AMETHYST 5.1: THE WINTER DOOR
“We hereby abandon the search for Bookwyrm and Bladesedge. Yes, I’ll admit it openly to you all, to crier and news-writer alike: even I can’t find them. Yes, maybe they’re dead. I can only pray that they stand here with us again one day, champions and brothers-in-arms just as they were. And, let’s be honest – I’m no good at praying.”
– from ‘Memories of Everseer’, collected 996 NE
I had to admit, I was getting a bit greedy. Em was casting me the odd glance every now and then, as if she were feeling worried behind her mask – worried enough that she was able to pull her gaze from her surroundings. Even here, under the dusky, pinkish light bleeding through the dark grey clouds; here, in the glowing, pear-scented mists.
Zel, on the other hand, barely batted an eyelid. With few words she guided us from still, silent meres to glades full of giggling, possibly-drunk demi-toads, from meadows of sky-high flowers to great edifices of ancient stone. It was almost like she understood we were, at least to a certain degree, on a date, and didn’t want to ruin it with her running commentary. Perhaps I owed her a few more discretion points.
Or perhaps she was merely keeping her nose out of it for her own reasons. She wanted me to increase my power, the versatility of my retinue, almost as much as I did. But she definitely found the practise of binding free creatures to one’s will far less unsavoury than I did.
Either way, I was happy. For its size, her nose was surprisingly obstructive.
When I picked up a unicorn, Em quickly came around, suddenly less bothered by my hoarding of entities. The unicorn’s name was Gilaela. Gilaela wasn’t exactly thrilled to meet me – be enslaved by me – but she seemed to catch on pretty fast that there were worse sorcerers out there to be bound by. I didn’t even have to exert my authority to persuade her to let Em onto her back; in fact she seemed quite smitten with my girlfriend, and it wasn’t long before she was comparing her mane to Em’s hair. (They were, admittedly, almost the exact same shade of shining white-blonde.)
Gilaela, the unicorn, differed little from a beautiful white horse – sure, she was exceptionally clean-looking, but nothing in the otherworld seemed particularly dirty; and sure, she had the horn on her head, twelve inches of coiled, glittery goodness. But, outwardly at least, that was all. Zel had said she had the power to ‘burn impurities’, whatever the Twelve Hells that meant. She seemed surprisingly playful, for a unicorn – in most of the stories they were prudish and aloof, but the authors clearly hadn’t been doing their fey-research.
Xiatan, the dryad, was a small tree, perhaps thirteen, fourteen feet tall. He looked like an oak, but it was obvious to the eye that he had to be something else – no ordinary tree so small was so broad, so blessed with branches. The lower section of his ‘trunk’ cracked in two, allowing him to stride around with his feet-skirt of roots; on one side, near the top of the trunk where his branch-arms grew thickest, there were some vague approximations of eyeholes and a mouth, black cracks in the bark of his flesh. So he had working limbs, and he had a face – but there the distinction between dryad and small tree ended. He even spoke as rarely as your average tree. I’d been able to exert my influence, force him to say his name aloud, and watched as the mouth-crack rumbled in Etheric – but since he’d contributed nothing else I left him behind to enjoy his solitude.
Sarcamor and Sarminuid were satyrs: my height, with beetle-wing black eyes and skin like blue leather. They resembled Flood Boy more than anything else I’d seen so far, but instead of the legs and horns of a small goat, theirs were those of huge rams – their snow-white fur contrasted with the oily blue of their flesh. Their hair and unkempt beards were white too, shorn short and left tufted. Both were almost as well-muscled as Avaelar, and when I (well, Zel) found them, they were engaged in some kind of wrestling match in a pool of thick, sparkling sap. I thought they were trying to kill each other, but they quickly set me right – they were apparently sportsmen, of all things, training for a competition to be held soon at ‘the court of the King of Yellow Flowers’. I merely took their fealty and extracted promises not to do each other serious harm before wishing them well in their upcoming tournament and leaving the glade.
There were others too – a family of what seemed to be, well, dire squirrels, each the size of a lion, their eyes the size of my fists, their fur gold with bronze bellies and tails. A scorpion no bigger than my hand which I only bothered commanding to my service at Zel’s stubborn insistence – a few words later, he was roughly the size of three wagons standing wheel-to-wheel, his legs planted like six trees and his prodigious tail hovering overhead dropping ichor… I was left once more apologising to my faerie queen guide.
But more than once I must’ve been casting the same hidden glance back at Em. She was enjoying her time here, and it was weird.
We are all broken, I reminded myself.
That she would come to the otherworld, to such a strange and dangerous place, and ride a unicorn… That I would go ahead and invite her here, as a romantic getaway no less… I mean, what was I thinking? Sometimes I thought I could hear something, a tinkling on the sweet breeze, and whenever I turned to look towards its source it had always emanated from the darkest shadows of the trees about me, the thickest tangles where the eaves were long and the glowing lights seemed leeched from the very air –
And then the feeling passed and I forgot how ominous, foreboding those tinkling sounds were – Zel didn’t seem to notice, which was impossible given her senses, so it was obviously just that they weren’t bothering her. I didn’t want to sound demented, ranting about dark tangles and shadowy sounds. So I kept my lips firmly sealed, my eyes open…
My shields active.
“I think you might want to head home now, Feychilde,” Zel advised, floating back towards us from the copse of sap-dripping trees she’d been investigating. “Time’s ticked by – I think it’s close to midnight back in Mund, and –”
“Midnight!” Em gasped. “Is zat possible?” She always tried to use her Mundian accent when garbed in her champion’s costume, but sometimes she let it slip. “Ve have been here only two, three hours at the most…”
“And for most of that time we’ve travelled in a straight line – you even went on your little jaunt, yet we’re still nowhere close to leaving Treetown’s borders,” Zel replied, a little churlishly. She definitely didn’t like being contradicted. “Explain that, mighty wizard.”
In spite of her tone, I thought I caught the glimmer of a grin on her miniscule features.
“I – I –” Em floundered.
“Space is a sticky thing,” Zel cut her off. “It doesn’t just stay where you leave it – it follows you, to a degree. Time’s the same – how do you think diviners do what they do? We can’t look across infinite time and space, you know. It’s the time that attends to us, and spreads outwards from us, like ripples on the surface of a pond…”
The lesson continued until I created a gate. Gilaela bade us a cheery farewell; Em’s hand in mine, we stepped back through to the mortal dimension.
Not that I’d had to hold her hand the whole time. I’d gotten the hang of creating my sorcerer’s mark after finishing the library book I’d been perusing the last week or more. It was simple, truth be told.
The seal of an arch-sorcerer had to be something personal, and it had to be scratched into the skin – it would last only for so long as the blood shone in the cuts. We’d had to stop a number of times, Em returning to my side with an apologetic look on her face, holding out her arm so I could use my knife on the back of her hand again, open the near-scabs and refresh the rune.
Hardly romantic, slicing into your girlfriend’s hand – but Em wanted the ability to fly free, and I couldn’t really blame her. Avaelar was the wrong kind of healer but the new druid in her band, Gherwen, would apparently be more than happy to fix her up later.
The seal I’d developed after a little trial-and-error was a stylised ‘F’, with branching appendages sprouting off the ends of the lines to connect the ley forces. Simple, and straightforward – something I could form in seconds, push my power inside without any inhibition.
It was strange, sometimes, archmagery. Why I could twist my force-lines to fit my ‘F’-rune far more easily than another shape, I had no idea. That’s just the way it was. I started with simple symbols, circles and crosses, but nothing had taken until it was personal.
“Tingles,” Em said, looking down at the back of her hand as we stood in the mundane, Mundian forests of Treetown, my dimensional gate sealing itself closed behind us. “It feels kind of funny.”
“That’s the planar connection,” Zel said, flying up at head-height in front of us. “The longer the seal is in place, the longer your stay, the stronger the bond. If you wandered in the otherworld for a few days, you might not be able to leave.”
Em shuddered with a weird smile on her face. “It doesn’t sound all that bad.” She pulled her body close to mine, put her head against my chest. “I could stay there…”
I put my arms around her, thinking of how it’d looked from above when we flew together. An ocean of treetops. An eerie sky.
No buildings in sight.
It was amazing and everything, but it was a little bit daunting, too, if I was being honest with myself.
“It is a pretty awesome place,” I said. “Don’t quite think I quite fancy living there, though.”
“You alone would retain your humanity, Feychilde,” my fairy reminded me. A few seconds later, after I didn’t reply, she muttered something to herself and disappeared in a green flash.
“I thought she’d never go,” Em murmured huskily, reaching up to remove her phoenix-mask.
“Leave it on, Stormsword,” I said, and kissed her.
We didn’t leave Treetown’s forests for quite some time – Em made a ring of carefully-controlled fire to warm us, scare off the beasts – and I never did get chance to properly test the powers of my new acquisitions before I left Em behind.
Before I left for Zadhal.
Em had said that I should already know that she really wished she could go – that such a thing should be obvious. I’d said in reply that I knew she could come along if she really wished: give up the mantle of magister; take up the mantle of champion full-time. But we’d left it at that. We didn’t let it come between us.
I knew she did want to go with me. To see the horrors of this distant grave-city from a shattered epoch. I could see it in her eyes, in the way she bit at her lower lip and looked aside when we stopped discussing it.
And I knew that, even if she said she was a champion, even if the gods accepted her at her word, there would always be part of her heart that would see Henthae as something more than her superior, her recruiter. The arch-enchanter was a mentor; a mother. The mother Emrelet could see as an equal.
I just had to hope she’d choose a side before she got torn in two.
* * *
Reconstruction had started in Helbert’s Bend before even Lord’s Knuckle, which had suffered worse. For whatever reason, Mud Lane had been prioritised, and while I was hardly going to complain it did make me wonder. Perhaps Henthae or Timesnatcher or even Ciraya had pulled some strings somewhere. Who did I have to thank?
But it didn’t matter. What mattered was that the skeletons of buildings were already there opposite my apartment block – that the people in the tents below could look up and know, really know, that their homes were going to be returned to them.
Hope. I’d have bet that Yune got a serious injection of power when the wizards started moving the wood into place.
And I’d have bet the goddess lost almost the same amount when I told my brother and sister where I was going.
Jaroan had taken the news well, on the surface, but Jaid let her true feelings be known in every facet of her existence. If she walked across the room, she flopped and floundered like a fish out of water. If she drew a picture, it was a sun weeping or a coffin. If she wrote a story, the pegasus lost all her feathers and could no longer fly.
It was with a certain degree of trepidation that I woke her, leaving Jaroan sleeping.
“Jaid,” I whispered, lifting her flaccid hand. “Jaid!”
“She’s having such lovely dreams,” came a soft voice from behind me.
“Shh!” I blurted.
It took a minute but my sister finally started to stir, her eyes rolling as she blinked…
She came fully alert as Gilaela dipped her horned head.
“Hello, young human woman,” the unicorn whispered. It was so weird, watching the equine lips move in pace with her words. “How are your dreams? I hope they are pleasant; they looked pleasant. May I say, your hair smells lovely. Far nicer than your brother’s.” She bared her teeth at me in a, well, horsey grin.
Jaid leapt out of bed, squealing a little – Jaroan opened his bleary eyes for a few seconds, took in the unicorn, then rolled over and went back to sleep.
I helped my sister into place on Gilaela’s back, and she wrapped her arms around the horse’s neck, burying her head in the gorgeous white mane.
“Oh, you smell lovely too, Princess! Can we keep her? Please, Kas, can we –“
“We’ve got no choice, I’m afraid.” I spread my hands helplessly, grinning. “She’s inextricably bound to me now. Once I’m back, we’ll go out of the city for a ride…”
I watched the expression on her face, the change come over her instantly when I mentioned leaving.
“Can’t – can’t you leave her here? Kas, please! Pleaaase!” Jaid growled. She didn’t sound as upset as she looked – she sounded angry, if anything. “You can leave her here, and I can feed her, and look after her –“
“I beg to differ, nice-smelling young human woman,” Gilaela cut her off, “I don’t really need much by way of feeding, or ‘looking after’, for that matter – you could bathe me in mud, I would still come out looking like this, you know.”
“You… you really haven’t seen where we live, have you?” Jaid asked, her lips that had been curled downwards in a frown now twisting upwards in the ghost of a smile.
It warmed my heart to see the way her mood had already lifted, even though she was clearly fighting it. But I couldn’t leave Gilaela here, could I? If I came close to death or even just drew on too much of my power while in the undead-infested city, the unicorn would flicker away and disappear, which would surely only cause Jaid to lose her mind, make them grieve me unnecessarily.
The shields I’d put in place around the apartment would disappear too.
“She’s bound to me, like I said,” I apologised. “Where I go, she goes – and I’m sure as hell not taking you!”
I reached up to lift her down, then held onto her, forcing her to accept my hug.
“I’ll be fine, Jaid. I promise. I came through the Incursion, and it won’t be worse than that. I’ll make sure Princess is kept safe,” I cast a gloating look at the unicorn over Jaid’s shoulder and I could’ve sworn the horse stuck her tongue out at me, “and I can send you a message, if you like, once we’re there? It’ll be an ugly little imp creature – I can’t send Princess, she’d be too obvious moving through the undead city –“
“Don’t be so sure,” Gilaela said in Etheric, and snorted softly.
“What, you’re a chronomancer?” I asked eagerly in the same tongue, borrowing from the official terminology. “You bend time? Or just turn invisible, or something?”
“I… can destroy the things that see me?” the unicorn replied, with a note of confusion. “You are proposing a trip to some realm of evil beings, no?”
Never mind, I thought. I’ll have to test it in the field.
I was only hours away from embarking on my fool’s errand, now. My newly-bought demiskin – my most expensive purchase by far – was already packed and waiting for me under my bed…
My sister had made up her mind. “You can… se-send an imp. I don’t want Princess to get hurt. I… Look after my brother, Princess.” Jaid suddenly turned and threw her arms around the unicorn’s foreleg.
After the shock faded from her posture, her ears and eyelids lowering again, Gilaela seemed to relent and lowered her head to nestle against my sister.
I didn’t dismiss the unicorn and bid Zel goodnight till Jaid was fast asleep again, then I quietly lowered myself onto my bed and struggled to join her in dream-land.
And I failed, tripping through the cracks between the clouds, into the dark recesses where falling forever is a mercy.
“You cannot let us go on,” Jaid and Jaroan say in unison, eyes empty.
“Hush,” I hear myself whisper, and I glance between them, frantic. I can’t feel my lips moving. “I’ll hear us.”
“But we didn’t say anything,” their voices echo again; they glance at each other, empty eyes worried.
“By Kultemeren!” I hear myself cry, “you are not my brother and sister!” Then I catch the sound of myself sniggering, and when my voice comes next it is not my own: “They would never have begged for death so quickly.”
Then I see it – their hands are full of beetles.
They must be dead inside already.
I burn it all.
I hear my fist hammering on the door; I cringe on the other side of the room, longing for an avenue of escape to reveal itself.
The tarot card turns before my eyes… and the only way out is the Tower.
The moat of blackness. The slimy slithering ink I can’t grasp at even though I’ve seen it, I have seen it.
No, there is no escape in that monolith – only the Shadow awaits me, whatever I do. I can’t run. I have to wait, have to face it, as the blows continue to rain down.
I look, and I know that the door is a huge slab of metal and magic, a foot thick – it could withstand a thousand fireballs a minute for a thousand years.
I know it is about to split asunder. I’m knocking. On the outside.
I turn back, casting my gaze across the great hall of black stone with its gleaming table, seeing it all for the first time. The vast spiral of marble. Its flickering orange hearths. Its thirty-three huge seats.
I am outside knocking on the door and I can hear the thunderous blows from inside and they terrify me.
Which one is me? Which am I?
I try to tell them the thoughts aren’t my own but I won’t let me. Below the rim of my grinning mask my matching smile terrifies me and now I’m elsewhere, pursuing myself through the Incursion.
The Incursion I only recently survived. It is the same. Everything is the same, reborn in nightmare form. A clarity only Infernum might achieve.
I clamber across the head resting upon the clay, the rust-red plates lit from beneath by golden flame, the veins of fire-mountains. I hesitantly peel open the flesh and hide myself inside.
They are in here with me. The other twins. All eight of them. They still trust me.
They even look like children.
I try to soothe them, calm them as I slay them, but they won’t shut up so in the end I just do it as quickly, efficiently as I can. They’re strong, but not strong enough.
Not strong enough to face me.
Not yet.
* * *
It was a rainy, grey morning and I could feel the chill north wind slicing at my ethereal feathers as I winged my way through the treeline. Once I reached the open space I felt a little giddy, so I halted, and reduced the height at which I was flying so that I skirted the ground as I continued onwards.
Already I could feel it. The Door. The incessant hum of the thing.
You’re going to keep an eye on it all?
“Two eyes,” Zel replied. “Or more, if you’ve got a willing donor or two.”
You mean, wake up some of the others? I thought back, in a somewhat critical-sounding mind-voice.
“I was joking! Tee-hee.” My advisor tittered. “Don’t worry, I’m all over this. Today should be interesting.”
She did sound like she was in an amazing mood, and it was quite infectious.
The Winter Door stood alone in a wasteland of dead trees, many of which had been chopped down a foot off the ground, the stumps marked with runes of closing, runes of resistance. The wards stretched about the Door in a dozen concentric rings – the shield was nowhere near as powerful as the one enclosing the Maginox, but I could at least see its faint bluish radiance now I was approaching the portal, stretching up to form a dome that stretched three times the height of the huge Door. I guessed the relative weakness of the protections here had more to do with the nature of the thing they were protecting than any failure on the part of those who made the wards. Certainly these were more straightforward-looking – the barriers weren’t designed to operate with ill-will-wishers permitted within, like Magicrux Altra and its prisoners. All the same, my teeth were already grating from the incessant hum of the Door, and I got the feeling that the resonance I was suffering through was having the same effect on the sorcerous barriers I could detect, seeming to thin them, soften them.
This place had no shrine, no visitors. While the druids could talk-up the perils of the Autumn Door, people visited the Giltergrove because it offered a whole experience – the awesome trees, the innumerable types of flora and fauna, in addition to the Door itself. It was kid-friendly, and mysterious. The Winter Door, on the other hand, had a very real history of tragedy and violence. Everyone knew better than to come here, and the Magisterium knew better than to let them. The area of forest around the Winter Door had been designated a no-go zone to most members of the public, and apparently even the lords and ladies whose properties came closest to the Door were turned away if they crossed the boundary.
So in place of a shrine there was only a simple, stone-built fortification: twenty-foot-high walls, four of them, forming a square. The walls were thick enough to contain a few buildings between the inner and outer faces – dormitories, I supposed, for those magisters taking breaks from their shifts – and a pair of archways offered non-fliers a way in and out. Arches without gates. Gates would not be needed here – and if they were, they could do precisely nothing to help.
The Door rose from the centre of the structure, seeming like the Autumn Door in almost every way – the same huge ‘door-frame’ marked with vast glyphs, the same ever-changing, scintillating surface, like a curtain of water and fire mingled together – but its colour was the most easily-recognisable difference. Its waves flowed and its flames licked sapphire-blue within the white frame; the glyphs adorning the alabaster stone were very similar but that was a matter more of style than content. The portal emitted a crackling sound, soft, like dry sticks popping on the fire. Nothing like as bad as the hum beneath, not even in the same league. It was obvious to me that this was a mortal sound, something originating in Materium.
This portal wasn’t asleep.
It was a very different experience – the Autumn Door, surrounded by massive golden trees, made you feel small, like a gnome in a giant’s forest. But the Winter Door towered over everything, with no equally-colossal features in the environment. The Winter Door simply looked big.
I spotted Glimmermere, the unique condor’s blue feathers almost hiding her from even my eyes. She winged her way across the cloudy sky, approaching the Door from the south. And below us, gathered around the portal’s base, was a mighty company of champions and magisters.
Some of the mages down there were adepts from the affiliated colleges, by the looks of their robes, contractors simply going about their jobs. Most were circling the two vast surfaces of boiling blue fire at various distances, casting their bone-sand in expertly-laid circles to form more-powerful, constantly-replenished wards.
But some of the magisters stood apart, with the champions…
Arch-magisters.
Then I saw her – the head of Special Investigations. Mistress Keliko Henthae was here, talking to a couple of important-looking sorcerers – a big, imposing man with silver-blond hair poking out from beneath his hood and a younger, female sorcerer who looked vaguely familiar. I ignored them, studying the arch-enchantress. Her beringed fingers glinted despite the gloom, her rose-hued robe supplemented by a thick-furred white cloak – the cloak’s hood was up, hiding her darkish-grey hair, but there was no mistaking her.
Henthae. The reason Em – the reason Stormsword – wouldn’t be backing us up today.
‘The Magisterium’s orders.’ A paltry set of ‘examinations’ she’d set up for my girlfriend, to keep her away from me, away from this.
I deliberately avoided looking at the old woman as I landed. Zel was quick to reassure me that she was ready: Henthae wouldn’t even get my surface thoughts without her knowing. That was to say nothing of the anti-enchantment amulet I wore under my clothing, clinking softly against my healing-phial. Henthae was clearly powerful, but powerful-enough to contend with my current kit? I suspected not.
Instead of studying her, I waved at the champions.
Timesnatcher. Lightblind. Starsight. Dimdweller, the dwarf. Yeesh, that was a lot of diviners, but I was glad to see Starsight back on his feet.
No Killstop? I caught myself wondering.
Glancefall. Rosedawn. Spiritwhisper. I was surprised Lovebright hadn’t shown up.
Leafcloak. Fangmoon. And Glimmermere, soon to arrive. I was kind of glad Nighteye had been left behind this time, for his sake.
Mountainslide, the second of the two dwarves. Winterprince… Only two wizards?
Then Shallowlie. Direcrown.
Me.
Most of the others were talking in low voices amongst their companions. Henthae, Timesnatcher and Lightblind were discussing the fact we were still awaiting the arrival of Shadowcloud (three wizards!) and another arch-magister too. I walked over to Starsight, and he was already reaching out to shake my hand.
As I clasped the white-robed diviner’s palm in both of my own, I hailed him:
“Starsight – good to see you’re back on your feet. And not even stabbing your friends…!”
I said it with a big joyful grin on my face, but I realised from the way he replied in a rather flat monotone, “Feychilde,” that my jest had come too soon. Had he only just recovered from the mind-warping influence of the infernal obsidian he’d touched?
“Did I get chance to thank you?” I asked. “For saving my life, after I fell?”
“You did,” he said, “but you didn’t.”
It took me a second to realise what he meant by that.
I opened my mouth: “I’m sorry –”
“No need,” he cut me off. “You gave me Neverwish’s share, didn’t you? And you spoke to me of stabbing friends.”
There was no open hostility in his voice but I could sense it just beneath the surface. He might’ve been frowning, glowering behind the five-pointed mask he wore… but I couldn’t tell.
Neverwish. Was that what all this was about? But… Timesnatcher had insisted I be the one to call the dwarven enchanter out on his darkmage-ways… Had ‘T-Man’ foreseen this? Had I been wrong to put my trust in him? What if he was just trying to make me hated?
I couldn’t be too quick to jump to conclusions. Starsight was suffering, probably in several ways. He’d come around.
He turned aside to say something to Dimdweller, the dwarven diviner who’d also turned on Neverwish in those last moments of Neverwish’s freedom; I sensed myself being dismissed.
I stood on my own for a minute, padding from foot to foot, trying to keep myself distracted from the portal’s awful hum by eavesdropping on six or seven different conversations. Direcrown was talking to a lilac-clad magister – or arch-magister, given the way the stranger was standing, as if speaking with an equal. Shallowlie was off to one side with Rosedawn, their heads close together, murmuring… The thirty-ish enchantress was clad in her robe of night-blues and soft pinks. Rosedawn’s mask covered only the upper part of her face, two hills shaped in the silvery material shadowing her eyes, a coppery sun rising between them to hide her forehead.
How long were we going to have to wait?
It wasn’t just the portal’s headache-inducing buzz. It was the anticipation. The nervousness. Everything from the Bone Ring and Lord Obscure to the Cannibal Six, from the Firenight Square attack and the Incursion to the vampire-lord, it all started flitting through my mind, everything that had led me to this moment –
“Feychilde,” came Henthae’s sardonic salute from over my shoulder.
I turned. She’d stopped a few paces from me, another magister halting just behind her, folding his arms almost defensively.
“Department-head of Special Investigations, Mistress of the Pool of Reflections…”
It wasn’t like the title she hid behind was any less stupid-sounding than a champion’s. I managed to grunt out the words, but my teeth felt like they were trying to prise themselves loose and my vision was starting to blur.
She wore a slight smile on her lips – whether due to the faux-politeness of my response, or the pained way I made it, I couldn’t tell. Then, once she knew I’d seen it, the smile disappeared.
She looked my robe (newly cleaned) up and down.
“You’ve come a long way in a few weeks,” she said appraisingly, stepping away from the protective-looking magister hovering behind her. She’d dropped the sarcasm, replacing it with a voice that couldn’t have been more-obviously buttering me up if it had drowned me in lard.
“Has it only been a few weeks? It’s been too long! I really missed our chats.”
Her eyes narrowed only briefly. “I also. Have you considered –“
“Considered your offer? Joining up?” I let my excitement flow, spoke in a confidential manner. “Gosh, Keliko, I don’t know what’s going on at your place – see, I asked my people to speak with your people, and it all just got lost somewhere around ‘Cram it up your a-’”
She’d already started talking over me, patient and undeterred. “I see, I see. Might I introduce Zakimel –” she gestured, and the magister behind her nodded slowly to me “– who will be representing the Magisterium’s interests on this excursion?”
I regarded him, and realised I knew him. He’d swapped his red-and-silver robe for blue-and-gold, but he was the same gaunt, bald-headed man who’d appeared in my glyphstone more than once. His thick moustache of neatly-combed grey hairs bristled as he glared at me.
Zakimel. The arch-diviner Em had mentioned several times – I’d never put two and two together till now.
Yet another arch-diviner for the trip?
“Special Investigations gets all the arch-magisters, then?” I asked, perhaps a bit brazenly – if he wasn’t going to say hi to me, why should I be the one to extend the first gesture? I looked back at Henthae. “Is that what Em’s destined for, once you’re done putting her through night-shifts?”
“Why are you asking me?” she replied.
“Should I be asking him?” I nodded at Zakimel, who stood a little straighter, raising his chin.
“I mean to say that Emrelet’s future is her own,” the arch-enchantress protested in a stiff voice. “If she were to choose –“
“I already know how you guide her choices, thank you, and I –“
“And I know how you guide her,” she cut me off, smiling once more. “If you insist I must dismount, get off your own horse first, as they say.”
“I don’t set her examinations –“
“Such is my role,” Henthae said curtly. “It is my job to keep your lover safe.”
My eyes only widened slightly.
The question of Em’s safety – the perfect way to disarm me, divest me of my high horse and send me crashing on my back to the earth.
But surely there was no way she could know anything like that for certain, could she? Em could hardly be fated to die if she went on the mission with us. Not with the strongest arch-diviners in the world going to Zadhal – that would throw all the predictions off, that much was obvious…
The vagaries of predestination were starting to bother me.
“You mean – if she went to Zadhal – she would –“
“I’ll say no more.” Henthae sighed, half-turning aside. “If there’s nothing else, Zakimel, I leave him to you.”
“Wait – there is one thing,” I blurted. “Ciraya. You need to be working on her, not Em. Make her your pet project. She could really go somewhere in the Magisterium, if you gave her a chance.”
From the exaggerated way Zakimel’s face twisted in derision, I almost thought I could hear his moustache rustle, despite the crackling of the damned Door less than a stone’s throw away.
“Ciraya?” Henthae sounded surprised, looking back at me. “I have already done much for the girl. You saw what happened to Belexor, scion of a noble house of Mund, when he merely changed your shape. You know what she did, don’t you?”
I thought back, not for the first time, to that initial interview in the Maginox.
‘… but Fe was so hungry…’
Would Henthae really give me answers?
“She – she killed some people?”
Henthae dared laugh about it. “Oh, yes. You really should ask her. She was exonerated of all charges, of course, but… I’ll take your recommendation onboard, Feychilde, for what it’s worth. Farewell.”
She turned to leave.
Who was I kidding? It wasn’t like she was going to care what I thought about her magisters, was it? If anything, I might’ve just dropped Ciraya in it.
“All I know is, I bet she saved more lives,” I finished, folding my own arms across my chest; I flared my wings half-unconsciously.
“Of course,” Henthae called over her shoulder as she made her way out of the group of champions and magisters, “but you and I both know that means nothing.”
I glared at her back, thinking of her hypocrisy – Ciraya had been spared because those she’d killed were poor, negligible, I’d have bet, while Belexor’s victim had been a new champion, a potential asset…
“Farewell, Special Head,” I muttered under my breath.
I moved my eyes to Zakimel. The older man had heard, and he was gazing calmly at me, a thin smile on his lips. Not a smile of pleasure – one of challenge. He was happy to continue staring at me quietly. He knew I was a babbler. He had the advantage, as I grew more and more uncomfortable, more and more rattled by the Door, every second that ticked by.
Suddenly Shallowlie was next to me, corpse-mask in place, looking up at me through the eyeholes. I happily turned away from the silent arch-magister.
“Whad’do you fink of i’, Feychile?”
She spoke in grunts, tension beneath the thick accent that told me she was going through the exact same thing as me.
“Unbearable.” I smiled tightly at her. “You?”
She just nodded.
When I glanced at Zakimel, he’d turned aside to speak with one of his own number. Another arch-magister: a druid by the looks of things.
“How much longer, do you think?” I asked.
“Look,” the sorceress said, pointing.
I followed her finger –
Shadowcloud was on his way.
In a burst of telepathic sound, Timesnatcher’s voice started coming through:
“– do you mean, not there? I saw him!”
Shadowcloud replied: “Look, if Nighteye was there, he was hiding himself. Why didn’t he just say if he didn’t want to come? I can’t guarantee…”
Then Spiritwhisper, true to his name, whispered to me, “Thought I’d link you up before you missed this.”
“Thanks, Spirit.”
I quickly gathered that Nighteye’s absence wasn’t due to Leafcloak side-lining him again. Quite the opposite – she’d been impressed by his and Fangmoon’s efforts, in the end, and had recommended both of them for this particular quest… While I was a bit sceptical of her logic, right now the young arch-druid’s status as missing took precedence.
He’d helped me out numerous times, but the whole rat-to-man thing easily topped the list. I owed Nighteye – big-time. Hopefully he was just taking a much-needed leave of absence.
The psychic link was filled with offers of help, my own included, and after a few moments Timesnatcher cut through it all with a sharp bark of: “Silence!”
I actually preferred the din to the quiet that spread across my mental landscape – it had helped drown out the Door’s hum.
Our leaders gave a series of commands – on Timesnatcher’s say-so the magisters were linked up – Zakimel dispatched messages to his subordinates to ensure Nighteye wouldn’t stay missing for long – and Shadowcloud and Glimmermere passed by to imbue me with flight and warmth, energy and vigour.
“Arch-sorcerers to the fore. Let’s put you out of your misery first, eh? Once you’re through, set up wards as far out as you can, get some relief from this noise you can hear.” Timesnatcher waited for us to line up – me, Shallowlie, Direcrown… and the lilac-robed magister Direcrown had been speaking with, Valorin.
At least there’s someone here who’s newer to this stuff than me, I said to myself.
“He might be new to archmagery, but that doesn’t mean he’s forgotten his magister training,” Zel reminded me.
True enough.
Valorin was mid-twenties and dark of complexion, short-haired and short-limbed. He was a little overweight but he carried it well with wide shoulders and a broad chest. He had big ears and intense, deep-set eyes, and a confident, professional look on his handsome face.
Perhaps I couldn’t condemn him outright just for chatting to Direcrown. I hadn’t been able to catch much of what they were saying – there’d been so many interesting conversations going on at the time – so they might’ve just been exchanging platitudes.
“Wiping out the undead in Zadhal is our priority,” Timesnatcher was saying. “Breaking their seals. Freeing their souls. Today, we take back our sister-city. It’ll be harder than I’m making it sound, but we’ve got the greatest force of archmages ever put to the task. Our glyphstones won’t work over there, but we’ve got the information from our previous expeditions, which I’ve shared with our enchanters – we’ll have maps, pinpointing us as we move towards our goals. We can do this. Mund is your priority; we’re not asking you to forget that. If you feel you must withdraw, then you must. But if you have the courage of your convictions, now is the day to show it. Stick together. We will be victorious. We will find the way.”
His mind-voice was firm, steady – too steady. I didn’t have to be an enchanter to be able to tell he was nervous too.
“No shields, Feychilde, Valorin,” Timesnatcher said.
How did he know we were the ones with them still active? Had he seen a future where we blew ourselves up, or was he wearing a gift of force-sight?
We both dropped our barriers in unison, and the arch-diviner went on: “Erect them again the moment you’re through, but don’t let them intersect the Door.”
That made sense, at least. I’d only need to be a few feet into Zadhal to bring up my circle, and if we wove our weave carefully right around the portal we’d be fine…
Netherhame had mentioned the likelihood of undead in the immediate vicinity. We had to be ready for anything.
“I will remind you all not to step through a portal in Zadhal or its surrounds. The sorcerous seal upon the place is ancient, necrotising the flesh born of Materium in under one tenth-second of exposure. Do not test its grip until we succeed and I give the all-clear. You will die – and worse. I very much don’t want to fight any archlich sorcerers, if it can be avoided.”
I looked to my left – the black-gowned Minnerveve, her corpse mask making her look serene as she gazed forwards. I looked to my right – the tall, rust-robed Direcrown with his jagged, silver-gold diadem and demonic steel face. And at the end, the lilac-robed Valorin, the only one of us freely baring his identity to the world, looking no less prepared for this than the champions.
Perhaps I am still the newbie here, I admitted to myself, and then turned, like them, to face the portal before which we’d gathered.
A magnificent wall of blue noise, crackling water, flowing fire.
Timesnatcher was now giving orders to the enchanters, preparing them to relink us as quickly as possible once they followed on our heels. We would retain our invisibility throughout, apparently – not that I could tell it was even there, given its enemies-only status.
And not that it was likely to do much against undead, with all their predatory senses.
I might’ve been the least-prepared, most inexperienced, but I couldn’t wait any longer. I felt an irresistible urge to get as far from this excruciating Door as possible, even if that meant crossing through it – and I was brimming-over with excitement and panic and this gods-damned humming…
I soared into the rippling blue ward-lines, ready to submerge myself in that pain the Door offered, submerge myself in it and pass through it into tranquillity – I moved forwards, and sensed the others like me rushing to follow in my wake.
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