by Ian Irvine
The following morning Shand had heard her desperate cries, released her and later, for reasons known only to himself, paid the indenture price to Gybb and allowed Aviel to use the abandoned workshop in his back garden to make and blend the perfumes that were her life’s passion. No one could have given her a greater gift; his generosity still brought tears to her eyes.
“You took advantage of my good nature,” he raged. “You abused my hospitality. You stole my grimoire!”
Guilt scorched her; she had betrayed his trust and now she was going to pay. She edged away, trying to keep the table between himself and her.
“I didn’t steal it,” she said, and knew how feeble she sounded. “I just—”
“Where is it?” he hissed.
“Here.” She fumbled in the bag she carried everywhere with her, pulled out the heavy square package in its canvas covering tied with green cord, and laid it on the table.
“It had better be undamaged. Unwrap it!”
Her normally nimble fingers fumbled with the wrappings. He pushed her aside and tore them open to expose a heavy book eleven inches square with covers of polished pink rosewood inlaid with camphor laurel, sandalwood, incense cedar and other scented timbers. The original owner’s name, Radizer, was embossed in red gold on the front cover. Below it in black silver was the title, Scent Potions.
“You took it without permission,” Shand said through his teeth. “You removed it from my house and you’ve carried it with you ever since. How is that not stealing?”
“M-Malien’s second letter c-came, s-saying that the summon stone had to be destroyed urgently, and you were a h-hundred miles away—”
“You’re a fifteen-year-old girl! It wasn’t up to you to do anything except send the letter on.”
“I’m sixteen,” she whispered.
“Since when?”
“Y-yesterday.” No one had known; this important day had gone uncelebrated.
“It makes no bloody difference. You knew Radizer died making one of the scent potions. It splattered him across the walls and ceiling of his workshop in smoking chunks and oozing gobbets.” Shand’s eyes bored into her. “And he had twenty years’ experience; he was a master. You’re not even an apprentice, but you took my grimoire and recklessly used it—”
“I … I meant well.”
“Are you saying that it’s all right to commit a crime,” he hissed, “as long as it’s with good intentions?”
She hung her head. “I … don’t … know.”
All along she had been terrified that this would happen. He would cast her out, and she could not blame him. But in a world at war, how could a little cripple with no money and no skills except scent-making survive?
“You owe me and you have to pay,” said Shand.
Aviel’s heart gave a convulsive thud. “I don’t have any money.”
“You don’t have anything,” he said nastily, “except what I’ve given you.”
Why was he so changed, so mean? She knew that the drumming—the corrupting emanations from the summon stone—had badly affected Shand, turning him cold and angry and allowing the old magiz on Cinnabar to get to him. But the magiz was dead and the drumming had not been heard since Aviel poisoned the stone.
She hung her head. Whatever he was going to demand of her, she had no way of paying it. Avoiding his blazing eyes, she rewrapped the grimoire. Her hands were shaking so badly she could not tie the knots in the green cord.
“Yet despite the theft,” said Shand, his eyes still piercing her, “and your criminally reckless stupidity in using the grimoire to make a scent potion to locate the summon stone, despite choosing a dark and deadly Great Potion, the Eureka Graveolence … somehow you succeeded in making the potion, finding the summon stone and, most astonishing of all, poisoning it with quicksilver at the moment it was linked to the newly opened Crimson Gate.”
Aviel could think of nothing to say. She made another fumbling attempt at the knot.
“Leave it!” Shand snapped.
She choked. He was going to cast her out.
Shand sighed. “You did well, girl,” he said gently. “Better than all of us put together, despite us being old and experienced and, in our own ways, a thousand times more powerful.”
“I don’t understand,” she whispered.
“I, who have always done my very best for my country and my world, am now despised as a traitor.” Shand’s voice shook. He sat at the table and dropped his head into his hands. “And I am a traitor! I was used.”
“How?”
“The magiz got to me when I was weak and vulnerable, and embedded a secret link in me, and via that link I unwittingly betrayed our plans to her.” He snapped his teeth. “How could I have allowed it to happen? How did I not realise? The shame is unbearable! Had it not been for you and Wilm, and Karan and Llian and Sulien, Santhenar would have fallen by now.”
“But,” she said quietly, “what do you want from me?”
“If I’m caught I’ll be taken, tried and imprisoned, then hanged like that sad villain Pender.”
Aviel could never forget his bloated body hanging from one of the spars of the flagship. “They wouldn’t!” she whispered. “Not you.”
“In wartime there can be no tolerance for traitors. But I can’t be caught! I’ve got to make amends and help to stop the Merdrun,” he said passionately. “And, though it matters not to anyone else, I have to restore my good name.”
She understood those needs, but why he was telling her?
“I must be free, but the only way I can stay free is with an exhausting spell of invisibility.”
“Where did you get it?”
“Long ago my former consort, Yalkara, gifted me with some aspects of her own Secret Art, unknown even to her own people. She warned me of the dangers of using them, and the cost—”
“What cost?”
“Never you mind. But I only dare use the spell for a few hours a day; the rest of the time I have to hide. That’s why I need you.”
“What for?” Aviel said warily.
Shand took off his pack and withdrew the device called Identity—a brass tube the length of her forearm with paired red crystals in one end. Gurgito Unick, a drunken brute but a genius at making enchanted devices, had invented it.
“Where did you get that?” said Aviel.
“Carcharon. And I understand that you have another of Unick’s devices—the one Wilm hid from me,” Shand’s eyes flashed and his jaw tightened, “and Unick took back.”
“Not all of it,” she said. “I don’t suppose it’s any use without the quicksilver.” She gave the device to him. “Is that all you wanted me for?” she said hopefully.
He laughed mirthlessly. “It’s only the smallest part.”
“What’s the rest?”
“I need the resources to make a very dark scent potion.”
She let out a squawk. “W-what for?”
He hesitated as if unwilling to speak it out aloud, then said, “The summon stone is an evil artefact, created by the Merdrun aeons ago with mancery we cannot understand. Tallia and Malien are making plans to destroy it—plans that will soon involve you.”
“Me?” she croaked. “What use am I? And how do you know?”
Shand smiled thinly. “They will fail. I also believe Malien is wrong to say mancery must never be used on the summon stone. The only way it can be destroyed is with mancery.”
Aviel shivered. “But she’s old and wise.”
“And she suffers from flaws that characterise most of the Aachim. It takes them for ever to come to a decision, and sometimes their courage fails at the sticking point. That’s how the Hundred, led by Rulke, took their world from them.”
“What if you’re wrong?”
“The Merdrun are already here,” he said harshly. “How can I make things worse?”
“What does the scent potion do?”
Again he hesitated. Was he telling the truth or making things up?
“If it
works I’ll be able to recover brilliant spells, long lost, and make them even more powerful.”
But what will you do with them? “Why does that require a dark scent potion?”
“To do so, I’ll have to go to forbidden places. Terrible places.”
“I don’t want anything to do with dark potions,” said Aviel quietly.
His eyes flashed. “Why the hell not?”
“I’ve already done too many bad things. To make the Eureka Graveolence, I had to rob a grave of someone’s skull bone. I’m on a slippery slope, Shand.”
“What a load of rot,” said Shand. “You’re one of the most moral people I know.”
“But … I’m attracted to the dark side, more and more, and if I have to—”
“Too bad! You owe me, and I need to use your workshop and equipment.”
“I don’t have either.”
“You will. I need to make the Afflatus Effluvium.”
Her knees gave; she clutched desperately at the table for support. “But that’s one of the forbidden scent potions.”
According to Radizer’s book, the Forbidden Scent Potions had been copied from a proscribed grimoire written more than 1500 years ago, but no one had ever successfully made any of them; they were considered to be impossible.
“What if I refuse?” she said, her voice going squeaky.
Shand bared his crooked teeth. “You won’t!” He vanished and the door opened and closed.
Was that a threat? But there was nothing she could do about it, short of betraying him, because her debt to him was too great. Yet if she did not, she would be betraying her world and herself.
19
SHE LOOKS QUITE USELESS TO ME
As Aviel emerged, still trembling, Lilis caught her arm. “Where have you been? We’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
Aviel started. “W-why?”
She felt sure Lilis could read her face. Lilis would have to tell Tallia and Malien about Shand, and then Aviel would be condemned … and hanged.
“Are you all right?” said Lilis. “You’re trembling all over.”
“Yes,” Aviel croaked. “Is something the matter?”
“Tallia wants you at her council of war.”
Aviel clutched her chest. “Why would she want me?”
Lilis shrugged. “I wasn’t told.”
“Why not?”
“The more people know our secrets, the more likely they’ll be revealed.”
Aviel felt her cheeks growing hot.
“You’ve gone all red,” said Lilis gaily. “If I didn’t know you better I’d think you had a guilty secret.”
Aviel was almost throwing up with terror. If Lilis could read her so easily, how could she pass muster with Tallia, Malien and Nadiril? The moment she entered the room they would know she was up to something bad.
Lilis led her down the hall to a chamber guarded by a huge fierce-looking man with grey hair and very dark skin.
“Osseion,” said Lilis, “this is Aviel. Aviel, Osseion is Ussarine’s father, and in the olden days he was personal bodyguard to the great Magister, Mendark.”
Aviel dared not look him in the eye. He would read her like a scrap of parchment.
Osseion reached down and shook her hand. His hand was gigantic, greatly scarred and callused, and missing the middle finger. “Thank you,” he rumbled.
“What for?” Aviel said dazedly.
“For all you’ve done. You’re braver than any of us.”
Without thinking, she said, “I have Mendark’s black sword.”
“Do you really?” said Osseion, astonished. Then he smiled. “Do you use it much?”
Aviel found herself laughing, and liking him. “No, I’m minding it for my friend Wilm.” She felt a spasm of fear for him, but buried it. “It’s his now.”
“I hope you find him again,” he said and opened the door.
Lilis said, “Good luck!”
What did she mean by that? Did Aviel need good luck here? If she did, she was in trouble. Where she came from, being a twist-foot, a silver-hair or a seventh sister were each considered bad luck, and the combination made her one of the unluckiest people of all. She had been plagued by ill luck most of her life.
“Don’t stand there gaping like an imbecile,” snapped a little old man at the end of the table.
He was dressed in extravagant mancer’s robes, the cream linen gorgeously embroidered in gold, deep blue and emerald thread, though they only highlighted his own meagreness. He was stooped and scrawny, with a bulbous nose, a pale face and bald head, both covered in brown moles and age spots, and a mean little mouth flecked with papery shreds of dry skin. Oddly, and undermining his expensive robes, the long stringy hair on the back of his head was tied in a queue with a scarlet ribbon.
“We’re busy people. Sit!” He pointed to the chair on his right with a knobbly yellow-stained forefinger.
Aviel crept across and slipped into the chair, trying to look invisible. Tallia, her head bent over a pile of papers, sat at the far end. Malien, to her left, was writing on a long yellow scroll curled at the top and bottom. To Tallia’s right, Nadiril was slurping at a cup of tea the size of a small saucepan. Next to him sat a stout middle-aged man with short white hair and a round sunburned face marked with small red veins. It was the beribboned officer Aviel had seen talking to Tallia earlier. His fingers were covered in black ink smudges and he was studying a tattered map a yard square.
“Ah, Aviel,” said Tallia after a long interval. She gestured to the stout man. “This is General Dedulus Janck, our commander-in-chief. He wanted to meet you.”
Janck looked up from his map and inspected her thoughtfully. His white eyebrows twitched and he bent over the map again.
“And this is Grand Master Torsion Tule.” Tallia indicated the angry old man beside Aviel. “Your new master.”
Aviel let out a squeak of alarm.
“Assuming she passes muster,” Tule said coldly. He swallowed noisily, leaned close and studied her as if she were a blowfly on his dinner. His flaky lips curled and the stained forefinger rose, pointing at her face, her throat, her chest. His arm had a tremor; no, his whole body was quivering, more on the right than the left. He swallowed again, with some difficulty. “Which seems very dubious. How old is the runt? Twelve?”
“I’m sixteen,” she whispered. He couldn’t be her master, he just couldn’t.
“Little liar!” With a series of twitches and tremors, Tule turned to face Tallia. “She won’t do at all. She looks quite useless to me.”
“Aviel has a rare gift,” said Tallia coldly. “She made the Eureka Graveolence on the first attempt, and used it successfully. Without it—”
“Scent potions!” sneered Tule. “A bastard art practised by frauds and incompetents. Not part of the true Secret Art. I won’t take her on. I won’t take any girl on—they don’t have the aptitude for it.”
“You will! Aviel has to learn the art as quickly as possible, and you’re the only master who can teach her.”
Aviel looked from Tule to Tallia, back to Tule. What was he supposed to teach her?
“Find me a lad with breeding,” said Tule, “one who’s completed a five-year apprenticeship with distinction, and I’ll consider it.” He rose unsteadily and turned towards the door.
“What’s breeding got to do with learning the art?” Janck said in a steely voice.
“Everything! She’s a little bastard, I hear—a cuckoo in the family nest—and I won’t take on a moral degenerate. Can’t trust them; can’t rely on them.”
“Since when do we blame a child for the faults of the parent?”
“Only for the past five thousand years,” sneered Tule and wavered off.
Janck bounced to his feet. “Sit!” he said softly.
“Damned if I will.”
Janck’s voice hardened. “I’m your commanding officer, Grand Master.”
“I’m not in your miserable little army, fatso.”
Nadiril
looked up from his papers. “When a State of War has been declared our commander-in-chief commands every man, woman and child in the land. Disobey his order, Grand Master Tule, and you can be charged with mutiny.”
“Which is a hanging offence,” said Tallia. “Sit down, Tule.”
Tule lurched back to his chair, rotated to face Aviel and gave her such a look of contempt that she quailed. He hated her and she had no idea why, but she knew she did not want him for her master.
“You will take on Aviel Foyl as your apprentice,” said Janck in a voice like chilled steel. “You will teach her all you know about the project. Is that clear?”
Tule’s response was indecipherable.
“An alchemical workshop has been set up, but other things may be needed.” Janck scribbled on a piece of paper and held it out. “Your warrant to draw on the necessary resources.”
Tule rose, snatched the paper and wavered his way across the room. “Get the door, twist-foot!” he said through his teeth, which were as yellow and crooked as his forefinger.
“Aviel stays,” said Janck. “We have matters to discuss.”
“Such discussions are always held with the master.”
“Private matters. Off you trot, Grand Master.”
Tule gave Aviel another look of utter loathing and went.
Aviel shrank down in her chair while Nadiril, Malien, Tallia and Janck discussed something in low voices. What else did they want? She knotted her fingers in her lap. Were they going to interrogate her about Shand?
And why had they made Tule her master when he held the art of scent potion making in such contempt? How could she work with him? He was the most unpleasant man she had ever met.
“Ah, Aviel,” said Tallia, looking up. “We have a job for you. The summon stone has gone from Carcharon and we don’t know where.”
“I suppose you want me to make the Eureka Graveolence again,” she said dully, wondering why she now needed a master for it.
Malien shook her head. “That scent potion can only be used to find things that are lost or hidden, and the summon stone isn’t either. It has simply moved.”