The Splintered Eye (The War of Memory Cycle)

by H. Anthe Davis

  Had he been injured by his own actions, Geraad knew he would have been left to fend for himself, but the Citadel was not happy that one of its civilian mages had been imprisoned by the Golds.

  Rian rose up on his toes as Geraad passed, mimicking his walk to the door. He was a gangly, bald creature with grey-black skin and large childlike eyes, and in the little coat and britches a neighbor had made for him, he looked like a cheerful nightmare toddler. His prehensile tail swayed as he walked, keeping his balance.

  Geraad shooed him back as he reached the door. He had been warned to be cautious. As the primary training center for the Empire’s mages, the Citadel at Valent was open to all—including Golds. Though there had been no direct threats toward him, he had opted to stay in the safety of his suite as much as possible.

  The wards on the painted door were somnolent, untriggered, and Geraad looked through the peephole and saw only a small cloud-serpent coiling in the air. Its scales and ephemeral wings were pearl-white, and as he watched it shimmered again, sending out a faint ringing chime.

  With a sigh, he tapped the wards and murmured the disabling key. They flashed once, then the gears inside the door-frame groaned and turned. The door cracked open, and the cloud-serpent arched to attention and opened its little maw wide.

  ‘Warder Geraad Iskaen, your presence is required before the Council in one half-mark,’ came a cool, clinical voice from the elemental’s throat. ‘A palanquin awaits you at the third balcony.’

  “Required?” he said, worried, but the elemental closed its mouth and hung in the air, message complete. Geraad grimaced and dismissed it, and it zipped away down the stairs.

  He closed the door slowly, his stomach in a knot. He had never been summoned to the Council before, not even to discuss his case.

  “It must be about that,” he told himself aloud, and headed across the sitting-room to the bedroom for his winter robe. Technically it was the previous occupant’s winter robe; all of his personal belongings were still with his former employer in Fort Varence, near the Rift Climb. He had protested being assigned the suite of a Master Magus who had recently died in action, but it was common practice. Circle Magi were often estranged from their families, with tools and possessions that could not be passed along to common folk, thus most Master suites were furnished with the accumulated goods of past inhabitants. While the décor here—bearhide rugs and paneled walls, framed artificing schematics, welded tables, plush chairs and a well-stocked liquor cabinet—was not quite to Geraad’s taste, at least it meant he had access to a wardrobe.

  He struggled into a green robe-coat with fox-fur trim, then stared at the hat-tree in mystification and reluctantly selected the hat with the fewest feathers. In such attire, he felt dreadfully conspicuous and very un-Wyndish, but it was cold out. He had to make compromises.

  As he headed to the main door again, he heard Rian tiptoeing after him, and stopped in his tracks. Looking back, he saw the goblin frozen as well, spindly hands raised imploringly.

  “No, you can’t come,” he said.

  “Ys!” the goblin rejoined.

  “No. I know you hate being left alone but this is not a place you can go.”

  The goblin’s pointed ears drooped, and he gave Geraad the big-eyed, imploring look that ensured that Geraad had eaten no more than two bites of anything meat- or pastry-based in the last two weeks before handing it guiltily to the goblin. Even now, with his nerves on edge, the look made him waver.

  “It won’t be safe for you,” he said more gently. “I know they said I could keep you, but not everyone is kindly disposed toward your people, and you can’t come in with me. You’d be stuck with the constructs and guard-elementals. As fun as that might sound, it’s not an option.”

  The goblin’s pitiful look did not slacken. Geraad bit his lip, then said, “You can have the rest of the candied cherries in the cupboard.”

  With a squeal of victory, Rian whipped around and raced to the kitchen on all fours, tail lashing happily. Geraad shook his head as the clatter of opening cupboards began.

  “Just the cherries!” he called after, then headed out and closed the door behind him. A touch and the activating word, and the wards sealed tight, all the clockwork latches falling back into place.

  In the cool, ambient light from the column of the staircase, Geraad took a deep breath and started onward.

  There were no halls here. This was the Sea Tower, one of the six Master towers, and each floor held only four suites, one in each cardinal direction. Geraad’s was the north. His neighbors’ doors were closed, but looked as individual as each mage: striated red stone to the south, carved inkwood to the east, blank blue metal to the west. The door he had inherited was green, painted with blocky mystic symbols he only vaguely recognized, and beneath was mostly clockwork. If he stayed, he would make his own door. It was traditional.

  All the doors opened into a central circle of walkway around the grand staircase that cored the tower. A column of bubbling phantasmal water lit the descent, tiny golden fish flitting within.

  Geraad headed down, keeping his hands on the banisters despite the occasional flare of pain. The third balcony was two floors below, and he arrived quickly, the tails of his robe-coat flapping behind him. At the landing, a long, narrow passageway led outward, lit by bands of glowing coral on the walls. He followed it to the balcony door and pushed through with his forearms and a grimace of effort.

  A gust of cold air washed in as the door unsealed long enough to let him through. He held his hat down with his wrist and squinted in the late light. The balcony stretched like a white bib around this level of the tower, a few patches of flowers browning in the planters between the benches. Positioned only a few yards away was a palanquin with Council-sigiled curtains, four branded construct bearers, and a hare-shaped stepstool awaiting him.

  Beyond them, the Citadel at Valent stretched in all directions. Titanic walls of black obsidian ringed the wild collection of towers, artificing factories, terraced gardens, journeyman apartments and communes, initiate dormitories, casting domes, greenhouses, markets, and construct-transport depots, all draped in old harvest-festival banners or coated in whitewash and sigils. Residents and servitors moved like ants on distant walkways. Behind Geraad, the Sea Tower rose eight additional floors but did not quite surmount the rim of the great wall; below him, it descended sixteen floors to the broad mesh layer that served as the ground level. Beneath that, constructs and elementals and arcanely adapted sea-slimes did their janitorial and maintenance-work among the detritus of the city.

  Usually there would be Masters’ apprentices lingering on the balcony, taking the opportunity to escape the stifling confines of their teachers’ suites and chat amongst themselves, but the weather had gone crisp recently and like migratory birds, they had sought warmer climes. Geraad’s footfalls echoed emptily on the whitewashed stone.

  The hare-shaped stepstool scuttled into position as he approached. It was a construct itself, squat and stony, and he stepped up on it and parted the curtains, then swung into the padded seat and pulled his robe tight. As soon as he had settled, the constructs lifted the palanquin and started off.

  Geraad sat back and tried to quell his anxiety. He had done nothing wrong; the Master Scryer overseeing his case had assured him of that. Escape from confinement deemed unlawful by the Silent Circle was not a crime no matter how it had been committed, and if he was going to be interrogated by Valent mentalists, he would not have been called to the Council Tower. He would be headed to the Tower of the Inner Eye.

  He had been trained there and knew its ways well. Though he was now a Warder, he had been born with a talent for mentalism, and thus had come to the Citadel as a youth to learn to harness it. Anyone with even a smidge of mentalist ability was required to do so; as the only spontaneously-occurring magical talent, it could not be permitted to grow wild among the populace. His choice to become a Warder had been made at the behest of his patron, Count Varen, who wanted a bodyguard-ma
ge on staff, but he had still spent more time in the Tower of the Inner Eye than anywhere else in Valent.

  Now, he thought he might have to return there. Mentalist studies did not require hands.

  The palanquin’s interior was warmed by the heatstone between his feet, and he held his hands over it, trying to stretch his fingers. His path-superior and current protectress, Warder Archmagus Farcry, had suggested a few minor exercises as physical therapy, but it had been obvious despite the woman’s clinical mien that Geraad’s injuries disturbed her—as they would disturb any mage. They terrified Geraad; he could barely turn pages, and certainly could not write. Beneath his pain-shields, he sometimes felt bone splinters shifting in his palms, and at night he often woke from terrible dreams where his hands had detached from his wrists and scuttled away like demented spiders.

  Sometimes he wished he had yielded to the Gold mages, let them search through the whole of his mind, but their methods had forced him to resist. He had told them all he knew and still they had tortured him; he would not let them see into his heart.

  With a practiced mental effort, he cleared the bad memories from the slate of his thoughts and fell into blank meditation until he felt the palanquin halt. Blinking back to reality, he brushed the curtain aside and peered out at the Council balcony.

  It was not nearly as casual as that of the Sea Tower. A cage of wrought iron covered it like a glassless hothouse roof, each bar etched with protective sigils that would rebound anything unauthorized, and a constant stream of messenger-elementals flitted through the gaps, their brands of servitude flashing before they disappeared into the messenger-holes in the tower’s white façade. Behind Geraad, the gate had closed, and the air felt bottled despite the openness of the roof. No benches or greenery disturbed the polished floor, nor any sign that the occupants might linger out here for relief. A few other palanquins and their construct bearers stood off to one side, and the double doors hung open between two massive obsidian guards, with a cloud-serpent coiling idly in the gap.

  ‘Warder Geraad Iskaen,’ it said as he approached. ‘This way, please.’

  Geraad followed, skin prickling as the guardian constructs’ heads turned to track his passage. As he crossed the threshold, the doors swung shut at his heels. He plucked his hat off automatically.

  The guide led him up a dimly-lit corkscrewing ramp, past tiny rooms that overlooked the balcony like archers’ posts, to a wide and imposing hallway lined with portraits and living sculptures of chained, twining elementals. The flickering radiance of lava snakes and cloud-serpents, sea-slimes and rock phosphors cast conflicting colors on the polished walls, and as the guide passed a winged statue formed of cloud-serpents, the whole mass of them hissed and flared bright white. The guide paused for an instant, runes rippling along its spine, before resuming its airy glide.

  Geraad shuddered. He understood the value of the Summoners to the Silent Circle, but creating art from enslaved elementals did not sit well with him.

  Beyond the portrait hall was an intersection, with two side-paths curving up and away beyond rune-barred gates. Straight ahead stood a tall double door so covered in protective wards that they spilled over onto the wall itself. From just a glance, Geraad knew that they could stop an army.

  The guide elemental ghosted up to the doors and hovered, whispering some inaudible incantation in a strange voice. A moment passed, then the doors unsealed. Geraad stepped after it into a shallow antechamber just off the Council room, and the doors closed behind him with the hiss of reactivating wards.

  Not far past his feet lay the inset iron ring that enclosed the entire chamber, protecting it from external magic. The floor within was tiled in dark diamond-shapes that glowed like jade where the light from the narrow windows striped them; between windows, the walls bore elaborate, flowing, interlocking designs in ivory and gold and celadon, almost too beautiful to be wards. The vaulted ceiling echoed the diamond pattern in paler green, flecked with pearly stars. A great crescent-shaped table filled the floor-space, with six chairs surrounding it, all turned toward the empty center where three concentric rings had been set into the floor, copper then silver then gold.

  Judgment circles. The copper stripped wards, the silver thwarted energy-magics, and the gold dispersed illusions. Any mage but a mentalist standing within them would be powerless.

  It took a bit more than circles to break a mentalist.

  Only three of the six Council chairs were taken right now, and he recognized two of the occupants. Warder Archmagus Cassa Farcry, Geraad's path-superior, lounged in her well-padded chair second from the left: a shapely woman in her middle years with only a touch of grey in her smooth dark hair and a faint, indulgent smile on her lips. She wore cerulean robes with a delicate white floral pattern, belted high and cut deep to display a mesmerizing V of cleavage. Geraad kept his eyes up, and she dimpled at him and wiggled beringed fingers.

  Across from her, in the far right seat, sat Psycher Archmagus Dzuren Qisvar, whom Geraad knew from introductory mentalist lectures. Qisvar was an expatriate Padrastan who never bothered to hide it. His robes were fashioned in the southern style—bright patterns of yellow, orange and olive, wide-sleeved, open-collared, with a black under-robe—and his shaven scalp was concealed beneath a nearly piratical headscarf. Though in his late fifties or perhaps sixties, his bronze skin showed little sign of age and his small, pointed beard was jet-black. He had been a fixture in the Tower of the Inner Eye for more than thirty years, long predating the hostilities between the Empire and Padras, but because of the current situation he was not trusted in the Psycher Archmagus’ usual role: head of the Inquisition.

  When their eyes met, Qisvar gave Geraad a nod and a thin but polite smile. Geraad bowed in return and felt the Psycher Archmagus touch his thought-shields, inquisitive. He passively resisted, and the sensation withdrew.

  A non-mentalist would have considered that an attack, but only because non-mentalists had no native protections. They were naked against the power of the mind. Geraad could feel that Qisvar’s defenses were relaxed, allowing him to be receptive, but the other Archmagi were mentally blocked—their thoughts hidden by walls crafted by the mentalists in their pay. It did not surprise him.

  The third Archmagus, seated to Qisvar’s left, was a weathered old Jernizen woman who Geraad guessed to be Artificer Archmagus Varrol—the so-called Lioness of Valent. She was known to disdain the lady-mage style of robes-as-dresses not because she was in her seventies but because she considered it silly and impractical; her robe was simple, grey and sleeveless, showing muscular arms covered in tattoos and scars, and her hair was cut to short white bristles. Deep-set eyes considered Geraad with little interest and no pity; when he bowed, she made no motion in return.

  Like Qisvar, she was an expatriate. The joke went that she and a few books were the last artifacts of the Citadel at Darakus—the old Silent Circle bastion that had crashed in Jernizan ninety years ago. Obviously no one said that to her face.

  Missing were the Summoner Archmagus, Evoker Archmagus and Scryer Archmagus.

  “Come in, Geraad,” said Warder Farcry. “You have nothing to fear.”

  Geraad nodded mutely, not sure what to think. He stepped over the iron circle and felt the faint crackle and sizzle of ambient Valent energies being drawn off of him.

  “Don’t stand in the middle,” Warder Farcry added as he approached the table. “You’re not being judged.”

  “Yes, Madam Archmagus.”

  “Technically we’ll only have five, not the full Council, but considering the circumstances, I think—“

  Behind him, the great doors flew open as if kicked, and a sharp, angry voice said, “—burn the whole place down!” Geraad stopped in his tracks to stare over his shoulder.

  Through the doorway came two men who could have been related if not for the difference in height. The taller man stared ahead, his superior smirk and hooked nose giving him the look of a bird of prey on a high branch. Grey-eyed like most Trivest
eans, he had close-cropped black hair and sideburns sharp enough to cut, and wore a high-collared robe of deep sapphire blue covered in sigils. The sleeves ended just above the elbows, leaving his forearms bare to show the rows upon rows of rune-covered bands, not one looking like something so flippant as jewelry. Fine strands of power drifted from each like spider-silk: a Summoner’s slave-bonds.

  Next to him, taking long strides to keep up, was the mage who had shouted. He was more than a head shorter and rather unkempt, but they shared their coloring: midnight hair, pale eyes, blue robes—though the shorter mage’s robe was darker and covered by a black outer-robe. He wore no other mark of authority, but his gloved hands were clenched and his face was white enough with anger that the scar on his brow stood out.

  “Really, Enkhaelen,” said the tall mage as they crossed the iron circle, sparks popping and dancing across both their shoulders, “do you think me so weak that I might lose control over a few dozen specimens?”

  “That’s not the point, Salandry,” snarled Enkhaelen. “The point is that you put those things out there specifically to piss me off. And it worked. So have them removed before something unfortunate happens.”

  “And I thought you’d gotten beyond your squeamish phase.”

  “I’ll show you squeamish, you—”

  “Gentlemen!” said Warder Farcry. “Please, let’s not have another one of those meetings. This is important.”

  “It had better be. I have too many things to do and too little time already.” Enkhaelen stomped around the table toward the two middle seats, then stopped and glared as Salandry slid smugly into one. “Who set these chairs up?” he said. “I am not sitting next to him.”