Robart pulled the silver rod from his belt, and pressed it to the arm of the chair. Hoyle’s whole body went slightly rigid as arcs of lightning flowed along the chair and jumped along his arms. His earring started to become warm, and then finally hot as it absorbed the magic of the rod. And then the earring was finally overwhelmed and the excruciating pain coursed through his body. He could smell burning, and realized it was him. Finally, he could grit his teeth against the pain no longer and let out a giant wail.
As suddenly as it was there, it was gone. So that’s why the chair was metal... It took Hoyle a few seconds to recover, his muscles twitching and jumping. His earring was hot against the side of his face. It would not be able to absorb any more magic for many hours.
“That was on the lowest setting,” said Robart, his eyes wary. He seemed to sense something wrong. “Shall we try again, with a more direct question?” His voice was booming in the stone chamber.
Hoyle nodded as best he could. He did not trust himself to speak; his mouth was always making bad situations worse.
“Why were you in the Goralon Merchants' Guild when the guard stormed the place?” He went straight to the point. The First Chancellor must have briefed him.
“They had some things of mine, and I wanted them back.” Hoyle replied more casually than he felt. It was more of a stutter than his regular voice.
The large man stood, stroking his orange beard. “And what was it they had of yours?” He strode to the table and poured from a second pitcher into another goblet and took a long drink. Hoyle saw that he had the tattoo of an eagle across the back of his bald head.
Hoyle knew he had to be careful here. “Gold and gems. I did some work for them, and they refused to pay.”
“You stole something for them, and then they stiffed you.” The larger man wiped the dark wine from his beard with the back of his hand as he put down the goblet.
“I found something for them, and then they stiffed me,” he corrected.
“And what did you find for them?” he demanded, walking behind the chair to which Hoyle was strapped. Hoyle’s muscles suddenly jumped from the twinge of lightning running through the chair. “That was the medium setting a handspan from the chair,” warned his questioner. “Don’t make me touch the chair.”
Hoyle stayed quiet. He knew those magestones were important and that his life was possibly forfeit if he answered truthfully. Hoyle screamed as the rod touched the chair. And screamed, and screamed. Finally, he passed out.
---o---
Hoyle laid in the grass staring at the clouds as they drifted across the blue summer sky, his older sister Vanda beside him. They were finding shapes in the clouds. Keela, his Sarethan hound bounded up to the two of them and licked their faces until they were laughing. His younger sister Niala was down playing in the creek at the bottom of the rise upon which they lay.
It was his tenth birthing day, the twenty-fifth of Jarn. It was five days before High Sun, the longest day of the year. The town was readying for the celebrations, hanging wreaths and decorating their houses for the festivities. Several caravans full of spring produce had arrived earlier in the day and the men of the town were helping unload. Some merchants had arrived from deeper in the Empire, and some from across the Whitetooth Mountains, from Goralon to the east.
It was said that one of the Emperor’s mythical sky citadels guarded the pass from Goralon; a fortress in the sky. He would love to see one of those someday; if they even existed. Tomrin, one of the other boys in town, had said he had seen one once, but everyone knew Tomrin lied more often than not.
Niala came running up the hill, out of breath. Keela jumped up, knocking her down in a tangle of limbs and then began licking her face. “Can we give it to him now?!” she asked Vanda, still giggling, rolling on the ground with the hound. “Can we?”
“Give me what?” he said excitedly, sitting up.
“Your birthing day gift,” said Vanda as she sat up also. She was almost fifteen, and tried to match the maturity of the older girls, usually quite successfully. She was failing right now, however.
“You didn’t have to get me anything,” he said, with even more excitement, but he didn’t really mean it. He was ten. Ten! It was a special year, and he should get presents.
Vanda reached into the small rucksack they had brought their lunch in. The adults were glad to send them on a picnic, getting them out from under foot. She brought out a small item wrapped in a bright cloth and presented it to Hoyle.
He opened it reverently, and saw a small silver firebird earring. It had flecks of red stone for eyes and its wings spread as if in flight. He was speechless. This must have cost Vanda all her chore money for the past year.
“The merchant said it was a charm to keep one safe,” said Vanda. “And mother helped out. She knows how much trouble you get into.” She smiled as she said it. Her smiles lit up her face, and made others wants to smile too. She had dark hair like his, but bright green eyes that sparkled.
“And it’s really pretty too,” added Niala, who was eight.
Hoyle looked at the hook on the end, and became apprehensive. How was he going to wear it? It was supposed to poke through his ear, but that was going to hurt. He turned to Vanda, who wore an earring in each ear. She noticed his look, and took the earring from his hand.
“It only hurts for a second, and is sore for a day or two. You have to make sure you wash your ear every day for a week, or it will get rotten.” She instructed. “Agreed?”
“Okay Vanda, I will.”
“Promise.”
“I promise,” he said as solemnly as any ten year-old had ever said the words.
“Which ear do you want it in?” Vanda asked as Niala sat up in the grass beside them, looking on intently. She did not have any earrings yet, their mother would not allow it.
“The left,” Hoyle decided, after thinking it through for a short time. He often went to sleep on his right side. He gritted his teeth as Vanda held his head steady and poked the earring gently against his ear to position it.
“On three,” she said and started counting, “One... Two...” And then a sharp pain shot through Hoyle’s ear as she pushed the hook through his earlobe.
---o---
Hoyle woke to the large man tugging on the earring, causing sharp pain to lance across the side of his head, “you said on three...” Hoyle accused his sister, waking from the dream.
“Awake now are you?” Robart asked as he let the earring go. He stalked to the water pitcher and poured more into the goblet he had allowed Hoyle to drink from earlier. He walked back and splashed it in Hoyle’s face. “There, that’ll help.”
“What was the question?” Hoyle asked groggily.
His only answer was a slap across the face. He could feel blood running down his chin from his split lip. He looked up at the large man looming over him.
“You hit like a girl,” he responded. This time the punch broke his nose and sent tears tumbling from his eyes. Blood now flowed freely down his face and dripped from his chin. A small, dark form was beside him then, wiping up most of the blood with a wet cloth. He thought he recognized the veklian as the one who served him the meal earlier in the day, but his vision was blurry and his head spinning. “Okay... maybe not a girl... more like a barmaid swinging a wet rag.” Hoyle braced himself for another blow, but nothing came immediately.
Suddenly, a booming laugh burst from the larger man, startling the guards at the door. “I must admit,” Robart said as he finished his laugh, “you do have a backbone... and grit.”
“I’m glad you’re impressed,” he replied, spitting out blood into the rag the veklian held beside him. “That was always my goal all along – impress the torturer...”
“I prefer to refer to myself as an artist,” came the response from behind him. Robart stepped quickly in front of him and with a swift motion drove a dagger down and into the meat of his thigh. Hoyle gritted his teeth as the immense pain swept through his body. The blade was in
to the hilt, so the tip must be through and out the bottom of his leg. He could hear more blood dripping on the floor. Robart leaned in front of him, staring into his eyes, and asked for about the eighth time in the last day, “What did you find for them?”
Hoyle stayed silent, more because he was starting to fade again due to blood loss this time more than the pain. Robart glared at the veklian, and the creature retreated to somewhere behind Hoyle. Hoyle's head started to droop as his vision started to tunnel. He saw Robart motion out of the corner of his eye, and then he heard the soft voice of the priestess.
“Be still,” she said as her hands touched both sides of Hoyle’s head. “I cannot heal him with the knife still in his leg,” she chastised his torturer. A sudden tug at the blade in his leg, and Hoyle lost consciousness. For at least the fifth time in two days. Not that he was counting...
Chapter 10
It was the second full day of petitioner duty, mid-afternoon, when Celia looked up to see that the line was done. She sighed, stood and raised her arms above her head and stretched her back. She felt several pops up her back as things realigned. The only thing she hated more than the helplessness she felt being unable to help most of the petitioners, was the hard wooden chair she had to sit in all day, with only a short break for lunch as a repreive.
Zazaril had assigned it as a punishment, but she felt it was more of a duty, which is the only thing that had gotten her through the last two days. As it was, she had had a hard time focusing, her mind wandering back to the feelings of the trace spell she had cast on Salrissa. She had spent the first half of the day before in the southwest quarter of the city, the trade quarter, at the Red Rooster Inn, Celia assumed. After that she had moved around the far side of the city until well after dark. The first time she ‘jumped’, it caught Celia off guard, causing her to spill her tea on the tome she had found in the library. One moment Salrissa was in the southwest, the next she was in the southeast.
That must have been how she had gotten them out of the guild tower, but Celia was still not sure what it was Salrissa had done. She had ‘jumped’ again several times that night, seemingly stepping from one end of Tala’ahar to the other in an instant. Celia still shuddered at the memory of what that trip had done to her body. She was not eager to repeat that event anytime soon.
This afternoon, she was still in the southwest quarter of the city, most likely the trade quarter. It seemed she was more active at night, and Celia understood why after spending that time with her. It was as if the night was her natural element.
Celia gathered her petitioner notes, mostly names and requests that would go on to Zazaril. Most would have to be ignored, but sometimes the notes taken revealed something of interest to her mentor, and the people were summoned and their requests granted. She placed these in the cherrywood box at the end of the table. She nodded to the other wizard on petitioner duty, an older man named Theus, with greying hair, a strong chin, and thoughtful eyes. He had the habit of wearing deep red robes, and today was no exception. He nodded back to her. She slipped out the back door and made her way to the dining hall.
It was early, but she could smell dinner being prepared in the large kitchen off the dining hall. It smelled of roast ham and warm bread. She took a seat by one of the windows and settled in to wait. She pulled out the tome she had found in the small archives vault the embassy kept in the basement two nights before. It was titled Treatises on Modern Magic and contained over a dozen essays written well over a hundred years ago; one by Widune the Wise, one by Sarisha’ala of the Emerald Court, one by Vicalas Ardasha; all respected wizards of their time.
Turning to the passage she had marked the previous evening in the essay titled The Comparisons Between Ancient Goralonian Blood Rituals and the Not-So-Modern Magic of Magestones, she read the passage by Widun that had caught her interest.
To compare Goralonian blood rituals to magic created with the quafa'shilaar, is to compare a mule with a tree; neither will move, but for different reasons; the mule, because it is stubborn and set in its ways, and if you’re not careful it will kick you; the tree, because it follows the laws of nature, and will bend when required, but only so far before it will break. The mule, if cajoled or beaten may move, but if your concentration wanders you may find yourself someplace you did not wish to be. From the tree, you may take small branches, and burn them in your fire, but if you’re not careful, your fire may consume the tree, leaving you without a source of warmth.
Celia thought this through, but came to the same conclusion she had the night before; blood rituals were dangerous and possibly unpredictable, which she already knew from her studies of ancient magic while at Mahad’avor. This passage also indicated the quafa'shilaar had limits. Celia was not that strong in her sorceress’s magical power, but she also had not tested her limits beyond what was required at Mahad’avor to gain her magestone. This passage seemed to indicate that one could burn out the magestones. Was that true? What did it truly mean? How? Or was it the wizards who burned out?
She continued to read until the server brought her dinner to the table at least a full bell later. She was so engrossed in the tome she only noticed the other two that sat at her table when she looked up to her meal. She looked around the room, shaking the chill off from the last passage she had read, by Sarisha’ala of the Emerald Court, a respected elven sorceress:
Based on the magical entropy the elvish race has experienced in its inherent magical nature since the spell-storms of the great Elf-Orc war from 526 to 534 PC (post cataclysm), it begs to question if the magic of the entire world is in jeopardy of decline, or complete entropy – if so, is the result a null-state or a Apocalypse event?
Based on her knowledge of history from her classes, Celia did the math quickly and determined that the great war mentioned by the elven sorceress was just over two-thousand years ago. If the elvish people were part of the inherent magic of the world, and they had caused some sort of imbalance in nature that had caused the entropy that was affecting their entire race, and that had grown worse over the last two millennia, how hard was it to believe that you could burn out a magestone, or the wizard wielding it?
“What is the matter deary?” asked one of her table mates, who, as it happens, turned out to be Mindeela. “You look a little pale.” Celia looked at the small woman, who was in a bright yellow dress, and thought that though she meant well, that she shouldn’t be commenting on that particular fact. The yellow dress just accentuated her own dreary skin and drab hair.
“Nothing important.” Celia finally replied when the other woman waited patiently for her response.
“Do you truly be certain?” asked the other woman at the table. Arandella was the opposite of Mindeela in about every way. Heralding from the Seven Isles in the Southern Sea, she was tall, with rich, glowing tanned skin, dark mischievous eyes, long black hair, and a presence that generally uplifted an entire room. She was wearing a multi-coloured floral dress with gold trim and a deep neckline to ample cleavage, several gold necklaces that drew the eye down to said cleavage, as well as several more bracelets of various types that jingled when she gestured. “It do be looking like you have seen a spirit.”
“It was nothing,” Celia asserted as she buttered her warm bread and took a bite to stem more questions, or at least having to answer them. The steaming ham slice on her plate was covered in thick vakirberry sauce that added a pleasant sweet yet tangy taste to the meal. She realized how hungry she was. She put the most recent passage out of her mind and dug into her meal with more gusto.
Mindeela and Arandella began to chat quietly about their several areas of study, Mindeela on trying to recreate the healing magic of the priesthood through magic, Arandella regarding the transport of people and goods across long distances. She had managed several sub areas of study, including creating sustained wind to speed transport ships, but her passion was to try and replicate the magic of gatal'shilaar - magegates, by spell alone. She felt that the gatal'shilaar were limited due
to their small size preventing wagons from traveling through. Because the Seven Isles were really comprised of seven large main islands and multitudes of smaller islands in a full archipelago containing islands as large as a three-day walk across, to those that a person could throw a good-sized stone from one end to the other, she was concerned about how to get goods or medical help to those distant locations.
Celia tuned them out after she had finished her meal, as had apparently become her habit she thought wryly. All her research over the past days had not brought her any closer to the reason why the Goralonians would steal the magestones.
Interludes I
Gorlag
Gorlag stood at his balcony in the evening light and looked down at the grey city below him. Smoke rose from most chimneys against the early spring chill, he could still see snow in the shadows of the buildings, where the sun could not reach. The smoke was thick with the smell of charcoal and steel. The air was thick with the sound of smithies working unceasingly, forging armor and arms. Those able bodied men that were not working those smithies, or some other critical function of the Kingdom of Goralon had been conscripted for the army. It was a country preparing to go to war - at his command.
He looked across the capital city of Karvesh, with its squat towers along the wide walls he could see ringing the city through the smoky haze. All the other buildings in the city were squat, with steep sloping roofs of grey slate to throw off the snow brought by the severe winter storms. Everywhere there was grey, and if not grey; black or white. He was sick of grey. And black. And white.
Karvesh was nothing like Tala’ahar, with its tall, ancient, glorious, elven-built towers, and magnificent bridges. He had visited as a young boy when his father had been forced by the Emperor to travel to the Imperial City to renew terms of the peace treaty. A small faction of Goralonian rebels had declared war on the Kastrun Imperium and had attacked several small border towns, killing hundreds, before they were captured and executed. What he remembered most from the trip to Tala'ahar were the soaring towers and streets full of color - the complete opposite of Karvesh.
Stones Unbound (The Magestone Chronicles Book 1) Page 8