Salamander

by David D. Friedman

  Coelus opened his mouth, closed it again, said nothing.

  “You have until morning to make your decision. Until then Wilham will keep your lady company. No harm will come to her tonight.”

  * * *

  Ellen waited until the mage in the other bed was asleep, judged at least by his breathing. Eyes closed, she let her mind explore the room. Iron bracelets were riveted about her wrists, the chain between them wrapped once around the oak plank that joined the bed posts. Enough slack to lie comfortably but no more … . The key to the iron lock to the bracelet around her right wrist wasn’t in the room; she had seen it leave with the Prince. The cup … .

  Outside the room two guards, two more by the inn door, a mage with them. The Prince was being careful.

  She moved her perception to the other bed; Wilham was indeed soundly asleep, his head beside the pillow. Everything in the inn was quiet save for a faint murmur of voices from the guards by the door. One step at a time. Shadows, at least, there was no shortage of. She wove them carefully about the head of the sleeping mage, that nothing she did would wake him.

  Next the chain. Too strong to break, and she could get no hold on the mechanism, shielded as it was by the iron case of the lock. The bed then; the frame was held together by glue and the tension from the rope mesh that supported the mattress. She felt her way into one of the sockets, into the linked fabric of glue and wood, unwove it.

  When she had finished with the glue joints she eased herself out of the bed, shifting her weight from the mattress and the rope mesh beneath it to one of the side boards of the frame. She wrapped both hands around one of the head posts of the bed, set her feet against the other, pushed the two apart with all her strength. For a moment nothing happened. Again. The far post moved. Another inch and she was just able to ease the end of the plank she was fastened to out of its socket.

  Once free of the bed, she slid the plank back into its socket, pulled the bed posts back together and rewove the glue; the Prince might as well have a puzzle to occupy his time. Wilham still slept. She crossed the room silently, slid her hand under his pillow, and drew out the wine cup, wrapped in a silk cloth. Clay not metal, but with at least five men awake in the inn, noise would be a problem.

  She felt a touch of cool air and looked up; the shutter was open a crack. She slipped to the window, swung it wide, unwrapped the cup, and threw it as hard as she could. It shattered on the stone flags of the inn courtyard. One of the guards at the front door of the inn said something; a moment later she heard the door opening and voices in the courtyard.

  The guards at the door heard footsteps coming up the stairs, and abruptly came to attention as their commander came into sight.

  “Any problem in the room?”

  “No sir. What’s happening?”

  “Someone in the courtyard; I sent Hermann to check it out. But just to be sure...”

  He opened the door quietly, looked in. Both beds were occupied, mage and lady prisoner sound asleep. He eased the door closed again.

  Once the guard captain had gone, Ellen went back to work. When she was done her bed sheets were gone; in their place was a long rope of tightly braided linen. She tied one end to a foot of Wilham’s bed; he should be easily heavy enough. The other end of the rope went out the window; Ellen followed it. The rope tightened with her weight, then loosened, shook itself, and came free from the foot of the bed. A few moments later Ellen was standing in the courtyard hidden in the shadow of the inn wall, the rope coiled at her feet. She pulled shadow as a cloak around her, paused to be sure nobody had seen her escape, then set off for the jeweler’s shop.

  Once safely inside she went to the large casting furnace at the back of the workroom—the small furnace had gone with its owner and contents. The lid came off easily; under it was a layer of fire bricks, under that a collection of flat wooden chests. The second of them contained jeweler’s files; she set to work with them on the iron bracelets chaining her wrists.

  * * *

  Coelus looked around the small stable, one of the inn’s outbuildings hastily converted into a cell for his benefit. The mage sitting in the other chair gestured at the empty bed. “I don’t know what His Highness wants of you and don’t want to know, but most things are easier with a night’s sleep.”

  Coelus shook his head, said nothing. If there was something he could do to escape, he could not see it. Unless Durilil came back, which seemed unlikely, or his daughter found a way out of the trap they were in. The Prince had made one mistake that Coelus could see—he had once made the same mistake himself—but he doubted that it would be enough.

  Rorik, the mage guarding him, was surely both stronger and more skilled in the application of magic than he—at least applied to situations like this. Inventing spells was a useful skill, but he was used to taking weeks to do it, not hours or minutes. No doubt there was some spell ideal for the circumstances. No doubt he would come up with it a week too late.

  Absent force or guile to use against the Prince, what about persuasion? Ellen did not, after all, know how to construct the Cascade. The Prince’s truthtellers would vouch for it if she said so. But then there would be more questions. Whether she knew what had gone wrong, first with Maridon and then with Fieras. That knowledge, forced from her, could cost her father’s secret as well as his.

  It occurred to Coelus that he had one advantage in any conflict with the Prince’s people; they could restrain him but could not risk any serious injury. No doubt His Highness had made that clear.

  Looking down, Coelus noted a tiny dust devil swirling a foot from his chair, recognized it for his own absent minded work. Fire was good for killing people; how could air be used? He gradually eased the miniature whirlwind along without looking at it, until it was spinning a few feet behind his guard’s back. The floor of the stable was dirt, dried dirt was dust. Dust … .

  It took most of five minutes to sweep enough dust into the whirlwind, now a good deal less miniature. Coelus stood up.

  “I suppose you are right; I’m for bed.” He took two steps towards the bed and the door behind it, spoke a Word, bolted for the door. He heard a crash behind him as Rorik, blinded by a faceful of dust, pitched over his bed and down.

  The door was closed but unbarred; Coelus pushed it open, stepped into the darkened courtyard, and collided with a large, solid figure. Effortlessly, the guard picked the mage up, carried him back into the stable and held him firmly until Rorik, face dripping, returned with his eyes cleared of dust.

  Coelus spent the next hour in bed pretending to sleep, feeling through memory for voices and words while Rorik, his chair pulled back into a corner, watched him. It took two hours more to assemble the pattern of voices, spells, and acts, occasionally mumbling sleepily to himself. The first few times, Rorik came over to the bed to listen, returning to his chair only as Coelus fell silent.

  Outside the door the air began to move. The faint moonlight would have shown a watcher, had there been one, a spiral of dust and straw, its top knee-high to the silent guard whose eyes were fixed on the door. The baby cyclone drifted across the yard, picking up air and force from gusts of wind blowing past the corners of the outbuildings, straw from the ground, more as it passed over a half-full manger, growing. It was a column of whirling straw nearly twelve feet high when its foot touched the guard’s lantern, caught fire.

  Rorik heard footsteps outside, a clamor of voices, then one he knew, the Prince’s, pitched as in speech but loud as a shout. “Fire. A Fire mage.”

  By the sound of it, one of the horses must have taken fright. Men were yelling. The Prince’s voice was heard again, lower, from just outside the door: “You had best come with me.”

  Rorik glanced at the figure on the bed, spoke three Words, made a twisting gesture, and went to the door. The Prince was out of sight, but the cause of the commotion was clear enough, a towering figure of flame twice a man’s height moving about the inn courtyard. He stood frozen for a moment. The sound of the Prince’s voice
from the far side of the figure sent him off around the courtyard in search of it.

  Coelus tried to throw off the blanket; nothing happened. His arm was limp against his chest, his muscles like water. He took a deep breath; his torso at least was still his, and his voice. A wriggle and twist got him to the edge of the bed, to the floor in a tangle of blankets. With luck, with the mage who cast the spell gone, the shock would be enough. He made it to hands and knees but no farther, and in a moment collapsed back onto the ground.

  Water. The words of Rorik’s spell; Coelus reached back through his memory. Water and weakness. The fourth counterspell he tried worked; this time he made it to his feet. The other mage’s cloak and hood, both of dark wool, were on the back of his chair; in a moment Coelus had them on and was out of his cell into the chaos of the courtyard, whipping more wind into the burning column of straw.

  The back door of the inn opened, a tall figure against the fire-lit room. This time it was the Prince’s real voice, lifted in a yell; Coelus filed it in his memory for future use.

  “The fire mage is out. Ward as best you can.”

  Behind the Prince a second figure. Coelus discerned Wilham’s voice, words in the true speech, moving hands.

  The burning whirlwind went out—where it had been was a column of steam that a puff of wind blew away from the inn door. Shadowed by its spreading fog, Coelus darted for the nearest passage between two outbuildings. In a moment he was in the street beyond.

  “Get rid of the cloak; they may be able to track it.”

  Coelus spun around, saw nothing, reached out, gathered Ellen into his arms.

  Chapter 21

  An hour north of town, the two mages stopped to rest their stolen horses in the shelter of a grove of trees just off the royal road. When they had dismounted, Coelus gave Ellen a long hug. “I was afraid I was going to lose you.”

  Barely visible in the thin moonlight, she shook her head. “Never. Who would you talk to?”

  “That too. But I am afraid we may be making a mistake.”

  She looked up at him curiously. “In running from the Prince?”

  “No. In running to your parents.

  “I have been listening for pursuit and thinking about what the Prince will do. Chasing us would be risky; he can’t afford to kill us and he has no way of knowing how willing you are to kill him or his people. Nor does he know what our limits are, especially after tonight. If I were the Prince I would have people following us, far enough away so that we wouldn’t spot them; he may have someone whose perception is even better than yours. Once he knows where we have taken refuge he can recapture us at his leisure with as many of his people as he thinks he needs.”

  Ellen looked unconvinced. “Can he afford to take that long?”

  “After what happened tonight, I think he will take as long as he thinks necessary. While he is looking for us he can have another team recreating the first Cascade, the way Iolen did, by trying to work out what went wrong. They don’t have to know exactly what the problem was. I didn’t. My best guess was that Maridon had tapped the sun, but I think the solution I came up with would have worked. Whoever is doing it only has to realize that there is some enormous source of fire out there to be tapped, then figure out how not to take too much of it.”

  “What should we be doing, then?” Ellen spoke softly, but he could hear the note of worry in her voice.

  “Your woven protection, the one that makes you invisible to perception. That’s part of the answer.”

  “And if His Highness’s mage spots two horses galloping side by side along the highway with nobody riding them?”

  “Is there any reason you can’t weave it around the horses too?”

  There was a long silence before she spoke. “Have I ever mentioned that sometimes I am very stupid?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so. One more thing we have in common.”

  After another hour of riding Ellen led them off the Royal Road on a track that ran east, through a patchwork of field and forest. Before dawn she found a haystack in a field with no farmhouse in sight and a convenient stream where they could water the horses. The horses tethered to a nearby oak, the two mages burrowed into the haystack. Coelus forced his eyes open to put a final question. “If someone happens to come by and sees two unguarded horses do we get to walk the rest of the way?”

  “Nobody is likely to see the horses unless he stumbles over them. I can’t put a shadow cloak on them, or on you for that matter, but I wove protections into their manes that should make them hard to notice. Go to sleep.”

  He half woke at noon, reached out, felt the reassuring solidity of Ellen beside him, fell back into a pleasant dream. It was mid afternoon when he reached out again, felt nothing, and came abruptly awake. He struggled clear of the hay, looked around. The horses were gone. A moment’s panic before he heard splashing from the direction of the creek.

  When Ellen came back, leading both horses, her hair was dripping, her tunic damp; she stood in the sun steaming while she combed out her hair. Coelus watched for a moment before turning to the horses’ gear, mostly hung up over branches the night before. The first saddle bag he checked turned out to contain courier’s rations, dried fruit, meat and twice baked bread.

  “I suppose the horses were waiting in case His Highness needed to send a message somewhere in a hurry.”

  Ellen nodded. “That was my guess when I spotted them and the groom. If nobody noticed where he was lying and woke him they may not have found out until morning. I’ve looked over horses and gear and I can’t find any spells on them other than mine."

  At nightfall the two stopped again, this time in a forest with neither farm nor haystack in sight. The horses were unsaddled and tethered a little way off the road, rubbed down with cloths from the saddlebags. When they were done, Ellen reached into her saddlebag and pulled out a heavy roll of fabric. “Last time I came this way I put up in farm houses, but I don’t want to risk word getting back to His Highness. So while you were sleeping like a log this afternoon, I was working.”

  She shook it out, a yellow cloth thick as a quilt; he examined it curiously. “Straw?”

  She nodded. “It won’t be missed, but I’ll do something for the farmer in payment next time I come by.”

  They made their bed under a tall pine from a pile of needles it had dropped that spring, with half the width of the cloth under them, the other half over. It was deep night when Coelus woke with Ellen sleeping quietly in his arms, her head against his chest. He lay watching the stars, listening to the soft sound of her breathing, before he fell back to sleep himself.

  The next morning, several miles farther along, Ellen was roused from her thoughts by Coelus' voice: "You're going the wrong way."

  She brought the horse to a stop at the left hand side of the fork. He had taken the right, and was now sitting atop his horse impatiently waiting for her to join him.

  "How do you know which is the right way? You've never been here before," she said.

  His expression shifted from impatient to puzzled. "I don't know; this just feels right."

  She nodded, thought a moment. "Close your eyes and think through your favorite song, words and music; just let your horse follow mine."

  "I don't have a favorite song; I can't sing. Will reciting the beginning of the First Treatise do?"

  "Admirably."

  In a few minutes she told him to open his eyes; he looked around curiously. "What was that about?"

  "Why you need me to find Mother; she has the house warded against mages. It doesn't affect anyone else, but there are two or three forks where a mage will go the wrong way. I'm so used to ignoring them that I forgot you weren't."

  It was late morning when Ellen finally turned her horse off the track; the path she followed led past an ancient oak and into a farmyard. The farmer waved. Ellen slid off her horse, walked it over to him; Coelus, after a moment’s hesitation, did the same.

  “Back for the summer art thou, Miss E
llen?”

  “Indeed, and a friend come with me to visit. Dan, this be my friend Coelus; Coelus, old Dan, who taught me to ride back when I needed a long ladder to reach the horse’s back.”

  The farmer looked Coelus over carefully, finally nodded to him, turned back to Ellen.

  “Expect thy ma'll be pleased then.”

  Ellen nodded.

  “Expect she will. Canst board our horses? 'Twill be for longer than t'winter past.”

  “In the back pasture, with thy old pa’s pack mule. I’ll rub them down for thee; thy ma will be hot to see thee I make no doubt.”

  “Father is home?” Ellen was unsaddling her horse as she spoke.

  “Four days back, thou'lt not call me a liar if 'twas five. Doubt not he’ll be glad t' see thee as well.”

  When both mounts had been stripped of saddle, saddle cloth, bridle and saddle bags she let the farmer lead them off, hoisted her saddle bags onto her shoulders, set off back to the road, Coelus following with his saddle bags.

  Another half hour brought them into the main and only street of a small village. Ellen led Coelus to one of the larger houses, surrounded by a less than orderly planting. Much of it was blue flax mostly blown, but some of the other colors were still bright. She stopped at the door, hesitating a moment. From inside came a cheerful voice.

  “Come in love, and your friend too.”

  They went in. The speaker was a small woman sitting by a loom, a length of cloth half woven on it. Her hair was grey, face wrinkled. She rose, stepping around her loom, dodged a chair and a small table, and caught up her daughter in a hug. Kissing both cheeks, she let go of her to turn to her companion.

  “And this is the young man you have told me about? You are most welcome, learned sir, and more welcome if I can persuade you to explain a few things I could not get clear from my daughter’s account.”

  Coelus eyed her uncertainly. “I will be happy to do what I can. What sorts of things?”

  “Basis stars, mostly. Why we think there are only a fixed number and what you base your guess on about what that number is. Also concerning the elementals, or more precisely the pure forms, whether the elementals and the naturals and the rest can all exist at once, or if making one set declare themselves reduces the others to mere potentials. If the Salamander and the sylph are real, does that mean that the web and the warmth are not? Also …”