Spells of the Curtain Volume One

by Tim Niederriter

  Edmath staggered back down the branch and Orpus Lengbyoi carried him off of it with its roots. The tree gently placed him on a branch. Brosk leapt down beside him.

  “I couldn’t find Akalok. Did you see him?”

  “No.” Edmath glared at the ground below, where Ursar stood, recovering from his fall. He unwrapped the striker chain from his bleeding arm. “Is Akalok moving again?”

  Brosk shrugged.

  “Must be. Do you have strikers?”

  The pain in his hand jolted as the wind tugged at his fingers. Edmath shook his head. Brosk swore.

  “Only one.”

  Ursar Kiet sprang up toward them, dodging several of Orpus Lengbyoi’s lethal roots. He landed on the branch above them, but the deadly black had faded from his eyes and no spear in his grip. A pair of slender daggers appeared from unseen sheathes, one in each hand.

  “You two fools,” Ursar said lazily. “Do you really think you’ll beat me a second time?”

  Akalok fell from above and landed on the branch beside Ursar. The former ambassador’s eyes glowed with pent-up magic. He would never give up this fight. Edmath’s eyes narrowed as he met Akalok’s gaze.

  The rogue bodyguard gave a grim chuckle.

  “Your eyes have changed. Once so lively. Now so dark.”

  Edmath’s broken hand hurt less than those words. Still, he held his head high.

  “The opposite of your champion, then.”

  Akalok shrugged his shoulders.

  “You Saales venerate even the smallest life,” he said. “Your emperor would have you take many for him.”

  The monks had always been people of peace. Sampheli had taught Edmath and Zuria to fear war after her husband’s death. Lexine Park prized progress, not violence. Edmath scowled, blinking through the pain of his hand.

  “You. Akalok. Is honor worth death?”

  Akalok closed his eyes and thought for a moment.

  “Sometimes. Yes.”

  Ursar smirked. He flipped the blade of one dagger between two fingers to throw.

  Then his hand vanished in a burst of blood and fire.

  Ursar dropped his other dagger and clutched at his charred stump. He fell to his knees but he did not scream. His eyes fixed on a point over Edmath’s shoulder and tears of rage appeared in his eyes. Chelka’s voice rang out from the top of the lodge behind Orpus Lengbyoi.

  “Edmath, you and Brosk get back.”

  Edmath swung down on the branch with his right hand. His chill fingers slipped free and he fell to the ground. Brosk dropped down beside him. “Let’s go, Ed.”

  Edmath looked over his shoulder to where Chelka stood on the peak of the lodge’s roof. He nodded. Brosk charged under Akalok and Ursar’s branch and pulled his striker chain up from the ground. It opened a small tear as he picked it up, but the magic flowed upward and out of reach on an unseen current.

  Ursar dropped down between Edmath and Brosk, apparently recovering from the sudden loss of his dominant hand. An instant later, Edmath saw why. Glistening black material flowed from the burned stump and hardened into the shape of a long blade. He swung to the left as Brosk lashed out with his striker chain. The weapons clashed and Ursar snaked out of the way of Brosk’s next swing.

  “Do you really think that weapon can match the powers of my sphere of almighty Roshi?” He snarled as he lunged at Brosk, slashing across his side with the blade. Blood ran along the blade.

  Edmath winced in sympathy for his friend. He made the sign of the branch and used the last of his magic as he broke into a run. The branch formed behind and raced alongside him. Above, Akalok shouted in triumph. Orpus Lengbyoi moved gingerly towards the lodge, roots roiling despite the deep gouge in its trunk.

  “Edmath, Chelka has been wounded.”

  The tree’s words reached him as he wrapped the fingers of his uninjured hand around the base of the blade that replaced Ursar’s hand. How much more violence had to be done? Edmath yelled in frustration. He drew the magic from the blade into his hand-gate. Ursar snarled over his shoulder. The blade cut into Edmath’s fingers. His remaining striker cracked and broke from the pressure, but still, he drew in the magic. The black blade cracked, then shattered along its length.

  Edmath threw himself back a step, his right hand bleeding, painful and striker-less. Ursar whirled. His remaining hand sought to seize Edmath. Fingers dark with blood and red with cold grasped for his throat. Edmath swayed out of reach. Survival art training paid off.

  Brosk surged toward Ursar and smashed into his back. The wind went out of the Roshi and he fell to the ground. Edmath glowered at him in triumph. Orpus Lengbyoi’s voice came again, urgent.

  “Edmath, Chelka needs our help.”

  The wind bit at his wet skin but Edmath’s need to move made him ignore it. He turned his back on Ursar Kiet.

  “Take care of him, Brosk.”

  “Right.”

  Edmath took off at a run through the falling snow. It rose up to his ankles all around. Only as he ran up the steps to the lodge did his lack of strikers register again. He still held the magic from Ursar’s sphere, but it would only give him two or three spells capable of challenging the Roshi before he’d need more.

  He made the sign of the branch and ascended to the top of the lodge. Orpus Lengbyoi raced alongside the building, roots not quite reaching the rooftop. Edmath landed facing Chelka and Akalok. They didn’t notice him but remained locked together by their eyes. A pillar of fire moved and twisted between them. Chelka’s grip on her stethian slipped. She put her other hand on the steel shaft to steady it but fell to one knee. Edmath stalked toward Akalok, his right hand clenching into a fist.

  The Roshi noticed him at the last second and threw himself out of the path of the fire he and Chelka had been fighting over. The fire sliced through the air and seared the peak of the roof, as it shot toward Edmath. He rolled down the slope, snow gathering on his cloak and chilling his exposed face and hands. His left arm jolted with intense pain, then went numb.

  He slowed himself to a stop at the base of the roof. Chelka limped towards him. The mirache circled over Orpus Lengbyoi on the other side of the lodge.

  “Ed,” Chelka said, sliding down the slope to him in a crouch.

  “I’m alright,” he said, rolling onto his back. “Are you?”

  “A small burn and I’m out of strikers.” She pointed to her leg with her stethian. “Where’s Brosk?”

  “He’s pinned down Ursar Kiet.”

  Chelka nodded and then looked skyward.

  “Akalok.”

  “I know. His grudge is never-ending.”

  Edmath climbed to his knees, his bloody right hand leaving trails in the snow. He looked up at the mirache, catching a glimpse of Akalok on its back as it descended lower. The snowfall had intensified. He could barely make out the Roshi’s face through the white flakes. Akalok wore an expression of disgust.

  “Lord Kiet,” he said holding, out one hand. “Return.”

  A luminance more like starlight than fire erupted from Akalok’s hand. Ursar appeared before him on the mirache’s back, cradling the stump of his right arm and groaning. Akalok looked over the fallen champion at Edmath.

  “You have beaten my champion.” He swung his legs over the side of the mirache and dropped to the rooftop. “But you haven’t beaten me.”

  “We’ve fought before.” Edmath glanced between his bloody hand and Akalok. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw clouds billowing overhead. “But now is not the time. There’s a blizzard on its way from the south.”

  Akalok flexed his fingers and another fire blade flickered into life on his fingertips.

  Edmath held up his wounded hand. “If we fight now then none of us might escape.”

  Akalok patted the mirache’s side. “Ursar, take your beast and go.”

  “Master?”

  “Go back to Roshi. There is nothing left for me in that place.” Akalok turned back toward Edmath. He raised the blade.

  Ursar urged
his mirache to fly in an animal language Edmath understood but could not identify. The mirache ascended on its magnificent wings and then soared away from the village.

  Akalok strode toward Edmath and Chelka, eyes blazing. His eyes flicked to Edmath’s wounded hand.

  “No rings,” he said with a grin.

  Chelka stepped to Edmath’s side and touched his shoulder with the end of her stethian.

  “Take it. I have no magic left, and there’s only one way to finish this.”

  He nodded.

  Edmath turned sideways, eyes still on Akalok. Chelka shifted her stance. His fingers closed around the grip of the stethian. He planted his feet. Akalok leapt at him with enhanced speed and power. Edmath slid down the roof away from Chelka. The flame blade slashed across Edmath’s shoulder. The fire burned hot. Just the red edge of the blade set his coat alight.

  He dropped into a crouched and swept the stethian at Akalok’s legs. The Roshi jumped up from the roof, evading the blow. Edmath fell back a step and caught the stethian along the flat of its length with his broken left hand. Pain surged in his bones, but his grip held. He opened his right hand to release the stethian.

  Akalok’s fist slammed into his jaw and sent him spinning toward the edge of the rooftop. Edmath’s head rang. He stumbled toward the side of the building, where twenty feet down the snowy street awaited. He steadied himself as well as he could manage and spun to face Akalok.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Edmath said.

  “You’re wrong. Only one of us can survive this day.”

  The man from Roshi fell toward him. Edmath made the sign of the branch and pounded the roof of the lodge with all his remaining strength, forcing the magic into the wood below the tile.

  Lances of white wood shot up from the rooftop. One of them caught Akalok through the forearm and he spun to one side. His legs shot out and kicked into Edmath’s head and chest at once. Dazed, Edmath staggered back toward the edge of the roof, unable to recover or stop his attack. Another length of wood stabbed into Akalok’s chest.

  Edmath staggered on the edge of the roof. Brosk appeared on one side, Chelka on the other. They caught him together. He hung in their arms facing Akalok in a haze of pain and confusion.

  Akalok hung on the two spears of wood, one through the arm and one through the chest. A final hazy breath drifted from his mouth. The end of the stethian smoked.

  Brosk gave a sigh of relief, but when Edmath glanced at him, there were tears in the Whale Princes eyes.

  “I don’t like it either,” Edmath said.

  Brosk helped him back onto the roof, then walked over to Akalok. He broke the wooden growths with ease using his tosh’s strength. He set Akalok on the roof and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

  “Creator’s rest, enemy. I hope to be a long time before following you.”

  Edmath’s hand ached. The small fire on his shoulder had gone out. His chest and head felt like forming bruises. In spite of all the pain, somehow his mind was numb.

  Chelka put an arm around Edmath’s shoulders and helped him stay standing. He lost his focus at her touch and all the magic flowed out of him. They had no more strikers, and Lengbyoi looked only barely capable of movement, let alone carrying all of them. The blizzard was coming.

  “We’re still alive,” Edmath said. “What are we going to do?”

  Chelka

  She had not had a choice, Chelka knew. Traveling to Beliu had been the only way to Save Edmath. She only wished there had been another. She huddled beside him inside the lodge by the burning embers of Kassel Onoi’s fire pit. Brosk sat beside the fire, still in his whale tosh. Blood had dried on all their clothes as night fell.

  If they had not fought the Roshi and their mirache they would have had a chance against the weather. Every striker broken, all the coats ripped and torn. Even Orpus Lengbyoi was unable to move. The cold closed in as the last coals dimmed and the fire went out.

  Brosk knelt by the pit, two stones in his hands, trying to relight the fire. At least, with a wooden village, there was ample fuel. But with no strikers, the fire might not be enough.

  Chelka’s last striker lay in pieces somewhere in the rubble of the building beside the lodge. Brosk’s chain, though sharp as ever, had lost every scrap of once-living matter needed to tear the curtain. Edmath’s broken and bandaged hand cradled the remains of a shattered flesh and bone ring. The lodge was bare from floor to ceiling.

  She released a breath into the air between her and Edmath. He inhaled audibly.

  “I’m sorry.” He tightened his arm around her waist.

  Orpus Lengbyoi had told them when they’d finished that he had sunken into the ground and couldn’t lift himself out with his roots. Wind pierced the cracks in the lodge and pierced Chelka’s skin. Only in her full tosh could she think to last long in temperatures like this and in that case she would not survive in the open air. She leaned against Edmath, hearing the floorboard creak as Brosk rose, abandoned the fire, and began to pace back and forth.

  “It’s not your fault we came here. I couldn’t let you die.” Chelka let out a low breath and sighed. “If we die of this cold, that doesn’t mean I regret being with you.”

  Edmath kissed her hand in the dark.

  “Thanks.”

  Chelka put her head against his shoulder, eyes open but surrounded only by darkness for she didn’t know how long. Minutes? Hours? Brosk settled by the dying fire. Edmath’s head rested on Chelka’s shoulder, his breath slow.

  A silvery wisp of light rose on a gentle current from the remains of the fire.

  “Edmath.” She shook his sleeping form. “Brosk, Edmath, look!”

  Edmath woke, aching and shivering, to the sound of Chelka’s voice. She pointed one shadowy finger at a pale sliver of light drifting in the center of the fire pit. He stared at the paler-than-moonlight glow as it reached the ceiling of the lodge and started passing through it into the sky.

  “That’s magic.”

  “But how?” Brosk said. “Where did it come from?”

  Chelka pushed herself to her feet, treading over the creaking floor to the fire pit. Edmath followed her, his eyes adjusting in the gloom. She stopped on the edge of the circle, looking up at the magic as it streamed out the roof as if the wood was air.

  “A natural tear,” Chelka said. “Don’t you two remember?”

  All those books, all that study, and yes, Edmath could remember. But why would a tear form now? The light spiraled up from the ground, seeming thick like a glowing fog. Something had happened in this room today that had released this magic, or perhaps something had happened on the other side.

  Brosk backed away from the magic bubbling up from the fire pit. He glanced at Chelka and Edmath.

  “Is it safe to draw in?”

  Kassel Onoi had spoken of mages that could traverse the world beyond the curtain. Edmath frowned at the light, but no sign of any human cause for it. He reached out his arm and put it around Chelka’s shoulders.

  “The world is full of tears.” He slipped past Chelka, fingers brushing her cheek. “I know what to do.”

  He descended into the bowl of the fire pit from which the life magic issued, reaching out one hand to grasp the free-flowing magic, to draw it in. The light dimmed as he tugged on it. He dragged more of it up from beneath his feet.

  He closed his eyes and felt the flow, a flow unlike that from human-made tears. Human magic felt like a barely tactile tickle on his skin compared to this crushing, breathtaking grip. This magic did not pass his gates with a whisper, but with a roar. And he drew in all he could.

  It pulsed through his body, alighted upon his nerves and scattered down his spine. This magic growled like a bear in his ear, demanding he use it. He threw out his broken left hand and channeled the magic up his arm. With his right hand, he made no sign, but he muttered the incantations he remembered from the monks, from twenty years ago. Torite was petrified wood, dead but once living. If plant remains like that could hold
magic, then perhaps logs cut to form walls could too. His old theory, much-scoffed at by the proctors of Lexine Park, sprang to his mind.

  Pressure wrapped around his wrist, the grip of slender fingers. Edmath opened his eyes. Before him, in the heart of the magic, in the center of the tear, stood a figure outlined in blazing life force, a man with a brilliant shock of white hair, a strong chin, and fiery eyes. In one gloved hand, the man held a striker ring the size of a bracelet.

  “Did you think you had run out of luck,” he said. “Son?”

  Edmath stared at the figure in the center of the bright tear in the material curtain.

  “How?”

  “Kassel told you didn’t he. There are ways to open the door between worlds,” said Jurgat Donroi.

  “But you’re dead. The dead cannot work magic.”

  Jurgat smiled.

  “Don’t believe everything you learned at Lexine Park.” He released Edmath’s wrist. “I can’t stay. You’d better use the flow while you still can.” He stepped back, fading from sight. “Good luck.”

  Magic shook the roof of the lodge.

  The wind howled through the cracks in the building as the branches bulged and turned green in the glow of the magic. Edmath stepped back up to the edge of the fire pit and raised his left arm. His arm shook, unable to contain the flow completely. Chelka raced down into the pit to hold his arm up with both of hers. As she touched his skin the magic flowed into her as well, lighting her skin like a silver lamp kindled by the sun and moon together.

  Brosk joined them on Edmath’s other side. The magic flowed upward from the fire pit in a raging torrent that even the three of them could not fully absorb. Brosk grunted and staggered. Chelka clasped Edmath’s raised arm, just below the place Jurgat had grabbed for that brief moment. The magic was too much, completely beyond control. Lights bright as day shot through the cracks in the logs that made up the building.

  The light flowing all around them pierced the roof. Flowers bloomed from sprouts on once dead logs. Edmath put some of his power into growing a branch beneath his feet on the edge of the fire pit. He struggled to make a sign with his lowered right hand. This magic did without direction. He and Chelka and Brosk rose toward the ceiling as timbers grew and warped beneath them. The living wood peeled away as they rose, forming a tear in the remains of the chimney. They emerged into the moonlight, moonlight dimmed by the brightness of the magic all around them.