C. S. Friedman - Magister 01, page 35
She had no answer for him, but bit her lip as Fadir’s sorcery took hold of the man once more. This time, however, even sorcery was not enough to quiet him; in the end the Magister reached out, touched a finger to his forehead, and commanded, “Sleep.” The man’s body sagged immediately, as it did earlier, all the strength seemingly drained out of it; his head rolled limply to one side, the lids half open but the eyes unseeing.
“Clearly he has told us all that he can,” Colivar said quietly. “So we shall view the past as he saw it.”
He walked to the head of the bed and passed his hand over the man’s face. A tremor ran through the witch’s body, but he did not awaken. Then, slowly, mist began to coalesce over the man’s face, colors drew together, and a vision began to take shape over him.
Dark it was, very dark. The sun was shining but the man’s fear obscured it like black stormclouds; only in the center of the vision did light shine clearly. Hie substance of the conjuring was a fine-colored mist that shivered in eddies and currents as it responded to the man’s memories, and details were unclear about the edges, but in the center of the field the mist soon resolved into a company of men on horseback leading several narrow wagons, with a pair of men arguing at the head of it. Near them on the ground sat another figure, uniformed, with the aspect of an idiot; a thin line of drool trickled down his chin as he stared off, trembling, into vistas no one else could share.
And then one of the men left the company—Antuas himself—and began to hike into the woods. He made an odd gesture about himself as he did so, such as witches sometimes used to bind power, and Siderea guessed that he was making sure that any sentries would be looking in another direction when he passed by.
What was it like to use the power so freely, she wondered. To feel the power surging through one’s soul from within in such deliberate quantity, instead of being portioned out in dribs and drabs for fear of an untimely death?
As the witch Antuas walked through the woods and then passed through them and beyond, they faded, became shadow. A settlement took shape before him. Empty. It likewise was left behind as he continued to walk. Houses came into view. Empty. Weapons were missing from their racks. Doors were left open. Dark stains were splashed upon a threshold, across the earth, trampled into the mud. The images passed in and out of focus like a dream, each fading into mist in turn as the viewer turned his attention to the next detail. That the witch in the vision was terrified was painfully clear. He was clearly no soldier himself, Siderea thought, merely a villager who had been paid to join the company of soldiers “in case of emergency.” Now the emergency had come, and it was clearly more than he could handle.
Then the trees gave way to open ground, and he saw what was waiting there for him.
He fell to his knees.
Siderea gasped.
All about him, as far as the eye could see, were bodies. Each was hoisted up upon the point of a towering stake, which had been set vertically into the ground. The bodies had clearly been there a while, and scavengers had plucked much of the flesh from the bones, but from their position it was clear that they had been impaled while alive, and thus condemned to a slow and terrible death.
There were dozens of them. Maybe even hundreds. Seen through the lens of the visitor’s memory the number was uncertain, as if the sheer horror of the scene made clear focus impossible. Already details of the scene were bleeding out around the edges of the vision; even Colivar’s sorcery could not keep such terrible images from being swallowed up by the man’s madness.
The witch in the vision fell to his knees and vomited.
“Is this Danton’s doing?” Siderea whispered. It was all she could think of. No other ruler seemed capable of such atrocities.
And then, as they watched, a dark shape began to arise from behind the forest of spears. Something with wings that had been hidden behind a rocky outcrop, that was now taking to the air.
The vision wavered. The witch moaned. His lips were a cold blue now, and where his eyes showed there were only whites.
It was a great beast, winged but not like a bird in its form, nor like a bat, nor any other flying creature she might name. Its vast wingspan stretched across the field of spears and cast the rows of rotting bodies into shadow as it rose. Fear-shrouded sunlight played through its wings as if through painted glass, glittering along veins and tendons as it might through the wings of a locust.
It was terrible. It was fearsome beyond words. And yet… it was beautiful. Siderea could sense its beauty even through the mists of Colivar’s vision, could feel the power of that beauty wrapping itself around her soul as she stared at the creature, transfixing her as a hare must be transfixed in that terrible moment just before a hawk strikes. An ecstasy of helplessness. How much more powerful must it have seemed in that place and time, in the creature’s actual presence? It was clear now why this man could not endure the memory of it, nor even narrate details of his story without being overwhelmed by what he had seen.
“Make it clearer,” Colivar commanded. His tone was strange, unlike anything she had ever heard from him before. “Look upon it more closely, we need the details…”
Higher and higher the great beast rose, its wings beating the air with a force that made the bodies tremble upon their stakes. Though there was no smell coming forth from the vision, Siderea sensed the moment at which the witch’s bladder gave way in sheer terror. The creature turned its great head in his direction then, as if that had drawn its notice. She saw the man bind his power again, as much of it as he dared, and he used it to disguise his aspect, so that when the creature looked his way he would appear to be no more than another body upon a stake. The subterfuge was visible in the vision as a misty overlay, beneath which his true shape was apparent, but apparently the real spell had been effective.
The creature looked over the field of bodies once, twice, three times… and then vaulted higher into the heavens, moving quickly toward the south.
The vision began to fragment, then, and all of Colivar’s power could not make it do otherwise. Images flashed through the sorcerous mists like scenes glimpsed during a lightning storm at night: suddenly illuminated, quickly gone. The witch running through the woods. A camp littered with dead bodies. The witch tripping over the nearest one and landing facedown in the dirt. Screaming. Shadows of wings overhead. Crouching down among the corpses, binding power to appear as one of them. The rising of a reddened, swollen sun. Staggering through the woods toward the only hope of safety…
Faster and faster new images came, the visitor’s body beneath them now shuddering as if each one was a blow to his flesh. They were losing all coherency now, scenes from memory fading into nightmare, and from nightmare into simple madness, in less than a heartbeat. From the man’s ghostly pale lips came a strangled cry, as the air above the bed suddenly became filled with winged creatures, eyes burning like crimson stars. “They’re coming!” he gasped. “They will come here!” Then his body convulsed, chest thrust outward, blank eyes bulging—and with a terrible final cry it collapsed suddenly, arms and legs askew like the limbs of a broken doll.
The vision faded. The sorcerous mists dispersed. From someplace near the door, the physician whispered a prayer to his gods.
Then there was only silence.
Finally the young one, Sulah, dared, “Was that… ?”
Colivar nodded grimly. All the color was gone from his face, and in his eyes a terrible black fire burned. It made Siderea tremble just to look at him.
“Souleaters,” he whispered.
“I thought they were all killed,” Siderea offered. “Long ago.”
“Driven away. Not killed.” He looked up at her. She could not bear what was in his eyes, and quickly looked away. “An important distinction, my queen.”
Then he looked to the other two Magisters. “We must go to this place. There are questions that need answers, and we will only find them there.”
“Do you know where it is?” Fadir indicated the body on the bed, now patently lifeless. “He can hardly lead us now. Or even anchor enough sorcery to show us the way.”
Colivar considered for a moment, then asked Siderea, “Do you have the clothes he wore when he arrived?”
She nodded.
“Have them brought.”
She gestured for a serving girl to do so. The three of them waited in silence as the frightened girl scurried off to obey. After a moment she returned with a pile of clothing wrapped in linen that reeked even through its bindings. Atop it sat the few simple items the man had possessed: a knife, a small purse, a worn belt, a leather cap. Colivar picked up the last. There was a band around the edge adorned with small brass studs; he ran his fingernail under the frontmost part of the design, where it would have sat upon the man’s forehead. Then he held his finger up to the light, showing them the grains of dirt he had dislodged.
“The earth he picked up when he fell will guide us to the place,” he said.
“What will you do there?” Siderea asked.
The black eyes fixed on her. It was a terrible, hollow gaze. She shivered inwardly but did not look away.
“You have called other Magisters?” he asked.
She nodded.
“If they come, tell them to follow us.” He lowered his hand down over the sheets and rubbed off a bit of the dirt, so that it fell upon the coverlet. “I leave them this to facilitate the journey.”
“Colivar—”
He reached over the bed, across the twisted body, and caught up her hand. “Do not ask to accompany us. Please, my queen. I would be loathe to deny you anything, but even more loathe to bring you into the middle of what we may find there.”
She shut her eyes for a moment. Sighed. Then, slowly, nodded. “You will tell me what you learn?” she breathed. “Everything?”
He kissed her hand. “Of course, my queen.”
Then he released her and stepped back from the bed. Sulah and Fadir came to his side.
Colivar looked over at the servants. The physician was huddled white-faced against the door frame. The girl who had brought the clothing cowered in a far corner. “You will forget what you have seen here,” the Magister said quietly. Siderea saw them stiffen slightly as the power in his words took hold of them. “No news of this man’s journey nor his message shall pass your lips until your mistress commands it be so. His death was a natural thing, the consequence of simple exhaustion. Any stories he told before dying must have been from the madness of that state. You understand?”
The girl whispered, “Yes, my lord.” The physician simply nodded.
Colivar shut his eyes for a moment, gathering his power. Then he whispered words of binding… and slowly the air surrounding the three Magisters began to shimmer, like waves of summer heat over desert sands. Their features grew hazy to Siderea’s vision, then insubstantial, then faded out into the air like the substance of ghosts. Until nothing was left in the room but the Witch-Queen and her servants, the slowly cooling body upon the bed, and the lingering scent of fear. And silence.
Chapter Thirty-Two
It was strange, Andovan thought, that his moments of greatest strength were fueled by his moments of direst frustration. But so it was.
Gods knew, there was enough frustration to last him a while. His dreams no longer guided him clearly, which meant that every step he took might be taking him farther from his quarry, rather than toward her. He had no way to know. Some nights he had no dreams at all, and it was as if Colivar’s spells had lost all their power, leaving him stranded in the middle of nowhere without guidance, without focus, without oversight. If that was the case, then he was exactly what strangers on the road perceived him to be, a wanderer without destination or purpose. A pitiful thing for a royal prince to become, for sure.
The only thing he knew for certain now was that if his quarry had left Gansang just ahead of him the night the dream-towers fell, then every day in which he failed to find her increased the likelihood she would pass beyond his reach forever, and that made him rage inside against the gods, the stars, or whatever forces of Fate seemed nearest. There were rare moments when something suffused his veins that was almost his accustomed strength, and the weakness that was the Wasting seemed to loosen its stranglehold upon his spirit. But only for a brief while. Sooner or later it returned again, a suffocating shroud of enfeeblement that sapped his hope even as it sapped his physical strength. It was all he could do to keep moving each night, and to pray that Colivar’s spells were still active, even though he no longer sensed them. If his dreams would no longer guide his steps, perhaps instinct would.
The dreams themselves had become chaotic, with strange images that seemed to have no rhyme or reason. Burning gems. Bales of wool. A beheaded infant. The images were like pieces of a puzzle—or ten different puzzles—and he could not manage to assemble them into a meaningful whole. Did that mean Colivar’s power was failing him, or was he simply going mad? Or maybe the machinations of the foreign Magister had intended that all along, to separate him from his father’s house and then play with his mind—
Don’t think like that, he told himself. You will go mad for certain if you do.
Because she was almost certainly traveling, he traveled as well. Nameless villages provided him with fresh supplies and sometimes a bit of excitement as one local or another chose to challenge him… and then they passed into the mists behind him as though they had never existed. Dream stuff. All of his life felt like a dream now. It was a disconcerting sensation, and he feared more than anything it heralded some new and weaker stage in the progression of his illness. And so he forced himself to pay the price of a night’s room and board at various inns along the way, and listened from the shadows to the tales of other travelers, always hoping to hear some bit of news or gossip that would give him focus again. But there was none. He listened to tales with an empty heart well into the night, and left in the morning with no more sense of direction than he’d had when he arrived.
/ will not die in bed! he raged at the gods. But they were cold and silent. And the more he traveled, the less and less certain he was that he was heading toward anything other than an empty, meaningless death.
Kamala’s dreams had been bad enough that she hadn’t gotten more than an hour’s sleep the night before. Each time she put her head down on the pillow it seemed she was transported into the depths of the abyss again, and those few times when utter exhaustion took hold and she would actually slumber for a few moments, she awakened soon after with a film of cold sweat upon her skin, her heart pounding as if it might burst from her chest.
Whatever it was that was after her, it was coming closer. Or at least she feared that it was, so much so that her mind was becoming unhinged. Which possibility was more terrifying?
Two days had passed since she had spoken to Netando. One more and she would be on the road again, able to lose herself among his retinue of servants and guards. But could she bring herself to wait that long? The nightmares were running her ragged. They might stop if she left this place, if she put enough miles between herself and… what? What refuge was safe enough? She didn’t even know what it was that was coming after her, much less how to avoid it.
One thing was certain, and that was that hiding in her room only made things worse. In the great room at least she could distract herself, and perhaps learn a bit about the world she was now set loose in. Kamala the whore had known nothing about the lands outside her own city, and Ethanus the hermit had been more interested in teaching her the ins and outs of sorcery than the rise and fall of morati governments. Now, in this place, for the first time, the whole world was being laid out before her, but in bits and pieces that she must fit together like fragments of a vast, confusing puzzle. Nations and wars and monarchs and treaties and political triumphs and social travesties were paraded before her in dizzying array, and she struggled to assemble some kind of mental map to give them all context. She could never ask for a real map, of course, or any kind of help in understanding the shards of knowledge that were being thrown about so freely. If her youth in Gansang had taught her one thing, it was that a show of ignorance attracted trouble like rotting meat attracted flies. In this company, so conspicuously worldly, any request for help would surely draw attention to her. And attention was what she must avoid at all costs, if someone or something were truly hunting her.
Now and then she caught a glimpse of some other customer keeping quiet in the shadows of the room, as she was, and she wondered if they were equally lost, equally struggling. The men who filled the center stage did not seem to notice their audience. Or perhaps they simply did not care. Boisterous as they were, self-absorbed and progressively drunk as the night wore on, they probably imagined they were being admired by all who saw them.
When at last it seemed to Kamala that her head had absorbed as many random facts about the world that night as it might contain without bursting, and that sheer lack of sleep would soon overcome her no matter where she was, she rose from her chair and began to move toward the stairs that led to her room. The darkness waiting for her there was uninviting, to be sure, but it was preferable to falling asleep in this public place and suffering her nightmares here. Or worse.
But as she moved through the main area of the room,
trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, a young girl entered who froze her in her tracks.
Maybe it was the girl’s age. Maybe it was the look in her eyes, half fear and half determination. Maybe it was the awkward way in which she approached the crowd of drunken men, as if she knew in words what she wanted from them, but had not yet convinced her body to support the mission. Ten years old, perhaps twelve at the most, but Kamala could feel the tension rising from her flesh like heat from an oven.
It was like looking in a mirror. No, more accurately: it was like looking through a distorting lens, not at the present but at the past.
