The wizard at Mecq tst-1

by Rick Shelley

  "The wife first." Carillia closed her eyes and snuggled against Silvas's side. "She sees you as a possible lover, someone to bring a little temporary romance and excitement to her drab life. She has found it hard to adjust to being the wife of such a minor knight at the edge of nowhere. Her life before was not so much different, but even that seems exciting in comparison. She would welcome a dalliance, even if she spent years repenting it." Carillia paused, waiting for Silvas to comment. He took his time. Her tale did not surprise him.

  "Others have dreamed that dream," he said at last. "What of the girl? You spoke of both ladies before."

  Carillia laughed and tightened her grip on Silvas's arm. "Oh, yes! I don't want to forget the daughter." She paused to get her laughter under control.

  "The girl has a very fertile mind, my heart. There is a deep strength to her that even she does not yet realize. She imagines in great detail and in great heat."

  "Heat?"

  "The young lady sees you carrying her off as your lady." Carillia said it as she would a joke. There was no hint of jealousy or uncertainty. She was simply reporting. "She doesn't even care what her status would be. Make her your wife or your plaything. Either would satisfy her. I find it difficult to believe how detailed, how precise, her fantasies are. Her father would be shocked to learn how his young maiden's thoughts drift."

  "She was quite determined to take part in the conversation at supper," Silvas said. "It was an embarrassment. And her father wasn't at all happy either. About that, or about me."

  "I can't say what he might have thought, my heart. You know that my gifts do not run in that direction. But do not slough off the girl. She is a rare one."

  "You never have any trouble seeing what I think, love," Silvas said.

  "Ah, but that is so different. You are my heart."

  "And you take my mind from the troubles of the moment so easily." He sighed. "Too easily. I've already told Bay and Bosc, love. I need a Council tonight."

  "So soon?" Carillia said, but she quickly covered that with "Of course, my heart. Whenever you're ready."

  CHAPTER TEN

  Carillia started preparing for bed. Silvas got a heavy robe and left the bedroom. Satin and Velvet followed him up the stairs into the east tower. The wizard was in no particular hurry, and the cats sensed that. He stopped in the library, but not to do any reading. Silvas went directly to the window seat and made himself comfortable, back to one side, feet up on the seat. He leaned back and rested his head against the stone.

  "A little rest before we start," Silvas mumbled. He took several deep breaths. Within a minute he appeared to be asleep.

  But some small part of his mind remained alert, active, sorting through what he had learned since coming to Mecq. The cats lay next to the window seat, content to follow their master's example. Silvas didn't discover any new connections in his meditation, but he hadn't expected to. And after a half hour he opened his eyes, turned to drop his feet to the floor, and stretched. The cats were quick enough to get out of his way.

  "Okay, kittens, I guess we can go upstairs now." Silvas stood and waited while Satin and Velvet went through their own routine of stretching and yawning, then led the way up to his workshop.

  There were fresh candles burning there, seven candles in each of three stands. Satin and Velvet took up positions by the room's two doors, curling up across the doorways to wait for Silvas to get ready. When the time came, they would move to their protective circles. Until then they had these positions.

  Silvas was still in no hurry. The others needed time to get to sleep before he could summon them to Council. The wizard walked the lines of his pentagram, looking for cracks or other flaws in the crystal. He had never found one in all his years in the Seven Towers, but he checked whenever he had time. After ten minutes, Silvas was confident that there had been no damage during his battle with the demons the night before. The ashes left from the destruction of the intruders had been cleaned up during the day. Silvas's metal-tipped quarterstaff had also been moved back down to his bedroom. He had seen it there earlier.

  When Silvas left the pentagram to look out the window, both cats lifted their heads to watch him. He turned to Satin first and then to Velvet.

  "Soon, kittens. You know this takes time," Satin yawned. Velvet stretched. Time was of no concern to them.

  Silvas leaned out the window to look at the sky. The heavens were clear, the stars bright and sharply etched against the black canopy. On his way to the pentagram, Silvas moved his knife belt, fastening it over his heavy robe. The knife rested comfortably at his right hip, where he could reach it quickly at need.

  "Okay, it's time," Silvas said as he stepped inside the pentagram again. The cats moved quickly to the same circles they had occupied the night before. They curled up, making sure that no part of their bodies, not even the tip of a tail, touched the pink crystal of a circle. And they kept their heads up now, on alert.

  Silvas went to the exact center of the pentagram. He faced north, with his feet spread comfortably apart. He chanted softly. After a few moments he turned to his right, facing the next point of the pentagram and repeated the chant. He repeated the same preliminary spell facing each point of the pentagram and each point of the compass. A council took some preparation.

  The candles in the room seemed to dim by half. The crystal lines of the pentagram and the circles started to glow. When Silvas faced north again, he spoke a different chant, invoking his Unseen Lord. A Wizard's Council was a formal magic, and Auroreus had cautioned the greatest precision in preparation. "You'll rarely be more exposed than during a Council," the old wizard had said time after time. "You touch others, you include them within your nearest shields. A mistake, even if it does not touch you, can touch those you bring in."

  As he did every time he summoned a Council, Silvas stopped when he had completed the last of his preparatory spells and reviewed them in his mind to be certain that he had omitted nothing. The spells were tools, effective only when used by the proper sort of artisan. Only the combination of spell and wizard could invoke this magic. The making of a wizard required both talent and training. Either alone was insufficient.

  Silvas closed his eyes briefly to let his wizard's senses reach out around him. There had been plenty of time for the others to get to that deep stage of sleep that made the summoning easiest.

  It is time, Silvas told himself. He sat cross-legged in the center of the pentagram, facing north, and moved into the spell of Summoning. The candles went out. The glow of the pentagram and circles increased. The walls and ceiling picked up in luminescence. Light without shadow softened the room.

  At the end of the first stanza of this spell, Silvas closed his eyes, but he could still see the room in front of him clearly. The lines of the pentagram, the surfaces of wall and floor, the two cats-all were plainly visible. The spell was working properly.

  The conclusion of the second stanza brought a soft hum to the air around Silvas, low-pitched, relaxing rather than annoying.

  After the third stanza, Silvas stood-rose up out of himself-and walked to the north point of the pentagram. He turned around and looked at his sitting body in the center, motionless but for a slight movement of the lips as the chanting continued. Then Silvas looked down at the ghostly Doppelganger that his incantation had expelled. The spirit body was a perfect duplicate of the physical body sitting in front of him, only less substantial. It wore the same robe, had the knife belt strapped on exactly so. But Silvas could see through the facsimile that currently held his consciousness.

  He waited until the original seated on the floor reached the end of the fourth stanza of the incantation, then stepped out of the pentagram. Satin and Velvet looked up at him, then down at him in the center of the pentagram. Silvas's Doppelganger smiled at the cats but didn't speak. He knew that Satin and Velvet could see this other body, just as they could hear sounds that no human could. The cats weren't bothered by the duplication. They had seen this magic before.

>   Silvas walked from the room. Mentally he walked, but the Doppelganger seemed to float. The legs and feet moved, but the motion was more glide than step. It was faster and more direct than he could manage with his physical body. He almost followed the corridors but not quite. The spirit body took shortcuts that weren't readily detectable, except that certain parts of the journey were elided.

  The wizard went first to the bedroom he shared with Carillia. He spoke her name and extended his right hand. Carillia sat up and then stood, while her body remained sleeping on the bed. Carillia didn't bother to look down at the sleeping form. She took Silvas's hand for an instant. Then he gestured toward the door, and she walked out ahead of him.

  When Silvas got through the doorway, there was no sign of Carillia. The wizard turned and headed toward the second-floor room in the tower next to the stables. There he summoned Bosc and gestured the groom through to the Council as he had Carillia.

  Bay was the last to be summoned. The giant horse was waiting and stepped out of his physical body even before Silvas called his name. Again Silvas gestured. Bay preceded him, and vanished from the wizard's sight beyond the stable door, but only for a moment.

  Silvas turned, stepped through a wall, and into council.

  The room in which Silvas's Council met did not exist within the Seven Towers. The wizard wasn't certain that it actually existed, physically, anywhere. The room was poorly defined visually, even more ethereal than the forms of the advisers Silvas had summoned. There were walls, ceiling, and floor, but it would be difficult to point to their exact positions or intersections. The only furnishings in the room were three chairs and a small round table, wood to the eye but insubstantial. They would hold the Doppelganger forms they were designed for, but the furniture was as transparent as the rest.

  Silvas sat in the middle chair. Carillia sat to his right, Bosc to his left. Bay stood at the table across from Silvas, in the spot that had no chair.

  Transparency wasn't the only noticeable difference about the bodiless bodies at the Council. Bay didn't seem so overwhelming in size. Bosc didn't appear so diminutive. They looked the same as usual, but their sizes seemed more in harmony with each other.

  Silvas looked slowly around the table. There was a feeling of timelessness about a Council, as if it possessed an instant out of eternity. Bosc's movements showed none of the jerkiness that they did in the flesh. He sat quietly, eyes fixed on Silvas, not even blinking. His hands were on the table, fingers laced together. Bay didn't fidget either. His eyes were directly on a level with Silvas's. Carillia was as serene as ever, a slight smile on her face as she watched her wizard watching her. All three of Silvas's advisers wore auras of calm waiting.

  "There is evil in Mecq," Silvas said finally. He spoke slowly and systematically listed what he knew or suspected about the situation in Mecq, labeling knowledge and speculation accordingly. He spoke of the things that he and Bay had seen and heard since topping the ridge to enter the valley. The only item that Silvas did not mention was his forced audience with the old man in the forest clearing.

  "I have made no secret of my feeling that this may be the place for the grand confrontation we have wasted so much time in baseless speculation about over the years," Silvas said after he finished his report. "Everything I see and hear-the attack on us last night, the illness I cured this morning, the connection of Mecq to the crusade against the Blue Rose, and on-strengthens my opinion that we have reached the site of that battle. But it is still only an opinion. I cannot see any details, any certain flow of events from one to two. But the Blue Rose seems to be so deeply involved that there must be more to this than a dispute over water rights."

  Silvas paused, but none of the others spoke. They sensed that he had not finished yet. After a moment the wizard resumed.

  "Particularly right now while we meet in Council, I feel that great powers are walking the land, approaching, arming to do battle here. It is a strong feeling, but I can find no clear definition, no focus. I need your counsel."

  Carillia was the first to reply.

  "I too sense the powers that approach." Her voice seemed subtly different in the spirit, less musical, more forceful. But her eyes were still the deep emerald green of her physical body's eyes, the most vibrant color in the chamber. At the same time the soft blues and greens of her aura changed into richer tones of power.

  "I would not dispute anything you said." She looked straight at Silvas. There was no "my heart" in Council. "Mecq is not as simple a country village as it seems on the surface. There are levels of complication and contradiction that make no sense alone. There are mists and storms that divert and disturb any investigation. I have never felt this level of power in connection with the Blue Rose. It is disquieting."

  "The ground itself is troubled," Bosc said, knowing precisely when Carillia was finished. There was no servility in the groom now. He was no servant here but an adviser, equal to the others who had been summoned. "The drought has been laid on this land as a punishment, and the land cries out that it has done nothing to deserve such treatment. It can stand little more. If the dryness continues for many more years, the ground will turn bitter and nothing will ever grow on it again."

  Bay picked up as soon as Bosc finished.

  "There are still too many uncertainties here for-" Bay stopped as abruptly as he had started.

  There was a trembling, a shaking, as if the land itself were being upheaved. Bright splatters of light flickered through and around the room, crackling and hissing, leaving a distressed smell behind. The room itself seemed to pulse, moving in and out. Even the table rocked. But no earthquake could affect a Council.

  "We appear to be under attack again," Silvas said, extending his mind to gauge the strength of this assault, and to ensure that his safeguards were holding. There seemed to be no immediate danger.

  "Bay, you were saying?" Silvas worked hard to keep his voice level, but it was difficult. In Council the others could all detect the slightest hint of uncertainty.

  "Too much uncertainty remains for us to plot any active steps in Mecq," Bay said. "We cannot strike accurately until we can see the target."

  Silvas looked away from the table again, and Bay quit speaking. The light and sound effects were stronger, interfering. The wizard chanted softly, putting his mind in touch with the outer defenses of the Seven Towers and with the threads of the special defenses he had erected to protect this Council.

  "Everything seems to be holding," he told the others when he finished. "I don't seem to be needed to take direct charge." He shrugged. "But the distraction. We might as well bring this Council to an end. As always, I count on your advice."

  Silvas closed his eyes and chanted. The others vanished even as his eyelids drooped shut. They would return directly to their physical bodies. Silvas expected to wake and find himself back in the center of his pentagram, where he could take whatever steps might be necessary to turn back this new attack on his home.

  He expected to find himself back in his pentagram.

  – |He did not expect to wake in the midst of an insanity beyond his wildest imagining. He did not expect to find chaos swirling around him, but he could find no better word to describe what he found when he opened his eyes.

  He was in a kaleidoscope, in the middle of an earth-rending explosion of sound and color that threatened to deafen and blind him before he could even guess where he might have gone. Everything was too loud, too bright, too fast for him to grasp any of the sounds or images. It was as if he were witnessing a magic that he didn't have the power to grasp, the way the villagers who had heard his first chants in Mecq couldn't hold on to his words as the smoke rose to receive the Glade.

  Silvas prayed for help, for guidance. His chants to the Unseen Lord tripped over each other. He felt himself being tossed and tumbled like a leaf in a cyclone, hurled about with no chance to affect his destination or his destiny.

  He spoke a spell of calming for himself, and he had not been forced to do that s
ince the death of Auroreus, when he had found himself suddenly master of the Seven Towers and responsible for all its inhabitants. Generations had been born and died in the world since then.

  "What is happening?" was not a thought but a cry unheard in the maelstrom. "Where am I?"

  He fought panic. He could not identify the visions he saw or the sounds he heard. There was an alienness about it that defied even his imagination. The Council had felt as timeless as always. Now time seemed to be rushing to consume itself, to burn itself to extinction.

  Silvas took an age and an age to fight his panic, calling on the strongest spells of self-control Auroreus had taught him. As they finally took hold, Silvas was even able to wonder that they had worked at all.

  His first guess at the cause of his distress was unavoidable. I've been taken by the god who has put his power behind the Blue Rose. He could picture himself being taken to some place of eternal torture. The Blue Rose was the faith of punishment. Their notions of Hell were detailed and pervasive. And if a god had decided that he liked those notions of torturous retribution…

  But the first guess had weaknesses, and long before Silvas quit spinning and tossing, he had discarded it. My magic would not work if I had been taken by a god of the Blue Rose. I could not have calmed myself. That brought a measure of peace to his soul, despite the fact that his circumstances had not improved.

  If my magic still works, there must be a way to win free of whatever this is. That turned his thoughts to more productive courses. If there was a solution within his power, there would be a way to find it. He had the training and experience. And now he had the calmness to apply them.

  For the first time his brain started to register some of the things he was seeing-an alien landscape that would not fit in any "present" or "past" that Silvas knew. There were people here, wherever "here" was. They were dressed strangely, but they were people and didn't seem to be undergoing the tortures of the damned. There was a lot of stone and metal and glass. Enclosed wagons of shiny metal and glass hurled past as if they had been slung from catapults; no animals pulled them. Noises echoed and screeched, threatening hearing with their constant insanity. The smells were different from any Silvas was familiar with, but the air itself seemed sufficiently noxious for any priest's visions of Hell. There were people walking, others riding in the peculiar vehicles, but no one in this vision showed any awareness of Silvas.