The D'Karon Apprentice (27 page)

She shut her eyes and plucked her staff from
the air. Her mind churned madly with doubt and confusion, but a
moment of concentration began to tame it. For longer than she could
recall, her every waking thought had been curled about the spells
and incantations that would open the gateway to the D’Karon realm.
Even half a world away, the unfinished spell she’d been working to
open a second keyhole stood like a searing ember in her mind’s eye.
If there was a gateway anywhere in the world, she should see it
like a full moon on a starless sky. And yet there was nothing. It
didn’t make sense. Nothing was making sense anymore.

Turiel scowled and shut her eyes tighter when
the guards finally tore away the last brace and pulled the tattered
door open.

“You there! How did you get here? You are
trespassing in the royal—”

“I am trying to concentrate! Kindly be silent
while I work at this riddle,” she growled, irritably turning her
back to the door.

“You will drop your staff and surrender
yourself to the—”

“I said be
silent!
” she hissed,
pivoting back to the door and opening her eyes.

The man before her was clearly a veteran
guard, a few years older than one might expect to see in active
military service. He still clutched a flat metal pry bar in one
hand. Her mere gaze was enough to inspire the guard to take a few
steps back, bumping into two of the men who had helped open the
door. He dropped the bar and fumbled at his belt for his sword.

When the bar hit the floor, rattling noisily,
Turiel slapped one hand over her ear and winced at the din. “What
part of
silent
was too complex for you? There is important
work to be done, and you are being terribly rude! How can I be
expected to concentrate if you won’t be
silent
?”

For emphasis she thrust her staff forward. A
crackling bolt of black magic issued forth, striking the guard
squarely in the chest. He wheezed in agony and launched backward,
bowling his fellow guards aside. The whole group, five in total,
went sprawling out onto the floor of the grand entryway of Castle
Verril. By the time the first of them had scrambled to his feet,
Turiel had stalked out of the room and squinted at the
comparatively bright light of the vaulted hall.

“Ah, yes. Castle Verril,” she said, taking a
brief moment from her task to gaze about at the hall.

In her youth, she had briefly served under
the king. She couldn’t remember the man’s name. Like most thoughts
more than a few months old, it was a distant and blurred memory
lost to time and madness. The entry hall, though.
This
she
remembered. The plush carpet of regal blue. The pennants and
banners hanging upon the walls and the brightly burning sconces on
the walls and columns.

“Wh-what did you do to him?” cried one of the
guards.

She turned, her expression souring. For the
second time the inconsiderate palace staff had interrupted her
thoughts. Did they not realize how
difficult
it was to
gather her mind these days?

The man she had assaulted was shaking and
pale. His breath had been reduced to wisps of curling black vapor,
and his eyes were milky white.

“I illustrated to him the folly of
interrupting my task. I would have thought it would have been
sufficient to convince the rest of you as well, but clearly
additional lessons are in order.”

“Mystic! Call the palace mystic, and the
healers!” cried one of the guards.

Two men hauled their stricken partner from
the ground while the others raised their weapons and attempted to
offer them some degree of protection.

Turiel shook her head irritably while the
call for assistance rang through the halls.

“I am
quite
certain the palace staff
was more mannerly in my day. At the
very
least they were
more intelligent. Alas, I suppose things seldom
improve
with
time. Now, the gateway. I can’t detect it at all. Perhaps traveling
here sapped my strength. I need to replenish.” She looked briefly
to the guards, who were now at the edge of the hall. “Bah, more
trouble than they’re worth.”

She paced back into the darkness of Bagu’s
chambers. The open chest with its three gems offered the only light
in the room now. She smiled as she approached them.

“Ah… thir crystals. And fully sated at that.
To think, I didn’t think I would ever have occasion to work with
one any larger than the one Teht gifted to me.”

The dark sorceress leaned down and clutched
one of the gems. It was almost too large for her to properly grasp.
When her flesh touched the smooth facets of the stone, her smiled
widened. She could feel the gem tugging at her, drawing weakly at
her spirit like an infant sucking its thumb. It was filled to
capacity with stolen mana, but still it wanted more. Such
delightful, artful constructions the D’Karon could make. A simple
piece of crystal that fed like a living thing.

She lifted the stone from the chest and shut
her eyes. A simple twist of magic, an unspoken command, was all it
took to reverse the gem’s thirst and send its power coiling up her
arm and into her soul. It was invigorating, like a long night of
sleep and a refreshing drink of water after a long journey. A few
moments of glorious feeding left the gem dark and lifeless once
more. Its hunger returned, and it tried to steal back the power it
had given, but Teht had shared the technique for denying the hunger
of the thir gems. She set it carefully into the chest again.

As it was designed to do, the gem had offered
up all of the strength it had gathered. With strength came clarity,
and with clarity Turiel was certain would come the long-awaited
image of the open gateway in her mind’s eye. She again tightened
her mind in concentration and sought the portal.

Steadily the smile faded and turned to a
snarl. There was no denying it now. If she could not find the
portal with her mind and spirit in this state, it could only mean
that there was no portal to be found. She turned to the door just
in time to find a young woman step cautiously into view.

The woman was a mystic in only the broadest
possible sense, that much was clear from a single glance. She was
dressed in robes just a bit too pristine to have been worn by a
seasoned spell caster, and the amulet she held shakily in one hand
was still glossy from the jeweler’s wheel. Her spirit had the pulse
and vitality of one who had learned to focus, but it was fragile as
an icicle, unforged and unpracticed. In her eyes Turiel saw the
bone-deep fear of a novice who knew she was facing a master. To the
woman’s credit, she did not falter.

Power gathered within the woman as she pulled
her freshly trained mind together about a spell. Her lips formed
quiet, carefully phrased incantations. A golden haze filled the air
between her and Turiel, and after a few more iterations of her
chant the haze tightened into a glimmering shield.

Thus protected, she spoke. Her words had the
slow deliberate cadence of someone with a tenuous grip on
concentration.

“By the order of the crown of the Northern
Alliance, I command you to—”

Turiel stalked forward and thrust her hand at
the woman. The necromancer’s fingers touched the shimmering veil of
protective magic, and the golden shine parted like smoke. A gasp of
fear was all the palace mystic could manage before Turiel’s fingers
were about her throat.

“You are a magician.
You
at least
should understand the nature of the woman with whom you are
dealing, correct?” Turiel said, her tone like that of a woman who
had finally found an adult among children.

Her foe nodded stiffly, fighting for air.

“Excellent. Now, to the north there
should
be a portal. I am searching for it, but I cannot find
it. Are you or any of the other palace staff hiding it
somehow?”

The mystic shook her head. She had yet to get
a single breath past Turiel’s iron grip, and her face was beginning
to redden.

“Have the D’Karon hidden it then?”

Again she shook her head. She’d released the
amulet and clawed desperately at Turiel’s fingers.

“Release her!” barked a guard at the end of
the hall, the foremost of a dozen such reinforcements that had
answered the call for aid.

Turiel made a sound of frustrated disgust and
waved her staff in a small circle. Black threads poured from the
cracks between the stones of the floor and formed a wall around her
and her captive. The guards rushed forward and attempted to bash
their way through the circle of black tendrils, but the
spider-web-thin threads may as well have been inch-thick iron.

“But there
is
a portal, yes?” Turiel
said.

Her captive shook her head weakly. The
woman’s eyes were beginning to flutter now.

“
Lies!
” Turiel spat. She hurled the
woman against the conjured wall. “I know the portal exists. The
timer has finished, so the portal has opened. Where
is
it?”

“It…” the woman gasped, “has been
closed.”

“Impossible! The opening of the portal is
like the dawning of the sun on a brave new era for this world. You
would have me believe that somehow the sun chose instead to retreat
back beneath the horizon?”

“The Chosen closed the portal.”

“What is this madness you speak? The chosen?
The chosen
what
?”

“The Chosen warriors! The beings of prophecy
who arose to defeat the D’Karon,” the mystic said. Her eyes were
wide with fear as the continued assault upon the conjured wall
filled the air with chaos.

Turiel’s confusion shifted first to
realization, then to fury. “You speak of
the adversaries
.
The foolish creatures that would stand in the way of my masters.
That,
too
, is impossible. The adversaries could not band
together unless the D’Karon attacked the people of this world
unbidden, and they would never be so careless.”

She leaned forward and grabbed the woman by
the front of her tunic, dragging her effortlessly behind her as she
stalked back toward the doorway to Bagu’s chamber. The wall keeping
the guards at bay shifted along with her, receding behind and
emerging in front to keep her safe. When she stepped fully inside
the chamber, the threads wove themselves into a solid black barrier
across the doorway.

“What is your name, woman?”

“Y… you are a necromancer. I can feel
it.”

“That isn’t an answer,” Turiel said, throwing
her prisoner to the ground beside the chest and leaning down to
fetch a second thir gem.

“A proper wizard would never tell her name to
a necromancer. It could give her power over us.”

“You are hardly a proper wizard, that name
nonsense is only for necromancers who haven’t reached full mastery,
and I’ve already got all of the power I need over you. So for the
sake of civilized conversation, tell me your damned name.”

“Kintalla.”

“Kintalla, all that you’ve said to me is
either fallacy or madness, but at the moment I don’t have any
evidence to contradict it. I
opened
the keyhole. And the
portal would only be where the keyhole was centered. So I know
precisely where it is.”

“But it has been
closed
, I’ve
told
you,” Kintalla said, taking the amulet in her fingers
again.

Turiel frowned and slapped it from her hands.
“Come now, I’ve let you live because I need to prove to you that
all of your lies and foolishness can’t keep me from the truth.
Don’t make me kill you before I do so. Then I’ll have to find
another witness, and this whole endeavor has been an untenable
waste of time already.” She paced to the map on the wall and held
the glowing crystal to it. “When I created the first keyhole,
naturally there was no portal point there, because the D’Karon had
only just arrived. And Teht only gave me a small list of points, in
the event I needed to contact them in a dire emergency. But I am
quite certain they would have created a portal point for the
keyhole as soon as they were able.” She peered at the most
northerly marked point on the map. “Ah, yes… they added
quite
a few more. But this one is the one I need.”

She again stirred the air with her staff,
summoning the swirling disk of black much more swiftly than she had
the first time.

“Yes…” she said. “Yes, I see where my mistake
was… This should be much smoother this time.”

There was no apparent fatigue in her voice as
she spoke, the spell being fueled directly from the thir gem in her
other hand. When the black disk was through growing and the portal
itself began to open, it filled the room with a vicious, biting
cold wind. Turiel discarded the expended gem and grasped Kintalla’s
tunic again, hauling her up.

“What… what have you done?” the young mystic
asked.

Turiel and Kintalla peered through the
portal. The sun had set, and in the dim light of the moon filtering
through the clouds it was difficult to see more than vague forms
through the portal. There didn’t seem to be any ground beneath it,
and now and again something would slide past the portal with a
ponderous, pivoting motion.

“Curious… I am not entirely certain this
portal is properly aligned,” Turiel said.

“You… you can simply open doors to other
parts of the world?”

Turiel dropped the expended thir gem into the
chest and retrieved the final one, smaller than the others, and
tucked it into a pouch within her robes. “I wouldn’t call it
simple
. Now, let me see.” She leaned though the portal. “Ah.
There seems to be something solid not far down. If you survive the
fall, do let me know.”

Before Kintalla could object, Turiel pushed
her through the portal. The young woman screamed in terror for a
few moments, then cried out in surprise and discomfort amid the
rustle of leaves and the cracking of twigs.