Od Magic

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  The warehouse seemed asleep, like the rest of the quarter, as they approached. There were no packhorses, or oxen, or half-loaded wagons in front. The doors were closed but not locked; they opened easily and without magic, Arneth discovered. Inside, the place was as bare as the aftermath of Tyramin’s performance usually left it: not a discarded scarf or a tinsel star anywhere. Just warped, scuffed floorboards, a makeshift stage with nothing on it but a carpet so old its patterns had grown blurred with age; it might have been lying there for centuries.

  “I’ll search in the back,” Arneth said briefly, hoping the wizards would leave him to it.

  But Valoren said, “Go with him, Yar.” His voice sounded odd, remote, as though he spoke out of a dream. Arneth glanced at him. The pale, unblinking eyes seemed flooded with light, the pupils all but vanished. He didn’t move. He didn’t have to, Arneth guessed with sudden insight. He searched for magic with his mind as he stood in the silent, empty warehouse. His thoughts could seep through the hoary bones of rafter and post, through closed doors and locked cupboards and chests, through the dark cellar, its beams moldy with river mist. There would be no place to hide.

  Arneth, his mouth tight, moved helplessly to search the only way he could. Yar followed silently. The tangle of chambers and corridors behind the vast storage space indicated a certain amount of flurry. Swaths of lace and silk eddied on the floor; forgotten masks stared sightlessly at the intruders. A flock of birds made of feathers and cloth were scattered all over the floor of a dressing chamber, along with a dancing slipper and a broken mirror. In another, costumes had slid from their pegs on the walls to the floor, where they slumped like disembodied sleepers. Another room held nothing but an old mask of Tyramin left on the floor. Paint had cracked on the bright cheeks, the vigorous brow. A clump of beard was missing. Yar spent a moment gazing at it, his own eyes as expressionless as the mask’s. More wizardry, Arneth guessed, but the wizard did not say.

  They searched every room, every passage, even the grounds at the back of the building. On the river, the fishing boats had gone out; a trade ship with painted sides and a great, carved sea monster twined about its prow, was finding a dock farther up the water. Nothing came close to the dock near the warehouse; the little boat that Arneth had seen before was still there, its sails tightly furled, as though it, too, slept.

  “Nothing,” he breathed. “They must have all scattered into the quarter.” Yar said nothing. Arneth looked at him, asked carefully, “Did you—Did you see something I missed?”

  “I doubt it,” Yar said, his voice oddly dry. He turned to go back in; Arneth followed, wondering suddenly how much the wizard had seen and if he would tell Valoren.

  But Yar only asked Valoren, whose eyes had turned human again as he waited for them, “What did you find?”

  “They couldn’t have escaped,” Valoren answered tightly, “when the princess broke our spell. They had no time. They must be still in the quarter.” He paused, hearing the question in Yar’s mind, it seemed, and answered it before he was asked, “I sensed no magic. At least nothing I recognize as magic.” He hesitated again, looking, to Arneth’s amazement, almost uncertain. “Could magic take such form that you or I, trained as we are, wouldn’t recognize it?”

  Expression startled into Yar’s face, fine lines of amusement and bitterness. “How would I know? We only know what we are permitted to learn. If all I ate in my life was cabbage, how would I recognize the fat wooly object in the next field as food?”

  Valoren’s thin mouth all but disappeared. “This is hardly the time to question the laws of Numis.”

  “Then when will be the time? When magic as obtrusive as a cloud on our horizon attacks Numis?”

  Valoren blinked. “You think that Tyramin—”

  “No,” Yar said adamantly. “I do not. I’m only suggesting that in the centuries we’ve spent keeping magic we can’t control outside the boundaries of the kingdom, we’ve left ourselves ignorant of power that we may find useful. Or interesting. Or astonishing. Or—”

  He stopped. Valoren’s eyes had grown strange again, luminous and remote, as though he were seeing into Yar and out the other side. Arneth, watching puzzledly, found himself holding his breath. In the air between the wizards a star formed and exploded with a minute flash of fire. Arneth started. It seemed oddly like one of Tyramin’s tricks. Valoren drew back abruptly.

  “Sorry,” he said stiffly. “I was trying to see what you are seeing. It seemed simpler than arguing.”

  “I suggest,” Yar said with asperity, “that when you are married you stick to arguing.”

  “Yes,” Valoren agreed. But his wide, unblinking eyes had sighted prey, Arneth guessed uneasily; he had probably not heard a word Yar said. “What was that?”

  “What?”

  “In your thoughts.” He held up a hand swiftly. “I know. I have passed far beyond the pale of courtesy. But for an instant I saw something, felt something that I have never encountered in all my years among the wizards. What is it, Yar? What are you concealing?”

  The pitch-black eyes nearly stared Valoren down. “Nothing.”

  “I felt it.”

  “You felt nothing beyond my thoughts.”

  “It seemed very old, very powerful…Does it have a name?”

  Yar was silent. Arneth, watching without daring to shift a muscle, resisted an urge to slide off his horse, sidle quietly into a back alley before those wide eyes, that sinewy, relentless voice started pursuing what was in his own head.

  “Yar,” Valoren said softly. “Nothing that powerful should be hidden from the king. You know that.”

  “It’s nothing,” Yar insisted, but this time Arneth heard the odd despair in his voice. “It’s a dream, an image, a fragment of writing—”

  “Whose writing?”

  “Od’s. There’s no danger to Numis in it at all. The writing itself is very old; she was traveling and saw—”

  “Traveling where?”

  “In the north country. Your own home. If you never noticed it, then there’s nothing to notice.”

  Valoren’s eyes changed, narrowing now, and burning within. “The north country. Brenden Vetch’s home as well. Perhaps that is where he got his power? Did he speak of them?”

  “Ceta showed me Od’s writings about them. She found a sentence in the royal library, another in the school.”

  Valoren nodded briefly. “Yes, I remember. She has been writing about Od’s life. But did the gardener speak of them?” He had to wait again; the silence itself, stretching long and fine, became an answer. “So”—the wizard breathed—“that’s where we might find the gardener. I want to see those writings, Yar. Will you come with me to talk to Ceta, or must I go alone?”

  Yar turned his face away from Valoren, touched his eyes wearily. He said nothing that Arneth could hear. But both wizards grew thin as river mist and vanished, leaving Arneth blinking reddened, gritty eyes that still tried to pick the dark figures out of the empty morning air.

  TWENTY

  Brenden found his way step by step out of the Twilight Quarter, across the river, out of Kelior. Home drew him, the bare, windswept hills, the marshes where he could sit for an entire day watching a bog lily open and never hear a human word. The stark longing fueled his magic; he shaped it to his purpose, no longer asking how it was that he could do such things but rather how they could be done.

  Getting out of the Twilight Quarter was a matter of combining wish and will. Appalled by the confusing and disturbing reactions to his magic, he wished himself wholeheartedly elsewhere. He had made himself invisible before by contemplating a wall. Yar had turned him into an illusion of bricks. When Yar left him to speak to Arneth at the gate, Brenden stood up and contemplated the shadowy predawn air. Soundless as a cat, he walked away from Yar and the sleeping boy, whose soft snores seemed to emerge from within the fire pit. As he walked, he let thought flow out of him, left past and future drifting; he banked the eager flames of the present within the misty dark aroun
d him. So he saw himself as he moved: a damp cloud of river mist and waning night. He had no idea whether or not he could be seen. He only knew that when he passed under torchlight, he didn’t see his own shadow.

  He wended his way through the quiet, unfamiliar streets until he saw the wall at the end of one of them. It was quite high, and very old; houses and buildings hid most of it, some attached to it like snails, using the ancient rise of stones for their own back wall. The wall enclosed the quarter in a horseshoe curve; the river itself completed the mysterious boundary, which, Brenden had noticed from his high garden, existed nowhere else in the city. He wondered if the quarter had shut itself away from the rest of Kelior to pursue its eccentric habits, or if, long ago, the city around it had grown weary of watching them or fearful that such aberrations might spread.

  Whatever the vagaries of history, he had to get over the wall or find his way to the river and swim. The wall was in front of his nose; the river was not. He went up to it. A rat sniffing through some debris did not notice him; neither did the mangy dog eyeing the rat. Brenden gazed at the old stones, seeing the north beyond them, the hills of home, the dark, craggy mountain even farther north with its astonishing hint of magic in the snow. He wished the wall were behind him instead of in front of him. He leaned against the stones, asking wordlessly what he must do for them to let him through. Stones slowly filled his thoughts; they were all he saw, all he heard, all he touched; there was nothing else in that moment but the rising of stone between him and his heart’s desire. He shifted, impelled by his longing, a stone-man with his mouth and mind blocked by stone, his body stretched over stone, his eyelashes and skin the finest grit, his bones the bulky shape and weight of it. And so he took his ponderous step, felt earth tremble and settle as his foot rose and fell. He took another interminable, mindless step, slower than a walk underwater, hearing minute particles shift as he passed.

  He emerged like a statue stepping free of its own stony husk. He opened his eyes, found the wall behind him as he had wished, and before him the broad road that ran along the river’s edge until it turned to cross the bridge over the river.

  On this side of the wall, Kelior was beginning to wake. He submerged his thoughts in shadow again and moved, quickly and unobtrusively, among fishers and dockworkers, toward the bridge.

  He crossed it as the sun rose, whey-faced and desultory, behind the clouds. Beyond it the city fanned like a great, breaking wave over the opposite bank, spreading and thinning until at last it reached its farthest, a scatter of distant fields and farmhouses. The road continued to the river, another, across the water, ran north through the rest of Kelior. Brenden had walked every step of it, not long before; he could walk every step of it back. He had a warm cloak, solid boots, and a little money. Those would take him a good part of the way home; the rest of the way he would worry about when he came to it.

  He trudged steadily through the day. Nobody seemed to notice him, whatever shape he was in. The sun, yielding to cloud, cast few shadows. Brenden, his thoughts neither here nor there, only on his next step, had no idea if he was cloaked by invisibility or just by disinterest. Either way it did not matter; he felt as safe. By midday he could see an end to the road he was on, as it left the distant fields behind and dwindled into a path traveled mostly by herds of cows and sheep. That stopped beside a stream, he remembered. A little east of it there was a stone bridge across the stream. And on the other side, an inn, where one road branched east and west away from it along the water, and another road wound through the woods beyond the tavern, heading north.

  He had almost reached it, near sunset, when he realized he was being pursued.

  He had been nagged for some time by an incoherent notion in his head. Something he had forgotten, something he needed to do, something weighing in his mind, but what it was would not reveal itself. The idea grew stronger as the pallid sun lowered itself toward a sullen bank of cloud. The cloud, he felt, was seeping into his own head, a dark mist spreading slowly through him, making him uneasy, wary, without knowing why. It was, he decided finally, as though he were being watched.

  And that stopped him dead in the middle of the dusty, lonely path. He turned, his skin prickling, looking behind him across the empty fields, the coming night.

  Valoren.

  He had no idea how the mind of a wizard worked when all its intricate, unwieldy powers were honed and trained in orderly fashion on a problem such as a runaway gardener. All he sensed, from what Yar had said, was that Valoren might be capable of anything. He might indeed track a solitary traveler simply by knowing his name and something of his power. How much of him Valoren had glimpsed during their conversation about flowers, Brenden had no idea. Enough to send a guard and a wizard after him into the Twilight Quarter. Enough to want to stop him from leaving Kelior. Enough, perhaps, to pursue him as far as he could run.

  Brenden moved again, quickening his pace. How could you hide your own mind, he wondered, from someone who was following it as intently as a fish drawn by the lure of wings? He had no idea. The best he could do, he decided alter some time, was to move fast. Faster than the wizard. Faster than he had ever moved in his life.

  That thought crossed his mind just as he crossed the threshold of the ancient, tidy fieldstone inn at the crossroads on the other side of the bridge. He went in anyway, and asked the plump, comely innkeeper for a bed. A scattering of faces, most of them solitary travelers, glanced up idly from their ale and beef to listen.

  “I do have a bed for you,” she said. “Sit and have some supper; you look as though you could use it.”

  Brenden nodded, sliding the pack from his shoulder to find a coin for her. The others, their eyes drifting over him and away, finding nothing to hold their attention, went back to their own musings. The innkeeper’s daughter, a solemn, red-cheeked child, brought him bread, beef, roast onions, and ale. He ate quickly, expecting Valoren to appear in the doorway at any moment, while outside the thick, smoky windows the prowling dusk peered in, drawn to the light.

  How? he thought. How to outrun the speed of thought. How to hide while you are doing it.

  He finished his supper, asked to be shown his bed, for he was very tired and must be on the road by dawn. The innkeeper sent her daughter to light Brenden’s way upstairs. She set a candle beside a pallet on the floor near the warm chimney stones. He sat down on it, began to remove a boot. When she had gone downstairs, he let his boot be and stood up again. Cloaked, pack in hand, he tiptoed down the stairs and out the back door, past kitchen garden and stables. He could see the wood, a vague blur in the twilight, and a twist or two of road that led up to it. He was used to sleeping among the trees and animals. There, in the crumbling hollow of a fallen trunk, he would find his bed for a few hours. He would empty his mind the way he did when he watched a plant grow, or a mushroom push itself up out of the bracken. Maybe Valoren would mistake him for a tree, if he did not dream…

  So he spent that night curled up with the animals in the wood, and if anyone inquired about a young, pale-haired young man traveling alone, he would be upstairs asleep upon his pallet. That would not stop Valoren, Brenden guessed. But it might puzzle him to find his quarry unpredictably slipped away into the night.

  He woke before dawn, ate a heel of bread and an onion he had dropped into his pack from supper, while he tried to think about traveling from a wizard’s point of view. When he could see, he followed the slope of the wood uphill, keeping the road visible but at a distance. He saw nobody else going north in that season.

  When he reached the top of the hill, he could see the road more clearly, a chalky white slash through scrubby fields and flowing plains growing sere in the autumn. Walking across that plain, he would be clearly visible. Unless he traveled by night. If he learned to see in the dark. Or unless he learned to fly like a bird. Or the wind. Or to leap across distances somehow, make them closer than they seemed. He lingered, considering possibilities, all of which seemed equally improbable.

  A chi
ll wind flowed over him, into his mind, it seemed; all his speculations scattered like leaves. He crouched down instinctively, alarmed and helpless; for a stark moment he had no idea what to do. And then he did it, seemingly without thought: he gazed down at the red-capped mushroom with the snow-white speckles on it like a warning. He let his mind fill with mushroom, become something small, fibrous, damp, and utterly wordless.

  After a time, during which the invisible sun moved fully into morning behind the tumbling gray clouds, he found a coherent thought in his head.

  He will drag me back to Kelior if he finds me, and I might never see home again.

  The thought alone was enough to move him. He cast longing like a hook on a rope across the landscape, toward a hillock in the distance with an enormous boulder on its crown ringed with brush like an egg within a nest. He hauled himself upon a wish through air and time, knowing nothing except his terror and his need. When he could see again, he found himself standing beside the boulder, blinking at the edge of the wood he had left, almost expecting to see himself still there, rising to take a giant step across the world.

  Air screamed and beat around him. He flung up his arms, fending off a flurry of fierce golden eyes and outstretched claws. The eyes, too like Valoren’s, stunned him breathless for an instant. Then his thoughts, outrunning his own body to escape the wizard, pulled him after them; in the next breath, he knew he was elsewhere, he had done something, but he was not certain what. The ground was flowing under him like water; the terrible eyes had vanished. Borne on the wind, or on the frantic rush of his own thoughts, a bird, a dead leaf, a wisp of smoke, whatever shape he had made for himself fled with him until the threat in his head diminished and he began to feel for his own shape again.

  He tumbled to earth then, rolling over and over until he smacked into a tree. Groggy, but still alarmed, he pulled his face out of the bracken and sat up. He saw the hill rising through scrub, farther away than he would have guessed. A bird circled the boulder, huge and dark; he could still hear its faint warning cries.