Elias had considered the possibility that Bryn had been poisoned to draw him out, but if he was the target it seemed simpler to come for him when he was unprotected and alone at his family homestead in Knoll Creek. Furthermore, he had to consider Talinus’s role and his motivations. While he and the imp had joined forces in the past to unseat Sarad, he had no doubt that Talinus did so only to forward his own agenda. Whatever had behooved him to help Elias it was not out of the kindness of his heart. Elias had to consider that it was Talinus’s design to see him banished from Galacia, but again it would be much simpler for the imp to strike him down from the shadows than concoct such an elaborate scheme.
Elias didn’t have questions in short supply, but if he was to have any answers he needed to return to Galacia. His Galacia. The one thing that he did know for certain was that if he never abandoned his post as First Marshal things would have played out differently.
A stir of motion drew Elias away from his reverie. Nyla stood by Leosis’s side once again and Teah knelt before him, her chin cupped in one of his long-fingered hands. Though he couldn’t see her face, Elias felt a profound sadness radiate from her. He wondered what words or what scenes from distant shores Leosis shared with his wife, but he didn’t have long to wonder for presently Teah pulled from his embrace and stood back.
“It honors me, friends,” Leosis said, “that you have joined me on such a celebrated occasion.” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He grew as still as death. When his eyes flicked open they shone with an otherworldly blue-white light. “The time has come for me to depart. Remember that while I leave this body behind, I haven’t left you behind.”
Light began to pour from Leosis’s mouth as he spoke and as he finished his skin grew lambent, as if lit from within by some hidden alabaster flame. The glow emitted from his pores and his features became indistinct until they dissolved all together into a wash of light as soft and stark as a bridal bolt.
The light bloomed into an orb and Leosis was no more. The orb arced through the air and encircled the clearing before rising into the night air and disappearing like a shooting star in reverse.
Silence reigned in the clearing, which seemed so much darker after the miraculous display of Leosis’s passing.
Chapter 6
A Foot in Each World
Elias’s memory after Leosis’s passing was spotty at best. Someone had produced a lute and someone else a flute. Dancing and merrymaking ensued, as well as the passing of a jug—or jugs—of a sweet, viscous liquor that tasted of berries and cream. He awoke the next day back at Teah’s house with no remembrance of the long walk back from the clearing. Far from the hangover he had expected, he felt strangely refreshed as slants of morning sunlight drew him from his slumber.
In the greatroom he found a mug of tea and a fist-sized biscuit stuffed with dates set on the hearth to keep them warm. He washed a mouthful of the biscuit down with the strong tea, the bitter flavor of the hot brew complementing the sweet chew of the dense scone. He followed his senses outside, as a faint tingle dancing across the skin of his arms announced the presence of magic.
Teah spun across the glade in exaggerated, slow movements. Elias dropped into the void and summoned his arcane sight. Teah pulsed with a faint but insistent emerald aura. Elias rose from the void, his interest piqued. Teah appeared to be channeling magic, but to no evident effect that Elias could determine.
Elias watched her progress in silence as he finished his cooling breakfast. Her movements had the look of fencing forms and the deliberate grace of a dance, but she wielded no weapon and followed no discernible meter. When Teah finished she made her way over to him, her skin glowing with a faint sheen of sweat. The air around her was charged, and Elias felt the energy of her aura without needing to resort to the use of his extrasensory faculties.
Teah cocked her head to one side in an uncannily feline gesture and said, “Why do you look so puzzled, Elias Duana?”
Elias’s first thought was to come up with a diplomatic answer, but instead he found himself saying, “You just look so...happy.”
“And why shouldn’t I be?”
Elias shifted on his feet, at once uncomfortable by the weight of her gaze. “I was concerned for your welfare is all.”
Teah’s eyes crinkled with her smile and Elias wondered how old she really was. “Have you ever considered that happiness may be a state of being and not a state of mind?”
“I’m not sure I see the difference between the two.”
Teah laughed, a bright, youthful sound. “A rare thing indeed are you—an honest man.”
Elias grinned back at her, but unlike his host, his good cheer was forced and did not touch his heart. He took a sip of his tea to give his mouth something to do. After he swallowed the dregs of the cup he asked, “Where is Nyla?”
“Off in the deep of the wood I expect. She is young yet, and Leosis’s passing has weighed on her.” She must have seen the question on Elias’s features for presently she said, “Don’t worry yourself. Nyla can take care of herself. She is quite safe here in the heart of my people’s domain, which is more than I can say for the world at large. It is dangerous beyond the borders of our wood, but outsiders never venture past the bones of Peidra.”
“They fear you?”
“Superstition keeps them at bay. A superstition that we do not go out of our way to discourage.”
Elias filed the information away for further review, along with the intention to dig into this subject further in the future, but presently his interest lay in other areas. “What magic did you use just now?”
“I assume by magic you mean an effect or a physical change in the environment brought about by an act of will. If that’s what you mean, then I must respond that I’ve performed no magic.”
“I can see Leosis’s crypticism lives on in you,” Elias returned before he could think better of his words.
Teah laughed once more. “Are all people from the past so funny? Here, put down your mug and walk with me.”
Teah set off across the glade and back down the path they had used last night. Elias was left with little choice but to follow her. As he cleared the glade and entered the cover of the wood, he discovered that she had vanished. He looked around wildly for a beat, wondering how she could have broken his line of sight so quickly before he realized that she must have employed some arcane trick.
“All right,” Elias said, “I can play this game.” He summoned his arcane sight and reached out with his senses, testing the air. He felt a pull to the left and when he turned he saw a faint trail of green light that wound into the trees—the arcane signature of Teah’s spell. The trail diverged off the path and led into the thick of the forest. Elias congratulated himself and set off after her.
It took him several minutes to find her. Teah knelt by a placid pool and peered into its depths. Though having a circumference measuring less than a dozen feet and despite not being fed by a brook the water wasn’t stagnant. Elias guessed the pool must be supplied by an underground spring.
“How did you move so quickly?”
Teah didn’t look up but continued to peer into the pool. “I used an art not unlike that used by the time mages.”
Elias thoughts turned to the energetic trail he had followed. “You didn’t teleport here. I saw the traces of your passage.”
“Well done. Come, sit by me.”
As Elias complied Teah produced a water-skin from a small satchel. She drank its contents, capped it, and set it in the pool. Beside the waterskin she placed a small pebble, which sank at once.
“The waterskin floats but the pebble sinks,” Teah said. “Why?”
“The pebble is heavier than the water and so it sinks. The skin isn’t as dense and it is partially filled with air, which is lighter than water, so it floats.”
“Consider that time is like water and we are objects that are sinking through it. We once believed as does the pebble, that it is a one way trip in a straight line. It is a
basic law of existence. Like the force that causes the pebble to sink, time is a force that pushes us onward toward the future in a single, uniform line. One moment becomes the next.
“Now, let us suppose that we can create a bubble of air around the pebble, as the skin has air within it. Would that keep the pebble from sinking?”
“I suppose,” said Elias, “providing the bubble was large enough to offset the weight of the pebble.”
“The analogy is imperfect but this illustrates the concepts that allowed the time mages to bend the laws of the cosmos.”
Elias studied Teah. “If you utilized time magic to get here so quickly, you would have had to do the opposite. If this analogy holds, filling the skin with air would have slowed you down.”
“Good,” said Teah, pleased at her pupil’s observation. “Although I did not use time magic as such, for I am no time mage, the principle is similar.
“Look here.” Teah took a stick and in a fluid motion thrust it down on the skin, driving it under the water. The skin vanished below the waterline for a few beats and then resurfaced, bobbing erratically and splashing water onto the earth.
“So, you’ve propelled the skin through time by applying a strong force.”
“Yes, but what’s the problem with my technique?”
Elias studied the pool. “For one, you’ve made a mess, and look you’ve put a hole in the skin. It’s starting to sink.”
“Indeed, and look at the water. Although the skin has returned to its original state, the water is as disturbed as a sea during a storm. See how long the water remains disturbed though the skin’s trip was so short. Notwithstanding the skin itself, which has been destroyed.”
Elias went cold and goose-bumps sprouted from his arms to the nape of his neck. “The very fabric of the tapestry has been destabilized.”
“This is the trouble with time magic. Fortunately, the time mages discovered a way to minimize this effect, though many believe it would be better if such arts were never discovered at all. Look here.”
Teah focused her eyes on the pool and the skin began to spin in circles as a whirlpool formed. Pins-and-needles washed over Elias as he felt the force of her magic. The whirlpool sped up exponentially and took on the aspect of a vortex with a hole at the center, which drew the skin downward toward the vertex.
Elias felt his mind drawn into the whirlpool and he entered a state of pseudo hypnosis. Shadowed memories flashed through his mind’s-eye. He saw formula and scripts from the Grimoire, felt the magic sewn into the aged pages. He had copied the scripts and drawn the spell forms, he had anchored magic to the proper coordinates, but he hadn’t understood the concepts or grasped the complex mathematics, not fully. Now the theorems coalesced in his mind and he began to see them in three dimensions, but his understanding proved fleeting for he was presently drawn from the interior landscape of his mind and back to the world. Back to the future.
A searing pain lanced through his head and his vision went white around the edges. Once again his knowledge of the spells he had learned dissolved, leaving a vacuum in his mind.
Someone was talking to him. He blinked and turned to Teah who was studying him intently, her green eyes uncanny, pregnant with lifetimes of knowledge.
“It looks as if you’ve just done some time travel of your own,” she said. “What did you see in the whirlpool?”
Elias turned his attention back to the pool. The maelstrom had vanished, replaced by calm waters upon which the skin floated, but faint ripples still radiated from the center of the pool. “Ripples.”
“What’s that?”
Elias cleared his throat. “Nothing. The action of the whirlpool drew the skin through time without sinking it. That’s how you got here so quickly.”
“Yes, but I didn’t enter the portal at the bottom. I rode the edges for a moment and then stepped off.”
“You created a vortex of energy around yourself and so slipped through time.”
“You have grasped the concept but not the exactitude. If I had entered such a vortex I would have stepped into another realm, or dimension, to use the time mages’ word. What I did was phase into a place between realms where the rules of time and space are different. The fey call these places between dimensions an overtone. I created a cocoon of oscillating energy around my body which allowed me to phase into this overtone, with one foot in each realm. This changed the passage of time within my cocoon relative to you. You see, in the overtone between dimensions space and time behave by different rules. I did not travel through time so much as I took a shortcut through space, and therefore through time, for the two are inexorably linked.”
“Thus giving you the illusion of moving at an incredible speed. Such a trick could prove most useful.”
“And also most taxing,” Teah returned. “There are none in my tribe who have managed to bridge the gap entirely, which is just as well. Our laws forbid us from breaching other realms, or from traveling through time. The lore of the time mages has been lost, which is a blessing for all living things. My knowledge of time magic ends at theory, for none of my people have ever practiced the forbidden art.”
The significance of Teah’s lesson was not lost on Elias. The whirlpool parable had illustrated how disruptive travel through dimensions or time could be without the proper precautions. Precautions he had not taken. He would find no welcome here, particularly if Teah’s people learned how he had come to their domain.
Elias looked back to the pool, at the marooned waterskin. “And that is why I must find the Wandering Isle, and soon.”
Chapter 7
Vortex
If this was the afterlife, thought Bryn, it sure hurt a lot.
“I think she’s awake,” a familiar voice said.
“You think right, Eithne.” Bryn opened her eyes and looked at her cousin, who watched her intently with red-rimmed eyes and grasped her firmly by the hand. “If your goal is to break my fingers, you’re succeeding admirably.”
Eithne blinked, then laughed and eased her grip on Bryn’s hand.
“She hasn’t left your side,” said Danica, who appeared over Eithne’s shoulder.
“How long have I been out?” asked Bryn as she pushed herself into a seated position.
“Two days,” answered Eithne.
Bryn’s head swam, and she wasn’t sure it was just from the effort of sitting up. “Two days. God’s teeth.”
“You lost a lot of blood,” Danica said. “There was one point when I couldn’t find your pulse even with a stethoscope. We thought we had lost you.”
“You saved me.”
Danica half-smiled. “You saved yourself. If you didn’t cauterize your wound and stem the bleeding, you wouldn’t have survived long enough for me to heal you.”
Eithne snorted. “I never would have guessed modesty to be a quality you possessed. As Ogden tells it, she stitched one of your arteries with her magic.”
Bryn’s only comment was to arch an eyebrow and pull back her covers. Her wound wasn’t bound, which surprised her. As she looked closer she saw why. The wound was closed and stitchless, a thin, puckered pink line the only evidence she had almost bled to death. No stranger to battle wounds, and scars, Bryn grasped at once the significance of what this meant, and the degree to which Danica’s power had matured. “This wound looks at least a month old.”
Danica shifted under Bryn’s gaze, but was rescued by Lar, whose voice called from Eithne’s sitting rooms. “Is she decent? Can I come in?”
Bryn tilted her head to a side. “Is that...Is that Lar?”
“He and Phinneas arrived about a day ago,” Danica said. “Phinneas is with Ogden right now in your rooms trying to figure out what in Agia happened there.”
Bryn looked about and it dawned on her that she wasn’t in her rooms but in Eithne’s bedchamber, but she put the thought on hold to address Lar. “You know for a fact that I am not decent, Master Fletcher, but do come in.” She pulled the covers back in place to cover her naked legs.
Lar whisked into the room and stood beside Danica. “Princess, I’m glad you’re better.”
Bryn studied Lar. His features seemed somehow sharper than she remembered. Though the southerner had always possessed an impressive stature, he had a harder look about him than when she had first met him. “Lar, friend, you know better than to call me by anything but my given name.”
Something melted in him and his expression softened, and she saw the ruddy farm-boy that had first come to Lucerne last year. “I can’t think what we would’ve done without you,” he said.
“Lar,” Bryn said as her throat grew thick, “I am glad to see you.” She swallowed. “Things have been entirely too boring around here lately. The Lucerne Sentinels are together again, but we are missing a member. I think it high time that we set about finding him.”
“I respect your zeal,” said Eithne, “but you need to rest.”
Bryn threw her covers off unceremoniously, eliciting an audible gulp from Lar and a guffaw from Danica. “I’ve rested long enough. Coz, be good enough to send someone to fetch my fighting leathers. We’ve work to do.”
†
“Bryn, what in Agia are you doing up?” asked a bewildered Ogden.
Bryn strode into her ruined bedroom with the others close on her heels and clapped him on the shoulder. “Come off it, old man. You’re thrilled to see me. No need to play the coy maiden!”
Wearing a broad grin, Phinneas approached to stand beside Ogden, who managed to bluster without saying a word. “I can see your brush with death hasn’t diminished the edge of your tongue,” the doctor said.
“Fit as a fiddle, thanks to your pupil. She put me back together so well, you’d never know I was broken. I’ve naught but a fine scar, not that anyone will ever see it but Elias.”
Ogden dropped the book he held in his arms and Phinneas’s eyebrows shot up an inch, as if someone had slapped him. She felt the eyes of the others on her as well.
Wayfarer (The Empyrean Chronicle) Page 5