The Floating Islands

by Rachel Neumeier

“We should go back,” Cesei protested, pulling to a halt almost before they were back inside the hidden school. “Tichorei, we should go back! Arei was right, we might be able to help—” There were tears of frustration and fear in his eyes. He looked far too young to be facing—whatever they were all facing.

  “And do what?” snapped Tichorei, hauling the little boy along by plain force. “You’re not a baby, Cesei; do as you’re told! If the backlash is bad enough, I might need you myself! Or do you think it’s beneath you to work on backlash and overextension?”

  Araenè had thought Tichorei had simply been detailed to watch them as though they were babies. She knew she, at least, was about as helpless as an infant. Trying to steady her racing thoughts, she asked, “Can you, we, um, can we … handle the backlash, then?”

  “I’m Master Camatii’s apprentice,” Tichorei said grimly. “And Master Camatii is the best there is at bringing an overextended mage back from the edge. I’m not—” He stopped.

  Not him, not as good? Araenè could imagine where that comment had been heading. And then, But I’m the best we may have. That’s what Tichorei meant.

  “Why not Master Camatii, then?” Cesei began.

  Tichorei gave the boy a little shake, too worried to be patient. “Because they need him where they’re fighting, of course. They’ll need a healing mage. He’ll overextend himself—of course he will—Arei!” He wheeled suddenly to face Araenè.

  Araenè jerked to a halt, startled and alarmed. “Yes?”

  “Can you recognize overextension when you see it?”

  She couldn’t recognize or understand or do anything. She shook her head mutely.

  Tichorei started down a hall with low arched ceilings, windowless, lit by spell light. He said over his shoulder, “A mage who overextends goes all still and cold—he might look dead, only you can see he isn’t, if you look properly. He’s extended too far, his mind isn’t aware of his body. If he stays like that, he will die. What you can do—”

  “Is bring him back?” Araenè asked cautiously. She doubted very much she could do any such thing. Did Tichorei think she—was she supposed to be able to—

  “No—that’s me,” the young man said grimly. “What you can do is keep me from overextending while I do it! Cesei!”

  “What?” Tichorei had released Cesei’s wrist at last, and the boy rubbed it, looking at once sullen and scared.

  Tichorei stood in the middle of the hallway, his hands on his hips, glowering at the younger apprentice. “Have you ever seen your master overextend?”

  Cesei hesitated. “I don’t think so.”

  “Then you haven’t! Kopapei’s probably not the sort to let it happen, but I expect it will tonight. Cesei, you can’t do anything to help your master if you can’t calm down and let me show you how! Right?”

  Cesei glowered and muttered that Tichorei should do something, then.

  “I am!” snapped Tichorei. He caught the younger boy’s wrist again, shoved open a door Araenè hadn’t even realized was there, and hauled him into the hall of spheres and mirrors.

  Araenè stared after them for an instant. Then she ran after Tichorei …

  … and found herself blundering through a place she had heard of repeatedly but had never visited: the balcony where the black gulls nested. The sharp, acrid smell of guano mingled with the salt smell of the sea. “Weeping Gods!” Araenè said, with a good deal more force than was seemly for any girl, and stood still, trying not to crush gull eggs under her feet.

  It seemed to her that hundreds of gulls wheeled and cried over the sea, the black ones mingling with the ordinary gray and white gulls, but only the black ones came in over this balcony. And what had everyone said about black gulls hatching out basilisks …? Araenè swallowed and shut her eyes. Narrow black wings beat through the air all around her.…

  Then everything else was suddenly overwhelmed by a terrible smashing, grating noise, a sound so loud that Araenè felt it echo in all her bones. She reeled sideways and back, not even sure whether the vast noise alone had made her stagger or whether some huge blow had actually struck the balcony. All the gulls were in the air, a wild confusion of beating wings. Araenè cried out and covered her face with her arms. A large hand caught her arm and steadied her when she might otherwise have fallen, and the wild torrent of gulls subsided as the birds fled for the open air over the sea.

  The sudden quiet after the overwhelming noise was almost like a blow itself, and Araenè flinched from it—but the grip on her arm did not slacken and after a moment she found herself able to straighten and look, dazedly, for the person who held her.

  “Well, now,” said the man, blinking down at Araenè. “You need to watch your step here. That’s a basilisk egg you just now came near sitting on. Fretful creatures, basilisks; you wouldn’t want to hatch one out by falling on top of it.”

  Araenè stared at the man. Then she looked down—or started to look down: the man caught her chin, tilting her face firmly upward, and she blushed hotly—of course she shouldn’t look, she knew very well she shouldn’t look at a basilisk; she’d never heard that looking at just the egg was dangerous, but what if it hatched while she stared at it?

  “Better,” agreed her unexpected protector. He was a large, untidy man with a tangled mass of hair spilling around his round, forgettable face. He let go of Araenè’s arm, patting her on the shoulder as a man might pat a nervous dog, still peering down at her. A twist of some green vine was caught in his hair. A bitter green scent clung to him, distinguishable even through the smells of the gulls’ nests and the sea.

  “What was that … noise?” Araenè asked him.

  “Well, let’s go look,” suggested the man. He turned, clumsy with his bulk, and picked his way among the gulls’ nests to lean over the balcony railing. For all his awkwardness, Araenè noticed, he did not disturb a single nest.

  In the west, a great red sun was sinking into the sea. The sky was streaked with crimson; the red light turned the still water to a sheet of blood, sheathed the Tolounnese ships with blood, set their limp white sails on fire. Long metal ladders stretched up and out from five of the ships, their upper edges buried in broken rubble where they had shattered the Island towers built into the stone: the closest was so near Araenè could almost have reached out and touched it. Broken shards of stone and brick were still falling from the cliffs where it had struck, but men were starting to climb it. A lot of men.

  Araenè turned to stare at the big man. “Are you … going to stop them?”

  “Well, more or less. I might stop that lot, I suppose,” said the man. He leaned his elbows on the railing without regard for the guano that speckled it, peering down toward the ships. “The question is, what’s going to stop the ones after that? Determined, those Tolounnese. Once they begin marching, they don’t like to turn around. They’re carrying a lot of power in their pockets just at the moment. A great lot more than we can raise up, you know.”

  “But—” Araenè protested, but then didn’t know what to say, or ask. She stopped in confusion.

  The man squinted down at her. His eyes were a muddy gray-brown-green color. Given their vague expression, Araenè wasn’t even certain he saw her. He said absently, “If everyone works at it, the Tolounnese might be held for a day or so, I suppose. Sometimes a day makes a great deal of difference. I’m sure you’ve found that in your own life. Or you will.”

  Araenè found herself growing angry as well as uncertain and frightened. “Can you be plain?” she demanded. “Where should I go? What should I do? I don’t know how to do anything, you know! What can I do?”

  “You might try trusting Tnegun,” the man suggested, not really as though he was paying much attention.

  “I—what?”

  “You seem to have decided you can’t trust him. That does seem a hard judgment on the poor man, as you haven’t yet tried.”

  Araenè stared at him, utterly speechless.

  There was no sign that the man noticed anything of h
er astonishment or anger or terror. He only looked down at the advancing Tolounnese soldiers, then peered around absently. “Let me see. Mm.” He wandered away across the balcony, stooping to pick up a black egg here and there. One he squinted at and put back. Then he glanced at Araenè, smiled, and commented, “We mustn’t distract the Tolounnese mages, but a basilisk or two in the right place can do wonders to divert even the most dedicated soldiers, don’t you find? You might try that door over there.” He waved across the balcony. “That might take you somewhere useful.” He held another of the eggs up to the red light of the sun and peered at it thoughtfully. “Hmm.”

  Araenè stared at the man—the mage—could this be Cassameirin?—for a long moment. Then she looked warily at the door he’d pointed out. It was the only door she could see anywhere. Three times her height, the door was still so narrow she would have to turn sideways to step through it.

  Turning back toward the big man, Araenè began to ask where this door would lead—though she already knew whatever answer he gave would probably be unhelpful—but it didn’t matter what he might have said, because he was gone. Black gulls flew in and out where he had been standing. Araenè stared out at the red sea and the red sky for a long moment. The shouts of men still echoed out there: shouts and then, abruptly, screams that made her wonder if a basilisk had suddenly hatched out at the feet of the advancing soldiers. And if she could do anything more useless than stand here and wait for a basilisk to hatch at her own feet, Araenè could not imagine what that might be.

  She wanted to curse. But even disguised as a boy, Araenè could not quite bring herself to swear. Not, at least, as violently as she wanted to.

  But she slammed the narrow door behind her, after making sure it led only to the great twelve-walled hall of spheres and mirrors.

  “Gods weeping!” Tichorei looked up, startled, from a row of spheres he’d lined up on the floor in front of a long, low mirror. “Do you have to crash things around? Where have you been? At least, I can see from your boots where you’ve been; why did you visit the gulls?” Then he waved a dismissive hand. “Never mind, just look here. Cesei, what do you think, this little glass one next, or this big basalt?”

  “I don’t know,” Cesei muttered. He was standing on the other side of the hall, on his toes, craning to see out one of the windows. “How should I know? I don’t know anything.”

  The little boy’s mood clearly hadn’t improved while Araenè had been touring the outskirts of the hidden school. Though she sympathized with his frustration, she also found herself rolling her eyes impatiently. Did she ever seem so sullen? Struck by this thought, she stared at the boy for a moment. Then, as Tichorei started to put the basalt sphere in his row, she held up a hand and said hastily, “No, no—the glass one.”

  “Yes?” Tichorei sat back on his heels and gazed at Araenè. “Why?”

  Araenè found herself unable to explain why it seemed obvious to her that glass should come next in the series Tichorei had arranged. Irritated by her own ignorance, she shrugged. “It just seems right.”

  Tichorei nodded. “Glass, then.” He put the sphere in place.

  “I met this man,” Araenè said diffidently. “Big. Dressed like a Third City man—not even like that, more like a farmer. He said …” She hesitated, then finished, “He said he was going to use basilisk eggs against the Tolounnese. I think that’s what he meant.”

  Tichorei had straightened up. He stared at Araenè. “Big, you say? Lots of untidy hair? Was he—” He stopped, then finished in an embarrassed tone, “A little far into his cups?”

  “Oh!” Araenè realized where she had met the man the first time: it had been the same man who’d first directed her to the mages’ school. Or … had it been the same? When she tried to think back, she found her image of the man uncertain. “Yes—maybe,” she said uncertainly. “Does he smell …” She hesitated. “Sort of green and wild, like crushed herbs?”

  Tichorei blinked. “Does he smell like herbs? Not that I ever noticed. More like ale, I should think! But if you met a big man who was collecting basilisk eggs, I think maybe that was Cassameirin. Master Cassameirin,” he said hastily. “I met him once. If he’s here now, that’s good. I think it’s good. He’s not—he’s too old to be powerful, but he makes things happen, you know.” He stared down at the spheres he’d lined up, then uncertainly up at the racks of other spheres. “Maybe I should add one for him. I wonder what kind.…”

  “That green one,” Araenè suggested, pointing to a sphere of soapy-looking stone she didn’t recognize. It tickled across her tongue with the same complicated herbal flavor that attended Master Cassameirin. “What are you doing?”

  “Setting things up so we can see out properly.” Tichorei added the green sphere to his row and studied it critically. He glanced over at Cesei. “You know how to do far-seeing?”

  “A little.” Not quite so sullen now that there was something to do, Cesei skirted the spiral stair in the center of the floor and came over to kneel down across from Tichorei. They both bent their heads over the row of spheres, suddenly looking very much alike despite all the differences between them. The first sphere in the row was obsidian. Then came topaz, amethyst, a smoky gray stone that Araenè didn’t recognize, and finally glass and the soapy green stone. The topaz sphere was the largest, the glass one the smallest. The air around the spheres sparkled with ginger and cumin, with undertones of herbs and pepper and cloves.

  “Master Kopapei,” Tichorei said, pointing to the obsidian sphere. He went down the row. “Tnegun, Akhai, Yamatei, Camatii, and Cassameirin. Now,” the young man explained, “I’m going to show you both how to set a sphere so you can catch the first moment of someone’s overextension—and then we’ll watch in turn, do you see? If one of the masters overextends, I’ll try to catch him, put him back together. Arei, if I start to extend too far myself, you’ll have to catch me.”

  “How?” Araenè asked tensely. She knew already that however one stopped an apprentice mage from overextending, she wouldn’t be able to do it.

  “You’ll have to hit me. Hard enough that I feel it.” Tichorei demonstrated, slapping Araenè on the arm hard enough to sting. Surprised, she yelped; the young man looked at her, startled, and she put a hand over her mouth. But the other apprentice only shrugged and put a fingertip out to the first of the spheres in the row. “Now, Cesei, watch me. You’ll have to do this if I, well. For now, you only watch, yes?”

  The boy nodded earnestly.

  “Now, Yamatei first, and we’ll see if we can still get him back,” Tichorei murmured. He bent over the gray sphere.

  That night seemed endless to Araenè. Sometimes shouting and the dim clamor of distant trouble were audible from the hall of spheres and mirrors; more often, not. She supposed it depended on exactly where the hidden school actually was at any given moment. Neither she nor Tichorei nor even Cesei ever went and looked out a window, not even when dawn approached. The spheres took all their attention.

  The spheres sparkled and glittered … and sometimes dimmed. Usually there was nothing to actually see, at least not anything for Araenè. But Cesei sometimes bent low over one sphere or another and told her something like, “Master Camatii is way down underneath First City. I think there’s a lot of men there. He’s very tired.”

  Tichorei didn’t look into the spheres, but sat with his eyes closed. He waited for Cesei to spot trouble for him, then sent his mind sliding after any mage who’d lost himself in the vastness of sea and sky. Over and over, growing more confident of her judgment and yet more tense as the bells passed, Araenè watched the older apprentice’s breathing become slow and shallow. Then she would lean forward and shout his name right in his face, slapping him hard. Tichorei would lean forward and shake his head, or stand up and pace around the twelve-sided hall for a few minutes.

  “I lost Master Kopapei,” he said bleakly, very early in the morning, shortly after the pearl-gray of dawn began to show around the edges of the shutters. “No, Arei, yo
u were right, you had to bring me back! Cesei, don’t cry; he’s not dead. Just, I think he’s very badly overextended. Master Camatii will find him eventually.” He didn’t say anything about the possibility that they might lose Master Camatii next, only put the obsidian sphere carefully aside.

  The morning dragged past.

  “There’s a lot of fighting,” Cesei said, looking worriedly into Master Yamatei’s gray-green stone. “I thought he’d be all right once we got him back. But there’s a lot of, I don’t know; I don’t like the way Master Yamatei feels now.”

  Tichorei came over to look, then grunted and went back to pacing. He didn’t say, There’s nothing we can do about that, but Araenè was sure that was what he’d meant.

  At fourth bell, Master Yamatei’s stone suddenly splintered with a fine lacework of red veins. Tichorei put it beside the obsidian sphere without comment, but he looked sick. “I shouldn’t have—” he began, then cut that off. And said harshly to Cesei, “I have to rest. I have to, do you see? Do you understand how I catch them back when they go too far?”

  “I’ve been trying to watch.” Cesei didn’t look sullen anymore. Now he looked frightened. “I haven’t, I can’t, uh, exactly see what you do.…”

  Too tired to be gentle, Tichorei simply put one hand on the boy’s shoulder, cupped his cheek with the other hand, and looked, with a strange kind of forcefulness, into his eyes. Cesei flinched, his face screwing up, suddenly on the verge of tears. He tried once to break Tichorei’s grip, but the older apprentice didn’t let go and after a moment Cesei steadied again, though his breathing had gone ragged.

  “You have that?” Tichorei asked him, his tone still rough. “It’s too advanced for you, I know that. You were brave to let me set the pattern. Can you hold it now?”

  Cesei didn’t look quite sure. “I guess so.… It hurts, Tichorei.…”

  “I know it does. Can you hold it anyway?”

  “I—” Cesei’s expression turned stubborn. “I can keep it for a while. I can.”

  Tichorei only nodded. “Good boy,” he muttered. He looked blurrily at Araenè. “Gotta rest. Wake me up by, by, I don’t know, sixth bell? Or if Cesei can’t hold that pattern, wake me up when he loses it.” He walked across the hall stiffly, as though just walking hurt him, lay down right on the floor, and went instantly to sleep. Except he looked more unconscious than just asleep.