Shadowborn
Page 33
He felt Neill’s hands light on his forehead and the back of his head, but he barely felt the touch of the man’s magic, except that his stomach finally stopped wringing itself out. The Shadowborn mage hooked his hands beneath his armpits and hauled him upright on his knees and then to his feet. “I warned you,” he said, through set teeth. Angry, Tam realized, and on his behalf. The Shadowborn mage pulled Tam’s arm across his shoulders and walked him around the curve of the earthworks. They were on an inner ramparts, with another level above them; there he sensed the presence of the flying Shadowborn.
Another earth wall loomed before them, with a smaller archway closed by a hanging. With a snap of the hand, Neill tossed aside the hanging to allow them through. Inside, another gesture lit several illuminated wands jammed into the walls. He dropped Tam into an armchair. The chair, the bed, the table—all were carved with a detail that any Darkborn would have coveted, though the wood was deep, even, rose brown, and highly polished. Except for its disturbing opacity, for its ability to cast dense shadows, it might have graced a bedroom in a guild master’s house. “I refuse to sleep on dirt,” Neill said, observing his interest.
In the corner, in a carved basket, tawny fur stirred. A small wildcat hissed at Tam from where she lay curled around her kits. “Where’s your sister? ” Neill said to her, and a thread of magic looped the room, drawing a second wildcat out from under the bed. Decades-old habit made Tam tally the bounty on the skins. Neill folded himself down on the floor, which he had covered with a camp mat in the southern style, allowing the cat to sprawl across his lap. Her flank bulged with her own unborn litter. “I’d best send you back, hadn’t I?” the mage said to her. “Too many things with big teeth around. I’ll do it as soon as she lets me.” He looked up at Tam; in this light, his eyes were a deep blue. “Not much of a welcome for the emissary from the Temple.”
“Why?” Tam said hoarsely.
“Her? Me? You? The world? Life? ”
“She could have asked.”
“Simplest answer: because she can, and now you and your Temple know she can.” He shook his head. “You should have let me handle it.”
“You’re stronger than I am,” Tam said bluntly, “but not that strong.”
The corner of Neill’s mouth tucked in. “And how, may I ask, did you survive in the Temple so long? ” He met Tam’s startled look with raised brows. “Did you think we didn’t study our enemy? ”
“We didn’t sense your magic.”
“We didn’t send up fireworks. We knew the Darkborn could sense Shadowborn, even if we weren’t aware that extended to Lightborn sports. We kept to the minor magic: shape-shifting when we had to”—minor? thought Tam—“ensorcellment of mind”—Floria—“some talismanic magic.”
“The”—he cleared his throat—“the munitions that destroyed the tower? ”
“Dealt with at the factory outside the city. All right,” he said to the wildcat, who had taken his stroking hand in her jaws, teeth not breaking the skin. “I’ll leave well enough alone.” She heaved herself off his lap and squeezed back into her refuge under the bed.
“Who is Emeya? How did she get . . . the way she is? The strength she has.”
Neill did not at first appear to hear the question, his eyes following the wildcat. But he let her go, rising to settle in the second chair. “How much do you know about the origin of the Curse? ”
“Laid by the mage Imogene and her followers in revenge for the death of her daughter in a war between mages,” Tam said, promptly.
“And why didn’t it die with them? ”
That was the subject of endless speculation amongst student mages, and like most such exercises in speculation, one Tam avoided. He was a peasant; what was, was. Magic was supported by the mage’s vitality and will, and when those ceased, so, too, did the magic. The Curse was the exception. Those were the facts; speculation was specious.
Then he had a sudden, appalling thought. “Did all the mages who laid the Curse die? ”
“The obvious question, but the answer is yes. All died, and more. If you think Emeya’s a monster, you should have met Imogene . . . Be patient,” he said in response to Tam’s stirring. “I’ll come to your answer. But first, Imogene, a monster beyond compare. She’d specialized for years—centuries, even—on ensorcellments of the will, and anyone who came within her reach was made subject or driven away, with the exception of her daughter Ismene, whom she doted on. Ismene took an earthborn lover—not by his choice, you understand. It meant nothing to her that he was plighted by custom and honor to another woman, or that he killed himself in shame when she cast him off. Earthborn law could not touch Ismene, and mage’s law barely, but that man’s betrothed—her name has not come down to us—did not forget. Thirty years it took her to have her revenge. How’d an earthborn kill a mage?” A smile, with sharp teeth. “The Darkborn seem to be learning the way of it. In this case, she found allies—many allies, who’d been injured by magic, who were jealous of magic, who feared magic—and what she couldn’t find, she bought. She found ways of setting the mageborn against each other, made sure that Ismene had enemies enough among the mageborn that her magic was worn down—not that that was difficult—and finally lured her underground and dropped a mountain on her head. And that is why the Curse, why Imogene took such revenge upon the earthborn, for all those who were part of her daughter’s murder. . . . I sometimes wonder what became of that lady after, though she probably did not survive too long.”
“Did nobody try to stop her . . . Imogene?”
“Oh yes, and either joined her or died refusing. That was the war between mages, there, between those who’d joined Imogene and those who opposed her. To ensure the Curse would survive them, Imogene anchored it in the vitality of everyone born into it, and made her and her followers’ children the keystones of the magic. Of those, seven survived the first century. Six were alive at the end of the third. Four after the fifth. Two at the eighth.”
Magic anchored in the vitality of another, one of the lost skills that the high masters had tried to retrieve for generations. He knew how the high masters would react to this, greedy as they were. “And those two are Emeya and . . .”
“Imogene’s younger daughter, Isolde.”
“And you are? ”
“Emeya’s great-great-grandson. She was so clearly deranged that even the other children knew it, so they kept her under ensorcellment. In the end, they were too few. Five hundred years had passed while she slept. You can imagine what that did for her. She let herself mature enough to bear a son, and then let others do the bearing for her.”
Five hundred years and then five generations . . . This man might be older than the archmage’s three hundred years. He had the strength for such longevity. “And Isolde? ”
Neill released a long breath through his nose. “Imogene’s other daughter, the one who was not the favorite, the one of whom nothing was expected. I’m sure her mother would have been surprised to find Isolde had outlived them all. I don’t think she’s sane, either.”
And how much of that should he believe, given that between Emeya and Isolde there was at least rivalry and possibly outright war? He wished he had Fejelis here—the prince made a study of the ways people revealed themselves. Mages could grow lazy.
“Why, after all these centuries, should the two of you be looking north? Why attack the manor? ”
“Emeya decided that Atholaya was too small for the two of them.” The tone was easy, but the shift of his eyes in their deep sockets betrayed a lie. Then he sighed and leaned back on his hands. “Emeya is afraid of Isolde.”
That might be truth, but the Temple mage distrusted such a ready admission of vulnerability. What else did it disguise? “Has she reason to be? Is Isolde the stronger? ”
“As to the manor, the Stranhornes and Strumhellers have been nothing but trouble for centuries. We wanted the manor. We’d have had both manors by now, but that we—I—got overconfident. Baron Strumheller, the man said, a
nd I knew that name, but I’ve never sensed anything so weak and ripped up with overuse besides. So I was talking to him, waiting for Sebastien to join us, and he simply shoots me—calm as you please, with a bullet that would drop a scavvern. I suppose I should be glad he stopped at the one. And while I’m putting my viscera back together, Midora and the idiot boy start burning up the interior of Stranhorne, until—boom.” He gave Tam a dark look, then let out a sigh and snapped his fingers in the direction of the basket, following it with a prod of magic.
The wildcat hissed, but obediently caught up a kitten in its jaws and carried it, dangling, to Neill’s knee. She crouched, glaring at him, while he examined it, inserting a finger into the small mouth, running a hand down the spine, testing the thrust of its hind legs. The diversion seemed to calm him, and he smiled engagingly at the angry cat as he handed her kit back. “She’s a beauty, isn’t she? ” he said to Tam.
Her pelt certainly was thick and healthy, though small for full bounty. “The creatures—are they all yours?”
“They are now. I inherited them from Durran—my father—along with my bent toward fleshworking. He’d the original idea to use what the Darkborn call the Shadowborn to drive the Sundered out of Atholaya and keep them out. They were all terrified of what they’d do if they found us, he most of all.”
“And . . . the transformed Darkborn? ” Tam said. He’d been too overspent and sickened to characterize the magic around the flyers, but this man could rework flesh, so if any mage could . . .
A white glimmer in the shadowed eyes. “Ah, you realized that.”
“Your doing? ” he said, quietly.
“Emeya would not have let them live otherwise. Transformed, they’re useful to her.”
“Do they agree with you that life is worth accepting on any terms? ”
“You don’t have the slightest idea what you are talking about,” Neill said, without temper.
“Do you not realize,” Tam said, in a low voice, “that what you are doing is an atrocity? ”
Neill tipped his head back, the light catching on the long, vulpine planes of his face. Its cast was not quite man, now Tam saw it fully in strong light, as though Neill had chosen to emulate one of his beloved animals. “I realize it. And I repeat: you don’t have the slightest idea what you are talking about. Believe me, there are worse atrocities.”
Tam was tired and sickened and ready to despair, but he struggled on. “And Sebastien?”
“My cousin Ariadne’s son. Emeya wanted her mated—didn’t matter to whom—but without waiting for them to find their way”—his eyes glittered with anger—“she set an ensorcellment on them. Ari was just strong enough to twist the ensorcellment toward another man, and just to add insult, she chose a new Darkborn slave, bound him to her and herself to him. The child born to them was mageborn, and strong, so Emeya let them live. But they were marked from that day. Hearne’s a survivor, if nothing else. He persuaded Ariadne to make a run for Isolde. They’d have taken the boy, but he was Emeya’s pet then, and he didn’t want to go. Knowing what Emeya would do to her, I helped them get away.” He grimly contemplated the pattern of the carpet. “If I’d known then what I know now, I wouldn’t.” He glanced up. “Emeya needs this Temple alliance; she just won’t face the fact.”
“Why? ” Tam said.
The deep-set eyes looked directly at him, blue in their depths and calculating. Tam wished again to be Fejelis or one of the high masters, old and crafty, instead of a blunt, muddled peasant.
Neill said nothing; plainly, he was not going to answer that particular question, at least now.
“Why do you stay with her? ” Tam said.
Neill said, “I’m a mage. I want knowledge. I crave the exercise of my power. That’s what binds me. I couldn’t live with all your Temple rules.”
Tam knew that craving. At its best, that desire expressed itself as it had in Lukfer, in the long years of study and unceasing efforts to master his unruly strength, and in the generosity that had made him willing to offer his knowledge to anyone who would receive it from him. It was not his failing that so few had. At its worst . . . he thought he had taken his measure of it at its worst, when the high masters had him lying bound before them and ransacked his mind for his knowledge. But now . . .
Now he had met Emeya, he knew her strength exceeded that of the archmage, exceeded that of the archmage and high masters who had bound him—for all he might try to tell himself that she had taken him unawares and they had not. And if she knew magical protocols lost since the Sundering . . . the high masters would want those.
“You look quite horrified,” Neill observed. “What are you thinking? ”
“About magic. And your archmage. And the high masters.”
“It’s not an unendurable life, ordinarily. Just lately . . .” And then the color drained suddenly from his long face. “She wants me,” he said. “Don’t leave this room, whatever hap—” In a knot of Shadowborn magic, he was gone.
Tam gagged. “ ‘Not an unendurable life,’ ” he quoted hoarsely, to the empty room. Hissing answered him, from the basket and from under the bed.
Could he escape, while Emeya was occupied with Neill? He might yet have the strength for a lift, drained though he was. He was desperate enough to try—to Stranhorne, even Minhorne. As Lukfer had repeatedly reminded him, distance was more a psychological barrier than a physical one; his body’s memory of all those miles walked barefoot or in holed boots refused to yield to magic alone. But should he succeed in leaving, dared he take this information back to the high masters? Would it repel or entice them—all this power, all this knowledge? Would they believe him or think him mistaken about her strength? Would they send him back to accept her terms? And what hope for Fejelis and the earthborn then?
He had a dreadful vision of himself set up as master and protector of earthborn, as Neill was master and protector of beasts. Had his stomach not already been empty, he would have vomited. A voice insinuated itself into his thoughts.
The vision had not been his own temptation, but hers.
He extended his magic toward the archmage, the high masters; reached in blind desperation and met only her presence, her strength, pressing down. She said,
He fell back into the chair, feeling half dissolved. He did not sense the wolf enter the room, though he heard the wildcats hiss. He blinked tears from his eyes in time to see it regard the basket with intelligent yellow eyes, and lurched forward in his chair in an absurd protective reaction toward one predator against a greater. Then froze as the wolf turned its malign gaze toward him. It whined, padded forward, and, even as he mustered the magic he would need to defend himself, propped its jaw on his knee, its brows quirking, doglike, as it contemplated his face.
He was still sitting there, pinned in place by his guardian, when Neill reappeared. The mage landed on his feet and promptly dropped to hands and knees. Tam could see the stripes across his face and neck and arms, wheals like those he had seen on a man who had fallen into a swarm of skull jellyfish. Mayfly abandoned Tam to snuffle at Neill’s ear. The mage slung an arm around his pet’s neck and leaned against the shaggy shoulder. The wheals along his jawline seemed to bubble as magics battled within them, hers to hurt, his to heal.
Her magic intensified. The wheals suddenly split and the bubbling spread across his entire face, and he rolled away from the wolf, curling into a fetal ball. Far later than Tam would have expected, he screamed.
Her magic swirled away, and Neill slumped over onto his back, the blisters sealing themselves over, the raw flesh drying and dulling and going pink. He stared at the ceiling for several minutes, chest rising and falling, then worked a hand into the wolf’s ruff and pulled himself up. “How d’you like that demonstration? ”
“Not,” said Tam.
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br /> “As you can perhaps gather,” Neill said, sounding slightly breathless, “she is not receptive to the idea of an alliance. I think she mismeasures your high masters’ strength, myself.” His skin was as unmarked as it had been before, but Tam noticed that his face had lost the angularity and length of jaw and was now entirely a man’s.
“Come outside,” Neill said abruptly. “I know you’ll never have seen this. I know I need to, just at the moment. It gives me strength.”
In trepidation, Tam followed him outside, and with even more trepidation followed him up a final series of steps to the ramparts of the earthworks. He could see around him the crumpled mounds of sleeping Shadowborn, each one with a mat for a mattress and its folded wings for blankets. He could feel Neill’s magic flickering around them, soothing. On the edge of the earthworks, not too close, Neill pointed east. The sky, so dark when they had met, had lightened along the horizon to the cobalt blue of a fine glass, draped with cloud. “Dawn,” Neill said.
“I’ve seen dawn,” Tam said. He would take no gifts from this cruel paradox of a man.
Neill glanced at him. “Not like this, I’ll warrant. Enjoy it. It may be our last.”
A wave of magic rose from beneath them. A boy’s voice screamed rawly. Neill closed his eyes in sympathetic pain. “I have to go. You stay. No one will bother you. Mayfly.” The wolf, summoned, pushed between them like a jealous child. “See no one does.”
Neill was right; seen from this side of sunrise, daybreak was astonishing—the transparent yellow, the intense orange, the blinding break of sunlight. Artarian should have been here. Beatrice should have had these colors to glaze on her pots. Fejelis would have watched with his usual interest in the new. His son . . . would no doubt have tried to throw himself from the ramparts or down the gullet of a wolf. He wiped his face. How could a sight so beautiful elicit such despair?