The Equilibrium of Magic

by Michael W. Layne

  Foot-length by foot-length, Merrick shuffled his way down the building, counting the floors as each was laboriously checked off in his mind. The perseverance of Huang Lee served him well, keeping his mind focused on his task and away from any thoughts of giving up.

  In less time than Merrick predicted, he arrived at the desired floor and moved out of the channel and onto a narrow stone ledge that ran the width of the wall. He shuffled along the ledge until he arrived at a window at the end of an empty hallway. Merrick pushed against the window with his hand and tried pulling it open, but it was locked. He assumed he could break the cloud-glass, but he also figured that doing so would set off the security wards.

  Frustrated, he leaned against the window, but felt its sturdiness give way almost immediately as he tumbled through the glass as if it weren’t even there. He had not been prepared for the fall, but his instinct kicked in as he landed in the hallway with a soft shoulder roll that Master Banzo had taught him. When he came to his knees, he listened closely, afraid that he had set off an alarm, but when looked back to the window, he saw that it was still intact.

  For a moment, he was confused, but then he almost laughed as he looked down at his suit. He had completely forgotten that his battle suit was woven from Rune Corp divinium. Although happy that the suit had helped him enter through the window, he was also suddenly anxious and cursed under his breath. He had made a point of not bringing another cube along because he didn’t want the possibility of more Rune Corp tech falling into the Emperor’s hands, but he had totally overlooked the advanced technology, including the lightweight version of the enunciator collar, that was built into the very suits that he and his team were so used to wearing.

  When Merrick had leaned against the window with his full weight, his battle suit had interacted with the Wind divinium, letting him pass directly through it. His suit acted as a conduit for his own internal magic in much the same way the cubes did, but without an interface.

  Merrick got to his feet and held his arm up to the wall. He imagined his sleeve turning the same color and texture of the cloud wall. Instantaneously, his arm turned the same shade of whitish blue as the walls of the grand palace.

  Merrick closed his eyes and willed his entire suit to do the same. At least now he was covered with some level of camouflage. His head, feet, and hands were still visible, but his suit would go a long way to remaining undetected as he walked around, blending in almost seamlessly with the walls.

  Plus, now he knew that he could always escape by traveling through the walls if he had to make an emergency escape.

  As he walked down the hallway, his mind was already thinking of how he planned on altering the battle suits when he got back to Rune Corp, assuming that the company was still in one piece by the time he returned. He would add a hood and gloves first and make sure the materials in their shoes were made with divinium as well. The suits would be the ultimate in personal stealth technology.

  Within less than a minute, Merrick arrived at the door to the Earth Room.

  He instinctively reached for the door handle to open it, but stopped short. If the Emperor was even half as cautious as Merrick himself was, the door would be protected with security wards.

  Even though his initial plan had required that he use the divinium statuette to detect the cube, he wondered now if he could achieve the same results by using his battle suit. After all, it too was made of divinium—and of Rune Corp divinium, whereas the statuette was made only of divinium from the Earth Clan.

  Merrick closed his eyes and reached out to his suit again as he focused on a mental image of the missing cube. He felt something, but saw no visual indicator in his mind as to what the suit was detecting.

  Frustrated, he stepped to the side of the door, tested the wall, and tried walking through it. His suit crackled with white energy, matching the Wind Magic used to create the palace, and Merrick was soon standing inside the Earth Room. He spoke a quiet word for light, then moved over to greet the small birch before picking up the divinium statuette of the bonsai tree.

  He held the divinium close to his face and concentrated his thoughts—trying to focus them on communicating with the statuette.

  Can you still sense the cube?

  Nothing.

  The interface that had been uploaded to the statuette was not the same level of complexity or functionality as the interfaces used in the cubes. Instead, it was more geared to gathering sensory data and preparing it to be downloaded back at Rune Corp, where they had the proper technology to analyze whatever signals the piece of divinium had picked up.

  But Merrick didn’t have any Rune Corp technology with him, and he had to depend on his own mind to interpret whatever the statuette was sensing. And right now, it didn’t seem to be picking up anything. As much as he had been hopeful, this did not surprise him, especially after the incident at dinner tonight. The Emperor would be sure to keep the cube locked up tight, with its signature dampened if not silenced completely.

  His only hope was to move around and get the statuette closer to wherever the cube was being held, hoping that the statuette would be able to detect the cube once it was near enough.

  As Merrick prepared to leave the Earth Room, he turned back to the tree and the boulder. He looked down at the ground next to the boulder and saw a single stone sitting in the raked sand, all by itself.

  He squatted down and picked it up. It was unremarkable as stones went, but it was of a type of quartz with which Merrick was familiar. He held the stone in his hand, remembering the creation name for that type of stone and that its meaning contained echoes of Merrick’s own creation name of Redemption.

  “Hello, little one,” he said. “I might be able to use your help later if you would be willing.”

  The small rock grew almost imperceptibly warm for a moment, and Merrick could sense that it was willing to help however it could. As Merrick slipped the stone into his pocket, he could clearly sense that the stone was ready to leave this place and to have the opportunity to one day be among its kind once again.

  Merrick turned around and exited the room through the wall as he had entered it.

  He knew that it was possible, but not likely, that the Emperor would notice the disappearance of the bonsai tree statuette, since he probably didn’t visit the Earth Room often.

  But to be safe, Merrick decided to return the little statuette before heading back to his bedchamber at the end of his excursion, if time and circumstances allowed.

  Holding the statuette in front of him, Merrick made his way down the hallway, his senses reaching out to his surroundings as he went, trying to detect any approaching guards before they would see him while also searching for the cube’s unique energy signature. As he walked along, the statuette grazed his battle suit accidentally. When it did, Merrick briefly saw a static-ridden landscape with a single blip of green pulsing out from one of its corners.

  He held the divinium statuette against the midsection of his battle suit and kept it there. The digitized landscape appeared again as if floating in the front of his mind. The statuette alone didn’t have the power or the interface to detect the hidden cube, but when it touched the battle suit, the suit acted like an array antenna, boosting the statuette’s ability to sense the cube’s presence.

  As he moved down the hallway, the signal continued to get stronger. He passed another hallway that snaked off to the right, and after another fifty yards or so, the signal began to weaken. Merrick quickly backtracked and started off down the connecting hallway.

  As he did so, the signal once again grew in strength.

  CHAPTER 43

  AS MERRICK APPROACHED the next intersecting hallway, he heard two male voices speaking to each other and getting louder. Without conscious thought, Merrick merged into the wall to his left and waited as two of the royal guards turned the corner and approached.

  Even though he was physically hidden inside the wall, Merrick waited, prepared to fight, in case the guards were somehow a
ble to detect his energy signature.

  Merrick held his breath as the guards passed him by and continued down the corridor.

  He stepped back into the hallway and started moving toward the green blip again. With each step, the signal grew slightly stronger. Soon, he arrived at one of the airlifts and took a right down yet another corridor. At the end of the corridor was a large door with a giant, round handle mounted to it.

  The green blip was glowing strongly now, and he felt a mix of excitement and nervousness being this close to his goal. Despite having a strong urge to use his battle suit to pass through the door, Merrick hesitated, unsure of what, besides the cube, might be waiting for him.

  Merrick steeled himself for whatever he might find as he leaned forward, about to step through the door. Before he could move even an inch, a hand grabbed his shoulder from behind and pulled him back.

  Merrick spun around, crouching in a defensive posture—his mind already racing with different scenarios that included dealing with his attacker, bursting into the room beyond and snagging the cube, and then escaping with Mona and the rest of his team before being captured.

  As he prepared to fight, a tall figure in a dark blue robe and a traditional straw hat floated away from him with such grace that it gave him pause. The hat covered most of his attacker’s face in shadow, but Merrick recognized the body as belonging to Tamami, the monk who had spoken to him privately back at Rune Corp about becoming the Ard Righ.

  “Tamami?” Merrick said.

  She lifted her head slightly, and Merrick saw a slight smile break across her face.

  “You remember me,” she said. “That is a good sign.”

  “A good sign?” Merrick said.

  “Just follow me quickly,” Tamami said. “I have much to explain to you, but we need to move to somewhere safe.”

  She turned away and glided back in the direction from which Merrick had just come. He didn’t know why he should trust her, but there was something about her that seemed familiar, and his gut told him to at least hear what she had to say. He knew where the Emperor kept the cube now and would come back for it later.

  With each step, Merrick’s mind felt like it was clearing from a haze he had not known was there. He blinked his eyes and wondered why he had been so headstrong just a moment ago even when his instincts had been warning him of danger.

  As he followed Tamami’s shapely form, he felt more like himself and more at ease as well. Before he knew it, they were nearing the entrance to the Earth Room.

  Tamami stopped and motioned him closer. When he walked up to her, he felt strange, as if he had just inhaled the heady scent of wild flowers.

  “Hold onto me and take us into the Earth Room again,” Tamami said.

  “You saw me do that earlier? You’ve been watching me?” Merrick said, as he stood even closer to her.

  She grabbed his arm and pulled back her hood so that he could see her scarred face and the concern in her eyes.

  “Take us into the room, now, Merrick,” she said.

  Merrick grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her close before stepping with her through the wall, back into the Earth Room.

  As soon as they were inside, Tamami exhaled and slumped against his chest.

  “We are safe for the moment,” she said, as she looked at Merrick in his eyes.

  Despite the massive scars on both of her cheeks, Merrick found her…alluring. Her high cheekbones and full lips were almost cat-like, and he found himself being drawn to her as if in a trance.

  The word of light Merrick had used earlier was still active inside the room, and it cast the rocks, the sand, and the young birch tree in a soft glow.

  “Let us sit and talk,” she said, pulling him gently by the hand to one of the large boulders in the room.

  They leaned against the rock and turned to look at one another.

  “It appears as if the ward has mostly dissipated,” Tamami said. “The Emperor had both exits from your room covered with protective wards, you know.”

  “They didn’t do a very good job,” Merrick said. “I almost found what I was looking for before you stopped me.”

  “That is what the Emperor wanted you to think,” she said. “The wards were not there to stop you from leaving your room. Their purpose was to compel you to find the very cube for which you are searching.”

  “You know about the cube?” Merrick said, leaning forward, taking in her scent again as his face neared hers.

  “Do not forget that I too have seen what your infamous cubes can do,” Tamami said. “The great Ohman possessed a genius that will be missed.”

  “Why would the Emperor want me to find the cube?” Merrick said.

  “Do you know what was beyond that door?” Tamami said. “That was the royal bedchamber.”

  Merrick was confused. The door to the room had been large, but nothing like what he would have imagined the entrance to the Emperor’s bedroom to be like.

  “That was the back entrance to his bedchamber, and it is normally heavily guarded. But not tonight. If you had entered through that door, the Emperor’s guards would have killed you before you had a chance to defend yourself. It was a trap.”

  Merrick shifted on the boulder uncomfortably. What Tamami was saying still wasn’t making sense to him, but something inside still told him to believe her—to trust what she said.

  “The wards he set up in my room directed me to that door without me knowing it?”

  “Not just the wards. Your statuette has been compromised as well,” she said. “The Emperor used your own cube to do it. Changed your spying device into one of his own to lead you into his trap.”

  Merrick looked at the bonsai tree statuette as if it had betrayed him.

  “Do not blame the divinium, Merrick. The stone is a complex living creature, but it also does the bidding of its keeper, and it had no choice. We will have to dispose of it tonight somehow. It is recording everything we are saying even now, so that it may report it to the Emperor. He will want to know what went wrong with his plan.”

  Merrick felt like he was trying to play catch up with everything going on. A few moments ago, he had been close to recovering the cube and worrying about how he was going to be able to get Mona, Jonathan, and Master Banzo out of the Cloud City safely. Now he was coming to terms with the fact that the progress he thought he was making had been a deception to lure him to his death.

  “If they found me in the Emperor’s chambers at night, they could claim that I had gone there to try to assassinate him,” Merrick said, “that I was trying to remove a political opponent—a leader of an opposing family. Is that why he’s been so adamant about calling me the Ard Righ?”

  Tamami smiled, and her face lit up with true humor. The agony she must have lived through as a child had not marred her warm nature.

  “No, Merrick,” Tamami said. “Always remember that the best lie is one that is as close to the truth as possible. The Emperor truly does consider you to be the Ard Righ. As do I. As do many of the Drayoom in all of the families. And it is for that reason that he also fears you.

  “It has remained largely unspoken, but our family and the Water People believe and fear that you might have the power to bring together the Earth Clan and the Fire Tribe one day. Such an accomplishment would be unprecedented since the split of the families so long ago.

  “Within a single generation, you could be the leader of a single family of Drayoom whose members worshipped both the Earth Dragon and the Fire Dragon. Within just a few generations, all the members of this new family could have the blood of two dragons flowing through their veins, just as you do. Imagine the power of such a family. The Emperor surely has. It would be twice in size as the Wind Family or the Water People, and each member of your new clan would have powers equal to your own.

  “This is why the Emperor tried to have you killed tonight. He wants to possess the power of the Rune Corp divinium and your company’s technology, and he knows that he can easily take both of
these after you are dead. But more importantly, he wants you dead because of what you may one day achieve.”

  Even though the situation was surreal to Merrick, everything Tamami said made sense to him. Merrick had never really contemplated joining the Earth Clan and the Fire Tribe, but if he were able to accomplish such a thing, it would be a game changer in the Drayoom world—something that could alter the course of events for his entire species.

  “Why not just have me killed in my room?” Merrick said. “I’m sure the Emperor could make up a suitable cover story that others would believe.”

  “The Emperor wanted to be able to show his people, and anyone else who doubted him,” Tamami said, “that he was justified in having you killed—that you entered his bedchamber at night, with a weapon that could easily have taken out the entire royal wing.”

  Merrick looked again at the divinium statuette in his hands.

  “Yes, the Emperor reworked your statuette into what amounts to a magical bomb,” Tamami said, “and no one would be able to dispute this. You would be seen as an assassin and a terrorist.”

  Merrick had been wrong about why the Emperor had revealed that he both possessed and knew how to use the cube. It hadn’t been an intimidation move at all. Instead, the Emperor had shown Merrick the cube as bait to draw him in and to provide the Emperor with an excuse to kill Merrick in a way that would be acceptable to the Drayoom community.

  “Why did you save me?” Merrick said, looking deep into Tamami’s eyes, desperate for a piece of truth amidst the Emperor’s deceptions.

  She smiled again.

  “You and I have many things in common,” Tamami said. “Did you know that I too have the blood of two dragons coursing through my body, although not the ones that live inside you? You and I are two of a kind in our world, and I would not see the life of someone as special as you destroyed out of ignorance and fear—a fear that I do not share with my brother.”

  “Your brother?” Merrick said.

  “The Emperor is my younger brother,” Tamami said, “and although we must dispose of this statuette and return you to your room immediately, we have much to talk about before you leave my city.”