“Perfect,” said Danica. “We’ll start there.”
“You expect that if you satisfy your curiosity on this subject it will help you unravel the mystery of what happened at the palace?” asked Leoman.
“Much rests upon finding out what happened that day,” said Danica. “The heart of Galacia is vulnerable until we do.”
“I can sympathize with your sense of urgency,” Leoman said. “I will send a note to Ogden Vandrael at once.”
“Leo, you old sneak,” said Bryn, “are you a Sentinel?”
Leoman snorted. “Why do you think Ogden sent you to me to tutor in the High Arcanum?”
“Shiny,” said Danica as she stood, her tea and pastry ignored. “We’re all in the same club. Send for Ogden and Phinneas if it pleases you, but I cannot afford to waste any more time. I’m going to the stacks now.”
Leoman weighed Danica with his eyes. “You’ll need to bypass the wards.” Danica’s only response was to glare at him, which elicited a thin smile from the old sage. “Very well. Come with me.”
Leoman led them from the kitchens and into the narrow corridor that connected the main library to the tower. Danica didn’t need to summon her arcane sight to know that the hallway was enchanted, for the tiny hairs on the back of her arms stood on end in the presence of so much magical energy. Leoman inserted a cylindrical, featureless rod into a hole in the door at the far end. He placed his hand inside a miniature spell circle etched into the door in silver. He murmured a couple of indistinct words, and the door swung open without noise, or fanfare.
Leoman beckoned with a hand. “Welcome to the stacks.”
The first floor of the hallowed tower was perhaps twenty feet across on all sides. Scones wrought with arcane sigils lit the way, but rather than flame, spheres of iridescent yellow-orange light hovered over them. Modestly appointed shelves lined three of the four walls, affixed directly to the stone, and bearing uniform books bound in brown leather while the fourth wall was taken up by an arcing staircase that spiraled to the second floor. Four large desks in the center formed a square below a decorative chandelier. Directly to their right stood a pedestal that featured a ledger that looked heavy enough to require two men to carry it.
“Count me impressed,” Danica said with a low whistle. “What subjects are on the first floor?”
Leoman offered her an indulgent smile. “Behold the stack’s catalogues.”
Danica’s lips parted. “What, all of them? How many books are in the stacks?”
Leoman’s smile became a smirk. “I don’t know anyone that’s devalued their time so much they dared try to count. While the catalogues are extensive and list the books both by author and by subject, the books themselves are listed alphabetically by author, beginning with A on the second floor. Long before my time it was decided that the subjects and sub-categories were too numerous to attempt to bundle them by subject and by author, so they simplified.”
“Except for the top floors,” said Danica with a smirk of her own.
Leoman’s smile faded. “Right you are. The tomes on the top floors were determined too volatile for all but the most discriminating of arcanists. Those floors, however, remain barred to us, and it is probably for the best.”
Danica eyed the staircase. “How many floors are there?”
“Twenty-two,” Leoman replied.
“And how many beyond that?” Danica asked.
Leoman studied Danica for a beat. “Three.”
Danica whistled. “Twenty-five in all. Nice round figure.”
“Don’t worry about us,” said Bryn, “we’ll mind our Ps and Qs with your books.”
“I don’t doubt it, princess. After all, I do know where you live.” Leoman walked over to a shelf on the wall opposite the entryway. He ran his fingers over a shelf and selected a book. “Here. This will get you started with R, for Olaf the Red. The eighteenth floor, if memory serves me.”
“You have the Crown’s gratitude,” said Bryn.
“I’ve business to attend to,” Leoman said as he offered Bryn a warm smile. “I’ll see you in a couple of hours. If you have need, send for me, but remember, if the door closes behind you, you’ll need me or another high-ranking scribe to reenter.” Leoman’s eyes lingered on Danica as he turned to return to the main library.
When he was out of earshot Danica said, “I do believe that man doesn’t like me.”
“Academes, like the high-bloods, are accustomed to ritual and tradition,” said Bryn, “and you gained access to their most protected treasure without going through any of the usual channels. On top of that, he’s an arcanist, which makes him suspicious by nature.”
“I suppose,” said Danica thoughtfully. She turned to Bryn. “But isn’t everyone at Arcalum an arcanist?”
“Not really.” Bryn began to flip through the book Leoman had handed her. “Historically that has been the case, although Arcalum always boasted a school of alchemy, which isn’t an exclusively arcane science, though many walk with a foot in each discipline. Ogden himself studied alchemy here, which is why no one thinks it odd that a man not known as an arcanist keeps company with Arcalum alumni and faculty.”
“Clever cover for a Sentinel. Hiding in plain sight.”
“Indeed. These days Arcalum offers curriculum to non-arcanists in doctoring and other physical sciences. With so many arcanists killed in the war and with dwindling admissions, I imagine they needed to concoct some way to keep the coffers filled.” Bryn pointed to a page. “Here it is. Eighteenth floor, just like the old coot said.”
Danica looked up the dizzying staircase with a groan. “Looks like we can skip exercise with Lar today.”
“Just don’t go getting vertigo on me and fall to your demise. You’re a small thing, but I still don’t want to carry you back to the palace.”
“In that case I’ll go first, so you can catch me.”
As fortune would have it, there were two copies of Olaf’s travel memoirs. The laborious tome was indexed only by Olaf’s many traveled locations. Luckily, Leoman had given them a hint when he mentioned that Olaf cited Aradur as being home to the exotic cabal of dreamwrights. Still, the chapters on Aradur were extensive and it was only after hours of skimming the material that Danica found her first clue. “Here, I’ve found something!” she cried.
“What page?” asked a bleary-eyed Bryn.
“Fourteen-hundred-and-ninety-two.”
“You’re nearly a hundred pages ahead of me—how do you read so fast?”
“A lot of practice at the Medical Academy. If I never picked up the art of skimming, I wouldn’t have had a lick of sleep at all in my third year. Look to the fourth paragraph.
“I had occasion to meet a mystic, wearing naught but a linen loin-cloth and a panther’s smile, sitting in the shade of a fig tree in a lonely corner of Mad Prophet’s Square. Little did I guess that he was the master of a secret lore.”
Bryn propped her head up between her hands and read along.
He named himself Eckrata, which I later learned meant simply waking one. The cryptic seemed to know me, or else knew of me, for he said ‘You seek realms both strange and wondrous. I can tell you, kopta (student), that I know of places that are both, and far beyond your ken.’
I found myself suitably intrigued, but dubious. The man looked a beggar and unfit of mind, yet I was inexplicably drawn to him. I made plans to meet him that very night in a quarter to the east of the great library.
The chill of night appeared to hold no power over him, for I found him sitting cross-legged dressed yet in his loincloth. He led me through darkened streets, where the fabled lights of the Shining City were nowhere to be found. The sweet ichor of opium smoke hung in the air, and I became fearful that I had fallen into a trap as the mystic had insisted I come alone.
Certain that I would feel the sting of Aradurian steel in mine back at each step, I followed him yet, until we reached a narrow alleyway which ended in an abrupt wall. ‘What do you see, Kopta?’
‘A dead-end is what I see you treacher!’ swore I. At this point, I turned about and drew my dagger, for I feared the worst. My guide laughed as if I were a mummer jigging on an arse.
‘Your dagger and petty magics will profit you little where we go,’ said he. He waved his hand over the wall and instructed me to look closer. Before my eyes I saw a doorway, as if it had always been. I thought to run from the mad magician that could materialize portals with naught but a flourish of the hand, yet my logic told me that such a man could strike me down at any juncture, so evidently parting me from the mortal coil was not his design.
He led me down a staircase into the womb of the earth where we happened upon a sandstone den inhabited by men in mismatched garb sitting on pillows on the earthen floor. Some sat as if in trance whilst others peered into paintings that hung on the walls. To my eyes, these men looked no different that the hundred other Aradurian mystics I had encountered in my travels. What made these men special? What secret Arcanum did they command?
When I voiced my observances to my guide, he told me that these men were travelers like myself, save that they sojourned to far realms while their physical shells remained safely sequestered in this very chamber. I swallowed my caustic retort and asked that he demonstrate this secret power to me.
He sat me before a painting and told me to look into its depths. I now became certain that this was some kind of trick aided by some hallucinogen that would make the painting seem to come alive. Eckrata assured me this was not the case, although he did admit some of this brothers used a sacred mushroom to help facilitate the transition. He explained to me that with he as my guide no such catalyst was required.
‘Am I to travel into the painting then?’ asked I, dubious once more. He told me that the image was naught but a focal point, or a conduit, to make a connection with a place with the same characteristics in the Nodumskyre, which translates into something like dreamscape, I believe. Indeed, Eckrata and his band had named themselves dreamwrights, in the common tongue.
“Dreamwright,” said Bryn, “that’s it. That’s the word Leoman used.”
“Right you are,” said Danica. “Let’s see what else he has to say.”
Danica skimmed a couple of paragraphs during which Olaf described the mystic Eckrata laying his hands on his shoulders and whispering hypnotic suggestions in his ear, punctuated by the occasional chant in an obscure Aradurian dialect. “It sounds like Eckrata utilized a method similar to the one Phinneas used on you to put Olaf under,” Danica remarked. Bryn grunted her assent and read on.
Rather than being pulled toward the painting, as I had expected, I found myself drawn inward, my essence contracted into a miniscule bead, until I reached some critical threshold, and then catapulted out of my body and into a new world.
Danica skimmed through the soaring rhetoric and lurid description of the surreal land Olaf had journeyed to, until she found something of interest.
There were other inhabitants in this shining new realm, yet they, for the most part, ignored me. It was with no small astonishment that I beheld persons flicker into being before my very eyes, whilst others vanished as if stepping behind a Veil of Occlusion. This realm had a definite realism; the ground felt solid beneath my feet, as did my body, yet for those details, it felt different from the physical world in some way I cannot name. It was as if the density, for a lack a more appropriate qualifier, of this world, and indeed of myself, was changed, was more subtle. Whilst I pondered these philosophical quandaries, my tutor showed me how easily the ether of this place could be manipulated; with what minute effort one could alter the landscape with a trifling extension of the will; how one could easily leap from the ground and glide through the air, or levitate without calling upon the Deep Arcanum or scrawling in charcoal or bone.
‘How can I learn to come here under my own powers?’ I asked, raptly, to my guide.
He smiled once more that secret and feline smile. ‘You must freely leave behind all you have ever known, every thread of your former life, and dedicate yourself fully to my order and swear obeisance to my Lord and to our creed.’
What could I say? I opened my mouth to make a retort, but he stopped me with a gesture. ‘I can see that you are not prepared to offer such a commitment, and there is no shame in that, Kopta. Perhaps in another life.’
With that last and cryptic comment, he smiled his peculiar smile and I felt myself pulled through the world, snatched as suddenly as if from dream, and opened my eyes, only I did not find myself back in the earthen chamber; nay, I lurched upon my feet, standing back in Mad Prophet’s Square, at the very location I first encountered Eckrata, only I was alone!
I arrested the closest person to wander by, a young street urchin and asked him the time and day. He cast unto me a scoffing glare and told me it was the seventh-hundred-and-fourth year of the Caliph Talik, on the fifth day of the week.
In a shock I looked to the sky to note the position of the sun, and learned that it was the very day, nay the very moment, that I had first encountered the mystic, though I had clear memory of whiling away the afternoon and early evening until I met him!
“That’s it then,” said Danica. “We’ve found a reference to the dream mages. It would seem that the traveling bard Olaf the Red did indeed encounter one.”
“So it would appear,” said Bryn, “but I’m not sure how serious old Red was taken. Someone’s left a notation in the margin here. Olaf’s only trip of worth in Indysis was to an opium den! I can’t believe C. Slack has punished us so as to make us read this drivel!”
“It does seem more in keeping with bed-time stories than a legitimate account, but his description bears remarkable similarities to our experiences when Phinneas hypnotized us.”
Bryn pushed the ponderous tome across the table and rubbed at her eyes. “Agreed, but Red here seems to allude that he visited a land possessed of an independent reality, and not some construct of the psyche.”
“Yes, but my own experience is more in keeping with Olaf’s. Perhaps the disciplines of the hypnotist and the dream mage are not as different as one would expect.”
“I have few expectations,” said Bryn, “as I know nothing of dream mages or their craft.”
Danica let Bryn’s comment pass, as her mind was already traveling other avenues of thought. “Perhaps the images created by Phinneas’s hypnotic suggestions aren’t solely psychological constructs as we’ve believed, but take on a reality of their own on some astral plane. Perhaps Phinneas is, in a way, practicing the same Arcanum as these so called dream mages or dreamwrights, albeit to a lesser degree.”
“An engaging theory, Danni, but how does this help us?”
Danica leaned forward, her eyes lustrous in the yellow, arcane light of the tower’s lamps. “If these dreamscapes have reality outside our own minds, I can use this Arcanum as a bridge to Elias.”
Bryn studied Danica for several beats, while the light in the chamber flickered in parody of an actual torch. The latter had begun to fear that the princess thought her fallen prey to wishful thinking, or else her wits had been grief-addled. Presently, however, Bryn said, “The difficulty will be in learning this secret art, as no one we know of has heard of it, much less mastered it.”
“You don’t think I’m mad?”
Bryn flipped a bolt of auburn hair over her shoulder. “What I experienced when Phinneas put me under felt real enough, and I remember well the fear that I felt when it crumbled around me. Though I have tried to rationalize my experiences since then, in the moment I was certain that if I didn’t escape that place I would die. I don’t think you’re crazy, and, frankly, we have no other leads. It profits us nothing not to try. The only question is how do we begin our search?”
Danica released an inward sigh of relief. She closed Olaf’s memoir. “We have a couple of clues, which is more than we had this morning. One, we know that Olaf met the dreamwrights in Aradur, so we can surmise that by researching Aradurian magic and mystics we may well find anothe
r clue. Second, it appears that dream magic and arcane hypnosis share certain similarities, so by researching hypnosis we may find some further clues. This may even lead us toward uncovering some intelligence on the time mages.”
“Time mages? How so?”
“Let us assume for the moment that Olaf’s tale is genuine.”
“Very well.”
Danica leaned forward. “After his experience with the dreamwright, he blacked-out and found himself back where he had first met the mage—back in time.”
One of Bryn’s eyebrows inched up toward her hairline. “You think he may actually have been transported back into his own past?”
“If his tale is to be believed, then yes, I think it is something we have to consider. He either traveled into the past, or else the entire experience was a dream.” Danica shrugged. “Either way, it seems that the dreamwrights and the time mages are connected, and Olaf’s aesthetic friend is our only cogent lead.”
“Hmm, Aradurian mystics and hypnotists,” said Bryn as she wound a lock of hair around a finger. “We begin our search for a hidden magic by reading about religion and philosophy. I have to admit, I never thought it would be like this when I dreamed of attending Arcalum and becoming the first princess magus.”
Danica grinned. “The perfect place to hide magic is where a wizard wouldn’t look.”
Chapter 22
Confession
Elias felt a pristine awareness of each passing moment, a heightened sensory perception usually attributed to the opium addict or the aesthetics of Aradur. Phinneas had taught him something of the seed of the poppy, and the mystics who used it, when he and Lar had pilfered a tonic of laudanum from the doctor in their teenage years, but Elias let the memory pass after paying it only cursory attention. At present, he had other things on which to focus.
He walked slowly into the ponderous audience chamber of the Enkilder court. His senses were overcome, for he fancied he could see the pulsating aura of every soul present, and feel the buzz of their emotions and thoughts tear through his mind. Elias steeled his mind against the myriad stimuli. He envisioned a white bubble surrounding himself in his mind’s-eye. This mental exercise helped ground him and restore his equilibrium, and he focused on putting one foot in front of the other until he reached his seat.
Wayfarer (The Empyrean Chronicle) Page 19