by Damien Lake
He was the scryer warlock, named Shanahan, if Marik recalled correctly. Marik would have enjoyed seeing the man cough or splutter for a response, but that was not in the cards. “Because geomancy draws its power directly from the elements. Simply the act of bringing a stone into the air means a natural conflict between air and earth. Magecraft could do it, but that would require constant energy expenditure. Spells might generate the same effect, but again it would require constant use of components.”
“What about permanent enchantment?” Marik interrupted. “Magicians are the only magic users that can create permanent magical objects. Why can’t a magician do that with the stone in that mountain the same way he would with…with a bracelet?”
This time one of the witches spoke up. “Creating a small magical item is extremely difficult. And expensive in terms of components. Enchanting an entire mountain…” She shook her head, gazing through the window. “You would need so much in components alone that you could build a second mountain from them.”
“And sorcery…,” Shanahan picked up. He nodded at the twin mystics.
The sister explained. “Sorcery is the only viable alternative, except there are problems. Galton agrees.”
Her brother nodded. “Galiena is right.” He nodded again to punctuate it. Marik nearly rolled his eyes.
“Very powerful sorcery,” Galiena continued, “might account for it. The strength of the Devil needed to achieve the feat is beyond imagination, though.”
“It would be impossible to control such a creature,” Galton added, “if Devils that strong exist in the first place.”
“Which it is extremely doubtful that they do.”
“It would be closer to a god.”
“And our own sorcerers would know about Devils that strong.”
“One that strong would be controlling all the lesser Devils across the entire Abyssal Plane, you know,” Galton finished.
“No, I didn’t know that,” Marik muttered. Matters involving the workings of Spirits and Devils from alternate planes had never been a subject of study for him. He raised his voice to point out, “But the idea of a flying mountain was supposedly impossible until a short while ago. How can you be confident that Devils with that much power can’t be summoned and controlled?”
“The stronger a Devil is, the harder it is to control,” Galiena explained. “And the stronger a Devil is, the higher intelligence it has.”
“Even if you completely bind a strong Devil,” Galton pointed out, “the longer it has to examine its bindings, the greater the chance that it can find ways to break free.”
“Spirits are more malleable and sympathetic to humans,” she finished, “except they don’t like being forced to a purpose. And the strongest Spirits recorded still wouldn’t have the power to do this, even if they all worked together.”
The eight people looked back at him while he digested that. “A sorcerer summons a Devil to accomplish a specific task, right?”
“As long as it is within that Devil’s powers,” Galton agreed.
“So how about,” Marik mused, “several sorcerers working together? Say a dozen, each summoning a Devil within his power to control. Then the dozen Devils work together to summon a much stronger Devil and they work together to bind it.”
“That sounds good,” Galiena countered, “except that has been tried before. Devils don’t cooperate willingly on anything. Forcing them to work together always ends in disaster.”
“And they’ll deliberately cause as much havoc as they can get away with in hopes of breaking their own bindings at the same time,” Galton revealed. “Devils can’t be trusted at all. Their nature is chaotic in the first place, and any bindings they crafted to hold a stronger Devil would be the same as a rope stuck together with pine tar from a dozen different segments.”
Galiena needlessly expounded on that. “One hard tug would only pull the whole thing apart.”
“That’s under what we know how to do,” Marik shot back. “Who knows what knowledge the Arronaths have mastered? Their sorcery abilities could be miles beyond ours!”
Shanahan resumed the spokesman role. “That does not change the fact that Devils so powerful as what we are discussing simply do not exist anywhere on the Abyssal Plane. It makes no difference if you are summoning from Galemar or across the sea. The Devils spring from the same source, and one with such power would not have stayed hidden from our sight for so long.”
Inora made the pronouncement. “You see that each of the other three talents would have to work at levels beyond their ability to achieve the levitation of such a large object.”
“And still, according to you, geomancy shouldn’t be capable of that either! Where does that leave us?” Marik glared at them all. “How about blended talents? For geomancy, let’s see…mystics, witches and wizards.”
“It’s the same story, just with different colors,” the second witch stated. He could not remember their names to save his life. “The geomancy might make it easier to accomplish your end, but it would still require the full powering resources of the secondary talent.”
“We are completely certain on this?” He cast his gaze over them each in turn. “The only possible method to do that,” he pointed at the scrying window, “is through geomancy. Pure geomancy.”
“That’s right,” the wizard pompously agreed. He was a man named Verge who wore a trimmed beard small enough it looked like an arrowhead pasted to his chin. “It’s only a question of how they managed to awaken the aura of stone throughout an entire mountain and control it. A thousand strong geomancers would be unable to accomplish it.”
“Hold on,” the second pure geomancer interrupted. Marik could remember his name no better than the witches, except he had a vague feeling it started with an ‘R’ sound. “We haven’t reached a conclusion on that issue. I still think it is far likelier they are using an aura of air. Surrounding the mountain with an eggshell of air, and lifting it by shifting the shell, rather than forcing stone into the sky.”
“That puts earth and air into direct conflict,” Verge retorted. “You can’t have air energy touching stone’s flesh and expect it to remain stable. We’re talking about an undertaking that already requires massive power behind it. You’d be insane to add to the load by forcing opposing elements to interact at the same time!”
“Flinging stone through the skies has the exact same counter-elements at play!”
“Please! The juxtaposition is far less with physical versus physical than when you have an elemental aura coming into contact with the physical nature of its opposite.”
Inora silenced them with a curt command when they looked ready to launch back into a fully fledged debate, saving Marik the bother of doing it. He could feel the vein in his left temple throbbing.
“It’s all supposition, is what you’re telling me. You’re assuming that geomancy is the power driving it.”
“No,” Inora challenged back. “The only possibility with any potential for success is geomancy. What you see through that window is the direct result of an elemental alteration. The easiest, simplest and most effective means to achieve that is with pure geomancy, which draws its power through that very medium.”
“Then why don’t you know if it’s using earth auras or air auras? From how I understand it, you should be able to tell without question when you see it.”
“Can you see any auras within that view?” She crossed her arms to wait for his reply.
Suspicious, Marik switched over to his magesight, startled at what he beheld. The room filled with the purple mists of the etheric plane’s mass diffusion. Each wall became jet black. Except the window became the true window it was; a hole in the barrier between them and the outer realm of the palace grounds. He belatedly realized that the view in the glass, be it window or mirror, only reflected an image his physical eyes could discern. Scrying could not actually stretch his vision into those far corners.
“No,” he admitted. “I can’t.”
&
nbsp; “It is the same with us. All we can do is estimate using our knowledge combined with what we see.”
“What, then, do your estimations suggest?”
She hesitated. Verge did not. “Unless they have over a thousand geomancers working tirelessly nonstop every minute of the day, then they’ve twisted natural laws to generate unbelievable amounts of elemental power.”
“Codswallop,” barked a witch. “If you had a thousand of the best, you’d still never lift an entire mountain for the length of time it takes you to shave your beard every morning.”
“How would you know?” he fired back. “Your geomancy couldn’t lift a pebble out of my boot on a good day!”
“Stop it,” Shanahan demanded. “I refuse to listen to you bicker the day away again.”
The second witch jumped in. “If you could find the power to lift it, that would only be the beginning, don’t you agree? It looks solid, but how much extra power would be needed to keep the whole peak from fragmenting into a million shards once it entered the air?”
“That’s a fair point,” Galiena conceded.
Galton picked up as soon as his sister’s last word came out. “Moving the mountain would generate untold amounts of stress pulling at it from every direction.”
“By rights it should be a pile of rubble on the ground.”
“Not still in one piece floating in the air.”
Verge glared in annoyance at the twins. “If you are already altering the earth properties in the stone, then binding the entire construct together would be of no consequence. It would be a natural byproduct of the earth aura through the entire mountain merging into a single elemental force!”
“You don’t know that,” Inora insisted. “And it seems to me that having so much concentrated earth force focused in one spot should make it collapse in on itself before long.”
“Not if proper precautions were taken to ensure the integrity of the earth matrix within the stone.”
“Which would require still deeper power reserves,” Shanahan argued. “You’re talking about elemental force beyond what can be provided by the subject of the alteration. You’d need twice as much earth aura as the mountain contains. Where do you plan to harvest that much earth force?”
“It’s not about power,” Marik shouted, pounding the book pile so hard he heard an ominous crack from the table beneath. He’d had no idea what he would shout until the words burst from his lips, but the moment he heard them, he sensed the inherent truth. “Look,” he said when sixteen eyes turned on him. “Magic is…” He stopped to utter a harsh laugh devoid of irony. “Magic is not set in stone.”
And indeed it was not. It was a truth he had learned, and proven, since his mage talent had awakened. In fact, within the palace grounds last summer, Celerity had admitted as much. What had she said, exactly?
In magic there are countless possible ways to achieve the same end.
Yes. What could be devilishly difficult under one talent could be simplicity itself under another. Closer to the point, a clever person could discover new ways to achieve the same effect under the exact same talent, ways that consumed less power or less effort or required less skill.
“We’re looking at the problem from the plateau with which we are most familiar,” he reasoned for the group. “From the perspective of how court mages, who are among those with the strongest talents in the kingdom, would first choose to levitate a stone off the ground. Court mages who are so adept at working at a high level that they’ve long been separated from lesser problems.”
The best players are the ones who can think unconventionally.
“What we need,” he mused, reflecting over Ilona’s words, “is a fresh perspective. Something outside the normal ways in which you work. Simple is usually the most effective, after all. So…if you can’t have an army of geomancers manipulating power on the level of a god, what can you do in its place?”
“Pray?” Galton asked, his tone dripping with sarcasm.
“Don’t be cheeky,” Inora reprimanded. “Bend your efforts to work the problem instead.”
As it usually did when he least expected it, Tollaf’s voice cut nastily through his brain. Startled by the recollection, Marik blurted out, “How many of you have formed alliances with elemental spirits?”
He might have laughed at the way all eight blinked simultaneously. Shanahan answered. “I haven’t,” he admitted. “In the first place, elemental spirits are like flies. They never keep their attention focused on any one thing for longer than a few moments before their interest is diverted. Making them understand what you want is similar to getting a child to read the newest law decrees.”
Verge took it up from there. “Contacting them is a pain in the neck, too. It’s not like sorcery where you can set up diagrams and yank a Devil away from his lunch whenever you please.”
Galiena scowled. “I would hardly say sorcery is so simple as you make it sound!”
Inora stepped between them to address Marik. “Elemental spirits can be handy to have alliances with if you happen to have need of a specific task for which they are suited, if they are near enough to answer your call, and if they are willing to aid you at all. They are very much creatures of whim. The odds of, for example, finding exactly the right situation in a battle where they could be useful are so low that forming and maintaining alliances with them over time is not worth the effort.”
“It sounds like a mixed blessing,” Marik allowed. “They would be best for small things. Such as a burst of fire or a gust of wind. Small manipulations.”
She nodded. “Any of which an adequate enemy geomancer would be prepared for. Having elemental spirits help us would save our own strength and energy, true, except they are not very useful in most cases.”
After a look around, the others also admitting to never having bothered with it. Verge justified his lack by pointing out, “Anyway, a dozen elemental spirits would have to unite in order to produce a single attack to match what I could do on my own.”
“What you could do on your own,” Marik echoed. Verge’s superior bearing made Marik want to stick a pin in the man. “But let’s say that, under different circumstances, you were born with a talent only twenty percent as strong as yours currently is. You’d never be standing here as part of the enclave. The cityguard might be charitable and throw you a bone from time to time if they needed help with an inquiry. If what the elemental spirits could accomplish was stronger than what your measly talent could achieve, would you still think it was a waste of time to forge and maintain a number of alliances with them?”
“That is a question of no value,” the man replied hotly, puffing up as he did so, “since my talent is far beyond such trifles.”
“I think that alliances with such spirits are far more common among lesser talented geomancers,” Marik announced. He shook his head in disgust while he added, “The effort is much less a nuisance if you are not so ‘blessed’ with talent that you can accomplish high-level works on your own. Finesse is usually more effective than hammering a problem with greater and greater strength until you finally force it. And that’s what we’ve been talking about the whole time. How to force a rock into the air. The Arronaths’ mountain seems less impossible if it was broken down into smaller chunks. Say, using however many elemental spirits as you needed to, each one assigned to a small portion of rock. Each one doing whatever was needed with their own tiny piece in order to achieve the larger effect.”
“That is equally impossible,” Verge countered snidely. “Keeping a few hundred-thousand earth spirits harnessed to a single task for so long? You’d need twice as many geomancers as them to keep a watch on the little bastards to see that they didn’t wander away. And no one is mad enough to try contacting an elemental lord, so the whole field of spirit alliances in geomancy is practically worthless.”
“Sorry, a what?” Marik asked. He’d been rubbing his chin with his fingers. He stopped to reassess what Verge had said.
The nameless ge
omancer took up the challenge. “An elemental lord. Or that’s what we name them. Elemental spirits have no name for them, so we call them that. Basically you have elemental spirits, which are like free-floating leaves drifting on the wind. They only possess dim awareness at best. The only elemental beings that are truly sentient are the lords, which are like sorcery’s Spirits or Devils. Extremely powerful. If elemental spirits are leaves, the lords are the trees.”
Inora continued. “There might be only one for each element; fire, water, earth, wind and ether. Or there might be several. Almost the only information we have regarding the lords come from the elemental spirits, and they are not good with numbers or individuality.”
“Then why haven’t you asked one of these elemental lords directly?” Marik demanded.
A visible shudder ran through the entire group. “Not me!” Galton adamantly proclaimed.
“Or me,” Galiena agreed. “It’s worth more than your life to pester one of them.”
At Marik’s raised eyebrow, Inora explained. “There have been attempts before…though not in my lifetime that I know of. The elemental lords do not enjoy humans attempting to call them, nor especially to demand services from them. Each approach has ended in…unpleasant consequences.”
Unconventionally…
She shrugged. Shanahan offered, “Basically, think of pure, raw, unadulterated elemental force. With a mind. We have no real gauge for their strength, except to say the strongest geomancers in history who attempted to form alliances with them ended up as dust in the wind.”
“Or liquid running across the floor,” the first witch added.
Marik thought about that for a long moment. He felt the slight clicking deep within his mind that he had experienced before. “Right,” he firmly announced, then retrieved his cloak from the standing rack beside the door.
“Where are you going?” Inora asked.
“Over to Trask’s camp. I want to ask the prisoners a few questions of my own.”
Chapter 09
A light breeze blew over the palace walls. Marik had found a balcony that he could easily access from the hallway outside the council’s meeting chamber. It afforded a view over northern Thoenar and the flatlands beyond.