Engaging Evil (Warriors of Vhast Book 2)

by Cary J Lenehan

  Asvayujau be with her, at least it will be a good lesson…one way or the other.

  ~~~

  Later that day Rani trooped all of the apprentices to the roof and explained what they were seeing; the charged diagram and the jade statue being prepared as the receptacle for the real spell that would be held within it in a matrix. “The spell preparing the jade lies in the realm of earth. Theodora is an air mage, so this bit will be hardest for her in some ways, but it is a charm that is well within her limits for the day.”

  They are impressed as Theo-dear casts the spell. “That was the easy part,” she said, as she picked up the jade mouse and carefully re-wrapped it. “We now have to be careful what spells are cast near this as it is empty and wanting to be filled. A prepared holding spell like this is greedy and will take in any spell that it can into its store until it is filled and locked. It would be best to do the rest of the spell straight away, but I cannot do that. To be cautious, none of us will cast another spell or even practice any at all until the spell is complete.”

  ~~~

  I am not sure how I feel about my growing domesticity. My lover is taking me to choose a house. I only have to approve one that my Princess has already chosen, a large empty building at the head of the courtyard against the cliff, and directly behind the spring. It is the one that we originally came down on from the cliff. Given how small most of the houses are in the village, I think it is very roomy for just the four of us. We have a kitchen and rooms for each of us, including Fear and Verily. There are two spare bedrooms, another two rooms that we can use as studies, and a courtyard at the rear. Off that are storerooms and a washhouse. There is an area for toiletries, a flat roof to put pentagrams on, a large room for dining, and a larger reception room at the front.

  “If we are going to be Princesses here, we will need areas to work and then we will need to receive people at some stage,” said Rani.

  “I am sorry that it is so small,” said Theodora. “Apart from taverns, I have never had to live in anything as tiny as this. Even where I played as a child was bigger.”

  “Yes, but you grew up as a real Princess—and with an Empire to look after you. We now live in a very small village. Look around you, dear. We have taken the largest house in Mousehole. It is the biggest by many rooms.” My Princess may know this, but she still expects more. “We still need to get it repaired. We can move in before it is finished, but with winter upon us, and being at the foothills of the mountains, we need it to be as weatherproof as possible. Having some doors will be a start, and some leather or waxed cloth at least to fill in the windows. Whoever built this village had some interesting ideas with plumbing.”

  “You mean that you do not have them like that in Sacred Gate?” asked Theodora.

  “Like almost everyone else in the world, my dear, we used pretty buckets. You mean these are normal for you?” I may ignore such things, but I am sure that I have never seen or heard of such pipes and levers that let water run through them before.

  ~~~

  The next day—Deutera—the second of the week, the students stood in a line on the roof waiting for the start of the fourth hour after noon. It is back to basics as I explain the times, how mana storage devices work, how the now-full and covered pots are placed and why, and show them all of the other correspondences. “We will go into more detail later. Remember that what you are about to see is a large amount of potential mana converted into bound and constrained mana by a spell, which is controlled and focussed mana. We will also be using the bound and restrained mana of the diagram to aid the success of the spell.” She studied their faces. I am seeing only blank looks. “Never mind, I will show you what I just said later. Now just be quiet and watch. Theodora may be the most powerful mage that you ever get to see. She is a lot older than I am, so she has had far more practice. There will be some in Pavitra Phāṭaka who are more powerful than her, but I think not that many. This spell should be beyond even her powers, it is the sort that only Hrothnog, of all living mages, would normally do. But my clever Theodora has worked out a way to, hopefully, safely do something that a mage of twice her skill might perhaps question.” Does that sound hollow? They seem happy with the explanation. Why is it not obvious to them that I am trying hard to sound more confident than I feel? Oh my dear Princess, I hope you are right. I cannot lose you. Sri Dhatr protect you/

  At the propitious time of four in the afternoon, Theodora started reading her newly written enchantment from her book held by the apprentice Goditha. I wait in my new, smaller, and uncharged pentagram to pass on my mana when she needs it. The spell is taking a very long time to read. She nods at me. Rani chanted the few needed words of passage and pointed her finger at Theodora. Now all can see my love shudder as my mana, her own mana, and the mana from our storage devices combined in her head. Now it is real. Now is the time things can go most wrong. She is saying the final words and pointing at the jade mouse…

  It has gone quiet. I can hear murmurs from the people going about their business below, but here on the roof my students are as quiet as… well…mice.

  She nervously looked around. There are no manifestations of free magic that I can see, all the colours are still the same, the bricks are not bulging, there are no odd shadows moving in the air, my Princess is still standing there seemingly unharmed, so she seems to have made no bad errors and her careful preparations seem to have overcome the massive penalties of such a cast for her. “Beloved, can you hear me? Did it work?”

  Very carefully Theodora moved outside the charged diagram. “I think so; I felt as if it did. I may have even been lucky and done it better than I expected to. I felt…elation when it was done.” She is able to move towards the door. “Now I need to rest.” She is collapsing.

  Rani moved to catch her. “Goditha, Naeve, help me get her to our room. We will need sweet drinks for her. Hulagu, take the others and pick up the pots and clean them carefully, make sure you disperse what is in them in the river so that nothing remains together. Take particular care that when you move to pick up the pots, that none of you touch the lines of the diagram. Come back to me when you are finished.”

  ~~~

  After a day Rani took Theodora outside the valley and attempted to probe it just with their normal senses and then with actual castings. They couldn’t and Theodora came back very pleased with herself. She insisted on celebrating that night and enjoyed so much of it over the success of her casting that she had to be carried to her bed. Rani spent the night beside the bed with a very concerned Fear and a bucket.

  ~~~

  I suppose it is fair that Goditha and Parminder shall use our guest room instead of staying in the barracks, in return for working on our house first. She admitted she wanted to be out of there as soon as she could. “Parminder and me art still in our old room and it hath too many memories for us both. I doth hope that bein’ away from there wilt help with Parminder’s dreams.”

  It seems that others need to work here as well. Now we have Dulcie, a woman in her twenties from the Swamp who, like Goditha, has taken a trade by default. Dulcie is the best carpenter among the Mice. She is also one of Harald’s suitors. Soon the sound of our village has become one of the two women working, with the blows of hammer on iron or of a bolster working on stone echoing sharply through the air.

  ~~~

  Fire is good for killing and creating light and I am good at both. My lover favours Air and that is best for spells affecting the mind and for flying. Information is the province of Earth and we have no earth mages yet, but some priests work in that area. Our priest just needed to be shown need and the idea. Father Christopher has developed his first major prayer that lay outside curing or protection. He seems to be very pleased with himself as he is reporting that he can now find the function of up to sixteen of the magical items they had lying around. “It will be every second day anyway, even for just one, so I may as well do more when I do. While we just sit here I have no problem with using a small storage device
. I have already made that.”

  Isn’t smugness a sin?

  It is with relief that it turns out that we have a device in a small box with five little stones inside it all of the same size and as big as a small fist. Each is been pierced and can be worn around the neck on a string. Using it, up to five people can talk to each other. I think it needs to be called a Talker. If we leave one part with a mage, one with the lookout, one with the roof guard, and one with Naeve, or whoever was going away to the furthest field or to the mine, that will work. I have no use for the last one as yet. It would have been nice to have sent Thord out with it.

  Chapter XXV

  Thord

  Thord saddled Hillstrider and set out to find where the path behind the village went. I have missed this. Looking back to a village slowly waking up after the wedding of Eleanor and Robin I can see a slowly stirring settlement. It is so much a part of the cliff and the valley that it can almost be Dwarven. Breathing in I smell the smell of sheep. Beneath me the saddle feels solid. A snuffling noise tells me that Hillstrider is more than glad to be out of the stable.

  They went down the gentle slope that led to the rivulet and around and up the slope on its right flank as it curved beneath them. I will go up ridge or valley, once we find the way. To me the river looks too flat to go properly up a pass. I wonder… He pushed through the vegetation. Going up the ridge, we are following what is an old path. Now I am past where it curved around to the mines and the quarry, it probably hadn’t been used since Mousehole was abandoned. The start of it is even harder to see. Now that I am through that screen of scrub I can just make it out. The path abandons the ridgeline completely and begins to make its way along the increasingly steep slope… Now I am travelling along a path set into a natural ledge in the face of the cliff and it is quickly narrowing.

  I can see that in places it has been partly carried away at the edges, but in other areas it is still solid and flat, even if overgrown. As the sheep and rider climbed they had to cross a stream that steamed in the cool autumn air. Hillstrider snorted at the heat from it. The water course went another two paces from the path and then curved through the air as it fell into the rivulet below. Dismounting and checking his footing, Thord edged forward. The fall is sheer and is already around forty paces. This is the hot spring.

  The path curved to the left as it followed the rivulet below. It is more evidently a path now, cut into the more steeply sloping hill that looms above it. The track way is damp and slippery with undisturbed mosses and small plants. Hillstrider snatched mouthfuls and grazed as he moved. I am content with the path. It will be wide enough to drive animals along, even to pass someone coming the other way if both parties are careful.

  Below him the valley had become uncultivated. At first there were patches of thick woods, and boulders that had slid down from the slope opposite and landslides of scree. As they had climbed for some time, the path reversed its curve and went to the right around a spur of the hill as the valley itself bowed around. Ahead of me I can see that the valley narrows until all that is below is the rivulet forcing its way through and under fallen rock. It is just as well I decided to follow the ridge rather than the valley.

  I am around the curve I can now see where our rivulet comes from. Some way ahead there was a waterfall above him and falling at least four hundred paces in a couple of drops to the rivulet, which was now two hundred paces below him. He looked ahead. Where is the path? Can I get up? It cannot just disappear. What I am riding on must, after all, go somewhere. Excited, he pressed ahead to discover that the path ran damply beneath the falls through a moss-covered cave and continued steeply up the other side of the valley. After another few hundred paces it changed direction again at a flat wide spot and ran back towards the falls, stopping well short. It reversed and did this again. This time it almost reached the falls and he could feel the dampness from its flow, the rock beneath the feet of his sheep was wet and the top of the falls was now a hundred paces above him. Here it again changed direction and headed away from the falls. We have bays cut back into the rock. This must be where you pass something that is wide. At the sharp bends there are even shelters that will hold a few people or a rider and a mount. Unless you knew how to look, they are almost invisible from below, cut into the rock behind the roadway. Someone had once done a lot of work on this way up the cliff.

  At last we are at the falls…I wonder where that side path goes. Thord dismounted and went down a few worked steps to a carved platform. There he looked down over a stone rail and the edge and saw the drop ahead. What a climb it will make to come up that. He chuckled. So they want to learn to climb do they? Wait until they see what their graduation from my school will be. Turning around and going up the last piece of slope he found himself at the bottom end of a new valley, one that was much larger and far flatter than the one below. The rivulet disappeared winding into the distance on a wide plain. This has to be where the original Mice grazed their animals in summer. Even now it might be worth bringing them up here for a few weeks. I wonder if we can get the cart up here. The grass, heavy with seed, is rippling in the gentle breeze. It is long and lush—not grazed, except possibly by some small animals. Looking over the upland plain there is no sign of any grazers at all. Why not? Whether or not the mines are successful, here is the real long-term wealth of Mousehole. If I show this valley to the people of Kharlsbane, they would likely want to move here. Their grazing is in many small valleys and animals have to be shifted from one to the other by shepherds. Behind the valley is the first chain of the real mountains and behind them somewhere, but probably in front of the taller peaks behind, lies Dwarvenholme. Mousehole lays at least a thousand paces below him.

  It is just as well that I said I could be up here for a week and that they should not worry until then. It will take a lot more time than that to explore everything here. I’d better get to work.

  There is a lot to see.

  ~~~

  Towards the end of the last day of his allotted six, Thord returned down the valley. As he came down the path he waved at Naeve, who was out with her flocks. She has spotted me and signals back. I will go over.

  On being told of the secret trail, Naeve confided that, in all of the time she had been in the valley, she had never realised it existed. Even though I have had just come down it, the path is really invisible until you know where to look for it. As they chatted they gathered the flocks and brought them back to their folds.

  That night as they sat at dinner Thord told everyone about the valley. Thord, the Shepherd, was in his element. He and Naeve wanted to move some of the flocks up there for some late grazing starting tomorrow. I can see that Giles doesn’t like the idea, but Naeve is glaring at him and he is relenting. It seems, unlike most of the Human places I have heard of, the women have the situation well in hand in the valley.

  I am glad they are all pleased with what I have said. My other report, just for the Princesses, will not be as good. If some attackers are good climbers and have motivation, then I have found places where they could enter the top valley and so come down the trail.

  “We have to assume that these Masters know of the top valley,” said Rani. “That means whoever is up there must have the last Talker. As well, when they bring the flocks down for winter we will need to put something up there to alert us to anything coming through the back door. We need to go up to see how far the hiding spell reaches anyway. So my dear, you know what your next device is, if the Father cannot find something useful with what is left in the magic horde.”

  ~~~

  The next day Thord left again for the top pasture. This time he had Naeve with him. Behind they left it for others to take over caring for the flocks that were being kept in the lower valley. They took the whole flock of sheep with them and some of the cattle. Seeing that he was no longer exploring, Thord rode at the front of the flocks and tried to stay in the middle of the path. Across his saddle he had tied a stick. It is a little longer than the width of their car
t. This will give us an idea if the cart will make it up and back. If it can’t, then we cannot bring many of the milking animals up.

  There had been a lot of talk last night about what we need. Giles told me he had made cheese before being brought to Mousehole and some more since. Now that he can do as he wishes, he wants to make and set aside a lot more to give us added winter supplies for next year. He is already making some of the soft and easy cheeses, but they don’t keep for long. Now he wants to cheddar some. The bandits didn’t trust the slaves much and brought a lot of their winter food in from raids, but Rani, after talking with some of the Mice, had decided to try to avoid having to rely on the outside world if we possibly could. Some food had already arrived for the winter before we freed the valley, but we will perhaps still be a little hungry this year. She does not want that to continue into the next year. I approve of that. I don’t like being hungry and, although we still have plenty of dried food, that is best kept for the trail. Dried food tastes better when you have to just bolt it down.

  Chapter XXVI

  Father Christopher

  Over the next few days Father Christopher found time to finish looking at the magical items they had horded. Most of these are, of course, weapons. It is sad that people are much more eager to kill each other than to be charitable, but we also have a few more interesting objects. I have told the Princesses about a few and given some to people who could use them, and yet others I have put aside to go with us next spring. Several are very hard to place. What do we do with a hall-runner carpet that, when it is unrolled across a gap turns rigid and acts as a bridge? How can we use this? At the very least I can let people look at the other side of their little river without getting cold and wet. Astrid likes looking in their small patch of forest. How she knew that it had been untouched for five hundred years, and probably at least twice that long, I still don’t know.