The Sleeping God (The Disinherited Prince Series Book 4)

by Guy Antibes

  Namion continued to ride alone and looked back at the trio from time to time. Pol could imagine the man gnashing his teeth.

  ~

  The Council of Malcia included more participants than Pol had imagined. Homan gave him the impression that most of the sessions were between magicians on one side and the Church on the other. Representatives from farming districts, merchants, manufacturers, and even another delegation from King Ricord’s administration milled around the large hall built expressly for the annual event.

  “And you expect us to protect the Prelate in all of this?” Fadden said.

  “There are soldiers available, too,” Pol said. “We will be floating around listening and assessing threats from the crowds.” He looked at the balcony and spotted Namion, with both hands on the railing, looking over the assembly. “Have someone keep an eye on him. He can point out threats, as well.”

  Fadden turned his eyes on Namion. “If he stays up there.”

  “At least your rival is far away from you. Isn’t that right?” Shira said.

  Fadden grumbled something. He had been considerably more pleasant before Namion had intruded.

  The Prelate walked up to them. “Are you ready to protect me?”

  Pol looked at Captain Deaz, who had a cut on his cheek.

  “Do you want me to close that up for you?” Pol said.

  Deaz bowed. “If you would.”

  “It might leave a little scar,” Pol warned.

  The Captain broke into a smile. “All the better.”

  Pol put his hand to the soldier’s cheek and sealed the wound. “Just wipe away the scab.”

  “Thank you. Now that you’ve joined us, I feel better about leaving the Prelate in your care.” Deaz bowed to Homan and left them. A few soldiers remained, and some accompanied him out the door.

  “He saw action to the west,” Homan said. “There were a few more of the Botarrans than he expected, so he had to get his sword out. That is good for the man.”

  “Were there many dead?” Loa asked.

  “The Botarrans turned and ran like they usually do once the battle’s outcome was clear.” Homan turned to Shira. He smiled. “Are we all shielded?”

  “Yes.” Shira said.

  Pol noticed that she didn’t use any kind of honorific. The Prelate didn’t seem to mind. He looked for seats but didn’t find any. “No one sits?”

  Homan nodded. “It keeps the sessions shorter,” he said quietly to Pol.

  The Prelate had no more standing in the Council than anyone else it seemed, but then a horn sounded. Four men walked into the hall, and the participants parted as they walked to the head of the hall. Homan joined them, and the five sat at empty seats behind a raised dais. All of them followed Homan. Fadden, Paki, and Kell took positions in front of Homan, facing out.

  Pol led Loa and Shira to the edge of the crowd beneath the balcony opposite from Namion, who still looked on from above. People began to fill in around him, but Namion kept his position.

  “I’m not sure which is a more defensible position,” Pol said. He noticed clusters of Fistyran soldiers, stationed around the hall.

  One of the men rose from his seat and raised his arms to quiet the crowd.

  “There are conditions for attending the council, and I will announce them now before we formally begin. If you are here to cause trouble, you will be cast out. There are soldiers and magicians spread around the crowds who will not tolerate disruption.” The man sat back down.

  Homan rose and opened a portfolio that he had been carrying. He read, using quite a few words that Pol didn’t understand. They must have been legal terms from the context of his statement.

  Pol dragged his two companions around the floor. If he didn’t understand what Homan said, they wouldn’t either. He began looking for nervous people or shifting eyes, anything that would indicate tension.

  He found plenty of tension, but it was general in nature. Pol suddenly realized that he couldn’t complete an appropriate pattern of the council without understanding the words. It was as if someone had put a veil over his eyes, and he could only see vague movements. The thought made him feel uncomfortable and incapable, and he felt inadequate as he roamed through the crowd.

  Pol hadn’t felt that way since before Malden Gastoria, his father’s magician, and Farthia Wissingbel, his tutor, began to expand his horizons. This was different from becoming depressed. Then he felt detached. But that wasn’t quite right. He didn’t have a sense of detachment, but of not belonging. His mind seemed fuzzy and confused.

  He turned to Shira, who was breathing heavily. Deep inside he screamed at himself. He was being ensorcelled. His awareness of the effect deadened the feeling. Pol checked his mind-control shield, but it was still intact. Someone had found a different means to affect the participants of the council.

  He leaned towards Shira. “We are under a spell.”

  “A spell?” She looked at Pol, confused. Her eyes widened. “A spell! Can you see anything?”

  Pol put his hand on her head and saw light-blue bubbles with yellow spikes on her brain. Where had he seen colorful spells? He furrowed his brows and glanced at the two girls. The fortress wards!

  No wonder his shields didn’t work. This was something new to Pol. “It’s a ward of some kind. Try to remove it from my head.”

  “But I can’t see inside,” Shira said.

  “You can’t always see wards, right? Use the same tweak.”

  She closed her eyes and didn’t even touch Pol, but suddenly it seemed like the sun had risen in the room. He did the same to Loa and her.

  “How did you feel?” Pol asked Loa.

  “Useless. I’ve never felt that way before, even in my darkest time in the fortress.”

  Pol thought for a moment. “I’ll bet the Pontifer uses this spell to break his women. I thought they were drugged, but I think they were in a state similar to depression.”

  “And the Pontifer would be there when the spell was broken,” Shira said. “He might be perceived as their savior.” She shivered.

  Pol could see she was thinking of herself. He closed in on a magician and didn’t see the ward. Pol thought of a new tweak to his location sense and looked out among the crowd with it, seeking light-blue spots with yellow dots. The image worked.

  He held onto his sense as he walked to the closest cluster. Three soldiers stood, looking morose. Pol removed the ward with one spell. The ward was as easy to defeat as the ones at the fortress. Whoever developed the pattern must not have realized they could be detected so easily.

  That didn’t make the council any less dangerous. He made his way towards the leaders of the council and could see three of the five men were spelled, Homan being one of them. Pol took care of their spells quickly, but he couldn’t think of a shield that might stop the wards from being applied again.

  Fadden, Paki, and Kell all had the wards applied. Pol erased them.

  “What did you do? I was daydreaming dark thoughts,” Fadden said.

  “Me, too,” Paki said. “I was thinking that women didn’t care for my charms.”

  “Is that a daydream?” Kell said.

  “Someone is spreading wards around. It isn’t the same as mind-control, but you can think of it as emotion control. You can’t see it, because it is applied inside the brain. However, you can find it by locating. I see it as a light-blue dot with yellow spots. I don’t know how you’ll perceive it, but if you tweak your location spell to find a ward, you should notice it.”

  Captain Deaz stood by himself, not far away. Pol could sense the ward.

  “Look at Captain Deaz with your magical eyes.”

  Fadden closed his eyes as people gave them disapproving glances. “Ah. My colors are different, but I can see what you mean. How do you eliminate a ward?”

  “Think of the color fading and drifting away or a bubble popping. Picture a physical effect, and then project it at the ward.”

  “Do you defeat all wards this way?” Fadden as
ked.

  Pol had to shake his head. “No. A master at wards can create a weave, and those have to be meticulously disassembled. The wards at the Magicians Circle fortress were large, but simply constructed like these. ”

  “Where did you see wards like that?”

  “Tesna,” Pol said. “The Abbot’s wards were superb, but Shira and I were able to defeat them. We can talk about all that later. Try to remove the ward from Captain Deaz.”

  Fadden concentrated while Pol watched on. The ward suddenly disappeared.

  The ex-Seeker grinned. “I washed it out.”

  “Good. Go to the soldiers in the hall and fix them. Whoever is doing this is trying to dull defenses. We now have to find who is attacking.”

  Pol and the girls walked around the hall until he stood underneath Namion, but whoever dealt out the spells hadn’t reached the balcony. He motioned Namion down to join him.

  “What do you want?”

  “Can you see wards?”

  “What are wards?” Namion said.

  Pol told him to look at yet another cluster of warded soldiers. “Look at them with your locator sense. Do the dots look different?”

  Namion took a while. “They are multi-colored. There are others in the room like that. I’ve never noticed spots like that before.”

  Pol duplicated the conversation he had with Fadden, except Namion pictured the spots being rent apart and fading away. “I don’t have a shield for this, but Fadden has left his post and is eliminating the wards. It would be nice if you did the same, with a priority on Fistyran soldiers.”

  Namion looked at Pol. “We work together?”

  Pol restrained smiling. “Of course. There are only four of us who can detect the wards, and there are hundreds of people in the room.”

  “We will talk of this later.”

  “When it isn’t so important to reduce the threat.”

  Namion nodded and went back towards the balcony. He stopped and closed his eyes. For the time being, they were a team, Pol thought.

  “Can you see the wards?” Pol asked Loa.

  She nodded her head. “I can see a faint glow in a person’s head.”

  “Have you tried to defeat the ward yet?”

  She nodded and gave him a self-conscious smile. She still was uncomfortable using magic.

  “Then Shira and you circulate together, and I’ll try to find out who is doing this.”

  Pol ran up the stairs to the balcony opposite the one that Namion had used. Whoever planted the wards hadn’t thought those in the balcony to be significant. Pol stood looking out at the crowd with his locator sense and with his eyesight, watching for wards to appear.

  He found a dot turning color and located three possible men. Pol noticed another dot appearing, and then another. The magician was re-warding a cluster of soldiers. Pol spotted the magician. He dressed like a Fistyran merchant, wearing a colored sash. The sash stood for a guild, but Pol had no idea which sash color went with which merchant group. He looked at the dais, with the participants still reading their positions, often using words that Pol struggled to understand. One of the two not warded was the merchant representative, and the other was the magician? No. Pol hadn’t noticed, but King Ricord’s representative was the other unaffected participant. Pol had removed the magician’s ward.

  Did Homan know or suspect? Pol would have thought the magician would have been involved, but no. That upset the political pattern that Pol had built. Now he realized that his confidence in the pattern that he had devised for Fistyra had been smashed by the actions of whoever spread the wards. He had to shake his head.

  He noted another change in color, and another magician dressed as a merchant also walked the floor. Luckily, the ward had to be applied individually. Pol didn’t know when the ward would be activated or used to influence the proceedings, so he felt pressed for time to eliminate the threat.

  He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He pictured a wave rolling in and soaking away the wards in the room. Pol grasped the railing and tweaked his mental pattern of the area, starting just below the dais and rolling through the room. People staggered as the mental wave washed through the council.

  Pol opened his eyes, and some people had dropped to the floor. He used his locator sense to verify that all the wards had been eliminated, but his act had halted council proceedings.

  “What was that?” the current speaker said.

  The leader of the magicians guild looked over those standing on the floor. Pol pulled out of sight back into the crowd of people in the balcony. His wave had drained him of his energy. He wondered how the abbot of the Tesnan Monastery could easily spread a mind-control spell over a room, when he felt too drained at what he had done? Pol might have simply used too much power.

  “A spell.” The magician paused and thought for a moment. “A benign spell,” he said. The magician raised his hands. “Let us take a break in the proceedings. We will reconvene at the top of the hour.”

  ~~~

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  ~

  Pol staggered down the stairs as people began to empty the hall. Homan stood talking to the King’s representative. Shira and Loa joined him, looking up at the Prelate.

  “Do you know what happened?” Homan asked.

  Pol shook his head. “Perhaps we should have a quiet conversation with the magicians guild representative.”

  Homan nodded and turned to the magician. King Ricord’s representative made to join them.

  “I’m sorry, not you, sir,” Pol said. “The Prelate will inform you if there is any need.”

  The man looked piqued, but nodded his assent and left the dais with the merchant’s representative. That union fit into Pol’s emerging pattern.

  Homan led the five of them out a back door into a garden.

  “What is this all about?” the magician’s guild representative said.

  “Someone was placing wards in the minds of those loyal to the magicians and to the Prelate.”

  The magician shook his head. “So that was what I felt.”

  “You were probably doubting how this council could succeed and why you were even sitting in council while everything was so hopeless?”

  “Not quite. Powerless would be a better word, but yes. So that was a ward? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  “Neither have I, but I found myself doubting my presence in the Council, while I stood listening to the proceedings. I stopped trying to concentrate on the legal terms. I haven’t learned Fistyran that well. My mind was dulled and getting duller, and then I realized I had to be under a spell. Shira, here, is an adept at wards and eliminated it. Then I dispelled your wards, and taught two others who have the ability to detect this specific ward to stop them as well.”

  “Did you disrupt the council?”

  “I did when I found out who was laying the wards.”

  Homan looked at the magician with accusing eyes.

  “No, not him,” Pol said. “The merchant guild and King Ricord’s emissary. They were the only two who were unaffected on the dais. The magicians who were spreading the wards were wearing merchants’ sashes. I’m sure they aren’t merchants.”

  “There are dreadful implications if what you saw is the truth.”

  “That’s why I washed the wards away.”

  The magician raised his eyebrows. “One massive tweak envisioned as a massive gust of wind?”

  Pol nodded. “A wave, actually. It wasn’t easy, and I’ll have to recover, but it was worth it. I think you two need to talk seriously about your relationship.”

  “Who are you to talk to either of us this way?” the magician said.

  “He is an extremely perceptive magician from the Empire. What they call a Seeker.”

  The magician huffed a bit. “I know what a Seeker is.” He looked at Pol more closely. “Do you report to Namion Threshell?”

  “No, but we are working together at the present. It is clear to see that Botarra seeks to gobble up Fist
yra, and with the South Parsimolians, take on Bossom.”

  “Madness,” the magician said.

  “Is it?” Homan looked at the magician. “Someone sent magicians to assault my priests in Bastiz. They wouldn’t have been your men, right?”

  “I wouldn’t do such a stupid thing.”

  Homan smiled and nodded. “It didn’t make sense to me either. If the Pontifer wants to saunter into Fistyra without much of a fight, what would he try to do to soften up his invasion?”

  “Take advantage of our deteriorating relationship?”

  Pol caught the pattern. “Why is it deteriorating?”

  The magician looked at Pol blankly.

  “Do you have magicians who can see wards?”

  “One or two. Most of our best magicians are promoted to Bossom.”

  Homan nodded. “Then I will write a missive to Bossom and have them send troops and magicians who can detect wards.”

  “Will that be acceptable?” the magician said to Pol.

  Pol shook his head. “I’m just a bystander, a busybody. I’m passing through on my way to Fassin. You don’t need my approval. You need to work with Homan and King Ricord, once the issue with his emissary is resolved.” Pol intended to see if the representative was under mind control as well.

  He left Homan and the magician talking when Captain Deaz approached with a squad of his men. Pol checked them for wards, but found them clean, and continued back into the hall.

  Pol noticed King Ricord’s representative talking to the merchants guild person. He walked over and introduced himself as a friend of Homan’s.

  “The magician boy,” the King’s man said.

  Pol put out his hand and the man took it. The physical contact gave Pol the opportunity to find the man clean from any mind control or ward. In one way, he was glad, and in another he knew that either King Ricord was playing with Homan, or this man was a traitor. He would leave it for Homan to decide, and he bowed to the two men and left them watching him as he left, or at least Shira told him that.

  Pol was getting ahead of himself. Who was he anyway? The representative called him ‘the magician boy’, and that was what he was. A bit of a prodigy, but Pol was still a boy and hard to take seriously. He didn’t know if his insight, which was an extension of his understanding of patterns, was a gift or a curse. He could see that advice coming from a sixteen-year-old was hard for some to accept.