“I probably am,” she confessed with a shrug. “But do you have any better ideas?”
Kale answered her summons as promptly as if the king himself had sent for him. He had been with Athaya from the beginning, having deserted his post in the King’s Guard soon after Captain Graylen’s death. Though not a wizard himself, the old soldier was unswervingly loyal and had saved her life—and Jaren’s—on more than one occasion. Tonight, however, the scarred hands held a delicate handcarved flute instead of a weapon—an item, Athaya thought, much more worthy of his gentle heart than a sword or crossbow could ever be.
“You sent for me, my Lady?”
“Yes, Kale. I need you to do something for me later tonight, once everyone’s gone to sleep. Something very important.” With the toe of her slipper, she prodded the edge of a loose stone in the chapel floor. Beneath it was buried the most lethal of weapons—a priceless crown of corbals, stolen from the king on the day he had tried to force her recantation before the people of Kaiburn. The boy who had stolen it later died for his effort, but little had Cameron suspected that he had procured the very item that could hold the key to their salvation.
“I want you to dig up the strongbox and take it away from camp—a mile, at the very least. Open it up someplace extremely dark; if enough moonlight hits those crystals, we may feel them even at such a distance. Then I want you to pry a few corbals loose from their settings. Get a variety of sizes and wrap each one up tight. When you’re done, come back and bury the strongbox again. Tomorrow morning, bring the loose corbals to me.”
Kale’s brows arched substantially. “To… you?”
“Yes, Kale,” she said, knowing it sounded as odd as a prisoner requesting that another rat be placed in his cell. She offered him a crooked smile. “I haven’t had a headache in a while and thought I was about due.”
Jaren crossed his arms over his chest, visibly displeased, but also aware that they were rather short of options at the moment. “I knew it.”
“If we can learn how to stand up to these crystals, too, then we’ve got a chance to surprise him.” Athaya curled into a tight little ball in the pew, hugging her knees to her chest. “I remember the first night that Rhodri came to me in the dungeon—the night I accused him of trying to torture you to death with that corbal crystal. He told me—how did he phrase it?—that it was all a trick, just like Ranulf said. That the corbal doesn’t cause pain, but deludes a wizard’s mind into thinking the pain is there. He said you could have stayed in agony forever, until you either went crazy, or killed yourself to escape a pain that didn’t really exist.”
Jaren stiffened a bit; the memory of that raking pain, however false, was powerful still. “But to start off cold, without any idea of what to do—”
“We may not know, but I’ll wager Drianna does—at least in theory. And if she’s sincere about joining us, she’ll be glad to tell us anything she knows about how the Sage wields his power.” Athaya’s eyes blazed with dark intensity as she listened to the singing and laughter of her campmates, as yet ignorant of the peril rising in the west. “Maybe my power isn’t as strong as it was, but I’m going to figure out how the Sage resists those crystals. At this point, it may be our only chance at stopping him.”
Chapter 5
The morning after the midsummer feast, Athaya, Jaren, Kale, and Drianna packed a basket of food, a flagon of watered wine, and a menacing collection of tightly wrapped corbal crystals and set out from the camp. Their destination was a small clearing roughly a mile north of the monastery grounds; at that distance, Athaya’s experiments with the crystals should not disturb the others.
She was, on the contrary, expecting to get the headache of her life.
“If you’re so certain of making yourself ill, then wouldn’t it be best to stay closer to home?” Kale ventured, increasingly unsettled at the growing distance their footsteps took them from the sanctuary of the forest camp. He cast furtive glances over his shoulder every so often, as if suspicious that the seemingly tranquil expanse of pines and brambles and snowy white trilliums around them cloaked the presence of the Tribunal’s agents—or the Sage’s. “Can’t you just do your…’experiments’ inside a set of wards?”
“I wish it were that simple.” Athaya smiled resignedly at him, grateful for his concern but powerless to alter the reason for it. “Wards may act as a barrier against magic, but they don’t work against corbal crystals. Remember the day we found Cordry and that priest—Father Greste, it was—surprised us with a corbal-studded candlestick? Ranulf had conjured wards to keep Cordry’s spells from harming anyone, but the crystal’s influences passed right through them. Luckily for Cordry, he was early enough in his mekahn that the crystal couldn’t hurt him much. No,” Athaya went on, somewhat pensive, “whatever power a corbal has, it doesn’t work quite the same way spells do. I’m afraid we don’t know everything about corbals yet,” she conceded with a shrug, “but thanks to Drianna, we’re about to find out a little bit more.”
“Have you told Master Hedric about any of this yet?” Jaren asked her, drawing back a snarled curtain of ivy and grape vines from the trail to let Athaya pass.
“I opened a panel to him earlier this morning,” she replied. “He was as surprised as the rest of us to learn that there’s some way other than a sealing spell to avoid being hurt by a corbal. And as you might expect,” she added with an obligatory air, “he told me to be careful.”
“I just don’t see how this talent can be commonplace on Sare—and has been for centuries, apparently—and yet not even our Great Masters know a thing about it, much less how it’s done. There’s not even the slightest reference to such a thing in the Book of Sages.”
“It was probably something the Sarians stumbled across by accident. I can’t imagine they set out to conquer the corbals on purpose.” She tossed a wry grin over one shoulder. “After all, how often did it occur to you to sit in a room with some corbal crystals and see how long it would take to make them stop hurting? That’s like pressing your hand against a hot cauldron and trying to make your flesh stop burning—not something any sane person would do to enliven an otherwise dull evening.”
Drianna, having fallen a few yards behind to pick a handful of rose hips for the evening’s tea, stuffed the tender treasures into her basket and hurried to catch up. “Bran—the Sage,” she hastily corrected with a sneer, determined never to use the endearment again, “told me that it was Dameronne himself who first discovered how to do it—and it wasn’t any accident.” She snagged her sleeve on a protruding sumac branch and paused for a moment while Kale stepped up to free it. “After King Faltil killed most of the wizards in Caithe two centuries ago, the handful that escaped to Sare knew they needed to find a way to withstand the crystals. Before Faltil’s scourge, the crystals had never been used as a weapon on such a large scale. No one truly realized the damage they could do.”
“I can believe that,” Jaren observed. “In Reyka, everyone knows what corbals can do, but nobody worries much about it. The crystals are all but nonexistent, and there hasn’t been a single instance in our history when they’ve been used for a massive assault like Faltil’s. So why would anyone bother to suffer through a great deal of pain to learn how to defend against a weapon they’ll probably never face?”
“But the Sarian wizards expected to face it,” Drianna pointed out solemnly. “Dameronne’s prophecy convinced them that they were destined to return to Caithe and rule one day—and they knew they would be confronting the crystals then. In order for the Lorngeld to rule Caithe permanently, Dameronne knew they had to find a way around this weakness. They took some of Faltil’s corbal-studded weapons back to Sare to use for practice, and then, once the technique was finally discovered, each wizard to become Sage passed the knowledge on. Brandegarth learned how to resist corbals from the man who was Sage before him. That is,” she added sourly, “before he Challenged him and took his place.”
“But where did Dameronne begin?” Athaya asked, overwhel
med by the immensity of such a task, as if someone had just handed her a pickax, gestured to a vast limestone quarry, and told her to build a castle by sunset. “How did he even know where to start?”
Drianna lowered her thick lashes, shamed by this fragment of her Sarian heritage. “He started with drugs,” she murmured, her voice as soft as the summer breeze stirring the pines. “Pastle seed, specifically; the plant is native to Sare. Inhaling the powdered seeds sharpens your thinking and makes physical sensations more acute—that is, as long as you don’t use too much or grow addicted to it. No small number of Sarians have, and it eventually leaves them unable to cast a simple witchlight, much less anything more difficult. I’ve heard it said that Dameronne used pastle seed from time to time—some believe it’s the only way he could have foreseen your crusade so far in advance—so it’s logical to believe he would have used it to try and defeat the corbals, too.”
“Just the reverse of looca-smoke,” Jaren said thoughtfully, pondering Drianna’s story with a scholar’s studied detachment. “Looca-smoke numbs the mind so the corbal’s pain isn’t as intense, but at the same time, it leaves you too addled to use your magic. Pastle seed does exactly the opposite.”
Athaya felt a sickly flutter in her belly. Surely there was some other way of mastering the power of a corbal crystal! Even if the pastle plant could be obtained, she staunchly refused to scramble her brains by experimenting with its dangerous seeds. After enduring both her mekahn and the sealing spell in the span of a single year, the thought of forsaking complete control over her wits was abhorrent to her. “But Ranulf didn’t say anything about the Sage using a drug…”
“No. Pastle seed is only a stepping stone. Once you know the secret of the corbal’s power, you can gradually wean yourself from the drug. Theoretically, anyway. Most wizards still need it as a crutch to defy all but the smallest crystals. But the Sage never had to use pastle seed at all—not even when he engaged more than one crystal at a time. His adept abilities gave him the skill he required without it.”
Athaya let out a thin sigh of relief; if Brandegarth had learned to battle the corbals without the drug, then she should be able to do the same. “The drug explains how the trick was discovered, but what exactly is the trick itself? What did the pastle seed allow Dameronne and the others to learn about the crystals?” Athaya stepped over the rotting remains of a fallen birch and then turned back to Drianna. “You’ve seen the Sage work with corbals before… did he ever tell you exactly how he does it?”
Drianna bobbed her head, eager to be of use to her new allies in any way she could. “He liked to talk to me about his magic, though I didn’t always understand everything he said. Once, he told me that all a wizard has to do is learn to tell the corbal is doesn’t hurt as strongly as the corbal is telling you it does. I can’t imagine a piece of rock actually ‘saying’ anything,” she added with a baffled frown, “but I know that’s what he said. If you push back hard enough, you can suspend the crystal’s power over you.”
Athaya’s first impulse was to dismiss the explanation as too simplistic to be useful, but then she stopped abruptly on the narrow trail and shifted a meaningful gaze to Jaren. “Just like Nicolas and the spell of compulsion.”
Yes, Hedric had described her brother’s inner struggle in strikingly similar terms. Much of his mental energies are involved with combating the spell. As strongly as the Sage’s compulsion bade Nicolas to do his brother harm, Nicolas in turn rebelled against it, but the price of the constant effort left him simple-minded. The Sage’s technique was much the same, the only difference being that applying his mental energies to the corbal’s covert persuasions left his spells out of reach, but not his elemental self.
“The Sage once told me that it was rather like battling another wizard during a Challenge,” Drianna added. “The corbal uses its power to make him feel pain, and he uses his own abilities to resist the compulsion and turn the pain aside.”
Athaya furrowed her brows; it sounded simple enough in theory, but she doubted very much that it would prove so easy in practice. “To push back against a corbal without giving in to the pain must take a great deal of focused concentration.”
Drianna lifted the hem of her skirt and hopped over a patch of mud in her path. “The Sage spoke quite often about the need for a disciplined mind. Before he practiced with his crystals, he would recite things to clear his mind of distractions—children’s rhymes, bits of poetry… and Dameronne’s prophecy,” she added with a subtle scowl. “He used to recite them aloud, but as he got better he just repeated the litany in his head. Then, once he faced the crystal itself, he used those same disciplines to overpower it. He likened it to defending against mind-magic—a traditional weapon of the Challenge. You must take control of your thoughts so they can’t be manipulated so easily by your enemy.”
The longer Athaya thought on it, the more credible the Sage’s strategy became. Master Hedric had long since taught her that the key to perfecting wizardry of any kind was to be found in mental discipline; clearly, much as they would chafe in unison at being likened to their Reykan brethren and their more prudent approach to magic, the Sarian wizards used that same philosophy to avoid falling victim to the crystal’s seductions. Regardless of the tradition, be it Reykan or Sarian, Athaya had learned the wisdom of discipline firsthand. The rote memorization that Master Hedric forced on her was intended to sharpen her mind and it was that expertly honed control that helped her fend off the devastating effects of the sealing spell as long as she had. Her last memory of the previous summer was reciting the Succession of Circles time and time again to keep her mind from splitting apart at the agonizing pressure of captive power wailing to be free. Credony, lord of the first Circle, twenty-six years; Sidra, lord of the second…
Without the familiar sanctuary of that mindless chant, she would never have lived long enough be rescued.
“This could explain why only the Sage can overpower the larger corbals without resorting to pastle seed,” Jaren mused. “Only adepts have the level of concentration required. After all, they’re trained to higher levels of mental discipline out of sheer necessity—they need that degree of control to master their more potent level of power. Curious… the stronger a wizard you are, the more intensely you feel a corbal’s pain. Now it looks as if that weakness is also a hidden strength.”
Athaya plucked a maple leaf from an overhanging branch and shredded it worriedly between her fingers; hidden strength or no, she foresaw one vital drawback to this talent. “I gather, then, that the Sage has to reach this state of concentration before someone confronts him with a corbal crystal—I mean, if someone takes him by surprise, he wouldn’t be able to focus his thoughts enough to fight it, what with his paths crossing this way and that.”
Drianna nodded reluctantly. “Several years ago, he asked me to sneak up on him with a crystal without telling him when or where, just to see whether he could drive the pain back once it already had him in its grip. He tried, but he simply couldn’t do it. It made him terribly cross,” she added, eyes flashing with belated vengeance.
Frowning deeply, Athaya tossed the skeletal remains of the maple leaf aside. “All this talk about corbals makes me wonder… If the crystals make us think we’re in pain, then why don’t they inflict pain on everyone? Why just wizards? Our paths—and our magic, of course—are the only thing wizards have that other people don’t. There’s got to be a link somewhere. I can’t believe it’s just a coincidence.”
Jaren offered his hand to help her over a fallen log in their path. “Coincidence or not, the last thing you need right now is another riddle to distract you,” he advised. He tilted his head in the direction of Drianna’s willow basket. “You’ve got an appointment with some corbal crystals.”
Obligingly, Athaya abandoned the mystery to focus on the task at hand. “So what we know is this: a corbal makes it impossible to work our spells because our paths cross—or we’re deceived into thinking they do—making it impossible to lo
cate our spells. And even if we could find the right spell, the pain, real or not, robs us of the concentration we need to cast it. So the secret is to mentally steel ourselves in advance and then block the pain by sending out thoughts of defiance. We can’t work any magic while we’re doing it, but at least we can think straight—that is, unless we stop pushing back and let the crystal overpower us.”
“That about sums it up,” Jaren remarked with an approving nod. “Just don’t forget to write all of that down in your journal for posterity. The one you promised Master Hedric you’d start the moment you got back to camp, remember?”
Athaya looked away evasively; as Jaren suspected, she had completely forgotten her pledge. “Oh, that.”
By this time, they had reached the clearing they sought. Kale spread a pair of wool blankets in a sunny patch of grass near a winding creek, while Drianna unpacked the basket, careful to leave the corbals undisturbed for the moment, and doled out four equal portions of molasses bread, green cheese, and blueberries.
Jaren gathered up his ration in a scrap of cloth and turned to go. “I’ll see you in a few hours,” he said, offering Athaya a quick kiss on the cheek. “Have a very pleasant headache.”
“Sure you don’t want to stay?” she asked playfully, swishing away a bee that had grown overly interested in her meal.
Jaren shook his head in adamant refusal. “You’ll be in a sour enough mood when you get back. If we both go home with splitting skulls, we’ll be sniping at each other all night. And besides, if the Sage’s best magicians can’t overpower a corbal crystal without resorting to pastle seed, then nobody on our side has much chance of mastering them besides you. I’ll go back and help Marya with her wards for a while, and then I’m due in the kitchens.” He expelled a shallow sigh of resignation. “I’m not sure what I did to deserve it, but Master Tonia volunteered me to help bake the rest of those blueberries into pies this afternoon.”
The Wizard King Page 9