The Innocent Mage (54 page)

With a thought, his arrow of light aimed true towards them and he left Barl’s Mountains behind.

A town. Small. Narrow streets, deserted. Iron-barred windows. Doors locked and uninviting. A central marketplace. Wooden gibbets, dangling crow-feasted bodies. Bones gleaming in the sickly moonlight.

What did it mean?

Onwards he flew, his mind seeking, seeking. Somewhere there was fear and a terrible foreboding, but he pushed the feelings aside.

More open countryside. Dispirited trees. Sickly crops. The land looked poisoned. Beaten to its knees. Another town, bigger than the last but shrouded in the same aura of dread.

Something caught his attention. Movement in the empty streets. He swooped closer.

Horror. A patrol of … of … beasts. Men with the mouths of animals, their eyes black and merciless in their dead white faces. Demons. They carried torches. Set fire to a house. The inhabitants ran screaming, burning. The laughing demons butchered them.

Sickened, he fled the dreadful scene. This could not be all. There was still Dorana, shining bright light in the midst of madness.

More woodland ahead. Thick. Black. Menacing. Out of its creeping darkness a shadow, rising. Man-shaped, with eyes that glowed like the sun and a mouth opened to swallow him alive … to swallow the world. It stank of evil incarnate.

Through the whisper-thin link that anchored him to his body he heard himself scream.

The shadow lunged, eyes flaming fire. Words formed in his gibbering mind: Who are you?

Terrified to the brink of unreason Durm turned tail and fled. Away from the woodland. Over the countryside. Over the second township, the first township, flying faster than thought for Barl’s Mountains and the Wall and the inviolate (safety of home. The magic parted before him and he was I [trough the golden barrier once more, flying over the City I rooftops and into his study, back in his body where he Housed safely once more in his cage of blood and bone

: fell to his knees, retching. Pain windmilled behind his I eyes. Shuddering, gasping, he lay on his face, fingers clawed I into the carpet, and waited for the world to stop spinning.

At length, when he thought he could trust his legs, he I lurched to his feet and stumbled into his little washroom. I Splashed water into the basin and sluiced the sweat of fear from his skin. Slowly, slowly, reason returned. With shaking hands he reached for a towel, blotted the water from his face and looked up to meet his stunned reflection in the I mirror.

He wasn’t alone.

Behind him stood a man, shadowy and insubstantial, with eyes that glowed like the sun. Coldly handsome, with I hair so pale it looked silver. Extravagant cheekbones. Imperious nose. Lips too full and sensuous. The man smiled.

Durm screamed. Turned. Raised a hand in self-defence: to no avail. Morg’s shade lunged for him. Was on him. In him. Melted into his flesh like sunlight through snow. Durm’s curdling shriek died midbreath. For a single frozen moment he wore two faces: his own, and that of the man stealing his body.

And then time ticked forward … and there was but one face in the mirror. Durm’s.

But the mind and the soul behind the eyes belonged to Morg.

‘Master Durm? Sir? Where would you like the tray put, sir?’ Morg, studying his outstretched hands intently, nodded to the table by the window. ‘There.’

The servant bobbed its head. ‘Cook said to tell you, sir,’ it said, uncovering steaming plates and bowls of food and laying them neatly on the blue tablecloth, ‘we run right out of chinchi eggs so she flipped a couple of bunties instead, seeing as how you like them almost as much, and hope that’s right as rain with you.’

What was it babbling about? ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Now get out.’

The servant darted him a startled glance. ‘Yes, sir.’

The door clapped shut behind it and he was alone again. Alone with his host… and his body.

T have a body,’ he marvelled to the room at large, and laughed, and laughed, and laughed. And the pleasure of that made him laugh all the more.

Seated at the table, knife and fork held lightly in remembering fingers, he took a deep breath — lungs! I have lungs! — and felt his head swim with the rich aromas. Eggs, Mushrooms. Beef. Gravy. Porridge, with cream and honey. Crusty warm bread soaked in butter. Spiced wine.

Durm ate all this for breakfast} No wonder the fool was fat.

Four hundred years had passed since last he’d tasted food. It was a memory. Less. The memory of a memory, discarded along with all other physical considerations and the inconveniences they entailed. No sacrifice was too great in the service of his higher purpose. So it could not be regret turning down the corners of this borrowed mouth. Could not be longing, remembered. It was the shock of finding himself corporeal once again after so long without flesh or form.

There was no regret. No longing. These emotions were nothing but the taint of the mind that even now gibbered inconsequentially from its cage deep within. Above all else he was an intellect, a necromancer powerful beyond the dreams and imagination of this wittering Durm and the others, the traitorous descendants of treacherous forebears, soon to be returned to the fold.

Soon to be punished.

But until that glorious moment he was also a body. And I his body was hungry. Saliva pooled behind his teeth, under I his tongue. His belly rumbled. His nostrils flared.

He ate.

The tastes! The textures! Sweet … soft … runny … I crunchy … it was too much. Too much. After so long, an assault on the senses almost past bearing.

Of course, there were certain drawbacks to being housed | within flesh once more. For one he was enslaved to that was bound by its limitations, would have to tend its I needs, dance to its desires — not all of which were as delightful as eating. But no matter. For the short time he’d be lodged here, he could manage.

Of greater concern, but still no serious impediment, the matter of his reach and influence. He knew his own mind. He knew the captive Durm’s mind. All others were closed to him. After nearly six centuries of unfettered access to every thought, every whim, every dark dream of the men, women, children and demons in his domain, the stark silence had been, in the first hours of his occupation, distressing. But he was adjusting now to the ringing empty echoes. To the knowledge that in this place his powers were circumscribed. That any attempt to use them, to channel the vast arsenal of magic at his disposal, would melt the meat from Durm’s bones and in doing so destroy himself as well.

And that was hardly part of the plan.

It meant he could not afford to be overconfident. He would have to proceed cautiously. Carefully. Housed within this fleshy prison he was, for the first time in centuries, vulnerable. To accident and perhaps more than accident if he raised an unwise suspicion, or misjudged the temperature of a moment.

Not that he rated the danger highly. These feeble halfwit child’s-play magicians were so far beneath him he had no need to read their minds to know their hearts. Their capricious faces would tell him everything he required to bring them to their knees before him.

And bring them to their knees he would. Soon he would have the means to chastise these unruly children of Lur. To ripen this sweet plum of a place, that he might pluck it neatly from its nourishing branch and thereafter swallow it whole.

So.

Licking egg-yolk from his fork, he chuckled. Really, this was turning into something of a — now what was the word? Ah yes … a holiday.

With his borrowed body bathed and dressed in a fresh robe, he went to the cupboard and withdrew from it an ancient wooden box hasped with silver. Placing it on the table by the window, he sat and considered it. Allowed himself a brief moment of gloating. Deep inside he felt Durm’s impotent fingernails, scratching, scratching, desperate to be let out. With a casual swipe of his will he silenced the fat fool and flipped open the box’s lid.

Inside, a pearly white globe nestled on a bed of blue velvet. Swirling deep within its heart a flux of colours: gold and green and crimson and purple. One might even call it beautiful, if beauty mattered.

‘Barl, Barl, did you truly think you could defeat me? Six years … six hundred … six thousand … you should have known I would never let your treachery go unpunished.’

Her fingerprints were all over the thing. Inside it, where the magic dwelled. He could smell them. Taste them. Feel them, like a breeze across his mind, an invisible caress. For six hundred years he had dreamed of confronting her. Vanquishing her. The discovery of the secret to prolonging life and intellect beyond a mere body had been theirs. All these long centuries he’d dreamed of meeting her face to face once more and bringing her to ok for her narrow-minded rejection of the greatness

‘d planned for both of them.

But even there she had denied him. Spurned their great iscovery. Spurned him. Instead of transmuting herself as tey’d planned, as they’d promised, she’d squandered her iwn life in the making of this perfect little kingdom.

In the creation of her damnable Wall, which had held him at bay for longer than any mortal had ever lived.

And in doing so had cheated him, again. Rejected him, again. Defeated him …

‘Or so you thought, my love. Yet here I am, and here shall 1 stay, and here will I pull down your Wall and | everything behind it you tried so hard to protect.’

Ransacking Durm’s memories and devising his plan of I conquest had been ridiculously simple. The key to the Wall’s I destruction lay in the magics that held it together, that fed I upon themselves and the ordered management of the I weather within the kingdom. It was an endless, self-perpetuating cycle: the power of the weather lent power to the magic, just as the strength of the weather helped I maintain the invisible bonds that held the Wall inviolate.

Snap one link in the chain and Barl’s precious Wall would come tumbling down.

All he had to do was take the Weather Magic into ‘. himself, find that one link, the one point that would yield most meekly to his coercion, and then he could just sit back and watch as Barl’s defiance unravelled and her defence of this place crumbled. And then he would stretch forth his hand upon the land … and his victory would at last be complete.

It had come as something of a surprise to learn that Durm did not possess the Weather Magics. He was their guardian, sworn to the tedious task in an unbroken line from Fuldred, the first Master Mage, appointed by Barl herself. Only the WeatherWorker, and the WeatherWorker-in-Waiting, were permitted to absorb the Weather Magics from the Orb. Not that more people couldn’t possess the magic. They just wouldn’t. Because Barl told them not to. The idea astounded him. Revolted him. Slaves. These lost Doranen were nothing but slaves who had placed the chains about their minds with their own hands and then had willingly swallowed the key.

Well. Now he would swallow them.

The Weather Magics were absorbed from the Orb intact and self-fulfilling. Whoever had them could immediately use them. Call rain and wind and sunshine and snow, with only a thought. Amazing. Hate her though he might, he conceded that Barl had created a miracle. But even so he would defeat her. After all, he was something of a miracle himself.

With a great surge of satisfaction he removed the Orb from its box. It felt warm, peculiarly alive, all that vibrant, violent magic humming within its fragile shell. Helpless to resist, Durm had given him the words of the Transference spell. He summoned them now. Cupped the Orb in both hands, closed his eyes, spoke them aloud —

— and was thrown across the room in a soundless explosion of heat and light and barrier magic. It seared his mind and scorched his skin and sent his disordered senses reeling. Echoing in his stunned mind, a whispering voice not heard for six hundred years.

No, Morgan. This is not for you. This is never for you. Never … never … never.

Gasping, retching, he barely made it to Durm’s small private privy before he lost his extravagant breakfast down the boghole. From a great distance deep inside he heard the fat fool laughing.

When he was again himself, could stand on steady legs and walk, he returned to the study and stared at the discarded Orb, unsullied, undamaged, unplundered and abandoned on the floor. Barl had anticipated him. Assumed that somehow he would reach this place … or at least that lie might. And because she knew him as no other body or mind had ever known him, she had devised a way to keep her precious Weather Magics away from him. Safe from him.

A tidal wave of thick red hatred surged within him, robbed him of sight and hearing, clawed his fingers and tore at his throat.

‘Bitch! Slut! Treacherous whore! You think this will stop me? You will never stop me! I am Morg! I am invincible and your defeat is a foregone conclusion!’

He picked up the Orb. Put it back in its box. Put the box back in its cupboard, and closed the doors.

So. If he couldn’t bring down the Wall this way, he would bring it down in another. In the end the manner of its destruction wasn’t important. All that mattered was that he saw it destroyed.

Slumped in a chair, he let his scheming thoughts wander. The key to his victory lay in manipulating the Weather Magics. In using them — their wielder — to bring down the Wall. The king was unassailable. Pointless to try and corrupt the girl, or take her over. Fane’s power was extraordinary, perhaps as fine as Barl’s had been, and she believed in protecting Barl’s Wall as fervently as the rest of them.

Which left only the cripple …

Frustrated, he paced Durm’s untidy study. There was a way to use the boy, yes, at least in theory, but it would take so long. He’d not thought to spend more than days in this place and now he’d be here weeks. The notion was intensely irritating.

But he could sustain a little irritation. Especially when the reward for patience was so great.

And he was in no danger here, provided he remained undiscovered. The greater part of himself that he’d left behind the Wall would wait for his return, their rejoining. Soon enough he would be Morg again. Would slough off this binding vulnerable flesh and once more become immortal, invulnerable spirit.