And in all of these rooms the people wore the same robes-and-trews in various shades of browns and grays that the first three Mages wore, with the same symbol embroidered on the breast.
“Our transportation is in readiness,” Ahkhan told him, which actually told him nothing. Were they heading for a stable full of the kind of horse that Ahkhan’s Natya was? Was it something more exotic than that? Magic carriages? Gryphons?
Finally they came to a set of double doors made of hammered copper. The man—magician!—who was leading them there threw the doors open, to show that the room contained nothing except a free-standing black stone arch at the end of it, and a great many people.
But the arch was filled with what looked like glimmering water, if a sheet of water could be made to stand upright, and the people were coming and going through it.
“You’re just in time,” said the magician who had brought them here. “If you hadn’t arrived today, you’d have had to wait at least a full moon, if not more.”
Ahkhan smiled. “I told you we’d be here today. You should know you can trust the word of a Sleepgiver by now.” He turned to Tory and Kee. “Get in line with the rest,” he instructed. “When your turn comes, step through the archway.” He gave Tory a little shove to get him going; there were only three people ahead of him.
“But—” Tory objected.
“Just go!” Ahkhan said impatiently. “They can’t keep the Portal open forever! We’re probably the last ones that will go through today!”
“You are,” the female Mage confirmed. “So don’t dawdle. This takes the energy of most of the School.”
There were only two people ahead of him now. Then one. And then none, and before Tory could object, Ahkhan stepped behind him and gave him a shove, and he went stumbling toward that weird substance that looked like vertical water before he could stop himself.
There was a moment of terrifying darkness, and complete disorientation.
And then he was stumbling into a room that appeared to be the mirror-image of the one he had just left. “Move!” someone snapped at him, and reflexively, he obeyed and cleared the area in front of the arch, as Kee stumbled across the threshold behind him, then Ahkhan, looking as if he was emerging from a bath, leading his horse who looked entirely unruffled by the entire experience. The horse honestly looked as if she had weathered things better than Kee and Tory put together.
And the moment Ahkhan appeared, the entire surface of the stuff filling the arch shivered, turned black, and vanished. Now there was nothing but a black stone archway, showing the brown stone wall behind it.
“Now we’re in Rethwellan, near the South Menmellith Border,” Ahkhan said, before Tory could say anything. “This is the Southern School of the Amber Moon Mages, and what you just went through was a magic Portal.”
Still feeling disoriented, Tory struggled to remember his maps, and then gasped when he realized just how great a distance they had traveled in what was barely the blink of an eye. Why, this was at least as far as it was from the Northernmost Border of Valdemar to the Southernmost! But—how?
—but it was magic, of course. Real magic! A portal was a door . . . so somehow, that arch had been a magical door, and it had taken them hundreds of leagues away in the blink of an eye.
“This was where my sister was heading when she disappeared.” Ahkhan told them, as the room emptied of people, leaving them alone. “The Sleepgivers have a contract with Amber Moon. We supply them with Primary Guards and Trainers; when we need magical expertise we can’t manage on our own, they supply that. And when we need to move from south to north quickly, they give us transportation between the two schools.”
“Why would you—” Kee asked. He was pale, and looked as if he was more shaken by the experience than Tory was. “—why would you supply them with people?”
“Because not everyone who undergoes Sleepgiver training has the stomach to serve the Nation as a Sleepgiver,” Ahkhan replied quietly. “So they elect to go into long service to serve the needs of the Nation in other ways, such as here. We have a similar contract with two other Schools of Magecraft, but the one with Amber Moon is the oldest.”
Tory raised his eyebrow at the Prince. “It makes sense,” he observed. “Who better to plan and carry out defenses than an assassin?”
Ahkhan nodded. “It serves us well. Now, we are near where my sister disappeared. Do you think you may be able to sense her now?”
“Once my stomach stops trying to crawl up my throat, yes,” Kee told him.
“Then I will arrange for a small quiet room. And some mint tea.” Ahkhan hurried off, giving no indication that they should follow. So, after looking around and seeing nothing like furniture, Tory sat straight down on the floor. Kee joined him a moment later, moving in a way that suggested that if he moved any faster, the results would be regrettable.
“I think I’m going to lie down now,” Kee said, putting his packs down and using them as a pillow. He looked quite green at this point. Tory didn’t feel quite as sick as Kee looked, but a wave of dizziness suggested it might be a good idea if he followed Kee’s example.
Once down, he stared up at the polished beams of the ceiling and the neatly laid stones above them, and he wondered again how the building of this place had been accomplished. And why? Why so much stone? Did it serve some special purpose for these Mages? Or did they build in stone for defensive purposes?
Maybe it was to prevent people from setting fire to it. Certainly you wouldn’t be able to set fire to a building that was made almost entirely of stone.
Or were Mages likely to set things on fire by accident?
He realized as he lay there on the stone that part of his dizziness was due to being drastically overheated, which probably accounted for some of Kee’s illness as well. As the cold stone of the floor drained the heat from his body, he began to feel better—and then to feel exhausted, as if he had run a very long distance. It felt very good to just lie there on the cool floor, staring up. Under the circumstances, in fact, the floor felt just as good as a mattress.
After a while he noticed that things even smelled different here. Drier, dustier, a hint of some sort of bitter herbal scent. Not unpleasant, but very different from Valdemar.
Ahkhan took his time about returning, and when he did, it was without his horse. He moved so silently by himself that to Tory it seemed as if he had performed another feat of magic and just appeared at their side, looking down at them with very faint sympathy. “My first transition through a Portal was equally fraught,” he said, looking at Kee, and Kee jumped a little when he spoke. “I should have remembered that, and warned you of it. Come, I have cots and mint tea arranged. Both will make you feel better.”
Tory rolled up to his feet; Kee did the same, with a little more effort. “Are we going to have to do this again any time soon?” the Prince asked plaintively.
“Not until your return journey,” Ahkhan promised him. “Though . . . whether that will be soon or late, only you can tell me.”
This time, he led them through only two of the linked rooms—although the building looked nearly identical to the one they had just left—before taking them up a stone staircase where, at long last, there was a hallway, with dozens of doors leading off it. This must be something like the dormitories in the three Collegia, Tory surmised. Or maybe guest quarters? In either case—given that Ahkhan had promised cots, they were probably bedrooms.
And that was what it proved to be; the narrow rooms they were led to were quite comfortable for something made entirely of stone; there were low beds, a couple of chests, a wooden wardrobe, and somehow shelves fastened securely to the stone walls. There was no glass in the small windows; instead, there were heavy wooden shutters, which were currently open to catch a breeze much warmer than he had felt in Valdemar.
There was also a small table beside the bed in each room, with a glazed potte
ry pitcher and cup. Kee immediately poured a cupful and drank it down. “That’s better,” he said heavily. “I need to lie down—”
“And sleep,” admonished Ahkhan. “You clearly took the transition hard. You may well be Mage-blooded. I am impatient to learn if you can touch my sister, but not so impatient that I wish you to be ill. Drink another cup, and sleep. You too,” he added, looking gravely at Tory. “You may not be Mage-blooded, but the transition was not easy for you.”
Tory was not at all inclined to argue with the Sleepgiver. He went next door to the room he had been given, dropped his packs on the floor, drank down two cups full of the mint-and-honey tea, and all but fell into the bed.
His final thought before exhaustion overpowered him was to wonder—if Kee was Mage-blooded, where on earth had that come from?
Well, it’s a Gift like any other, I suppose, he thought. It could come from anywhere. . . .
The next thing he knew, Ahkhan was shaking him awake, and the golden quality and slant of the light coming in the windows suggested it was very late in the afternoon. “Kyril is awake and prepared to try if you are,” the Sleepgiver said, as Tory knuckled his eyes.
“This is generally better not done on a full stomach,” he replied by way of agreement, and stood up. He was pleased to feel no dizziness, nor that drained feeling. “Let’s see what we can do.”
Kee sat cross-legged on the foot of his bed and gestured to Tory to sit at the head. He did so, and they clasped wrists. It took no time at all to fall into that familiar trance.
And suddenly his darkness lit up with a cluster of new “presences.”
One was very near, but it was one he was used to by now; that was Ahkhan, sitting at the window and watching them gravely. Six of them were near-ish—as near as, say, Abi would be on one of her very distant missions to build something, and these were all new to him.
He strove to “see” them all, and sense what was going on in their minds. Ahkhan was easy; Tory had known for some time now that the Sleepgiver’s calm and confident exterior masked a storm of worry for his sister. There was nothing new there, except a heightened anxiety that he and Kee would be able to make contact with her.
He moved to the five, distant ‘beacons’ and concentrated on the first, a presence that seemed to attract him the most powerfully. He found himself observing an older man, about his father’s age, alone in a room that appeared to be carved out of the living rock of a mountain, in grave conference with a group of even older men and women. He looked uncannily like Mags. The family resemblance was unmistakable. Is this father’s cousin Bey? It must be, because he was the one that “attracted” Tory the strongest, probably since he was the nearer relation.
All right. Let me see if I can “read” anything from him. If we manage to find Sira, it will help if I can get a sense of how she’s holding up, even if I can’t Mindspeak with her. He concentrated for a moment, and got the distinct impression that although this man was putting on a “normal” face for the benefit of those with him, he was deeply worried about his missing daughter.
Not far from him, perhaps no more than a few rooms away, was a boy on the verge of manhood, and another a little older diligently doing something in a still-room. And again . . . there was no doubt that they, too, were worried about Sira, and they were using this task as a way to keep themselves distracted.
The next two were physically farther from the first two. A young man about Perry’s age and a much younger woman, were engaged in running and climbing all over a course that was built on and next to a mountain slope, a course that made his own roof-running look like a child playing in a back garden. And again, it was very clear that all this was a distraction.
And last of all, he found a young man maybe a year younger than Abi, training dogs—his rapport with them was second only to Perry’s, and he was teaching them how to dodge thrown weapons and blunted arrows as they ran in to attack men wearing so much padding to protect themselves they could scarcely waddle. He, at least, was succeeding in distracting himself with his task as he coordinated the pack of six dogs to come in to attack and retreat as if they were teasing a bear, never letting the men get a moment to gather their wits, evading the weapons, weaving around like a pack of ferrets.
Their mother must be there somewhere, but since she wasn’t related to Tory at all, he wouldn’t see her unless she was literally standing next to one of his distant cousins. And even then, he would be unable to sense what she was feeling.
Right. At least I’ve established that I can reach the other cousins from here. So . . . Sira, let’s hope you are within my range.
So . . . there it was. A very distant seventh. Farther than the six, and in an entirely different direction; they were east and south, this was east and north. In the south of Karse, if all this in his mind lined up with maps.
With glacial slowness, a picture began to form in his mind. First, he saw a girl about Kee’s age, her hair cut at about chin-length, wearing a sort of shapeless bag for a garment. She seemed to be meditating, wedged into a corner. Gradually, he made out a stone floor, walls, ceiling. A cell, with nothing in it but the girl and a bucket. Try as he might, he couldn’t manage to extend his view past the walls of the cell, so eventually he gave up, and fell to examining the girl herself.
She looked unharmed. No wounds, no bruises, no sign of mistreatment. He did his best to figure out what she was feeling, but all he could get was a combination of worry, and exasperation at herself.
Well, if she was feeling annoyed at herself—for falling into this trap?—surely that meant she didn’t have anything more serious to concentrate on.
At least . . . he hoped not.
The family resemblance to his father was startling, more so than in any other of the cousins. Her youth, when compared to his father, didn’t make a great deal of difference either; she had a very “hard,” refined face, and like Mags, she was so good at controlling her expression even when alone that it was unreadable. The only real difference between them was that Mags’ “resting face” was one of affable stupidity—he’d told Tory that it made people consistently underestimate him. Whereas Sira’s resting face was a complete blank, not merely like a statue, but like a statue that has been deliberately carved to look impassive.
This, combined with the general lack of information he was able to get merely by observing her, had the effect of making him feel immensely frustrated. Most of the time he was perfectly all right with not being a Mindspeaker of any kind, but at this moment in time he definitely wished he had his father along on this little “excursion.” No one had ever really tested the limits of Mags’ Mindspeaking ability, and it would have been awfully useful to have been able to discover what the blasted girl was thinking!
It was that frustration that broke his concentration and dropped him out of the trance—dragging Kee along with him. He opened his eyes to see with some shock that Kee was absolutely furious.
“I wasn’t done yet!” Kee hissed, in a show of emotion that startled him.
“What did you see?” Ahkhan demanded, eyes alight, interrupting whatever remonstrance Kee had been about to deliver.
Tory spoke first. “Well . . . we found her, all right. It looks like she’s in a prison cell. They’ve taken her clothes, and presumably everything else she had on her. She’s not hurt, not even bruised, so I guess she hasn’t been mistreated. Yet,” he added, because surely Ahkhan understood that was only a matter of time. He thought about adding what he’d felt . . . but he wasn’t altogether sure about that, so he decided to leave it out. “I couldn’t see anything that wasn’t in her immediate vicinity, so I don’t know where she is, although there was normal daylight coming in through the windows, so she’s not underground.”
“She’s angry,” Kee interrupted. “And frustrated. And starting to be afraid. She’s at the top of a tower, in something like desert, but I didn’t get a chance to see m
ore before I got dragged out.” He glared at Tory a moment, then turned his attention back to Ahkhan. “She’s definitely in Karse, as you thought. I’m pretty sure they don’t actually know she’s a Sleepgiver, or they’d have her in chains at the very least, and she’s not.”
“I’m certain you’re correct,” Ahkhan agreed. “But it won’t be long before they find out. Because sooner or later, they’re going to try something unpleasant, and she will not tolerate that. Hopefully it will be later, much later. Hopefully she is clever enough to keep them frustrated, but not so frustrated that they feel reduced to brutality.”
That certainly sounded odd, coming from the mouth of an assassin . . . but then again, didn’t the Sleepgivers pride themselves on doing their work quickly, so quickly the victim didn’t even have time to feel fear?
Well, mostly. I suppose they haven’t been treating the Karsite priests they’ve been killing that way.
“Well, can you two still sense the direction she’s in?” Ahkhan asked.
They both nodded. Tory felt it in his breastbone now, as if he was pulled in that direction by a cord. Presumably Kee felt the same way.
Ahkhan spread out a map on the floor and instructed Tory to kneel on a spot marked Amber Moon South. It was a big map, and Tory’s jaw dropped a little when he saw how far Amber Moon South was from Amber Moon North. It was . . . impossible. But Ahkhan wasn’t inclined to give him time to think about that just now.
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