by D. P. Prior
It was a question that had never occurred to him before, in the narrow confines of Malogoi. But here, in the middle of a mist-shrouded lake that seemed to have no end, it took on a compelling relevance. It was also a diversion to keep the sorcerer from prying.
Theurig followed his gaze then turned back to him and frowned. A moment later, he laughed. “If we were back home, I’d pull out a map and demonstrate just how large the world is. Even if it had an edge to fall off of, you’d see we are in little danger of reaching it. But I’ll let you into a secret.” He leaned in close and whispered. “Nemus isn’t flat. It’s round.”
Snaith gave a knowing laugh.
“No, really,” Theurig said. “It’s a sphere. A gigantic ball that spins as it passes around the sun.”
“Really?” Snaith said with a shake of his head and a raise of his eyebrows.
“Really. Just don’t tell our friend.” Theurig nodded toward the Lakeling, then sat back with a self-satisfied grin on his face.
“And how do you know?”
“Better books than Cawdor’s,” Theurig said. “Better-held secrets. And one or two corroborative artifacts from the time of the ancestors. I’m talking before the First Invasion and the coming of the Wakeful. Our people knew things back then. They had a quite remarkable body of lore, which is only extant in fragments. And relics whose use we can but guess at.”
Snaith found he was the one frowning this time. He watched the sorcerer’s face for any hint of mockery. “You’re serious.”
“Sometimes. Ah, look! A water moccasin! Do you know, their poison can—There! In among the bullrushes…” He pointed to the bank they had been traveling parallel to. “Hemlock! The perfect tisane for a friend you despise. Take us over to it.”
The Lakeling turned the craft with three deft strokes to one side, then nudged the bank with the prow so that Theurig could hop out. Only, he didn’t. After a perfunctory show of turning out his robe pockets, the sorcerer glared at Snaith.
“My gloves were in the pack you left behind, along with the cloth I need to wrap the leaves in. Forget it,” he said to the Lakeling. “Carry on down the lake. This is your fault, Snaith. Next time, I’ll expect better of you.”
Theurig fell into a sulk, hunched over at the prow, muttering to himself. Soon enough, though, he was back to pointing out the flora and fauna: maple trees, sweet gums, a mating pair of cranes, a wood duck.
As they passed through a dense reed bed, Snaith covered his nose against the stench. His stomach clenched, and it was all he could do to stop himself from vomiting over the side.
“Swamp gas,” Theurig said. “Unless it was something you ate. Oh, it couldn’t be; all our food was in my pack. If the smell doesn’t kill us, starvation almost certainly—”
He was cut off by a rasping growl that punctured the mist. The Lakeling lifted his oar from the water and kept perfectly still, listening. The sound came again, this time louder, a guttural bellow. It was answered by several distinct grunts further away.
“Mating season,” Theurig said. “The loud one is female. Nothing to worry about. They’re not interested in us, eh, my friend?”
The Lakeling scrutinized Theurig for a second, then returned the paddle to the water and set them underway again.
“Lake Pleroma is teeming with alligators,” Theurig explained. “Some of them quite large.”
Again the impulse to push the sorcerer in. Fleeting only, but it frightened Snaith how close he’d been to doing it before his mind had a chance to catch up. Usually he thought things through, visualized them, weighed up all his options.
He knew what the root of the problem was: his father’s book, which Theurig had taken from him. And it wasn’t just the book; it was what it represented. His injured arm tingled from the desire to make a fist. His good hand was already clenched and ready to strike. Theurig had his back to Snaith, scouring the misty waters. He hadn’t noticed. But the Lakeling had. He was watching through his amber eyes, but nothing about his body language revealed what he was thinking.
Theurig sat back away from the gunwale, apparently satisfied there was no threat from the water.
Snaith cast a wary glance at the Lakeling then forced himself to relax. It was no easy task. His blood was on fire, his muscles taut with anticipated violence. As the Lakeling resumed his rowing, Snaith tried to lose himself in the rhythm of the oar-strokes, but it had the opposite effect. Each splash became for him a stab, the spray of water the spilling of blood. Desperate for calm, he threw up his image of Tey but grew angry at its falsehood. And then, on impulse, he visualized her naked, as she’d been on the bed at Theurig’s house, and he added her scars to his simulacrum. One by one he placed them, diligently, precisely, perfectly. He could see them as clearly in his mind’s eye as he had in reality. That was his gift. That was how the Weyd had blessed him. If indeed there really was a Weyd. And if there was any purpose in this world that had, for him, been turned on its head.
Once more he deduced a pattern to Tey’s scars, but he had no key with which to decipher it. His attention was drawn to the triangle etched between her breasts, three sides too equal in length to have been the product of chance. And the patterns that flowed from it: cuneiform, like the crude lettering masons had carved into the granite slab beneath the chair of the Malogoi chief, listing all his predecessors. But although some of Tey’s scars had the feel of letters, they were no letters Snaith recognized. The rest seemed merely to be lines in relation to one another: parallel, perpendicular, diagonal, weaving a design that bespoke some hidden purpose. And yet that made no sense. The scars were self-inflicted. Since the bear attack, since the unveiling of her disfigurement, Snaith had little doubt Tey’s mind was as chaotic and void of purpose as a roiling brume.
Frustrating as it was to intuit meaning in her scars yet have no idea what it was, the exercise of rebuilding his simulacrum and revising his previous imperfect image was enough to divert Snaith from his murderous thoughts. There would come a time when he could avenge his parents. For now, he had to sit patient and learn what he could, if he was going to survive. What little he’d discerned about the wider world outside of Malogoi told him the currency of power was knowledge, and particularly knowledge that very few others possessed. Survival, for him, was going to involve a game of masks and layers of deflection. Maybe that was what Theurig had seen in him from the outset, why the sorcerer had pursued him so tenaciously. That, and Snaith’s near perfect recall, and his aptitude for mental imagery.
The best place to start, he told himself, was to play the role that had been assigned to him: to be the inquiring and attentive apprentice. That meant showing interest and asking questions, but just the realization he would have to suppress his violent inclinations toward the sorcerer was enough to dry up all his spit and make it an effort to talk. He ran his tongue around his lips, took a long, deep breath, and began as carefully as he could.
“How do you know the names of so many plants and animals? Are they passed on from sorcerer to apprentice, or do you make them up yourself?”
“The answer, once more, is books. Very old books, and very rare. Some of them written in Egrigorean. I have Slyndon Grun to thank for many in my collection. He has his needs, and I have mine. Where he gets them all from is another matter. Experience teaches me it is better not to ask. I have one tome in particular that is a veritable catalogue of genera from the largest whale in the oceans to the smallest of insects. There is even mention of creatures so tiny they can’t be seen with the naked eye.”
“Then how do you know they exist?”
Theurig shrugged. “They had their ways, the ancestors. One day, I hope to find out what they were. But for now, we must take their teachings on faith.”
Snaith shook his head. If you couldn’t see something, reach out and touch it, then it wasn’t real, as far as he was concerned. Except maybe for the Weyd, but even then he wasn’t so sure. He believed only in what was tangible, what was useful. Skills that could be acquired, the meat the hunters
brought back to the village, the produce the farmers grew. His mind inserted the recollection of Tey’s cool hand on him and the sensations that brought. His cheeks began to burn, and he glanced up to see Theurig watching him, reading his thoughts, mocking his shame.
Abruptly, the sorcerer looked away to the sky, where a cluster of birds, no more than distant specks, undulated beneath the clouds.
“Swallows,” Theurig said. “No need to see them up close if you know how they flock.”
He went on to speak about the flight formations of various species of bird, then moved on to their eating habits, which led to a discussion of insects, those to avoid, those that were edible, those that laid their eggs inside a living host, so the hatchlings could eat their way out.
“All life is parasitic, Snaith. Once you understand that, it changes how you go about things. To come to know the Weyd, observe everything and apply it to that basic paradigm. See how it fits into a world of competing, insatiable organisms vying for supremacy, yet ultimately succumbing to decay. The totality of knowledge, from the most infinitesimal detail to the fullness of creation, the undergirding of all that exists, even those things we cannot see, every thought, feeling, or concept, is but a fragment of the Weyd, which at its fountainhead is the root of existence itself. But there are strata upon strata of the Weyd, each denser the further it is from the source, until we reach the solidity of the world we inhabit.
“Consemius—one of my favorites among the post-Wakeful lore masters—speculates in his Ruminations: A Metaphysic of the Weyd that the higher strata seep through to the lower. Indeed, it was Consemius who came up with the idea that the stars are pinpricks in the heavens letting through the essence of the strata above. Each higher level of existence, he says, is supernatural to the one beneath. In the system he posits, magic is simply a matter of the forces of one strata acting within a lower realm. Ultimately, though, the Weyd is a mystery knowable only through inference and observation, and subject to the limitations of our finite minds.”
Theurig’s words clumped like wet clay in Snaith’s guts. So, the Weyd was everything and nothing—no-thing, Theurig had called it. Worth devoting your life to.
But was it, if that’s all it was? If all you could do was observe and infer and rely on the far-flung speculations of long-dead lore masters, what was the point? Gloom every bit as oppressive as Branikdür’s skies settled over his mind, gave it the cast of melancholy. Before he sank even further into despair, though, a new question shone through, like a shaft of sunlight penetrating the clouds.
“Does the Weyd possess thought?”
Theurig looked at him curiously.
“I mean, does it have aims and plans? Does it act in the world?” Because Theurig had always been warning about the will of the Weyd, about what would happen if the Weyd was thwarted. Wasn’t that what he’d threatened Bas Harrow with?
“All I am prepared to say at this juncture,” Theurig said, again glancing at the Lakeling, “is that the Weyd should not lightly be dismissed.”
“This is important,” Snaith said. “Does the Weyd curse us?” Because if it didn’t, that was one more reason to suspect Theurig was the one to decide what constituted a transgression and who was afflicted. “Does it—”
“It is considered bad form to press a sorcerer on what he does and does not know. Especially concerning the Weyd.”
“And what about magic?” Snaith said, desperate for some sort of foundation to stabilize his fractured world. “Is it just made up, like the gods?”
“Weren’t you listening when I spoke about Consemius? If he is right, and I believe that he is, magic may simply be the bleeding of one strata of existence into another. There is another school of thought, though—Pharsanion’s—that says magic is seeded within all life, an attribute no different to breathing, or mentality, or the circulation of blood. Consemius’s critique of Pharsanion points out, though, that, if the theory is correct, the magic within must be a dormant trait, else why do we not see its expression here, there, and everywhere?”
“You have this?” Snaith asked. “You have magic within you?”
Theurig waved off the question. “And then there is the matter of ancient lore, artifacts we have yet to—”
The boat careened, pitching Theurig toward the gunwale. Snaith lashed out with his good arm and snagged the sorcerer’s robe. In the same instant, the Lakeling reversed his oar and thrust down with the spiked end. Water churned pink as something scaly thrashed to one side of the boat. The Lakeling withdrew his oar amid a spurt of crimson, and the alligator rolled away beneath the surface. The boat bobbed in the agitated water, violently at first, then gentler as the disturbance stilled.
Clenched silence fell over the lake. Snaith sat rigid, eyes flicking left and right, seeking out the merest shadow of movement beneath the carpet of mist. But there was nothing. Just the terrible emptiness of anticipation.
Theurig exhaled sharply, and Snaith took that as a signal to breathe.
The Lakeling stirred his oar-spike through the water, then, apparently satisfied, reversed it once more and set them underway.
Snaith glanced at the sodden pages of Cawdor’s book then back at the water. It wasn’t lost on him, how close the boat had come to capsizing, and the images of what could have happened that his mind threw up seemed a curse more than a blessing.
They drifted on, the anticipation of another attack twisting Snaith’s stomach. Theurig caught his eye, a half-formed smile of gratitude on his face. The Lakeling seemed unfazed, though his oar strokes had noticeably quickened.
The mist coating the lake thickened, as if attempting to conceal the dangers lurking beneath. Snaith could no longer see further than the prow of the boat, and then even Theurig and the Lakeling were obscured by swirling clouds of vapor. The splash that accompanied every oar-stroke was now heavy with menace, and Snaith sat tense and rigid, flinching at every sound.
Little by little, the mist brightened, backlit by a wavering emerald glow. As the boat drew nearer, the radiance separated into globes of green fire, and Snaith could make out shadowy forms holding aloft lanterns.
The Lakeling brought them alongside a jetty of dark wood, and the shadows became men and women dressed like him in feathered cloaks and bird masks with elongated beaks. Behind them on the craggy shore were flaming torches, black smoke pluming from them, carried inland by an imperceptible breeze.
The Lakeling shipped his oar and cast a rope onto the jetty, hopping after it to moor the boat. Once he’d tied off around a cleat, he stepped into line among the other masked figures, motionless, indistinguishable. Except Snaith had seen enough of the man to recall every idiosyncratic movement, every stitch of his mask, even the minor flaws in his feathered cloak.
Snaith gave Theurig a worried look as the sorcerer stood next and tried to gain his balance against the rocking boat. From their vantage on the jetty, the cloaked and masked Lakelings were giants peering down at them. Emerald light reflected from devil-eyes of amber.
Theurig retrieved his staff from the bottom of the boat and disembarked. From the jetty, he reached down to lend Snaith a hand. No reassuring smile. No words of encouragement.
Snaith refused his offer. Tey’s touch he’d swiftly grown used to, and look where that had led. And with Theurig, he didn’t know where those fingers had been, what unsavory concoctions they had come into contact with. He packed Cawdor’s book in his satchel and climbed out onto the jetty.
With a shake of his head, the sorcerer turned away and strode along the silent line of watching Lakelings.
Snaith glanced at the boat and past it into the mist, then at Theurig’s retreating back. All sense of choice drained away into the water lapping at the mooring posts, and he set off along the boardwalk after his master.
THE CHAMBER OF DARK MIRRORS
The door opened onto a vast chamber lit by some kind of sorcery that washed everything inside with a soft lavender glow. The floor space was comprised of alternating black and white
hexagons of a sleek material that was soft underfoot. In the middle was a broad iron grate that covered some kind of pit. Directly opposite was another metal door, just like the one they’d entered by. Tey counted eight walls in total. The six without doors were paneled with riveted brass, and dark rectangular mirrors were set into their centers. Before each mirror was a tarnished silver desk and a high-backed chair on a pedestal base, molded from a substance that resembled tar. The chairs were occupied by skeletons dressed in faded, dust-caked tunics and britches that may once have been blue. Snouted masks with yellow-tinted glass eyes covered their skulls, and their hands rested atop sleek grey tablets. A gentle breeze came from vents set into the ceiling, carrying with it a scent that was both musty and astringent.
Tey looked at Pheklus for an explanation, but he simply shrugged.
“Don’t ask me. First time I’ve come so far down here. I normally take the long route over land. It was Slyndon who suggested we give the tunnels a try this year. Something about his knees not holding up over rough ground, and a minor scare he had with the Skaltoop a while back.”
As Tey went to examine one of the seated skeletons, she heard Pheklus tell Vrom to check that the far door was locked. Vrom groaned but obeyed, crossing the open floor space with a pained shuffle. Hirsiga set down her pack and closed the door they’d entered by with a resonant clang.
The skeleton was old. Ancient, even. Its clothing was brittle, ossified, with the appearance of flaking plaster. When Tey touched it, a section crumbled to dust, revealing mottled bones beneath that looked as if they would disintegrate just as easily. The hands resting on the grey tablet atop the desk were fossils, the fingers no longer connected by ligaments which would have rotted away centuries ago.
There was a bracelet on the skeleton’s left wrist, a slender black band made from a similar material to the chairs. Set into its center was an oval crystal. On closer inspection, Tey saw no patterns of lines inscribed into either the oval or the band. If it was a sorcerous artifact like the vambrace, it was of an altogether different kind.