Ley Lines

by Lisa Lowell

  Finally, when he couldn't stand the pressure any longer, he announced that he was leaving and Paget saw him off at dawn of the final day with a hug, but no kiss and she walked back into the palace without a word. Vamilion couldn't understand his emotions at this cold, frank departure. So, without answers, he latched onto the far western peak at the edge of the Vamilion Mountains and shifted away, as unsettled as a volcano.

  Traveling mountain to mountain was effortless and had no ill side-effects for him and Vamilion was able to move instantly three hundred miles to the edge of the chain without pain. Then he simply sat on the ridge to think. Behind him dawn had not reached this far west and he watched the summer sky lighten as he looked below at the Laranian River winding to the sea beyond him. The green snaking water reminded Vamilion of Drake for some reason and he distrusted its placid nature. Something lurked below and he could not begin to comprehend it now, not with being so unsettled.

  That brought to mind the tale of Raimi, Owailion's Queen of Rivers. Vamilion never met her, but it would have been her responsibility to keep sorcerers from coming to the Land via the rivers and now her skills were lost, leaving the Mountain King and Owailion, the King of Creating, to do her work. If he squinted into the glare off the water Vamilion could see Raimi's palace, built after her death, on an island in the delta of the river. It gleamed like a diamond, the hope Owailion retained for her resurrection, but remained empty and cold even in the summer light. The legends said that when all sixteen of the Wise Ones had taken their place in their palace, becoming Seated, that the Land would again be sealed and no magic would dare again attack. The problem was Raimi was dead. Would there ever be someone to replace her? Not in Owailion's heart. He was bitter and practically a hermit in his grief over her. And while Owailion would come to the aid of the Land at need, he did not do it willingly.

  That thought led Vamilion to consider what his fellow Wise One would do to guard this river. They had agreed to split the duties: Vamilion on the Laranian and Owailion on the Don. It seemed unfair that, here he was, stuck on a mountaintop watching a river because this was as close as he could get magically. There must be something better he could do to stop outlander sorcerers from invading. But what?

  Vamilion turned toward the southwest, hoping to see a ship that oozed evil magic. No such luck. He saw only a few fishing boats and trade vessels bringing timber down river to build up the docks and villages along the southern part of the delta. The lower half of the Laranian had been slow to develop. It was swampy now, since Raimi's death, and most of the immigrants had elected to go farther up the river to where the mountains brought down fresh water, nurturing forests and better farmland. With so few people here at the delta, it was vulnerable to invasion. How could Vamilion prevent a magical influx when mountains would only interfere with the flow of the water? He would do more harm than good for the people of the Land by blocking the flow or lifting and draining the marsh.

  What he needed was some way to block the mouth of the river from all unwanted traffic. How? Owailion had forbidden him changing the actual geography of the Land even if it was well within his capability. The elder magician had muttered something about hidden magic in very specific places and if Vamilion fiddled with the bedrock some of the secrets would be lost. In other words, don't change the mountains. Vamilion's inner rebel grated against the restriction. It would be wonderful to have a lone peak in the middle of the plains to make travel easier, but that would be interference to some other Wise One's Seeking sometime in the future.

  Vamilion looked out to sea now and could not make out where the ocean and sky met. They were the same color and bright in his eyes. He might not be able to make changes on the land, but what about the sea? It was from the sea where the invaders approached. Every danger on land, he could block because of his connection to the stone beneath, but danger still most often came by sea. Someday there might be a King or Queen of the Sea, but until then, Vamilion had a duty to guard the waterways from invasion.

  Without meaning to, he pressed his mind down into the roots of the mountains and sensed the fault lines that had crafted the Vamilion Mountains after which he was named. They plunged under the river and then turned abruptly out to sea. The heavy weight of the gulf water did little to inhibit his probing mind and he felt the tension in the two plates pressed against each other. They might slip against each other, but what would happen if he forced the direction down on the smaller plate? He could bring up a volcano. The heat of a melting plate would rise and he could craft a mountain at the mouth of the river to guard the way. The faults were set already for such a move and it would not interfere with any of Owailion's secrets hidden somewhere in the Land. It would only form an island to guard the way just beyond the mouth of the Laranian River.

  Almost with a compulsion, Vamilion began the pressure needed to force one plate under the other. An earthquake under the water created a wave, but he suppressed it before it could wash ashore and the boats never noticed a change other than they had some extra tacks to make as they came into the mouth of the river. The heat rose and Vamilion's magic burned and cracked like iron in a forge. He felt the magma rising and bubbling onto the surface of the ocean bottom. It would take weeks to get the volcano to break the surface, but he had nothing but time, sitting on his mountain, watching for invaders and hoping to block them with a guarding island.

  With that working, he reluctantly pulled out the tablet that he had been using to communicate with Gailin. He hadn't looked in three days and felt a little guilty for avoiding her questions. He trusted Owailion to keep her safe, and while he wanted to resist growing closer to her, he also wanted to learn how it went dealing with the snake. He wanted to reject his curiosity. He could justify ignoring her, but he didn't want to. He needed to keep up with her world even as he alienated her. With a wave of his hand the tablet revealed all she had written in the past week since she left for the plains with Drake.

  And what he read sent a shiver down his spine .

  She was learning amazing things about the ley lines and the magicians that tapped into them. She now knew more about Wise One magic than Owailion or Vamilion had suspected. Well Magic was a new concept to him. And now she was plotting how to get the map of the ley lines from Drake or at least share it with Vamilion. She even implied that breaking the ley lines might be possible. Also she had successfully released some of the souls from within the hunter. However, in order to gain this close connection, nurturing his trust and knowledge, she had to allow Drake to touch her and had been bonding with him in ways that made Vamilion physically ill.

  With his magical eye, Vamilion tapped into the past and saw for himself how Drake's hand had gravitated toward her throat. The King of Mountains wandered like a ghost through the sorcerer's mind maze, observing the corrosive and yet crumbling walls. He watched Gailin's hand slice free the souls within the snake. This patient work she performed would eventually make victory possible but Vamilion struggled with his own impatience and felt like throttling Drake for allowing his hand to linger evocatively on the neck of the girl he would one day call his wife. If she felt fear of the monster, or worse, attraction, it made Vamilion's gorge rise. He found himself wanting to abandon his post and challenge the snake. Maybe it was a good thing that Vamilion didn't have the gift of instant travel or he would have done just that.

  And Owailion was allowing, even encouraging this? Of course he was. Owailion would have seen nothing wrong with permitting or at least justifying Gailin's attraction for Drake. He wanted them together so that she could learn all there was to know about their potential invaders. Keeping Drake off center, weakened and vulnerable, was only part of it. Probably the oldest Wise One also wanted to show Vamilion all he was risking by not bonding solely to Gailin and thus exposing her to this danger. It would be poignant justice if she were compromised or killed because of Vamilion's abandonment.

  Vamilion's ire made the volcano he was crafting lurch explosively and he had to hurriedly squelc
h another tsunami before it got out of hand. Then he turned back to look at Gailin's thoughts behind the words. She didn't express much emotion in her writing; a healer to the core, he realized. She would not let her revulsion or attraction interfere with the task at hand. However, Vamilion couldn't help but read between the lines, wondering if she wanted Drake to touch her. Was she lonely or attracted to the idea of a man wanting her to the point that she would allow his flirtations and courting to flatter her? Many a woman wanted a man, any man, just for the sake of having one. Especially since Vamilion had rejected her, would she gravitate to Drake?

  Again Vamilion felt his frustration get ahead of his wisdom. He didn't feel anger toward Gailin. That seemed impossible given the compulsion he felt toward her. She was the victim. But he felt something and it had no outlet but that volcano. He had to direct his discontent toward something more worthy of being fought. He couldn't take it out on Drake who would simply kill Gailin the instant he sensed Vamilion's attack. The only other resource for venting his frustration was Owailion…who wasn't even watching over Gailin at the moment.

  Vamilion stretched out his mind and found his fellow Wise One at the mouth of the Don River working with settlers there to build two fortresses, one on each shoreline to house soldiers against the invasion there, the third wave Owailion anticipated. Vamilion interrupted with a thought.

  “You aren't protecting the Queen,” he barked at his colleague mentally, distracting him from carefully setting a stone using non-magical means. “You are setting her up to be…to be…” Even in his mental tone, Vamilion was sputtering, unable to launch his anger with enough pressure to satisfy. Words didn't fall like an avalanche and Owailion was safely far from the nearest mountain.

  “So you noticed,” Owailion drawled, hardly fazed by the volume and ire directed at him. He kept his eye on the catapult crane the men were working to lift a stone as he simultaneously replied. “It was your choice. You won't look her in the eye and abandon yourself to loving her. So I'm protecting her from you as much as him. She is valuable to him now and he won't kill her because of it. That's protection enough.”

  Vamilion fumed. “And what is your plan to get her out? Are you keeping her from… from being taken advantage of? She won't kill him, at least not willingly. She will feel like she can disable him and render him harmless instead. She doesn't realize she will have to kill him eventually and she won't want to be the one to rip his brain apart since she's wandering so freely within it. She's going to fall in love with him.”

  Vamilion could feel Owailion's sincere doubt in the inaudible scoffing. “No, and I have every confidence that she will have no problem killing him,” Owailion replied frankly. “She'll do it if you or I are in danger. She will commit herself to the cause of the Land or she will be lost to us. She will not ever be torn the way you or I have become. She will only have one path.”

  “You're a…” Vamilion couldn't think of a good enough word for Owailion's manipulation and cold, cruel pragmatism. For the first time, the language of the Land failed him and he ripped off a string of curses in Demonian for Owailion's benefit before he cut off the contact.

  Somewhere two thousand miles away on another river Owailion smiled as the next stone was set in a tower. Plans were coming into place quite nicely.

  * * *

  Through the weeks they walked and Gailin used the well magic to provide for them the whole way. She deliberately didn't conjure grand things and instead gathered carefully from the land around them. She harvested wild grain by hand for porridge in the morning and magically provided the water for the cooking as if this was the most she could provide. The salt and honey they had brought with them when they left on this journey didn't quite seem to run out for some odd reason and she hoped Drake didn't notice. The rabbits and groundhogs they were able to catch in snares they set at dusk always managed to get trapped rather easily so there was always meat in the pot at the end of the day. Drake didn't complain or comment. He still didn't know the extent of her magic and she wanted to keep it that way.

  However, at night he slept with his arm across her, pinning her and taking his energy from her like a thirsty man from the only watering hole for a hundred miles. His seductive touch still chilled her, like a reptile had climbed across her shoulders, twining around her neck and subtly squeezing, not quite cutting off her breathing; a burning cold necklace of threat. She dare not move in her sleep and she spent her nights desperately hoping his hand did not slip. One night she tried to roll over onto her side with her back to him, but his hand slid onto her hip and he pulled her close, almost snuggling, and she didn't do that again. While he seemed devoid of emotion or passion, she wouldn't put it past him to rape her just to absorb more energy from her fear and pain.

  So she remained sleepless most of the trip, managing on only one or two hours at most. She used the dark hours to delve into his mind, mapping how it worked and making up for all the parts of the anatomy she had been unable to study in a live human. She knew his past, his memories, his senses, even his magic, like it was her own. She possessed everything but his name. If she wanted, she could render him blind or deaf with a little flash, burning one connection in his brain, leaving the rest intact. On a regular basis she traveled down to the well of souls and cut open the void again, releasing a few more, but this activity always resulted in headaches in the morning so she didn't push for all of them to escape at once. The barrier encasing them sealed itself up almost instantly so she doubted Drake would notice the loss.

  Dare she strip him of his memories? Could she steal his name from him? Was it possible to make him forget that he knew her name? She felt capable of it, but not until she had freed the last soul within. Then she would call Vamilion and Owailion and attack, but only once she knew it was safe. You did not cut that chord until you were sure.

  So in the meanwhile she plotted how to get the map from Drake. She nightly pulled it out of his cloak but he had made the writing invisible and she put it back as she found it, still thinking how to get its secrets without his knowing. He never looked at the parchment that she was aware of and she doubted he would notice if she replaced it with a fake but that didn't give her a way to read it. Finally she did replace it one night with an identical and absolutely blank roll of parchment. But what to do with the blank map? She dare not keep it with her and after one day of travel with it placed next to her invisible Heart Stone, she decided to send it to Vamilion. Sending the parchment might be an interesting exercise in magic she had not tried yet.

  With concentration, and the sky perfectly dark, devoid of moon and stars obscured under a thin veil of cloud, she reached out, hoping to feel a brush of the solidity she found in Vamilion's mind. Her trek across the plains had brought her progressively closer to the Great Chain of mountains and she used them to feel for him.

  “Vamilion?” she called, using hope as the spark to reach for him. It seemed the only thing she could manage with her throat closed off by Drake's hand. It took longer than she hoped and she began to fear that he was out of her range, or she was misdirecting her call. Surely the mountains knew where he was. Then, far and echoing, as if it bounced between the mountain ranges, she heard a reply.

  “Gailin, is this safe?”

  She could have wept for joy at the mind voice he provided to her. The comforting strength and solid patience of it brushed aside the clinging cool of the reptile touch on her mind. Vamilion's protective thoughts leapt out to her first. He was immediately worried for her. His mental majesty lifted her soul and she realized that yes, she did feel different for her constant contact with the sorcerer. She had forgotten how it felt to be warm, clean and strong. Even when she was alone and without magic she felt better than being used and absorbed by Drake. Vamilion's caring voice reminded her of that.

  “Yes, I think. He….he…”

  “I will crush his brain for you. The instant he touches you…the instant you think it is safe. Please say you are safe.”

  “Saf
e, no. I am not safe, but I am not in immediate danger. I have the map to the ley lines that he has created. He should not keep it. I've traced his mind and can eliminate the memory of it if need be, but I want you to take the map. It might be of use some day.”

  “What will happen when he realizes you have taken it?” Vamilion asked, seeking something conversational so he didn't find himself climbing down the peak to be with her.

  “I'm hoping he doesn't realize it's missing. He never opens it because there are no ley lines here for him to mark. He is barely functioning and does no magic because he cannot really do more than survive off the energy I'm giving him. But we soon will reach the mountains, where there are ley lines for him to tap. That will be the true test. Will he need me anymore? I think he will keep me, but by then hopefully I will have released all his souls. He'll be hungry then and will have to kill again. That will be when we must be ready.”

  She could hear Vamilion's palpable sigh of resignation. He wanted to come to her rescue, a gallant knight in shining armor, but he knew that would not help. While it was charming, she knew it for a whimsical thought. “I'll see what I can do to make his ink visible. In the meantime… I'll throttle Owailion for you instead.”

  “Why? He's been very supportive.” She almost gasped at the rancor she heard in Vamilion's mental voice.

  “Because he got you into this mess. It was his suggestion. I would never have tolerated sending you off with a Soul Eater to cross the plains if I had known he would not follow you more closely. There has to be a better, safer way to strip Drake of your name. Owailion doesn't really worry about your protection. He only wants to learn from him all about the invasion and…”

  “Invasion?” Gailin interrupted.

  “Yes, your snake there, he is the scout for the two other magical invasions. That's my job; to counter the first wave when they arrive while Owailion prepares for the second. It shouldn't be long now. They must suspect Drake is in trouble and are coming because they haven't heard from him. He is probably planning on giving them the map so they know where they can safely invade and we must be ready. I might have to give him the map back to keep you safe, but I will change the lines and see how they fare out in the middle of the plains far away from their lifeblood.”