The Raven Collection

by James Barclay

  Moving impossibly fast, the ruptures, which the town’s people couldn’t see, tore through the south shore and disappeared beneath the lake. For one blissful moment, Denebre thought the water had halted the charge but the rumbling never died and the tremors increased their intensity. A picture fell from the wall behind him. The logs shifted on the fire.

  Turmoil churned the placid surface of the lake. Waves fled out from its centre in every direction, great bubbles boiled to the surface and finally, with a huge, sucking thud, a wall of water erupted, sending a mist into the air, falling back like a deluge of rain.

  Denebre gripped the window sill, the vibrations through his feet leaving him uncertain of his balance. Dust shivered from every crevice and his chair rattled against the stone flags.

  Devastation was coming. The farmland north of the lake fell into the void as if hell were pulling it down. Tears were streaming down the old Lord’s face. What the Wesmen couldn’t achieve, nature would wreak in the blink of an eye.

  He leaned out of the window. Down in the town, milling confusion reined. People were screaming or barking warnings. Feet slithered on heaving streets, doors were closed, windows fell from frames and the roar of approaching doom still had no face.

  ‘Run, run.’ Denebre cursed his voice. Weak with age, it couldn’t hope to carry and though he waved an arm frantically, even if anyone was looking, they couldn’t hope to understand what he was doing. He was helpless, and the earth was swallowing his town.

  Land folded inwards at its borders, the fractures tore into the first building and moved on, faster than a horse could gallop and straight as an arrow, heading for the castle. The world was shaking. Sudden subsidence robbed Denebre of his purchase and he fell heavily, feeling a bone in his hand snap as he tried to absorb the fall.

  He cried out, his breath coming in short gasps, but no one would be hearing him. Outside, the rumble had become a deafening roar, as of some earthbound leviathan finding its voice at the surface.

  Denebre clawed his way back to his feet, the floor around him shaking, the window frame creaking, glass long since gone. A timber crashed down behind him, thumping into the fire, scattering burning logs across the floor, embers filling the small room. The old Lord ignored it all.

  Panic had engulfed the streets and market place. Men, women and children ran blindly away from a threat that showed no mercy. Timbers split, stone cracked, and whole buildings heaved, struck by giant ripples of land before collapsing into the maw of the beast, crushing anyone in their path.

  A choking dust mixed with smoke thickened over Denebre. People scrabbled desperately against the tilting land only to lose grip and slip shrieking into the depths of the earth. The castle gatehouse rocked violently and crumbled, huge gashes fled along the courtyard walls and orders from guardsmen were lost in the awful wailing of horses and the chaos of a hundred poor souls trying to save themselves from a fate from which there was no escape.

  Lord Denebre’s tower shifted ominously. Behind him, another timber hit the floor. Slates from the roof fell past the window to land in the crevice opening up before the front doors of his own house and not pausing before sweeping under the keep.

  ‘May the Gods have mercy upon us,’ he whispered.

  The tower shuddered again, the window frame loosened and fell. The air was filled with dust and the creaking of protesting stone and wood. Denebre stood firm, leaning against the shifting wall but the keep groaned, a mortal wound struck in its foundations.

  Beyond the walls, the market place was gone, replaced by piles of rubble, mounds of earth thrown up by the leviathan and scattered with bodies, precious few of whom were moving.

  Lord Denebre took one last look at the sky, blue and peaceful, the sun shining down. Beneath his feet, the tower moved sickeningly sideways, the violence of the movement all but breaking his grip on the loose window sill. His knees gave way and he sagged forwards, determined not to lose sight of his beloved town. A thudding far below him, reverberating through his feet, told him of central supports breaking.

  The tower teetered, the roar of hell pounding at his ears, the sounds of collapsing stone only just audible. His chamber shifted and sagged. Slabs of rock fell through the ceiling to smash into and through the floor and the fall of slate outside became a torrent.

  A third massive shudder and the tower leaned outwards at an impossible angle, slipping, sliding on inexorably. Denebre wiped his face clear of dust and tears.

  ‘Not long now, Genere, my love. Not long now.’

  The air was clear, warm and pure in her lungs, as Erienne’s ShadowWings took her slowly higher, revealing more and more of the quite extraordinary structure that dominated Herendeneth’s single shallow peak.

  She’d meant to let the air blow through her, dismissing confusion to allow her to think about all that was going awry. But the scene below her changed all that and for an age it seemed, it filled her eyes and her mind.

  The house of the Al-Drechar was sprawling, disorganised and magnificent. She hovered, identifying the orchard where Lyanna loved to play, and worked outwards.

  Immediately below and towards the path to the landing, she could see what would have been the original grand entrance to the house when it had first been built. Half-towers and gallery-sized rooms were covered with a slate roof which itself was bestrewn with vibrant green creeper. More recently built and making the new frontage, was a lower structure of wood and glass, a long slender entrance corridor that Erienne remembered running along after Ren’erei, on their arrival that now seemed a long time ago.

  To the left of the orchard, three slate-roofed wings jutted like the legs of a monstrous insect, not quite straight as if built around immovable natural features. Swooping a little closer, she could see these features were gently steaming rock pools and delicate water-falls none but a fool would destroy.

  To the right, one massive structure dominated. She moved slowly over it, seeing courtyards and follies built into the intricate multilevel building of white stone, grey slate, dark wood and an extraordinary abundance of flowers as if the Gods had sprinkled them from the heavens. A gorgeous confusion of reds, yellows, blues and purples, strung with emerald green, every pigment strong and pure.

  But the real majesty was to the rear of the orchard and it dwarfed the rest of the house. Cut into steps up the shallow incline to the peak of the hill were terrace after terrace of arches, statues, pillars, domed roofs as of small temples, grottos, pools, intricate rock gardens and perfectly formed trees. And on the peak itself, a stone needle, thirty feet high and six across its base, pointing to the sky, swarming with ivy, covered with weathered carvings and exuding a deep and ancient aura of mage power.

  Erienne flew lower, extending her wings for a long slow glide across the extraordinary architectural and cultural diversity of what she saw. Approaching, she looked for a likely landing place, already imagining herself walking in the tranquillity, lost from herself and everyone for a few precious moments. But as she neared, the air chilled and she retreated upwards, feeling all at once like a trespasser in the past.

  She wasn’t flying over the fanciful notions of artists brought to fruition, she was flying over graves. One, surely, for every Al-Drechar that had lived to dream of the reunification of the colleges and died, unfulfilled and fearful of the end of all in which they believed.

  To land now would be to desecrate the memories. First, she had to carry through her mission, despite her burgeoning misgivings. She flew a little higher and tried to make sense of it all.

  Lyanna’s training had performed an almost instant change on her, exactly as Erienne had feared. Gone was the carefree spirit that sang nonsense songs to her doll, to be replaced by a considered, almost introverted, quiet. And though she would still talk, Erienne could see there was more than just the thoughts of a child behind her eyes. It was as if she were assimilating everything she saw, felt and heard; and presumably it was the same on the mana spectra.

  Erienne was at once sc
ared of what her daughter would become, proud that she was the future of the One Way and jealous of the wonders she might see.

  It was all so different from her time in Dordover, where Lyanna’s training, based on generations of developing the minds of infants, left her with all her innocence and gave her the gift of mana acceptance. Erienne felt yet another sweep of guilt as she rode the warm thermals above Herendeneth. She knew Lyanna’s mind was suffering in Dordover and they had had to leave, but was this really any better? She still shouted out in the night, she still awoke crying from the pain in her head. There was comfort, though. Here, at least, Lyanna stood a chance of living and giving Balaia back the gift that stood on the precipice of extinction.

  But she couldn’t banish the worries. She’d seen the Al-Drechar leave the Whole Room and fail to disguise the anxiety in their faces. She had seen them become visibly more frail at the end of each day though the training was barely seven days old. And she had interrupted whispered conversations that stopped too abruptly when she was noticed.

  Determining to speak to Ephemere later, she rose higher, interested to see where the illusion began. She was perhaps only fifty feet from the ground when the house started to become indistinct. Like grey cloud washing across the sky, blotting out detail, the house disappeared under the enormously complex spell with every beat of the ShadowWings. At a little over sixty feet, all she could see was the top of a mist-obscured long-extinct volcano.

  As she watched, the illusion flickered and steadied. She thought it a trick of her eyes until the shimmer was repeated. To her left, a roiling in the spell left a wing of the house plainly visible for several beats and closer inspection revealed light shining through illusory rock.

  Erienne’s heart raced and she dived for the orchard. She’d seen enough poorly maintained static spells to know the illusion was decaying towards the point of collapse.

  Something was badly wrong. Surely the Al-Drechar’s strength could not be so seriously impaired this soon. A failing illusion was worse than none at all, sending flares of mana whipping through the spectra. To the trained eye, they’d be like a beacon fire in the dead of night. No clearer signal would be needed. All it would take was a master mage searching the southern coasts of Balaia and out to sea.

  And then Dordover would come in force. It would be no contest.

  Chapter 7

  Two days after leaving Ilkar and The Unknown Warrior, Denser sat in his chambers, a warm fire heating the small study, its crackling frequently drowned out by the storm assailing Xetesk. Lightning flared and spat across the darkened heavens, thunder rolled and crashed, reverberating through the stone of the College, while rain drove against the shutters like the furious knocking of a thousand angry demons.

  But no sound came from the pair in the study; Denser at his desk and the promising young lore diviner, Ciryn, in a chair by the fire. She was one of a relatively new breed trained to develop an empathy with certain aspects of another lore, in this case Dordover’s. And scattered around the room was every text and scrap of information Xetesk had on Dordovan lore and its meaning. It amounted to precious little but they had shed fragmented light, held together by educated guesswork, on one of the Tinjata passages Denser had stolen. It had been easy to see why Vuldaroq had ordered the translation removed.

  Denser seethed at the danger Lyanna had unknowingly been in every day of her stay in Dordover, a death threat hanging over her. And Erienne could not have known of it, though she would surely have researched Tinjata during her years in Dordover. But, he reasoned, Vuldaroq would have seen this abhorrent passage withheld from her just as he had from Denser.

  He reread the words they had pieced together, his anger and relief clashing uncomfortably. ‘. . . silenced forever . . . ritual . . . order of casting . . . and only then can the breath be stopped and the celebration begin . . . scattering of ashes accordingly . . . lore demands. ’

  ‘There’s no mistake in this?’ he asked.

  Ciryn shrugged, her lank brown hair lifting on her shoulders as she did so, and looked at him though dark eyes set in a face too long to be anything but plain.

  ‘Almost certainly in the words, Master Denser, but not in the meaning.’

  He shouldn’t have been surprised, he supposed. But the ritual magical killing the words implied made the Dordovans no better than the Black Wings. Just a little more precise.

  Denser returned to a passage towards the end of the prophecy. So far, Ciryn had determined that it dealt with another danger to the Dordovan order. There were words describing some odd type of shielding but no apparent reference to a casting. It also suggested, Ciryn thought, that the shielder would die as a result of the process, or at least become what she called, ‘irrevocably altered’, but that the One Mage would grow in some undefined manner.

  Much as Ciryn did, but less logically, Denser scoured the texts at his left hand, looking for anything that might unlock just one of the words of Dordovan lore for which they had, as yet, no clue. Their knowledge was so frustratingly slight. And the Prophecy was written in a lower lore. Had it concerned spell construction or generation, they would have read nothing whatever: the higher Dordovan languages remained completely closed to Xetesk.

  Denser sighed and Ciryn looked up, frowning, her finger propping open a scroll, her teeth irritating at her bottom lip.

  ‘Master Denser?’

  ‘Sorry, but I can’t make any sense of this.’

  ‘But I’m afraid I think I can,’ said the diviner.

  ‘Why afraid?’

  ‘Because you are the child’s father. I’ll write down the piece I have translated,’ said Ciryn.

  ‘No, just tell me,’ said Denser.

  ‘Oh. All right.’ She took in a deep breath. ‘I don’t think it’s a shielding, I think that was the wrong interpretation. But it’s a way of bringing a One Mage from Night undamaged.’

  ‘How?’ A chance to really help his daughter was there for him to grasp.

  ‘By the father opening his mind to the storm and surrounding his child with the power of his mind, so showing the light the mage needs to complete Awakening.’

  Denser felt suddenly cold. ‘But that would mean I would d—’

  ‘Be irrevocably changed, yes.’

  The Circle Seven had taken Denser’s words in complete silence the following mid-morning. Deep under the Tower of the Lord of the Mount in the Laryon Chamber, they had granted him unwilling audience then sat transfixed as he recounted recent events in Dordover, spoken of Erienne’s letter and the work he and Ciryn had completed the night before.

  The Circle Seven, Xetesk’s Tower Masters, chaired by Dystran, the fortunate incumbent of the Mount, had been expecting more pressure for research. What they heard was a cry for help and the raising of the spectre of a threat from another College.

  ‘How long since her disappearance?’ asked Ranyl, an ageing master, hairless and hunched but still vital in his magic.

  ‘More than sixty days.’ There was a hiss of indrawn breath.

  ‘And you still hope to find her,’ said Dystran. His tenure had aged his young face, his eyes looked heavy and his black hair was shot through with grey.

  ‘Yes,’ said Denser firmly. ‘There seems little doubt who she has gone to.’

  Dystran chuckled. ‘Indeed, but we are now entering the realm of myth and blind belief. And we have no idea where these one-magic mages of yours live, should they turn out to be real.’

  ‘You should read more,’ responded Denser. ‘Ilkar says there’s significant evidence that they’re on or near Calaius and that’s backed up, albeit tenuously, by the leads we found in Dordover.’

  ‘So what do you want of us?’ Dystran regarded Denser over steepled fingers, affecting a pose of studied contemplation. Denser almost laughed. This Lord of the Mount was a ridiculous figure who had done nothing but engender political instability since his surprise tenure had begun more than five years before. A bigger surprise was that he remained alive. Ranyl was dou
btless the architect of his continued survival. Denser wandered how long it would be before the old man made his move.

  ‘I need Xetesk to keep Dordover away. Their intentions are clear enough and we can’t let them take Lyanna back, or worse.’

  Dystran’s eyes flashed fanatically cold. ‘Oh we’ll keep Dordover away, all right. We can’t have them meddle any further with the natural order. And you clearly understand your role. It’s certainly fortunate we’ve delayed implementation of the volunteer release plan your Unknown Warrior so desires, isn’t it?’

  Denser shuddered. The Protectors would be marching again. The Unknown wasn’t going to like it.

  Selik rode with a guard of eight Black Wings, his journey from Dordover to Arlen pausing in the ruins of Denebre. He wanted to show his men what it was they were fighting for. Not that they were wavering. It just never hurt to reinforce beliefs.

  But what he saw didn’t merely do that, it added a whole new dimension. And for Selik personally, it set his anger raging afresh and brought an ache to his dead eye. The nine men rode slowly around the edges of the once beautiful lakeside town. They couldn’t even get to what had been the centre; chasms in the earth blocked their way.

  And perhaps that was fortunate. The stench of death was everywhere. Above the wind, the buzzing of myriad flies was a warning to keep away and everywhere they looked, rats scurried. Disease would be running into the rivers and soaking into the ground. Selik hated to think about the state of the poor innocents lying dead and unburied.

  He could imagine all too easily the panic that had engulfed the town. As the earth heaved and buildings plunged, people would have abandoned everything that was dear to them. Their homes, their possessions. Their families. The air would have been filled with the screams of the terrified and the wounded and dying. Dust would have clogged lungs, chips of stone and glass would have slashed faces and hands; and everywhere they ran, the people of Denebre would have encountered the ground at their feet tearing itself apart, swallowing them whole or ripping their bodies to shreds.