Mind of the Magic (Arhel Book 3)

by Holly Lisle

  She found herself on a narrow, dark, nearly empty street—barefoot without her pack or her weapons, lost, broke, weary, hurting, and hungry… though she did still have the other potato and the rest of the bottle of wine. She sighed, looked up the road, looked down the road, and saw nothing she recognized in either direction.

  “Well, then.” She lifted the wine to the sky. “Here’s to adventures—may they happen only to other people from this day forward.” She swigged the drink, tucked the bottle through her belt, and started off in a direction she picked at random, chewing on the second raw potato.

  As she passed an alley, an arm reached out and dragged her in.

  Chapter 28

  SHE was too startled even to scream. She threw herself against the alley wall, pinning her captor’s arm between her body and a stone building, and in one smooth movement pulled the wine bottle from her belt and shattered its base against the wall.

  “Ow-ow-ow-ow-ow!” a familiar voice yelped as she spun to face her attacker, wielding the broken bottle as if it were a dagger.

  Delmuirie cradled his arm against his side and backed away from her.

  “Edrouss?” She lowered the bottle. She was amazed at how handsome he looked in the dark alley.

  He winced. “I came to rescue you. Doesn’t look like you needed me.”

  But Faia smiled at him. “I did, though. I have no idea where I am. How did you find me?”

  “Thirk delivered his ransom note to your brother’s house, and we followed him back here. We were amazed how simple it was to track him—Bytoris said he thinks Thirk was expecting a magical attack, and because of that, he wasn’t watching for anything else. Once we found out where you were, I hid here to wait for the tavern to close so I could break in and get you out—your brother took off after Thirk. I haven’t seen him since.”

  “What should we do, then?”

  “We agreed that I would take you back to his house as soon as I rescued you. Not that you needed rescue.” He rubbed his arm ruefully. “You’re the least helpless person I think I’ve ever met.” He pointed out a direction, and they started back toward her brother’s house.

  Faia smiled at him, but then her smile died. “We do need to get back as fast as we can. Thirk isn’t really our problem.” She told him what she’d discovered about Gyels.

  Edrouss was horrified. “He’s a god?”

  “He’s worse than just a god,” Faia told him grimly. “He’s the god of things that go wrong, the patron deity of disaster. He brings trouble with him because it’s what he likes.” She shoved her free hand in her pocket and picked up her pace. “He probably brought the Klogs back to Arhel because, to him, watching them eat people and destroy things would be funny.”

  Edrouss led her past a guardhouse at the corner of a street. The nightwatch called out and he stopped and showed his identification and hers. “My wife and I were at the tavern back there—but we’re heading home now.”

  “Jarel’s,” Faia said helpfully.

  One of the guards gave her an odd look—she studied him, but didn’t recognize him. She wondered, though, if he might have been one of the guards who’d been at the gate, or if he somehow recognized her. She resolved to say nothing else.

  “He’s open late tonight,” the other guard muttered. “That’s going to get him in trouble with the lairdlaw if he’s not careful.” But both guards shrugged, and the one who’d been staring at Faia finally shook his head and said, “Straight home, then, both of you. It’s not a good idea to be out this late, things bein’ like they are.”

  “Yes, sir,” Edrouss said. He put an arm around Faia’s waist and the two of them hurried away from the guardhouse. “Some things don’t change,” he told her.

  “Much of what I see in the world now, I don’t understand—but I understand guards, always telling you ‘straight home, now,’—as if it were their idea and not what you were already doing.”

  “Is it hard for you?” Faia noticed that even once they were out of sight of the guards, he left his arm around her. “I mean, seeing the way life is here, and knowing you can’t go back?” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she felt tactless.

  But the man next to her only sighed. “It’s terrible. More than anything else, I miss having a purpose. Thinking I was going to rescue you… that was the first time in a while that I felt someone needed me.” His half-smile held little humor. “Then you didn’t need my help after all—but for a bit I felt I mattered again.” He sighed. “You probably can’t imagine what it’s like to feel that way.”

  Faia, though, remembered the three long months when everyone could do magic and no one in Omwimmee Trade needed her. “I do know how that feels,” she told him. And she draped her own arm around his waist.

  He smiled at her then, a sweet, hopeful smile that did wonderful things for his plain face. And for a while, as the two of them hurried through the streets, arms around each other, Faia felt truly happy.

  Chapter 29

  FAIA snuggled beneath thick, downy covers, drifting. She became slowly aware of people talking nearby, but at first she didn’t worry herself about what they were saying. After a while, though, their tone began to disturb her, and she began a gradual ascent to wakefulness.

  The voices floated up through the floorboards in fits and starts—snatches of speech pushed into her woolly consciousness, leaving her with the oddest impression of what the men downstairs discussed.

  “…get away?… behind… has to be first priority!” That was Edrouss Delmuirie. She let her mind wander; she imagined his face, smiling. He had a good smile—and his arm around her had felt so nice. She rolled to her side and burrowed her head deeper into the feather pillow and tried to imagine what it would be like to kiss him.

  “…not important, and the Klogs…” Her brother’s voice—so desperate. “…no sense… what about this god?… trouble…”

  Faia stretched. Her head still throbbed, and she had the most horrible taste in her mouth. She opened one eye. She was back in the upstairs room. Pink-grey light crept through dusty slit windows and scattered little dapplings of color across the wall next to her. She watched dust motes drift upward through the bright lances of light, and entertained herself for a while by blowing gently and making them scatter.

  So this was early morning. She was safe and warm in bed—the sheets felt clean and smelled good. She didn’t have to concern herself with anything. She let her eyelids close again, and began to sink back into delicious lethargy.

  “…what if he tries to kill Faia?” Edrouss asked.

  That carried well enough. Faia woke up completely, and sat up in the bed. The covers fell to the floor as she swung her legs over the side of the bed and eased herself up. Her head hurt worse when she moved—damn Thirk. She wasn’t in any shape to be getting out of bed—but she didn’t want to miss the discussion downstairs.

  She threw her clothes on—wondered briefly how they’d gotten off in the first place; she didn’t remember undressing, or even getting as far as the bedroom, for that matter—and headed down the narrow stairs as fast as she could. She found Bytoris and Edrouss sitting at the morning table, eating dreary antis-fare and looking worried. Both nodded to her as she came in. She attempted a smile, but gave it up as a bad idea. Her head felt like it was going to come off, and she began to wish it would. She could hear the youngest of her nieces and nephews playing quietly in another room. One of the older girls was singing while she worked out in the walled yard, cleaning the birds they would eat for nondes.

  Faia pulled up a chair and settled across from the two men and ladled some of the grey paste and spiced gravy into her dish. It looked disgusting, but didn’t smell too bad. She took a tentative nibble, and decided, glumly, that its smell was deceiving but its appearance wasn’t. She poured herself a little glass of the ale that sat opened on the table, then made a face at the taste of that, too—it was too strong for breakfast. She would have preferred water, if only Bonton still had a safe supply.r />
  Edrouss studied her and his expression became concerned. He touched her hand. “Are you not well?”

  “My head hurts,” she muttered. “Where Thirk hit me when he knocked me out.”

  Delmuirie’s lips thinned to a tight line. “Hit you?”

  Faia shoved her sleeves up her arms. Her wrists were purpled with bruises and swollen. She held her hands in front of her and turned them so both men could see the marks. “He did this, too.”

  Bytoris frowned.

  Faia saw Delmuirie pale, though. “He’s going to hurt for that.” the man whispered.

  Bytoris said, “I wish I could have caught him last night.”

  “He got away?” Faia pushed her bowl back. The headache was destroying her appetite. She thought perhaps she would go back to bed and wait until it went away.

  “He ran straight through the middle of a street fight and apparently went down an alley while I was trying to get past the fight without getting killed. I looked for hours, but it became obvious after a while that I had an Arisser’s chance in a wit battle of finding him.”

  The front door slammed, and Bytoris’s wife Renina appeared in the doorway, soot-streaked and breathing hard. “They attacked the district marketplace,” she shouted. They were dropping fireballs into the stalls—the market is ablaze—fire jumping from house to house, and the roofs burning, and the beasts eating up the fire brigade!”

  No one needed to ask who “they” were.

  Edrouss asked, “Should we get out of here, then?”

  Bytoris told him, “The marketplace is not near here, but all the houses are very close—this house will likely burn with the rest.” He frowned, then told his wife, “Gather the children; have them bring a few clothes. I’ll pull out the cart—we can carry more in that than in our arms.”

  Faia looked at the grim, frightened faces around her. “You’re going to run.”

  “Better to run than to burn.”

  Edrouss said, “Show me where I can be of service. I’ll carry what I can for you.”

  Faia nodded “Me, too.” All of them rose from the table; then a surge of magical energy blanketed the city. For an instant, the room, the people around her, sights and sounds and smells—all ceased to exist in her awareness. She felt magic shaped and aimed and fired; the power of the blast was so great she could feel the forms of the buildings it touched as clearly as if she stood among them.

  Then it was gone, and sight and sound came back—she found herself sprawled on the floor of the morning room with Edrouss, Bytoris, and Renina around her, staring down.

  “No fire,” she said slowly. The room still spun, an odd aftereffect that she thought might have been a result of the sudden magical blast but was more likely the result of Thirk’s whack on the back of her skull. She sat up slowly, discovering new levels of pain in her head as she did. “Gyels—I mean Witte—put the fire out. He was somewhere near the market when he did it, but he’s stopped using magic again, and I can’t find him.”

  “I thought you said he only did evil things,” Bytoris said.

  “He had some ulterior motive for putting the fire out,” Faia told him. She rubbed the back of her head, wishing the pain would stop.

  Sounds seeped from outside: shouts, joyous cheering, applause.

  “Oh. How foolish of me. I forgot how much he enjoys playing the hero,” Faia muttered.

  She staggered to her feet, and without even excusing herself, returned to bed.

  Chapter 30

  FAIA’S next few days passed in a fog. The pain in her head grew worse instead of better. She was endlessly sick—retching to the point of dry heaves, hearing voices she knew didn’t exist, all while the world pitched and rolled beneath her. Her vision blurred; at first she saw a ring of fuzzy fight surrounding everything she looked at—then the images grew darker, and she realized she was going blind.

  Edrouss Delmuirie stayed with her, holding her hand, putting cool cloths on her forehead, talking to her. His calm, reassuring voice was always there when she woke, frightened from worsening nightmares. He encouraged her, he sang to her—and finally, as days passed and she got only worse, ever worse, when he was afraid she was dying, he told her he loved her and implored her to hang on.

  At last a healer came—a woman with a bag of herbs in hand and a gloomy prognosis.

  “I couldn’t get here any faster. Others worse who need help right away—and she hung on, then, didn’t she? For what good that will do in the long run. Blow to the head, was it?” The woman’s voice was weary, and offered little hope. She was talking with Edrouss and Bytoris outside the door, but Faia could hear what she said well enough.

  “I can tell you exactly what’s the matter with her. She’s bleeding into her brain—slowly, or she’d be dead already. There’s a pool of blood pressing into the grey matter of the brain—that’s why she can’t see, why she can’t stand up, why she vomits all the time. I’ll tell you, she’s likely to lose movement on one or the other side of her body, too. This is a bad, bad situation. If the magic weren’t gone, I could fix it ready enough, just heal the bleeder and release the pressure on her brain—but as it stands now, she’ll either stop bleeding soon, and gradually get better as her body absorbs the blood back, or she’ll die.”

  “Couldn’t you drill a hole in her head to let the pressure off?” Edrouss asked.

  “Could,” the healer answered. “If I knew where in hell to put the drill. But without magic, I can’t see the bleeder, I can’t see the pressure spot, and I can’t tell how far in to drill or what tissue is healthy and what is dying.”

  “There’s no hope, then.” Bytoris said that.

  “I didn’t say no hope. There isn’t much.”

  Faia heard a rustle in the hall—it sounded as though the woman was getting ready to leave. “Keep fluids in her if you can—don’t worry about solid food at this point.” A sigh. “There’s one other thing you might try. I’ve heard, in the past few days, of a priest who can do miracles—he’s brought back the magic water-fresher in the Sookanje district, and kept the flying nightmares from attacking the wall just yesterday. If he’s doing miracles, he might be your man. Your friend in there could use a miracle.”

  Silence. To Faia, it felt wary.

  “Is his name Gyelstom ArForst?” Edrouss asked her.

  There was a pause. “No… that isn’t it. This is an Arisser name. Calls himself Holy Perabene Hannisonne… Heralsonne…”

  “Huddsonne?” Bytoris’s voice then, with strain evident in those two syllables.

  “Yes! That’s it. You know him, then?”

  “Of him. He’s… not a friend.”

  “Too bad. He’d be a good man to be friends with.” The shuffle again, then, “Good luck. If she’s still alive in the next few days, call me and I’ll stop by to take a look at her again.” The sound of feet, hurrying downstairs, muffled voices from below, a door slamming.

  Another long silence. Then Bytoris’s voice, sad. “So he lied to her. The chalice was the source of magic after all.”

  “I don’t think so,” Edrouss answered slowly. “I would guess… well, I would guess this is worse even than that. Imagine if Thirk found Gyels—er, Witte—and enlisted as Witte’s priest. Then we would have the God of Mischief and a madman as his chief worshiper and servant.”

  “Yes. I can see that—but what would be in it for the god? Why would he accept Thirk, or give him power?”

  “What could a god desire? If you know that then you know the rest.” Edrouss sounded thoughtful when he continued “Faia said Witte told her he liked to stir up trouble. How better could he stir up trouble than to give a madman magical power, then turn him loose to use it?” He fell silent, then, after an instant added, “Gods always want worshipers, too, don’t they? It will be a simple thing for him to gain worshipers in a city without magic if he offers them what they’ve lost.”

  “Then disaster is coming.”

  “As clearly as thunderheads on a horizon.”
/>   Bytoris swore softly. “How do we avert it?”

  Faia thought, I think I know the way. She tried to call to them, but her voice wouldn’t work as she wished. She tried to get out of the bed, then, to go and tell them, but when she sat up, she lost her balance and heard her pulse roaring in her ears.

  And for a while, she knew nothing at all.

  Chapter 31

  “FAIA, can you hear me?” A gentle voice, the warmth of a touch on her shoulder.

  Faia opened her eyes. She saw light, and a blurry form in front of her. “Yes.” Her voice came out as a croak. “I can see you, too.” She blinked, but her vision didn’t clear. “A little, anyway.”

  “You can see?” The voice belonged to Edrouss, though her vision was too blurred for her to identify his face.

  Faia rubbed her eyes. She was amazed at how much effort it took to move her arms. “Everything is fuzzy,” she complained. “I’m starving. Can you get me something to eat?”

  “You’re hungry?” He sounded overjoyed. He shouted through the house, “Bytoris! Faia’s awake—and she can see! And she’s hungry!”

  The shout was loud enough that it made her head hurt. “I’m hungry. I don’t see where that requires you to scream in my ear.”

  “You haven’t responded to anyone or anything for almost a week now. You wouldn’t eat, you wouldn’t drink, you wouldn’t move. When the healer returned, she put a tube down your nose into your stomach, and we’ve been giving you sugared wine through that.”

  “A week?”

  “A week. You’ve done nothing but breathe in all that time—until a few minutes ago. You seemed to be having a nightmare—you were talking about Witte.”

  “The little god. There’s something about him that I needed to remember.”

  “He’s become God of Bonton. The Bontonards have embraced him as the god of the city—and Thirk is his priest.”