Netheril - Dangerous Games Part 2

"Bones!" Candlemas swore. "What kind of fool does she take me for? The only bones she ever touches are dice! And while she's gambling and demanding my help, whole villages will wither and die! Where will she get money then, eh? Where?"

But Candlemas was ranting to himself while a wide-eyed page stared. "Get busy, boy." The boy scooted away. Candlemas chided himself, "And me too."

Sunbright didn't go far. There was something he had to do, and he'd been dreading it, putting it off.

Now was the time to face it.

He stood in a stone-lined hallway cut by windows down one side. As with Candlemas's airy tower, nothing showed outside but the purple slopes of the Barren Mountains. Tightening his gut, Sunbright stepped to the window, braced both hands against the window frame, and leaned out to look.

The side of the castle dropped sheer for many stories, a dozen at least, all pierced by square or round windows. Far down showed the footings of solid granite. Below that...

The earth and dark forest far, far below.

Sunbright groaned involuntarily. His palms on the window frame were slick with sweat, trembling.

He wanted to back away, but forced himself to stand firm. He'd known all along where he was, of course. He'd seen Castle Delia float over the southlands (for a tundra dweller, everything below the Barren Mountains was south), had known it was Candlemas's home. So when the arcanist offered to bring him "to his workshop," the truth had eventually dawned on him. Now he was here, and he'd have to adjust- It was no good. His legs shook so violently his kneecaps drummed the stone wall. Stand here too long, and he'd pitch out the window like dice rattling out of a cup. Slowly, shuffling his broad boots, he crept away from the gaping s.p.a.ce.

"Is something amiss, milord?"

Already spooked, Sunbright jumped at the girl's soft question. Backing against the inner wall, he willed his heart to stop pounding. Sweat trickled down his cheeks, dripped salt onto his lips. He must look a fool, he thought, the greenest of country b.u.mpkins. Humility was not helping his pride this day.

Earlier he'd had to have a water closet explained. He'd rather face a pack of starving wolves than live through that embarra.s.sment again.

He didn't belong in this place. Room lights, water closets, running water, even drains that magically whisked away garbage were alien to him, as was the inhabitants' casual use of magic. Even the sweepers could nudge a dustpan along without touching it. Sunbright was here to learn magic from Candlemas, and he knew less than the slop boy who could spark a fire with a flick of his finger.

Surrounded by magic-users, Sunbright felt like a trained racc.o.o.n at a market fair: it might wear clothes and do tricks, but it wasn't human.

The girl sensed the reason for his unease. Moving gracefully to the window, she peeked out, murmured softly, "It is high. Being in the clouds takes getting used to. I couldn't even walk past a window for the first month I lived here." For something to say, Sunbright croaked, "How long .. . ?"

"Have I been here? A year and some months. I work for my dowry. My family had all girls and little money." She smiled, not to mock, but to comfort. Like many maids, she was small, pixieish, with short-cropped hair and natural curls now emphasized by dampness. She was one of the bathmaidens, and still wore a bulky black robe.

"Where . .. ?"

"... is my village? It's very small, at the headwaters of the Ger, but in sight of Patrician Peak.

Frosttop, we call it, not that it needs a name. Not many come our way."

Sunbright nodded. His breathing had slowed, and he mopped his brow with his sleeve. He hated being up in the clouds. His land was the tundra, table-flat, where a musk ox looked like a mouse standing on the horizon.

He'd been up high only once, and that accidently, on the back of a dragon, and he still screamed in his sleep when he recalled that trip.

Patiently, the girl waited while he gained his composure. "You know, my lord-"

"I'm no man's lord. Or woman's. Call me Sunbright. Please."

She bit her lip. "Very well, uh, Sunbright. You know, it's not often we have a visitor so tall and strong, so handsome and das.h.i.+ng. You make a girl wonder what the future might bring." As if scratching idly, she tugged open the fluffy black robe, revealing the soft upper curve of a modest breast.

Dully, the barbarian nodded. Without knowing why, he reached for her, and she leaned to meet him. But his hand didn't stray to her throat or breast. Rather, the knotty scarred brown hand stroked her hair along one side. She smiled shyly, confused by a gentle touch from such a fearsome man.

As if speaking in a foreign tongue, Sunbright said, "One day a fine and simple man with violet eyes will ask a drink of water, then marry you, get you with strong children, a round half-dozen. But you'd best get about it soon. It's unnatural to live here on high, suspended on naught but magic. T'will come a time when thunder tolls and these castles fall."

Surprise flickered in the girl's brown eyes, then fright. Sunbright felt her fear, and sensed it within himself. How had he made such a p.r.o.nouncement? He'd spoken like a seer, a prophet.

A shaman.

Dazed by his own behavior, his hand dropped from the girl's hair. She bit her lip, excused herself, and bustled away, robe pulled tight around her neck.

Sunbright shook his head, laid a hand on the inner wall for support. The rough stone tingled under his fingers, as if he felt stone for the first time in his life. The floor too seemed full of imperfections: dips and whorls, and huge cracks where before it had been smooth.

Why was he seeing things so clearly, so brightly? Had someone cast a spell on him? Or had he cast one upon himself?

What power? What knowledge?

Why here?

Why now?

Chapter 3.

Even Sunbright's nights were disturbed, for he dreamt of Greenwillow.

Three nights now he'd dreamt of her, visions of love, memories of battle, miles of travel they'd made together.

But tonight was different.

A dark forest was rife with roots and rocks, a foot-tripping tangle impossible to see. Black boles surrounded him. But ahead, as if between prison bars, flitted his elven lover. Greenwillow of the Cormanthyr was tall and slim but with a woman's curves, her face pale as milk, her eyes and ears slanted and exotic, her hair flowing down her back in black billows. This night she wore a sheer gown of white silk, embroidered all over with elaborate runes and vines, and that was strange, for Sunbright had never seen her in anything but emerald green and black leather armor. She tripped among the dark trunks like an errant bird, and he stumbled to catch her. Occasionally she cast a glance over her shoulder, but always tripped onward, eager to lead him. To show him something? What could it be?

Hard pressed to keep her in sight, Sunbright thrashed through the woods. In the pitchy night, he banged his shoulder against rough bark, stubbed his toes on roots, conked his forehead and scratched his face on branches. But Greenwillow sailed on, light as a breeze. They ran for dream-miles.

Sunbright gasped for her to slow down, heard only his own panting. "Greenwillow! Wait! Wait for me...."

The blackness began to change, to wane. A bright light like a single torch speared the night. It came from high overhead, gathering strength, banis.h.i.+ng the blackness. Sunbright squinted, picked out Greenwillow only as a dark, slim silhouette against white light. Then it was too painful to look, so he plowed on blindly.

He grunted as he fetched up hard against an up-thrust chunk of granite, skinning his knees. He slapped at the barrier to find a way around, found it rose only higher on each side. Cursing, shading his eyes against the fiery glare, he swung a knee on the stone to climb over. But the top surface felt strange: cold and very smooth. Too smooth to be natural. A quarried rock here in the forest? The wall of a ruin?

Backing, he felt the wall. Square everywhere. How... ?

"Sunbright, wake up!"

Greenwillow's voice, the first time in a long tune he'd heard it, clear and sweet as a lark's warble.

He opened his eyes, and his blood ran chill.

The dreamer stood in the stone hallway of Castle Delia. The barrier he'd struck was the windowsill.

Sleepwalking, he'd tried to mount it, climb over. With a gasp, he looked down. He'd have fallen a mile or more to the forest floor.

Gagging, Sunbright stumbled back from the open window. He clawed sweat from his face and eyes. But he still had to squint, for the fiery glare out the window was no dream.

High in the sky, slicing the night in an arc, was a shooting star. Even as he watched, it completed its journey from the heavens to the earth. The glare illuminated distant tall trees like twigs in a campfire-for just a second, then the light was snuffed out. Sunbright thought he felt the earth under his boots shake, but that was his imagination. He wasn't on the earth, but floating a mile above it. On trembling legs, he staggered back to his plain chambers and tousled bed. He closed the bedchamber door and bolted it, then wedged a heavy chair under the latch.

He collapsed on the sodden bed, tried in vain to recall Greenwillow's face and sweet voice.

"What do you mean, you want to go down to the forest? There's nothing down there but-but trees!"

"I want to see a tree." Sunbright sounded petulant. His head ached and he was dizzy. He wasn't sleeping well, and never would until he stood on firm ground.

"Walk in the gardens! We have nine of them! What about our agreement, our working together? Do you know how many artifacts I have to interpret?"

"No." The barbarian's tone suggested he didn't care, either.

"I'll show you!" Candlemas ignored Sunbright's reticence as he marched across the big workshop.

Sunbright followed. Slowly he was learning his way around Castle Delia, or Candlemas's small corner of it. The mage's realm was mostly this tower on one corner of the floating mountain that supported Delia. The tower was a dozen stories high, big enough inside for a chariot race on any floor.

Candlemas's workshop occupied the topmost floor, a room bigger than Sunbright's village. Tables and screens and part.i.tion walls split the chamber into smaller areas, but always the high windows loomed in all four walls. The floors below, Sunbright had seen, contained more rooms and workshops where some thirty lesser mages worked at dirty, complicated, and arcane tasks per Candlemas's orders. The pudgy mage was an Inventive, he'd explained, one of the empire's leading experts at creating and destroying artifacts, and so a favored employee of Lady Polaris. Secondly Candlemas was a Variator, but the barbarian hadn't grasped that word's meaning. There were more flavors of magic in this society than colors to the forest, and everyone from the mightiest archwizard to the dumbest stable hand practiced magic. Everyone except Sunbright.

And this single tower was only a tiny fraction of the castle, for Candlemas's other realm of responsibility was steward, overseer of the holdings of Lady Polaris. Below and far out of sight were farms and orchards, plantations and ponds, mills and mines that belonged to this one woman who, it was carefully explained by the maid who'd fetched his breakfast, was one of the supreme archwizards of the empire, but not the uppermost: merely the tenth or twelfth. Archwizards spent most of the time scrambling to one-up their rivals, to step upon their enemies while climbing the ladder.

Like salmon hurrying to mount a cataract and spill into a fisher's trap, Sunbright thought.

Castle Delia was almost a square league in area, and the mansions, outbuildings, and battlements on it ran for acre upon acre, stacked six and seven stories high in places. Two hundred and sixty rooms made up the main house, a maid had breathed. Or so it was rumored: no one knew for sure. Over two thousand servants kept it tidy under the all-seeing eye of Umeko, Acting Chamberlain (the former chamberlain, Sysquemalyn, had vanished) for those few occasions when Lady Polaris actually visited.

For it stunned Sunbright to learn that this vast castle was only one of seven such keeps owned and maintained by Lady Polaris, in addition to her mansions in many of the larger floating cities, including one in the capital city of Ioulaum. To the tundra-dwelling barbarian, who owned a sword and a blanket, the idea of so much wealth-and the power it brought-was incomprehensible.

And his difficulties with the city-mansion were immediate and irritating. For one thing, in the few days he'd been here, healing, resting, and arguing with Candlemas, he'd consistently gotten lost. Many rooms and hallways had no outside windows, being lit by magically illuminated globes. In such conditions Sunbright had no way to tell north from south, east from west. He felt like an addled child every time he fetched up in some dead-end hallway or dusty cellar, which was often enough. A maid had offered to a.s.sign him a boy as a guide, but the barbarian's pride had bristled at the idea.

Eventually, he decided to stick to outside hallways to keep his sense of direction, even though the yawning windows with their precipitous drops made his stomach ache and his bowels pinch.

And now he'd told Candlemas he wanted to be on the ground a while, and had sounded whiny. If it weren't for needing to find Greenwillow, he'd climb the Barren Mountains and take up shepherding.

"Here!" The wizard led him around a trio of ornate gold-leafed screens that depicted heroic battles and quests from the distant past. Behind the screen were odd statues and rolled rugs, gla.s.s chandeliers hanging from temporary wooden frames and a dozen or more mismatched chests, both plain and fancy. Planting his sandaled feet before one, Candlemas uttered a cantra to spring the lock and flung back the lid. Sunbright peered. Inside were gadgets and gewgaws, velvet pouches, long wooden boxes, bundles wrapped in cloth and tied with ribbon. Candlemas plucked one up at random. To Sunbright it looked like something cut from a reindeer's guts, bulbous and tubular, but crafted of silver, now tarnished black in the crevices. "Do you know what this is?"

The barbarian shook his head.

"Neither do I," snapped the mage in disgust. "But it's magic. I have three apprentices who do nothing but detect for magic. Everything in these chests is enchanted, and I don't know what any of them do!"

Sunbright watched as Candlemas opened another chest, then another. Most were full. "Where did you get these things?"

"They're found in odd rooms in the castle, bought in markets, won by Lady Polaris in gambling dens, and from her neverending wagers. She wins a pot of gadgets and sends them to me, and I'm supposed to interpret them!"

Sunbright was mildly interested. "And do you?"

"Sometimes." The mage slammed the lid. "I work on whatever problem or question she hurls at me today, then drop it for tomorrow's emergency. Most I can fob off to underlings, but sometimes I must work nonstop to glean the workings of some piece of arcane junk. I once spent three weeks a.n.a.lyzing a jeweled poker-sort-of-thing. Polaris-excuse me-Lady Polaris insisted it would harden quicksilver to silver. Do you know what it did? It curled one's hair! It came off some fop's vanity table!"

"Why would someone want to curl their hair?" asked Sunbright.

Candlemas rolled his eyes. "Never mind. That's not the point." He swept his arms to encompa.s.s the jammed chests. "I had hoped you, with your promise of shamanism, could help me solve some problems. The wheat rust, for one. Blight, actually. One a.s.sistant thinks it's attacking rye now. Shamen are supposed to understand growing things. I had hoped that, among other experiments, you could a.s.sist me in sorting these gadgets, perhaps find one that cures plant disease. There are enchanted tools here that resemble farm implements. Maybe one deters crop rot. A magic sifter, or wand of rowan wood, or a stone that, buried in the field, sucks up evil influences. ..."

Idly, Sunbright touched the top of an iron-strapped chest. The glyph protecting it shocked his hand.

Sucking a scorched fingertip, Sunbright opined, "I couldn't even break one of these locks, let alone puzzle out your-gaj-dits. Blight is part of the natural order of things, you know. Plants grow strong, are attacked by disease, but fight it off and grow stronger. Or they die and are replaced. All things scribe the circle eventually, come from earth and return to it. Us too."

Candlemas rubbed his head, work-roughened, chemical-stained hands rasping on his bare scalp. "I don't need a lesson in barbarian philosophy. Yes, things pa.s.s away. And I'll pa.s.s away, and so will thousands of peasants, if we don't cure this blight! Don't you understand? If we can employ magic properly, we can undo all these ills and make the world a better place! The point is not to give in to despair, but to best it! Magic can solve everything given enough time and effort! There's no limit to its power!"

"Everything has limits," said Sunbright evenly. He fingered the nose of a statue, a bronze beauty holding a two-headed snake across her bare shoulders. "A touch to this statue wears it away, in a small way. This castle will be dust some day. Trying to stop the decline of things, or to hasten natural ways-hardening quicksilver to silver-never works for long, and usually backfires. If you would cure your blights, burn the crops. That's a natural cure and ends the problem. Let people move elsewhere and eat differently until new, clean crops appear. The land and people will be stronger for it. But to hope that a random tool from a heap of junk will solve your problem is silly. To cure an ill, you need only visit the source. Sit upon the earth, in the field, fast, clear your mind, learn how the grain eats of the earth, and why the disease works its evil."

"There isn't time." Candlemas stared out a distant window.

Sunbright continued, "And another thing. Where's your end of the bargain? You agreed to help me track Greenwillow's soul. How fare those efforts?"

The elder mage only waved his arms. "Again, there might be something in these boxes. Mirrors are the best thing I know for seeing to other worlds and planes. Telescopes sometimes, or kaleidoscopes.

Gla.s.s eggs, too. There are probably six of each in these trunks, and more downstairs. And enchanted doors: there are five in the cellar, stacked against the wall. Feel free to fit them to frames and chant over them. By the time you're as old as me... ." The barbarian peered at the trunks, frowning. "I'd give the same answer. A mirror might show some other world, but only that part desired by whoever enchanted it. So too a gla.s.s egg or door. To find Greenwillow, we'd need some part of her: a lock of hair, or a ring she wore for a long time. Shamans can learn the animal by reading a bone, or commune with the dead while sleeping on a skull. But we have no piece of Greenwillow. Only dreams."

That thought conjured the night's vision, a dark forest, Greenwillow's ghost leading him on to- what?

He interrupted himself. "I need to go to the forest."

"Fine, fine. Ask the birds if hollow wheat kernels are bitter, or if groundhogs can gnaw bare cobs."

Candlemas waved a weary hand. "I'll fetch you at sundown."

He forked his fingers to invoke a s.h.i.+ft spell, but Sunbright stopped him. "Let me retrieve my tackle."

"Why? I said I'd fetch you within hours."

The barbarian didn't answer, only turned for his chambers. Candlemas swore softly and slammed the lid of a trunk.

How proceeds the fire?

The fire amongst the humans? They seek heat, and we heap on coals.

Far below the earth, in chambers that had never seen sun, whirled a score of creatures like tops with diamond tails. Cruel gashes with rock-hard edges were their mouths, for they could eat anything found underground: roots, rocks, moles, hibernating bears, tombstones, and bones. But mostly they fed on magic, for enchantment ran through their very fiber. They were the Phaerimm, unknown to men, seldom seen, and even then invariably mistaken for dust devils. Usually they destroyed the observer, champed his bones and muscles to bits, leaving only sc.r.a.ps and stains in the wilderness.

I like it not. Piling magic on magic puts them at risk of burning out, but it endangers us as much.