The Congruent Apprentice (The Congruent Mage Series Book 1)

by Dave Schroeder

  Directly ahead was an empty circular stretch of white ground about as far across as he could throw a rock the size of his fist. The center of the circle gently sloped up to a modest rise, topped by a truncated cone-shaped formation that looked like a melted candle. Thin lines of darker colors, like streaks of rust, radiated out from the cone and converged on the downhill side of the circle, closest to the mud pots.

  The footing seemed solid, despite the lack of vegetation, so Eynon allowed his curiosity to win out over his sense of self-preservation. He approached the formation cautiously. Chee stuck his head out of Eynon’s coat. Eynon glanced down to see the raconette’s eyes scan back and forth and his nose wrinkle.

  “I don’t like the way it smells here any more than you do, little fellow,” said Eynon. “But I do want to check this out. I don’t think it’s an insect mound. I’ve never seen one that big!”

  Eynon used his staff to tap the ground, feeling for hidden sinkholes. He realized that the surface around the cut-off cone seemed more solid than most of the ground in the basin. It reminded Eynon of the coating of ice he’d had to chip off his family’s farm wagon when a rare sleet storm descended on the Coombe three winters back. When he struck the ground with his staff, the white surface made a tink-tink sound instead of a thump-thump.

  “So far, so good, Chee,” said Eynon, stroking the raconette’s head with two fingers.

  He was nearly at the cone, about to look down inside it, when he heard the beast hiss. A heartbeat later, he realized it wasn’t Chee making the noise—it was the cone. A thread of steam rose from its center and the hissing grew louder. It was joined by a rushing sound that reminded him of the waterfalls near the castle.

  Chee broke into a frantic chorus of chi-chi-chi-chees, repeated over and over. He pawed Eynon’s chest from inside his coat.

  “I’m with you, my friend,” said Eynon. “Let’s get out of here!”

  He turned and ran back over ground he’d already tested, his staff rocking back and forth in his left hand with each stride. The waterfall sound grew louder and it felt like something liquid was rushing by not far beneath Eynon’s speeding feet. He didn’t stop until he was outside the circle of white ground, near the field of mud pots. Then he spun around on the toes of his boots to see what was happening.

  With a fierce sound like every mountain lion in Dâron growling simultaneously, a jet of steaming water shot out of the top of the truncated cone until it was at least ten times taller than Eynon.

  Accompanying the roaring jet was a hissing that could have come from a batsnake as large as a dragon. Sunlight through the mist generated by the jet made the water droplets in the air sparkle. A few drops, carried by a slight breeze, landed on Eynon’s face. One rolled down his cheek and he captured it with his tongue.

  It was bitterly alkaline and made the atrocious cider he’d had for yesterday’s breakfast taste good by comparison.

  The water continued to thunder upward for a few more seconds. When it stopped, Eynon saw a strange creature emerge from a bubbling cauldron in the field of mud pots to his right. It looked something like a lizard, but was built like an armored weasel, with a sinuous body and long tail covered in hundreds of thick, mud-gray plates. It had an extended snout, longer and wider in proportion than a wolf’s, and a mouth lined with sharp pointed teeth. Waves of heat radiated from its body and the mud that covered it had baked into a second skin in the few seconds since it had emerged.

  Eynon had no idea what sort of creature it was. There weren’t any beasts remotely like this monstrosity in the Coombe. Then the creature from the mud pots spotted him and turned to stare in his direction. Its eyes were hypnotizing. They were deep red and twice as large as they should have been for an animal of its size. Eynon was captivated. He couldn’t look away as patterns of something dark—he didn’t know what—swirled in the glistening red spaces surrounding the vertical black pupils.

  The small part of Eynon’s brain that wasn’t held in place by the beast’s gaze gave the creature a name. Basilisk. The species was briefly mentioned in the middle of a long chapter toward the end of Robin Goodfellow’s Peregrinations. Some of the beasts lived on a large island near a fire mountain in the middle of an inland sea. Goodfellow reported that they could turn people to stone. Instead, Eynon realized, they froze their prey in place with their eyes so they’d be easier to capture and eat.

  Eynon could feel the blue stone on his chest pulsing a warning, but it didn’t help. Like a mouse facing a batsnake, he couldn’t move or break eye contact.

  The mud-covered beast lumbered toward Eynon on legs that splayed out to the sides, using the same gait as the tiny lizards that skittered about on warm rocks in the Coombe. When it was a dozen yards from Eynon, the basilisk opened its mouth like it was yawning, revealing a bright red palate and purple tongue.

  The part of Eynon’s mind that wasn’t entranced saw that the movement was designed to expand the basilisk’s jaw so it would be able to consume Eynon whole, not waste time cutting him into bits with its teeth.

  The monster set its feet and wiggled its rear hips like a house cat preparing to pounce on an unwary songbird. The free portion of Eynon’s brain thought of Merry and how much he wished he was still with her back in the Blue Spiral Tower.

  Ouch! Eynon was in pain. Sharp claws were digging into his chest and neck. It was Chee. The little beast climbed up to his hat, clutching the beaver fur with his front paws and hanging down. The raconette’s body covered Eynon’s eyes and broke the basilisk’s hypnotic gaze. Eynon turned away. Chee quickly flowed his flexible form back inside Eynon’s coat.

  Eynon’s feet propelled him of their own accord. He ran deeper into the basin with the steaming basilisk in literal hot pursuit.

  Chapter 19

  “Searching is as much about the seeker as what’s sought.”

  — Ealdamon’s Epigrams

  It’s not easy to work magic when you’re running for your life, thought Eynon.

  From the sound of its footfalls, the basilisk was gaining on him, despite Eynon’s much longer legs. Eynon focused on speed, not safe footing, though he kept enough sense of self-preservation to mostly put his feet on patches of ground with vegetation.

  Ahead was another steaming circular hot spring—this one ringed in blue and green. Eynon lengthened his stride and pulled slightly ahead of the basilisk until he put the spring between himself and the mud-caked monster. There was enough steam rising off the surface of the spring to interfere with the basilisk’s hypnotic gaze. Eynon could keep track of the beast’s location without having to worry about being mesmerized.

  The hungry creature circled to the left. Eynon matched its movements to stay on the opposite side of the hot spring. The beast turned back and circled right. Eynon changed course as well—stalemate.

  The basilisk sniffed at the water in the hot spring and growled. Eynon had been afraid the menacing monster would jump into the spring to swim across and attack him, but the mud-dwelling lizard-thing didn’t seem inclined to get wet. It stared at Eynon and he looked away, unwilling to risk a chance of being frozen in place by the basilisk’s gaze.

  In the lull as the young man and the monster considered their next moves, Eynon finally focused enough magic to generate a rudimentary round-shield of solidified sound. If the basilisk tried to attack him now, Eynon could interpose the shield between the basilisk’s teeth and his own vulnerable flesh.

  The beast didn’t attack him, though. Eynon could see its mind wasn’t as quick as its four-limbed gait. It was still trying to figure out why chasing the tall human around the hot spring wouldn’t work. Eynon had an idea, based on how his sister would discourage their cats when they wanted to help her peel vegetables at the sink back home.

  He pushed the solidified sound round-shield away from him with the bottom inch or two of the shield just skimming the surfac
e of the spring. A spray of hot water flew up and struck the basilisk’s face and shoulders. The beast growled and retreated a few paces back toward the mud pots.

  It doesn’t like water, Eynon determined. Maybe it doesn’t like losing its protective layer of mud?

  Splashing water with his shield only sent the liquid flying a short distance, so Eynon reformed the simple, one-piece magical barrier into a more complex construct.

  It looks like a giant milkweed pod, he realized, or an unshelled almond as big as a prizewinning blackseed melon.

  He lowered the lens-shaped structure into the hot spring and increased its permeability so it would fill with water. Then he lifted the lens out of the water, brought it close to the basilisk on the far side of the spring, and pressed the top and bottom of the lens together with wizardry, allowing a jet of water to squirt from an opening he’d created at the tip.

  The stream of high-pressure heated water struck the basilisk on its nose, evoking a low-pitched grunt of surprise and a series of indignant squeals from the gray mud-covered beast as it abruptly turned and retreated back to its original field of mud pots.

  It worked! thought Eynon. A lot like the water shooting up from the tall mound! Maybe that’s what planted the idea in the back of my head?

  No matter what had inspired the concept, Eynon was glad to be safe, at least for now. He had bigger expectations for his life than ending up as a basilisk’s lunch. Chee stuck his head up at Eynon’s coat collar and gave a satisfied chi-chee of approval. He kept his head out to supervise.

  Eynon refilled the transparent lens with more spring water and directed it to hover at-the-ready behind his head in case more monsters emerged from mud pots on his way to the multicolored hot spring. It never hurts to be prepared, he considered, realizing that would make a good epigram if he lived long enough to write it down.

  With a quick hop, Eynon jumped up on a small boulder to take stock of his surroundings. He was pleased to see he was a lot closer to his planned destination than he’d expected. His feet must have carried him in that direction when he’d run from the basilisk.

  Climbing down and using his staff to check the ground, Eynon crossed a narrow isthmus between two broad fields of mud pots and finally reached the polychromatic hot spring that had initially captured his interest.

  It was every bit as intriguing close up. The hot spring was circular and close to fifty feet across, Eynon estimated. Now that he was next to it, he could see the colors came from something floating on the surface of the water, like the green algae or scum that formed on the edges of farm ponds or horse troughs back in the Coombe. The red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple rings around this hot spring had colors far more intense than the muted green Eynon was familiar with, however.

  Eynon scanned the area, looking for threats, and realized there was a large, pale rock formation at the back of the spring. It was taller than he was, but hard to spot because it was the same uniform shade of white as the rest of the land in the basin. Carefully checking his footing, Eynon tapped his way around the spring’s perimeter until he reached the rock. He hoped to climb up it somehow, to gain a better view of the spring’s rainbow of colors.

  He was pleased to see someone had carved narrow steps into the side of the rock away from the hot spring. Eynon ascended until he reached a flat spot no bigger than a boy’s sleeping pallet at the top. He was high enough to have an excellent view of the hot spring and its translucent rings of color. To Eynon’s surprise, the center was transparent, not translucent.

  The red color in the middle of the spring was not from floating plants. It came from something resting on top of a small white pillar in the spring’s exact center—a brightly glowing red gem, easily visible through the clear water. When Eynon saw it something snapped into place in his brain.

  That’s my magestone!

  Now he understood what Damon had meant by, “You’ll know it when you see it.”

  From his elevated vantage point he could see the gem pulse and sparkle, as if it was calling to him from the depths of the spring. The blue magestone under his coat and shirt was vibrating, sharing his excitement. Eynon couldn’t tell if it was jealous of the red stone as a competitor or happy that he’d found his stone at last.

  You’re mine, thought Eynon, but how do I get you?

  He wasn’t interested in losing his skin by diving into the steaming, toxic water. Maybe if he knew the secret of controlling animals, he could entice the basilisk into entering the spring to retrieve the stone, but given that monster’s antipathy for water and its evident unpleasant disposition, Eynon would have to come up with another solution.

  With a hand shading his eyes, Eynon scanned the trees nearby, looking for one tall and slender enough to help him reach for the glowing red magestone. Unfortunately, all the nearby trees—where nearby meant a quarter to half a mile away—had trunks too thick to serve in that capacity. Besides, he knew it would be wrong to mar the chromatic symmetry of the rainbow-colored hot spring by stirring its waters with a pole, no matter what its diameter.

  Could I summon the stone to my hand? mused Eynon. There were tales of wizards demonstrating great feats of levitation, though most moved their own bodies through the air on magic disks, at least according to an illustration he’d seen in Peregrinations. After half a day of training, Eynon was pleased he could make simple shapes from solidified sound. Levitation must be a future lesson.

  Wait! he realized. I know how to cast fireballs, sort of.

  That idea also fell by the wayside. If inserting a pole in the spring would be wrong, disturbing its delicate equilibrium with a fireball would be a travesty. He had to find a better way. Eynon could almost hear the red magestone calling to him. Something inside him ached to hold it in his palm, to feel it against his skin, but he was stymied. There had to be a way.

  Nûd had said, “I hope your magestone shoots out of the first hot spring you pass and lands in your hands.” Eynon considered that he might have enough fine control to flash-boil a few ounces of water directly below the red gem, tossing it out of the hot spring where he could catch it with a construct of solidified sound. He focused his mind and called on the same wizardry that boiled water for clean dishes earlier. Unfortunately, despite Eynon’s most intense concentration, all he managed to do was cause the water near his magestone to bubble more vigorously.

  Why did Damon think I was ready to find my magestone? wondered Eynon. I need to learn a lot more magic before I can do anything useful.

  He wiped his forehead where he had been sweating underneath his fur hat, not sure whether the extra perspiration was from mental exertion or steam from nearby mud pot fields. Eynon looked down and saw a broad shadow flicker over the rock where he was standing. It moved across the surface of the spring before disappearing. Eynon tilted his head back and spotted a black wyvern—probably the one he’d encountered earlier—circling fifty feet above him.

  Where’s your yellow ball, big fellow? thought Eynon.

  While maintaining the basilisk-discouraging lens filled with water behind his head, Eynon created another tasty ball of solid sound and sent it high into the sky. The wyvern beat its wings and gave chase, like a hound fetching a pheasant. The wyvern was a distraction, for now, but with careful handling, the two-legged dragon-like creature wouldn’t be dangerous.

  Creating the ball for the wyvern to chase gave Eynon an idea. He could control the motion of his solidified sound constructs, up to a point. What if he pushed a ball into the center of the hot spring and made its bottom semi-permeable, like Nûd pushing the bar of soap into the lens with the dishwater back in the castle? He could push the ball down on top of the red gem and retrieve his magestone. That might be something he could handle with his limited magical abilities.

  It’s worth a try, thought Eynon.

  He formed a transparent ball of solidif
ied sound as wide as his outstretched palm, without worrying about its color or taste. Then he guided the ball down into the center of the hot spring until it was directly above the red gem. An extra push moved the stone from the top of the white pillar to inside the ball—Eynon was almost there.

  The gem seemed to blink at him encouragingly, though perhaps it was just a trick of the light reflecting underwater.

  With a nudge of his magic, the ball expanded to the size of his head. The enlarged ball ascended until it was out of the water and hovering in front of Eynon’s station atop the rock. He opened a small hole in its base so the boiling alkali water could drain out. Then, with a pop he dispelled the bubble of solidified sound. Eynon caught the magestone as it fell into his hand.

  Success! The magestone was warm in his palm, nestling against his skin like it belonged there.

  Unfortunately, Eynon wasn’t able to relax after his accomplishment. He heard several more threatening pops, plus thick, gooey plops accompanied by deep grunts and growls. Two dozen basilisks had emerged from the mud pot fields on both sides of the multicolored hot spring and were fast approaching Eynon’s rocky perch. He gulped and stared at first, but didn’t completely succumb to the beasts’ combined hypnotic gazes.

  After a deep breath to clear his mind, Eynon directed the water-filled lens behind his head toward the lead basilisk and compressed it, sending a jet of liquid into the monster’s face. It stopped momentarily, but the other mud-covered beasts continued to approach. Soon, the one he’d squirted shook off the effect of the water and joined them. Four basilisks were now on the makeshift stairs leading up the rock to Eynon’s position.