by Dorian Hart
For a quick instant two little pinpricks of light shone through his closed eyelids. His eyes snapped open, but there was nothing.
A scuff of brisk footsteps mixed with the fading echoes of the bells. A woman approached, long golden hair unbound and flowing, the hem of her gold and white robe whispering against the marble floor.
Tor confronted her first. “How is Aravia? Will she live?”
The woman smiled. “Peace, young man. Yes, she will live. Your friend contracted a disease of the blood from the bites of the vermin, but we have divined a remedy that will cleanse her. She must rest for three days and be given a dose of our medicine every two hours without fail, until what we have mixed for her is gone. Do this, and she should suffer no lasting ill effects. And here she comes now.”
Aravia appeared in the inner doorway of the guest hall, flanked by Dranko on one side and a golden-robed man on the other. Pale and dotted with scars, she walked slowly but under her own power, and didn’t appear to be shaking. Pewter was wrapped around her neck, sleeping.
“Aravia tells us that you have a place to stay here in the citrine district,” said the priest. “Our beds here at the church are always in short supply, so we are releasing her into your collective care. Her cat should rest as well; it is not sick, but it lost a great deal of blood defending its owner.” He looked at Aravia. “I hope you appreciate its loyalty.”
“His loyalty,” said Aravia sleepily. “And I appreciate everything about him.”
“Gah!” Grey Wolf bent at the waist, clutching at his stomach. “Oh no…”
Darkness fell, and it didn’t. Kibi couldn’t say afterward if it was night or day for that minute. It was twilight dark, like the inside of a cave at dusk, but the sun still streamed in bright through the skylights and picked out the statues like sunbeams through gaps in a storm cloud.
Rust-colored grass grew up right through the marble floor, and the air above it smelled fresh as a harvest. Jet black field mice scampered about in confusion—and one was picked up by a gray owl that swooped silently out of the darkness. But the owl thereafter slammed into one of the statues. The mouse dropped from its talons and ran away squeaking while the owl tumbled to the floor, shook out its feathers, and launched itself into the night sky.
The Sunwardens nearby, half a dozen of them, were in obvious shock, some pointing and staring, others making repeated circular gestures with their hands, as though trying to ward off bad spirits. Grey Wolf clutched his golden bracelet with his other hand, his face twisted up like a stone gargoyle.
“What is happening?” cried one of the Sunwardens. His voice sounded flat and distant, as though he stood in a field with a breeze carrying his words away. Which he was, after a fashion.
And then all returned to normal.
The Kemmans stopped looking mostly up and brought their stares down upon Horn’s Company. Kibi doubted that forcing unnatural darkness into a sun goddess’s church would make them very popular.
“Wow!” said Dranko. He looked at the priest who had been walking Aravia out to them. “Was that show part of what we get for all the miracs we gave you? How did you do that thing with the owl?”
The priest spluttered and waved his arms. “That was no artifice of Kemma!”
“Well you can bet it wasn’t us,” said Tor. “We were just standing here.”
“But the darkness…”
Tor looked as though he would keep protesting, but Dranko jumped back in. “I wish we had a wizard that powerful. Whatever it was, you should thank Kemma it didn’t last very long.”
The priestess with the golden hair whispered something in the priest’s ear.
“You should go,” he said. “We will pray for understanding of what happened here.”
“I wish you luck,” said Dranko.
Dranko could talk faster than Kibi could think, and a good thing, too. Kibi looked back wistfully at the beautiful ceiling as they exited the guest hall together, Grey Wolf doing his best to hide any after-effects of his discomfort. A priest stood on the high balcony, looking down upon them, and though Kibi was too far away to be certain, he fancied that the man’s eyes were wide with something like recognition. Had he been standing there when the darkness had sprung up? For a second their gazes locked; the man quickly turned away and moved out of sight.
* * *
Lunchtime at the Jeweled Crow came and went with no sign of Burning Candle. Ernie had taken a tray of food up to Aravia, and the rest finished up a fine meal brought to their table by the innkeeper himself, a stout gentleman named Hammered Iron. That seemed to be how folks born in Djaw were named, and it took some getting used to. The woman who cleared the tables was named Sinuous Fox, which made Dranko snicker a bit whenever someone addressed her. Like just about everyone who frequented the Jeweled Crow, Hammered Iron was aghast at how Aravia and Tor had been set upon by vermin. The attack was a choice bit of gossip for the locals.
“To think that honored guests to our city would suffer such a thing. Unheard of! Appalling! But I promise you I have never seen a tail or whisker here in the Jeweled Crow. Here you will have a fortress against the rodents of the street and enjoy my finest hospitality.”
“We’re very grateful,” said Ernie.
Hammered Iron bowed before them. “I understand your injured friend may need additional days of rest. As long as she needs to recover, I will not charge her for room or board.”
Kibi raised his mug in thanks, and the others followed his lead. Hammered Iron bowed a second time and hurried away, shouting orders that lunch should be served to their guests without delay.
Dranko took a long swig of his beer and smirked. “Clever fellow. Giving Aravia a free ride makes us more likely to stay longer, and he’s still charging the rest of us full rates. I like how he thinks.”
Morningstar came downstairs halfway through lunch, which meant it was Kibi’s turn with Aravia. He took two hasty bites of bread, pushed back his chair, and polished off a mug of something that was more-or-less beer but with an aftertaste he didn’t fancy.
Upstairs, Aravia was propped up in her bed with a book, one hand holding it open, the other working through some painful looking finger-bends. Pewter slept curled up on her feet. Kibi expected she’d dismiss him or at least bid him sit and be quiet so as not to disturb her, but as soon as he had shut the door behind him she closed the book and dropped both hands to her lap.
“Hello, Kibi. Has there been any news from Burning Candle?”
“Nope. Grey Wolf is sure she skedaddled with our coins and ain’t comin’ back. Dranko says we just gotta wait, but I think Grey Wolf’s got the right of it. So, how are you feelin’? Medicine doin’ its job?”
“I think it’s too early to tell, but thank you for asking. The concoction tastes vile, but I’m sure dying of rat disease would be worse.”
Kibi smiled at her. “From my own experience, I’d say the worse a medicine tastes, the more likely it’s gonna do its job.”
“Then I should be better in no time.”
Pewter opened his eyes and raised his head, staring directly at Aravia. He looked a bit mangy; the rats must’ve taken some of the fur off him during the attack.
“I was hoping to talk to you,” said Aravia. “I’ve been meaning to since we escaped from Trev-Lyndyn, but I’ve been extremely preoccupied with the problem of returning to Abernathy once we’ve obtained the Crosser’s Maze.”
Kibi lifted his eyebrows in surprise. Aravia hadn’t said much to him in all the months they’d been working together. He’d be the first to admit that his mind worked in slow ways, and Aravia never had much patience for him.
“You got two hours to go before your next sip a’ medicine,” he said. “I’d be happy to chat a bit.”
“It’s about your magic,” said Aravia.
“My magic? I ain’t got no—”
“Your stone-working magic.”
Ah. That. “I’ve tried to explain it before, but it’s hard to describe.”
; “Could you try again? I want to hear as much about it as you can elucidate.”
Kibi figured “elucidate” must mean “talk about.” He shifted in the chair beside Aravia’s bed. “I suppose. It’s…”
He had made some attempts at this, in small ways, to Morningstar and Ernie, but something told him Aravia would want a more technical explanation. Problem was, there wasn’t one.
“So, the stone,” he said. “You can kind a’ imagine it’s a livin’ thing, with things it wants and doesn’t want, just like you and me. Before I can do my stone-shapin’, I gotta talk—well, no, not talk, exactly—I gotta recognize how the stone feels ’bout things and try to make it understand what I’d like it to do.”
“What language does it speak?”
“Oh, it ain’t language, not usually, not in the way you think of it. Now, the Eyes a’ Moirel and the Seven Mirrors, they spoke in clear words, but most a’ the time it’s not so simple. I think my brain hears what the stone is sayin’ in words, but the stone itself ain’t usin’ no language.” He shook his head and laughed at himself. “Yeah, I know, that don’t make no sense. Maybe if I knew more fancy words about magic, I could make this more clear.”
Aravia glanced at Pewter. “No, I think you’re doing fine. But I could ask the stone to change its shape as politely as I please, and nothing would happen. There must be a source of your magic. Do you have any sense of where your stone-shaping comes from?”
It made sense that there’d be an answer to that, but Kibi had never considered it in those terms. “Maybe I’d have an easier time with this if you explain how your magic works.” He chuckled. “But remember, the fancier the words you use, the more they’re gonna fly over my head. Pretend you’re a teacher and I’m the slowest student you ever had.” Which is just about the truth.
Aravia reached out and gave Pewter a scratch behind the ears. “I’ll do my best. To begin, magic is a substance that’s in the air all around us. There’s some debate as to its specific nature; my teacher, Master Serpicore, calls it the ‘aether,’ and Abernathy used the same term the night he summoned us. We don’t know if its mixed in with the gases of the air or is an entirely separate phenomenon, but it’s evenly diffused and always available.”
“Right,” said Kibi, though he had to guess at what “diffused” meant. “I get you so far. But when I asked you ’bout it before, you said you had to be born a certain way to be a wizard.”
“Yes, that’s right. An easy way to think of it is to consider the subset of people who cannot discern certain colors. Imagine you could not tell red from green, and all books in the world were written with red ink on green-dyed pages. You might be the most intelligent person in your village and willing to practice reading ten hours a day, but it wouldn’t matter. When it comes to manipulating the aether, almost everyone on Spira cannot tell red from green, as it were.”
“But you can. Is wizardry just a matter a’ learnin’ how to reach out and stir up the aether, then?”
“That’s a simple way to think about it. The aether can be manipulated—coerced, you might say—to bring about certain effects. At the heart of it is simply imagining what you want done, but that doesn’t mean a wizard can do anything she desires. It’s not just imagining a thing, but understanding how the aether can bring it about. And the way we understand that is through a rigorous intellectual framework most analogous to a complex branch of physics or mathematics.”
Kibi was losing the thread of her explanation, but at least he could grasp that magic was like arithmetic. He didn’t need to tell Aravia to keep going; she was rolling like a log downhill.
“There are two ways we directly manipulate the aether: sounds and gestures. And because the whole system is so complex, over the years wizards have discovered and codified specific sets of sounds and gestures into spell formulas. For instance, sometime in the past some wizard worked out the precise words and hand motions, combined with an innate mental understanding—the physical real-world application of the effect—that charge the aether to work a telekinetic effect on an object or creature.”
“Sorry, but you lost me.”
Aravia thought for a moment. “It’s like a recipe for stew. You would combine broth, potatoes, chunks of goat, carrots, leeks, and so on, then heat them to the right temperature and stir periodically. You could write all that down and at the top call it ‘recipe for goat stew.’ For me, I combine these finger positions and gestures with these words, timed just so, and at the same time I fix in my head an understanding of how an apple would physically fly through the air if someone threw it. I put it together and call it ‘formula for minor arcanokinesis.’”
She said something quick and quiet, quirked her fingers oddly, and an apple flew from a bedside tray and thunked into her hand.
“The main difference is that stew is easy to prepare, and the consequences of failure are mild. Even a simple spell requires exceptional precision, concentration, and knowledge, can take weeks or months to master, and the failure cases can be quite perilous. And, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, the act of translating theory into effect is quite draining on the caster.
Kibi turned all that over in his head. “I ain’t never got tired or drained or what have you. Hells, gettin’ stone to shape itself is a right bit easier than doin’ it with a hammer and chisel.”
Aravia took a bite of the apple. “It would be useful to figure out how that’s possible. Wizards have been trying for centuries to find ways of reducing the toll magic takes, but none have succeeded, not truly. The only thing that works is time and practice; the more familiar a wizard becomes with evoking a specific formula, the less draining it becomes. But it’s a slow process. And, yes, we can make small variations to established formulas, but in order to make magic less taxing, we have to reduce its effect. Longer casting times, weaker physical forces, shorter durations of energetic phenomena. I’m not familiar with any spells that open tunnels through stone walls, but I would guess that a person replicating your recent feats through traditional wizardry would be seriously enervated.”
“Enervated?”
“Sorry. Exhausted.”
“Right. You asked me where my ability comes from, and I was hopin’ hearin’ you talk ’bout magic might give me some idea, but I still don’t know. The only thing in common is, as part a’ your magic you imagine how it’ll come about, and as part a’ mine I picture what I’d like the stone to do. But I don’t feel like there’s any aether or nothin’. You make the magic happen yourself. I ask the stone to do it instead.”
Aravia scooted her feet down and lay back on the bed; Pewter hardly budged, staying curled on her waist. She closed her eyes and didn’t say anything for a minute or two, as if maybe all that talk had worn her out. But she spoke again.
“I see three possibilities, leaving aside the questions we still can’t answer. One, you’re performing normal magic, coercing the aether, but you don’t realize what you’re doing. Perhaps because of your ignorance, your talent is restricted to stone. Two, your abilities are divinely sourced. One of the gods has granted you this ability for reasons he or she hasn’t deigned to share with you.”
Neither of those sounded right. “And the third?”
“The third is that you’re something that the world has never seen before.”
Kibi thought of his mother, Gela, a woman his father had discovered alone in a gully, with no memories of a past life or how she had come to be there. How many times had he wondered about his maternal grandparents? And then there was the purple Eye of Moirel. It had looked right at him, in a manner of speaking, and said, “My regards to your grandfather.”
He kept those thoughts to himself, having already chased them around in his head without catching anything useful. Had the Eye implied he’d meet his ma’s pa someday? That couldn’t be; he’d be a hundred years old! But Aravia was wrong. The world had seen someone like Kibi before. His grandpa must have been like him. Nothing else made sense.
Aravia yawned.
“Pewter reminds me I should sleep. If he falls asleep, too, could you wake me when it’s time for my next dose?”
Kibi watched her doze, pondering the nature of his abilities, until Grey Wolf arrived to take his turn. Downstairs, Morningstar had saved him some fruit, the last heel of bread, and a lump of half-melted butter.
The remainder of the day crept slowly past. Each time the door of the Jeweled Crow opened, everyone who was downstairs would look up, hoping to see Burning Candle. It was never her. Dranko complained that the table gossip was boring, that the patrons of the inn talked too much of clothes and music and local politics. A couple of times folks talked about the odd thing that had occurred that morning at the local Church of Kemma, some kind of tremendous magical illusion, with the sorcerer still at large. Horn’s Company, by good fortune, had for the moment escaped any specific connection with that event. Grey Wolf had convinced Tor not to talk about it; no need to draw additional attention to themselves.
Aravia felt markedly better by dinnertime, coming down to the commons and joining the rest for the evening meal.
“If I continue to recover at this rate, I will be back to my normal self by the day after tomorrow. Pewter may need an additional day or two; his bites were more severe.”
“But what are we going to do?” asked Ernie. “If Burning Candle doesn’t come back, we’ll have to find out about… about her, ourselves, and given Candle’s reaction, I don’t see that going well.”
“She’s not coming back,” said Grey Wolf. “Dranko’s gamble didn’t pay off.”
Dranko cast a glance at the door. “I’m starting to agree with you. But she’s not the only source of information in Djaw, you can bet on that. A city’s a city, and ferreting out information is one of my specialties.”
Aravia sipped from a cup of water. “Consider that Parthol Runecarver’s intelligence is centuries old. Most likely there was a shrine to our evil goddess in the distant past, but in the years since then it has been destroyed and abandoned. Our hope will rest on there being some records or other evidence that survived the purge.”