Burell lowered her legs over the side of the lounge with great deliberateness, as if she had to concentrate to make them respond. Pushing herself up with the arms of the lounge, she managed to stand. Elric joined her. Suddenly they stood beneath a single globe of light in a small, dark room. Burell’s cranberry gown had become a plain black robe. Her coiffed hair had vanished to reveal a bare head. Her shoulders were hunched, her body held at an angle, as if it had lost its symmetry. Her face also carried a hint of asymmetry, as if all the pieces didn’t quite fit together. Elric wondered again what illness had struck her.
Burell reached into the darkness and found her staff. She planted it firmly on the floor to support her weight. Elric offered his arm for further support. She took it, leaning heavily on him, and they walked out into the dusk.
The chrysalis-stage apprentices were gathering for the Becoming. Galen stood beside the circle of grass mats, awaiting the arrival of Kell, who would conjure a fire in their brazier. Elric had told Galen that he must act as host for this event. Once Kell had conjured the fire, he would join the other mages around their own circle for the Being, and the chrysalis-stage apprentices would be left to carry on by themselves. The muscles in Galen’s legs were still burning from his marathon run through the tents. He looked around anxiously. The mist was thin, the night illuminated by globes of light. Several of the apprentices had not yet arrived and they were due to start within a few minutes. He saw Fa crouching in the shadows by the side of the tents. Galen went over to her. Her fists were jammed under her chin. She looked as if she’d been there for some time.
“You have to go back to town. This is a private time for the mages. You can’t be here.”
She did not look up at him. “You will be—initiated?”
“This is the start of it. Go home now. Go on.” He shooed her away, and she ran back toward Lok. Galen was about to return to the fire circle when he saw Elizar and Isabelle standing farther around the curve of the tents. They were on the wide strip of land between the tents and the cliff that overlooked the sea. Elric and Galen had set it up as a scenic walk illuminated by globes of light, though it was empty now save for Isabelle and Elizar. Against the blackness of the land’s end, their figures seemed almost to glow.
Isabelle had her back to him, as if she were heading toward the ships and Burell. It seemed as if she had never reached her destination. Elizar was leaning toward her. He gestured in a sharp chopping motion.
Galen approached them. This afternoon, Isabelle had said Elizar was following her. Was Elizar trying to gain her support as well? Or was his interest related to the training session today? Galen was suddenly overcome with the fear that Elizar was attracted to Isabelle.
“A shield cannot carry that kind of power.” Elizar’s hand again chopped down through the air, his tone argumentative. “Not any shield that we know.” He was so intent on Isabelle that he didn’t notice Galen until Galen came up beside them.
Isabelle’s face was flushed and her eyes wide. Her hands were clenched together in front of her. “I don’t know what else to say. I’m not keeping any great secret from you. My shield has no greater power than others.”
Elizar flung his arms wide, pacing out a small circle. “Then my weapons should have been successful. Projectiles of that size and energy should have been able to break through.”
Galen’s heart jumped to a more rapid beat. They were both agitated. Galen felt he should say something to calm them, but he didn’t know what to say. A sickening sense of dread came over him, a feeling from the past.
Isabelle glanced at Galen. “My weave is very tight. Perhaps that’s the difference. With most shields a tiny projectile can slip through.”
“That’s it,” Galen said. “I was watching on my sensor-pad”—he took it from his pocket—“and the energies were woven so tightly together the spikes couldn’t find a way through. It wasn’t the power of the shield that stopped you. It was the integrity. Your strategy would have worked well on most shields, but with Isabelle’s, the best attack would be one with all the energy concentrated at a single point. If that energy is greater than the energy of the shield it will have to fail.”
Elizar straightened, his hands falling to his sides. “You haven’t found a secret for a more powerful shield, then.”
“No,” Isabelle said. “I wish I had.”
Elizar’s voice was soft. “I wish you had too.”
Galen released a breath, relieved that the argument seemed to be over. “We should go to the fire circle.”
Elizar’s gaze fell on the sensor-pad in Galen’s hand. “You took some readings when Galen was training, didn’t you?” he said to Isabelle.
“A few,” she said. “I haven’t had time to look at them yet.”
She was lying, Galen knew. Why? There was no way the readings could be used to derive the spell that had generated them. The spell hadn’t even fully formed. Yet the readings must be so alarming that Isabelle felt they should not be shared.
But would the lie work? Although Elizar wasn’t supposed to use his chrysalis without Kell present, perhaps, if he was upset enough, he would. A skilled mage could detect lies through his sensors, monitoring heartbeat, respiration, blood flow to the skin, pupil size, voice stress. Some mages could regulate these functions, and so mask their lies. Galen had failed at this thus far; he didn’t know the extent of Isabelle’s skills. Yet for Elizar even to be monitoring her—for one mage to suspect another of lying—would show how far the conversation had deteriorated. And he didn’t understand why.
Elizar’s hand curled inward; his thumb began its circular course around his fingertips. “You and Burell are quite the pair. You claim to have the ability to understand the tech through scientific inquiry, yet what have you found? By the time you discover anything useful, it will be too late.”
Elizar knew of a threat—a threat not only to us, but to everyone, he had said—and he was desperate to find some weapon to fight it. But his urgency did not make sense.
He acted as if the threat were here, now. Yet if that were so, the other mages would have to know about it. Galen found himself breathing hard, his system racing. The chrysalis echoed his anxiety.
Elizar’s angular face turned toward Galen. “What spell did you conjure this morning in the training hall?”
Galen wanted to help his friend, but he couldn’t. The spell was too destructive. It could never be used. Galen shook his head. “I... I don’t really know.”
“That’s impossible, Galen!” Elizar yelled. “You always know. I told you this very morning of secrets being kept from us. Now you are keeping one of those secrets. Why would you do that? Why are you both keeping secrets from me?” Elizar looked from Galen to Isabelle, his chest heaving, mouth open, caught between fear and anger.
A surge of adrenaline shot through Galen. His heart pounded, and the pounding echoed back to him from the chrysalis with anticipation and readiness.
“Let me see the readings,” Elizar said, extending his hand. “Perhaps I can find the time to look at them.”
Galen took a step back.
“What’s this?” Elizar’s voice broke.
“It’s too dangerous,” Galen said.
Elizar gave a truncated laugh, throwing up his arms with a flourish. “Too dangerous. You have no idea what’s going on. Most of them don’t. They do their petty stage-magician tricks and pat themselves on the back. They have no idea what our true potential is.” He leaned over Galen, enunciating his words with frightening intensity. “We have greater powers, Galen, than we know. If we are to survive what comes, if we are to make a difference, if we are to restore the glory of the techno-mages, we must know the full extent of that power. We must learn the secrets of the tech. If we don’t find out...”
Elizar’s hand clenched into a fist. “When I discovered the Circle—and Kell—withholding such information... I felt as if I had lost my parents. And now you. I’ve no one to trust here. No one at all.” He strode away, stopped
, turned back to face them, a pale figure against the darkness. “You want power for yourselves, is that it?”
“No,” Galen said.
Elizar’s eyes narrowed. “Of course not, how could you. You haven’t the ambition, or the imagination. You are a technician,” he spat at Galen. “You,” he said to Isabelle, “a frustrated scientist. You bury your noses in study and play at being wizards. You keep your secrets. You do what the Circle tells you. You crawl when you could fly. But you know what happens to those who crawl? They are crushed.”
Elizar cupped his hands around his mouth. A sustained syllable emerged from deep in his throat.
“No,” Isabelle said.
Galen felt his chrysalis echoing the spell before he even realized he’d intended to cast it. His action had been instinctive, immediate. He had to stop the attack, to protect himself and Isabelle, and to do so his mind had jumped to the equation he’d conjured today, the first spell in the progression. The chrysalis, in an adrenaline-heightened state, responded instantly.
Energy suffocated him with its crushing pressure and then shot outward. Galen stumbled, jerking his head up toward Elizar, immediately realizing his great mistake. A spherical area surrounding Elizar began to redden and darken.
Galen could cast a quenching spell, but it would not begin to dissolve the sphere until it had folly formed. That would be too late. But if he could not dissolve the spell, perhaps he could alter it. Galen desperately visualized adding the second term to the equation.
Time turned sluggish, distorted and Galen’s arm was suddenly long enough for the hand holding the sensor-pad to hit the ground. Within the reddening sphere, Elizar’s body deformed as if Galen saw him through a distorting lens. His head and hands stretched tall, his fingers rippling. Then something emerged from Elizar’s cupped hands. It was not a spike at all but an image, a malformed image that expanded to float and undulate in the air: Elric’s circle of moss-covered standing stones, crumbling to dust.
The chrysalis echoed Galen’s new command, but the echo was distorted, a smeared superposition of the one-term and two-term equations. A ringing dissonance racked the air, and the sphere surrounding Elizar rippled. Elizar took his hands from his mouth, revealing an opening that had once been a mouth but could be called one no longer, the dark cavity twisting and stretching and curving back on itself in some abstract pattern that no longer looked Human.
The vibration built until Galen thought space itself would be ripped apart, and all of them with it. Then the right side of the sphere bloomed open like a dark flower. And with a great crack the orifice exploded in a stream of fire.
Time and space snapped back to normality, and Galen found himself flying back through the air. As he hit the mak and tumbled backward he saw Elizar screaming, covered in flame.
— chapter 5 —
Galen ran toward Elizar and Elric. To his left, Isabelle sat in darkness near the cliff, where she had been thrown, her legs splayed out in front of her. To his right, fire roared through the tents.
Within seconds of the explosion, Elric had arrived on a flying platform. He knelt over Elizar. Galen stopped behind him. The smell of charred meat passed on the air. Without turning, Elric reached back, grabbed Galen’s arm, and pulled him to his knees beside Elizar. Galen was shocked to see that Elizar only looked stunned. His eyes were fixed on some point in the sky, and his mouth released short, rapid breaths.
“Have I taught you nothing?” Elric whispered.
Elric’s head was bowed and Galen followed his gaze down to Elizar’s left arm, which lay before them. It was black. At first he didn’t understand what he was looking at. Then he realized that the jacket sleeve had been burned away. What remained of Elizar’s arm was thin, almost skeletal, with a leathery, black surface. Elizar’s hand was a petrified claw. It gleamed in the firelight with an unnatural shininess.
Here was the source of the charred-meat smell.
Others swooped down around them. Ing-Radi immediately came to Elizar’s side. With only a glance of her slit pupils at Galen, she extended her four orange hands toward Elizar.
“No,” Elric whispered. “Galen must do it.”
Elric’s face, for the first time in Galen’s experience, had lost its sternness. Even when Elric was in a good mood, his face always carried a tension to it, a sense of discipline, as if he were always examining, evaluating. Yet now it was completely relaxed—no lines between the eyebrows, no stern compression of lips. It was as if he had lost control of it, as if he was so far away from Galen, and from this moment, that he had left his body behind.
Galen realized he had destroyed any chance he had of becoming a techno-mage, that he had gone against everything the mages stood for. He couldn’t even fulfill this one last task Elric had set him. “I can’t,” Galen said.
That brought the sternness back to Elric’s face. “You will.” Elric laid his hands on Elizar’s arm, sending a fleet of microscopic organelles from his body into Elizar’s. From his pocket, he brought a crystal hanging from a silver chain. He laid it in Galen’s hand. Then Elric stood and took his place behind Galen, taking hold of the chrysalis.
Elizar’s good arm rose a few inches, flopped back down. “I can”—each syllable came out with a panting exhalation—“do it myself.” His face had gone white.
Elizar was in no shape to heal himself. Galen had no choice but to try. He closed his eyes and visualized the equation to access the crystal and the organelles with which it communicated. The crystal requested Elric’s key, the secret symbol that would allow Galen control. Elric used the same key on all the probes and devices to which he wanted Galen to have access. Galen visualized it, and the crystal’s systems became available to him.
He held the crystal by the end of its chain over Elizar’s arm. The organelles had very weak transmitters, and so could not transmit information from one body to another without some mechanism to boost their signal. The crystal had been designed and built by the mages to serve that purpose.
In his mind’s eye he received images and data from the organelles, as they moved through the injured area. The skin had been completely burned away. Great masses of dead fat and muscle tissue dominated the layers near the surface, looking very much like cooked meat. In some places the fat had protected the muscle beneath; in others, such as the hand, the burn had penetrated deep into muscle. Nerves were dead or overloaded with conflicting signals. Capillaries were broken, clogged, melted.
Farther below, healthy cells did survive. New tissue could grow. With traditional medical treatment, over time, Elizar would heal, though he would never regain full use of his limb.
From Galen’s early years of study, before he’d realized he had no aptitude for healing, he had an idea of what needed to be done. First, nerve impulses to the burn area had to be blocked. Then healthy skin cells at the edge of the burn needed to be stimulated to grow skin over the arm. This would keep moisture in and microorganisms out. At the same time, blood vessels at the edge of the burn would need to send out capillaries to provide blood flow to the new skin. All dead tissue had to be liquefied and drained from beneath this new skin, and then within that underlying space the necessary muscles, nerves, arteries, veins, and tissue must grow. Finally, the nerve block had to be removed.
The problem was that healing didn’t work this way. There was no spell to block nerve signals, or to stimulate the growth of skin over an area. In all the reading Galen had done, in all the discussions he’d had with Elric, Ing-Radi, and others, he’d never found a concrete link between the healing tasks that needed to be done and the spells that were cast. And so he’d been unable to successfully translate any healing spells into his language of equations. Healing spells were the most complex of any used by mages. In Ing-Radi’s case they were songs she hummed with barely any variation in volume or pitch. Her explanation for how they worked was equally obscure. You must understand the damage. You must find the shape of what needs to be done. And you must become that shape. In her case, th
e shape was the shape of sound.
Galen could accomplish the first step, understanding the damage. But he didn’t know how the necessary healing actions could comprise a “shape,” or how he could become that “shape.”
In the past, when he had tried his uncertain translations of healing spells, none had any significant effect. If this was to be his last act as an apprentice mage, he would try his best to do what was required to at least in some small way undo the horrible wrong he had done.
He took a deep breath and cleared his mind. He visualized Elizar’s arm, the damage the organelles had shown him within it. He visualized the healing that needed to occur—the nerves, the skin, the capillaries. He searched for a shape to the healing, a sound, a word, an equation. He imagined the microscopic organelles moving about. Like the chrysalis, like the implanted tech, they were organic technology, a hybrid of the biological and the electronic. He visualized them providing chemicals to block neuronal signals, stimulating particular cells to divide, gathering and liquefying dead cells. He felt no echo within the chrysalis, no sense of an order being received and carried out.
He was simply breaking the healing down into tasks again, rather than viewing it in some holistic way as a shape. He tried again, blanking his mind, praying for some insight, some way to help. He had lost his parents to fire, had determined to become a healer to undo such damage. Instead he had become the source of fire.
He could find no “shape” to the healing. Perhaps that was the most important lesson of his apprenticeship. He had wanted to be a healer, and he had failed. He had injured his friend, and now he could not help him.
Before him on the mak, Elizar’s arm lay black and shiny. His chest continued to flutter in rapid shallow pants. His gaze was fixed on Galen.
“I’m sorry,” Galen said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I hurt you. I’m sorry I can’t fix it. I don’t know how.”
Galen felt Elric release the chrysalis, turned to see him walking away.
Casting Shadows (The Passing of the Techno-Mages #1) Page 10