The Godlost Land

by Curtis, Greg

  He wouldn't however, tell her about what pained him most. The questions of what had happened to his family that day. He couldn't. It was almost certain that they were dead, because there was no way that they could have survived given where they had lived. They had likely died in the first hour of the attack. And yet because he hadn't actually seen their bodies he was left with doubt. Just a sliver. And that sliver somehow became the faintest of hopes. Hope that was like a dagger in his chest being twisted.

  Harl gulped at the ale Soria brought him as he told them his tale.

  “Nyma said that you were there on the wall when it fell?”

  It was a simple question but not the one she really wanted answered. Harl knew that. What she was really asking about was Rickarial. About their one great hope. The unofficial head of the Circle. The one who had led them all with such great pride. And the way he had met his end. Grimly Harl told her of what he had seen.

  “I was there with Rickarial. On the wall. I saw him fall. It was terrible.”

  “So I was told.” The wizard looked away for a moment, her voice soft and sad. “He died well?”

  And that was what mattered he realised. It was maybe the only thing that mattered any longer. To her, to him and to any of the wizards of Lion's Crest. That one of the Circle had stood up and fought instead of running. That one of her friends had stood against the rest.

  “Very well. He was glorious. He stood on that wall sending all the fire and lightning into that fray that he could, and the city fairly shone with his might. We – maybe a hundred and fifty soldiers and I – stood beside him with our swords before us and guarded him with our lives. We knew he was the only chance Lion's Crest had. And for a time we even hoped that we would win through. Because we had Rickarial with us and we saw in him a chance.

  But then an arrow streaked through from nowhere, crossing the city in the blink of an eye and pierced his heart.”

  “There was nothing we could do. It was too fast, too sudden, and there was no warning. He died instantly. And when he died he didn't burn; he exploded. A blast so powerful that it tore down part of the city wall and sent those of us still standing flying.”

  “If only there had been some warning.”

  “There is always warning boy. It's just that we don't always know it.”

  The sadness in her voice grew, and he guessed in the lines of her face. It was hard to tell in the dim light. But she wasn't talking about the arrow. Harl knew that. She was talking about the attack. And the deal that had been made. And maybe, he hoped, as he let the silence drag he might finally learn from her what had happened. How this disaster had unfolded. How twelve of the most learned of wizards could do something both so terrible and so stupid. And who among his friends were guilty. It was a while before she spoke.

  “Terellion was always proud. Too proud. And he always said that the Circle did not get the praise it deserved. He was a man of poor heart raised to a position of great power because of his skill in summoning. That was a mistake, and it surely should have been a warning.”

  She meant Terellion the Bright, the summoner, a wizard who Harl had only ever seen a couple of times, and then only from a distance. But he knew she was right about him. Terellion was known for his pride. His apprentices suffered for it when they failed to introduce him properly to guests or pay him the respect he believed he was due.

  “Lucara craved knowledge above all else. I have no doubt that he was both the designer of the deal and the one who pushed it hardest with the others. No one else would have the knowledge. We always said he would give his life to master a new spell or learn something. It seems we were wrong. He gave everyone else's lives instead.”

  Lucara the Sage was someone Harl had only ever heard of but never seen. And even then he had not heard a lot. But then Lucara spent all his days and nights at his books, and much of his time scouring the world for more. He had hardly ever been in Lion's Crest.

  “Tyriole was ever a cold man. Cold and arrogant. But his skill was great and that was overlooked. It should not have been.”

  Much like Geron, Harl thought, at least in the coldness. The apprentice had cared nothing for those he had killed. But in his memories of Geron's master Harl thought he had seen kindness at least. Clearly he had been wrong. And he should have remembered that often apprentices took after their masters.

  “And then there was White Tail. We knew he would be difficult from the beginning. But his mastery of the magics of the mind was unsurpassed. We should have known that his endless tricks and jests would not always be harmless.”

  Of White Tail Harl knew a little more. And of all the ones that Dina had named he was the one that Harl could truly imagine signing a deal with a demon. Everyone in Lion's Crest knew him, and no one that did would have trusted him. He was one of the few fauns in the city, and he was constantly laughing. He spent his days according to many doing nothing more than playing tricks on people. It was his passion. His people followed Pan as did he. But his tricks and his japes were not generally the most well intentioned. His laughter often had a cruel edge.

  Once he had taken the voice from a bard and made his fingers no longer work as they played the mandolin. Not for malice as far as anyone knew. Simply because he had not liked his singing. And he had done far worse to others. If the faun was still in Lion's Crest or one of the other cities Harl had no doubt he would be laughing at the misery of others. Misery he had helped to cause.

  “We were an ill-omened lot. Among us there were few who joined the Circle for noble reasons. Far too many of us saw it as only a mark of prestige and power. That is our failure, and it should have been our warning. The Circle should have been filled only with those of good heart. With those who used their gifts to serve others. Instead, it was filled with those who served only themselves.”

  Was she including herself in that? Harl suspected she might be even though she had not been a part of the deal. But if she was, if she was letting guilt and shame guide her tongue, he didn't think it was a judgement she truly deserved. He remembered only too well her words to him as she assessed his progress each year. And though she had been hard with him as she had been with others, her words had always been intended to make him a better wizard. Never a prideful one.

  “Regrets will not help us win this war,” Erislee told her companion firmly. Then she turned her attention to Harl.

  “Dina says that you can build a device that will transport someone to the underworlds. To the demonic plane.”

  “A gate? To Tartarus? Maybe. I know the spells. But I would not. A gate to such a place would be dangerous. A crime. Anyone who used it would die. Torn apart at the claws of the demons. Worse, it might allow some of those demons to come here. Or send their servants through.”

  Which was almost exactly what was happening, save that it wasn't the demons who were coming through. It was their twisted creations the chimera.

  “Not a gate. A one way portal that someone could be pushed through against their will.”

  It took a few heartbeats and a swig of the ale before Harl understood what she was talking about. After all, how would you force someone through such a thing? And why? And then he looked at Dina, at the sickness in her eyes, and thought he understood.

  “You want to build a demon trap?”

  The idea caught Harl by surprise. He understood the value of the device – it held and returned any demon that had been foolish enough to come to the mortal realm by itself, or else had been unlucky enough to be summoned. But why did she want one? The demons had not come to the world at all, save perhaps Est and a very few others. They had only made a deal and then sent their beasts. They still resided in their realm as far as he knew, feeding off the lives of those who were destroyed by their army of beasts. That was the deal. The demons got the lives they so craved, and perhaps sometimes the flesh and blood as well, while the wizards got a little of the power they had dreamed of. A very little as it turned out. Maybe even nothing at all. That sometimes struck
him as the cruellest irony of all. That everything they had done – that all those they had killed had been for nothing. Not a single scrap of knowledge or power.

  “Yes.” The wizard nodded.

  “Why? There are few if any demons in the world.”

  And there never would be, thank Hera. Demons liked this world no more than people liked theirs. Some came, a very few by choice like Est, but they didn't linger. They came, they did what was asked of them or what they had chosen to do, and they left.

  “It is not for the demons,” Dina Windstrider told him softly, then looked away. And it was then that he understood completely.

  “You want it for those who made this terrible deal. The Circle wizards. You think that what will work on demons will work on their agents as well.”

  And she thought that when the trap was sprung it would send those traitorous wizards to the demons realm where they would be consumed and that when the deal was broken by their deaths, it would unleash its terrible fury in their realm. It was the only reason he could think of that she might want to do such a thing. Otherwise it was simply easier to kill them and then let the gods send their souls directly to Tartarus.

  “Yes.”

  “Why? It may well work but what's the point?” Other than justice of course. The Circle wizards would suffer a terrible death. “When Alenda Goldeneyes died there was an explosion of course, and some were hurt and killed, but if we'd known it was coming we could have avoided it. We could have run.”

  The fort couldn't have of course, and it had suffered extensive damage. But if they'd known to run the moment she'd died, no one would have been killed. Not by that. And as for the tear in the sky, while that had been odd and a little bit frightening he wasn't sure it was any more than that.

  “You're assuming that all the discharges will be of a similar size.”

  “Yes. You're not?”

  It seemed reasonable to him that they would be. Maybe one wizard was a little more powerful than another, but in the end most of the destruction was caused by the breaking of the deal. And each of them presumably had one twelfth of that magical strength contained within them.

  “No. I'm expecting them to become progressively more powerful with each death and the last to be terrible beyond imagining. This deal was not a simple agreement and a spell. I think it was a binding. And it was bound with lives and souls. With a binding of this magnitude and complexity held between them, when one dies only a small part of that strength will be discharged. The larger part of the strength is spread among the other survivors and contained within the binding itself.”

  A binding? The thought surprised him. Was she right? Harl didn't know. But he knew she could be. Some complex magics woven between different wizards were bindings. Spells that contained not just magic but the life force of the wizards woven into them. Typically the most powerful barrier spells were designed like that. That way as the wizards who had crafted the defence fell for whatever reason, the spell could be held by those who survived because much of the life force of the dead wizards remained bound in the spell. Until, of course, the last one fell and with him the entire spell failed – usually with spectacular consequences. And sometimes, though it was a crime, the bindings contained the lives of others within them as well. People who had had no part in the magic. Who weren't even wizards. Innocent people sacrificed to maintain the casting.

  If this was truly a binding of magic, lives and souls – probably many of them victims who'd been sacrificed to create the binding – then it could be a hundred fold worse when it finally collapsed. It all depended on how many lives and souls had been sacrificed.

  What he didn't understand was why would they have crafted the deal in that way? Why a binding and not a simple deal? Unless, as he suddenly realised it could be, the demon king had insisted. And if the wizards were foolish enough to make a deal with a demon they were foolish enough not to understand why he would want it to be a binding instead of a simple spell of bargaining.

  It could be a way for Xin to ensure that he got all the lives he craved for as long as possible, even if one or two of the wizards died. Even if eleven of them died. And some of them had been pretty old. Xin would have known that a normal deal could have collapsed the instant one of them died. But a binding meant that the arrangement continued until the very last wizard fell. Then of course all the hells would be unleashed.

  “All right. Maybe it is a binding and it does work that way. In which case we want that destruction to occur in the demon realm. A demon trap will do that.”

  “I know.” But she still would not look at him, and he did not know why. It was almost as if she was ashamed of what she was suggesting when it seemed eminently practical to him.

  “I can do it. I can fashion the trap easily enough. I know the recipes for the metals and stones. I can enchant the proper warding and holding spells. But I cannot craft the banishment spell. A gate is one thing. To send a Circle wizard through one against their will is something else. For that you will need a priest.”

  The banishment of demons after all was the realm of the divine. Even those wizards who could summon demons could only summon them with their consent. To call one or send one away against their will was much harder than to simply open a portal.

  “And I will cast that prayer upon the device.”

  The moment she said that Harl knew why the High Priestess was with her. Why she had left her army. This was not the sort of prayer that could be left in the hands of a regular priest. Not when they were speaking about a Circle Wizard and a deal with Xin. It would require the most powerful they could find and she was a High Priestess. Her bond with Artemis was closest.

  “Then if that's what you want I will do it.”

  Harl did not see the problem. In fact he saw the idea as a clever one, and the thought of sending one of these Circle mages to the demon realm to be consumed body and soul seemed like a form of justice to him. Although it would never be enough to repay them for the crimes they had committed and the tens and hundreds of thousands that had been killed, it was something.

  “Good. The first to be so sent will be Maynard the Irrepressible. He is a summoner of great power with some gifts in the realm of dimension as well.” But the wizard still refused to look at him as she named their target.

  Maynard the Irrepressible. Maynard the Mad as he was more commonly known. He was still somewhere in Midland Heights as far as Harl knew. Certainly there had been no report of the mad wizard escaping, and he was not the sort to go anywhere unnoticed. Not with that shock of white hair bursting from the sides of his bald head and his incessant habit of speaking to himself. He also had the disturbing habit of shouting at you at one moment and whispering the next. People tended to notice him. Especially when there were plagues of cats accompanying him.

  Harl remembered him from Lion's Crest. He was one wizard no one would ever forget. He was also one that the bards and minstrels constantly wrote ballads about. Someone of such great magic and such madness was a figure of fun to them as he wandered the city streets. He was also a mystery as they endlessly made up stories to explain how he had become as he was. For his part Harl had seen him a few times though he had never actually spoken with him. But he had always wondered how his apprentices could possibly abide working for him.

  “I will craft wards into the trap against all the magics, but those two will be my most powerful.”

  “And I will come and inscribe the prayer of banishment when you have the device built. How long will it take you?”

  Erislee placed her hand upon his forearm as she asked and surprised Harl with it. He wasn't completely sure why. Because she was a pretty woman? Perhaps in part. Because she was a High Priestess and as such he'd always understood, beyond the sordid gropings of common men? Perhaps it was in part that too. Yet even high priests and priestesses did take husbands and wives occasionally so he understood. There was no requirement of chastity laid upon them. Though of course they were not tavern wenches to be pa
wed on by customers.

  But mostly he suspected it was because she was a High Priestess of Artemis. And for five long years he had hated Artemis with a passion. He had considered the Goddess a traitor and a murderer. A betrayer of the people. And the monster who had killed his family and friends. To accept such a gesture of familiarity from a high priestess wearing her robes was hard, even now that he knew the truth. And there would always be a part of him that would not accept that the Goddess was not involved somehow. It was her temple after all. Still he did not withdraw his arm and he did not flinch – much.

  “Not long. I have the metals and stones I need and the construction is straight forward. If I start this afternoon I can have it finished by tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Then I will visit with you tomorrow afternoon.” She smiled politely at him before turning to the wizard.

  “You know Dina that this is the best thing to do. It will save lives. And Maynard has brought this upon himself.”

  And there it was! The reason that Dina was upset. Harl was annoyed that he hadn't understood it before. Dina Windstrider was a Circle Mage. So was Maynard the Irrepressible. And they had both been part of that Circle for decades. They knew one another. They had surely met with one another many times. They might even have been friends. And now she was planning to send her friend body and soul into the demon realm to be torn apart. She was damning him. It didn't matter that it was justice. Or that it was the best thing to do. It felt like she was betraying her friend.