Islands of the Inner Sea

by L J Chappell

  He took the Emerald Crown off and held it between his hands staring at it, concentrating on it, trying to feel anything from it, but there was nothing. The cold translucent green material that gave it its name was cold to the touch, and didn’t seem to warm up, no matter how long he held it. It couldn’t really be emerald, could it? Not that size, surely – the entire circle seemed formed from one single piece. But if it wasn’t emerald, then what was it? Was it natural or somehow created? He had no idea.

  Together, he and Kiergard Slorn spent the next couple of hours together, trying in turns and in combination to elicit any reaction from the Emerald Crown but with absolutely no success.

  Most of the others returned to the hotel well before midnight, after an equally unproductive evening: takings had been disappointingly low, and almost everywhere in Sherron had shut early.

  2

  They had all explored on their first day, so the second day was much duller.

  Lanvik spent half the morning in Lisamel and Tremano’s room, practising with a simple drum.

  ‘You’re almost there, now,’ Lisamel seemed to be permanently enthusiastic, but he knew that she was only trying to encourage him. She was playing a simple melody with a rhythm and a beat that hardly varied through the whole song and he was still failing to follow it.

  She also tried starting him on a pipe: he learned how to breathe and how to blow so that the notes sounded right, and he learned four different notes. She came up with two or three simple tunes that only used those four notes, but he found it impossible to tell his fingers how to move quickly enough to play them.

  After two hours, they had both had more than enough.

  ‘Don’t get depressed,’ she told him. ‘It will come with practice.’

  After that, they joined the others downstairs.

  The hotel had a large courtyard at the back for functions and parties and, during summer, as an outdoor extension of the restaurant. Eight of the company had taken over the space and were running through weapons drills in pairs. A handful of other guests and hotel staff were idly watching them.

  Garran, Ubrik and Thawn all belonged to Dog clan, the fighting caste among the Terevarna; Bane was Madarinn, but they treated him as an equal during combat training, so Lanvik assumed he had been a professional soldier or guardsman before joining Kiergard Slorn’s Company. Certainly he was the largest of them – broad and very tall. Each of these four was practicing with one of the others. When Lisamel and Lanvik arrived, Vrosko Din and Menska took a break, and Lanvik was able to practice swordplay with Garran.

  Garran was less kind about his progress than Lisamel had been.

  ‘How are you so useless at this?’ he asked, knocking the sword out of Lanvik’s hand for the third time in as many minutes. ‘Think of it as an extension of your own arm. It’s as if your arm is longer than normal and you’re trying to push my blade to one side with it. Let’s try again, but slower this time.’

  As well as simple thrust and parry routines and repetitive forehand and backhand drills, Garran had a number of exercises to make him feel more comfortable with the sword. They spent at least twenty minutes trying to bounce a small hard ball up and down on the flat blade. Most of the time Lanvik missed it completely and, on the accidental occasions when he managed to hit it, it bounced off in random directions.

  ‘It’s just co-ordination,’ Garran assured him. ‘It’ll come with practice, but you will have to do that practice. A lot, in your case.’

  A little depressed, but feeling optimistic that he would improve if the others remained willing to spend time teaching him, Lanvik returned to the tables he had found the day before and ate lunch there. He found simply watching the boats relaxing.

  In the afternoon, he visited the tailor’s shop.

  There was a large pile of material on the counter, in roughly cut shapes and lengths that were destined to become his new clothes. However optimistically he looked at it, everything seemed a mess. There were chalk lines and other marks on the material, dangling threads, part cut pieces, and a dozen sleeves and legs secured and fashioned only with tiny pins: so many pins that Lanvik was terrified of breathing too deeply when the tailor tried anything on him. There seemed an impossible mountain of work still to do if anything was to be finished tomorrow, though he conceded that the old man had clearly put in a significant amount of work already.

  There was no sign of his old clothes, and Lanvik was reluctant to ask about them. After being referred on a personal recommendation, he felt awkward and somehow under an obligation, even though he wasn’t sure who he was indebted to. He found himself having to put his trust entirely in the word of this man, whom he didn’t know at all, on account of complete strangers whom he had met by chance. What would he do if nothing was ready in time? Or if the end result was poor or different from what had been promised: would he refuse to pay?

  Simply contemplating that situation made him feel uncomfortable already.

  After initially congratulating himself for being less cynical, suspicious and wary than the rest of the Company, by the time he left the tailor’s shop he was beginning to worry that actually he had been naive, foolish and gullible.

  Perhaps he needed to be more like the others after all.

  3

  On their third day in Sherron, Geitar came round to the hotel.

  ‘There’s a mage,’ he said, excited. ‘I thought you might not have heard. We’ll have to hurry if we want to see everything.’

  ‘I’ll be right with you,’ Lanvik assured him. He rushed upstairs to excuse himself from his music practice with Lisamel.

  ‘A mage?’ she said: ‘I’ll tell the others. No-one likes to miss a mage.’

  ‘He’s here for the Little Harbour,’ Geitar explained on the way. ‘The wall’s been collapsing for years. It’s got so bad that they can’t use it any more.’

  There were two harbours in Sherron. The larger one, where ferries and transports docked, had quays on all three sides and the main jetty extended out in an angled arc that sheltered the entrance.

  A little further along the shore, backing onto the warehouses from the other side, was a second harbour. The land had been built up into a dock on one side, and opposite it, a gradually curving harbour wall stretched out into the sea. At least three sections of this wall had collapsed and the waves lapped over the top of it at high tide, even when the weather was calm. When the weather was rough, it must have offered very little protection to any boats berthed there. The landward side of the basin gradually rose to a shallow embankment – a couple of rowing boats rested there, dragged up onto the mud, but otherwise the harbour seemed completely unused.

  ‘There’s not much traffic in winter, so there’s plenty of space,’ Geitar told him: ‘but it was a real problem last year and it’s got worse since then. The fishing fleet normally berth here, and some smaller boats: private boats. But they’re all in the main harbour now.’

  Around them, it seemed that half the town was heading in the same direction.

  Lanvik felt himself becoming gradually less enthusiastic. Perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea. What if mages were able to recognise other mages, even if they didn’t have a staff: could somehow be aware of them?

  How many mages were there, anyway? There couldn’t be many, surely. Ten? A hundred? A thousand? Perhaps they all knew each other? Would this mage recognise him simply because they knew each other – wave and greet him by name? And then what would he do?

  Perhaps the mage could give him his memories back – perhaps he could ask the mage to use magecraft to heal him. But what if he remembered something that had to be hidden, some awful secret that other mages mustn’t find out? What if his memory loss had been deliberate, to conceal something?

  It was possible that mages had factions, violently opposed to each other, and he could be a prominent member of one of them. Or he might be a wanted man, on the run from his fellow mages – especially if he had been involved in a murder, though he didn’t u
nderstand how Lord Skollet from the tiny kingdom of Urthgard might be in any way important to mages.

  Perhaps the other mages had caused his memory loss, and then banished him?

  And, of course, there was a strong possibility that he wasn’t any kind of mage at all and never had been, but simply had a shaved head. Perhaps he had been a diversion, so that someone else could get away – part of some plan that had gone wrong because he lost his memory. Or maybe that had been part of the plan too.

  He realised that he was fantasising, creating reasons not to get close to the mage.

  ‘Is this the first mage you’ve seen?’ he asked the boy.

  ‘No, no,’ Geitar shook his head. ‘I saw one when I was little, about four or five. They come through here, you see. Everyone comes this way, across the Isthmus.’

  Despite what he said, mages obviously didn’t come through here very often if Geitar had only seen one in … what, the last ten years or more?

  When they reached the Little Harbour everyone else was blocking their view, because there wasn’t much of a slope down to the water.

  Despite that, Lanvik told Geitar: ‘I’ll stay here.’ The boy looked puzzled, and he explained ‘They make me nervous.’

  ‘You don’t mind if I go closer?’

  ‘No, no. You don’t need to stay with me. And thanks for coming to find me; thanks for letting me know.’

  ‘Of course,’ Geitar smiled and disappeared into the gathering crowd, weaving his way between the adults.

  There was a low wall that ran parallel to the shore, a little higher than Lanvik’s knees, and two or three people were already standing on it. So he climbed up beside them: no-one paid him any attention, and he could suddenly see over everyone else. He almost called Geitar back to share his view, but the boy knew his way around Sherron: he would know where he wanted to stand.

  The majority of the crowd around the quayside were Humans, but there were plenty Dark and Light Elves among them.

  Was this what happened when a mage came? The town’s population turned out to watch?

  Geitar had said that the mage had come because of the harbour – but what was he actually going to do? And how did he know that he was wanted, or needed? And how had he arrived?

  Lanvik suddenly realised that he was completely ignorant on the subject: he knew nothing at all. People had called him a mage, but until this moment, he hadn’t even realised that there were things about mages or magecraft that he should know. Mages carried staffs, which they used to perform their magecraft; and they were all Human; and they shaved their heads. That was all he knew, and he had assumed that was all there was to know.

  But where had this mage come from? And why? And how? And why hadn’t Lanvik thought to ask these sorts of questions before?

  Everyone around him presumably knew the answers, but now was the wrong time to reveal his ignorance. He would wait until he was alone with others from the Company.

  He could see a large group of labourers standing on the road beside the harbour holding tools: a mix of Humans, Light Elves and Dark Elves. And four huge barges had been towed close to the shore and anchored there: they must have arrived recently, as Lanvik hadn’t seen them yesterday – perhaps they had been waiting further along the shore, in some sheltered bay or artificial anchorage.

  The waiting crowd were murmuring quietly, waiting with an almost palpable sense of excited anticipation.

  Eventually, one figure emerged from the group of workmen: he looked expectantly across to the edge of the crowd and nodded.

  And suddenly there was the mage. He had been waiting almost immobile, and Lanvik had missed him. But now he stepped forward, closer to the water’s edge, and pulled down his hood so that everyone could see his shaved head. He was holding his staff in his right hand, and now he raised it and held it a little away from his body.

  That’s just theatre, Lanvik thought, a little dismissively, but he couldn’t take his eyes away from the spectacle.

  Without any warning or apparent preparation, an entire section of the old quay wall, just in front of where the workers were standing, began to shake. It broke away from the rest and lifted several feet into the air with no obvious support. The seawater on either side of the newly-created space simply waited there instead of gushing forwards, lapping against nothingness as if there was an invisible wall holding it back.

  As Lanvik watched, unblinking, that massive stone section of quay floated through the air slightly further out to sea, where it crumbled into smaller blocks and then dropped into the water, creating a small breakwater.

  Together with the foreman, half a dozen of the workmen had jumped down onto the impossibly dry foundations of the previous wall, flanked by the seemingly impotent waves at the height of their heads and chests. From the nearest of the barges, a massive stone slab lifted and floated across to them through the air, just above the waves. It lowered into the new space, and the workmen set about securing and bedding it in place.

  At each new feat, the crowd gasped and cheered and applauded.

  Lanvik was astounded. Back in Darkfall, he had told the others that he didn’t believe in magic: it didn’t make any sense to him that there would be such a thing. But now, unless he was to reject the evidence of his own eyes, it was clear that he had been completely wrong.

  When he had thought “mage”, nothing like this had come to mind. He hadn’t known exactly what he expected, but he felt the word had some romance associated with it. Magecraft, in his imagination, was essentially for fighting: defeating dragons or hostile armies and perhaps blowing things up. Not for construction work. But no-one else seemed at all surprised or disconcerted.

  And practically, what would a mage do when there were no wars? No dragons?

  What mainly surprised him, though, was the power of it.

  This wasn’t an explosion, a quick firework, a three or four second display that drew an instant round of applause. This was a massive effort – a hundred men couldn’t have matched it, either for sheer force or for precision – and the mage simply stood there, moving his staff from time to time as if directing a group of musicians. Not only did he not appear tired, but he also seemed completely untroubled by the level of effort required. It seemed easy for him – mechanical.

  How could Lanvik have imagined that he could do that?

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Menska said quietly from beside him. He hadn’t even noticed her climbing up. ‘I’m sure it’ll come back.’

  ‘If I ever had it,’ he voiced his doubts.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘If you ever had it.’

  Most of the others were there as well: as Lisamel had said, no-one wanted to miss a mage.

  Over the next hour, they watched as the entire harbour wall was replaced on both the landward and seaward sides in three sections, and then filled in with sand and rubble. Workers started almost immediately creating a flat bed on top of the new wall, ready to lay cobbles or paving slabs. The remains of the old ruined wall now formed an entirely new breakwater slightly further out from the shore.

  With his contribution presumably complete, the mage sat down on the edge of a wall, his only apparent concession to any fatigue. He was now surrounded by a large group of squealing, excited children and was amusing them with little flickers of fire, making random objects rise and fall and pirouette in the air, and creating tiny figures that seemed to dance on the ground around him, like mythical pixies or goblins. Lanvik spotted Geitar standing on his toes on the outside of the group, peering in.

  Even from this distance, Lanvik was slightly nervous that the mage might somehow know that he was watching: might turn his head to look straight at him, to meet his eyes. But he didn’t. If mages were able to sense each other, then maybe that was only when they had a staff – “the magic’s not in the mage, it’s in the staff”. Wasn’t that what they said? So perhaps a mage without a staff was no longer a mage? And perhaps he had no chance of recovering any magic unless he had a staff …

/>   It was early afternoon now, and he was beginning to wonder when he should go back to the tailor. They’d agreed that his clothes needed to be ready for today, but hadn’t set any specific time. Would everything be finished already? That seemed unlikely, in which case would a visit so early in the day put unnecessary pressure on the man … imply that Lanvik didn’t trust him to be ready on time? Or perhaps the tailor would expect him to turn up and maybe try everything on, have adjustments made, drink more tea.

  On the one hand, he didn’t want to risk slowing the man down. But he also didn’t want to leave everything until the very end of the day either – in case he had to make decisions about what was actually going to be ready and what wasn’t.

  As he deliberated, Lanvik found himself wandering in the direction of Vask’s shop without thinking about it. Through the window, he could see the old man hunched over a wide table towards the back of the shop, working with scissors and thread: hopefully working on Lanvik’s things.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ Vask looked up as he walked in, peering at him over the top of a pair of round spectacles. ‘Just a few hours left to do, but I had to miss the mage.’ There was a note of chagrin in his voice.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It can’t be helped,’ the man shrugged. ‘I was hoping you might look in: I have a couple of little things to check.’ Lanvik had a sinking feeling – surely there shouldn’t still be “things to check”? But it turned out that the man was only talking about minor finishing details: the exact length of the hems, the preferred angle of the collars. There were a lot of loose threads but almost no remaining pins, and everything he tried felt comfortable already and looked good in the mirror.

  ‘I’ll work on these,’ the man said, when he had everything he needed. ‘You could come back in a few hours.’ He pointed across to a paper-wrapped package in the corner, secured with string: ‘Those are your old clothes. I don’t know if you want to check them now, or take them away, or leave them until later …’