As the light of the lamps penetrated the darkness it illuminated old wooden cupboards and tables. Cery felt his heart sink with disappointment. He wasn’t sure what he had been hoping to see. Hidden treasure, maybe? A better place to hide?
They moved inside the room. As the light of all three lamps filled the space, Cery felt apprehension replace his earlier anticipation. The room was clean. There was no dust or rubble. He moved to one of the tables. It was covered in small pots. Each contained earth and a tiny plant.
“Are we at the fa—” Gol began.
“Quiet!” Anyi gasped.
Cery and Gol turned to see that she was peering up a narrow staircase, holding her lamp away from the well so that its light wouldn’t penetrate. They moved closer and, as they joined her, heard voices above. There was the creak of a handle being turned.
Without another word, they fled into the tunnel, Gol pulling the door closed behind him. Cery’s heart was beating so quickly his chest hurt. Anyi put her eye to the spy hole and Gol set his ear to the door. Amused, Cery gently pulled a silently protesting Anyi aside and took her place at the spy hole.
The room beyond was no longer dark. Something bright was moving down the stairwell. He felt a wry relief as he saw a magical globe of light appear, then two magicians descend into view. One was an old woman, the other a young man.
“What’s happening,” Anyi murmured.
“Magicians. They’re looking around the room. Can you hear them, Gol?”
“Faintly.” The big man replied. “One said he thought he heard something. The other agreed.”
The two magicians shook their heads and walked toward the tables. The male one picked up a plant, then put it down with obvious careless anger.
“The old woman asked something. The young one says he’s sure,” Gol reported. He paused, and Cery could hear the faint sound of voices. He signalled for silence, then pressed his ear to the door.
“So we’ve been tricked,” the woman said. She didn’t sound surprised.
“Yes, as you suspected we would be,” the younger magician replied. “If you smoked this... this common garden weed, you’d get nothing but a headache.”
“Well, we knew getting hold of roet would not be easy.”
Roet? Cery felt something hot race through his veins. The Guild wants to grow roet?
“We’ll just have to keep trying,” the woman continued. “Skellin must be growing it somewhere – and growing a lot. Eventually someone will betray him, if we offer enough money.”
“All we need are a few seeds.”
“I wish that we didn’t need any.”
The voices were growing quieter. Cery put his eye to the spy hole again and watched them ascend the stairs, the magic light rising ahead of them. When all light disappeared abruptly, he guessed that the door above the stairs had been closed. He pulled away from the spy hole, closing its cover, and described what he’d heard to Anyi and Gol.
“What does the Guild want roet for?” Anyi asked, scowling at the door.
“Maybe it has potential as a cure,” Gol suggested.
“Maybe,” Cery echoed. “Maybe more than a few Guild magicians are addicted to it now, and they want to take control of their supply out of Skellin’s hands.”
“Perhaps they want to put Skellin out of business,” Gol said. “Then when they control all trade, stop growing it.”
Anyi turned to stare at him, horrified. “What about all the common people who are addicted to it? It would be... people would go mad!”
“The Guild has never stopped the underworld acquiring anything it wanted,” Cery reminded her.
His daughter did not look reassured. “It’s never going away, is it?” she said, her eyes wide with realisation. “We’re stuck with roet forever.”
“Probably,” Cery agreed.
Gol nodded. “But maybe if the Guild gets hold of some, and studies it, they’ll find a way to stop it being so addictive.”
Anyi still looked glum. “I guess, as an escape route, this is no better than fleeing into the University”
Cery looked at the door. “We don’t know if whatever is above that cellar is occupied by magicians all the time. It will probably be guarded by someone, if they get more seeds and try again, but that could be just a servant or two.”
“Skellin is more likely to follow us through there than into the University,” Gol added. “So it might be a good play to lay our trap.”
“Might be. But let’s not tell the Guild we know they’re trying to grow rot until we have to.”
* * *
“Bad memories?”
Sonea looked at Regin in surprise. Was it that obvious? Since the carriage had begun its slow ascent into the mountains she had been pushing aside dark and gloomy feelings. At first she’d dismissed it as weariness and worry, but then she would see some feature – a tree or rock – and feel sure she’d noticed it the last time she had travelled this road. But surely her mind was playing tricks on her. My memory can’t be that good.
Not sure how to answer Regin’s question, she shrugged. He nodded and looked away. She’d thought at first that their conversations had dwindled to silence because he was distracted by the view outside. Unlike her, he had never travelled this road before. Now she wondered if the silence was her fault. She hadn’t felt like talking for some time now.
Is that the place we stopped? A gap had opened in the trees, revealing fields and roads stretching into the distance, divided by rivers, roads and other human-made boundaries. The trees seemed small, however. Surely they would have grown taller in the last twenty years. But objects tend to be larger in our memories. Though... I thought that only applied to objects remembered from childhood, because we were smaller then.
“What is it?” Regin asked.
She realised she had been leaning forward, craning her neck to better see the outside. Leaning back in her seat, she shrugged.
“I thought I recognised something.” She shook her head. “A place we stopped, last time.”
“Did... something happen there?”
“Not really. Nobody said much during that journey.” She couldn’t help a smile. “Akkarin wouldn’t talk to me.” But I kept finding him looking at me. “He was angry with me.”
Regin’s eyebrows rose. “For what?”
“For making sure they sent me into exile with him.”
“Why would he be angry at that?”
“His plan – or so I thought at the time – was to get himself captured by Ichani and communicate the result to all magicians.”
Regin’s eyes widened slightly. “A brave decision.”
“Oh, very honourable,” she said drily. “Shock the Guild into realising the danger it faced while sacrificing the only person who could do anything about it.”
His eyebrows rose. “But he wasn’t. There was you.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t know enough. I didn’t even know how to make blood rings. We wouldn’t have beaten the Ichani if he hadn’t survived.” But that wasn’t why you followed him, she reminded herself. You did so because you couldn’t let Akkarin die. Love is selfish. “By forcing him to keep me alive, I forced him to keep himself alive.”
“Those weeks must have been terrifying.”
She nodded, but her thoughts suddenly shifted to the Traitors. She’d always suspected there was more to Akkarin’s time in Sachaka than he’d told her. Once, when checking facts for his book, Lord Dannyl had asked her if there was any truth to the rumour that Akkarin had been able to read a person’s surface thoughts, without touching them. She could not remember Akkarin speaking of it. People had believed Akkarin had all kinds of extraordinary abilities, even before it had been revealed that he’d learned black magic.
Perhaps he had been able to, but kept it a secret. Like his deal with the Traitors. Made with the Traitor Queen, no less, though maybe she hadn’t yet become queen. I’m sure he told me the person who taught him black magic was a man. Was it a deliberate lie, to he
lp conceal the Traitors’ existence? I can’t help feeling a little hurt that he didn’t trust me with the truth, but then I wouldn’t have wanted him to break a promise made to somebody who saved his life.
Sighing, she looked out of the window at the sun, which hung low in the sky. Her memory of the end of the climb to the Fort was of exposed rock and little vegetation. While stretches of rock were visible here and there, the trees had not yet thinned to the degree she recalled. We’re going to arrive later than I planned – maybe even after dark.
A sharp turn to the side forced her to brace herself. Surprised, she leaned close to the window, wondering why the carriage had changed direction, and blinked at the unexpected brightness of a tall, curved wall blazing yellow in the late sun ahead of them.
Not late after all, she thought. Trees must have grown over all that bare land I remembered.
“We’re here,” she told Regin. He moved to sit beside her so that he could look out of the window on the other side.
She watched his face, glimpsing echoes of the awe she’d felt as a young woman on seeing the Fort for the first time. The building was a huge cylinder carved out of solid rock, encompassing the gap between two high, near-vertical rock walls. Turning back to the window, she saw that the facing wall was not the flawless smooth surface that she remembered. A different-colour stone had been used to fill large cracks and holes. They must be repairs of damage done during the Ichani Invasion. She shivered, remembering the battle here, seen by all magicians as the Warrior leading the Fort’s reinforcements, Lord Makin, had broadcast it mentally, until he died at the hands of the invaders.
The carriage rolled to a halt before the tower. A red-robed magician and the captain of the Fort’s unit of Guard walked forward to meet them. Sonea unlatched and opened the door with magic, then paused to look at Regin. The excitement in his face made him look younger – almost boyish. It brought a flash of memory of him as a smiling young man, but she didn’t entirely believe that memory was real. In her recollections of him at that age, his smile had been always full of malicious triumph or glee.
Not for a long time, though, she thought as she climbed out of the carriage. Actually, I don’t remember him smiling much this last year. Unless with forced politeness, or maybe in sympathy. To her surprise, she felt sad. He’s a very unhappy man, she realised.
“Greetings, Black Magician Sonea,” the red-robed magician said. “I am Watcher Orton. This is Captain Pettur.”
The captain bowed. “Welcome to the Fort.”
“Watcher Orton.” Sonea inclined her head. “Captain Pettur. Thank you for the warm welcome.”
“Are you still planning to stay for the night?” Orton asked.
“Yes.” The title of Watcher had been created for the leader of the magicians who now guarded the Fort along with their non-magician counterparts. The Guild had been worried that no magician would volunteer for the role, so they had given it extra benefits of both influence and wealth. They hadn’t needed to. Watcher Orton and his predecessor were both men who had fought the Sachakan invaders and were determined to ensure none would enter Kyralia again without a decent effort at resistance.
“Come this way,” Orton invited, waving toward the open gates at the base of the tower.
Sonea felt a shiver of recognition as she saw the tunnel beyond. They walked into the shadows of the interior. Lamps kept the way illuminated, revealing more repair work, and the traps and barriers that had been added.
“We have a memorial to those who died here at the beginning of the invasion,” Orton told her. He pointed to a section of wall ahead, and as they drew closer Sonea saw that it was a list of names.
Reaching them, she stopped to read. She saw Lord Makin’s name but the rest were unfamiliar. Many of the victims had been common Guard. At the top of the list were longer names that included House and family – men from the highest class who had sought a career in the Guard and were guaranteed a position of power and respect. The men working at the Fort in those days, however, had often been failures or troublemakers, sent to where it was believed they could do no harm – or, if they did, it was well out of the sight of anyone who cared.
Above those were the magicians. The family and House names were familiar, but she had been too young and new to the Guild to have known any of the magicians personally. Except one.
Fergun’s name drew her eyes. She felt an uncomfortable mix of dislike, pity and guilt. He had been a victim of the war. For all that he had done, he hadn’t deserved to die by having all the energy within him ripped out by a Sachakan magician.
But that still doesn’t change the fact that he wasn’t a good person.
At that thought, the conflicting emotions faded away. She understood it was possible to feel sadness at the injustice of a person’s death without having to convince herself that they were a better person than she’d known them to be.
And he got a Stayhouse named after him. She turned away. Which I’m sure would have appalled him for entirely different reasons than it appalled me.
Watcher Orton led them to a dark, narrow door. A complicated procedure followed, in which he identified himself, the captain and their visitors, and then all kinds of sounds followed as a locking mechanism was worked. When the door opened, she was amused to see it was a hand-span thick and made of iron. They entered a room, then went through the same procedure to pass through another, equally robust door. The occupants of the Fort were not taking any chances.
A narrow, curved passage with a sloped floor led steeply upwards. The ends of pipes protruding on either side suggested that something could be poured into the space. Water, or something less pleasant? Physical defences wouldn’t necessarily stop a magician, but they could use up power, trick a magician into lowering his guard, or surprise one before he or she could find an appropriate way to counter it. The passages were designed as a labyrinth to confuse and disorientate, and allow fleeing occupants time to escape.
When they had reached the end of the passage, Orton paused to look at her.
“I hope you weren’t relying on the Sachakans being unaware of your arrival here.”
She looked at him and felt a shiver run down her spine.
“Why?”
“We’re sure the road is being watched. Patrols have found tracks and other evidence on the Kyralian side of the mountains. Of course, we can only observe the Sachakan side from afar, but our watchers have seen small groups of men moving about.”
“Ichani?”
Orton frowned. “I suspect not. Ichani don’t carry good-quality rations. Whoever it is, they aren’t concerned about hiding their tracks when they do venture over our side. I suspect because they don’t realise they have. It’s not as though we have painted a line where the border lies.”
The thought that the Ichani made a habit of wandering into Kyralia was not a comforting one. But the outcasts who inhabited the mountains had always been a disorganised rabble, preying on each other more often than the occasional unfortunate traveller. The humbling fact was, the invaders who had nearly overtaken Kyralia had only done so because one of them had the strength of will to unite a handful of them – and it had taken him years to do so.
An organised Sachakan army would have been unstoppable. Might still be. And here she was, one of Kyralia’s few weapons of defence, heading into Sachaka itself to rescue her son. I have to hope that Kallen and Lilia are defence enough, if the Sachakans take advantage of my absence. One a roet addict. One a naïve young woman. Suddenly she felt light-headed and nauseous.
Time to stop thinking about that, she told herself.
“Who do you think these people are, then?” she asked.
“Spies.”
“Of the Sachakan king?”
Orton nodded. “Who else could they be?”
Who else, indeed.
Several twisting passages later, they arrived at a dining room large enough to seat ten people. It was laid out with impressively fine tableware. Three women and two men
stood waiting to be introduced. Two minor captains and their wives, and the wife of an absent captain. Orton invited them all to sit, took his place and asked a servant to bring the meal.
The food was surprisingly good. Orton explained that he believed good food did wonders for the morale of the people here, who must always live far from Imardin and with the threat of possible invasion. Local farmers and hunters benefited from the trade, too. Yet the meal was not an entirely relaxed one. They were interrupted several times by guards bringing messages or making reports. At first Sonea listened attentively, assuming that something important must have happened, but it became clear that this was simply a routine that was never abandoned – not even during dinner with a high-ranking magician.
The other guests were used to this, and barely paused in their conversation. Sonea only realised that she had stopped paying attention to the reports when Orton interrupted a conversation she was having with Captain Pettur.
“Black Magician Sonea,” he said, his tone grave and formal.
She turned to see that, despite his calm expression, his eyes betrayed anxiety.
“Yes, Watcher Orton?”
“A strange message just arrived.” He handed her a piece of paper, folded in odd, converging lines. “The guards on duty who received it said it glided through the air like a bird, and landed at their feet.”
She looked at the neat writing and her heart skipped a beat, though whether in excitement or trepidation she couldn’t decide.
We advise Black Magician Sonea to remain at the Fort until safe passage can be arranged. Instructions will follow soon.
A symbol had been drawn underneath the writing: a circle with a spiral scrawled within. Lorkin had described it to Administrator Osen, saying that it was one the Traitors had told him they would use to identify themselves. She felt a thrill of excitement. Soon she would be judging for herself the people who had impressed Lorkin so much, and who had helped Akkarin escape slavery all those years ago.
Sonea suspended the paper in the air with magic and set it alight. The other guests murmured in surprise as it quickly turned to ash. She turned to Orton and smiled. “I don’t think those spies are going to be a problem for much longer, Watcher Orton.”
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