Salamander

by David D. Friedman

  As the guard slowly raised his head, Coelus nodded in the direction of the other. The first guard motioned the other over. "Take a look at this."

  The other guard bent down to look. The first guard untied the cord holding the gag in Coelus' mouth as the other bent to free his legs. Coelus stood unsteadily, picked up the sheet of paper, folded it, and slid it into his pouch.

  "You were instructed to remain here until I returned,” he said, softly. “Do so. Remember nothing more."

  His cloak was hanging by the door; he put it on and left the room.

  * * *

  Dur turned to his daughter. "Good work. With luck, Iolen will think Fieras opened the hole. We have to find Coelus and get him out of here. I don't want to look like this when we find him, so we only have half an hour or so. There is a limit to how much fire the sphere can hold for me."

  Ellen nodded, closed her eyes, in a moment spoke.

  "He got himself out; I don't know how. He's on his way to the front gate."

  "Can you get us to him before he reaches it? There are guards at the gate."

  Ellen nodded, led her father into the north wing, out a door opening on the paved courtyard that separated the kitchen from the magister’s wing. At its south edge another door gave access to the main corridor.

  Coelus saw the door open. Through it, to his surprise and relief, came Ellen, followed by a stranger, a man of about forty with a vaguely familiar face. Coelus was the first to speak. "You are all right? They didn't do anything to you?"

  "I'm fine, but we have to get out of here; follow me." She turned back through the door.

  "You can't; that doesn't lead to the gate."

  The stranger spoke: "Just follow her; you'll see."

  Chapter 17

  Iolen looked around the lawn, turned to Rikard. "You're the mage; you tell me. How did Fieras overcome your loyalty spell? Did he somehow use the spell he was casting?"

  Rikard considered his lord's question for a moment before answering. "I am not sure he did overcome it, my Lord. I saw him do nothing related to the containment sphere in the seconds before it opened."

  "The mage who died before had made a hole in the sphere, trying to spread the Cascade across the kingdom. So did Fieras."

  "What mage who died?"

  Lord Iolen’s puzzled look vanished. "Of course. You haven't seen the report on the Cascade—I was trying to keep it to as few people as possible. Take Fieras' copy; it’s over there on the table, underneath his athame. Take your spell off it first; a stack of blank pages won’t be of much use to us.

  "We just tried to replicate Coelus’s experiment of months ago—a spell to permit one mage, with the help of four others, to drain power from all the mages he can reach. One of Coelus’s colleagues was the focus. He took control, breached the containment sphere, and was about to spread the Cascade outside the sphere when something burned him up. I had men stationed on the other side of the boundary in case it happened again."

  Rikard began to speak but changed his mind. Bowing to Iolen, he crossed the lawn to gather Fieras’s papers and returned. "I will read these. Maybe they will help me understand what happened. Who else here knows about the containment sphere and how one opens it, your Lordship?"

  "Magister Bertram is the most senior of the magisters still here,” Iolen replied. “If he does not know, he probably can tell us who does; report to me at the inn after you have spoken with him. Bring all that you can find in Magister Coelus’ office that might be of use, anything in his writing."

  An hour and a half later, Rikard, on his way up to Iolen, passed a worried Captain Geffron coming down the inn stairs. A servant brought in goblets of wine, then withdrew. "I saw the Captain coming out, my Lord," said Rikard.

  Iolen nodded. "I told him Magister Coelus had vanished, kidnapped, perhaps, by Forsting agents using a compulsion spell. I offered two of my men who know what Coelus looks like, one for the forces watching the road and one for those searching the village. I also offered your help; a truth teller should be useful in the search. If anyone asks, you are looking for a missing magister who had a spell go wrong and might be a bit off his head as a result. With luck, if Coelus starts talking, nobody will believe him. What have you learned about how Fieras got through the containment sphere?"

  Rikard had spent some time thinking about what to say. His lord was, on the whole, a fair as well as a generous master, but pushing the argument too far might be risky.

  "As far as Magister Bertram knows, the entrance gate is the only way through the sphere and only the gatekeeper, a retired magister who knows the spell, can open it. I don’t know what they would do if the gatekeeper happened to drop dead. But I learned two other things. The papers you gave me say that Maridon didn't breach the sphere until after the spell was complete, and the power of everyone inside the sphere had been gathered. And he did it by walking up to the surface of the sphere and literally ripping it open with his hands. That doesn't accord with what we saw Fieras do."

  Iolen thought a moment before answering. "Fieras had read the account, had plenty of time to make his own plans. Even if we don't know how he managed it, we did see him do it."

  Rikard hesitated a moment, then made up his mind. "We saw the hole, my Lord. We do not know if Fieras was the one who made it. I learned something else."

  Iolen waited, said nothing, his face unreadable.

  "Magister Coelus knew more about magic than anyone else in the College. He was interested in the sphere and had one of his students studying it for him. His office overlooks the magisters' lawn; when the sphere opened, he was not fifty feet from it."

  "You think he somehow opened the sphere. How and why? He was bound and gagged."

  "And got free just as Fieras was casting the spell, slipped two guards and left them with no memory of what happened or where he had gone. Perhaps he was planning to make a hole and leave through it and somehow got the placement wrong."

  Iolen shook his head. "Speak up. If I made a mistake I want you to tell me, not polite lies."

  Rikard relaxed; he was over the tricky bit. "As your Lordship commands. I think he somehow knew, or guessed, the precaution your Lordship had taken. How I do not know, any more than I know how his leman managed to get away from two mages and a guard. There's much going on here I don't understand."

  "You think Coelus opened the hole as Fieras was finishing the spell so he would be shot down by our own people?" Iolen said, evenly.

  Rikard nodded. "Yes, My Lord. I don't know how he did it, but it makes the most sense. The only other mage who could have done it is the gatekeeper. And that makes no sense at all."

  "And he sent us—me—haring off on a false trail, Fieras’s. If so, our Magister Coelus is a very clever and very dangerous man."

  "Yes, My Lord. I am afraid he is."

  Iolen closed his eyes for a minute, sat thinking. Finally he opened them again. "If you were Coelus, what would you be doing now, other than laughing at us as fools?"

  Rikard pondered. "If Magister Coelus is loyal to His Highness, he may be headed there. If in service to the Forsting or another faction, he may be playing for time until he has something to sell to them, or he may be on his way out of the kingdom along with his leman. If he is loyal to His Majesty and falsely suspects your Lordship is not … ."

  Rikard faltered. Should Lord Iolen ever be arrested for treason, it would be useful to be able truthfully to say he knew nothing. Iolen finished his sentence for him.

  "…then he is off to His Majesty. I have taken precautions to avoid any misunderstandings along those lines—His Majesty is not all that easy to get to, and I have friends at Court—but there is always some risk. The road to the capital goes past the garrison, and they will stop anyone suspicious. I only hope it isn't too late. Have you a fourth alternative?"

  Rikard nodded. "Coelus said he told His Highness he would no longer work on the Cascade. He did not say why. Perhaps he believes that you are in truth working with his Highness, and is hidi
ng from both of you.

  "We have half a dozen competent mages available, and Gyrgas may survive. There must be many things associated with Magister Coelus in his rooms. If he is still nearby, I expect we can find him."

  * * *

  Coelus looked around the room curiously—a chair, a desk and a shelf containing several codices, a clay bowl with a spoon in it, and a mug. A single bed. He turned to the stranger. "I wasn't paying attention; where are we?"

  "A room over one of the shops—we came in by the back door." He gestured to the ladder in the corner, "That goes to a trap door to the roof. If Iolen's people come looking for you, go to the roof and hide behind the low wall there. Ellen and I will dispose of the ladder."

  "Don't they know about Ellen? The Prince did. She needs to hide too."

  The other nodded: "She will. But hiding you from eyes and ears won't be enough; if Iolen decides to search for you he will have mages out as well. Ellen needs to make both of you invisible to them."

  Ellen turned to Coelus. "I am going to weave you the same protection I used, making you invisible to a mage’s perception. Unless one is familiar with it, it blocks in both directions, so you will have to depend on your eyes for a while. And you have to stand still while I do it."

  Coelus, standing still, closed his eyes, and took a last opportunity to examine the other man. Either not a mage or a very tight veil, tight enough to hold even at a range of a few feet. What else he was … .

  Ellen gestured toward the lamp on the table; it flamed alight. From it she drew a thin thread of flame. Coelus watched, rapt, as her flickering fingers wove it into a fabric, formed the fabric about his body. He closed his eyes again; for a moment his world was flame, entirely surrounding him. The flame faded, but the world beyond him remained invisible. He opened his eyes. The other man was speaking.

  "Don't forget yourself, love."

  For a moment Coelus stopped breathing as he watched Ellen, with a gesture he had seen before, pull a final thread of flame from the lamp, stroke it down her body, and sit down on the bed. The stranger closed his eyes, turned from one to the other.

  "That should be sufficient; I can barely see you, and I'm a lot closer than Iolen's mages will be." Which meant that, whatever else he was, he was a mage.

  "Since Iolen won't be looking for me, I'll fetch dinner in a little from the cook shop. Before I do, it might be prudent to put together what we know to try to figure out what Iolen is doing and what he is going to do. Why don't you start." He nodded to Coelus.

  "Before I tell you what I know,” Coelus said, deliberately, “I need to know a little more. In particular, who you are."

  The other smiled. "Very prudent; you would not want to be telling a random stranger all about the Cascade. His Highness' warning seems to have done some good."

  "You are from the Prince?"

  "No; I have been watching both you and him for my own purposes. I think Ellen should make the introductions."

  "I'm sorry; I should have. But everything was happening so fast." She stood up. "Father, this is Magister Coelus. Magister Coelus, this is my father."

  A long silence. Coelus' expression was a mixture of surprise and relief; Dur, who looked quietly amused, was the first to speak.

  "So that, at least, is one thing you do not need to worry about. As far as keeping secrets is concerned, I think I know at least as much about the Cascade as either Ellen or Iolen and his people. As I gather you already know, Ellen's mother helped create the containment sphere; one advantage of knowing how it was constructed is that it becomes possible, with practice, to see things happening inside it.

  "We may not have a lot of time. What was Iolen up to with you, and how did you get away?"

  "I don't know Iolen's purpose; he claimed to be coming from the Prince, but I doubt it. He wanted me to tell him how to do the Cascade. I refused. He had me gagged so I couldn't speak any spells, tied my feet to the chair, but left my hands free under guard by two of his men. I was to write what he wanted, and my guards were instructed to stop me if I tried to destroy anything I wrote.

  "I think he planned to run the Cascade inside the containment sphere, using whatever he had gleaned from the mages who helped last time. The mage at the focus was to cast a loyalty spell on me while the Cascade was draining my power into his. I would be unable to resist, and with that much power behind it, the spell should hold for a considerable time. I knew what he wanted. Once made loyal to him I would do it.

  "I waited long enough so the guards would think the spell had been cast, then used paper and pen to perform a spell of my own, using glyphs instead of words. I got one of the guards to take a look at it. He drew the other one over, then both of them untied me. I didn’t know when or if Iolen's mages would manage to accomplish the Cascade. I was trying to get to the outside of the sphere before they did so, when you met me."

  Dur nodded approvingly. "Very sensible, and reasonably accurate. Iolen first had one of his mages cast a loyalty spell on the focus—Ellen's friend Fieras. The plan was to have the focus start the Cascade, use the power to cast a loyalty spell on you, then dissolve the Cascade and let you tell them how to do it better next time. Just in case something went wrong and Fieras managed to get control and break through the sphere as Maridon had, Iolen had crossbow men stationed on the other side with orders to watch for a hole in the barrier to open and, if it did, shoot the mage on the other side of it. A well thought out scheme, if a little on the elaborate side. I had my own plan for stopping him, but my clever daughter came up with a better one." He turned to Ellen, waited.

  "All I did was to open a hole in the barrier, about where Maridon did, just before Fieras finished starting the Cascade. The later done, the more likely that Iolen would assume Fieras was responsible."

  "And? Did Fieras finish the Cascade and start casting spells?"

  Dur shook his head. "Not with two crossbow bolts in him he didn't. The third hit their fire mage; I don't know if he survived or not. I told you she was being clever. What we don't know is whether we fooled Iolen, or what he plans to do next. He met with several of his people at the inn not long ago, but he has strong privacy spells and I haven't yet gotten through them."

  Coelus interrupted. "Do you know what he is doing, what the point of all of this is?"

  Dur nodded, turned to his daughter. "Thanks to Mari, you know the politics better than I. During the six months that King Thoma was dying I was busy dealing with an infant fire mage; good thing your mother is a healer."

  Ellen gave him a rueful smile, spoke to Coelus. "Don't believe him; I started early, but not that early. I think he's been saving that line up for the past seventeen years, waiting for someone to tell it to."

  "Nonetheless, I paid little attention to kingdom politics back when the old king was dying; babies take up a lot of time and attention even if they aren't setting everything in sight ablaze. Tell Coelus what Mari said."

  "The old king, Thoma, never got along with his eldest son; there were rumors, but nobody seems to really know why. On his deathbed he tried to get the great lords of the realm to support his second son for the succession. His third son, Prince Kieron, supported the eldest brother; they had always been close. Near the end Kieron hid Prince Petrus from their father's people until the old king died, then helped him put down their brother and his supporters.

  "By the time it was over and Petrus was crowned, Josep, the second son, was dead. Josep's son Iolen inherited his lands and his surviving supporters. He has, of course, sworn allegiance to His Majesty but hates the Prince and does what he can to oppose him in court.

  "So Iolen claiming to be acting on behalf of Prince Kieron was surely a lie. I couldn’t get word to you safely then. He had to be here about the Cascade, meaning you’d be the first they went after; I thought our best chance was to get word to the Prince. I asked Jon to take a message to Mari for His Highness. Then I fetched Father and we slipped back into the College, skipping the front gate, to see what we could do about stopp
ing Iolen and getting you out."

  She fell silent. Dur continued. "Clearly, Iolen found out about the Cascade and decided to stake all on getting it to work under his control, then using it to eliminate his uncles and seize the throne. The question now is how he will attempt to cover his tracks. All the possibilities that occur to me involve a lot of blood, some of it yours. If all else fails, he might run for the border and hope the Forstings have some use for a royal pretender…. What's that?"

  A voice below, and a hammering on a door. Dur pointed at the ladder; Coelus caught Ellen’s eyes.

  "I'll be all right. Go."

  He fled up the ladder, Dur down the stairs. Ellen slid the ladder under the bed, then followed her father.

  The hammering at Master Dur's closed front door proved to be his neighbor, the manager of the cookshop, with four other men, three of them armed, one a mage. Dur opened the door and stood back to let them come in. His neighbor turned to one of the armed men.

  "This is Master Dur, the jeweler who lives here." He noticed the girl coming through from the back room. "Your granddaughter?"

  Dur put his arm around her, gave her a hug. "My own flesh and blood. Her mother lives a few days east of here, but she's visiting. What's the problem?"

  One of the armed men came forward. "We're looking for one of the magisters from the college, a man named Coelus; do you know him?"

  Dur nodded. "Younger than the rest? I think I've sold things to him from time to time. What do you need him for?"

  "Apparently he was trying out some spell or other and something went wrong. He's nowhere to be found and his colleagues are afraid he may be wandering around with his memory gone, or thinking he's a squirrel, or whatever happens to mages when they make a mistake. He might be with a student of his, a girl, maybe five or six years older than your granddaughter."

  Dur shook his head. "Wherever he is, he isn't inside this house. And, aside from my little sweetheart here, I haven't seen any girls around this evening. I'll keep an eye out. If I see something I think you ought to know about, where do I send word?"