Aethersmith (Book 2)

by J. S. Morin

  “Toktu seems worried these days. More cares than an elder should have in good times, I think,” Kyrus commented. As scattered as his Denku was, Kyrus could tell by the elder’s body language that there was something bothering him.

  “The tide. He says he wonders now if you are a spirit man or just a spirit. No man can hold back the tide. Maybe a spirit could,” Gahalu answered Kyrus’s unspoken question.

  They both knew it was Kyrus’s magic that was the cause of concern. Tricks of fire and levitation were fun for the villagers. Being able to turn wood and stone into trinkets and toys seemed harmless. Stopping a sea storm that should have at least washed into the low-lying parts of the village was different. As benign and benevolent it may have been, it bespoke a power that they had not realized their spirit man possessed. Hadku, the last spirit man, had blessed newborns and painted protective spells on the hunters who went into the jungles; it was nothing that could be seen working. It worked quietly, subtly. It was not the frightening power that Spirit Man Kyrus had shown.

  “He has just never heard of a man who could do it before. Now he has. Everything is impossible until someone has done it,” Kyrus answered. It was a play on a Kadrin saying: “Everything is possible, and someone has done it.” It was an easier position to hold in a world with a vast history of magic that spanned back longer than anyone could remember.

  “Why did you do it?” Gahalu asked. “To break the saying? To see if you could manage it? The storm was not so bad. No one was in danger if we had just waited inland until it passed. We could have rebuilt anything that was damaged or swept to sea. We have done it before. More were in danger from this storm because they wanted to be close and watch.”

  “Your hunters hunt the little boars that run around all over the island,” Kyrus said by way of reply. “Are they difficult to kill?”

  “Young hunters kill them all the time. They are only dangerous if you do not have a spear or do not know how to use it properly. They weigh half what even the youngest hunters do. You could probably kill one with no magic, Spirit Man.”

  “They taste wonderful, too. There are enough of them that you would hardly need to hunt anything else to feed the village, even if the fishermen’s nets came back empty,” Kyrus added, and Gahalu nodded his agreement with the sentiment. “So why does Gaktu wear a necklace of panther teeth around his neck? Why does he tell anyone who will listen about the scars on his arm, and how he got them?”

  “To prove he is a good hunter. He wants to be first hunter when Fannu becomes an elder,” Gahalu said.

  “And is he a good hunter? Should he be first hunter after Fannu?” Kyrus pressed.

  “I think so,” Gahalu said, then nodded after considering for a moment.

  “I doubt he learned to be a good hunter by killing little boars,” Kyrus said. “He fought panthers and crocodiles and whatever else he could find in the deep jungle. Well I am no hunter, but I will not become a better spirit man by playing with cooking fires and lifting children in the air for their amusement.”

  Kyrus took his queen and captured the knight Gahalu had just moved. The board was thinning of pieces, since when Gahalu was pressed to make a move, he tried to capture anything he could.

  “So … now you can stop the sea itself. What more do you need to prove?” Gahalu asked. He moved one of his bishops to point at Kyrus’s queen.

  “No. Try again.” Kyrus pushed Gahalu’s bishop back where it had come from. “I could have taken it with my queen and you did not have it protected. And it is not a matter of proving. It is a matter of practice and control. I have more I need to learn before I am ready.”

  Gahalu glared at his reprimanded bishop. “Why are queens so strong in this game? I never heard any stories where a king is so weak and his queen is stronger than all his soldiers.”

  Kyrus could not help but think about Iridan and Juliana. “Not all kings are mighty warriors, and not all queens are delicate flowers. I admit, though, it is probably less common that way.”

  Kyrus managed to draw the game out a while longer. Gahalu needed practice more than a thrashing and Kyrus did not want to demoralize his friend. He really wanted to find someone who was a worthwhile opponent, rather than merely a student, but he knew that he would have to be on the island a long time before that would ever come to pass.

  * * * * * * * *

  Kyrus managed to find some time to himself that afternoon. He had learned to keep his clothing from being left behind when he turned himself incorporeal and had slipped through the wall of his house and into the jungle when no one was watching. Eventually they would grow curious and come looking for their spirit man, but for a while Kyrus had bought himself privacy and a bit of safety for any who might have been curious enough to spy on him. What he was dealing with were forces he understood poorly and was still struggling to control.

  There was a small stretch of beach well outside the normal Denku wanderings that Kyrus had taken for his practice with the transference spell. It was on a small inlet, too rocky to make a good spot for putting fishing boats into the water. There were little tidal pools all along the water’s edge, teeming with tiny sea animals, from barnacles to crabs. The tidal pools had been threatened by the storm’s fury as well as the Denku village, but Kyrus’s protection had not extended so far from where his hosts made their homes. The aquatic inhabitants had been violently displaced by the strong tides and massive waves, and even days later, things were only beginning to show signs of recovery.

  Kyrus had spent part of the previous afternoon practicing a slight variant of the transference spell. He had used it to create tiny spheres only a handspan in width that he could create in one spot and make appear a few feet away. The variant was a bit more complex than the version he intended to use to travel home to Acardia, but far safer to practice, since he was not actually moving his own body when he did it.

  Kyrus’s next step was one that he considered crucial in his quest. “Doxlo intuvae menep gahalixviu junumar tequalix ferendak uzganmanni dekdardon vesvata luo.” Kyrus weaved his hands through an intricate set of gestures, envisioning it as a rune he was painting in the air with his fingers. He kept track of each line of the rune as he created it, each finger leaving its own trail of fire in its wake in Kyrus’s imagination as he challenged his mind to keep the memory of the rune’s path in proper order.

  A short way from where Kyrus stood barefoot in the sand, a small scavenger crab walked by, oblivious to the adventure upon which it was about to embark. A shimmering sphere of opaque aether enveloped it without warning, along with a few good handfuls of the sand around it. Kyrus felt the flow of aether quicken as he envisioned a spot a few paces down the beach as the sphere’s destination, and then let the spell go. The sphere disappeared, leaving a perfectly smooth scoop taken out of the beach. At the intended destination, nothing.

  Kyrus looked about and saw a shadow that did not belong. Ducking and glancing hurriedly upward, he saw the crab and a loose collection of sand plummeting down at him. Fortune smiled on the little scavenger crab as Kyrus managed to quickly catch it with levitation, and set it gently down on the beach near where it had begun its magical journey.

  Well, that could have gone worse. Still needs work, though. Kyrus could easily forgive a bit of missed aim on his own journey, especially with his ward to protect him in the event of a fall, but he knew that he needed more practice.

  Never did he harass the same creature twice, but Kyrus tried a dozen more times before finally being satisfied that he could reliably send a crab, sand piper, or seagull to whatever location he wanted.

  “That was wondrous!” Tippu exclaimed, breaking Kyrus free from his introspection as he considered the results of his final sand piper relocation. “Send me!” The Denku girl was squealing with excitement. Kyrus’s lesser magics had become accepted among the island’s inhabitants, and even if it was still strange to them, the awe and wonder had lost their edge. This making of things disappear in one place and appear in another
was enough to renew the sense that their spirit man was still beyond their understanding.

  “What are you doing here? And no, it is too dangerous to send you.” Kyrus tried to sound stern, but it was a tone he still thought sounded hollow coming from him.

  “The bird is fine. I want to go,” Tippu insisted. “Now, before Kahli finds us. I want to go first.” Kyrus assumed that the two of them had split up to search for him, but did not want to sidetrack the conversation by asking for details on why the near-inseparable pair had separated.

  “You are too big. I need to try more times.” Kyrus wished he had a better vocabulary in Denku to better argue his point, but was consigned to battle with the armaments he had and not those he wished for. “I maybe hurt you. No.”

  “You try again. Make it bigger this time and I watch,” Tippu countered, undeterred.

  Kyrus was glad that through days of complaining and pleas to have them repeat themselves, both Tippu and Kahli had simplified their choices of words to the selection of Denku that Kyrus had learned. It helped that the two of them had been in no small part responsible for his learning the language.

  “Fine. Stay back and do not speak.” Kyrus hoped that maybe seeing it a few more times (along with his likely setbacks) might assuage her interest in becoming an experimental passenger on the ill-fated magical ship, Guess and Try, that Kyrus was currently captaining.

  “Doxlo intuvae menep gahalixviu junumar tequalix ferendak uzganmanni dekdardon vesvata luo.” Kyrus sought no passenger, but instead ripped a man-sized scoop of earth from the ground not far from them. Hoping to put a bit of a scare into the girl, Kyrus gave a rather larger share of aether, even beyond what increasing the size of the sphere required. He pictured in his mind not a spot a few paces distant along the beach, but a spot well out over the water, in front of him such that Tippu’s eyes would spot it easily as she watched him and the opaque sphere he created.

  Sploosh!

  A great mass of sand and the packed earth well beneath it splashed noisily into the Katamic. Kyrus turned to Tippu. “Do you still want to try?”

  Tippu frowned at Kyrus. “Try again,” she insisted.

  Kyrus repeated the spell, but this time there was a great crash in the foliage behind them as Kyrus dumped the sand in the sparse jungle not far from the water’s edge.

  “Try again,” Tippu said, unwilling to give up on her hope of trying the spell voyage herself.

  Kyrus began to grow annoyed. Who does she think she is, anyway? Ordering me around like I am hers to command. She is not my wife, though she wishes she was. She is not an elder. Even Gahalu I would not allow to tell me what is right and wrong to do here on his island. Kyrus decided to rid himself of Tippu for a while.

  It was a small change. There was a part of the gesture for the spell that directed the location of the originating sphere; that was all that was needed. “Doxlo intuvae menep gahalixviu junumar tequalix ferendak uzganmanni dekdardon vesvata eho.”

  Kyrus vanished.

  Tippu at first though he was playing a joke on her, but she did not find him and then returned to the village greatly worried. In his place, there had briefly been a giant sphere of seawater, which immediately crashed to the ground, leaving a flooded pit with a handful of colorful (and confused) fish.

  * * * * * * * *

  The world of light disappeared in an instant. Kyrus had seen the world of aether before, but it looked different, cut off not only from his coexistent vision of the light, but also from the shackles of his physical body. His view shifted with the faintest whim, disorienting him without a solid frame of reference to ground his vantage point.

  He could make out a rough mass of Sources that he figured were the jungle trees and one human one that was probably Tippu. His own form stood immobile within a cage of aether, a hollowed husk with no Source in it at all. He was cut adrift, Source from body, and was venturing forth without the fleshy home his Source had inhabited since long before he had been aware of it.

  Kyrus perceived little motion among the Sources he saw; time was slowed to the point of nearly stopping. He tried to stop and watch some single Source for a time to check his assumption that time was still passing, but his thoughts would not hold still enough for him to make such a painstaking observation. He flitted about like a hummingbird bereft of its innate navigator, his attention drawn to something only to find that he had sped to it as quickly as he could form the thought.

  A sudden chilling feeling pervaded Kyrus’s discorporate form. His movements began to slow; his vision started to grow hazy. Aether. I must be using up what I had drawn. Kyrus called to the aether. It responded sluggishly, like an ocean of honey oozing toward him, grudgingly heeding his summons, where normally it snapped to his call as a gale wind. The syrupy aether invigorated him as he drank it in, more aware of its feel as he had no bodily distractions to dilute the experience.

  I cannot stay in this form indefinitely. I need to find a place to reform and emerge into the world. Someplace Tippu will lose sight of me.

  Kyrus was a bit uncertain of the geography as related to the aether. It was not the same as seeing the aether overlaid upon the world of light, as he had grown so accustomed to seeing it. The ground was as permeable to aether as was the air, or the sea for that matter. Air would have been fine had he not wished to hide upon his re-emergence, but water suited his purpose better. Kyrus watched until he saw what was either a flock of birds or a school of fish, and settled upon the latter being most likely. He moved to within their midst, and willed the aether sphere and the inert Kyrus within to come to him. Once it had surrounded him, he released the magic.

  Kyrus had but a fraction of a second to gulp air as the temporary pocket that came with him from the beach collapsed under the weight of the Katamic. He fought down the panic as the weight of the water crushed in on him suddenly, and was thankful for the protection of his tattooed ward that his ribs were not crushed as well. He was much farther below the water’s surface than he had expected.

  Though not a strong swimmer, Kyrus was still adept at silent telekinesis magic and he used that to yank himself up to the surface. He gasped for air and saw that he was staring out to sea. From behind him, he heard frantic shouting from the beach.

  Wonderful. Kahli found Tippu and they both just noticed me.

  Kyrus began a slow, resigned swim to shore.

  * * * * * * * *

  “I hear your training went poorly today,” Toktu commented, taking a bite from a spit of boar, and passing it on to the next reveler. It was the evening of the equinox, which was one of the many days the Denku took for feasting. All along the beach, festive fires were lit and the islanders danced, sang, and shared both tales and drink.

  “I need more practice. I will do better,” Kyrus responded. He sat not far from the elder, who was widowed and had no wives to attend him with the fawning attention Kyrus studiously ignored from Tippu and Kahli.

  “I am told that Tippu asked you to use your magic on her,” Naknah added. She was another of the elders, as well as Tippu and Kahli’s common grandmother. She looked much like Kyrus would have imagined either of them to look had they been left for long years in the sun to dry. She was darker skinned, but it had a greyish cast to it; it did not shine or glisten as Kyrus’s companions’ did, and her curves had receded to sharp angles covered by sagging skin. Her head she kept clean shaven in perpetual mourning for her long-dead husband. “I thank you for showing wisdom by telling her ‘no,’” she said.

  “Thank you.” Kyrus nudged the inattentive Tippu, who was curled at Kyrus’s side, eating a hollowed mango that had recently been filled with liquor. “Do you hear your grandmother? Listen to her when you would not listen to me, next time.” Kyrus paused a moment, uncertain whether that came out quite right. The point seemed lost on Tippu anyway, who looked up long enough to nod in the way that children learn when they are required to agree with their elders: insincerely, but with feigned deference.

  “How much longer do
you think until you are ready?” Gahalu asked.

  It was a question that hung in many minds, but the Denku struggled to bring themselves to broach the subject with Kyrus. It seemed such an impolite question from all angles. By asking it, they admitted they were pondering his departure, which made them seem poor hosts. By telling him they wished him to stay, they imposed upon him selfishly. Mostly, it seemed, they just wished that Kyrus would change his mind after a time and decide not to go at all.

  “You got your magic to work, at least a little,” Gahalu said.

  “Not long. I was not ready for a long go (the best word Kyrus could think of for a journey). A little more practice. A plan to find home and I go.” Kyrus nodded. “I mean to come back,” he stated, “once I find the one I left. I want to bring her here. This is a good place. Good home.”

  “Did you tell them that?” asked Kappi, another of the elders, nodding toward Tippu and Kahli.

  “Each night when I came here, more times than I counted. I stopped. They do not listen,” Kyrus explained.

  But they were listening. Kyrus had felt them tense when he mentioned the girl he had left back home. Abbiley was a sore subject with them. Kyrus had explained about her when he first arrived—that she was the one he wished to be with and that he longed to go home to see her. They had insisted that he was better off with them, making every effort to supplant this mystery foreigner in Kyrus’s heart.

  The feast lasted long into the night. The Denku were experts at merriment and hard drinkers for the most part. Kyrus had learned his lesson and managed to drink little, despite vessels of various sweet-smelling drinks being passed to him. His head was clear as he made his way to the secluded stone house that was his home for whatever little time he would remain among the Denku. With his success on the beach, he was confident that his time in paradise was nearly at an end, at least until he could return with Abbiley.