When Darkness Falls

by Mercedes Lackey

  “I’m going to have to go and see if I can do something that I’d always been told—back in the City—couldn’t be done. I’m going to make a pact with Elemental Forces. And see if I live through it,” Cilarnen answered with grim cheerfulness.

  KARDUS and Idalia had said goodbye to him as if they were sending him off to war. In a way, Cilarnen supposed they were—the only kind of war he was equipped to fight. Not a war of horses and armor, but a war of spells, of Illusory Creatures and Elemental Beings. Of dragons and unicorns.

  And, yes, of Demons.

  High Magick could find them. High Magick could kill them. True, it had to be done in concert with a Wildmage, but the Allies seemed to have plenty of those, and he was the only High Mage there was. On their side, anyway.

  For now.

  The Allies talked about finding more Wildmages. They even talked about finding and training another Knight-Mage like Kellen—everybody said he was a different kind of Wildmage, but nobody had ever explained the difference to Cilarnen in any way he understood. But they all overlooked one thing.

  If this worked, Cilarnen could find and train more High Mages.

  Everyone had the power that fueled the High Magick, the power that the High Magick burned the way a lamp burned oil. The difference was, the High Mages could use that power, not merely create and horde it. What made them respected (feared, a small part of Cilarnen’s mind traitorously supplied) was that they had found a way to harvest (steal) a lot of that power, so they would have a lot of it to use. They had found that way because that method was safer, easier, and more comfortable than the method Cilarnen was about to try.

  But with everyone having the power—and that meant Wildlander farmers and High Reaches families, too—that certainly meant that there were people born into those families who could use the power just as those born into Mage-born families did. It had just never been awakened in them, the way the power naturally awoke in the sons of Mageborn families from close proximity to all the magick in Armethalieh.

  There might not be many, but they were out there. They had to be.

  Cilarnen could find them and train them.

  If this worked.

  And if the Demons would give them time.

  Idalia, Kardus, and Cilarnen’s other friends among the Wildmages had spent the whole morning moving his tent and everything he owned up to the ice-pavilion that was going to be his new home. That way, when (if) he made a disastrous mistake with his spellcraft, the only person he’d blow to Darkness would be him.

  Idalia had worried about how far he was from the main camp, since now the patrols were starting to see wolves in the Heart-Forest, though the Ysterialpoer-ines said that this was rare this early in the season (and thus a cause for even more concern than it would be normally), but Cilarnen had assured her that if his plans worked as he hoped, he would have nothing to fear from wolves. And if they did not, he would have nothing to fear from wolves for quite a different reason.

  He had been very nearly rude, shooing them out of his new camp as quickly as possible, ignoring their offers to stay and help him finish setting up, or—worse yet—stay the night. But he could not afford the presence of the non-Mageborn. He had gained Kindolhinadetil’s permission at last, and this was the last day for nearly a moonturn upon which he could perform the Summoning Ritual. He had an enormous amount of work to complete before the appropriate half-bell.

  There were five wandering stars in the night sky over the City: Metwoch, Gwener, Tienstag, Dediau, and Shanbe. Each one governed a day of the sennight; the two leftover days were governed by the sun and the moon. In addition, the seven heavenly bodies, plus the four Magickal Elements, plus the Eternal Light, were paired to govern the ritual bells that marked time in Armethalieh in its twelve daylight aspects and twelve nighttime aspects. The Summoning Ritual must be performed under a waxing moon, upon the day and the portion of the bell of Metwoch dedicated to it. If he missed tonight, the day and half-bell of Metwoch under a waxing moon would not come again for an entire moonturn.

  And that was only the beginning of his preparations.

  There were braziers in the Number of Metwoch which had to be set out in precisely the right directions, the Seal of Metwoch to be inscribed upon the floor of his working area with his ritual sword, the proper incenses to be compounded and burned at the proper times leading up to the casting of his Circle, the preliminary prayers and ablutions to take care of—because contacting an Elemental was a potentially-dangerous business and he did not wish to scrimp on any part of the procedure and cause himself unnecessary risk due to sloppy preparation and having allowed his attention to wander at the vital moment.

  Normally a Mage would have an apprentice—or a number of apprentices—to do most of the scutwork while he concentrated on those tasks that only he could do. Cilarnen had to do it all himself.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so happy.

  Cilarnen vaguely remembered Kellen from Before. In those days Kellen had been a sulky gangly boy who stank of the Commons and radiated misery like heat. Lord Lycaelon must have flinched every time he’d laid eyes on him. So much had changed! Now Kellen was happy, having apparently found something that he understood.

  He’d obviously never understood the High Magick, and so he’d hated it. From the little he’d said since Cilarnen had met him again, Kellen still thought of the High Magick as really only a way to get the unGifted to grovel to you. But what he had never understood—and what Cilarnen had always known too well to even be able to articulate it—was that the High Magick was always so much more than that.

  It was beauty. It was an end in itself. Cilarnen could have found true joy in spending his entire life serving its exacting specifications.

  At its heart, the High Magick was a map to the way the world worked. Describe something exactly, know it utterly, and you could change it in any way you desired. How could anyone want anything more than this? Not the power—but the knowledge! See into the heart of a tree, and you could create anything you wanted, from furniture to a forest. Or you could just see the tree, and have the knowledge that it could be either one at any time you wished. Because you understood the tree from its first seedling bud to the ash of its burning.

  Spells could be elegantly simple, such as the ones that made fire or heated water—or turned water to ice. Or they could be brilliantly complex, like the spells that stopped Time in order to preserve food and strengthen walls. Or they could be created from layers of several different classes of spell together to produce an effect which seemed—on the surface—to be nothing like any of them. Like Mageshield, which was at root a stasis spell combined with several other simple spells, including the spell of levitation that moved it through the air.

  Once, Cilarnen’s highest ambition had been to become an arcane experimenter, one of those Mages who worked day-in, day-out with the simple homely building-block spells, trying them in new combinations in an attempt to produce a useful new spell for the good of the City.

  Such a possibility now seemed as unlikely as that he would live until summer.

  Or that Kellen Tavadon would ever understand how purely glorious the High Magick could be.

  Because he’s all caught up in his Wild Magic, I suppose. Wild? Lunatic, is more like it! Truly, I’ve heard more sense from the headsick people my masters were called upon to cure when I was an Entered Apprentice. But it does not mean there is harm in them … so why not leave them alone instead of condemning them to death and pretending they are agents of Demonkind? It’s just that their magic seems so … untidy.

  Untidy or not, Cilarnen did have to admit that it took far less time: He’d never seen a Wildmage cast a spell that took more than half a chime, if that. As for him, it was mid-day when he began working, and five bells later when his preparations were complete.

  It lacked a bell of midnight, the second half of which was Metwoch’s time, so Cilarnen allowed himself a chime of rest before beginning the last series of invoc
ations and prayers. By now his workspace shimmered with the wards he had set, and he was feeling the tug of exhaustion, for he had used up nearly all his own personal reserves of power as the bells moved from Dediau to Shanbe and on to Metwoch.

  THE glyphs he traced hung before him in the air. He whispered their names under his breath, and the air was so cold that steam rose to swirl amid the traceries of colored light.

  Soon. It would be soon.

  He had never done anything like this before.

  The High Magick taught that any creatures the Mageborn might see in their spells were only hallucinations—one of the first things a young Apprentice studied was the types of Illusory Creatures he might expect to see during his working life, and how to ignore them. They were, so he was told, only the symbols of the power he commanded by right of his training in the High Magick.

  But Cilarnen knew now that they were not symbols, but real.

  And he had not come to command, but to ask.

  I ask not for myself, but for the good I might do with any Power You would loan me, he recited in his mind. It was only the truth, but he wondered if, when the time came—if the time came—he would be calm enough to say the words aloud.

  “Come to me, Powers of the Elven Lands. I co—I ask that you come to me. In the name of those who rule these lands, I summon you—I request that you come before me to hear my words.”

  He drew the last of the sigils in the air before the eleventh brazier. It was the most complicated of all, and he was sweating before he had finished. For a moment it hung in the air, perfect, and Cilarnen let out the pent-up breath he had been holding in a long sigh of relief.

  But then it began to blur and change, swelling and growing brighter. If it had been badly done, it would simply have faded away.

  Something must have gone dreadfully wrong.

  He clutched his wand tightly, scouring his mind for some counterspell to contain the damage. But he had stretched his resources to their uttermost simply to cast this spell. He could not do so much as light a candle now.

  The glyph became a ball of light, then an oval, then a cylinder. All its colors faded into a pale blue-white, as it slowly settled to the ice, balancing on its end. It began to melt into itself as Cilarnen watched in horrified fascination, slowly taking on something like a human form.

  By the Eternal Light. It’s worked. I called it here.

  And now it’s going to kill me.

  He’d done nothing to protect himself from what he’d intended to summon—he’d had barely enough energy to cast the most basic of wards and then to cast the Summoning Spell itself. All he could do was watch.

  It was like seeing something come from far away, as the manikin took on form. The glow resolved itself into flame—blue flame—racing all over its body. It was small and slender, the humanlike form inches shorter than Cilarnen himself, and somehow Cilarnen could see eyes, a nose, a mouth in that burning face of flame, although he was not certain of how he could make them out.

  He had not known what would come to his Summoning—the land-wards which protected the Elven Lands were made up of a blending of all four Elements—but it seemed that the Powers themselves had chosen.

  And what they had sent was a Salamander, creature of Elemental Fire.

  “You have Called Me, Cilarnen Volpiril. For what task?” Its voice was blurred and hard to understand, like the roaring of a large fire, and he could smell an odd scent that he could not quite describe. Something burning, he decided. But not wood. It smelled like fire itself, burning without fuel.

  “I need your help. The Elves need your help.”

  “We already aid the Children of Leaf and Star.”

  Cilarnen sensed rather than saw the strange drawing-inward, as if the Salamander was preparing once more to depart. And he knew he did not have the strength to cast this spell again.

  “No! Wait!”

  He did not know what he said then. He’d had a speech carefully prepared, but he’d forgotten it. He babbled like a fool, telling the creature things he was certain it already knew—about the Demons, and the war. About the High Mages, and their ancient source of power, and what they had taken to use instead. And how he hoped to fight the Demons, but he needed …

  “Help,” the Salamander finished for him. “Our help.”

  He felt the creature look into him, as if only now was it seeing him for the first time. A terror he had not known he had the energy left to feel gripped him. Cilarnen had not felt so afraid when he and his friends had been discovered by the Stone Golems in the City, or on the night he had thought his Magegift stripped from him. He had thought he had been afraid when he had seen the Scouring Hunt for what it truly was, or when he had seen the Demon’s face in Stonehearth.

  All those moments were pale echoes of this. Each of those times, Cilarnen understood now, he could only have died. The force he confronted now was raw Magick Itself: It had the power to unmake him, as if he had never been at all. No one would remember him—that he had been here, that he had cast this spell … in Armethalieh, his family would forget his very existence… .

  The Salamander smiled sadly, and Cilarnen’s terror faded. No, it would not do that. It had such power, yes, but for all its inhumanity, it was a Creature of the Light. It had come at his call.

  Did he have the courage to accept the help it might offer?

  He’d thought he’d understood what that would mean. He’d had no idea. This was Death, as certain as any a warrior faced upon a battlefield. Yes, he could gain the power to cast any spell he needed, but it would be like carrying the sun itself within the marrow of his bones. Such power would waste him as surely as if he consumed a slow-acting poison, and in the end it would kill him. “The life of a Battle-Mage is bright and brief,” the old books had said. Well, now he understood why. The Mages had not changed their ways for no reason. They had changed in order to live.

  “Help me,” he whispered.

  “Take my hand, Cilarnen Volpiril,” the creature of blue flame said, “and be one with the land.”

  He hesitated at the thought of plunging his hand into that conflagration. The ice-pavilion was filled with heat. His clothes were steaming with it. The only oddity was that the wards and the circle stopped the heat precisely, so that the circle itself was wet with water, but the ice outside it was dry with cold.

  But he had called it, and now it had agreed.

  And if this did not work, he did not know what else to try.

  He reached out, and took its hand.

  The Salamander flowed into him through their clasped hands. Fast enough that Cilarnen didn’t have time to think of ways to stop it, slow enough that he knew what was happening and had time to think of the precise word to label the sensation.

  It was intolerable.

  That was what it was.

  It was intolerable.

  He was being stretched from within, his lungs pressed against his ribs so hard he could not take a breath, and the same cloying unclassifiable burning scent was all around him now, except now it was coming from inside: It was on his breath, in his nostrils, on his tongue. He felt light filling his brain and shining out through his eyes, blinding him; he gagged on thick radiance filling the back of his throat and he tried to cough it out, to empty his throat and his stomach and his lungs, but he couldn’t. It was there, stretching him until he thought his skin might tear like a too-tight glove. But what would spill out?

  Slowly all of it faded away: the light, the smell, the gagging pressure. He was alone in the ice pavilion, and suddenly he was shivering with cold.

  He felt a faint numbness in his hands and lips, like frostburn or poison, but in a few minutes that faded, too, and Cilarnen realized he was cold because all of the braziers in the ice-pavilion had gone out and he was standing in four inches of cold water.

  The Salamander was gone. Cilarnen felt as if he’d just suddenly awakened from an odd dream. As if the spell had been a dream. It had all seemed very logical and even compelli
ng at the time, but now that he was awake, its events seemed peculiar, even absurd, and the more time that passed, the more the events of the dream became vague and unreal.

  He knew from his reading that the Great Spells were often like that, but he had never cast one before and didn’t know if this experience was what it ought to feel like. He simply felt as if he ought to be terribly frightened, and for some reason his body wouldn’t cooperate.

  He stepped carefully to the edge of the circle—there was more ice beneath the water, and a scrum of ice was already re-forming at the edges of the circle—and stepped out onto the ice. As he walked toward the braziers, his shoes began to stick to the ice as they froze.

  With a gesture, he lit the braziers.

  All of them.

  He shouldn’t have had the power to do that after the ritual, but he did.

  He felt the Salamander’s ghostly presence as it shifted beneath his skin. It wasn’t there, not of itself. That would kill him in truth just as he had feared during the ritual. But he was now linked to the land-wards of the Elven Lands, and through them, to the Elemental Powers that gave them life: sylph, gnome, undine, Salamander.

  He had the power he needed.

  HE completed the ritual—the prayers and glyphs that ended it were simple, compared to the preparations—and spent the rest of the night reinforcing the wards around the ice-pavilion, making them as strong and complex as he could. Now that he could practice—really practice—there was a lot more potential for disaster than ever before.

  Warping a Mageshield, or … some of the spells for summoning lightning, or a rain of fire … I don’t want to even try those without the best damping wards I can possibly cast. Layers of them.

  And if he meant to go viewing over a distance, the most important thing was that no one he chose to look at be able to look at him.