The Summoned Mage (Convergence Book 1)

by Melissa McShane

  Nothing happened. The drumming stopped and the room was completely silent. I heard someone walking toward me and opened my eyes, blinking away afterimages. Vorantor bent to pick up a small book, no larger than one of my hands. It was bound in gray leather and was locked shut. Vorantor pried at it, with no success, and Cederic gently took it out of his hands and gave it to me. “Sesskia,” he said, and I used the mind-moving pouvra to unlock it. That set my head to pounding, so I handed the book back to Cederic and massaged my temples.

  Cederic opened it, then handed it to Vorantor with a bow. I’m pretty sure he only did this because he knew Vorantor wouldn’t be able to read it, and he could afford to look gracious. Vorantor turned a few pages and tried to appear wise and contemplative, but I thought he only looked like a fool.

  “It is the book,” the God-Empress said, and everyone moved aside while trying not to look like they were fleeing. She walked right up to Vorantor and took the book from him. The air hummed with the sound of fifty-one people, myself included, trying not to shout at the divine madwoman who had no experience in handling ancient books. Though it didn’t look ancient, something the God-Empress pointed out immediately. “This can’t be the right one,” she said.

  “God-Empress, the book comes from a time when it was new, so it has not experienced the passing of time,” Terrael said, surprising everyone except Cederic. Then he shocked everyone by taking the book from her and turning to the first pages. “I can’t read it yet, God-Empress, and I apologize for asking for more of your patience” (I had no idea Terrael could be so diplomatic!) “but I can verify whether this is the book we wanted, if you’ll allow me a moment.”

  He skimmed the first few pages, turned to the back and examined the binding, then turned to a page about two-thirds of the way through and looked at it closely. “The first pages contain the name Veris, the binding has been repaired where an extra signature was inserted—a signature is a bundle of pages, God-Empress—and this is the page where Veris gave the book to her successor, Barklan; the handwriting changes. This is the Codex Tiurindi.

  Now it didn’t matter that the God-Empress was standing among us; everyone cheered, or gasped, or cried, or did something to express their excitement and relief, which meant Cederic turned away with his head bowed, and I hugged Audryn and we both tried not to dance. Terrael was already trying to read the book, but Vorantor took it gently from him and said, “All in good time, Master Peressten! God-Empress, thank you for allowing us the joy of your presence on this day. I assure you—”

  “Don’t bore me with your assurances, Denril Vorantor,” the God-Empress said, all traces of her earlier lack of focus gone. “You told me the book would keep my empire safe from this disaster. Show me.”

  That shut everyone’s celebrating down. Vorantor’s mouth sagged open. “We—God-Empress, we need to translate it, it’s not so simple—”

  “Show me something, Denril Vorantor, or I will make your life very simple indeed,” the God-Empress said.

  Vorantor’s eyes were wide and panicked. “What do you—what should I show you, God-Empress?” he begged.

  “The Codex Tiurindi was written in a time when defensive magics were more refined than they are now, God-Empress,” Cederic said. “Would you care to see one of them?”

  Vorantor’s eyes were even wider now. I know a good lie when I see one, and I prayed to the true God Vorantor wouldn’t do or say anything to give Cederic’s game away. Of course there was no way the Codex Tiurindi could show the God-Empress anything, but she didn’t know that, and I was certain by the expressionless look on Cederic’s face that there were a lot of other things about magic she didn’t know.

  “The book, please,” he said to Terrael, who was as wide-eyed as Vorantor, but handed the Codex to Cederic. He flipped it open (at random, I guessed) and said, “We will need to translate it to create the ultimate kathana, of course, but there are smaller pieces to the puzzle—here.”

  He shut the book, tucked it into his trouser pocket, stripped off his robe and used it to scrub the floor to remove the residue of the th’an. He’s slim, with a scattering of short dark hairs across his chest, and he has more muscle than I would have guessed, for an academic. He was nearly done before it occurred to anyone to join him. He threw the stained robe away and chalked some th’an on the floor, looked at the book again, chalked a few more th’an, then said, “Step back, please,” and made a few final marks.

  A shimmering hemisphere about two feet tall sprang up around the th’an, glowing with a greenish-gold light that swirled like a film of oil across the hemisphere’s surface. Cederic stood and rapped on the hemisphere with his knuckles, making the oil ripple out from that point of contact as if his hand were a stone thrown into a lake. “You might ask one of your soldiers to strike it,” he said, “but I am not entirely certain it will not turn that force back on him.”

  The God-Empress shrugged and snapped her fingers in the direction of her soldiers, and with some hesitation, one of them came forward. She pointed, and the soldier drew his knife and approached the hemisphere, then brought the weapon down as if he were stabbing an enemy in the back. The knife met the oily surface—and shattered.

  No one spoke. The soldier looked impressed. All the mages looked stunned. I don’t know how I looked, awestruck probably. Cederic looked bored. The God-Empress nodded once, slowly. “I am satisfied,” she said. “Teach the others. And tell me when the book is translated.” She gestured at her soldiers, and they surrounded her as she left the room.

  The instant she was gone, and the heavy door was shut, Vorantor was in Cederic’s face, shouting, “What in hell’s name were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking,” Cederic said, not shying away from Vorantor’s ire, “that I would prefer none of us be killed by the God-Empress’s soldiers.”

  “You had no idea whether that kathana would work!” Vorantor shouted. “Kilios or no, you could barely have understood what you were reading—how could you even know it was what you said it was?”

  “I didn’t,” Cederic said. “I made it up.”

  That left Vorantor gaping with nothing to say. “Even Master Peressten cannot read that book,” Cederic said. “I gambled that the God-Empress would not believe we were telling the truth that it would take time to translate all of it, and I…invented a kathana that would satisfy her.”

  I think I was the only person watching Vorantor at that moment—everyone else was staring at Cederic in awe—and I was enjoying his look of stunned chagrin when it turned, for the briefest instant, into something much darker, something that frightened me. Then he smiled, and threw his arm around Cederic’s shoulders. “You never stop amazing me, old friend,” he said. “Cheers, everyone! It’s time to celebrate!”

  The first cheers were weak little things, but they grew into robust, happy noise as it settled on everyone that we, first, had succeeded in the task that had driven us these many days, and second, were not dead. The room wasn’t conducive to celebration, so we moved to the dining hall, and I ended up at the tail end of our procession next to Cederic, who looked as calm as always, though a bit scruffy in his reclaimed, wrinkled robe. He congratulated me on my part in the kathana, and I expressed my admiration at him making up a new one out of whole cloth.

  “That may turn out to be a bad idea,” he said in a low voice. “It probably saved all our lives, so I do not regret it, but now the God-Empress will want us to turn that kathana to her army’s use. Just one more way in which we are giving her more power. And I am not entirely certain I remember how to repeat it.”

  “I don’t believe you’ve forgotten a kathana in your entire life,” I said, making him smile, “and I don’t see that you had much choice. She wouldn’t have been satisfied with a kathana that showered her enemies with rose petals.”

  He smiled again. “Not unless they were rose petals that exploded,” he said.

  That brought us to the dining hall door, and I thought about inviting him to sit with me—he
couldn’t possibly want to sit with Vorantor after that, could he?—but I hesitated too long, and he nodded at me and moved off to his usual table. So I sat with my friends, and we laughed, and drank too much wine, and had a wonderful time. My head hurts from the wine, so I’m going to sleep it off, and in the morning—strange, I don’t know what I’m going to do next.

  I’ve been so focused on the kathana that I’m used to having direction, and now it’s a matter of waiting for Terrael to translate the book. And I really don’t know what happens then. Will Vorantor be able to accept that he’s been wrong? I think he’d be capable of violence if threatened, and I’m sure he sees Cederic’s competence as a threat to his position. Never mind that Cederic wouldn’t want to be the God-Empress’s chief mage even if—well, no, if it meant saving both our worlds I think he’d accept the position. But certainly not for anything less.

  Chapter Seventeen

  27 Lennitay

  Very boring. Terrael is preoccupied with the Codex and the Darssan mages are half-heartedly cooperating with Vorantor’s mages on the kathanas he’s developed for “minimizing the damage” when the worlds come together.

  Cederic was gone today, teaching the shield kathana to the God-Empress’s battle mages. He didn’t look happy when he returned, and I can’t blame him, but he really had no choice. He told me he wishes it wasn’t quite so simple a kathana, and I told him he should have thought of that before he went around being brilliant at people, which made him smile. What he needs is a good laugh, but I have a hard time imagining him laughing.

  Terrael won’t talk about what he’s learned so far—says talking is a distraction, and makes him jump to conclusions—but I know he’s in ecstasy over being the first to read the Codex Tiurindi in centuries, maybe millennia. We still don’t know exactly how long it was after the disaster that civilization began repairing itself.

  Nothing for me to do, though I could look at it as a good thing that the God-Empress hasn’t called on me to entertain her. Today I finally went to look at the picture in the floor of the mosaic room. It’s a falcon. It looks much more like the real bird than the helmets, but at least now I know where the inspiration came from. Exploring tonight for sure.

  28 Lennitay

  I’ve finally encountered Aselfos, though “encounter” is probably the wrong word, because it implies we met face to face, and I’m just as happy he doesn’t know I exist. Though that might not be true, depending on what he noticed last night.

  I decided I was going to make more of an effort to figure out where Aselfos went, the night I saw him talking to Vorantor. He’d gone down the secret staircase into the treasure tower, and I already know the treasure rooms only lead to one another and to the spiral passage inside the tower, and the room with the war wagons has no visible exit other than the guarded one. He might have left the tower by the corridor I’d originally entered by, but there were also the brass double doors on the outside wall of the tower I’d never investigated, so I decided to try my luck there.

  I waited for Vorantor to finish his meditation, or whatever it is he does in the observatory after dinner, then I used the secret staircase to get into the treasure tower. I probably could have taken my original route, but Aselfos’s way is more fun.

  Once inside, I trotted down the spiral passage to the double door, looked through it to be safe, then pushed it open (it was unlocked) and went inside. As I wrote before, it opened on a corridor about five feet long that made a sharp turn to the right. I peeked around the corner and saw a hallway extending off into the darkness, which I proceeded along, quietly and cautiously. I recalled my mental map of the palace and concluded that I was beneath the Sais’ wing. This was certainly close to the same length as that hallway, though much narrower.

  Eventually I came to an iron door held only loosely in place by rusted hinges. The door was locked, and the strange thing was the lock was much newer than the rest of the door. That seems foolish to me, given that someone could easily break the door down, bypassing the lock, but then there’s a lot about this that makes no sense to me.

  I used the see-through pouvra and discovered the corridor continued a short distance to another door, this one wooden. Also strange. I unlocked the iron door and walked down the corridor to the wooden one, which was also locked, but with a simpler lock that wasn’t any newer than the door. I looked through it, but whatever was beyond it was too far away to make out details.

  So I started to unlock the door and got a nasty surprise: someone had set a clever little trap on the locking mechanism. It wasn’t intended to harm anyone, just to show anyone who knew how to look that someone had passed through the door. A warning to the trap-setter. It was complicated enough it would take at least three hands to prevent it from going off while the door was being unlocked, and would be impossible to stop if you were entering from the other direction. Now I was certain Aselfos used this route, because I bet he’s got that kind of devious and suspicious mind. So that’s one thing we have in common.

  I examined the trap until I was sure I knew how it worked, and carefully removed the trap with my hands while I used the pouvra to unlock the door. I might have been able to do the whole thing with magic, but why take unnecessary chances?

  I set the trap on the floor inside the corridor, out of the way, and shut the door behind me. The room beyond looked like it might be a music room, though the instruments leaning against the walls weren’t familiar to me. I peeked outside and was able to orient myself; I was in the wing containing all the empty guest chambers.

  At this point I had nothing to go on. I felt it was safe to assume Aselfos had exited the tower through this door, and that he suspected someone might follow him on his trips up to leave notes for Vorantor. But I could only guess where he’d gone from here. I took the most obvious option, concealed myself, and went toward the one alcove off the main chamber I hadn’t yet explored.

  I’d only gone about a hundred feet when I was nearly caught. I admit I was careless, just as I’ve always feared using the concealment pouvra too much might make me. And I was getting tired. So it was mostly luck, and the fact that I’ve been doing this for a long time and my reflexes are excellent, that saved me.

  I was nearly to the mosaic chamber when a door opened ahead of me and I had to dodge to one side and press myself flat against the wall. There was no convenient doorway for me to hide in, and I was grateful for the concealment pouvra even as I cursed myself for depending on it so much.

  A man and a woman emerged from the open door. The woman said “…past time.”

  “It will have to be enough,” said the man, and I recognized Aselfos’s voice. When he came closer, I got a better look at him. He was older than I’d guessed, nearly fifty, but lean and athletic, and he moved with assurance. That he could navigate the secret staircase did not surprise me at all.

  His companion was about the same age, with close-cropped hair that was gray in the dim light, and although she was fat where he was slim, she moved with the same assurance, like someone accustomed to command. I recognized her after a few moments as one of the God-Empress’s soldiers, the one who’d worn a different uniform than the rest at the kathana. If this were Balaen, I’d assume she was a general, though again, I don’t know the Castaviran Empire’s military ranks.

  “It would help if we had a better estimate,” the woman said.

  “Vorantor says the time is shrinking,” Aselfos said.

  The woman snorted. “Vorantor is a problem.”

  “He’ll validate my claim, and I’ll make him powerful,” Aselfos said. “Whether he’s right about this catastrophe or not. And his work on this supposed disaster is keeping the Kilios occupied.”

  “I suppose as long as his summoning puts our resources in the right place at the right time, it doesn’t matter,” the woman said. “But you should tell Vorantor sooner is better. Who knows what idea the crazy bitch might take into her golden head?”

  “Have patience,” Aselfos said, and he walk
ed in my direction. I held my breath. “We’ll have a day’s warning, and that will have…” and they were out of earshot. I continued to hold my breath for a few more seconds, then released it slowly and retreated to the music room, through the door and into the hall, where I again paused before resetting the trap and locking everything behind me. Then I returned to my room as quickly as I could. That brings me to now.

  I’m a thief, not a politician, but that sounded like a plot against the God-Empress to me. And Vorantor is involved. And they’re afraid of Cederic interfering, I think. I should tell Cederic. But…if Aselfos is planning to act against the God-Empress, how is that a bad thing? He might be a better option than her—almost certainly would be.

  I just don’t know enough about Castaviran politics to know how a coup would affect the mages. They might be associated closely enough with the God-Empress that Aselfos would want to destroy them with her, and Vorantor has been negotiating with him for their protection. Or, knowing him, his own protection, and to hell with what happens to the rest of us. No, that’s too cynical even for me.

  I’ll tell Cederic in the morning, wait for him to stop being sarcastic at me, and figure out what I can do.

  29 Lennitay

  Something is wrong with Terrael. I think. I mean, it’s probably normal that he’s avoiding people while he’s working on the Codex, but avoid Audryn? I doubt even Terrael could be that obsessed. And I’ve seen him go out of his way to keep from meeting Cederic in the hall. He acts…furtive. As if he has some secret he’s afraid he might give away if he steps wrong. Audryn couldn’t find him at lunchtime, so she had me and the Darssan mages look for him, and I found him in the circle chamber, scribbling on the walls.

  But he wasn’t writing th’an, it looked like ordinary handwriting, not that I can read that. When he saw me, he turned absolutely white, then scrubbed off the wall as fast as he could and said it was just a theory he was trying on some I don’t know what, it was technical linguistic things and I didn’t understand him. Which, I think, was the idea. He wanted me distracted. If he’s so upset about something that he doesn’t remember I can’t read his language…something is definitely wrong with Terrael.