by Scott Rhine
One of the thugs laughed and held her head under the water, just like they did to kill wharf rats. When they pulled her up after a full minute, she spat in the soldier’s eye. They would have killed her on the spot if it hadn’t been for Lord Kragen. The grim-faced Lord had her pulled up and held between two gargantuan servants while he appraised her from crown to toe. Grown men had been known to wet themselves when held before the gray-eyed necromancer, but when Humi was held before him, she felt different. He was twenty-five, well-dressed, and handsome. Perhaps it was the way he’d given the order, “Stop that, you fool. You’ll hurt her. Can’t you see how rare she is?”
The wizard meant rare in the valuable-commodity sense, but that’s not what Humi heard. As the young woman felt his gaze on her, a thrill went down her spine, and the room became too warm for her to breathe. “I have need of you,” he told her.
“W-what can I do?” she shivered.
Handing her a blanket, Kragen asked, “Have you heard of the College of Wizards?”
She nodded, wrapping herself in the wool, and huddling on a crate. They were the pure-bloods of training who’d managed to ride out the tempests at the Center and remained to guard the sanctuary of the Miracle Throne from all manner of usurpers and thieves.
She melted inside as he sat beside her and put a confidential arm around her shoulder. “I petitioned for return to the Center as next in line for the throne. They rejected me as unworthy—wanting some mystic sign to herald the next dynasty.” The arch-criminal couldn’t overcome their physical defenses or their magical protections so close to the source. He narrowed his eyes at the memory. No act was too despicable if it led one day to the restoration of the empire and the lifting of the curse. “I’ll give them a sign.”
He whispered in her ear, “In my western palace, on the farthest of all islands, I’ve found a force that can overwhelm all the lesser men who doubt me. Then I can ascend to my rightful place.” Pausing to look her full in the face, he asked in suave tones, “Would you use your extraordinary skills to help me?”
“Yes,” she said, without even considering that refusal would mean death
Thus, Humi became the cornerstone of Lord Kragen’s project. The western palace was unique in that the waters were relatively shallow around it and the glass bottom was fractured. This meant that magic sand, glass, and fossils worth a king’s ransom were available to the first person to reach down and grab them. This information was so secret that no one who discovered it could leave the palace alive.
Kragen had the magic and means to distribute the goods, but he lacked the people to do the actual procuring. For the promise of jewels, dozens of men had died trying. But swimming to such a depth, for that long, and in such treacherous water was considered impossible… until Humi broke into their meeting place. She agreed to dive and train other divers.
The project involved Kragen, one other Imperial wizard, three spider-like ki mages, one short builder of artifacts from the steel-producing mountains of Kiateros, and an insane fire mage. To be sure, there were other types of magic, but none so violent. After years of effort, the lord had pieced together a complete sept. Others who wanted a place in the dark council could only obtain a seat by challenging an existing member to a duel. No one had succeeded at this feat in over three years, but even the losers had their uses; Kragen wasted nothing.
A payment schedule was established for each category of treasure brought up from the depths. A basket of red sand, a bucket of amber-colored glass, and small fossils each earned a gold coin. This inspired the young divers, but Humi knew they’d never be able to spend it. The real payment came two years later when she found one of the larger fossils. Kragen had been so overjoyed by her first big find that he’d kissed her full on the lips. On the second such occasion, when she found the human footprint, he was so pleased that he offered her anything in the palace as a reward.
“Treat me as a full-blooded, Imperial woman for one night.”
Since he was scheduled for a trip to Innisport, Lord Kragen brought Humi along. He ordered the shopkeepers to fit her with a fine kimono and had her hair done by the most expensive stylists in the port city. When she reched his table at the fine restaurant, Humi’s beauty took his breath away. True to his word, he treated her as an equal the whole evening. At his townhouse, when the powerful man escorted her to the guest room, he kissed her hand goodnight. The shuddering gasp she responded with led him to kiss her up to the elbow. When he stopped there, she removed the other arm from its sleeve, and placed it boldly in his hand. “The other one’s jealous.”
By the time he reached her neck, the new kimono had fallen to the floor. Kragen never reached his own room. Upon their return to the Temple of the Unseen, her belongings were moved to Kragen’s tower.
After that, she advanced his project with more single-minded efficiency than Kragen could have himself. Years of brutal labor later, she still loved him. Humi didn’t know what her lord did with the best fossils, and she didn’t care. However, as time progressed, the easy treasures had all been plucked. The ones that remained were deeper and more dangerous to reach, yet Kragen’s need was stronger than ever. The great, rose-colored lens had been constructed, and the mandala was nearly completed. The components had to be in place by this Emperor’s Day. His organization wouldn’t hold together for another seven years in his absence until the next such celestial event, and his ambitious apprentice would not be put off much longer.
Chapter 9 – Apprentice
All wizards are convinced that they’re the Lords of Creation, and those of the True Blood were the greatest of them all. Tumberlin clucked his tongue as he scraped scum off the hull of the second-shift boat and refreshed the wards. He was overweight and sweated profusely with the exertion. How the mighty had fallen. The son of the ambassador to the Steel Court, he’d been groomed to become a court wizard. Because ten years ago Sandarac the Pretender had invaded the famed foundries of Kiateros, Tumberlin was stuck in the boondocks doing drudge work for people who failed to appreciate his finer qualities. He hated the incessant heat and humidity.
Then Humi walked past him to ring the bell. Kragen’s apprentice admired her firm legs and the shine of her youth. He took time from his duties to watch her exquisite body until she passed into the dormitory. The heat had its benefits, requiring fewer and smaller clothes. Perhaps one day, when Kragen tired of her fare, the master would share her secrets as well. Tumberlin didn’t see her shudder with revulsion after she passed the threshold.
Once the distraction was gone, Tumberlin returned to his rounds, checking spirit traps and other defenses. He also resumed his libretto of self-pity. His personal guards were the laziest men on the island. They refused to accompany him to other zones on the island unless they drew hazard pay. His provisions had run out twice in the last month, and Tumberlin suspected his chief steward of profiteering. Unfortunately, he had no time to run the blackguard to ground or lead a scavenging expedition himself. In addition to his normal responsibilities, he had to spend one shift out of every five at the front guard towers. One of those despicable, stick-thin ki mages had made himself sick just to get out of his share of the work.
Normally, Tumberlin would spend the day watching the diving women from the telescope in his tower. He would exchange signals with the boat and the other tower to triangulate on their position as well as collect depth readings on the water. Over the past few years, he had built an excellent model of the undersea landscape. Sometimes he would relay messages about their finds or soutlp for emergencies, but mainly he watched.
Being a student of the High Art was not easy. The first thing they did was kill your faith. They told you what the Emperor’s Star really is so that you could use it. Theoretically, any pure Imperial could tap the tiny star with proper training. The unseen sun hung over the center of the Inner Sea, over the Miracle Throne itself. Wizards of the blood could see by its light when the larger, yellow sun was not interfering. Normal humans could see faint traces
of the Emperor’s Star once per year, on the first day of the New Year—Emperor’s Day. Colors they couldn’t describe shimmered in its corona when it flared.
Wizards on the Inner Sea used this fixed point to navigate by; with a sextant and some mathematical expertise, one could find the distance to Center. Imperial maps had concentric circles drawn on them, each labeled with the number of sextant degrees. A picture of the Compass Star in the center had lines radiating outward in all directions. On land, the exercise was more difficult, but the power source of the star could be detected by a wizard from anywhere in the known world. As the ruling class, there were many fields the Imperial race had to study that the commoners couldn’t even name, let alone comprehend.
There were many arcane arts learned by an apprentice wizard: rune wards, ancient languages, geometry, weather prediction, and celestial mechanics, to name a few. But the most useful by far had been optics. Proper lenscraft formed the basis of all Higher Arts. Focusing the light of the Compass Star through a specially shaped piece of Emperor’s Glass, a wizard could singe or sting the spirits of the Inner Sea. No one knew why, but the sages claimed that the invisible light was somehow linked to a fundamental part of the spirit’s nature. Perhaps in some way it reminded them of their deaths.
When the Emperor’s Star had been born, the mystical force fused the soil and all living things in its radius into a new type of matter, forming a round bowl of glass hundreds of leagues across and many miles deep. Mountain streams from every direction fed the bowl with rushing torrents until it became the great Inner Sea. In many cases, parts of creatures on the surface had been preserved within the glass. Long after their physical forms had been eroded or compressed, shadows of their existence remained, bound to the imprint. These fossils could be used by an expert to summon the creature’s essence. An old drunk with a stubbly beard had showed them the trick when they first arrived on the island of the temple. One couldn’t avoid spirits in this thickly infested region; they saturated the air like humidity in the swamps. Tumberlin supposed the locals had to know something of the art just to survive.
Technically, this summoning was a form of Necromancy and therefore forbidden by Imperial law. But the monks of this island had received a special, royal dispensation to study the procedure for the enrichment of all humanity. He’d heard rumors that they sometimes conversed with the ancient spirits to gain the solutions to modern dilemmas. The sentence of death was usually enough to prevent imitators elsewhere. The old summoner who had taught them disappeared without a trace after waking them all with his screams one winter night.
Tumberlin was particularly adept at summoning air-bound spirits, the birds and the bees, as it were. The apprentice had honed his skills so well that he could make the winds themselves obey him. He no longer needed sight to tell when the summoned were around.
The weaker spirits and the mindless ones could be controlled easily and absolutely. Then the multitude of weak spirits could be used to manipulate the stronger ones. Kings practiced this same tactic in their diplomatic arts. Tumberlin’s father had often used analogies between the masses and the demons of the Inner Sea; both could turn on the careless wielder.
No one related to politics or magic could be trusted. Everyone competed for a limited pool of power. Like statecraft, so much of magic was trickery, misdirection, and outright lies. The sesterina wire that wizards wove decoratively into their fine robes was really armor against their spirit foes. Many of the trappings of wealth at court were just disguising the light-bending utility of Emperor’s Glass: large rings, sequined gowns, crystal amulets, and even the chandeliers. The expensive incense burned in Imperial homes and temples was a specially concocted, aromatic vapor that spirits couldn’t tolerate. Like more mundane smoke used against hornets, the incense of the Inner Islands could be used to flush out a nest of unseen ones or hold them at a safe distance.
Kragen was more pragmatic, though, and Tumberlin appreciated this. Other than a good-quality sextant that he always wore around his neck, the only obvious trapping of wizardry that his master ever bore was the crystal of a hundred facets that scattered a halo of rainbows around the wielder in a protective circle. The lord had it mounted on the end of a staff of precise dimensions. The staff fit into the center of the elaborate, stonework design on the floor of the courtyard. No one else alive had gained more mastery over light and miracle metal, and this knowledge made Kragen uniquely able to rule the odd coalition of wizards who had joined the sept. Without him, the project members would have fallen out years ago. There was magical power in such singularity.
In fact, this entire island was a kind of singularity. All of the other islands of the Inner Sea were near the Center; this was the only one within arrow shot of shore. The gardens of the inner sanctum bloomed without human tending. The maze of crypts below seemed to fill more volume than the island itself, losing even the most diligent explorer in its turns. Adding to its mystique was a rumor among the wizards that the abbot of this monastery, after being cloistered for seventy years, had visited the last, true emperor on the very eve of the Scattering.
At the heart of the palace was a special room that no one could enter. The apprentice had tried repeatedly, always meeting an unseen wall. Inanimate objects could pass the barrier, but his hand always met another, invisible hand pushing back with the same pressure, like a mirror. He suspected that Kragen kept his secrets there and had placed the powerful ward to protect them. Officially, the sept shared their knowledge in an enormous, palace library. Although extensive, one could learn little of magical value there. One was far more likely to stumble across a volume on toads or poetry.
The same principles applied to the soldiers and workers; each member contributed to the common pool. In practice, each wizard kept the best men close for personal luxury and protection. Indeed, each also employed his own master chef, not trusting the same cooks who prepared mess for the troops. Such a replication of effort was expensive and wasteful, but necessary, since one of the founding members of the sept had been poisoned by a rival. This meant that the military-command structure was confusing at best, with every wizard responsible for a different tower or section of wall and seven armed soldiers. The sept controlled many more men elsewhere in their syndicate, but only seven for each were permitted within the confines of the West Palace. By treaty, Lord Kragen commanded them all. Due to his leadership role, the high wizard was allowed twice the portion of men that the others had arounde.
Unfortunately, most of these extra men were needed to secure the underwater-mining operations on the far side of the island and to prevent prisoners from escaping. Between the project, Kragen’s tower, and Tumberlin’s tower, there were almost forty people residing on the back half of the island alone. It was a constant battle to make sure their mercenary troops weren’t spying, stealing, or shirking key duties. Tumberlin kept paid informants in every camp, so he assumed others were doing the same. The apprentice always put on a good show in case his master was watching.
While Humi managed the bulk of project operations, Kragen wasted most of his time mired in bureaucratic pursuits, espionage, resolving petty squabbles, and coordinating the various secret aspects of the project that each wizard was responsible for. This couldn’t be avoided, because each member of the cabal was a specialist in some area vital to their combined success.
Leaving the segregated walls of the back island, Tumberlin traveled along the north wall of the abbey, which was guarded by the sinister Vlekmar, a ki mage. The man’s second-cousin thrice removed, or some inbred relation the apprentice could never remember—another one of the spindly leeches—guarded the southern route. Tumberlin never spoke to the pair or their spice-scented louts of men if he could help it. From this vantage he could see the twin towers guarding the bridge to the mainland. The fire mage Wrathrok occupied the southern post. The apprentice avoided that one as well. An undisputed genius, the fire mage had rediscovered the ancient techniques of using volatile gases and rare elements f
or fusing shards of the Emperor’s Glass back together stronger than the original. The bulging-eyed wizard had gone mad, though, from inhaling the mercury-laden fumes. And how did Kragen use this arcane process that any sage would die for? They spent all day converting treasure from the sea into queer, little paving stones! The soldiers were going hungry and his master wasted a fortune on this art project that they could walk on.
Tumberlin managed to reach the courtyard proper without undue harassment. This was the domain of Dvardoc, the artificer. The short man didn’t like to speak, and when he did, it was in a stilted dialect of old Kiateran. Only Tumberlin and two or three master craftsmen could make any sense of him. But Kragen’s apprentice knew the crafty, old dwarf could speak the Imperial tongue as well as any of them. Dvardoc controlled the masons, smiths, and glass workers constructing the mystery known as the Mandala.
Around the borders of the giant, hexagonal pattern lay a brick path and a series of closely spaced stone posts to keep people off the work in progress. On top of each post was a delicate, glass orb containing an ornate, sesterina, windmill-like device. Whenever spirit energy approached the pattern, the windmills would spin. Of course, Dvardoc didn’t invent these; rather, he’d collected them from a dozen archaeological digs. In some cases, the dwarf had even repaired them. Tumberlin understood very little of this place. Why use devices to warn of spirits when a high mage with a shard of glass could see them plainly?
The battlements around the courtyard were hung with highly polished mirrors made from thin layers of sesterina over cheap, wooden shields. The concave mirrors were placed to reflect the light of the Compass Star onto the pattern. His master had each mirror draped with a linen cloth so they wouldn’t dull before the time of the planned spell was at hand.