Magesong

by James R. Sanford

  The passage twisted upward and he soon lost all sense of direction. The stepped tunnel, carved into solid granite, was void of shoring timbers and cross beams, void of any feature, even scars left by cutting tools. It must have taken an entire cycle of thirty-six years to build. He could imagine even an army of miners taking thousands of days to finish it. He frowned, puzzled. Never had any kind of empire, any people with enough resources to undertake such a project lived in this land. Only the elder grammarie of the age of magic could have made such a passage.

  He paused at the entrance to a wide, level gallery. Demonic shapes carved into the walls looked out at him, their faces scarred with runes of fear. His breath coming out frosty in the deepening cold of the mine, Reyin started down the passage. Then the ghosts came.

  They came out of the dark on jagged, torn wings, their silvery translucent bodies twisted and shrunken, their fanged mouths open in silent agony. But with his magesight Reyin knew them for what they were.

  "You are mere illusion," he told them, "less than the weakest ghost. By my sight you are dismissed and banished, now and forever."

  Ty'kojin had said that in the lost age, illusions were a simple trick that any magician could perform, but now there was no modern grammarie that allowed for that kind of art. The nature of the Essa itself could no longer embrace the sheer power of that time.

  Reyin stood still for a moment. There was a pattern to this way, a test that only a magician could pass. The door had been a test of power. The gallery a test of sight. There would be one more, a test of art. And it came at once.

  The far end of the gallery opened into a darkness the torchlight could not penetrate. He inched his way into the blackness, his feet sliding searchingly along the stone floor, his hand reaching for walls and not finding them. The torch was swallowed by the dark. He could feel its heat, but no light escaped, and his skin revolted against the inky touch of the darkness.

  The solution to this test was obvious — a spell of light would illuminate this magical dark. Another simple thing for the magicians of old. That power, too, had been lost in the Cycle of Ice. He continued sliding forward and pondered the price of failure.

  Although he half expected it, when his leading foot found the drop-off he lost his balance and nearly fell. He lowered himself and lay on his stomach and reached downward then out, trying to find a step or the other side if this was indeed a crevasse. Nothing was there.

  He had come too far to turn back now. Maybe there was some other way through. He crawled along the edge of the drop till it ended in a side wall, then he felt his way back to the gallery opening looking for a door or even a hole, then repeated that with the opposite side wall, finding the drop-off again and returning to about where he started. He listened — for the sound of running water, air whistling through a shaft, a sign, anything.

  Maybe the crevasse was only a few inches deeper than the length of his arm. He called down into it, and the echoes sounded far and deep. No, he would have to cross over if he wanted to see this way to its end.

  He called again. "Hello."

  No echo to the front. A wall stood opposite him, not far away. He was sure of it.

  He sang a clear high note. He sidled along the edge of the crevasse until he got there and sang the note again. Yes, this was it. An echo nearby, straight across. He summoned every secret way of knowing he had ever learned. No more than five or six feet away lay an opening, big enough, with a safe place to land. But this wasn't some exercise with Artemes, standing on a log just a foot off the ground with a cheesecloth blindfold. If he was wrong he would fall to his death.

  Against all logic he knew he was right, knew that he could do it. He closed his eyes against the awful dark and found the edge of the crevasse. He took one deep breath, then leaped into the blackness.

  The landing came sudden, shocking as he fell sprawled on hard rock.

  He had dropped the torch. On hands and knees he felt for it, then stopped. A strange shape lay carved in the stone beneath him. He traced it with one finger — the rune of darkness, that which powered the enchantment on this place.

  He found a loose stone and scratched through the old rune. The unnatural dark gave way to the shifting light of the torch. He sat in the opening of a tunnel that had been bored into a sheer wall. Reyin picked up the torch and looked into the crevasse. There was no bottom.

  He turned and went deeper into the mountain, the tunnel inclining sharply upward again with stair steps. Each step was now a labor. He stopped several times to rest, but it was a long climb. He pushed himself forward and up, forward and up. The stairwell rounded tightly about, then straightened into a steep grade, the rise of the steps becoming taller. Then there were no more steps, only the sound of rushing wind. He stood in a low stone hut with a narrow archway that opened onto the mountaintop.

  He went out and was surprised by the girth of the summit. From below it had looked sharp as the tip of a rapier. Flat, and roughly oval, it likely measured two hundred paces across.

  In the center stood a dome of bronze.

  Black and green and silent with age, it shone dully metallic in the afternoon sun. It must have been struck with lightning a thousand times since its construction. The dome was supported by concentric rings of white marble columns triple the height of man, offset and so closely spaced that they screened the interior from direct sight.

  Reyin slowly circled the structure. He discovered that one pillar was deliberately missing, and he took this to be the entrance. He went in. The ancient marble floor peeked through a blanket of dust in places where a recent visitor had left scuffs and footprints. He followed them to the space at the center. Beneath the dome, smaller than the poorest peasant's hut, sat a one-room house of translucent glass. A huge copper statue stood to each side of the low double doors of the house like a pair of palace guards. They were dragons, the creature that embodied the Unknowable Forces themselves.

  He looked up at them, and for a moment imagined that they would suddenly come to life and spring at him. Ty'kojin had never spoken of power like that, but Reyin knew that almost anything had been possible to the ancient mages.

  Standing between the guardians, he gently released the silver latch holding the doors. They slowly swung outward.

  The floor of the inner chamber was simply the raw, rocky surface of the crag itself. A waist-high upthrust of stone, the very tip of the pinnacle, rested inside that fragile place. It looked familiar. Yes, a stone much like it sat in the center of the village, with the same flat top and the same four-point star etched into its surface.

  In this place, he felt, he could initiate oneness with the Unknowable. But the shrine had been violated, entered by one who had not passed the tests of the sorcerous passage. It would have to be purified.

  He rummaged in his knapsack and found the tiny purse he kept full of salt. Regents were not really necessary in places where the Essa ran high, but Reyin thought it would lend elegance to his incantation.

  He cast the salt to the four directions, speaking as he turned in place.

  "Iurna astyzaq. Begone foul spirits and vanish airs of ill. Xedkaidfa msufak. Banish the nameless. Deny the unclean. Come forth unseen flames. Milluvian Gan! Make pure with your light this place where I stand." And he threw the last of the handful of salt down at his feet.

  Now he sat on the floor before the guardian statues and began the meditation that would open him to the presence of the Unknowable Forces. There was no time; there was only eternity. There was no space, only infinity.

  His view of the statues became distorted, the world blurring as if he saw a double image of the same object. Then the two images moved one into the other and his vision came into focus. The dragon stood before him, bright in its silver mail. Its eyes, burning sapphires lined with heavy platinum lids, shone with an alien light. Reyin could smell the exotic scent of its breath, feeling heat and power and danger.

  The creature held out to him in its taloned claw a perfect sphere of crysta
l, and trembling, the apex of power there threatening to tear away his identity, Reyin took the orb.

  The dragon no longer stood there, but he still saw it reflected in the crystal ball.

  "The star beneath the sea," the dragon hissed in the Essian Tongue.

  "That which has been lost," Reyin answered.

  The dragon returned to take back the orb and the reflection of itself, and Reyin suddenly found himself returned. Blinking sweat from his eyes, he sat still for a moment and let the heat of the dragon bleed away.

  He went to close the ancient glass doors. He looked at the jutting rock and thought for a moment. What did they call the one in the village, the touching stone? He touched it and felt thick layers of enchantment. The touching stone. The stone on which something is touched? The stone which allows one energy to touch another? He ran his hands across the star-shaped indentation. Then the history he had learned of the age of magic came flooding forth and he blinked in disbelief.

  The Aevir. It had to be. This was a place created by Graifalmia to hide one of the Aevir.

  He reached for the Essa, and it was there. Closing his eyes, speaking in the Essian Tongue, he said, "I summon now before me presentments and visions of that which was here and now is lost."

  Reyin stood in a waking dream and saw it, a shining wooden chest of unusual shape, a shape that would fit the pattern of the four-point star. He floated above it, around it. He looked at the other objects in the room, a menagerie of valuable antiquities, then let himself float upward. He hung motionless above an enormous house with an overhanging roof of yellow clay tiles. It was but one part of a small estate, the kind that is found within, or on the edge of a city. He saw a stable and a yard, an ostler brushing a horse, a wall and a gate, armed men wearing colored livery standing in a tower above the gate, a man unloading fruit from a cart in the street outside. Reyin let himself float higher. The street was part of a city. Higher. A great city with a palace and a prison and a coliseum, and buildings of state surrounding a diamond-shaped square, a city on the ocean, a port choked with wharfs and warehouses, boats and skiffs and sloops and merchantmen and warships, guarded by an island fortress in the harbor. Float higher. The ruins of another city, much smaller, an ancient fallen city bordering the living one.

  Reyin snapped out of the trance, his face damp and cold.

  He had never been to that city, but he knew it from drawings and maps he had seen. It was Mira-Delvin, one of the oldest cities in world, in the Kingdom of Jakavia a thousand leagues to the south.

  He closed the doors and walked away, stopping to turn and bow to the inner shrine in the manner of the Pallenborne before passing through the labyrinth of columns and into the open air.

  Farlo sat in front of the stone hut, lazily tossing pebbles off the side of the mountain. Reyin went to sit next to him. Farlo nodded a greeting.

  "You followed me," Reyin said.

  "It seems that I did."

  "Why didn't you come inside?"

  Farlo tossed another pebble. "I wasn't invited. Besides, places such as that, they aren't for the likes of me. Who would have thought it was here, though?"

  “Apparently someone did.”

  “The one who took the spirit away according to Jonn.”

  "Tell me," Reyin said, "what do you think of Jonn's story about the sky boat?"

  "I think you have a strong idea what that is."

  "There's a man in Sevdin named Conarra, an inventor of sorts, calls himself a scientist. He has discovered that filling a huge cloth sack with hot air enables it to rise to great height for a short time. He built a flying ship powered by these bags of heated air and went aloft himself early one morning over Sevdin harbor. No one talked about anything else for weeks. I was there. I saw it."

  "And you think he came here?" Farlo said, the burned side of his face wrinkling.

  "Maybe him. Perhaps someone else. I'm fairly sure that it was a rich nobleman from Mira-Delvin."

  "The city in Jakavia? What makes you think that?“

  "As Jonn implied, I have ways of knowing things.”

  “Are you telling me you’re some kind of seer?”

  “I suppose I am.”

  Farlo scratched at the grey half of his beard. “Look, I’ve seen enough island juju men in my time to know the weird look, and if anyone around here has got it, it would be our young Jonn. I don’t think he’s feeble-minded. I think he does hear outside voices, so if he says you know secret things then I believe it. But all the sorcerers died in the Cycle of Ice, and all their magic died with them. Everyone knows that. And besides, you don‘t much act like a mystic.”

  “No, I act like a troubadour because that is what I am. That’s sort of the point when you belong to a secret society. And it’s not that magic is dead — the lifeforce of magic itself was changed — it is more subtle and indirect now. Don’t mistake me, magic is still powerful, it simply passes unseen by those who don’t know how to look. In fact, there is no spell a true magician can cast that cannot be explained away by the new science, by so-called natural means.”

  “And there’s a whole society of magicians?”

  “I belong to one of several small circles. Most of us live to learn, and learn to teach so that the art is preserved through these lesser times. There is one circle I know of who practice magic only for personal power. The rest of us shun them.”

  Farlo eyed him for a moment. “What else do you know?”

  I think someone came to this mountain top and took an artifact that belongs to this ancient place. I believe that the sanctuary is old as the cycles, from back before the age of the enlightened princes, from the age of eldest magic."

  "An artifact. Not a spirit?"

  "A spirit box, if you will. There is a story that a teacher of mine held to be true, but I don't remember all the details." Artemes told me so many things in such a short time.

  "In the time before the Cycle of Ice, a sorcerer named Derndra summoned and bound together the six great elementals that inhabit this world: the Aevir, in the speech of power. Essential spirits you could call them. In the most obscene act of the lost age, he enslaved and used them to create the most powerful grammarie that has ever been known. Derndra could raise volcanoes from level plains, or control the minds of emperors from the deep caves where he lived.

  "Derndra’s power was broken by Graifalmia, the greatest mage of the times. It was said that his defeat drove him to madness, and that he fled to the underworld to die by the hand of one of his own sorcerous creations. The secret of summoning the Aevir died with Derndra, and Graifalmia didn't know how to return them to their natural state, so she hid them in the places where they had been captured, hoping one day to learn the secret of releasing them."

  "And you think this is one of the hiding places, that the spirit of this place is being held by this missing artifact?"

  "Yes, I do. And I think that returning it here is the only way to put the land aright."

  Farlo was deep in thought. "A captured spirit."

  "This is the place where the great elemental was summoned from the earth, and the summoning tore away the life energy of this valley. But I think Graifalmia enchanted the stone where the device of imprisonment sat, and the Aevir, in this place of power, was able to touch, if not return, to its home."

  Farlo nodded, plucking at the discolored place on his beard. "I see it clearly now. And I see that the privilege has been given to you."

  "Privilege?"

  "Yes. That's something I've learned from Syliva these past three years. The folk of the Pallenborne believe that helping is not a duty; they think of it as a privilege that most of us are not granted, maybe because we're unworthy, maybe because we're unlucky. I don't know."

  Reyin sat silent. "Privilege," he mumbled, shaking his head. "I'd call it the hand."

  Suddenly the mountain winds seemed to cut him to the bone. He stood, pulling his coat closer against the chill, walked to the western precipice, and looked down to where the escarpmen
t ended in a sandy shingle next to the ocean. There was room enough to launch Conarra's airship.

  "So you'll go and find the captured spirit?" Farlo called to him.

  "It seems that certain Powers have chosen me to do so. But I don't know why."

  "So do you believe in yourself or no? Tell me, is Jonn right about you? Do you see things?"

  "I see things," Reyin said quietly, looking at his feet. "But only in places like this that have a weird power."

  Farlo stood. "Listen, I'm not asking you to do this alone. The two of us can go together. Just think — a short sea voyage to the south, and we'll accomplish the greatest thing that we will ever have the chance to do."

  "The voyage will take months, and it will be very expensive. You have a wife who is with child. And in the end — " Reyin's voice dropped. " — it might not even make a difference."

  "How much money do you have?"

  "About one kandar."

  "If you plan to travel half the length of the world with an empty purse, you'll need someone to go with you."

  "I thank you for your offer, but I can travel better alone."

  "Look, do you think I would just up and leave my pregnant wife in the middle of a drought, if I didn't feel like this was something vital." He paused and thought for a moment. "Reyin, you and I are bound together somehow, both of us coming here like we did."

  Farlo picked a rounded rock from the ground and turned it over in his hands. "I didn't trust you at first, and you didn't trust me, and that's right for us, growing up like we did along the Paved Road. But the folks here aren't like that. They trust from the start. And it's very easy, just staying with them a short while, to forget what the world of hard men is like. We both know that out there, only them that's got money get protection."

  "I don't need a bodyguard."

  "I think you do," Farlo said with a momentary sparkle to his eyes, "but there's a simple way to find out." He rose to his full height, his fists clenched into knots of oak, a murderous look coming over him, and Reyin felt his gut twist with the unexpected threat.