The Mages of Bennamore

by Pauline M. Ross

  Behind me, I could hear Hestaria’s shrill voice arguing with Mal’s low rumble, but I was entranced by the shimmering spheres. Slowly I walked towards them as the argument faded behind me. I had no idea what they were for – or what the tower itself was for, come to that – but I knew they were not pointless.

  I was drawn irresistably forwards – I stretched out one hand towards them. There was a very clear boundary, now that I looked more closely. The balls stayed within some invisible line a few paces from the edge of the tower. When they neared it, they seemed to bounce off it, moving away in a different direction. They didn’t bounce off each other, though, simply adjusting course very slightly to avoid contact, like a shoal of slow-moving fish.

  My hand passed the boundary with just a slight tingle to mark its passage. Inside, the balls effortlessly avoided it, even when I waved it about. There was no resistance. I’d thought the air might be thicker inside, to keep the balls moving so slowly, but it felt exactly the same.

  With infinite slowness I floated forwards. The tingle of the boundary passed up my arm, into my shoulder, through my head. Somewhere in the distance, like a sound in a dream, I heard Mal’s voice but I couldn’t make out the words. I felt almost as if I were underwater, cut off from reality, the world familiar and yet utterly different.

  Another step, and there was silence. All around me the balls spun in their endless motion, and there was nothing else in the world except me and the shimmering spheres and the haze of magic in the air.

  I moved forward as gently as the balls until I reached a point where the magic was thickest. The middle, perhaps. There I stopped, quite unafraid, feeling whole and well and nothing like the exhausted, thirsty, dust-coated woman who had entered the tower.

  And waited, although I couldn’t say what for.

  Then, a warmth in my head, which died away almost at once. Around me the balls seemed to draw back, so that I stood in a little empty space. And then, drifting down from somewhere above me, a single glass ball, as colourless as the rest, hovering in front of my face.

  My ball. Somehow I knew that this ball was for me, had been chosen or matched to me in some indefinable way. It sounds insane, but I knew it, as surely as I knew my own name.

  I cupped my two hands together and the ball drifted down again to rest there. I felt able to move again, and floated onward until I passed through the tingle of the boundary again, the sphere cradled in my hands.

  A cacophony of noise assaulted my ears.

  “Moon and Sun, Fen! What the fuck were you thinking? Are you crazy? You had no idea what that would do to you, no idea at all.” Then, after a pause, “Are you all right?”

  I couldn’t miss the concern in his voice, but I felt as if I was still floating, slightly drunk.

  “I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?” I reached up to stroke his face, and saw him relax a little.

  Then Hestaria’s braying tones. “You gave us a turn and no mistake! You could have just reached out to take one, you know, if that was what you wanted. There was no need to go right in, no need at all.”

  “But this is mine,” I said, smiling beatifically at her. “It chose me.”

  As I looked at it, colours swirled through it in a complicated sequence – yellows, reds, then green, then a deep brown slowly fading, then orangey reds before finally settling to a pale creamy brown. I wondered why the spheres in motion were entirely colourless, when they acquired colours as soon as they were captured.

  “A bauble,” Hestaria squawked. “A child’s toy. However, Losh may be interested.”

  She had a ragged scarf around her head, all that remained of a more elaborate style, perhaps. She unwrapped it, and used it to tie up her sphere so that it could be carried.

  “Let us explore the rest of the tower.” She pointed to the outer wall, where a stair spiralled up and up. Without waiting for us, she strode off.

  I pulled out my crumpled, blood-stained cap from my pocket and tied it carefully round my own sphere, before attaching it to my belt.

  Mal waited for me, saying nothing.

  “Don’t you want one, too?”

  He shuddered. “I don’t trust anything I don’t understand.”

  That made me smile. “Like magic?”

  “Magic is odd, and I’m not particularly competent with it, but its possibilities are known. This – thing is a total mystery.”

  “You don’t think it’s a child’s toy, then?”

  “No, nothing like. We don’t know what it might do. It’s dangerous, Fen.”

  “Maybe. But Ish has one, Hestaria has one and I wanted one too. Let’s find out what other mysteries this place holds.”

  24: A Way Out

  The stair climbed evenly up and round the inside wall of the tower. There was no rail on the edge, but each step was broad and I felt no fear. In the centre, the spheres continued their slow dance, now far below us as well as above. There were no rooms, no floors above the lowest level, nothing but the steadily rising stairs.

  There were windows, though, and doors. They weren’t visible from below but as we drew near to each one we could see the outline very faintly. When we were alongside one, it would become clear glass or else a wooden door. The first windows were dark, since we were presumably still underground. As we began to rise above the rock and dirt of the promontory, the windows revealed wind-blown heather and whin, and circling seabirds in a blue sky.

  Every fourth outline was not a window, but a door, a plain affair with a simple rope handle. And they opened. There was no lock, no latch, no magic – a simple tug on the rope opened the door. The first was still below ground, opening to a smooth rocky face, but the second was mostly above ground with a gap large enough to crawl through. The third had a drop of more than a man’s height, but still manageable. Beyond that, the doors were too far above the ground to jump without breaking a leg, or worse.

  I couldn’t quite see the purpose in going all the way to the top, but Hestaria had raced ahead of us, and we couldn’t abandon her. As we plodded upwards, Mal took my hand with a smile, and I felt the slight tingle of his magic as our palms met. For all the strangeness of the tower, and the strain of everything we’d suffered over the past few days, it felt very intimate to be hand in hand, like a long married couple, contented and secure. There were many questions to be asked and explanations to give and plans to make, but for now it was enough to be together, walking side by side through the unknown.

  “Hurry up!” Hestaria screeched from above. “This is fascinating!”

  As we neared the top, we realised there was a room up there, for the stairs disappeared. In a light tower, that would be the place for the giant lanterns and reflecting walls, but this was assuredly not a light tower. Even though there were windows, nothing inside was visible from the outside.

  The stairs twisted at the top to veer away from the walls and then we were passing through the floor of the room above. At first, after the brightness down below it seemed dark up here, just a circular room with blank walls, the only illumination filtering up through the stairwell. But then it struck me how odd the light was lower down. Despite the many windows, light seemed to emanate from the tower itself, filling the space evenly. The windows were no brighter than any other part of the tower, with no beams of sunshine from the summer’s day visible through the glass. Magic makes everything seem not quite real.

  Up here, though, all was gloom.

  “Look at this!” Hestaria’s piercing tones made my head ring.

  As my eyes adjusted, I could see what she was pointing to. In the centre of the room, on a marble plinth, sat a giant version of the glass balls gently drifting in the body of the tower below. It was huge, sixty paces round by Mal’s stride, and just as clear and colourless as its spinning fellows. This one didn’t move, though. It sat, immobile and inert. Whatever magic it contained was hidden from us.

  “Very nice, Hesta, but let’s get out of here,” Mal said.

  “Have you no curiosity? Do y
ou not wonder what it will do, when activated?”

  “I don’t want to find out. This is madness. You’re both crazy.” His gaze swept over me and then Hesta. “Whatever this tower was built for, whatever these – these things are supposed to do, it makes no sense to just poke and prod until we get burned or something explodes.”

  “Where is your sense of adventure?”

  “I’ve had enough adventure for now. All I want to do is to get out of this place, go home and have a long soak in the bathtub, followed by a meal and a decent night’s sleep. I don’t want any more surprises.”

  There was a weariness in his voice which surprised me. I’d never seen him exhausted, not even after a heavy training day. Perhaps in body he wasn’t yet spent, but his spirit was overwhelmed by everything that had happened. I was excited and intrigued, just as Hestaria was, but Mal hated the unexpected.

  “She’s going to try it anyway,” I said. “And this is the last thing. After this, we’ll leave.”

  A half smile. “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  Mal and I backed away to the wall, while Hestaria walked all round the glass ball.

  “Right. Here goes.” She reached out both hands and slapped them down onto the ball.

  The room lit up as if the sun had been uncovered.

  We all threw our hands up, dazzled by the sudden brilliance, and the light in the ball faded away, not abruptly this time, but a gentle diminishing to nothing. We were back in the dark.

  “Well!” Hestaria chortled. “So it does do something after all. I will try for a little longer this time.”

  “It may be like the small ones,” I said. “Perhaps it needs to cycle through all the colours.”

  “True. Everyone ready?”

  Mal winced, and turned his head away. I took his hand again, and he squeezed my fingers.

  Hestaria laid her hands on the ball, and it exploded into light again. This time she kept her hands firmly planted. No colours. For a long time nothing happened at all. But then, deep in the ball, a tiny point of colour, a vivid orange red. Even as I became aware of it, it expanded to fill the ball, then winked out of existence just as suddenly.

  There were windows.

  All round us, the outer wall of the tower was filled with windows, each one only a handspan away from its neighbour. Beyond them, distant views. But every one was different.

  Hestaria stayed at her post, hands pressed against the ball, in case the windows disappeared as soon as she let go, but Mal and I walked round, speechless, gazing into each window in turn.

  There were twelve of them. Three were dark, showing only stars, but the others showed daylight, clear blue skies, or scudding clouds. Pouring rain lashed at one window, while its neighbours were filled with sunshine.

  “How is it even possible?” Mal said in a low voice. He was still clutching my hand in a tight grip.

  Up close to the windows, the view through each expanded to show more of the scene. We could look down onto roiling seascapes with waves crashing against rocks, or calm grassy headlands with a long line of islands stretching away into the distance. One window showed endless sand dunes, another a small fishing port with oddly constructed ships, long and thin, with striped sails and high prows carved into animal heads.

  And one was a city. The main part of it stood on a headland, with high walls in pink and grey stone which twinkled in the sunshine. Red-tiled roofs with curved ends showed above the walls, and many high towers, solid and square, with domed canopies and flags flying. Below, a river slithered round the walls, the near bank covered with dark buildings – warehouses, perhaps. A bridge across the river was choked with traffic and people – so many people. Directly below our vantage point, a massive harbour was alive with ships coming and going, or waiting in long lines to dock. They had many masts and an intricate array of sails of different shapes, but they also had double rows of oars. I’d never seen anything like it. We stood and watched it for an age, mesmerised.

  “I am about to step away.”

  Goddess, I’d forgotten all about Hestaria, still affixed to the ball, craning her head this way and that to see the windows. She lifted her hands, but nothing happened. The ball remained lit up, although with a more muted light, and the windows stayed visible.

  She walked round, peering into every window, even the dark ones, and then began another circuit, muttering, “Fascinating” at intervals. Then she stopped with a muffled exclamation.

  “Come here and tell me what you see,” she called imperiously. She was standing at one of the dark windows.

  Mal just rolled his eyes, so I went across and obligingly peered through. “Stars. No moon. A few clouds.”

  “No, no, no. Lower down.”

  “Water. The sea? Oh, and lamps, I think. A line of lamps, with a bend in it.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “Hmm, I don’t know. Actually, there are more lamps, if I stand on tiptoe. Ships, I think. A harbour? So the line of lamps is – oh!”

  “Yes, quite.”

  “It looks like our harbour. That line of lamps is the harbour wall, and if we could see further round, the town.”

  “That’s Dristomar?” Mal squeezed past us to look. “Well, it’s very similar, but it’s night out there and we’ve already seen through the lower windows that it’s the middle of the day.”

  “Oh, it may be showing a different time altogether,” Hestaria said airily. “Think about it. All the views we get from these windows are from high up, just as they would be from another tower like this. I think they are towers just like this one. That glass ball behind us is a scrying stone, a device for seeing at a distance. There are legends about them – that the mages from before the Catastrophe knew the secret of making them. But then a lot of things are said about the time before the Catastrophe. If even one tenth of them are true, it must have been an age of wonders indeed.”

  “You think we’re really seeing some other places, far away from here?”

  “I do, and maybe from some time in the past, who knows? I guess there are twelve towers like this one, scattered about the continent, and all connected so that each one can see the view from all the others.”

  “But why are some of them night-time?”

  She frowned at that. “I am not entirely sure. I know that the continent is so big that when it is night in one place, it will be day somewhere else, but…”

  “That’s ridiculous!” Mal said. “The sun shines on everybody. Doesn’t it?” He turned to me, hands spread in appeal.

  “Yes, but not at the same time. Think about it, Mal, it takes hours for the sun to cross the sky, it can’t be sunrise everywhere at once.” He shook his head, unconvinced. “There is a model at Shannamar, a plan of the whole continent, and a lamp shaped like the sun that moves over it, and you can see how it lights the eastern shore, then across the mountains and plains, and eventually reaches the sun-blessed lands. And by that time the eastern shore is dark again. So maybe if these windows are looking from different towers, some of them are in daylight, and in some it’s still night.”

  Another thought. “A scrying ball – I wonder if mine can do it, too! Do you think? It looks exactly the same, only smaller.”

  I fished it out of my cap, still slung onto my belt, and gazed into it with renewed interest.

  Hestaria snorted. “Now that is just silly. This one has windows to scry through, yours has nothing. How can it possibly work the same way?”

  “Oh.” I was instantly deflated. I held in my hand, and the creamy brown colour inside swirled gently under my touch. “It looks exactly the same, except for the colour,” I said. “Does it feel the same…?”

  I reached out to touch the giant ball.

  The instant I set my other hand on it, the windows went dark, and Hestaria gave a squeak of annoyance.

  “What have you done?”

  “No, it’s all right,” Mal said. “They’ve just changed, that’s all. Now they all show the same place.
Look.”

  He was right. The window showing the eastern harbour was unchanged, and its neighbour showed the edge of Dristomar town, a few lamps twinkling at street corners. Most of the windows were dark, though, with a few stars near the top.

  “I think the tower is in a hollow,” I said. “You can’t see it from most of the town, so we wouldn’t be able to see the town from the tower, would we?”

  “That is all well and good,” Hestaria said, “but how do we get the other views back?”

  We hadn’t any idea. Hestaria and I milled about, touching the ball again, standing in different places, even touching the small ball against the larger one (which didn’t work, they slid away from each other, no matter how we tried).

  Mal walked round and round the room, looking through each window in turn.

  “Hey, look at this!”

  Behind the stair, in shadow because the nearest windows were dark, was a small marble basin with a marble spout which gushed a clear liquid.

  “Water,” Hestaria said, but Mal shook his head.

  “It could be anything. I’ve seen clear liquids that eat through metal, or even stone, like a wire through cheese. Don’t touch it, Hesta.”

  We stood round, staring at it, in something akin to desperation. It was so tempting. My throat was parched and coated with dust, and it was becoming hard to swallow. The constant low burble of water drove us mad.

  With an abrupt jerk, Mal thrust a finger under the flow, withdrawing it just as quickly. Hestaria squeaked, and my jaw dropped. Mal sucked the wet finger, then grinned.

  “Water. Nice and cool.”

  We slaked our thirst, washed our faces and then refilled the water flasks. Hestaria didn’t have one, but I still had mine, and Mal, well-trained guard that he was, had remembered to bring his from the dank underground cell.

  “Why did you do that?” I hissed, as Hestaria went back to the giant ball. “It’s not like you to jump into something risky.”

  He shrugged. “I have the healing magic on me. Besides – better me than you. Or Hestaria,” he added as an afterthought. “Look, I still don’t get this day and night business. I don’t understand why we saw daylight from the windows as we came up the tower,” His finger stabbed downwards. “Yet it’s the middle of the night in this—”