Wizard (The Key to Magic)

by H. Jonas Rhynedahll

  Leaning back in his chair, Mortyn swung his head about to take in the sparseness of the group dining in the compartment. "How many did we loose from the Commonwealth?"

  "None."

  Mortyn raised his eyebrows.

  "The majority of the evacuated members and the recruited Participants are going immediately into stasis. In a week, we will have only a complement of volunteers large enough to maintain the orbital still awake."

  "So it has been decided to suspend operations?" He had known that the possibility had been discussed, but now that it seemed to have taken place, he did not want to believe it.

  "Yes. My latest dreams show that the Project is in grave peril. Even without the missing Chapter Presidents, the Board had a quorum and the vote was unanimous. We have waited out chaotic disruptions of civil order in the past. We will wait out this one.

  He thought about Myra and supper. "I would like to volunteer to serve on the maintenance crew. The thought of being preserved like a pickle in a jar has never appealed to me."

  "This is as I expected. I made arrangements to have a place reserved for you."

  "I appreciate that. What of you?"

  His friend waved a hand as if to indicate the inherently confining quality of the orbital. "Rather than be canned like a fish, I will take the pickle jar."

  Mortyn laughed as he extended his hand. "Good luck, Oyraebos."

  The sorcerer extended his own hand for a firm grip. "Farewell, Mortyn."

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Maintaining his position by encouraging the flow of the ether to slide around his body without affecting it, Mar hugged the metaphorical shoreline of undertime, the flux boundary that separated him from normal time. After a few subjective moments, he made out a backwater lagoon a short distance upstream and carefully sculled to it.

  Growing a new foot gave him an agonizing focus for a time that could have been centuries or seconds and then he did nothing but rest for an eternity.

  Or perhaps only moments.

  When he tired of rest, he took out the text and studied for another eternity.

  Or perhaps only moments.

  After musing on what he had read, drawing conclusions, practicing the outlined techniques, and musing again, he left the eddy and approached the boundary.

  Standing in the shallows with just his feet wet in the swirling flux and allowing the nearly quiescent current to nudge him along, Mar learned to flip through the days like the pages of a book.

  It took him a while to understand how to use his magical sense to peer through the clashing curtain of disrupted ether that separated time and undertime. The curtain thinned or thickened with no perceptible pattern, obscuring and revealing the shore -- the domain of time -- seemingly at random. His views of the shore were abbreviated glimpses -- a flash of light here, an echo of a sound there -- but when taken in sequence were a lifelike portrait of individual moments of the world without. From time to time, the views became distorted as if by ripples, but he was always able to regain clarity by sharpening his mental focus.

  Even the slightest perceived change of his stance or shift of his head would alter the view by time and location. These shifts, inadvertent and volitional, proved difficult to control in precise terms, but he was able to latch onto specific perspectives for extended periods.

  The first scene that came into brief focus for more than a few seconds was both innocuous and ominous. Two armored, dusty men, perhaps brothers, were digging a hole on a hillside covered in dead grass. Overhead, a gray sky threatened rain and a stiff wind fluttered the warriors' long black hair. Mar's perspective was as if he were standing at the foot of the muddy excavation and looking up the hill. Above the crest, dark smoke rose from an unseen large fire. Both men worked ceaselessly but without desperation and neither man spoke. The image dissolved before either context or resolution were revealed.

  More similarly unidentified and incomplete glimpses coalesced. Some went on at length and some lasted no more than seconds. At first, no connections between the scenes were apparent and the people -- there were always people in the visions; he never saw a deserted alley or vacant room or empty field -- were always different.

  Then one scene came in sharply and persisted.

  It was a battle. A great fortress lay under siege.

  The forces arrayed against it marched under a yellow flag with curlicue lettering in blood red and the sorcerers that led the automatons and monstrosities wore yellow uniforms. No skyships flew overhead, but that seemed to be because a great many lay crashed and burning upon the approaches to the fortress.

  At first he wandered among the Faction entrenchments. The besiegers had taken many casualties. Dozens of men screamed as they were cut from twisted and mangled monstrosities and many would never scream again. Automatons lay in heaps like windrows before the magically joined stones of the fortress walls.

  His view jumped and then steadied, leaving him looking upon the battlements from a position just behind the sparse defenders, men and boys who wore homespun and leather and had long hair woven in braids. These served compact war engines of magical power so great that each launch rocked the ether like an earth tremor.

  Here too, the losses were great. Many of the emplacements were blackened and filled with mangled wreckage and great rents had been made in the stone wall and the invisible ethereal walls that reinforced it. When he turned his head slightly, he saw covered bodies laid out by the score in the bailey behind the allure.

  Bolts of light and fire from the Faction sorcerers fell constantly on the battlements. A good many slammed fruitlessly into the shielding flux, but an increasing number penetrated the failing barriers to shatter merlons and men.

  A running armsman passed across Mar's view and shouted, "We must hold the wall!"

  Tall, lean, and bearing the same lines of jaw and nose that Mar had seen in Old Mar's face, the man had barked his order in Common, but he had a trilling accent unlike that of the people of Dhiloeckmyur.

  Another armsman, bleeding from a head wound, rose to an embrasure to fire a rifle, was struck full on by a lance of ethereal flame, and toppled, burning and screaming, off the allure and out of Mar's sight.

  Wearing armor that was much too big for him, a boy of no more than ten or twelve ran to the side of the man who had given the command. With a quick lunge, the man pulled the boy down into a crouch as the tempo of the assault quickened and the battlement began to shudder like a drum cadence from the magical barrage.

  "Why did you leave the rear guard?" the man demanded of the boy.

  "Brother nMahr," the boy shouted. "I am here to fight alongside you--"

  A tremendous explosion consumed the battlement, blasting away the man, the boy, and dozens of other defenders along it. The wall came down and through the breach monstrosities poured by the hundreds, their weapons cutting down the few that rushed across the bailey to challenge them.

  Mar stumbled in the shallows. When he regained his footing and recaptured his view, he was looking elsewhere, though still within the fortress.

  On a fractured balcony of the main keep, a sliding catapult served by a girl and a badly wounded man fired constantly but with fading strength at the sky. Near them, a woman heavy with child stood at the shattered railing looking down upon the battlements. Her expression of horror showed that she had witnessed the explosion and death of the man and the boy. After no more than a moment, she backed away from the railing and turned to run back inside.

  The view of the balcony vanished when a bolt of emerald light struck and Mar's view began to jump from spot to spot within the fortress.

  Anything that would burn was ablaze and monstrosities were firing with no other purpose but destruction. The inner bailey and the keep were taking a steady bombardment from circling skyships and much of the main structure had begun to collapse. Then the inner gate went down and monstrosities and skyships drew back to give place to the sorcerers. In a courtyard at the heart of the keep, a slaughter of the wounded a
nd those that cared for them began.

  Mar stumbled again.

  The pregnant woman ran before him, careening down a narrow passage that began to crumple around her. She reached an iron grating that was almost as wide as she was tall, shook a fist at it to cast a spell that made it rise out of her way, and then hurled herself in as falling stone buried the passage.

  He stayed with her as she clawed her way through a tiny tunnel nearly full of black water and filth, crawling with no light more than two hundred armlengths. When she spilled out finally into a rocky gully washed by a polluted stream, she was shivering and begrimed. She took no time to rest, but immediately began to work her way down the shielding gully, climbing awkwardly, desperately, and painfully over slimed rocks and through stinking pools. The sky behind her was full of fire and smoke, but not once did she turn to look back towards the fortress.

  He watched her trek for leagues without food or rest into a forested hill country, and then watched her collapse finally in the middle of a dusty road. He saw her birth a son and then perish as her life drained from her.

  He saw a man-like creature rescue the babe and cremate the mother, saw the creature bear the infant to a hidden cottage, saw what became of it, and then he knew the reality of what Old Mar and Mortyn had told him.

  Feeling no temptation to indulge in a grief that he did not feel, he did not linger in that tragic past. The couple that had brought him into existence had lived and died in their proper time, no less phantoms than any of the people, both those who had earned his loathing and those that had enticed his sympathy, that he had met in Dhiloeckmyur. He could not feel sadness for parents that he had never known.

  An orphan he had always been and an orphan he would always be.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Clinging to the shallows, he let the inevitable flow of undertime carry him forward, peering out at a world of doomed magic. He saw many things that he did not understand: spells for purposes unknown in his own age, skyships that flew above the sky, devices that were creatures and creatures that were devices. He also saw many things that he did understand: cruelty, hardship, brutality, and, increasingly, war.

  Another scene drew him in.

  A man, a woman, and a baby, appeared in a port station.

  Wrapping both arms around the baby, the woman dug in her heels, pulling away as the liveried man tried to drag her off the platform toward a trail leading uphill into a forest.

  "Stop, Rhynn! Tell me what's going on right now!"

  "The City is about to be destroyed, Eilia! Every bit of magic is going to go unstable and our only chance is to get away from all of it now!"

  Clearly panicked, this Rhynn surged up the hill, nearly carrying Eilia, now white and shaking.

  As they made the top of the hill, Eilia screamed. "My anklet! It's burning me!"

  Only seconds before it exploded, Rhynn ripped the jewelry from her and threw it away.

  Then the entire sky to the south bloomed in ruptured flux.

  Wind and earth heaved, lashing the cringing refugees, as the assaulted ether rebelled. The uproar quieted for a moment, but then another concussion swept through, staggering the two.

  "We have to get farther away," Rhynn said. "It's not over yet."

  Eilia looked back, wiping tears, and then said in a voice flat and cold, "It's all gone. They're all dead. Mother and everybody."

  "But we're still alive and so is our son."

  The family moved on, climbing higher into the hills. They spent the night in the rough, but the next day they reached a well appointed but vacant small farm that had obviously been their destination. Their refuge provided food and shelter and seemed safe from the raging storm that tore apart the background ether. Their story would not end in tragedy.

  Mar skipped ahead.

  For reasons that were not apparent, Rhynn left Eilia and the child and retraced his steps along the trail toward the devastated city from which they had fled. While still high in the hills, he met a band of refugees attired as he was -- all, men and women alike, were armsmen -- and then watched in shock from a prominence as the sea consumed the ruins and made a once great land an island.

  Rhynn watched the disturbed sea and the wrack that tossed upon it for only a moment, then turned from the disaster, steady and resolute, and sought out the leaders of the band, an older man and a dangerous man -- Mar's unease told him that the man was a weapon, sharp and lethal -- who had but one arm and who all addressed as nhBrenl, though that was not the name that he had been given at his birth.

  The older officer looked haggard but steadfast. "Rhynn. I thought you dead."

  Rhynn nodded. "I would have been if I hadn't come here, Commander Karhle."

  The dangerous man watched Rhynn with care. "You have a place here in the Reserve? All the homesteads are working farms, are they not?"

  Rhynn shook his head in firm rebuff. "It's not large enough to support all of you. I'm sorry Vice-Commander nhBrenl. You'll have to find your own way."

  "We'll clear land to expand your farm," nhBrenl said, gesturing at the trees that covered the hills. "We'll hunt and scavenge."

  "I'm not so foolish as to try to order you to help us," Karhle said, "but I am also not so proud that I won't plead if necessary. There are three hundred and twelve of us. We have enough food for three days and potable water sufficient only for one. We have sixty-two wounded, many severe, including Commander nhBreen, who we expect to die. He gave you leave to depart, Comm Spec, and thus I am sure saved the life of your family. We are your comrades, men and women with no place to go, and we beg you to help us."

  Rhynn's stoney expression did not falter.

  "You won't be able to hold your farm on your own," nhBrenl said. "There will be more survivors and few of them will have a place to go. They'll be hungry and cold and they'll come for your farm, Comm Spec, and you won't be able to fight them off without magical weapons, which I'm sure that you don't have. This band can help you keep it."

  "With what? I know that you can't have magical weapons as well."

  "Swords, spears, arrows and blood. We will make the first and our courage will provide the last."

  "I will not be put under your orders," Rhynn stated with crossed arms.

  "The City and the Defense Service are no more," Karhle agreed. "Loyalty will be won by the support that we give one another. We are no longer soldiers, but we can become kin."

  After a long moment of silence, Rhynn gave a still reluctant nod of his head.

  The march to the farm was slow. Most of the wounded had to be borne on litters. One of these, a blackened corpse that did not stir or seem to breathe but was not quite dead, drew Mar's particular attention.

  In no more than a day, the survivors that nhBrenl had prophesied began to appear. At first, the bedraggled individuals and families came as supplicants and were taken in and enlisted in the feverish work of building and feeding the nascent village, but then larger groups came with demands and were turned away with blood and steel. By the time the first freezing rain of winter left a layer of ice on the log walls of the palisade that the one armed man had had built to circle the farm buildings, new and old, no more wanderers from the vanished city appeared at the gates.

  Mar let the days roll into years.

  Life for the band was difficult. They were nearly all magenfolk, accustomed like the denizens of Dhiloeckmyur to a life of splendor abetted by luxurious magic, but none were sorcerers and though they could perform some small enchantments and alchemies to ease the toil, they had no magical devices of any sort and had to learn to depend on the strength of their arms and backs and the keenness of their ingenuity to provide their daily sustenance.

  Strong backs were needed in the fields and fleet legs to give chase to the deer and boar, and it became left to the childbearing and the grandmothers to preserve and employ the few spells that had been saved. The daughter that Lilia bore to Rhynn, Amra, was exceptionally skilled in this endeavor and she and her descendants became the pri
me stewards of magic for the place that was first known as Rhynn's Farm and later as Rhyfm. In time, the carefully hoarded spells became secrets that were handed down from mother to daughter generation after generation.

  A decade after the end of the world, Karhle died of a blood disease that his people were unable to cure without the magic that they had lost.

  Thirty years on, the one armed man who had been given the name nhBrenl died in an ambush, but only after piling thirteen dead enemies around him.

  After long lives that were not desolate of joy, Rhynn and Lilia died within hours of one another in their own beds while surrounded by their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

  The corpse persisted in the same state, not healing but not dying, year after year. At first, it was cared for with great dedication by the band, then watched over with reverence by their sons and daughters, and finally, when there was no one to remind them of the lost glories of their heritage, entombed and forgotten by those who had never seen magic.

  The band prospered and multiplied in a magicless world, becoming a clan among clans whose cotholds spread to cover the hills and mounts of the island that was spoken of as Gath lem Hoem, or Place of the Survivors.

  When there were more young men than cotholds to leave to them, the islanders took to the waves, became fishermen and seafarers and built the port of Gath'l'hoema.

  After a few more generations, a doddering codger gave up the sea, landed in Gh'emhoa, and went home to die with his people.

  One night, the codger and a stripling disturbed the corpse in its tomb and it crawled into the day, gained life from the sun, and began finally to heal. After many days, the corpse stood and walked away wearing the face of the man that Mar knew as Waleck.

  Mar lost the old man from time to time as seemingly random images, sights of people in varied places doing varied things, intervened, but his view always returned to trace Waleck along his uninterrupted trudge through history.