Emissary

by Thomas Locke

  The wizard stroked his beard and gave a scholar’s studied examination to the orb still hovering above Hyam’s head. “Must you keep my kindred wizards bound any longer?”

  The outer wall was a smoldering ruin where it ran closest to the acolytes’ shattered cells. Two youths scrambled over the remains and ran for the forest trail. Hyam waited for more to flee, but the other acolytes merely showed fearful faces through the holes he had made. Hyam extended his arms, and the youths vanished back inside. He reached with his extended power-senses back into the Long Hall and released every spell he had made.

  “Thank you,” the greybeard said quietly.

  Hyam heard the soft rush of many feet, and mages swarmed into the courtyard. They scurried toward him, their sandals slapping frantically upon the cobblestones. But they did not come to attack. Instead, they clustered and clutched at the ragged opening, their gazes locked on the orb hovering above Hyam’s head. Hyam could well understand why. Without the globe, they were not merely stripped of power. Their entire existence was rendered futile. If it ever had any point at all.

  Hyam reached above his head and took hold of the still-glowing orb. He offered it to the wizard. “This is yours.”

  “Yes,” Trace solemnly agreed. “It is.”

  “Promise me you will never hold another prisoner within your walls. Including your acolytes. Each year, all who live here shall be granted the right to depart.”

  “This do I vow.”

  “You will do your utmost to see this becomes the rule in every Long Hall.”

  “Agreed. I and my successors.”

  “Then take it.”

  The greybeard gravely accepted hold of the orb, and instantly the light diminished. This was not lost on the mage or on the other wizards who clustered in the front courtyard.

  Hyam turned away, only to be drawn back by the mage saying, “May I ask a boon of you? I know I hardly hold any right. But . . .”

  “Speak.”

  The mage leaned in close enough to reveal the desperation in his bright blue eyes. “Take me with you!”

  Their departure from the Long Hall meadows was delayed until well after dark. Three times one of the remaining acolytes came out to beg Hyam’s patience. The last youth’s gaze lingered overlong on Joelle, then he caught Hyam’s glare, blanched in the torchlight, and tried to slip through the ruined wall.

  “Come back here!” When the youth stood tremblingly before him again, Hyam demanded, “You were her friend?”

  “She was kind to me, after a fashion. The first months were hard, they were.”

  “And yet you stayed. Not then. Now. When I gave you release.” Hyam studied the acolyte and realized, “You like it here.”

  “Ever so much, your lordship.”

  “Why?”

  “I am hungry for learning. They feed me. Master Trace most of all.”

  “I was hungry too, once,” Hyam replied. “But the mages beat it out of me.”

  “I was beaten at home,” the youth said. “But not here.”

  “Never?”

  “Not once. Master Trace won’t allow it.” He twisted his hands nervously. “You’ll keep him safe, won’t you, your lordship? We’re ever so fond of him.”

  Hyam moved Joelle and his animals back to where the meadow met the forest. Joelle spoke little and cast furtive glances toward her former prison. When he offered her food, she refused to eat until he assured her it had not come from the Long Hall. The young woman’s silent burdens made Hyam steam.

  He had trouble not staring at her, for she was truly lovely. But he could feel a fearful tension radiating from her. So Hyam moved back to where he stood between her and the Long Hall. Torchlight and candles and magical illumination poured through the gaping holes. Perhaps he should have felt satisfaction over the evidence of his vengeance. But the young acolyte’s shining gaze and the words he had spoken left Hyam feeling vaguely ashamed.

  He walked back to where Joelle sat watching him with her unblinking gaze. Hyam hefted the saddlebag and moved down to where the meadow joined with the ruined outer wall. He stood quietly, feeling his exhaustion, and wondered if this sensation of being so utterly drained was the price one paid for using the orb. If so, he would soon be in even worse shape.

  The trickle of power flowed directly beneath his feet before passing beneath the Long Hall. Hyam’s ability to reach out was weakened by his fatigue. But the connection was still there, the orb filled with a force he could draw upon. His exhaustion did not vanish as the power surged through him. It simply no longer mattered. He extended his arms toward the broken wall, and farther still. Out to the hidden chamber where the orb had been replaced and where all the mages now gathered. He resealed the chamber, repairing the walls, drawing the stones together in a flow as constant and steady as the power upon which he drew.

  The old mage found Hyam returning the outer wall’s stones to their proper order. Trace watched in silence as Hyam completed his work. The wizard then stepped forward and ran his hand over the restored wall. Lines of fire glimmered between the stones, fading gradually.

  Hyam walked back to where the Doorkeeper and several of the other mages observed him cautiously through the ruined portal. They stepped well back as he began the process of healing the door frame. He reached into the forest behind him and hefted a massive felled trunk. He drew it to him, held it in midair, stripped away the branches, then sectioned it into planks and spliced them together with the same veins of fire that had sealed the walls. Then he shut the portal and blocked his view of the mages’ burning gazes. Sealing him outside. Beyond the hallowed walls. Where he belonged.

  “They won’t thank you, you know,” Master Trace said.

  “I want nothing from them.”

  “Well, on that point they will most certainly satisfy you. For that is precisely what you will get for your trouble. Nothing.” The old mage fell into step beside him as Hyam started back across the night-clad meadow. “You shoved them off their self-righteous throne. You shattered their sense of worth and power. You terrified them.”

  “I’m glad.”

  A wide swath of gleaming teeth appeared amid his beard. “So am I.”

  “Strange attitude for the Master to take. As strange as hearing the acolytes liked you.”

  The mage flicked his hand, and a light the size and strength of a lantern’s glow appeared above his right shoulder. “It is such a pity they treated you so harshly.”

  Hyam’s fatigue robbed his words of ire. Still, he spoke because he wanted Joelle to hear. “They beat me until I bled.”

  “We do not beat our protégés. It is forbidden.”

  “I’ll wager that won’t last with you gone.”

  “Forbidden,” the mage repeated, raising an arm in greeting to the slit-eyed woman. “That was why I tarried so long. Ensuring that my chosen successor was set in place and that she acknowledged my goals and my vows as her own.”

  Hyam bent over his gear, then paused, doubting he had the strength to lift the saddle.

  The old man touched his shoulder. “Let me do that, lad.”

  Hyam stepped back because he had to and watched the old man huff and heave the saddle into place.

  “Just because my fellow wizards are too shaken to do what is right and proper does not mean it must be left undone.” Master Trace straightened into the formal stance of a senior mage and said, “Thank you for restoring our orb and healing our home.”

  They traveled less than an hour, which was good, because Hyam’s feet became increasingly reluctant to rise from the trail. Joelle rode. The Master walked ahead of them with his soft light revealing the path. Hyam walked behind, using his bow stave for support. Dama took up the rear, glancing back so often Hyam wondered if perhaps the mages were trailing along behind. Then he decided he did not care what the wizards did.

  He had reached the limits of his endurance when they arrived at the base of the second narrow valley. Hyam sensed a distant coursing flow of power rising throu
gh his exhausted legs and declared, “We stop here.”

  “There is a pool just beyond the next ridge,” the mage responded. “With a cave that offers a fine shelter.”

  “Here,” Hyam insisted. When Joelle descended from the saddle, he told her, “I brought only the one bedroll.”

  “I do not care.” Her eyes gleamed in the light. “I am far too excited to sleep.”

  “Then you can stand guard.” Hyam tossed Trace the pallet, threw himself onto the earth, and was gone.

  He awoke in the depths of night. The wizard slumbered off to his right, the magical light nestled in the boughs of a sapling that rose by his head. Joelle sat with her back against a tree on the trail’s other side. Someone had dragged the saddle off the horse. Dama rose from her position beside Hyam and nuzzled him as he groaned softly and forced himself erect. He walked to the pile of gear and hefted a water skin and a sack of food from the inn. He eased himself down beside the woman and offered her the skin. She drank briefly, accepted bread and cheese and a plum. While she ate and drank, Joelle’s gaze never left his face.

  “Are you tired?” Hyam asked.

  “For three years and seventeen days, I have lain in my chamber and dreamed of this night. When I could taste the wind and smell the forest and watch the stars. I will sleep later.”

  “How old were you when you entered the Long Hall?”

  “Fifteen. My parents died from a fever that swept through the forest where we had our cottage. I lived alone for a year. Then the sickness returned, and I thought I was going to die. Then someone rescued me. I thought . . .”

  “Tell me. Please.”

  “I thought the person had green skin.” She looked ashamed by the admission. “I was very sick.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I was taken to another place where someone else cared for me. I remember a home made from white stone where they fed me a potion that tasted dreadful.”

  “The Ashanta took you in,” he realized. In the mage’s light, her features were smooth as carved alabaster. Her pain was an alien presence and did not belong.

  “Those people were not kind. They treated me without feeling. Everything they did for me was a chore. They kept me until they were certain I would survive, and not a moment longer, then they brought me to the Long Hall.” She smeared streaks of wet across her cheeks. “Tonight is the first time I have been back in my beloved forest. I never thought this night would come.”

  He set the water skin aside and retied the food sack. “I need to ask you to do something.”

  Her gaze was steady, her voice flat and hard as the blade beside her hand. “I will do whatever you ask.”

  Hyam realized with a start what she expected him to say. He blushed furiously. “No, it’s not . . . I don’t . . . Well, I do, but . . .”

  She sat and watched him, her gaze like lavender stone.

  Hyam took a deep breath and tried again. “I need to contact the Ashanta.”

  She started. “What does that have to do with me?”

  “When I came to you in the night, you realized I was there. How?”

  “I saw you with my other eyes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Master instructed me never to speak of these things.” She glanced over to where the wizard slept. “He was my best friend among the mages. He tried to teach me. He tried . . .”

  Hyam recalled the narrow-faced Doorkeeper and finished for her, “Some of the mages forbade it. And took pleasure in doing so.”

  Her gaze returned to the slumbering magician. “Trace spent time with me. He instructed me, even when others said it was forbidden.”

  Hyam heard the unspoken. “He taught you magic?”

  “Some. A little. He seemed thrilled when I showed talent. Some of the others were . . . not pleased.”

  Hyam resisted the urge to tell her of his own experiences at the hands of narrow-minded wizards. “You don’t have to do what the mages said, not ever again.”

  Joelle nodded slowly. “What do you want?”

  “This second vision of yours. Tell me how it works.”

  “You came to me, and you do not know this?”

  “I have only been able to do it in dreams, and never by my own will. I am drawn forward.” He lifted his hands. “I don’t know any other way to describe it.”

  “That happens to me sometimes as well. Other times I am free. For a moment or so.”

  “When did this process begin?”

  “A few months ago.” She smiled at the memory. “The first time, I thought I had truly escaped. Waking up was dreadful.”

  “And this second sight?”

  “That came the year after my parents died. Gradually, slowly.”

  “How do you travel?”

  “It always happens upon awakening. I have often wondered if I might learn to control it. Go when I want, rather than wait for it to happen.” She extended her arms. “Just reach out and fly.”

  “Will you try now?”

  “If it is important to you. But . . .” She turned away from him and the mage’s light and stared into the darkness. “I went once to the Ashanta. They punished me for coming and told me never to return. They called me a woman of tainted blood. They said I was forbidden from ever approaching them again.”

  Her angry pain clenched his chest. “You miss them.”

  Again she swiped at her cheeks. “I have done nothing to them. They had me locked away. And now . . .”

  The tightness compressed his own rage into a tightly controlled flame. “If I can, I am going to change all that.”

  She seemed to have difficulty even hearing his words. “But how?”

  “That’s why I need your help,” Hyam replied. “To do this very thing.”

  30

  Hyam found a softly padded section of ground where moss grew thick beneath a massive oak. He used the sack holding the orb for a headrest. He watched as Joelle hesitated, then lay down not two full paces away from him. “I don’t know if this will work.”

  “Thank you for trying.” The words seemed feeble, given all her reasons for denying his request. “I mean that.”

  “I know you do, Hyam.” She spoke his name for the first time. “And it amazes me that you should find it necessary to thank me for anything. Ever.”

  Again he felt the flush rise from his collar, for he heard the clear invitation in her voice. As well as the bitter resignation. This time, he could not draw his gaze away. Her hair was shaded somewhere between russet and blonde. That and her eyes were the clearest signs of her human blood. There were many beautiful women among the Ashanta, who were known as a handsome race. But none that Hyam had ever met carried her sorrow.

  “There is an energy far below us.”

  She blinked, clearly expecting him to say something else. “Inside the earth?”

  “Very deep.” He poked the moss at his side. “Do you feel it?”

  “I don’t . . .” She was silent for a time. “No. I sense no such thing.”

  “It’s very faint here. We’ll try this again elsewhere.” He settled into a prone position and shut his eyes. “I will connect with this energy, then encircle us both. Perhaps that will make the transition easier for you.”

  He sensed as much as heard her lie back. “All right.”

  He bonded with the orb and reached down, down. His awareness of the streaming force grew with each exercise. The current here was a minuscule stream. Hyam saw how the orb was both a receptacle and conduit, that in fact he could connect with the coursing energy precisely because of the orb’s presence. He breathed in the growing force, then out, encircling them both. When the mage-force fully enveloped them, he heard Joelle whisper, “I feel it.”

  “Try to go now.”

  Hyam waited, and when Joelle did not speak again, he assumed she had been successful. The question was how to join her.

  He did not so much speak the command as visualize what he wanted. Then mentally he reached out, searching for
a woman who was disconnected from the body laying beside him. Instantly he rose from his body, smooth and precise. He hovered long enough to focus his awareness and found Joelle there waiting for him.

  She remained where she was for a time, studying this unformed component of him. Then she turned her awareness away and extended.

  He sensed clearly that Joelle was seeing, searching, and then once she located her destination, she moved. And as she sped away from where they both lay, he journeyed with her.

  Farther and farther they went, until she arrived at a pristine meadow. The fields were far greater than the ones surrounding the Three Valleys settlement. And the Ashanta city rising from its heart was far grander.

  Joelle stopped by the nearest boundary stone and said, “I dare go no farther.”

  “Will you wait here?”

  He did not know how it was possible for him to hear her so clearly. Not merely the words, but the timbre of her speech and the pungent fear. “If you command, then yes. But I’d rather . . .”

  “Don’t go.”

  “When I last came, they hurt me.”

  “They won’t do that again.” His vision blurred slightly beneath the sudden wash of rage. “I promise you.”

  “All right. I’ll wait.”

  He swept through the boundary stones, and this time the sentries in the watchtowers were alerted to his arrival. Ahead of him rose an abrupt heaving alarm. Which meant his next move was redundant. But his anger over the way they had treated Joelle needed venting.

  Hyam drew in all the power he could muster, then released it in a bellow that shook the watchtowers on their foundations.

  “WAKE UP!”

  The hastily gathered Assembly might have held a comic edge, had the intent not been so serious. Many of the Ashanta arrived directly from a disturbed sleep. More still were aghast at the fact that they had been called by the presence of an interloper. An outsider. One who was not of them. The fact that he bore the title of emissary changed none of this.

  Had he not still been so irate over their treatment of Joelle, Hyam might have been more respectful. As it was, he waited impatiently while the leader mounted the platform and gathered his robes of office. The number of people there in bodily form was much reduced from the last time. Yet the unseen host that surrounded him was as numerous as before. And far more alarmed. Clearly these secretive folk disliked being hauled from their complacent isolation as much as the Long Hall mages.