Maverick

by Curtis, Greg

  “Above all it is a place of death. Nothing lives there, nothing goes near. The air is cold and bitter with the smell of decay, and the only living things even nearby are great hawks that fly overhead, fly very far above it. They do not land there, do not nest nearby.”

  “No they don’t.” The sylph stared at him for a moment, the strangest expression in his eyes, before he turned to the others.

  “I know this place. All of my people do, though it is not a place we would visit if we could. It is dark and cold and above all a place where the soul withers. And I suspect it is a place that the enemy will have a difficult time reaching.” He paused for a moment, lost in thought. “You know it too.”

  Everyone stared at him, shocked, and slowly weighing up the implications, the first of which as far as Marjan was concerned, was the fact that it was a real place. His dream was not just a dream, it was a vision.

  “Where?” The elder spoke for them all, and he suspected she didn’t really want to hear the answer. It was a case of having to rather than wanting to.

  “Lochore Bridge.” He spoke its name with absolute certainty and for a moment Marjan believed him, until he remembered the rest. They had been there, not a year before, and there was no such terrace, there was no such peak. Still instead of mentioning that he held his questions back and let the others ask instead.

  “Marjan’s vision is of a time long ago, a time before the bridge had become as it is today. A time when it was an actual mountain and a time before the great chasm had formed. In truth our seekers of the past say that the chasm when it formed was the cause of the mountain it fall and the bridge to form. As to how that happened we don’t know. The magic involved in its creation is beyond anything even my people can imagine, and we can imagine very much.”

  “But we do know something of how it was shaped.”

  “Once, before the chasm formed there was a peak there, a place of dark power, and some of our seekers of knowledge say, a home of the old gods. Also so we believe, a home of the oldest and most powerful of magic users, including it would now seem, Qua’thor himself.”

  “They lived in what was until Marjan here levelled it, the great black castle which stood upon its lowest foot hill, and they worshipped or studied on a terrace further up the side of the mountain, using it in the same way a modern wizard uses a tower. A place where dangerous magics can be released, and the people cannot be harmed. It was warded, and we believed that the pillars Marjan has described were the spell fonts of those wards.”

  “But when the chasm formed, when whatever terrible magic was unleashed that could split a continent, much of it was destroyed. The castle on the lower foothills remained, possible protected by the magic of those who dwelt within, but everything above it was shorn away. And what was shorn away slid off the new terrace that had formed, to fall far down to the bottom of the chasm below.” It made sense Marjan realised, save for one problem, surely if even the mountain had fallen into the chasm, it would still have been large enough to be seen from the bridge, and there was no mountain below. Again he let others ask the question for him.

  “But you can see it. It’s just that it no longer looks like a mountain because it landed upside down. The peak buried itself in the bottom of the chasm, its flat base exposed to the sun and known as the Broken Terrace. Ironic really, when if you descend all the way down to the bottom of the chasm and look up, you can see the actual terrace, and the very pillars Marjan has described, hanging upside down a third of league above you.”

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  Chapter Twenty-Three.

  “We must destroy the lock and seal him in for eternity.” The sylph was only echoing what many of the other spellcasters had been saying all morning, seal him in, make sure he could never escape. And it seemed so simple, so right.

  “But the ancients never did that.” A gnomish caster stood up and responded exactly as had so many others before him. All morning the argument had raged back and forth among the assembled casters, and all morning not a single thing had been agreed upon. Destroying the lock and sealing the gate was the logical thing to do, if it would trap the dark wizard in the void forever, but the ancients hadn’t done it, and they had to have known the dangers inherent in leaving a gate to the void behind, locked or other wise, which meant they had had a reason for not destroying the lock.

  All around Marjan could see heads nodding and shaking, he could hear the continuing murmur as the assembled disagreed with both speakers and with each other. Some saw the danger, that in destroying the lock they might actually open the gate and release Qua’thor, others the hope that in doing it they would ensure it could never be opened. But everyone knew the risk, that if they left things as they were, sooner or later one of his servants would find the key and release him. That could not be allowed. But what to do? Already the meeting was six hours old and not a single decision had been made, except of course for the fact that there was an agreement that something had to be done.

  “We destroy his servants, all of them.” Arison the eldest of the dryads spoke up again, repeating exactly what he had said before, and it was logical, except that they didn’t know who all of his servants were. With the holy places awakened and the fires relit, they could fight the wyrmlings and destroy them, they already were, and there was some hope even that most of them were already destroyed, the dark wizard had not had a limitless army after all, and as they began their slow march north across the chasm to reclaim old lands, the battles were fewer than expected. A dozen battles had been fought over the previous months, a dozen more armies destroyed, and some of those armies had been powerful, but still it wasn’t the all out never-ending pitched war that had been expected. The cost of Qua’thor’s war might have been terrible, the number of dead countless, but he had lost so many armies that the dark wizard was also weakened. They hoped. But there was still one problem.

  “We don’t know who all his servants are.” Master Silas standing in the middle of the makeshift meeting chamber and continually stroking his beard as he had all morning, repeated the only answer he had, again, and it was true. They had no idea how many more might have fallen under Qua’thor’s spell. Certainly the two adepts from the guild that they knew of, one dead a decade or more and the other saying nothing at all except to laugh at them, were but the beginning. There were more.

  Dimeter had said nothing except to acknowledge his master, but intensive scrying of his past had revealed others. Other wizards, other sylph, other dwarves and even other dryads. The dark wizard had cast his net wide, and only a few of those he had caught had been found, and they too like Dimeter, were saying nothing. Fully a score of prisoners were now spending their days in specially prepared prisons, and not a single word from them, not a confession. None denied it, they would not dare deny their lord, but they weren’t about to betray him either.

  It was more than loyalty at work, more than even fear Marjan thought and others agreed. It was almost as if they were owned by the dark wizard, body and soul, and maybe they were. No one knew the nature of his magic, nor the power. All they had were legends to work with. That he was a great necromancer, and a powerful summoner. So maybe he could have bound them to him.

  “But we have a start.” One of the other sylph spoke up from somewhere in the back, with so many people there of all races it was nearly impossible to make him out in the audience, but he had a strong voice and a clear message. “We hunt them down, we scry, we capture, we interrogate and we keep going. We do not give up, and sooner or later we will have them all. Then when all are caught, when what remains of his armies are destroyed, we set new wards, new seals, and we make sure no one can ever go near the gate again.”

  There was a fair smattering of clapping and muted agreement from the others around him, and to be fair Marjan would have joined them had it been seemly for a junior mage like himself to do so, but he was only there on sufferance, admitted to the gathering because he had given them the knowledge and they hoped his link to the Go
ddess might perhaps yield a little more in time. It wasn’t a perfect solution, like all the others it had risks, but it seemed the best.

  “And we ensure that Gallanar’s knowledge is never again set free for others to play with.” Master Vant very nearly received a standing ovation for those few words. It was the one thing everyone could agree on. No more portals to the void, ever. There was some magic that was simply too dangerous to be played with, which was one reason Marjan wasn’t so unhappy that much of his library including everything that Gallanar had written, was gone, vanished into the large guild libraries never to see the light of day again. Though he loved reading of the ancient wizard, whatever happened, he would never be responsible for any of his students learning such dangerous magic.

  “Its not enough.” Another wizard somewhere near the back of the gathering stood up and gave his opposing view, and of course others supported him immediately. It wasn’t enough. Nothing was enough. But it was all they had, in Marjan’s view. Of course his view didn’t matter, he didn’t even get to speak, and so even as he wanted to he had to watch as the meeting turned once more, and everyone started speaking at once.

  ‘Hunt down the dark wizard’s servants. They would never find them all. Hide and seal the gate. Destroy the lock. Seal him up forever. Don’t dare destroy the lock. It’ll release him.’ All morning the same, and probably it would be the same all afternoon.

  Soon the spellcasters began shouting, each trying to make their own opinion heard over all the others, and it became hard to make out anything at all. The meeting was becoming a shouting match. It wasn’t the first time that day, it wouldn’t be the last, and yet somehow out of this disorganised rabble of spellcasters they had to come up with a plan. Somehow as he sat there and resisted the urge to bury his head in his hands, Marjan knew that was going to be a very long way away, if it ever happened at all.

  It was going to be a long day.

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  Chapter Twenty-Four.

  Marjan stepped through the portal following the hundreds of others, and then like most of them stopped dead in shock when he arrived at the other side.

  “Ephesus be praised!” It was impossible. Marjan was staggered to be at the bottom of the chasm and to look up and see the mountain towering above his head, upside down. To see the sheer walls of dark rock, extending upwards and outwards, forcing him to crane his head further and further backwards until the mountain arched right over him and almost seemed to be about to fall on him, was just impossible. Impossible on a level he’d never before imagined. And of course as he kept craning his neck back further and further to try and see the edge of the mountain, he almost fell backwards, something he guessed wasn’t his mistake alone. To make it worse, on both sides the sheer rock walls of the chasm so far away from him also towered high above him, making the little sky that he could see a thin ribbon of blue high above while he stood in shadow. The sun was nowhere to be seen, and they were all in shadow, a permanent condition in the bottom of the chasm so he guessed, and the air was cold and damp, depressingly heavy. It almost felt as though he was being buried alive.

  It took a moment to steady his nerves, and to convince himself that the mountain wasn’t falling on him, though from the huge piles of rubble and large rocks all around, some larger than castles, it seemed that it actually was slowly crumbling down. And then when someone pointed and he followed his arm, he could see the portal itself, and just setting his eyes on it, felt a moment of dread pass right through him. It might just have been fear, but it almost seemed to him that something dark and evil in the portal itself was staring back at him.

  He wasn’t alone, and when he finally managed to tear his eyes away from the portal and back to the ground, it was to see others around him all showing the same emotions, shock, awe and fear. It was written in their eyes, in the pallor of their skin, and the way that they all like him, instinctively wanted to take a quick step backwards into the portal if not run screaming.

  Staring up at the sheer scale of the upside down peak, he found himself awed by the power of the ancients, whoever they were. To have somehow not just shaved away the base of the mountain but then to have somehow then pushed it away to leave a flat terrace, that was far more powerful than any magic he’d ever heard of. And all of that had been done just to trap the dark wizard, which spoke volumes as to just how dangerous and powerful he must have been. You didn’t build prisons like this for street cut purses. The one thing he was suddenly certain of was that he never wanted Qua’thor to be free again. If the ancients had had to go to these sorts of lengths just to hold him, there was no way they could stop the dark wizard if he got loose. Not all of them put together.

  At least he wasn’t alone, and he felt Essaline’s hand in his, squeezing just a little tighter than normal, as she too stared at the impossible vista towering over them and tried to withstand the overwhelming feeling that the walls were all coming down upon them.

  “Mother be!” She murmured the blessing softly under her breath and he was tempted to echo her. But what he really wanted to do was send her back to Evensong and safety, far away from this terrible place of darkness. She should never have come, but she had insisted, the rest of the priests too, and they could not be argued with. They would not be argued with, and surely fifty priests and priestesses were standing with them. At least as many dryads were with them, and they too looked a little pale under their normally well tanned skin, but determined. What they thought they could do here, especially if everything went wrong, Marjan didn’t know, but still they leant him a feeling of comfort in this dark place.

  “Let the Lady be, and start the preparations.” Master Argus was in fine form as he dismissed their ‘silly rituals’ as he called them, but for once Marjan was glad of his rough manner. It helped to focus him on the task at hand, not that he had much to do. He was just along to witness, too minor a wizard to be involved in the spell, but accepted as being a representative of both Ephesus and the Goddess.

  He wasn’t fooled though, they didn’t think he could be of any use in what was planned, but given that his connection to the Goddess was annoyingly strong even if he was but a pawn, they hoped that if things went wrong with the sealing, and there was always that chance, he would provide another defence as the lady spoke through him. It wasn’t a comforting thought, especially when the Goddess didn’t speak to him, just occasionally used him. It would have been welcome to have known her thoughts just then or even just to know that she was there with them, that she had a plan.

  “I should join the others.” Essaline gave him a quick kiss on the cheek before she hurried over to the other priests, leaving him standing there alone. Or almost alone, Bearabus nuzzled him a little, reminding him that she was there and probably hungry, and he was grateful for her company. He knelt down and gave her a good scratch behind the ears while she licked at his face. Whoever had brought the little bear cub to him he decided, had not been thanked enough. Of course if they’d managed to teach her a little of cleanliness, that would have been welcome too.

  He sat down beside her and then brought out the small brush he usually carried with him these days, and began the hard work of teasing out her knots, brushing away the dirt and removing the endless pieces of grass and twigs that she seemed to spend most of her days acquiring, enjoying the work, and letting it take away a little of his worry. Bearabus enjoyed it too, stretching out like a cat so his brush could get everywhere. She liked being clean, if only so that she could then rush out and get covered in muck all over again.

  He worked diligently, brushing her down thoroughly so that soon her fur was once more shining in the gloom and ignoring the babbling of the spellcasters as they went over their plan one final time. He knew it off by heart anyway, as did the rest of them. Eventually though, he had to start paying attention as he felt the first of them begin raising the font of magic, calling all the force they could to them, and readying it to be used by the shapers. Marjan stood up about then, put away
the brush and began paying attention once more to the portal so high above them, waiting.

  It was a long wait. Surely eighty or ninety masters of all races were calling the magic to them, drawing it from everywhere, and building it up into a massive ball of potential between them, waiting to be shaped and released, and then when they were done another dozen began transforming it from the raw magic into the locking mechanism they hoped would jam the gate for eternity. And maybe they had reason to hope. It was by far the most powerful spell Marjan had ever witnessed, and his magic sight was screaming at him about the incredible power bound up in it. This was the sort of magic that could level mountains, an unfortunate thought considering where they were.