Oathbreaker, Book 2: The Magus's Tale

by Colin McComb

  Many-armed, six-horned, and clawed like a lobster at three of its extremities. Its four wings were those of a dragonfly and those of a tattered bat. Its face was monstrous. It was a wrongness, and the poisoned air poured from it. I looked on this horror and heard the voice of the flames.

  This is why you have come.

  “I came because I thought I was one of the lost children of Suryat,” I replied. “I came to discover my parents.”

  You have no place on Suryat. There is only this. Take it.

  “I do not want it,” I said.

  Take this from the Island Sea.

  “What if I do not?”

  We cannot compel. We can only ask.

  “I cannot.”

  You can. We would not have called you else.

  “What must I do?”

  We shall teach you the dance of the inferno. When we release the cage, you must grasp that which it contains. We shall give you the power to hold it. When you have bound it in yourself, you must dance the eight steps and trap it within that blaze. Then you must take it beyond the Island Sea, to the wastelands of the north. The eyes of flame see no farther than this.

  “I will do this.”

  They taught me the eight steps of the dance, and the two flames that made the cage disappeared and reappeared in the empty corners of the hut. I took the idol in my hands. It was carved of flesh and pain, and it writhed in my hands as I raised it to my mouth. I chewed each piece as quickly as I could, and when I was done, I began the first step.

  The pain in my stomach was nothing I have felt before. I staggered through the dance, and with each step the agony grew worse. But when I completed the last step, it vanished.

  We thank you, Trembling Crow. You are ours, and we are yours.

  I bowed my head and closed my eyes.

  When I opened them, I sat cross-legged in front of the monument again. The sky had cleared, and the stench of evil was gone. I took the steps back to the beach and called to my master in the harbor.

  The Ocean Fox brought the cog to the shore, but as he neared, he shouted in horror and drove the craft back into the harbor. He called to me from the safety of the waves. “Trembling Crow, what have you done?”

  “I am doing the bidding of the flame,” I called back. “We need to sail north!”

  “I cannot do this with you,” he shouted. “The creature you have become would overwhelm me.”

  “I am no different than when I landed. I need your help.”

  “No! No! Trembling Crow, you must do this on your own.”

  “But I need a vessel, master, or I will be stranded here.”

  “I am not your master any longer. You have passed me.”

  He called up a wind, and it filled the sails of the cog.

  “Goodbye, my son.” These were the last words I heard from the Ocean Fox. I watched until he rounded the spit and made the open water, and then I began looking for a boat of my own.

  By the time night fell, I had been across the island and had found nothing but dead Suryati. I felt the sickness in my belly slowly growing. With it came terrible knowledge. I saw how it had come to Suryat:

  A Surya stealing into one of the great black pyramids, entering the vast chamber of sacrifice, spying the idol of the guardian on the altar. Fleeing before the priest returns, returning to his boat, and then overwhelmed in his mind. Return to Suryat and flesh. Slaughter. And then the cage.

  The image of the cave awoke a memory in me—the memory of the lost children. I gathered thick grass and began to weave a mat for a ride from the southern reaches of the sea to the north.

  Dawn draws near. I will not tell you of the ride across the sea. The waves calmed at my approach, but birds and fish alike fled from me. I came across the wreckage of an Imperial battleship. A lifeboat bobbed amid the broken wood, stocked with water and a dead man. I made a sail, and the spirits of the air filled it with their thanks.

  When I struck land on your southern shores, the earth quailed before me. A brace of magpies took flight, and I followed the birds north across the blasted hills. I fought a creature made of metal and blood that challenged me, and its lightning failed it. I came north. I sent an idea to the east and called to a brigand, and she answered my call and became a kidnapper. I have come to this place because I must. She has come because she must.

  Now I say this to you: I have left the dreams of the open sea behind me because I seek a vessel for that which I command, which commands me. I have traveled this far and no farther because the vessel must now come to me.

  With that, he opens his fist and releases the flame. Dawn creeps across the faces of the warriors, and they prod their hostages into the shelter of the trees and the rude huts there to await the coming of the next starred night. The chieftain watches the shaman, who is crouching by the fire with closed eyes.

  The chieftain speaks, his voice harsh. The shaman replies, his eyes still closed. The chieftain speaks again, harsher, angrier. His warriors edge uneasily closer to the shaman, tightening their grips on their weapons. The shaman sighs, stands slowly, and opens his eyes. Malaise spills from his chest like blood, driving the warriors to their knees as with the weight of chains. He speaks a few words, and they, trembling, seize their leader. Fear of the chieftain has been utterly replaced by fear of the stranger, their new commander.

  Their old one dies slowly.

  When the chieftain is dead at last, Trembling Crow moves to the trees’ edge. He speaks with the captives from the east for a time. He points to the masks that lie around their necks and asks questions. He appears satisfied with their answers, for he leans back against a tree and closes his eyes again.

  He might be dreaming. His new tribe gathers uneasily around him, fearing for the future.

  Interlude: Sickened

  The years following the defense of Underhill Tower passed quickly for me. I stayed mainly in the tower, concentrating on my work, but I made it a point to travel to Lower Pippen or some of the smaller hamlets under my jurisdiction at least once a week. I did not want the villagers to suffer under the same fear that had accompanied every step of the old Magus’s infrequent visits. The habits of hundreds of years are difficult to break, both in the common populace and among the magi, and I settled for a careful neutrality with the people who could look to me for protection.

  Baron Mulvrain was jealous of his prerogatives, this is true, but he could spare neither the men nor the effort to patrol the Pippens. He had to satisfy the demands of Terona in its endless wars, maintain enough able-bodied men and women to keep the economy moving, and protect the rest of his barony against the ever-growing threats of raiders, bandits, and reavers. Further, he had the example of my mentor to guide him, and I don’t think he could have withstood a similar level of contempt from a man thirty years his junior. We met once or twice a year, the first to take each other’s measure, and the rest to discuss Imperial policy and plans that might require greater attention from us. Otherwise, we left each other alone.

  The town guards were enough to keep the Pippens protected, for the most part, but I kept an eye on the monitors my predecessor had hidden around the area. No point, I thought, in jeopardizing the autonomy he had created. The eyes were hidden in the trunks of trees, above major and minor roads alike, and on various buildings and other high places. I had around a hundred of them, all told, and could review a compressed version of the events they stored at the end of my day. I could use the transport system to drop me near those monitors if I had to get somewhere in a hurry. Thus it was that I could keep the peace in the area and arrive shortly after trouble started—sometimes even before it began.

  These were a good few years for me. I was never invited to study under the Archmagus, though I had to report my research to his assistants. I focused on my spheres, although I had never received any sort of encouragement. I thought they demonstrated utility, variety, and the illusion that they operated under their will alone. They might not have the same brutal and immediate appeal as t
he blood-sworn swords the Knights Elite carried, but they were easily as effective.

  The problems lay in their production and their mastery. Each sphere was an investment of several weeks’ time, with laborious circuit tracing and construction for their different functionality, and each had to be matched to the control belt. Once they were slaved, I had to tune the controls more finely and rearrange the ordering controls in the gauntlet. Each was an individual work. I made explosives, lightning, and (the one of which I was most proud) a kind of shield that, though it wouldn’t stop attacks altogether, would slow them long enough for me to dodge them.

  I submitted my research monthly with no response from the Council. I did receive one visit from Trellaise, the assistant to the Archmagus, a haughty woman with the face of a horse and the mind of a scalpel. She had come in the summer after my ascension to review my work and wanted entrance to Underhill Tower; I met her in a glade outside town instead and was glad to have done so. She had a companion with her, a gray-skinned man with dead eyes whose face I thought I recognized. The man said nothing, and it was not until minutes into the meeting that I realized it was the guardsman William Lawson. I greeted him, and he simply stared at me. I opened my mouth to speak to him again when Trellaise’s laughter silenced me.

  “He’s dead, Alton,” she said. “I wanted to show you the work we’re doing now in Devilsfoot.”

  “Necromancy?” I asked, horrified. “I thought this work was purely theoretical!”

  “Not anymore,” she said, “though it’s a time-intensive endeavor and one that, as yet, does not have enough value added to it to make it a worthwhile pursuit. I do have hopes that I can improve the process, and when I do, we’ll have made a serious contribution to the security of the Empire.”

  “How is it done?”

  “Do you have a strong background in anatomy, physiology, and consciousness resonance studies?” she asked.

  “No,” I replied, “my work is heavily grounded in localized physical mini-phenomena and miniaturized controlling devices.”

  “Then you wouldn’t understand,” she said.

  I studied the dead man carefully, leaning in close. I pushed his cheek with my finger, and the texture of the skin felt as though it would burst under even that light pressure. He showed no response, and I looked back at Trellaise, my eyebrow raised: What’s the point? I asked silently, and that’s when the dead man’s hands locked around my throat and lifted me from the ground.

  I struggled and kicked at the corpse, but its grip was implacable. Behind the fingers, the dead eyes stared, stared, and I could not break free. My vision tunneled as the air choked from me, and I brought my penetrating globe to my aid just as the corpse dropped me. The sphere tore free from its concealment in the trees and exploded through Lawson’s head, showering me and Trellaise with gore. Even as the body slumped to the ground, she began screaming at me.

  “You complete idiot! Do you have any idea how much of my time that man took to reanimate? Do you have any idea how much money it cost? Did you think I would have let it kill you?”

  Shaken, I stood and shouted back at her as best as my crumpled throat could manage. “What did you think I would do when you had your corpse attack me? Laugh?” I coughed, a raw heave that tore, and spat blood. “You wanted a demonstration of my work? Now you’ve had it. Get out of here.”

  I brought the other three spheres from the woods, setting them to hover five feet around me. She left, and I watched her leave. After five minutes, I bent down and retrieved the box of my research notes and samples of my works in progress, and I stripped off all my clothes save the belt and the gauntlet, and carefully examined each article. Sure enough, I found a small silver needle in the neck of my cloak, a tracer or a scrambler, stuck there by the corpse of Lawson as it performed its demonstration. I stuck the needle into the seam of my explosive sphere and told the sphere to wend its way to the river and activate its internal energies about thirty feet above the ground. No point in revealing the locations of my transport disks. Only then did I go home.

  I heard no more from the Archmagus or his assistants.

  When I returned to the tower, I found the years-old letter from Lawson that I had cast aside, unopened, on the desk, and read through it in its entirety, and I shuddered at its implications. I had trusted Caltash. I hadn’t—at that time—thought of my treatment of Underhill as a betrayal. I had thought of it as righteous revenge. But now, now I was ashamed. I was ashamed but also vindicated; I was not the only one who thought the old man was using me hard and horribly.

  What hurt me more was knowing that even from the start, Terona had intended for me nothing more than its own revenge. Very well. It only hardened my resolve to work for Terona in name only, to reserve the best of my knowledge for myself.

  It was only later that I learned that I shared this feeling with my compatriots, but that I was one of the first to defy the Archmagus outright. All of us, on the road to becoming magi, were isolated and made untrusting of each other so we would not unite for long against our masters.

  I was not entirely alone in my studies. I had some contact with the other magi, as was my right and my duty. The collaboration I undertook with them was the most rewarding time of my life, developing artifacts for the Empire itself or for the Great Houses within. We might attempt to create truth-tellers for the Vukovi, reading pupil and skin responses of the subject, or spying gear for the Cronen to place in embassies and palaces. The questions they put to us for answers were always challenges, and I produced an excellent body of work for my masters.

  With Sandoval, for instance, I learned how to attune my spheres to my desire so they would maneuver primarily by the force of my will. In exchange, I showed her how to refine her whip so she could add features to its already awesome power. Together we worked on a pacification project—a euphemism for subjugating unruly crowds, which is in turn a euphemism for mobs. The larger cities of the Empire—Terona, Amarkas, Litchenberg, and Mainstay, among others—were afflicted with riots with some regularity. The incessant wars to the east, the uprisings in colonies long thought to be under Terona’s thumb, had drawn away those who might work the fields and tend the livestock. The result was famine, the result of the famine was despair, and the result of the despair was violence.

  Our work was to prove to the rioters that they had better outlets for their rage than the cities in which they lived. We applied the thinking behind the neural whip to a broader application, a shrieking box that would incapacitate all within its range. Sadly for us, the range was too short to be effective against a large mob and the cost in time and materials too prohibitive to construct many.

  Although our collaboration met with rejection from the Council, we were both driven to new heights of creativity, and we managed to sell some prototypes to Deng merchant trains for protection against brigands. The money on this alone was enough to justify two years of research. I would have liked to work with Sandoval again, but Imperial law and the customs of the Council dictated that I collaborate on three other successful projects with three other magi before I could resume a partnership. Ostensibly, the rule was emplaced to ensure that we would gain a broad understanding of the various fields of our study, but its application ensured that we would remain in isolation.

  This lack of sustained interaction with my peers made me long for human contact. I sought it among the townsfolk under my protection.

  My efforts were met with failure. The farmers and the trappers steered well clear of me, as ignorant folk will do when confronted with powers beyond their imagining. Whatever they had known of me in my childhood had disappeared, long gone. I had moved so far past their worlds that I suppose I might as well have been an ambassador from under the sea or behind the clouds. My aunt and uncle had moved away and had not told anyone where they had gone. I could have hunted them, but I respected their decision. It is no easy thing having blood ties to a magus.

  The guardsmen shunned me to a man. They saluted me and treated
me with the respect due my rank—for who knew when they might need me?—but my friendly words were met with polite replies and impenetrable deference. When I visited their tavern, I drank in silence.

  I complimented their captain, a now-elderly Turen Ghos, on their discipline. He was old enough and fearless enough (and quite possibly drunk to boot) to tell me that my place was not among the laborers and the common men like his guards. “In fact,” he said, “you’re making them downright uneasy, and that’s making their job harder.”

  After that I stayed away from the guardsmen. I tried to make diffident contact with my old friends from before my apprenticeship and found that they had been drafted, left town, married, grown fat and stupid. Even Darien, who had been my closest friend, had settled into that life.

  I traveled to his house one night to see if that old friendship still existed. I rapped on the door with old Underhill’s staff and… no, I don’t want to discuss this. His utter fear and pure debasement were answer enough for me. I don’t know who was more relieved at my departure.

  I went home that night and cleaned and prepared my tools until morning: the spheres, the staff, the belt, the gloves. I filled them with power and retested them in the proving grounds of the subcellar. Friends? A sad joke.

  Months of solitude went by, and I immersed myself in friendships that weren’t mine, gleaned from details snatched from my monitors: friendships, feuds, assignations and betrayals, love… I lived my life by watching others live theirs, and I knew more about their lives and their friends than they did. For two months, I imagined that I was living a normal life. The illusion was ruined the next time I went to town: I saw Sarah Cowler, the daughter of Arnold and Petra, and I asked her if she had found her doll yet—she had lost it only the night before and had told only her parents. She did not know me, and she looked at me with dawning horror. I realized then what I had done, and I was grateful that I had not made a fool of myself with an adult.