Fog overlapped the stone walls and spread around him, encircling copse, Corner Post, and rowan, but not closing in. Colrean could still see the starlit sky directly above, but it was as if he were in a deep hole, surrounded on all sides by gray walls.
Walls of shifting, dense fog.
There was something in the whiteness. Colrean could sense it, but was grateful he couldn’t see it. He knew what it must be: one of the ancient evils of thrice-burned Hîrr, the city-state still reviled and feared though a thousand years had passed since its last and utter destruction. The thing in the fog had been called many things by many different peoples. Colrean chose the most common, one that would not reveal his knowledge of any deeper mysteries.
“Grannoch! Many-in-one!” shouted Colrean. “This is not your land, this is not your time. There is nothing here for you. Begone!”
Fog swirled. Colrean caught a glimpse of something—some long limb or perhaps a tail—of ever-burning hide, like lumpy charcoal with crosshatched lines of fire. His eyes burned and tears ran as he watched it disappear once more into the roiling mist, to be replaced by the sudden emergence of a human hand, smooth-skinned and elegant, the fingers beckoning to him, summoning him from his circle. Offering him in that gesture everything he ever wanted, or might want: the most beautiful lover, the greatest power, riches beyond compare—
Colrean dug his foot into the earth, just as it began to rise without his conscious direction, to make him take that first, fatal step out of his protective circle.
“I am not to be caught that way,” said Colrean. “I say again, begone!”
The beckoning hand disappeared. The fog thickened, but Colrean could see a dim silhouette building there, a figure forming. Something twice his height, and twice as broad, and only roughly human. One arm was very long, or perhaps held a blade; he could not tell from the mere suggestion of shape in the twisty cloud.
It was a blade, of dark crystal or congealed black flame or something stranger still, a blade that erupted from the fog and struck at Colrean, so swiftly he barely saw it. He cried out and flinched as it hit, but it did not cut him in half, as it would have had he been unprotected. The circle he had made around himself stood firm, the unearthly blade rebounding from the unseen barrier with the screech of a nail drawn across an anvil, magnified a thousand times.
“A sorcerer?” whispered a voice high in the air, somewhere in that bank of fog.
A little girl’s voice, clear and sweet.
“It bears no ring,” answered another voice, seemingly from beneath the earth just beyond Colrean’s circle.
This voice was male, and old, and crotchety.
“It has no staff,” muttered yet another voice from somewhere in the fog.
A deep-voiced woman. A high-pitched man. An adolescent, the voice shifting, changing with every word.
“The circle is well wrought, and adamant,” announced another male voice. “Yet, three strikes shall see it split asunder, or so I judge.”
“Unless it be renewed.”
“Renewed? No ring, no staff. It is mortal. Such a meager vessel; it must have spent its force.”
“Why do we hold back? Strike again, strike again!”
“It smiles. It has a secret. A true wizard comes, we must not tarry.”
“Strike or go, strike or—”
The blade shot out again, and once more every muscle in Colrean’s body tensed, expecting sudden, awful pain and then the perhaps welcome relief of death. But again the circle held with the scream of iron, and the blade whisked back.
Before the Grannoch could strike again, Colrean hurled himself down and sideways out of the circle, breaking its protection himself even as the third strike split the air above him. Like a cockroach he scuttled away, circling behind the rowan, but the fog rolled closer, and the blade came too swiftly for him to fully escape, the very tip of it slicing the heel off Colrean’s left boot and the sole beneath, leaving an agonizing, four-inch-long wound along his foot.
Stifling a sob, Colrean clutched the trunk of the rowan and drew his legs up, hands scrabbling at the chain around his neck. But before he could draw out what was hidden there, the terrible sword came out of the fog once again. Colrean had a split second to know this was the death blow. He shut his eyes and let out the scream that he had been holding back the entire time.
Three seconds later he was still screaming, but he wasn’t dead, and there was no new pain to add to the white-hot burn in his foot.
Colrean opened his eyes, the scream fading in his throat. The sword hung above him, wrapped and roped and entangled in rowan branches, and more branches ran outward to grip a great, grotesque arm of smoking, chancred charcoal hide. Through the suddenly broken and dissipated fog Colrean saw the hideous misshapen body of the Grannoch, the “many-in-one.” Worst of all, he saw its lumpen head, adorned with all those it had taken over centuries, dozens of mostly human faces crammed too tightly together. All eyes dull and lifeless, but the many mouths writhing, emitting cries and curses as the monster tried to free itself from the grip of the ancient rowan.
Colrean resisted the temptation to shut his eyes again, or to look away and vomit. Instead he drew out the chain, his shaking hand closing on the pendant object. But before he could use whatever he held, the Grannoch tore itself out of the grasp of the rowan with the crack of snapping branches and the rasp of shredding bark. But it did not attack again, instead staggering back, great arms reaching to fend off the rowan’s whipping branches, the monster’s many mouths no longer shouting or screaming but exhaling thick streams of fog as it tried to shroud itself again.
Colrean put on the ring of wreathed gold and electrum that he usually kept hidden on the chain, and called forth its power. Muttering memory-hooks, he directed his magic this way and that, lines of force reaching deep into the ground around the Grannoch. Then with one wrenching effort of will, the magic opened a great chasm in the ground, the earth breaking apart with a thunderous blare.
Now the Grannoch reached for the rowan branches, rather than trying to fend them off. But it was too slow, the opening of the ground too deep, too sudden and unexpected. The monster fell into the ravine, spouting streams of fog and curses, the rowan’s branches snapping back to let it go.
Colrean called upon the last reserves in the ring and shut the chasm with a clap of his hands. The electrum wreath crumbled to dust. The gold band shivered, but remained, though it was now powerless and empty.
Even so, it was clearly a sorcerer’s ring, worn on the third finger of Colrean’s right hand, and the sight of it would have settled many bets in the three villages.
For a minute or two the ground groaned and rumbled beneath the sorcerer, as if the very earth might choose to spit the Grannoch out, but eventually it stilled. Colrean, his hands trembling with hurt and shock and only slowly ebbing terror, painfully stripped the boot from his left foot and inspected the wound. It was not deep, but ugly, and even as he half laughed and half sobbed at the irony that it had to be his left foot the Grannoch’s blade had struck, the mage carefully summoned a fraction of the remaining power he held ready in himself. Calling a cauterizing flame to his hand, he used it to cleanse and seal the angry wound.
When he was finished, he tore the tail from his linen shirt and bound it around his foot. That done, he rested his forehead against the rowan’s trunk and gave thanks in a quiet whisper. He had hoped it was an ancient guardian of the kind that reviled such things as the Grannoch, but he had not been sure.
When he lifted his forehead from the tree, the rowan’s branches shivered, and a single leaf fell into his hand, a leaf more silver in the moonlight than any normal rowan’s. Colrean carefully put it inside his jerkin.
“I thank the rowan,” he said formally, gingerly hopping up onto his right foot. He almost fell over, and would have done if he hadn’t caught himself, both hands against the rowan�
�s trunk. “For all.”
He stood there for some time, supported by the tree. Listening, letting his otherworldly senses stretch outward, fearing that the ground might burst open to reveal the Grannoch was not crushed and dead far below, as he truly hoped.
But everything seemed once again returned to the normal business of the night. There was no fog, no silence, just the soft velvet darkness lightened by moon and stars, and the usual small sounds of life and death.
After a time that felt long but he knew was well short of an hour, Colrean began to hold some hope that he might now survive until the dawn. If he made it that far, he should survive the day beyond, as he had some expectation that help would come before the next night. An oath-bound, trustworthy wizard would likely come from Ferraul or Achelliston, as both cities were within a day’s hard riding. Less, using post-horses and a little magic to draw away fatigue and renew tired muscles.
He had even begun to imagine just such a wizard, when he both heard and felt the approach of something that, while it sounded rather like a horse, he knew from his mage-sense was not. Once again, the natural creatures about knew it too, and all around the owls were fleeing, the field mice diving into holes, the very crickets digging under the barley stalks, all hoping like Colrean to stay alive until the dawn.
There was nowhere for Colrean to hide, and he could not flee. Instead he drew himself up, only one hand resting against the rowan’s trunk. He looked across at the stone, and the staff thrust into it. Again he wondered who had put it there, a staff of such power, one sure to draw Rannachin and things like the Grannoch, and the wizard who was coming now.
Only then did Colrean remember the Grannoch had said a true wizard was on the way.
Surely not an oath-bound wizard, though, for there had not been time for anyone to come from the closest cities. Besides, this one was riding a peggoty, a made horse, a thing given a semblance of magical life for a short period. A peggoty was fashioned from green sticks of willow, mud, and the blood of no less than seven mares. Such mounts were accordingly very expensive to make, they took a great deal of power to create and not much less to maintain, and were difficult to ride. But they were much swifter than a horse.
Making things like the peggoty was forbidden to oath-bound wizards. It was blood magic, requiring a great deal of often slow and painful killing, and its practitioners invariably ended up having no concern for any lives but their own.
Sure enough, up alongside the Thrake-Seyam wall came a strutting mount of sticks, with a cloaked and hatted figure on its back, a staff held negligently in the rider’s hand. Colrean could not see the face of the wizard, shadowed under the brim of the hat, but he already had an inkling of the rider’s identity just from the silhouette and seat. He knew that rider.
She—it had to be she, if he was right—stopped the peggoty a little ways off, and dismounted onto the stone wall. Unlike Colrean, she did so with nimble grace, and there was no danger she would fall or stones dislodge. Her hand waved, moonlight catching several sorcerer’s rings upon her fingers, not a meager single ring as Colrean had possessed. With that wave, the peggoty collapsed into its component parts, its work done.
Colrean caught a whiff of the horrible charnel stench of decaying blood and tried not to breathe it in.
He still couldn’t see the wizard’s face, but he was sure now. He did indeed know every movement of her slender body, the shape of those elegant hands.
“It’s been a long time, Naramala,” said Colrean, his voice loud in the silent night.
The wizard tilted her head back, perhaps in surprise at hearing his voice, though probably not. He could see her face clearly now. Beautiful Naramala, the woman he had once thought sure to be the great love of his life.
“Coltreen,” she said, her voice musical and lovely, even more lovely than her face and body. It was her voice he had fallen in love with first, hearing her unseen in the university library, undeterred by the shushing and hushing of the proctors.
“I am called Colrean now,” he said quietly. “The Islanders cannot pronounce hard t’s. It seemed easier to let it go.”
“The Islanders?” asked Naramala. “Is that where you went? But then why are you here now, so far from the Cold Sea?”
She walked along the wall now, toward copse and rowan and Corner Post. And Colrean. She held the staff like a rope-walker, across her body, as if for balance, though he knew she had no need to do so.
“I live nearby, these two years past,” said Colrean, gesturing with his right hand, the moonlight catching on his own ring. “I had enough of the sea, the cold.”
“And you made your ring, after all,” said Naramala. She stopped several feet short of the farthest-reaching branches of the rowan and stepped lightly down from the wall, bringing her staff vertical. “I did wonder what had become of you. And why you left so abruptly, without a word. Indeed, I was quite hurt.”
“I saw you with Alris,” said Colrean.
Naramala laughed, an easy, carefree laugh. Even now, knowing what he knew, Colrean felt an ache when he heard it. Such an easy laugh, so warm and inclusive, with her eyes widening that little bit and her mouth twitched just so—
“Oh, we were students then and carefree! How was I to know you would be so jealous of some simple pleasure? Or was it because she was a woman? So rustic, Coltreen! I suppose these barley fields suit you better than the streets of Pran.”
“It wasn’t jealousy, though I will admit to that. I saw you kill her,” said Colrean flatly. “Strangled with her own scarf. And you took her bracelets, the proof that won her the first place.”
Naramala didn’t answer for a moment, then she laughed again. A little laugh, very different in tone. One of cold amusement, not for sharing, and her eyes became colder still.
“How ever did you see that?”
“There was a cat,” said Colrean. “I was practicing watching through its eyes. It chanced to alight on your windowsill, and…I saw.”
“Only four of us were to be allowed to try for our sorcerer’s rings that year,” said Naramala conversationally. “Alris might have got my place. Though your leaving made it easier still. Were you afraid I would kill you, too?”
“No,” replied Colrean. “I was afraid I might kill you. I couldn’t bear…everything, I suppose. The disillusionment, the despair. I decided to go as far away as possible. I was young, rash, and judgmental. Of myself, more than anything. How could I have ever loved a murderer?”
“I thought true love would transcend mere murder,” said Naramala. She looked up at the rowan’s branches, many of them now leafless, the bark shredded from its combat with the Grannoch. Giving the tree a wide berth, she circled around toward the stone, tapping the ground with her staff as she walked, her gaze never quite leaving Colrean. “If you ever truly loved me, you would understand why I had to kill Alris. Wizards are not to be judged as normal people, Colrean. If you had stayed to make your staff, you would understand this.”
“So you are beyond me, and my judging?” asked Colrean. “Or that of anyone, save other wizards?”
“I am beyond their judgment too,” answered Naramala. “Or I will be, once I take the staff in that stone for myself.”
“You are not oath-bound?” asked Colrean, though he already knew the answer from the mere existence of the peggoty. “How so?”
Naramala smiled. “Let us say I crossed my fingers,” she said. “I found a way to loose the coils. The oath could not hold me, not beyond the passing of a dozen moons. I pretended it did, of course. The old fools have no idea.”
Colrean lifted his eyebrows to show his amazement and shuffled around the rowan a little as Naramala edged closer to the stone.
“Are you going to try and stop me, Coltreen?” asked Naramala. “Indeed, I am puzzled why you are here at all. Sorcerer you may be, but you could no more draw that staff than you could stand ag
ainst me.”
“That is as may be,” said Colreen. “But you will not take that staff. Nor could the Grannoch who came before you.”
Naramala tilted her head slightly, those beautiful pale-hazel eyes weighing up Colrean. He knew she was taking stock of how he leaned upon the tree, his right foot planted too heavily, knee at an odd angle, his left foot drawn up to try and soften the pain of his wounded sole. The single gold band upon his finger, that doubtless she suspected no longer held any reserve of magic. The lack of a staff, and no other obvious articles of magic, no sword or knife or wand. All in all, he must look a posturing fool to deny the wizard Naramala, in all her majesty and power.
“A Grannoch? I wondered what strange corpse was immured below. But any power you did have must have been spent to slay such a thing. I hazard you are empty now, of all but words.”
“I am not,” said Colrean. “I make no more warnings.”
“I would heed none from such as you,” said Naramala, and raised her staff.
She muttered no memory-hooks, choosing a simple blast of pure magic that would have thrown Colrean to the ground, doubtless breaking many bones. But he concentrated magic of his own from some unseen source in his clenched fist, raising it against her spell. Naramala’s blow broke upon it like a wave on a tall rock, all force diverted about Colrean, dissipating into nothing.
“I wasn’t going to kill you,” said Naramala. “But you have annoyed me now.”
She spoke memory-hooks, her staff raised high. Magic coalesced around the silver-chased tip of the staff, becoming visible as luminous trails that swirled and spun to become a globe of sick yellow light, which with a flick of her arm, Naramala sent drifting toward Colrean’s head.
He knew what it was: a standard of wizard’s duels, though few could cast it so well or so swiftly. The Asphyxiation of Lygar, an impenetrable globe that would settle on his shoulders and constrict, denying him breath or crushing his skull, death coming swiftly either way.
Colrean drew yet more power into his fist, babbling memory-hooks himself, each word reminding him how the magic must be shaped to form a specific spell, this one a counterspell of considerable strength.
The Book of Magic Page 33