Magesong (7 page)

He cast the salt to the four directions, speaking as he
turned in place.

"
Iurna astyzaq
.  Begone foul spirits and vanish
airs of ill. 
Xedkaidfa msufak
.  Banish the nameless.  Deny the
unclean.  Come forth unseen flames. 
Milluvian Gan
!  Make pure with your
light this place where I stand."  And he threw the last of the handful of
salt down at his feet.

Now he sat on the floor before the guardian statues and
began the meditation that would open him to the presence of the Unknowable
Forces. 
There was no time; there was only eternity.  There was no space,
only infinity
.

His view of the statues became distorted, the world blurring
as if he saw a double image of the same object.  Then the two images moved one
into the other and his vision came into focus.  The dragon stood before him,
bright in its silver mail.  Its eyes, burning sapphires lined with heavy
platinum lids, shone with an alien light.  Reyin could smell the exotic scent
of its breath, feeling heat and power and danger.

The creature held out to him in its taloned claw a perfect
sphere of crystal, and trembling, the apex of power there threatening to tear
away his identity, Reyin took the orb.

The dragon no longer stood there, but he still saw it
reflected in the crystal ball.

"
The star beneath the sea
," the dragon
hissed in the Essian Tongue.

"That which has been lost," Reyin answered.

The dragon returned to take back the orb and the reflection
of itself, and Reyin suddenly found himself returned.  Blinking sweat from his
eyes, he sat still for a moment and let the heat of the dragon bleed away.

He went to close the ancient glass doors.  He looked at the
jutting rock and thought for a moment. What did they call the one in the
village, the touching stone?  He touched it and felt thick layers of
enchantment. The touching stone.  The stone on which something is touched?  The
stone which allows one energy to touch another?  He ran his hands across the
star-shaped indentation.  Then the history he had learned of the age of magic
came flooding forth and he blinked in disbelief.

The
Aevir
.  It had to be.  This was a place created
by Graifalmia to hide one of the
Aevir
.

He reached for the Essa, and it was there.  Closing his
eyes, speaking in the Essian Tongue, he said, "I summon now before me
presentments and visions of that which was here and now is lost."

Reyin stood in a waking dream and saw it, a shining wooden
chest of unusual shape, a shape that would fit the pattern of the four-point
star.  He floated above it, around it.  He looked at the other objects in the
room, a menagerie of valuable antiquities, then let himself float upward.  He
hung motionless above an enormous house with an overhanging roof of yellow clay
tiles.  It was but one part of a small estate, the kind that is found within,
or on the edge of a city.  He saw a stable and a yard, an ostler brushing a
horse, a wall and a gate, armed men wearing colored livery standing in a tower
above the gate, a man unloading fruit from a cart in the street outside.  Reyin
let himself float higher.  The street was part of a city.  Higher.  A great
city with a palace and a prison and a coliseum, and buildings of state
surrounding a diamond-shaped square, a city on the ocean, a port choked with
wharfs and warehouses, boats and skiffs and sloops and merchantmen and
warships, guarded by an island fortress in the harbor.  Float higher.  The
ruins of another city, much smaller, an ancient fallen city bordering the
living one.

Reyin snapped out of the trance, his face damp and cold.

He had never been to that city, but he knew it from drawings
and maps he had seen.  It was Mira-Delvin, one of the oldest cities in world,
in the Kingdom of Jakavia a thousand leagues to the south.

He closed the doors and walked away, stopping to turn and
bow to the inner shrine in the manner of the Pallenborne before passing through
the labyrinth of columns and into the open air.

Farlo sat in front of the stone hut, lazily tossing pebbles
off the side of the mountain.  Reyin went to sit next to him.  Farlo nodded a
greeting.

"You followed me," Reyin said.

"It seems that I did."

"Why didn't you come inside?" 

Farlo tossed another pebble.  "I wasn't invited.  Besides,
places such as that, they aren't for the likes of me.  Who would have thought
it was here, though?"

“Apparently someone did.”

“The one who took the spirit away according to Jonn.”

"Tell me," Reyin said, "what do you think of Jonn's
story about the sky boat?"

"I think you have a strong idea what that is."

"There's a man in Sevdin named Conarra, an inventor of
sorts, calls himself a scientist.  He has discovered that filling a huge cloth
sack with hot air enables it to rise to great height for a short time.  He
built a flying ship powered by these bags of heated air and went aloft himself
early one morning over Sevdin harbor.  No one talked about anything else for
weeks.  I was there.  I saw it."

"And you think he came here?" Farlo said, the
burned side of his face wrinkling.

"Maybe him.  Perhaps someone else.  I'm fairly sure
that it was a rich nobleman from Mira-Delvin."

"The city in Jakavia?  What makes you think that?“

"As Jonn implied, I have ways of knowing things.”

“Are you telling me you’re some kind of seer?”

“I suppose I am.”

Farlo scratched at the grey half of his beard.  “Look, I’ve
seen enough island juju men in my time to know the weird look, and if anyone
around here has got it, it would be our young Jonn.  I don’t think he’s
feeble-minded.  I think he does hear outside voices, so if he says you know
secret things then I believe it.  But all the sorcerers died in the Cycle of
Ice, and all their magic died with them.  Everyone knows that.  And besides,
you don‘t much act like a mystic.”

“No, I act like a troubadour because that is what I am.  That’s
sort of the point when you belong to a secret society.  And it’s not that magic
is dead — the lifeforce of magic itself was changed — it is more subtle and
indirect now.  Don’t mistake me, magic is still powerful, it simply passes
unseen by those who don’t know how to look.  In fact, there is no spell a true
magician can cast that cannot be explained away by the new science, by
so-called natural means.”

“And there’s a whole society of magicians?”

“I belong to one of several small circles.  Most of us live
to learn, and learn to teach so that the art is preserved through these lesser
times.  There is one circle I know of who practice magic only for personal
power.  The rest of us shun them.”

Farlo eyed him for a moment.  “What else do you know?”

I think someone came to this mountain top and took an
artifact that belongs to this ancient place.  I believe that the sanctuary is
old as the cycles, from back before the age of the enlightened princes, from
the age of eldest magic."

"An artifact.  Not a spirit?"

"A spirit box, if you will.  There is a story that a
teacher of mine held to be true, but I don't remember all the details." 
Artemes
told me so many things in such a short time
.

"In the time before the Cycle of Ice, a sorcerer named
Derndra summoned and bound together the six great elementals that inhabit this
world:  the
Aevir
, in the speech of power.  Essential spirits you could
call them.  In the most obscene act of the lost age, he enslaved and used them
to create the most powerful grammarie that has ever been known.  Derndra could
raise volcanoes from level plains, or control the minds of emperors from the
deep caves where he lived.

"Derndra’s power was broken by Graifalmia, the greatest
mage of the times.  It was said that his defeat drove him to madness, and that
he fled to the underworld to die by the hand of one of his own sorcerous
creations.  The secret of summoning the
Aevir
died with Derndra, and Graifalmia
didn't know how to return them to their natural state, so she hid them in the
places where they had been captured, hoping one day to learn the secret of
releasing them."

"And you think this is one of the hiding places, that
the spirit of this place is being held by this missing artifact?"

"Yes, I do.  And I think that returning it here is the
only way to put the land aright."

Farlo was deep in thought.  "A captured spirit."

"This is the place where the great elemental was
summoned from the earth, and the summoning tore away the life energy of this
valley.  But I think Graifalmia enchanted the stone where the device of
imprisonment sat, and the
Aevir,
in this place of power, was able to
touch, if not return, to its home."

Farlo nodded, plucking at the discolored place on his
beard.  "I see it clearly now.  And I see that the privilege has been
given to you."

"Privilege?"

"Yes.  That's something I've learned from Syliva these
past three years.  The folk of the Pallenborne believe that helping is not a
duty; they think of it as a privilege that most of us are not granted, maybe
because we're unworthy, maybe because we're unlucky.  I don't know."

Reyin sat silent.  "Privilege," he mumbled,
shaking his head.  "I'd call it the hand."

Suddenly the mountain winds seemed to cut him to the bone. 
He stood, pulling his coat closer against the chill, walked to the western
precipice, and looked down to where the escarpment ended in a sandy shingle
next to the ocean.  There was room enough to launch Conarra's airship.

"So you'll go and find the captured spirit?" Farlo
called to him.

"It seems that certain Powers have chosen me to do so. 
But I don't know why."

"So do you believe in yourself or no?  Tell me, is Jonn
right about you?  Do you see things?"

"I see things," Reyin said quietly, looking at his
feet.  "But only in places like this that have a weird power."

Farlo stood.  "Listen, I'm not asking you to do this
alone.  The two of us can go together.  Just think — a short sea voyage to the
south, and we'll accomplish the greatest thing that we will ever have the
chance to do."

"The voyage will take months, and it will be very
expensive.  You have a wife who is with child.  And in the end — " 
Reyin's voice dropped.  " — it might not even make a difference."

"How much money do you have?"

"About one kandar."

"If you plan to travel half the length of the world
with an empty purse, you'll need someone to go with you."

"I thank you for your offer, but I can travel better
alone."

"Look, do you think I would just up and leave my pregnant
wife in the middle of a drought, if I didn't feel like this was something
vital."  He paused and thought for a moment.  "Reyin, you and I are
bound together somehow, both of us coming here like we did."

Farlo picked a rounded rock from the ground and turned it
over in his hands.  "I didn't trust you at first, and you didn't trust me,
and that's right for us, growing up like we did along the Paved Road.  But the
folks here aren't like that.  They trust from the start.  And it's very easy,
just staying with them a short while, to forget what the world of hard men is
like.  We both know that out
there
, only them that's got money get
protection."

"I don't need a bodyguard."

"I think you do," Farlo said with a momentary
sparkle to his eyes, "but there's a simple way to find out."  He rose
to his full height, his fists clenched into knots of oak, a murderous look
coming over him, and Reyin felt his gut twist with the unexpected threat.

"If you want to keep me from going, you're going to
have to beat me in a fight.  Do you think you can?"

Reyin felt the Essa coursing through his body.  With one
word he could stun the man long enough to pick up a rock and hit him with it. 
"I see the point you're trying to make."  He watched Farlo carefully
for a moment.  "But right now, in this place, you cannot harm me."

Farlo responded with an ugly grin.  "You can't spend
the rest of your life up here.”

The afternoon passed slowly, fair and light as the clouds
drifting in from the ocean.  Syliva sat on the dunes above the beach at Siadal
with Kestrin and Lovisa, working and watching the men work.

Lovisa said, "They're so, oh, relentless when they get
the idea to do something — "

"Amuck," Kestrin said.

" — like the waterwheel at the mill, always pushed round
and round by the stream."

“More like they're caught up in the stream," Syliva
said, fetching a long sea-green from the pile where dozens dried in the sun,
"carried along by a flood."  She began crushing it into a huge
basket, turning her face away from the sudden sharp odor.

Reyin had certainly been impassioned by her son's words
three nights before.  He had returned the next evening from the Skialfanmir,
weary and in a kind of fever, saying he had climbed to the top.  None in the
village knew what to think.  That the stranger had made it up the unscalable
peak was as fabulous as Jonn's story of the sky boat.

The morning after, Farlo had rapped on the door early, and
the two of them sat at the table for an hour, arguing, agreeing, speaking low
and fast in their native tongue, a conspiracy in the making, then off together
as to a hunt.  Last night, secretly, Reyin had told her in broken Pallenor the
he was going off to get something that would put the land to rights.  Maybe he
had meant something else, but that was what she thought he said.

"I can't believe," Kestrin said, "that they
went across the bay, repaired Reyin's boat, and brought it back all in one
day."

"They simply patched it enough to bring it here without
sinking," Syliva said, "and they couldn't have done that without
Yothan's help."

Kestrin looked to where Reyin and Farlo sat unraveling old
thick ropes into countless single strands.  "Look at them down there. 
Tight as brothers, like they've known each other for years.   What do they keep
talking about?"  She turned to Lovisa.  "Why is your husband working
so hard at this?  Is he that anxious for Reyin to be gone?"

Lovisa smiled back at her.  "I know someone who is not
so happy that he's going."

"He said he will come back."  Kestrin blurted it
out with so much conviction that it made Lovisa laugh.

Syliva laid her hand on Kestrin's arm.  "Oh Sweetness,
don't let your heart go too far that way.  The man earns his bread by
travelling; his life is one long voyage.  Would you really want a husband who
was only home a few weeks each year?"

"Maybe Kestrin doesn't want to go through all the
trouble of a wedding."

While Lovisa giggled, Kestrin threw wet strands of sea
greens at her.  "I've hardly even spoken to him."

"The man is leaving," Syliva said.  "I don't
think he has romance on his mind."

"Well," Lovisa said, "if I wasn't married,
I'd surely be doing my best to find out."

They all laughed again.

"When is he going?" Lovisa asked Syliva.

"Soon as his boat is seaworthy.  Three or four
days."

"Do you think he'll really come back?"

"I think he will try.  I've no idea of the difficulties
of life beyond this valley.  Simply living here, being a farmer's wife, I find
that there are many streams to cross.  It's so easy to get caught and swept
away."

They fell silent then, and for a short time each worked
alone with her own thoughts.

"I wonder," Kestrin said, "what is it like,
out there in other lands?"

Lovisa reached for another long leaf.  "Farlo says that
the big port cities are as wide as the valley, that they are awful, dirty and
smelly, and no one knows your name.  And even if they did, they still wouldn't
help you if you were sick or hurt or hungry.  He says that everyone is out to
cheat or steal from each other because they're all poor except for the lords
and ladies who have all the riches."

"What about the land outside the cities?"

"The wealthy overlords own all the land and keep it for
themselves.  They'll let you live there, but you have to pay them for it every
year, and if you don't pay they have men with swords who will come and take it
from you."

"That sounds terrible.  Syliva, do you think it's
true?"

"There's probably truth in it, but if that's all there
was out there, how could you find people with good hearts like those two men
there?  One summer when I was a little girl, my father went all the way to
Noraggen.  He said it was big and busy and full of wonderful things."

Lovisa turned to Kestrin.  "Would you go with him, if
he asked you?"

"Reyin?  Of course not,
don't be silly," she snapped, her cream-colored cheek flushing to rose. 
"Why would he do a thing like that anyway?"  She stood and shook out
her apron.  "I need to go see about my father," she said, her voice
suddenly dry.  "He forgets to eat sometimes."  She turned swiftly,
her red hair flashing in the sunlight, walking away, then trotting, then
breaking into a full run.

The morning light came stealthily, through a thick grey
overcast.  Syliva thought that at last a spring shower would fall, but the
clouds did nothing more than shut out the sun.  Perhaps rain fell in the upper
valley where her husband kept watch over their livestock.  She wondered what he
was eating this morning, if he had slept out on the ground.  He was too old to
be living like a shepherd boy.  The season grew more strange, and some folk had
begun showing an odd temper.  He should be here.  Not that she felt lonely;
they had been apart many times before.  The Svordens always sent for her when
one of them fell ill, and she would at times stay with them for a week or more. 
He should simply be here, that's all. 

Reyin had spent the night with his boat in Siadal, so Syliva
went early to see Lovisa, thinking that Farlo may have stayed in the fishing
village as well.  As she approached her friend's door, she heard a clatter,
then Lovisa speaking heatedly in a high pitch, anger through tears.  Syliva
knocked loudly.  Farlo threw wide the door.

"Oh," Syliva said, "I thought — "

"It's alright," Farlo barked, "I was just
leaving."

He snatched a knapsack from a hook, pushed past her and was
gone.

Lovisa sank to the floor, her face in her hands.

Syliva knelt beside her.  "Shh.  Don't cry.  Don't
cry.  Tell me what's wrong."

"He's leaving," she wailed through her hands.  "He's
going with him on the b-boat.  He'll not be here for me.  He'll not be here for
our child."

"He will come back.  He will."

"No!  They'll catch him and kill him.  Or they'll cut
his foot off so he can't run away again.  Tell him not to go, Syliva.  Everyone
listens to you.  Even the men listen to you."

"I don't think they will this time," she
whispered.  She held Lovisa, there on the floor matting, until the fit passed.

Lovisa pulled herself up to a chair.  "I'm alright
now."

"You know that he wouldn't go, wouldn't risk his life
with you, unless he thought it was very important."

"I know.  But he's wrong."  She went to the water
basin and found a damp rag.  "He's so full of himself.  He thinks no one
is capable as he — that if he doesn't go, Reyin will fail to come back with
'that which will make the land aright' as he puts it.  What is it anyway?"

"He didn't tell me, but I had the feeling that it is
some kind of charm or rune.  Farlo thinks Reyin to be a rune-singer.  Did you
know that?"

"No.  And that's another point; they are so skulking
secretive.  Like we wouldn't understand.  Oh, I hate it."

"In their home lands they would be laughed at behind
their backs.  Many folk there don't even believe in the spirits."

"Now everyone is going to think Farlo is running away
because times are hard." "Lovisa, no one will think that.  And even
if they did, would you really care?"

"No.  I just want him here."

"So do I," Syliva
said.  "I want him here too."

Syliva took Reyin's hand and placed the gold coin in it. 
"Good luck to you.  Keep safe."

Reyin nodded as if he understood.  He looked over his
shoulder.  Farlo stood in the boat, helping Jonn lash down the water keg.

"Syliva," Reyin said, searching for the Pallenor
words, then, with a sheepish smile, he shrugged, unable to find them. 
"Syliva . . . my friend."  He hugged her gently, then, turning to
Kestrin and Lovisa, he bowed solemnly as he would taking his leave of noble
ladies.  Without a word he trudged across the sandy beach to where the rising
tide lapped against the keel of the little skiff.  He shook Jonn's hand in the
Southern style, climbed aboard, and tugged against the mast to see that it was
securely stepped.

After taking a last look at the main halyard, Farlo vaulted
the gunwale one-handed, running back to Lovisa to say his good-bye.  They were
both past terse words or tears.  Syliva touched Kestrin's arm and they stood
aside, not watching, giving the couple this moment alone.  Even over the growl
of breaking waves, Syliva could hear the violence of their embrace, the passion
in their whispers.

"Take care of my daughter until I come back,"
Farlo said, lightly caressing Lovisa's belly.

"Your son will miss you while you're away."

He started down the sloping sand, but Lovisa stopped him
with a call.  "Hey!  You forgot this."  She held up a lumpy sack,
three days worth of hard flatbread for their short run to Noraggen.  Syliva had
tried to give them dried apple, cheese, and jerked meat, but they would take
none of it.

Farlo came trotting back, flashed the three women a grin and
a wink, and carried the sack down to the boat.  Reyin climbed out, and the
three men pushed the skiff into the surf until the keel floated free on the
water.  Then Reyin and Farlo leaped aboard, taking their places at the tiller
and the halyard.  Jonn leaned his thick shoulders into his task, took two long
strides, and gave the little boat a tremendous shove, sending it out past the
breakers.  He stood waist-deep in the cold water, waving and laughing.

Farlo raised and trimmed the yellowed sail, and Reyin slid
the centerboard into place then set the boat on a starboard tack.  Reyin
glanced behind for a moment, and Farlo gave Jonn a quick salute.

On the beach, Syliva, Kestrin, and Lovisa watched the sailboat
pushing into the wind, closing with the blue and grey horizon.  They stood
motionless, saying nothing to each other, watching the skiff sail and tack,
sail and tack.  Nearly an hour passed before the tiny craft made a last turn at
the mouth of the bay and slipped out of sight.  Only then did they turn toward
their homes.