Sagaria (51 page)

“Er …” said Perima.

“Watch,” said Fattanillo conspiratorially. “It’s a new method of getting to Qarnapheeran. I devised it only a week or so ago, and I haven’t had the opportunity to show it off yet. You people are the first.”

These wizards are as bad as each other,
thought Sagandran sadly.

“Watch,” repeated Fattanillo.

Half-turning, he lifted his staff and, using the tip, he sketched the outline of an archway in the rain.

There was an almighty flash of brilliance, as if ten thousand lightning bolts had all struck the same place at once. The boom of thunder sounded like a million eager voices all talking simultaneously, deafening the companions. Even the rain seemed to be jolted out of its downward course by the blast.

Once his head had stopped spinning and his vision had stopped blurring, Sagandran saw that there was now an arched doorway standing in the mud. Without a wall to support it, it looked as if it should fall over under the beat of the rain, but somehow it stayed upright.

“Ah, yes, side effects,” said Fattanillo happily, watching as they recovered from the detonation. “Got to do something about them.”

“You always were a clumsy spellcaster, Fats,” remarked Samzing, “and age hasn’t improved you.”

Fattanillo shrugged. “Welcome to Qarnapheeran,” he said.

Sagandran looked at the door; it was made of wood and had once been painted orange, but had faded to a sort of indecisive brown. It did nothing. He blinked. It was still just a door.

“Well, open it, someone,” said Fattanillo. “Do I have to do everything around here?”

Sir Tombin looked at the faces of his friends, then strode to the door. He opened it cautiously, and bright light poured out into the gloom of the rain-tormented plain.

“What you do,” said Fattanillo, as if explaining something for the thousandth time to a recalcitrant child, “is go through it.”

Sir Tombin gaped back at him. “And this is Qarnapheeran?”

“Yes. Where else? I told you I’d take you there.”

“All right.”

The Frogly Knight braced his shoulders and stepped over the threshold. At once, he threw back his head and laughed, reaching out his arms as if he wanted to embrace the sky above him. Samzing could see that Sir Tombin was standing in dazzling sunshine.

The others quickly followed the Frogly Knight.

As they were stepping through the doorway, Perima looked up at Samzing with a smirk.

“Fishface?” she said.

“Watch it,” growled the wizard.

Sagandran had never seen anything like the city they now found themselves in, and he suspected that none of the others had either (with the obvious exception of Samzing, who’d been here many years before).

Green hills rimmed the horizon, holding a city in the cup of their hand that was not widely scattered; its buildings did not strive to touch the sky, but the
city was nevertheless superbly proportioned and conceived, whichever way he looked. It bore an ethereal, gossamer beauty that belonged more to snowflakes than to stones. Those few structures that did reach more than a few stories high seemed to float rather than rest on the ground, and they carried fanciful architectural embellishments that apparently defied gravity. These included elliptically spiraled stairways that led outward and upward from upper stories to end nowhere; statuaries that would have been gargoyles were it not for the flighty capriciousness of the fragile spirit creatures they portrayed; steeples that corkscrewed their way heavenward; hanging gardens; and pagodas that had the delicacy of lamb’s fleece. All of the colors were restful and subdued, yet Qarnapheeran did not give the impression of drabness. Instead, Sagandran thought, it was as if the stones and tiles and the other unimaginable materials of which it was constructed possessed deep reservoirs of brightness that they could have exhibited had they so chosen. There were people everywhere dressed in robes that were brighter versions of the city’s hues, and many of them were talking vigorously, arms waving or laughing uproariously; yet the city lacked clamor, as if it were so old that the briefness of a human scale of time could not be permitted to stamp its mark, even temporarily.

He saw the dignity of the city, yet this was no sterile, moribund dignity. Qarnapheeran was a place very much alive.

A young man dressed in a sea-blue robe approached. He had curly black hair and bright black eyes that seemed to sparkle as he swiftly evaluated them.

“Greetings, travelers,” he called when he was still a little distance away. “We’ve been expecting you.”

“But Fattanillo only just—” Perima began.

“Oh, that was a long time ago,” said the young man. His appraisal of her made her blush. “Here in Qarnapheeran, the clock hands turn at the pace we decree, rather than us bowing to the dictates of the clock hands. My name is Shano, and I’ve been instructed to escort you to the main temple. If you will permit, I will see that your horse is well-stabled and fed.”

While Perima took a few moments to bid Snowmane farewell, promising the stallion that this time she would not leave without him, another blue-robed young man approached to take the reins from her hands.

“Come,” said Shano as the horse was led away. He began walking off at a leisurely pace.

“Who was the guy we spoke to at the gate?” asked Sagandran, walking along next to Shano while still looking around in all directions at the strangeness of the city’s buildings. “Fattanillo, he said his name was.”

“Fattanillo,” replied Shano, “guards the door that leads from the outside
world to Qarnapheeran, and has done so since long before I was born. His task is to allow in only those the city deems true.”

“What happens,” said Perima, speaking as if she felt she should perhaps keep the question to herself, “if people stray into the Never Plains by accident and get lost? What if they need to be helped before they die of starvation or something?”

“Fattanillo shows them the doorway, just as he showed you, and we take them in and care for them until they’re ready to leave. Most often, by then they don’t want to. They’ve become a part of Qarnapheeran or Qarnapheeran has become a part of them; it makes no difference which way round. You see, no one ever comes to Qarnapheeran by accident, even though they may think they do. The city draws the people it wants here, whether they know it or not.”

“Like Samzing’s searching spell,” murmured Sagandran.

“Your wizard friend used a searching spell to find us?” said Shano with a smile. “I thought as much. Yes, it’s the same sort of thing.”

Perima nodded, satisfied, but already there was another question pressing past her lips. “Why is Fattanillo so much like a bird?”

“A strange question coming from someone who’s so friendly with a frog,” commented Shano wryly. “But I’ll answer you as true as I know, which is not the complete story, far from it. The only person who really knows is Fattanillo himself, and he never talks about it. It seems that long ago he was a wizard like any other, but one day he made an error casting one of his spells. The spell worked all right (he wanted to make himself fly like a bird, because he was late for an assignation) but afterward he was unable to reverse its effects.” He chuckled and then his face turned serious. “Magic is not to be taken lightly, you see. Having the power to perform magic is a great blessing and a great privilege, but also brings with it a great responsibility. If you do not concentrate entirely on what you are doing and focus your mind and soul, spellcasting can be extremely dangerous to yourself and others.”

“You never spoke a truer word, young man,” said Samzing from behind them.

He and Sir Tombin had been content to follow in the others’ wake.

The comment surprised Sagandran; if he ever thought someone was the epitome of an unconcentrated, unfocused magician, it was Samzing.

They passed a group of magic-users – some young, like Shano, others as old as Samzing and Fattanillo – dressed in robes of various colors. The sea-blue of Shano’s attire was common, but so was a deep and satisfying blood-red. Other distinctive shades were less frequent. One young woman was wearing a robe the yellow of a canary’s belly, but paler; it made a striking contrast with her skin, which was as dark as Perima’s.

Perhaps because she noticed this, Perima asked Shano what the significance of the different colors was.

“Each color represents an element,” Shano replied. His voice was patient, but it was obvious that the answer was elementary to anyone who had been in Qarnapheeran for more than a few minutes. “The blue robes represent the element of water. Magicians wearing blue robes habitually, as it were, draw their power from the oceans, rivers, lakes and rain. Yellow robes signify the element, air. Those are the magicians of the clouds, the winds and the air you breathe. Green is the color of the element earth. Green-clad magicians derive their abilities from the ground and from all the things that grow in it: flowers, bushes, the trees of the forests. Red symbolizes the fourth of the elements, fire. Lightning, flames, blood, volcanic eruptions – that’s where those magicians gain their abilities.”

Perima paused and looked back at the people they’d passed. “But I can see far more colors than just those four.”

Shano took a breath, maintaining his cooperative smile. “Yes, that’s true. The other colors are worn by magicians who draw their magic from more than a single element. Imagine you were mixing the hues of the elements like paints on a palette. A wizard who can call upon both water and fire for magic would wear a purple robe, and so on. You have to be highly skilled to derive power from more than one element, but there are plenty of highly skilled wizards in Qarnapheeran.”

He suddenly looked annoyed with himself, as people do when they’ve been patronizing simpletons so thoughtlessly that they’ve managed to make an error with the basics.

“Maybe I was wrong to talk of paints on a palette. Imagine instead the way all the colors of the spectrum blend together to give us the pure white of sunlight. If you see someone in a white robe, you’ll know that this is a wizard who has mastered the magics of all the elements. Such people are very rare indeed.”

“So they’re the most skilled of all?” inquired Perima.

Shano grinned again, his good humor returning. “Oh no, nobody can ever become that.”

Sagandran’s brow wrinkled. “I don’t understand.”

“The highest level of all can never exist,” said Shano. “One of the first things you discover about magic is that there’s always more to learn, always fresh understanding to master. It’s as if you were climbing a mountain that stretched upward forever, a mountain whose summit you could never reach no matter how high you climbed. You will never gain an understanding of magic unless you can accept this, indeed, welcome it, before you start.”

Sagandran frowned yet harder. He could grasp what the young wizard was trying to tell him, and in a way it was a much more satisfying scenario than the idea of just clawing one’s way to the top and then being king of the castle. At the same time, he realized that most of the people he knew back on the Earthworld would have turned their noses up at the notion. People like Webster O’Malley’s dad, and even Sagandran’s own dad, thought success was getting to the top as quickly as possible and staying there, or finding a new and higher summit to climb to. They wanted to be the company boss, or the richest man in the neighborhood or even (the slightly nuttier ones) to rule the world. The idea that there was no top to be reached would have been anathema to them, were they, by some unlikely chance, to hear about it. Yet, walking along beside Shano, Sagandran realized that always trying to be better than you were now was really a beautiful thing in itself.

Thinking these thoughts, he missed the next few exchanges of the conversation. By the time his mind returned to the present, it was Sir Tombin who was putting a question to Shano.

“When you mix paints,” the Frogly Knight was saying, “and you mush all the colors together, it’s not white you get, but black. Are there magicians with black robes too who, as much as the ones in white, have succeeded in bringing together lots of different forms of magic?”

Shano scowled unhappily. “Yes, there are black-robed wizards, but you won’t find them here in Qarnapheeran, nor even in Sagaria as a whole. They have mastered many forms of magic, yes, but they have perverted their knowledge and powers to evil ends. Scores of them were banished from Sagaria to the Shadow World over five hundred years ago after they had wreaked great havoc during the wars that raged across the world in those days. None of that ilk has been seen in Sagaria since.”

“Let us hope,” said Sir Tombin softly, “they never will be again. It is to try and ensure this is so that we’ve come here, you know.”

“I know,” responded Shano gravely, in the same quiet tones.

Flip, sitting in the brim of Sir Tombin’s hat, had a question as well. “What sorts of magic have the black-robed wizards blended together?”

Shano avoided giving an answer. “The temple is ahead of us now. It is regarded as one of the crowning glories of Qarnapheeran.”

Flip gave a little whistle of awe, and Sagandran only just stopped from doing the same. While the other buildings they’d seen were comparatively modest in scale, like Qarnapheeran itself, the temple was huge. It wasn’t especially tall. Back home in the Earthworld, Sagandran would have guessed that it had eight or ten stories, but it was broad and covered a great area. It gave the impression
of sheer massiveness as it squatted among expansive, well-tended gardens where the water in the fountains played and scores of wizards quietly strolled or lounged about studying scrolls. This astonishing sense of bulk gave it an aura of enormous antiquity, as if it could have been built even before the world itself; as if it might be older than the very ground it stood on. The other buildings had a grace born of lightness, of delicacy; this one had as much grace or more, but it was the grace of confident power.