Magesong

by James R. Sanford

  "Oh Mr. Orez," Turo called, "where would you like the lute player to stand?"

  Orez, who seemed to be the head butler in charge of this affair, stopped short. "Far enough back to be out of the way," he said with controlled impatience. "But close enough to heard. You decide, Mr. Porane. That's why I hired you." Then he walked away.

  Turo straightened his jacket. "Stand over there when you play. I will signal when you are to stop."

  Reyin watched for a long time while the guests drank sparkling wine and played lawn games. It soon became apparent which one was Airen Libac, and Reyin found it difficult to believe that this same man had sailed to the top of the Skialfanmir in an airship. Reyin looked at him with the sight and saw an aura of lines and angles in precise alignment. Ty'kojin had called it the aura of the scientist. They would be the magicians of the new world to come.

  The evening shadows grew longer. A platoon of servants in white jackets came and stood at attention near the table, and Airen Libac called his guests to dinner. Turo signaled the mimes who were now onstage to stop, so Reyin brought out his mandolin and quickly checked the tune. A moment later, as a servant began to open bottles of wine, he went and took his place opposite the waiters. The dinner commenced with Libac offering a toast to his friends, and Reyin began to play.

  He played softly, trying to listen to the conversation at the table, particularly to what Libac had to say. But he only heard half of what was said, and none of it proved useful. He played as they ate soup, and fish, and had a new bottle of red wine opened for the roast beef. His variations of Twilight on the Sea of Heaven had become quite complex by the time pudding was finished and servants had come to light the lawn torches.

  He was running out of music, and the feeling pressed down on him that when he came to the end he would have no more time as well. A whirlwind bore down on his thoughts and they found no shelter. The thundering powers he had heard coming closer for the last three days were almost upon him now. A greater moment had come.

  He played the final note, but hardly anyone noticed. Overhead, in a lavender sky, the first star of the evening blinked open, and he knew what to do. He laid his mandolin on the grass, then straightened and closed his eyes, feeling himself once again within the circle.

  And he started singing.

  He sang the Song of Returning as he had first heard it. He sang it full yet soft, and he sang it for the people of Lorendal. He sang it with his being, and he sang with power, as if it were the very spell of Making.

  From out of the realm of power, a waterfall of rarefied ether fell down on him as he sang, and he took it into his being and sent it onward with his voice to meld with the life force of magic. And it returned to him a hundredfold. He felt himself buffeted by a torrential river of power, the Essa itself, and he sang the river.

  Then he was done. No one moved or spoke, and everyone was looking at him.

  Reyin had sung the essence of the magician into his being, and he knew the truth of what he had done. He could touch the Essa. He was a true magician.

  The head butler was staring at him as well, but not with the same look the others gave. This man's eyes were full of the weird. Airen Libac said something to him, but Reyin wasn't listening.

  "I'm sorry, sir," he said to Libac. When he glanced up again the butler was gone.

  "Where," Libac said hoarsely, "where did you learn that song?"

  "You seemed to understand it, sir. Do you speak the language of the Pallenborne?"

  "Yes, well enough to know the words you sang. It was beautiful. Is it a folk song?"

  "It is the springtime song of Lorendal valley. The whole village sings it together, standing in a great circle."

  Libac rose and went to him. "Will you walk with me in my garden, sir? I wish to discuss this."

  Reyin bowed, and side by side they walked into the labyrinth of sculpted foliage, the scent of exotic flowers hanging heavy in the dusk.

  "I've been there," Libac said, "to the Lorendal valley. At least, I've been above it."

  "It's unfortunate that you did not stay even one night with the villagers, who are the most generous folk I have ever met. They treat strangers as I would my closest friend."

  A shadow crossed Libac's brow. "How did you know that I never saw the inhabitants."

  "They would have remembered you and told me. You see, I have just come from there. Would you like to hear more about the song? On the eve before the first day of spring they gather and sing it. They sing it at the end of each day until the first new blade of grass sprouts. But this year nothing grows. Their land has been blighted and is slowly dying. They face starvation instead of a harvest, and still they sing the song in hope that nature has not forsaken them."

  Reyin stopped and faced him. "Tell me, do you think it is possible for an object to be so exquisite that it can capture a spirit?"

  "Yes," Libac said, looking away. "I know it to be so."

  "I'm not discussing art."

  Libac turned to him. "No." Their eyes met and each knew that they both spoke of the same thing.

  "I have felt it," Libac said. "My wife thought I had been dreaming when I told her, but I have often thought that it is a living entity."

  "The relic you found at the top of the Skialfanmir?"

  "Yes."

  "Perhaps it contains the life of the valley, and was placed in that mountaintop shrine for safekeeping."

  Tilting his head in puzzlement, Libac said, "How can that be?"

  Reyin instantly thought of Ty'kojin, now seeing the great difficulty of the task he had put upon himself in teaching. What does one say to another who has suddenly discovered the hidden realm?

  "There is a way, but I don't really know it."

  He silently called to the shadows cast by the rising moon, summoning them to gather close around him, and then the two men stood alone in darkness, the torch throwing light on their faces. Nothing else was there. Out of the dark Reyin conjured the cries of starving children and the moaning of old people dying in the night.

  "All I do know," he said, "is that a people will die."

  And then the darkness and the voices were gone.

  Libac started, looking over his shoulder and back to Reyin. "What? How? Did you do that? Did it truly happen?" He calmed himself quickly and looked at Reyin with an uncertain eye. "I find that I am fearful of you now, sir."

  "I did not mean to frighten you. I only want you to believe in what you already know to be true. This object that you had thought a forgotten relic you know now to be a much greater thing, something of the unseen world made corporeal, and something that is, and has always been, connected to the folk of Lorendal as a life is to a life."

  "I take it, sir," Libac said warily, "that you want me to hand over the artifact to you?"

  "It must be taken back if we are to have any hope of ending their suffering. I have no desire to possess it. Return it yourself if you wish. But know this for truth," he said passionately in the Essian Tongue. "You hold the very life of their land. And you had no right to take it."

  Libac's head bowed beneath the weight of the truthsay. "Come with me," he said quietly.

  He led Reyin into the house, smiling politely and nodding to his bemused friends. They went down a wide hallway with tapestries hanging on granite walls and passed through a sitting room into a hall with many statues. As they approached a door at the end of the hall, Libac broke into a trot. The door stood partially open.

  "Orez!" Libac shouted as threw himself at the opening.

  He stumbled, then stood still before an empty pedestal of white marble. "It's gone," he said in a strangely casual tone. "Nothing else is missing."

  He turned back to the open door. "Orez!" he yelled furiously, threatening to burst a vein at his temple. "I need Orez sent to me at once!" Then he returned to speaking evenly as he examined the door. "The lock isn't broken; it is simply unlocked. But that's not possible. I locked it myself this morning and I have the only key."

  Libac
paced the room and Reyin looked at the treasures he had seen in his vision on the Skialfanmir. The captured elemental had been here only minutes before. He went to the pedestal and laid his hands on the place the relic had sat. At once, he began whispering the incantation that would call to it. An impulse, an echo, came back to him.

  Libac strode into the hall and stamped his foot. "Where is Orez?" he called to the heavens.

  A dark-suited butler, walking quickly, approached him and bowed. "Your prime retainer is nowhere to be found, sir.”

  "Have you checked the wine cellar?"

  "Yes sir, the stables too. He is not anywhere on the estate."

  Wrinkles grew on Libac's face. "Why would he go somewhere at a time like this? He's supposed to be overseeing this entire affair."

  The butler glanced at Reyin and lowered his voice. "I wouldn't know that, sir, not knowing his habits. After all, he has been with us for less than a month, sir."

  "But still," Libac said, thick in his ruminations, “he knows how important it is to be here."

  Reyin stepped quickly to his side, grabbing him by the arm and whirling him about.

  "By the Spirit, man. Don't you hear what he's telling you? One of your treasures has been stolen, and your chief of staff has gone missing at the same time. Use that mind of yours, Libac, and bridge the two events. What's wrong with you?"

  Then he saw. The man had been touched by glamour.

  "How long have you known this man, this Orez?" Reyin demanded, still clutching Libac's sleeve. "Less than a month?"

  Libac nodded slowly, his shocked look changing to one of resignation as the truth washed away the bright illusion of glamour.

  Reyin, too, crossed a bridge. The man he had thought of as the head butler had used the sight on him. The man had been a magician and had carefully engineered this theft. He must be one of the Supplicants of the Final Grammarie. Why else would the Unknowable have shown him the vision of their inner shine? And now they had the last Aevir.

  "I'll have to send for the Chief Constable," Libac said.

  "He will be of no use. Nor will a squadron of private guards, nor the best thief-catcher money can buy. None of these will ever get close to this man you call Orez." Reyin placed a hand on Libac's shoulder. "And I think you know this as well."

  Libac dismissed his servant. "What's to be done, then?"

  "I am going now. I will find him and take it from him, and I will return it to the Pallenborne. It is lost to you."

  Reyin left Libac standing in his treasure room and went outside into the street. He stopped under the lamp at the small side-door and hissed into the shadows.

  "Farlo! Farlo, are you there?"

  Silence.

  He peeked around the corner. "Farlo!"

  He saw and heard nothing, He didn't know why he expected his companion to be there, but following and spying on him was just the sort of thing Farlo would do, and now Reyin needed it to be so.

  "Farlo?" No, no one was there. Farlo still waited in the ruined city. Why did he choose this night to be sensible and do as I asked him?

  He looked up. A full moon had climbed high into the night sky. He had no more time for calling into an empty street. Inside, at the pedestal, he had felt an impulse, and now he chased it down the lane, deeper into the city.

  Artemes had told him that the supplicants travelled the world in search of talismans, grimoires, and other relics from the lost age of the magician, but he had not explained the nature of their final grammarie. Did Artemes not know of their attempt to reunite the Aevir, to resurrect the most obscenely powerful form of magic that had ever been?

  And now they could do it. His steps came faster and faster as he reasoned, and with the last thought, he began running.

  CHAPTER 16: The Wellspring

  The sun had shone white and hot that week, as if it pressed closer, and Syliva perspired freely as she crossed the stream, heading home after her morning rounds. When she walked into her house, she found Aksel and Jonn at the dining table, Aksel gripping the shaft of a hunting arrow tightly with both hands while Jonn finished lashing the arrowhead with fine catgut.

  "That's the way, son," her husband said. "That's good. Take another loop. Now another loop — no, inside the first one. Yes, that's the way. Now pull it tight and cut it. Good. Now go get the hot tar from the fire and finish it."

  "So you're teaching him everything about bows and arrows," Syliva asked, "not just how to shoot?"

  Aksel had not looked at her much of late, and when he did, she hadn't liked what she saw. It didn't matter how many times she told him that anyone in world would have been powerless against fenwolf fever, he still blamed himself, as if he could have resisted the disease had his will been stronger.

  "It's something a man of the Pallenborne should know." Then he saw her face. "What's wrong?"

  "He's going to die."

  "Kestrin's father?"

  "Yes."

  "I thought we were feeding them. If there's something he needs that he's not getting we can trade meat — a whole goat if need be."

  "It's not that. He has the wasting sickness that no one can cure. If it had been a wet springtime I could find a fungus that would at least help him with the pain, but I can't find any now, even at the . . . "

  "Are you sure? Is there nothing you can do."

  She shook her head.

  "How long?"

  "You never really know, but he looked much worse today. Soon, I think."

  "I'm sorry, dear heart," he said, the squint coming to his temples. "I truly am. Poor man."

  He stood to take her hand, but then Jonn came in with the bucket of hot tar.

  "Hold it, son," Aksel said. "I think we'd better do that outside." He looked at Syliva.

  "Go ahead, I'll be alright."

  But after they went she sat and stared at the wall.

  Tired from the inside out, she laid her head on her arms. She should be elated at the way this strange part of her life had turned out. Aksel had recovered from the fenwolf fever, and he and Jonn were closer than they had ever been. No one talked about armed committees any longer. But she felt no peace. Only emptiness.

  She had planned to get away after suppertime, but long-term fatigue caught up with her then and forced her to rest. Everyone in the valley now suffered from occasional fits of weakness as they further cut their daily rations, half of them now faring on an ersatz bread made from flour mixed with dried ground ice-moss. Lovisa and the other pregnant women never lacked for a good meal though. The Monjors and the Barlsens and the others who had enough always saved their best for them.

  She felt better that evening as Aksel said his goodnights and shuffled sleepily to their bed, and she put on her field boots. She went out into the last warm light of the day and struck out northward. Past bedtime and it's still warm, thought Syliva, pushing up her sleeves. She skirted around the village, and after entering the deep shadows of the forest she felt like the blanket of heat had been thrown off her. The pines smelled strongly of sap, but their needles, brittle and dry, fell away as she brushed past them.

  As she approached the pond, with twilight settling over the valley, the air changed. She could taste moisture in it, more and more as she went. Each breath was like a cool drink. Up ahead, the willows surrounding the pond stood motionless while a silver mist rose among them. Vague shapes formed from the mist, breaking away to twirl and then reunite with the fog. Shining with its own light, the mist moved on ghostly currents and split into dozens of shapes that outlined elfish figures trailing silver flames. The elf-flames danced in a circle around the spring, twisting and leaping as they went. Some of the figures reached skyward when they jumped, as if they tried to grasp the moonlight. Some of them took a partner, spinning small circles inside the larger one. Syliva watched the dance, the world suspended between day and night. Then the light of the full moon pierced the fog, flooding the clearing, and with a cold gust from the mountains the mist elves wavered and vanished.

  Th
e bare branches of the willows gleamed starkly against the blackening sky as Syliva crept forward into the clearing around the spring. The elf dance. She had seen the elf dance. No one now living in the valley had ever seen it. To be honored by the forest spirits like this — it was something from the Poem.

  And she knew all at once that the wellspring didn't belong to her. But now she had something that was better than a secret place, and it would be hers and hers alone forever. She had seen the elf dance.

  She knelt by the pool and saw her reflection by moonlight. Then, in the depths of the well, she saw the valley, green and lush and thick with ripe harvest. Cupping her hand, she raised the cool water to her lips and drank.

  "I don't lack respect for the tradition, Syliva," Kurnt said. "You know me, Midsummer Day is my favorite holiday."

  "But to not have the festival?" Syliva couldn't hide her disappointment.

  “It wouldn't be much of a festival. We would be thinking about all the food we usually have at Midsummer's. Most of us want to observe the noontime rites, but after that I think it would be best for everybody to return to their homes for a quiet evening with family and close friends." He mopped his face with a handkerchief. "I figure the whole village will be at your house, mine, and the Barlsen's."

  "Alright, if that's what everyone wants," Syliva said, shouldering her waterskin. "In this terrible heat, it might be for the best."

  She said good-bye to Kurnt and started toward the village with the water she had fetched for Lovisa. When she discovered Lovisa's house empty, she took the wooded trail that led to the bluff overlooking the bay. Syliva found her friend sitting there with her legs dangling over the edge.

  "So here you are. Did you walk all the way out here to spite me because I wouldn't let you haul your own water?"

  Lovisa made a face at her. "It's not very far. And I didn't carry anything but this." She patted her bulging stomach.

  Syliva sat next to her. "Should be any day now."

  "I hope he's born on Midsummer's. That's supposed be the best of luck."

  Lovisa cast her gaze back out to the ocean. The sea lay calm. "Do you think it's possible for them to find a rune that can cure the blight? There hasn't been any rune-singers in the Pallenborne since the time of the sagas, and the Southerners don't believe in such things."