Ley Lines

by Lisa Lowell

  “I'm sure you, with your understanding of the body, can manage to be sure you conceive and it is a son. Now, shall we proceed?” and he placed his hands on her hips possessively.

  Gailin looked longingly to the north, wishing the mountains were more than a grey line where the sky met the horizon. Then she remembered that towns and villages were there. Perhaps someone else could help her. She grasped at the hope.

  “Do you want your son to be a bastard? I must marry you first.”

  Drake also looked over toward the north, surprised by the suggestion. It had been a long time since he had slept in a bed and fed on souls instead of Gailin's steady stream of well magic. His lust dwelt at many levels and none of them were met by groveling here in the grass. He nodded, removed his hands from her body and then began gathering up their belongings. When she didn't move to help him, he sighed and said the words. “Gailin, you can move again.”

  She dropped to her knees and with shaking hands began to pack. He would at least do this right. She used her reprieve to magically scribble a comment in the book about Drake but because of the prohibition set on her she could not set a compulsion to read it on the words. Instead she made a running list of her thoughts as they packed up and began walking toward the northern horizon as if nothing had changed. And yet everything had.

  Over the day Gailin began to come to a somewhat peaceful conclusion that this was probably the best she could hope for. If she didn't think about his magic and just Drake as a man, she wasn't displeased. Of course she wanted to love, or to at least care about the man she married. She might have thought much the same of Jonis. Drake wasn't repulsive physically and while she didn't love him and disliked his cold personality, he wouldn't beat her or abuse her, drink or womanize like other men might. More than once her grandmother had told her that in a place like the Land, so recently settled, a girl didn't have the right to remain unmarried. If Vamilion had not come into her life, she would have probably eventually married Jonis and been a farmer's wife with half a dozen kids and a tired existence.

  That thought made her weep for what might have been. Drake noticed her tears as they walked but said nothing and she hurriedly wiped them away. What would her life have been like with Vamilion instead? He would have loved her and she had no doubt she could easily come to love the King of Mountains back. They would have had a heritage of magic and surely she would not have been as uncomfortable as the thought of being with Drake? Vamilion had Paget and she would always be Vamilion's first choice. But what would it have been like if fate had dealt Gailin a different hand? What if they had met when no hunter tracked him or he had no other love already in his life? Would they have grown to care for each other or would the magic make their attraction and bond instant?

  Right now, considering how wretched she felt, Gailin would have gladly given up the magic and not be driven into either choice. Drake or Vamilion, neither was fair when magic manipulated the outcome. Why should she give up her free will in either case? Magic was to blame and she almost swore not to use it again if it were going to push her in a direction she didn't want to go. It was no better than what Drake had done to her, invoking name magic to force her to do this. Drake at least had a motive of a sort. Did she want children? She had not thought about it much. It seemed foolish to think about that before she had a man and with her grandmother as a responsibility, even that was beyond her.

  Now Gailin had been launched into the world and was falling into a chasm with her life buried in mist. She might as well enjoy the flight. Maybe the beauty of small things was all she could expect. Having a child would be nice, despite the circumstances. Drake might be a decent husband for all she knew. Maybe she could keep him from harvesting more souls, for her sake. She would continue to let him tap into her magic and maybe that would enhance their relationship. She had no idea how this would come out but she would come to terms with it. A person dying of a slow growing tumor made much the same adjustment and while the diagnosis was grim, at least she was aware of her fate and would make the most of the time she had in her life.

  Two days later they reached the town of Meeting on the eastern branches of the Lara River. Drake used name magic to forbid her to speak to anyone as they wandered in the streets of the relatively large town. He directed them to an inn where he purchased the nicest suite with money she didn't know he had. They took turns bathing and then he went down to ask the innkeeper where a priest could be found. While he was gone Gailin experimented with how much magic she could do despite his restrictions and found that other than calling to anyone mentally she seemed to be free to work. She conjured a clean set of clothes to get married in and then realized she had a worse problem. As soon as Drake walked back in the door, she presented it to him.

  “Getting married is an oath. For a Wise One, taking an oath puts me into that royal clothing. The priest will notice.”

  Drake rocked back on his feet as he recognized this would interfere with his plans to remain behind the scenes, not known as a sorcerer. “I will just absorb him after the ceremony and he won't be able to tell anyone he has just seen magic,” he suggested warily.

  “No,” she almost panicked, revolted that anyone would die because of her. “No, let me handle it. I…like you better when you aren't hurting others.” It sounded incredibly awkward, but she had to say something to stop him if she weren't able to hinder him magically.

  Drake looked at her oddly and then smirked as if this met his needs also. “Well, you make that possible. I haven't absorbed anyone since I met you. It's enough just to absorb you.” He almost sounded glad that he hadn't found a need to kill someone either. They both privately thought it was a strange arrangement, but then he escorted her to the priest.

  It was a simple ceremony with only the priest there and predictably, when Gailin's clothing shifted into the royal costume, she swiftly entered the priest's mind and stripped away the memory of the shock. Her intimate understanding of the human brain that she had gleaned allowed Gailin to tap into a minor portion of the mind and remove a memory. It was a practice that she intended to keep rare and hopefully use on Drake sometime soon. When the priest continued with the ceremony with only a moment's hesitation and then wandered back into his office without even congratulating the newlywed couple, Drake looked impressed.

  “Subtle is better,” Gailin commented and then turned back into her normal clothing and they left the little church. Now if only she could work a spell on herself to forget what else she was now bound to endure.

  Chapter 12 – Rumbling

  Vamilion stood waist deep and filthy dirty in the ocean surf that swirled with noxious gasses and ash spewing from the volcano that now rose visibly above the surf in the bay at the mouth of the Laranian River. He had to speed up the eruption process when the first boat of sorcerers had arrived, leaving him no time, not even for daylight. Forcing the volcano's growth meant more powerful eruptions and he could not counter the tsunamis fast enough unless he stood right there in the water. The coastal villages would be wiped out otherwise and hopefully the volcano had encouraged evacuations already. So Vamilion grounded himself to the bedrock below him so he wasn't washed ashore every time the waves came, but that meant he also spent half the time underwater blackened to ink by the roiling ash and boiling gasses filling the surf. While he didn't technically need to breathe, it was a luxury Vamilion appreciated as he battled the minds of the sorcerers who knew he was there to challenge them.

  Dozens of outlander sorcerers of the likes of Drake had come, commandeering a ship, and had tried to sneak in the mouth of the Laranian. Vamilion caught them before they reached fresh water and hit them with a tsunami from his convenient volcano, pulled them back out to sea and then dashed them onto the still steaming shore of the new piece of Land. Unfortunately killing sorcerers wasn't that easy. Their shattered ship washed all around Vamilion at his beachhead, but he would not allow these sorcerers even that much territory. He battered at their minds, hoping to break through but
failed, though his attacks kept them busy.

  Someone among them must have had a gift with weather or wind, for the clouds of ash began blowing in a perfectly unnatural direction, out to sea and rain clouds built up, washing the sky of ash that now fouled the waters Vamilion stood in. He probably looked like a monster made of lava, but he was not harmed in the least. Instead he countered by calling up great globs of still fresh magma to grow up over the legs of anyone standing on the island. The pain must have been excruciating for Vamilion heard their howls and some died, he sensed, buried in beds of freshly forming stone. The weather manipulating sorcerer fell to this fate and the magically manufactured storm clouds gave way to volcanic billowing once again.

  However, some sorcerers escaped this tactic by changing themselves into something less human and slithering into the water or circling overhead like vultures, ready to swoop down the instant they spotted him. Perhaps being covered in ash and saltwater could be a benefit for Vamilion, for they could not see him in the night and vast blindness of the eruption. Again he forced the volcano to release more poison that rained down on the unnatural birds and the lava bombs fired like missiles down on anything that moved. Heaven help any of the villagers who lived nearby. They had been warned by the earthquakes and tsunamis before the invaders ever made their appearance but Vamilion could not afford to spare them his attention. And battle he did. By dawn he found himself with a glimmer of light lifting between the black water and the darker clouds formed from the new land mass.

  With the sun's rise no minds came to challenge him. At last Vamilion let the volcano settle except for a crack of lava oozing on the island's northwest side, spewing out a perfect spot for a port in the deepest water near the island. It was the least he could do for the poor people who had to live in the shadow of an active volcano. He fully intended for this island he had made to be habitable and pleasant. As he wearily swam up and then climbed onto Gardway Island, as he christened it, Vamilion looked around and sensed no one dead or alive to battle. Wearily he walked the shoreline, strengthening the lava mixture beneath his feet. Any further eruptions out of the volcano hopefully would be meant for land building and not battling invaders. The volcano should probably cure for at least a year before anyone else touched this land and it would take that long to develop enough soil to support plant life. Vamilion would see to that and not speed up the process of bringing in greenery. He also made a few hot springs near the bay he had created and washed in them, enjoying being clean.

  All this magic, however, left him no energy or thought to see how Gailin fared. Indeed, after three days in the dark of battle and blasts of ash, he could not think at all and fell asleep in one of his conjured hot springs. At dawn of the fourth day he thought to go tell Owailion about the battle he had encountered and almost forgot to go back to his tent up on the mountain to pack, or rather make all he had conjured disappear. And it was a good thing he did go, for he had left the tablet there unattended and the snows would have soon have buried it. Summer was fading and these mountains would soon be lost to the cold.

  But then he picked up the tablet and absently looked over what Gailin had written. Then his hands began trembling. In an entire stream of consciousness, not a letter to him, she told him all she was enduring.

  She had been trapped by the hunter when he discovered the map was a blank forgery. Drake had made it impossible for her to call for help or work magic to defend herself. When Vamilion read of the snake's ambition to get a magical heir, with Gailin as the mother, the volcano erupted again and he did nothing about the tidal wave that resulted. Over the several days' worth of writing Gailin obviously began to come to grips with her new reality and Vamilion began to calm into a more dangerous anger.

  Owailion had done this. He had allowed her to go with the hunter out onto the plains where Vamilion could not follow. Instead of shadowing her as Vamilion would have done, Owailion had stayed down at the mouth of Don River building with his little toys and not checked on Gailin regularly to see that she would not be manipulated or harmed. Vamilion's anger seared and boiled, with responding earthquakes throughout the range on which he stood. But he forced himself to read to the end, holding down his gorge as Gailin dispassionately described her wedding night.

  Why couldn't she have waited for him? Why had she walked into this danger? Why did Owailion allow this? Why didn't she just slip into the snake's mind and erase her name, slit his metaphorical throat and release the souls. Why hadn't Vamilion done that for her? Why had he abandoned his duty to the woman he already loved, despite himself? Why must she suffer this? Just like Owailion he would lose the companion that God had arranged for him and he would spend eternity alone with only memories of dying ladies for his solace. He might as well call down the avalanche of the ages over himself and be done with it.

  Gailin's words cut off eventually, after describing the cold intimacy of the snake, leaving Vamilion with no idea exactly where she was or if she had survived. Drake might not kill her seeing as he wanted his magical heir, but perhaps Gailin had challenged him and he would have been forced to kill her. Vamilion didn't even know how long ago this had taken place. It had only been five days since he had read her last update, but that would not stop him now. He threw the tablet on the table and reached out his mind toward the north. Where was Gailin now? They had been heading for the Great Chain, but he couldn't hear her mind. Was Drake blocking her, shielding her from magical identification? Desperately Vamilion switched perspectives, not listening for her mind but instead using the mountains as his eyes. He had all the mountains there seeking for a beautiful lady traveling into the passes. They couldn't be hard to spot, but still, he saw nothing.

  Vamilion could endure it no longer. He picked up the tablet and launched himself across the continent to another mountain nearest to Meeting. Illogically he hoped to see her without magic though it seemed foolish to expect that he could physically do what magic had been unable to accomplish. He looked the sky around, day and night. The clouds wheeled overhead, filled with the first snows that began to drift down before his misery and despair finally drove him to another tactic.

  He would confront Owailion.

  Using mountain to mountain, Vamilion launched himself to the southernmost point of the Great Chain, where the Don River emerged from a thousand cracks among the peaks. He stood at the last high ridge with a Wise One's palace visible below him down on the plains below near the roaring Don River, just above a waterfall. Owailion had forbidden him from changing the geology but right at that moment, Vamilion didn't care what the elder Wise One wanted. He wanted answers.

  Vamilion lifted his hand out over the valley that stretched before him. With a thought, he dammed up the river with a well-placed avalanche of rubble. Snapping trees and crushed rocks filled the river's path and blocked up the channel. The flow began to back up, forming a lake and the old path failed. The waterfall dropped to a trickle in the lower river and Vamilion smiled at the bare cliff that had been revealed, now devoid of the roaring veil of the falls.

  Next Vamilion felt for the fault beneath him that had formed the long Great Chain of mountains like jewels on a necklace. That fault stopped here, blocking him from traveling farther south. So what if Owailion said not to make more mountains, he thought rebelliously. Vamilion reached deeper into the fault and with the force of his anger, he cracked the earth to its roots. He wasn't seeking a volcano, but uplift. His hand rose and with it, the eastern half of the widened crack he had created. Below him the land pitched and screamed. If there were not a magical foundation under that Wise One's palace, it would have toppled. The lake he was forming deep in the mountains behind his landfall became rivers in new directions and found a way around his dam, gushing back into the Don.

  What would have taken a million years took a matter of hours but Vamilion had a new mountain and river before his eyes. Then, as if he were not troubled by his own rebellion, he leapt to his newly created peak and began another mountain in the chain, anoth
er jewel in the Land's necklace. He would surround the entire continent in his creations if Owailion did not come to him and explain himself and help him find Gailin. The pitching earth and snapping of solid stone did not trouble him. The loss of the Queen, that hurt beyond words.

  “Gilead, stop!” Owailion's words echoed as he appeared behind Vamilion on the newly created peak. The King of Creating looked placid and hardly surprised at what his younger protégé had done to gain his attention. However, he also didn't look pleased; more annoyed that he had been pulled away from his project. Owailion stripped off work gloves and stuffed them in the pockets of his welding apron with a huff.

  Vamilion turned around slowly lest he slide on the unstable mountain top. Having name magic invoked on him only angered him more, but his inherent patience allowed Vamilion to turn to face the man he needed now to help him find Gailin. Owailion's haphazard, lazy look, even as he balanced precariously on the top of the world must have been meant to put Vamilion over the top, encouraging him to explode like a volcano. It wouldn't work just yet.

  “You shouldn't do that, Owailion. We are equals and I don't know your name. Right now that might be a good thing or I might just kill you. The Queen is missing because you let her go off with that snake. This is what she wrote to me; the last I've heard from her. I cannot find her mind anywhere and the mountains have not seen her. I want to know what you've been doing to protect her.” He held out the tablet.

  Owailion took the slab without looking away from his colleague, as if he now began to understand something; no matter that he had never set eyes on Gailin, Vamilion was already bonded to her. His profound anger witnessed to that. It took a moment before the King of Creating dare look down at the words Gailin had written. Owailion's usually sour face changed little. Maybe a pursed lip or a breath released just a little more slowly as he absorbed what had happened, but Vamilion watched him intently, waiting for the impact of some regret on the man's frosty façade.