, knew that he hoped for exactly that. No succession to the Domdur throne had ever been openly disputed, in all of recorded history, but everyone agreed that the oracles were no longer telling the Imperial family what the line of inheritance should be. Beretris had twin sons, and an elder daughter who, it was rumored, did not see why her sex should remove her from serious consideration as her mother's heir. The potential for disagreement was greater than ever before.

  What good a disputed succession would do the Nazakri was not really clear. Aldassi knew that his father thought a civil war would provide opportunities for a resurgence of the Nazakri and the restoration of Olnami independence, but he had serious doubts about the likelihood of such opportunities. Mostly, Aldassi knew, his father simply wished ill to befall the Domdur, even if it did the Olnami no good.

  There had been no word in Dolya Korien that Beretris was in anything but the best of health, and as far as Aldassi knew all her children were on the best of terms with one another.

  “Nothing like that,” Aldassi said. “But there's a rumor going around that some people just the other side of the mountains have found some new way of making magic, one that doesn't need Domdur priests.”

  The boy had intended the remark as idle chatter, but Rebiri's hands suddenly stopped their rapid motion. He looked up, staring at his son's face.

  His grandfather had come to these mountains seeking black magic to use against the Domdur; he had found traces of it, deep in the earth, but had been unable to use them. Rebiri's father had spent his life struggling to control the dark energies beneath the mountains, and had never managed it. In fact, his sudden and mysterious death might have been caused by those forces.

  Rebiri himself had followed in his father's footsteps to some extent. He had been seeking useful magic other than the mind tricks of the Domdur priests for most of his life, but had abandoned the quest at last, and had sworn not to pass it on to Aldassi. There was no point in wasting another generation in such a fruitless pursuit.

  But perhaps it didn't have to be fruitless. Had someone else succeeded where the Nazakri had always failed?

  “A new magic?” he said. “What sort of magic?”

  “I don't know,” Aldassi said, startled by his father's intensity. “The stories say the man who first learned it used it to fly like a bird. What else it might do, I couldn't say.”

  “Fly?” Rebiri's gaze became less focused, more thoughtful. “That might have its uses. This man – who is he? Is he Domdur? Olnami?”

  Aldassi shook his head. “Neither, Father. He's from one of the mountain tribes, the Diknoi or Megani or one of those. He's supposed to be starting a school to teach his arts. And the priests in Ai Varach are said to have sent one of their magical messages to Seidabar to ask if this skill should be banned, or brought to the capital.”

  “He's in Ai Varach?”

  “Near there.”

  “We need to see this man.” He got to his feet, the duck forgotten.

  “Father,” Aldassi protested, “the sun's below the mountains, and I'm hungry!”

  Rebiri hesitated, then looked down at the duck and the cookfire. Reluctantly, he seated himself again.

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “Tomorrow morning, by dawn, we shall be on the trail to Ai Varach.”

  Chapter Five

  It was forty days later, half a season, that Rebiri and Aldassi finally reached the little Diknoi village of Fadari Tu, a cluster of a dozen clean, well-made houses built on a broad, grassy ledge below the mouth of a cave, some fifty miles north of the major Domdur outpost in the area, Ai Varach.

  Aldassi seemed to have grown visibly during the journey; he had begun it a boy, but now, though he was still only in his fifteenth year, he looked almost a man. Rebiri was proud of the lad's progress.

  They had reached the stone-walled citadel of Ai Varach ten days before, and had asked everyone they encountered there about the stories of a new kind of magic. The result was a tangle of contradictory reports. Some of the people they questioned had told the two ragged Olnami wanderers that the magician was a fraud, and the priests from the temple at Ai Varach had proven it. Others had said that he was genuine, and the Empress had ordered him slain, and that soldiers from the garrison at Ai Varach had carried out those orders. Still others had said the orders had been given and the soldiers sent, but the magician had escaped.

  A few had said that soldiers had been sent north, all right, but that they had gone to invite the magician to appear before the Empress in Seidabar – not to harm him, but to reward him.

  Everyone had agreed that priests and soldiers had gone north to Fadari Tu, and had returned, but that was all that they agreed upon.

  The two Nazakri had gone on from Ai Varach to Fadari Tu, hoping that the magician was still there and alive, but Aldassi, at least, had not been optimistic. Rebiri did not choose to state an opinion.

  Deep in his heart, though, Rebiri could feel, with a certainty he could not explain, that whether the magician was there or not, something great would come of this journey. He sensed a dark power in the world around him, a power that he somehow knew favored him in his desire to destroy the Domdur Empire.

  He had never before known such a sensation, but he believed in fate, and he believed that this power he felt was his destiny, coming to him at last.

  He said nothing of this to his son; Aldassi had quite enough to concern him just with his share of keeping the two of them alive and getting them safely to their destination.

  When he and Aldassi finally stumbled up the road into the tiny community of Fadari Tu half a dozen of the pale, brown-haired villagers came out to greet them, and one of them almost immediately asked, in the Domdur tongue rather than their own incomprehensible tribal dialect, “Are you here to learn the New Magic?”

  Rebiri looked at the speaker warily; he could feel nothing of that looming destiny in her, and he did not trust these strange-looking foreigners, with their washed-out coloring. They didn't smell right, either, though he didn't care to think about why. He asked cautiously, “New magic?”

  The villagers made little effort to hide their amusement. The Diknoi were well known to be a direct people, not given to subtleties in their speech or manner – though they were reputed to be very subtle indeed in their arguments and philosophies.

  “Do you expect us to believe you had some other reason to come to Fadari Tu?” another woman asked. “You're no mountain-born Govyan, that's certain, and you don't look much like a Domdur scholar or tax collector; you look Olnami or Matuan, by your skin and hair. What else would bring an easterner up to this part of the world?”

  She spoke Domdur fluently – better than Rebiri did. He supposed that was not surprising; anyone who dealt with travelers or any part of the imperial government would need to use Domdur, and the Diknoi, despite their isolation, had always been interested in the outside world. They were, in fact, notorious for their inquisitiveness – “curious as a Diknoi” was a common expression in Govya.

  “Could I not be a Matuan scholar, come to study your folkways?” Rebiri asked.

  “Are you?”

  Rebiri smiled at the blunt question, the sort of thing a child might say. “No,” he said. “I am Olnami.” Despite his sorry condition he still felt a surge of pride in stating that simple fact.

  “In all their history, the Olnami have never studied anything for its own sake,” the woman declared. “You desert folk never had time to spare for such pursuits. So you're here to see whether the stories of the New Magic are true, and maybe to join the school.”

  “And if I am?” Rebiri asked. “Is this inventor, this teacher, still here?”

  “No,” an older man said. “Vrai Burrai, who discovered the secret, is on his way to Seidabar for an audien
ce with the Empress. But the school he founded remains.”

  “Who teaches in this school, if the magician is gone?” Aldassi asked.

  “I do,” said a new voice, and both Rebiri and Aldassi looked about for its source.

  Then they saw the villagers looking up, as if at the various moons in the sky, and the two Olnami looked up as well, to find a young man hanging in the air above their heads. He held a peculiar short staff before him in both hands; at either end of the staff was something that glittered so brightly in the sun the Nazakri could not see it clearly.

  Aldassi's mouth fell open with surprise; Rebiri's eyes widened slightly, but no more than that.

  This man was a key to his destiny; Rebiri knew that, without knowing how he knew. Nothing in the workings of that destiny could truly astonish him.

  “I am Tebas Tudan,” the flying man said, “foremost among Vrai Burrai's pupils.”

  As the Nazakri and the villagers watched, Tebas Tudan settled gently to the ground, descending slowly until he stood on his own two feet before the strangers. Once down, he lowered his staff and bowed.

  “Welcome to Fadari Tu,” he said. “What would you like to learn of our New Magic?”

  “Everything there is to know,” Rebiri replied.

  “Can you pay for this knowledge?”

  “No,” Rebiri admitted, “but I will swear that if I am satisfied, I shall find a way to pay you generously for your teaching.” He nodded toward the woman who had spoken earlier. “Your friend here knows something of the Olnami,” he said. “She will tell you that if I swear an oath, I will keep it.”

  “I know that much of the Olnami myself,” Tebas Tudan retorted.

  “Then will you teach me? And my son?” Rebiri's eyes were alight with anticipation. Here was the moment when his fate would begin to unfold, and the doom of the Domdur would be sealed.

  Tebas Tudan considered, then smiled and held out a hand for Rebiri to grip after the Diknoi fashion. “Why not?” he said.

  And Rebiri felt that mysterious power in the world around him exult.

  The next triad – the Diknoi had adopted the Domdur custom of dividing the year into three-day periods, rather than using the less-exact Olnami use of seasons and fractions thereof – was spent settling in; Rebiri and his son found lodging in an unused storage loft, and learned their way around the village. Then, when their instructor was ready, their training began.

  The first lessons were the hardest. Tebas Tudan admitted that this was deliberate.

  “Why should I waste any longer than necessary on a student who will not work hard enough to learn what he needs to learn?” he asked, when one of the students questioned the need to cram so much into each class.

  At least, Rebiri thought, they had not had to learn the Diknoi language, with its precise shades of meaning and multilayered compound words; the lectures were given in Domdur.

  The classes were held in a chamber of the cave above the village, well up inside the mountain, where a magical crystal provided plentiful light and kept away any evil things that might have lurked in the surrounding stone. Besides Rebiri and Aldassi there were six other students – four of the Diknoi villagers, a Domdur trader whose ancestors might have been Megani, and a tall, dark-skinned Sautalan who wore the red uniform of the Imperial Army, but without insignia – either a veteran or a deserter, and none of the others dared inquire which. A fifth villager had given up during the first lesson, justifying Tebas Tudan's decision to start off with the hard part.

  The eight of them persevered, however, as Tebas Tudan explained how Vrai Burrai had discovered a method of forming crystalline structures that trapped and magnified the sun's light, and that could then be linked to a person's spirit and used to perform various wonders.

  How he had stumbled upon this Tebas Tudan could not explain. Vrai Burrai himself had said that one day the idea was there in his head, and he didn't know how or why.

  Rebiri and Aldassi studied hard, but there was much to learn. Vrai Burrai had been a glassblower, a skilled artisan, before stumbling upon his magic, and Tebas Tudan had been a gemcutter, while the two Nazakri had never been called upon to perform any task more delicate than threading a needle; the fine handiwork did not come easily.

  Likewise, the mathematical methods that the Diknoi used to determine the best shapes for their constructs were unfamiliar, and the meditation techniques needed to attune the crystals to the user's spirit so that the trapped energy might actually be used required a calm and a concentration unlike anything Rebiri had ever attempted.

  When he meditated, though, Rebiri could sense the dark power of his destiny all around him, eager to be unleashed.

  At last, some twenty-five triads, almost a season, after their arrival, when the cold winds of approaching winter were howling outside the cave and sending occasional spirals of bitterly cold air around the students' feet, Aldassi lifted with both hands an ugly, intricate crystal construction roughly the size of his own head.

  “I think it's done,” he said.

  “Let us see about that,” Tebas Tudan said. “Anyone else?”

  The Sautalan, Wasyanei, lifted his own device – smaller and sleeker than Aldassi's, but just as complex.

  “Anyone else?” The teacher looked around.

  A Diknoi girl studied hers critically. “Almost,” she said.

  The other five said nothing. Rebiri's own still needed several days more work.

  “Well, let us test these two, at any rate.” Tebas Tudan led the way down toward the cave mouth.

  Aldassi and Wasyanei came immediately; Rebiri hesitated, looking at his own unfinished crystal, then set his work aside and followed, as did all the other students but the Diknoi girl.

  The day outside the cave was cold, the wind hard and carrying the scent of coming snow, but the sky was clear and intensely blue. A dozen moons gleamed pale and faint, like reflections on blue ice, and the sun blazed yellow-white in the western sky.

  Rebiri shivered at the chill; the air felt sharp in his nose and throat as he breathed, and each breath was plainly visible. He did not hesitate, though, and he was close on Tebas Tudan's heels as the party arrived at a stony, more or less level area.

  Here the Diknoi magician stopped and waited for the others to gather. Then he beckoned to the younger Olnami. At Tebas Tudan's direction, Aldassi raised his crystal above his head to trap the sun's light.

  The day seemed to dim perceptibly for an instant, and then there were two glittering lights – the sun, and Aldassi's crystal. Everyone present could hear the glass humming, and Aldassi gasped as he felt the power surging through his spirit.

  “Lift, as I taught you,” Tebas Tudan said.

  Rebiri watched with fierce satisfaction as his son rose unsteadily into the air, like a flag being hoisted.

  A battle flag, he told himself – a Nazakri battle flag, raised in defiance of the Domdur! That unseen power seethed around him; Rebiri felt it.

  Wasyanei's crystal proved to have a flaw; it whistled piercingly, and would not hold steady. He was unable to maintain his flight for more than three or four seconds.

  Aldassi watched from fifty feet up as Wasyanei's attempt failed; then he settled gently to the ground.

  After that excitement none of the students could concentrate on the delicate work of crystal construction, but Tebas Tudan was not willing to waste that excitement by letting them go for the day. Instead, when everyone was back in the cave workshop, he took questions, on anything and everything related to Vrai Burrai's magic.

  “What limits the amount of sunlight you can absorb?” asked Vedrur, the Domdur trader.

  “The strength of the crystal's substance,” Tebas Tudan answered. “Too much energy, and it will explode. Messy. Vrai Burrai and I had that happen twice; I still have the scar from the second one.” He held up his left hand and displayed the fading red marks on either side where, Rebiri realized, a small fragment had gone through the teacher's hand.

  “Fortunately, the
purity of the light apparently prevents the wound from becoming infected,” Tebas Tudan remarked. “Every wound we ever experienced from a shattered crystal healed quickly and cleanly.”

  The Olnami frowned. Something was nagging at him, a question he needed to ask, as if his destiny were prompting him. He said, “Can other sources of energy be used, rather than sunlight?”

  Tebas Tudan shook his head. “We have not found any other light strong and pure enough to be useful.”

  “What about darkness, then?” Rebiri asked.

  That, he knew, was the right question, another key to his destiny.

  Tebas Tudan frowned.

  “I haven't tried it,” he said, “but I can't see how that would work. After all, what is darkness but the absence of light?”

  Rebiri said no more, but inside he almost laughed at the simple ignorance of this Diknoi teacher.

  An ordinary darkness might be merely the absence of light, but Rebiri knew there were other, deeper darknesses. There were things in the night and in the depths of the earth, things that shunned the sun and the Hundred Moons and all the gods of the Domdur, things that had their own power. Rebiri and Rebiri's ancestors had struggled to control them for decades, to find some way to turn them against the Empire, but always, that dark power had slipped through their fingers. The darknesses in the earth had no language that anyone could understand; they could not be bargained with, could not be controlled.

  But perhaps, with these power traps, they could be caught.

  And used.

  Somewhere, somehow, Rebiri Nazakri knew something much greater than himself approved of the idea.

  Chapter Six

  The torchlight painted the stone walls in shifting patterns of black and gold, light and shadow, as Rebiri Nazakri made his way deeper into the cave.

  This was not the gentle, tamed cave of the Diknoi magicians, high on the western slopes; this was instead the wild cave at the base of the eastern cliffs where Rebiri's father Tolani had brought him, long ago, so that Rebiri might see for himself that there were powers in the earth that did not answer to the Domdur priests.