A Mage Of None Magic (Book 1) (12 page)

Those immediately about dropped away from their own conversations. No-Eye and Baldy snickered their approval.

Niel flicked his eyes to where he knew Arwin and the others sat. Through the thickening wall of patrons, he couldn’t see the table. He sighed again. “Look, I didn’t mean—”

Toothless clutched Niel by the throat with rough, dirty fingers. “No,
you
look—”

A slim hand appeared from behind Toothless and tapped his shoulder. He and his friends turned to reveal Peck, arms clasped behind his back, smiling congenially as he rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet.

“Problem, gentlemen?”

“Get lost,” No-Eye growled. “This is between us and Sweetness, here.”

“Well, I can certainly understand why you’d find Sweetness irritating,” Peck replied, “but the truth is I really need him in one piece when the morning comes. Sorry.”

“Sorry fer you,” Baldy slurred, “’cause we gonna mess him up real bad.”

Peck frowned. “I see.” Then his face brightened. “Tell you what—what if we settle this in a way that’s mutually beneficial?”

The three exchanged confused looks.

“In a way that’s good for all of us,” Peck said.

“And how’s that?” Toothless asked, suspicious.

Peck tilted his head toward the left. “There’s a knife board over there on the wall. How about we throw for it? If we lose, then you can take Sweetness and stomp him into goo—”

Niel tried to shake his head, but Toothless’s hand around his throat held him fast.

“—and if you lose, we’ll buy your next round of drinks. Either way, you come out ahead. How’s that sound?”

No-Eye, Toothless, and Baldy clearly distrusted Peck, but the lure of free drinks just as clearly proved a temptation.

“If we win,” No-Eye said, “we stomp him
and
you buy.”

Peck shrugged. “Fair enough.”

“All right,” Toothless said, “we’ll throw for it. But he throws, not you.”

He yanked Niel down from his stool, finally letting go of his neck. Blood rushed back to his head, making him dizzy.

Peck began clearing a narrow path between the bar and the knife board when Niel noticed Cally and Arwin in the crowd nearby but keeping their distance. Niel started toward them, but Arwin held up a finger and gave a subtle shake of his head.

Peck marched back up the aisle made by the crowd, and with a flick of his hand produced three small throwing knives. “Here you go.”

“Peck!”
Niel whispered. “What are you doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t throw these things! I’m more liable to hit someone in the crowd than I am the wall.”

Peck put a finger to his mouth and thought for a moment.

“No,” he said. “I’d recommend against that.”

Toothless pushed Niel aside. “I’ll go first.”

He reached for the bar, took a large swig from a mug that wasn’t his, then in rapid succession hurled his three knives into a tight grouping near the center of the painted cross section of tree stump.

An approving round of shouts and whistles erupted as Toothless held up his arms in triumph.

“Pretty,” Peck said, clapping as well. “Very pretty indeed.”

No-Eye shoved Niel hard from behind. “Now you, Sweetness.”

Niel looked pleadingly at Peck, who smiled.

“Remember what I taught you,” he said as he crouched down, hands on knees. “Just take your time and concentrate.”

Niel had no idea what he was talking about. Figuring he’d better do
something,
he held the first of the three knives by its tip and brought it up just beneath his eye in a shaky aim.

“On the count of three,” Peck said. “Ready?”

He wasn’t. But he nodded.

“All right, then. One…”

Niel concentrated on the board with all his might.

“Two…”

Niel raised the dagger high, readied for the throw…

And Peck whirled around in a blur, punching Toothless square in the face.

Stunned, Niel watched as Toothless reeled backward into the crowd, where a couple of women avoided a collision by shoving him into two other patrons. Those two men, taking exception to Toothless being thrown at them, flung his limp form aside and launched themselves at the women.

In the space of a heartbeat, The Funny Gus exploded into a frenzy of fists, broken glass, and animalistic howls of delight.

No-Eye turned to help his remaining companion as Peck delivered a merciless whip-kick to the side of Baldy’s head. Cally then felled No-Eye with a blow to his face with her tankard followed by a nasty upper-cut.

Niel stood isolated in the eye of the storm that had burst around him, not believing he was suddenly in the middle of a
bar fight
. Jharal finally loomed into view in the background, bellowing in horrible glee as he leapt upon a clump of customers who could do nothing but hold their arms up in front of them and cry out in terror.

A hand reached up and pulled Niel to the floor.

“So, what do you think of Trelheim so far?” Arwin asked on his hands and knees.

Niel shouted over the scuffling mob. “I think you and everyone else in this town are insane!”

Arwin shrugged and turned to lead the way.

Niel hung his head in exasperation then crawled after him.

The lone figure who’d watched them the entire time from his dark corner made his way outside as well, then disappeared into the night.

14

Denuis had donned his nightclothes by the time Ennalen arrived at his chambers. She found him in his study, in one of two oversized lounging chairs facing the fireplace. He poked absently at the fire with a long dowel, looking cheerless in the orange glow. On the stone floor, at the chair’s leg, sat a half-empty glass alongside a near-empty bottle.

Ennalen spoke from the doorway. “Making an early night of it, I see.”

The Lord Magistrate nodded without looking up. “Been tired as of late. Come in.”

She glanced about the room, then seated herself in the chair beside his. She folded her robes over her legs and placed her hands in her lap. “If you’re unwell, I could summon your physician.”

Denuis cocked an eyebrow and cast a sideways glance. “How do you expect to become the next Lord Magistrate when you fret so over the current one?”

“You assume I’m interested in being your successor.”

Denuis sighed. “Of course.”

Ennalen heard the familiar twinge of impatience in his tone, which meant it was time for her to come to the point of her visit.

“The truth is,” she said, “I’ve noticed as of late a general… reservation, let’s say, on your part. Is there anything we need to discuss?”

Denuis gave the fire a final, indifferent jab then rested the near end of the thin staff on his shoulder. “I’ve been giving a great deal of thought to the implications of the Lord Elder’s interest in the Apostate.”

“What do you mean by implications?”

“I take it you’ve not read the Lord Elder’s notes.”

On impulse, Ennalen lied. “Not yet.”

Denuis’s glare held more than a hint of disapproval. “In that case, I’ll put it this way: Has it ever occurred to you that if the Apostate is real, then so too might be the Heart of the Sisters? The
actual
Heart?”

Despite herself, Ennalen leaned away.

Clearly the stone hidden in her workshop, in and of itself, was an artifact of monumental importance. Quite likely it and others like it had long ago inspired the lore surrounding the Dragon Sisters. But did she think the black gem she possessed came from the heart of an ancient deity?

Absolutely not. One storybook character mucking things up for her was plenty. No need to go prodding about for more.

“I had no idea you were the religious sort,” she answered, hoping she sounded more entertained than uncomfortable.

Denuis’s chuckle was bleak. “That’s as good a way to put it as any, I suppose. And in keeping with your choice of words, your Lord Magistrate is having what I suppose could be considered a crisis of faith.”

Ennalen stared into the fire.

Through the sharp heat pressing like broken glass against her face she concentrated on quieting the emotions goading her toward outburst. Ironically, nearly the very same discussion had played out inside her own head when she realized where the clues she discovered in the Main Library might very well be leading. But her belief in what she had been taught, and in herself, had put that uncertainty to rest.

“Denuis,” she asked, hearing irritation in her voice despite her intention otherwise, “are you actually entertaining the notion that the gods might really be out there, waiting for humankind to find them again?”

“As a Magistrate, you better than anyone should know not to dismiss the ludicrous without careful consideration—”

“—because, all things being equal, even the ludicrous can be true,” she finished. “I did read one or two of the books you put in front of me, you know.”

“It’s a thought, is all.”

“It’s foolishness,” she scolded. “The gods were concocted by people living in caves so they could stop pissing themselves every time it thundered. Thaucian is a very old man, and his choice of the Apostate as his hobby of the moment hardly justifies throwing reason out the window.”

“I think, though, I’ve become weary of reason, Ennalen. Sometimes I can’t escape the notion that we here have become detached from something important, something larger than all of this.”

“Larger and more important than what?” she chided. “Than the College?”

“No,” Denuis sighed. “Larger than this facade we purport to be the College.”

Ennalen pushed herself up in disgust. The chair legs squawked across the floor.

“I’m not going to listen to this, Denuis. I realize you’re drunk or very close to it, but you’re also very close to heterodoxy, and I have an obligation to my office. As do you.”

With that, she turned to leave.

“Yes, you’re right. We mustn’t ever forget our sworn duties.” He returned his attention to the fireplace. “Speaking of which, my congratulations regarding Brother Sala. No doubt a well-deserved conviction.”

On hearing Sala’s name Ennalen’s balance faltered.

A loose stone beneath the rug, she told herself, but didn’t bother looking back to see.

“Goodnight, Lord Magistrate,” she said.

15

Never, ever ask that again!

Niel, being only five, couldn’t understand what had made Biddleby so angry—or was he frightened? All he had wanted to know was why his teacher glowed so much differently than any of the other magicians he’d seen, and the question sent Biddleby into an inhuman fury.

Never, ever ask that again, boy!
the old man shrieked as he shook Niel hard by the shoulders.
Never, ever…

***

Niel woke, unable to remember making his way to bed.

He’d had the dream so often and for so long he couldn’t be certain which parts came from things he remembered, and which parts stemmed from his own imagination. There’d been something increasingly unusual about the dream in recent days, though. The image of his teacher’s face deformed with rage, the fear and shame at disappointing him—all had grown more vivid, more unnerving.

Niel had long possessed the ability to recognize the magical shine of a person or object without need for incantation. He’d also long heeded the dream and had neither scrutinized nor divulged the peculiar talent. Some things were best left at face value, if not just left alone entirely.

On the other side of the balcony door windows, darkness abated into a palette of dreamy, ambient blues. Niel stretched slowly, minding the tightening ache in his back. The blanket in which he’d wrapped himself hadn’t been as much cushion as he’d hoped. Or perhaps Jharal had clubbed him at some point during the night.

He smiled, despite the pain prowling with sharp claws from the middle of his back into his shoulders. He sat up carefully, surprised to find himself wanting his straw mattress at home.

Home.

Niel sighed and cleared the thought from his head.

The others, it seemed, had long been up and about. Their belongings formed a small pile near the table—sacks, pouches and a couple of rope-handled wooden boxes. Either he had slept deeply, or they’d gathered their things quietly to let him rest. Niel couldn’t imagine Jharal tip-toeing about the apartment to keep from waking him up, so he figured he’d slept through it all.

He wondered why they hadn’t woken him to help pack.

The morning air smelled heavy and pleasant with the rain that came overnight. Niel yawned, rubbed where his head had been pillowed by nothing but the floor, then groaned with a dreary realization: The streets in Trelheim were nothing but well-packed dirt. A night of rain would have turned everything to mud.

He stood and stretched again, working his shoulders.

“Good morning!” came Arwin’s disgustingly, obscenely cheerful voice.

Niel glared over his shoulder. The soreness leaped from his shoulders into his neck, graduating from a dull ache to an honest-to-goodness strain.

Arwin clapped Niel’s arm. “Don’t you look fresh as a spring flower.”

Niel squinted.

“Not a morning person, I see,” Arwin said.

“Barely a person at all right now,” Niel croaked. “Where are the others?”

Arwin stooped and picked up two of the canvas packs from atop the pile, shouldering the one with a strap and hoisting the other onto his head, the way Niel had seen servants carry large bundles of laundry. “Jharal and Cally have the wagon out front along with the horses.”

“Wagon?” Niel asked through another yawn.

Arwin raised his eyes toward the bag balanced on his head. “As fun as this looks, it doesn’t work very well on horseback.”

Niel nodded. It made sense to have a wagon to move equipment from place to place—that, or haul along pack animals that had to be fed and tended.

He rubbed his neck. “Any coffee around?”

Arwin headed for the door. “Downstairs. And some fruit and bread, but be quick if you don’t mind. I convinced the others to let you sleep in, but we’ve got a long day ahead. We do need to leave soon.”

Niel stopped massaging his collar and watched his companion duck to clear the door frame. “Arwin?”

Arwin teetered around to face him. “Yes?”

“You’ll understand if I say ‘thank you but don’t do that again,’ right?”

Arwin gave an approving grin. “That was exactly what I’d hoped you’d say.”

***

A quick face scrub with icy water from the clay basin washed Niel’s grogginess away. The intriguing hint of tea rose oil on the rough cloth helped, as well.

He shook his head. Cally didn’t seem the type to bother.

Heading down the stairs, Niel couldn’t help admiring the elegant craftsmanship of the railing one last time. He hadn’t noticed the auburn-tinted, mottled-glass window above the stairway the night before, and he enjoyed how the early light streaming in accented the warm, red highlights of the wood.

The dark, charred aroma of coffee filled the Inn’s main parlor. Niel looked around, amazed at how different the room seemed when empty of thugs and the like, and not so amazed to see the same strange little man behind the bar as the night before.

With a shrug he supposed he’d best get used to that sort of thing, given his new profession. Or more to the point, lack of one.

He approached the bar and smiled, though the bartender’s eyes never left the scratched and pitted wood.

“Coffee?” Niel said.

The man produced from somewhere below a stout, steaming clay mug and set it gently in front of Niel.

“How much?” Niel asked.

The bartender held up his hand and shook his head. Niel hoped it meant Arwin had already taken care of it.

He hefted the mug. Vanilla and a trace of brandy wafted up; most Southerners took their coffee that way. After a tentative touch of the coffee’s dark surface to his lips, he closed his eyes and sipped at the beautiful blackness, dabbling in the notion that things might not be as bad as he’d thought.

“Niel!”
barked a voice, startling him so badly he splashed what should have been a lovely, resuscitative swallow of coffee onto the bar.

He turned to see a trace of satisfaction on Jharal’s wide face.

“What?”
Niel growled through gritted teeth, then immediately wondered how many steps it would take for Jharal to reach him and yank his head from his shoulders.

Either Jharal didn’t notice Niel’s tone or didn’t care. “Get your ass out here now or I’ll be wearing it on the end of my boot.” He headed back outside.

“Hey, Jharal?”

Jharal stopped and scowled.

“Thanks for letting me sleep in this morning,” Niel said, offering the most contemptuous smile he could muster. “That was really, really sweet of you.”

Jharal remained for several moments, then turned and left.

Niel continued to smile as he looked down into his mug, then tilted it to his mouth and took a long drink. It did taste as wonderful as it smelled, for which he gave thanks.

Because given how the large, blue vein in the middle of Jharal’s forehead had begun throbbing before he left, Niel imagined his days of tasting things might soon be coming to an end.

***

The mud Niel imagined as a waist-deep river of glop turned out to be not much of a concern. The thickest of it had gathered in the center of the trough-cut roads, leaving the sides considerably easier to travel.

Above, the clouds were breaking, allowing the wet ground to warm itself. In an hour the grey would be gone completely and the day looked as though it might be a pretty one.

Jharal sat on the driver’s bench of a small flatbed wagon. Two dappled horses fidgeted side by side in a simple harness, mud caked up to their knees. Cally, going over the horses’ cinches, gave Niel a look somewhere between amusement and annoyance, then nodded good morning. In the rich yellow light of the early day, her face glowed.

He nodded in return, then let his eyes dart to Jharal, who hadn’t turned around.

Behind the wagon Arwin saddled a pair of horses, mirroring Cally in his attention to their tack. One of them was the beast that had nearly thrown Niel the day before. He rubbed his stiff neck again, then frowned at the thought of bouncing about the countryside on the monster’s back.

Niel turned from the wagon and glanced about. “Where’s Peck?”

Arwin grunted as he gave a final tug on the girth strap of Niel’s saddle. “He usually rides ahead. We won’t see him until tonight, most likely.” He patted the bay on the chest and tilted his head toward the animal. “Let’s go.”

With a sigh of resignation, Niel placed his foot in the stirrup and hauled himself up.

***

Trelheim, the southernmost Lyrrian settlement in Aithiq, receded behind them amidst sparse farms and rough grassland. After an hour of travel, all signs of humanity had yielded to the thickening forest. Even the road ceased being more than a wide, mossy trail cutting through a steady crescendo of green.

Niel rocked side to side on the back of his horse—which had behaved far better than expected—engrossed in the spell Arwin had asked that he learn before they arrived at the ruins: a spell for creating light.

Magic in its written form placed both the literal and abstract under a single yoke, like a blend of dictionary and painting—broad strokes set the stage for meticulous exactness, and minute details led the reader to vast landscapes of possible interpretation.

The Conjuring Light spell, a deceptively simple incantation that allowed luminescence from whatever small object the caster desired, provided a good example of that juxtaposition. The initial subject rune on the page indicated the element fire. While elemental runes contained tremendous power, in the case of this spell the predicate glyph immediately following the subject rune constituted a diminutive, leaving the call for fire both slightly and significantly altered. It worked, in effect, by using only a portion of the element’s overall properties—much like speaking the first syllable of a large word and still conveying a good sense of its meaning.

From what Niel could tell, the spell when cast properly permitted a magician to produce light without heat. He smiled at the composition’s elegance and ingenuity. Unlike the scrolled version of the spell he’d carried in his pack, the author here had gone so far as to arrange the symbols in a shape representing infinity, with the last character leading back into the initial rune. In theory, the caster could produce light lasting forever, assuming one would care to put in the years necessary to reach that level of aptitude.

Niel lowered the book and closed his eyes to quell a mild wave of nausea. As engrossing as he found learning a real spell, he would have happily exchanged a good portion of his exuberance for a cozy library and motionless desk.

***

Cally rode to Jharal’s left, near enough the wagon so the two could talk. Niel watched their conversation as each took turns smiling and nodding.

“They seem close,” Niel said to Arwin, who rode at his side.

“I wouldn’t pick a fight with one while the other was nearby, if that’s what you mean,” Arwin replied.

“No, I think there’s more to it than that.”

Arwin’s eyes cut back and forth, as though he’d just learned of a terrible conspiracy. He leaned toward Niel.
“You do?”
he said in an overdone whisper.

Niel ignored him. “How long have they known each other?”

“Years. Well before they ran into me.”

“Do you know how they met?”

Arwin gave a smirk. “Why not ask Jharal?”

“I’m not sure he’s in the proper frame of mind to entertain my questions. And rumor has it he may not like me.”

Arwin laughed. “You could have a point.” He tightened the reins on his horse to slow it and allow Jharal and Cally to pull ahead a little further. Niel followed suit.

“There,” Arwin said. “That’ll do.”

Niel grinned. “Must be some story.”

Arwin didn’t smile back. “I don’t divulge the affairs of others lightly, Apprentice. Everyone’s entitled to their privacy.”

“If you’re betraying a confidence—”

“No, that’s not it. But I’d rather not make anyone uncomfortable. I’m sure you’d expect the same consideration.”

Niel nodded. “I suppose I would.”

Arwin took the small waterskin hanging on the horn of his saddle and offered it to Niel. “Drink?”

“No, thanks.”

Arwin pulled the stopper from the neck, took a long gulp, then closed it and replaced the skin. “Jharal and Cally served together in the house guard at Dehlmoor.”

“That’s in eastern Lyrria?”

“The very one. The captain of the guard, I forget his name— Biloff, Bilom, something like that—had served there for three generations of lords. He was well-loved by the family and respected by his men.”

“Three generations? He must have been pretty old.”

“Old, yes, but no less capable from what I understand, which served the house well in its long-standing feud with one of its neighbors.”

“Which neighbor?” Niel asked.

“I don’t recall. Now, even though Cally had been at Dehlmoor for only a short while, her skills and professionalism caught the attention of Captain Bilom—pretty sure it was Bilom, now that I think about it—and she quickly rose through the ranks. First, leader of her squad, then of her barracks, leapfrogging others who’d been there longer. She eventually found herself third in command of the entire house guard.”