Once, not that many years ago, jousting had been a civilized sport, with contestants bowing to one another before their passes and taking care to avoid imparting serious injuries. Whether in victory or defeat, opponents had accorded courtesy to one another. Such things were marks of a lost era. The goal was no longer merely to unseat a rival but to humiliate and injure him. Broken bones were common and deaths weren’t unheard of. Rancor had replaced respect. Even those who were friendly away from the tournament became mortal enemies as soon as the games began.
Azarak didn’t know the names of many of the contestants. Dressed as they were in full suits of armor, they all looked alike. They clambered onto their beleaguered mounts, charged toward their adversaries at full speed, then hit the ground with jarring crashes or lifted their arms in triumph. It rarely took more than one pass and never more than three. The rules were specific: the contest continued until someone was separated from his horse.
Rangarak’s first joust was the most anticipated but hardly the most remarkable. He was pitted against a burly, jovial member of a minor noble’s household guard. Against a lesser opponent, the man might have stood a chance despite his obvious limitations as a horseman. Against Rangarak, however, the results were brutal and predictable. As he lay writhing on the ground with a broken leg, the man probably didn’t consider himself lucky, but Azarak knew that a slightly different angle of the lance might have deprived the guard of more than his dignity. The question for the king of Vantok to ponder was whether the Iron King had shown his own brand of mercy or whether he had been clumsy. In the end, it hardly mattered.
Azarak was seated between his chancellor and the unoccupied chair reserved for his new wife. Also on the raised dais were key members of Obis’ royal party, including Azarak’s soon-to-be “vice chancellor” and Grushik’s foul-mouthed companion and brother-in-law.
“Impressive,” said Toranim after Rangarak had departed in triumph. His second round appearance would be later in the day with three more to come on the morrow in the likely event that he continued to advance.
“When it comes to acts of pure physical prowess, few are his peer,” replied Azarak. He kept his voice low so as not to be overheard by Grushik or Sangaska. He need not have worried; the two were so engrossed in drinking and applauding violent collisions that they showed little interest in any conversation between the king of Vantok and his chief advisor. Or so it seemed. Azarak couldn’t help but wonder whether a majority of Grushik’s boorish personality was a carefully constructed disguise. It was difficult to determine whether the man was cunning or stupid. Myselene sided with the latter interpretation but Azarak wasn’t sure.
“We have no one to challenge him,” said Toranim matter-of-factly. “It rankles that Vantok’s grandest sporting event in years will be won by a foreigner.”
“More’s the pity. I’d love to see the bastard unhorsed, and not just for patriotic reasons, but it seems unlikely. His reputation’s warranted. I only hope he doesn’t kill someone on his path to claiming the trophy.”
“Ah, for the days when Vikon was in his prime. He’d have given Rangarak a battle.” Vantok’s soon-to-be-ex-overcommander, a winner in three previous competitions, had originally been slated to compete, but he had backed out upon learning that Rangarak would be a participant. Years ago, Vikon had been a well-loved jousting champion. He had lost only one bout: his final one, the one that drove him into retirement. He had no desire to re-emerge only to be humiliated by the king of Obis. Azarak, however, was less concerned about Vikon’s jousting aspirations than the man’s wavering loyalty.
On the field in front of them, two more contestants were taking their places. Azarak sighed. “I can’t think of a more dull way to spend the first two days of my wedded life.”
Those words would not prove to be prophetic.
* * *
The breeze was gentle and teasing, blowing across Sorial’s bare scalp and tousling Alicia’s hair. It carried the unmistakable aroma of the sea - something he could no longer smell due to his sacrifice at the portal. But that would not be true of his wife and this trip was for her. It was time for her to taste the fullness of her powers. He had spent weeks in isolation ripening his abilities. Thus far, the best she had managed was a few hours by the river.
They were standing on a wide, desolate, rocky beach, naked, with the incoming tide lapping at their toes. Little more than a hundred feet away, whitecaps were breaking with a thunderous roar but the undertow sapped their ferocity before the onrushing cascade of water could reach the wizards. In a way, we’re both in our elements. Even under all this water, there’s still earth.
“It’s so much different than I imagined. All this water. All this power.”
“Can you control it?” That was the key question. Whatever she was going to learn, she had to learn fast. They had little time here; Azarak needed them back in the city two days after the tournament ended in case Rangarak tried something.
She went very still and her gaze became faraway. It was the same way he looked when he was calling for the rock wyrm or attempting a magical feat. “Yes,” she said finally, her voice distant. “But water is heavy. You don’t realize it when you’re swimming in it or drinking it, but it requires a lot of effort to move. The power in those waves...”
He understood. Weight and power. A wizard had to learn to circumvent one and harness the other. For Sorial, the key to moving dirt wasn’t to shift huge amounts at one time, but to transfer it speck by speck. He had discovered that early, but the trick was being able to do it fast enough so that large quantities moved at the same time. Mastering that had allowed him to build Mount Vantok.
He noticed there was no water at his feet. Ten, twenty feet in front of him, the stones were exposed. The sea was receding, pulling away from the beach and gathering into a monstrous wave.
“Go underground, stableboy,” said Alicia, excitement and urgency in her voice. Her eyes sparkled: hard, green, ecstatic. “I can survive this. I don’t think you can, and I don’t know enough to help you.” This was her demonstration but he would be the only one to witness it.
He could have counseled patience. He could have advised her not to try to do too much too soon. But he did neither, because he needed her to take these sorts of risks, just as he would have to push himself in the days and weeks ahead. The Lord of Fire and Lady of Air weren’t going to give them time and space to explore the depth and breadth of their powers. There was no prescribed path to follow. It was all trial and error even though the possibility existed that if either of them overreached, there would be an opening for a new wizard. That was their reality. Circumstances had robbed them of the opportunity to study their craft slowly and meticulously. That’s how wizards had accomplished their apprenticeships a thousand years ago. But those men were long dead; he and Alicia were here now with no guidance but their instincts.
The wave was perhaps forty feet from base to crest when Sorial allowed himself to melt through the stones and into the earth. Unsure how powerful the impact would be when the wave crashed to the ground, he went deep. Even fifty feet below the beach, he felt the concussion when it hit - a mighty tremor that shook the earth for miles around. At that moment, he got a sense of the kind of power Alicia could command if she learned how to do it. He also realized that all the power became available to him at the moment when it was transferred from the water to the earth. If he captured it at the precise instant, he could channel it in any way he saw fit. It was a moment of enlightenment that illustrated a way in which he and Alicia might be able to complement one another in a real-world situation.
The power of the wave reminded him that Alicia’s abilities were more varied and potentially more destructive than his. After all, over time, water could wear away earth, undermining it and eroding it. The Lady of Water could do something as delicate as staunching an injured man’s wound and as devastating as flooding a city and drowning every soul living there. The ability to save lives and to take them.
When Sorial returned to the surface, Alicia was standing in the exact spot where he had left her, drenched but otherwise untouched. She flashed him a smile when she noticed him. “That was fun! Almost as nice as an orgasm but different.” Then she turned serious. “I think I understand your difficulty in bringing me with you when you travel underground. I was able to cushion myself against the impact of the wave - I hardly felt it - but I couldn’t have stopped it from crushing you. My ability to interact with it was limited to my body.”
“I’m sure there’s a way; I just haven’t figured out what it is. But if we’re going to be effective, we need to experiment. Plus, I hate always arriving naked.”
“Endowed like that, you’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. I like you naked, and I’m sure you feel the same about me.”
“Here, it’s fine. But it was damn cold at Ibitsal and it was embarrassing to get undressed in front of kings and half the city’s nobility. I felt like I should have been performing in a brothel.”
Remembering Myselene’s appraising gaze, she remarked, “You may be right.” Then her smile returned. “Let’s play some more!”
That evening, after the sun set, they were snuggling by a small campfire they had started above the high-tide point. It was warm enough that they didn’t need the flames for heat but Sorial preferred cooked fish to raw, although Alicia was surprisingly willing to eat them either way. She claimed raw fish, when prepared a certain way, were considered a delicacy among the nobility. Sorial was dubious of the claim although, in his limited experience, the upper class evidenced some strange tastes.
After eating, they removed blankets from their packs to spread over the beach’s pebbles. Spending a night lying directly on that ground would be uncomfortable even for Sorial. They held each other quietly for a while, listening to the rhythmic crashing of the surf and luxuriating in the warmth exuded by each other’s bodies.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” said Alicia. Her features, illuminated by the ruddy glow of the dying fire, were serious. Her earlier playful demeanor had evaporated.
“While you were with the king this morning, I went to the palace to visit Ferguson. I had a little trouble getting in to see him, since I don’t share your exalted rank, but Myselene helped me get through the checkpoints.”
“Why would you want to see that withered old husk?”
“Those are almost exactly the same words the queen used. To be honest, I’m not sure what I expected from the encounter. I guess I wanted to look him in the eyes. Maybe I wanted an apology.”
“I’m sure you didn’t get one.”
“No; he’s unrepentant. But I’m surprised how old he looks. It’s only a year since my Maturity but he seems to have aged decades. All the life and vitality’s gone. There’s nothing intimidating about him. Yet he seems strangely at peace, almost as if he enjoys the simplicity of sitting in that room reading.”
“I’m sure that’s only temporary. A man don’t easily give up the kind of power he had for decades.”
“Perhaps not, but he seems diminished. He had a lot to say about the upcoming war and the motivations of our enemy.”
Sorial thought back to his recent conversation with the prelate. “I’ll bet he talked in riddles.”
“Not really. I don’t claim to understand half of what he said, but seemed to be trying to speak plainly. He gave me a ‘recommended reading list’ that he said will help me to come to a better realization of what’s happening. And he said there’s a library halfway around the world, on another continent, that was built by the wizards of old to house their most important writings. He’s been there.”
“Now I wish I could read. Never could see much value in it when I was working at The Wayfarer’s Comfort. But that’s when I was a stableboy.”
“Someday, I’ll teach you, or try to. You may be too thick to learn. But we don’t have time now. Sorial, I’m going to have to go to that library. You and I both know the kind of trial-and-error stumbling we’re doing won’t be good enough if it comes to a fight with your sister or The Lord of Fire. Practicing and learning at our own pace would be fine if there wasn’t a war on the horizon, but we don’t have that luxury. According to Ferguson, there are books there that can teach us shortcuts and help us understand the deeper methods of our powers. What we’re doing now, what he calls ‘surface magic,’ is fine when fighting humans but practically useless when going against a trained wizard.”
Sorial didn’t like the idea, but he knew she was right. For the moment, however, there were other concerns closer to home. Unless this wizards’ library contained a solution to their immediate problems, its esoteric secrets would lie dormant for a little longer.
“Did Ferguson say anything about an Otherverse?”
Alicia nodded. “He talked of little else. He said all of what’s about to happen is merely a prelude to a more dangerous and audacious scheme. He speculated that The Lord of Fire will limit his use of magic in any war because he needs to husband it for some eventual assault on The Otherverse. Ferguson suspects The Lord of Fire’s capabilities may be waning. He’s operated as a wizard for more than twenty years and most wizards in ancient times burned themselves out and died in a shorter period. Sometimes much shorter. That could give us an advantage in a battle if his reserves are almost exhausted while ours are fresh.”
But only if we can learn how to do more than ‘parlor tricks.’
“He knows I’m a wizard. Not just suspects. He knows.”
“And takes credit for it. You and me both. He sees himself as our creator and believes that gives him some say in how we live and what we do. For all his knowledge, he’s blinded by arrogance and a sense of his own infallibility.”
“He thinks you’re not ruthless enough. He called mercy a weakness that ‘wizards can ill afford to be afflicted with.’“
“No one could ever make that accusation of him. How many people has he killed, or caused to die, without a second thought? People are tools for him, to be used and twisted and manipulated, then thrown away when their purpose is done. He thinks of us in the same way. Bigger and more powerful, but still tools. Once we’ve finished his tasks, he’ll toss us to the side. By then, maybe he’ll have died of old age, although I begin to wonder if he’ll outlive us all.”
“Do you think he’s right, though? That in order to defeat The Lord of Fire, we’ll have to become ruthless? Shed our compassion and start looking at things from a colder, more detached perspective?”
Like Ferguson. Like Rangarak. Both powerful men whose brands of justice were harsh and uncompromising. Sorial had tasted that twice before in himself: once in Havenham when he had dispatched Langashin and once in Ibitsal when he had snuffed out Maraman. Those men had deserved to die for their sins. Ferguson’s approach was to sweep people aside if their continued existence was an inconvenience.
“Maybe that’s the only way to win in a war like this,” he conceded. “War is about destruction and slaughter. Defeating an enemy means killing enough of his men so he can’t attack anymore. It ain’t always the best equipped or bigger army that wins. So there’s a place for ruthlessness in battle. Maybe even a necessity for it. But Ferguson would have us be like him, do to innocent people what he did to Annie. Manipulate them to their deaths like Vagrum and Kara. None of those things were needed. That’s what he means by ‘ruthless.’”
Alicia shivered despite the heat. She pressed her body closer to his. “Promise me we’ll never become like that. Promise me we’ll retain our humanity no matter what happens.”
“I promise,” said Sorial. The moment he said the words, he wondered if he might regret them. Was that an oath he could keep or would circumstances demand something different of him, the way they had demanded something different of his sister? Kara’s portrait of Ariel had been of a sweet, devoted, caring child. Those characteristics were gone. Now she was a killer. A ruthless killer. With dominion over earth and with a city to protect, could Sorial afford to be anything less?
Had he just lied to Alicia?
* * *
The stink of failure clung to Ariel like a fetid second skin. Not only did Sorial still walk the earth but her attempts to foment civil war in Vantok hadn’t borne fruit. Yet capricious fate had offered her an opportunity for partial redemption. And, when this task was done, she would devote the entirety of her effort to discovering her brother’s location and accomplishing what she hadn’t been able to achieve on her previous attempt. When she was a little girl, her mother told her that there was nothing ignoble about failure if one learned from it. It was strange that, after all these years, she remembered that lesson.
Now on her second day of watching big men in full armor galloping toward one another on burdened horses, Ariel had developed an active dislike of jousting. It was brutal, cruel, and pointless. It also didn’t go unnoticed by her that at least three-quarters of the audience was male. Men, it appeared, were more enamored of this sort of thing than their wives and daughters. There were no women on the royal dais, where the queen’s empty seat expressed her opinion of a tournament supposedly in her honor. King Azarak was present, but his expression was one of ill-concealed boredom. Sorial was nowhere to be seen; he hadn’t made a public appearance since the failed assassination.
Ariel winced at the memory of that. She had been certain he was dead, but she had committed the cardinal sin of not finding out for sure. She hadn’t spoken to Justin since then but she knew how displeased he would have been to learn of her mistake. Hopefully, he hadn’t lost anyone at the portal but she suspected his prized Lord of Earth candidate might have been sacrificed to her error. He wouldn’t easily forgive that mistake.
The Curse in the Gift (The Last Whisper of the Gods Book 2) Page 32