Roar, page 25
“Explain!”
“Have you got pen and paper?” He didn't ask her if she could write while she was in this state – because he wasn't completely sure she was asleep and dreaming.
“Yes,” she agreed, sounding a little suspicious.
“Good. These are the spells I'm using.” He proceeded to tell her about the sleeping wind and more importantly the falling star. That spell was a gift from the gods, and he suspected that her wizards would have even more success with it than him. After all, they had mouths to speak the words and hands to gesture with.
It took a little while to get all of the details to her. Perhaps that was because she was blind and writing wasn't easy for her. But eventually she was done and ready for some answers. Like what Thorm proposed her people should do with their new war spell.
“Cripple the King's armies of course,” he told her simply. “You know where the King's other troll pits are. One wizard armed with these two spells can destroy them. And you have the avaryads to fly them in and out at night. With these spells you could take out the pits one by one. Once they're gone that will eliminate one of the King's shock troops. His plans of invasion end.”
“For now.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But maybe forever. You see the trolls aren't just his shock troops. You told me that yourself. They're also the means by which he keeps the people of the Volden Plains in order everywhere outside of the Eternal City since he can't use his wizards. Without them, and without his wizards to enforce his will, he must rely on his soldiers. Unfortunately for him, he's been busy executing them. That's likely to have severely eroded their loyalty. And in any case they can't fight wars if they're keeping order.”
“Getting rid of the trolls should also badly weaken his ability to control the various nobles and lords.”
And that he figured, was how you started a civil war. But even if it wasn't, it bloodied the King's nose and made it impossible for him to start his planned invasion.
“And you think it's that simple to overthrow the Eternal King?!” The Oracle still sounded unimpressed. “People have tried and failed to do that for a thousand years.”
“And as I keep trying to explain: This isn't about overthrowing him. It's about crippling his ability to wage war. Bloodying his nose publicly and making him look weak. Forcing him to hold back his armies to defend himself.”
“And then what?”
“Then I don't know,” he answered her honestly. “But one step at a time. Let's end his dreams of conquest first. After that we can think about the rest.”
The Oracle's answer was only silence for a long while after that as she presumably considered his idea, and for a time he thought the conversation was over. But eventually she broke her silence.
“You're also trying to free your people? The wizards?” She asked the question nervously, as if she was afraid of the answer.
“I'm trying to free everyone,” he corrected her. “From the King's rule.”
“And how are you going to do that?”
“I don't know yet. But I will.” And that was his intention. But it was a question of finding the right place to attack and the right spells to use. He didn't have them yet.
“But I suppose you won't do what we want?”
“Probably not,” he agreed. “I don't want to fight in a war. Your way is likely to get too many innocent people hurt. I don't want that.”
“At least you're honest, I suppose.” She sighed meaningfully at him, obviously irritated by his words.
“And I have a pretty smile too!” Not that she would ever see it, he guessed – unless of course she could see in her dreams. He really had no idea what her powers as an oracle allowed her to see. But she might be luckier if she couldn't see him. People didn't like to see lions close up. Especially if they were smiling! In fact they tended to run screaming.
“But you're going to get yourself killed for little purpose,” the Oracle continued calmly, ignoring his cheek. “Sooner or later you'll be caught and killed. Your head will decorate a wall in the King's palace. And everything will return to how it was.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But at least my hands will be clean.” Then he thought about it for a moment. “My paws.”
“I will pray for you.” The Oracle shook her head sadly, as if considering him a lost cause. And maybe he was. But her plan could not be his. “And I will keep searching for your family. Despite your doubts I have been trying. So have others. But there has been nothing so far.”
Then she left him, and he was able to return to his sleep. But even as the waking dream faded he found himself troubled. A painful question followed him into the darkness.
What if she was right?
Chapter Twenty Four
Life in Strongheart was dull. That was the kindest way Camille could describe it. She could have called it far worse. Confusing, annoying, sometimes infuriating, often lonely and mostly pointless. But for the most part it was just dull. Or it was once she had come to terms with the confusion of having a city contained within a single building and filled with magic!
How could a single building be a small city? She still didn't understand how that worked. Nor how this one building could be built in so many different styles and made out of so many different materials. It even had streets and open air sections! An impossibility surely? And yet it did. Everything here was connected. Every house and hall was part of the same structure. Every street just a roofless or glass roofed section of the whole. And though nothing seemed to match, it was all part of the one structure.
Camille had been assigned quarters in the Sorcerer's Hall – a ramshackle collection of three and four story wooden houses joined together into a quartet of streets surrounding a central open air meeting place – and told not to leave. Camille had ignored the direction – a suggestion surely! – and left whenever she could. The Sorcerer's Hall was where the fell witches, sorcerers and hags came together. But while she was the daughter of one of the most powerful fell witches ever and the niece of another, she had no magic of her own. She felt completely out of place. Added to her woes, everyone there knew it. They looked at her pityingly as they passed her by. They denied it, pretended she was imaging things, but she knew she was right.
Officially she was here to be tested. But the testing had ended almost as soon as it had begun. She had no magic. She was no fell witch. No wizard or druid either. She had some skill in dreaming but she was no dreamer. There was simply nothing magical about her. And in this place, that made her a failure. The thought that she might be forced to stay here for many years to come filled her with dread.
She didn't think she could stand it.
She also hated the fact that so far she had been unable to contact her mother. Camille had been to half a dozen dream weavers to help her contact her mother in the Great Dream. But though they had searched extensively they still had not found her mother.
There were many possible reasons for that. The usual one was simply that her mother wasn’t asleep at the time they had tried to contact her. But they had tried half a dozen times, and at all hours of the night. Had she stopped sleeping? Or was the damage that had been done to her by the King's foul potions now so great that it was making her unrecognisable even in the Great Dream? Camille feared the latter.
Potaine had said that it had been getting harder and harder to speak with her these past years. That even in her sleep when her soul was free of all the drugs and she was once more the woman she had been, she did not always make sense. She'd also said that it was becoming harder for her mother to carry what she learned in her dreams back to the waking world and act on it.
Her mother was losing the fight for her soul and Camille was desperate to stop that happening. She had to save her!
But if she couldn't contact her. If she couldn't tell her mother that she was safe in Erisen, and that it was time for her to escape the Volden Plains any way she could, Camille knew that her mother would be doomed. Literally trapped in a living hell – before she was physically thrown in one. It was worse than anything Nyx could dream up. And yet there was nothing she could do about it.
That was why she would sneak out of the great city building whenever she could. She needed to escape her fear for a little while. It was what she had done this day.
Of course, she didn't go far – she had nowhere to go – but she had discovered that there were many places outside the building itself, where she could find a seat and stare at the sky and the fields, and let her thoughts wander, before turning her mind to the pages of a book. It was one of the few joys about this place that she had discovered. The Wizard's Quarter had a five story high library in its heart, and not all of their books were about spellcasting. They had a great many books on the history of the world as well which she found fascinating. A history she had never known. No one in the Plains had. The others were right about one thing – the Eternal King had been busy rewriting history during his thousand year reign. And as it seemed she might be in Erisen for a while, she had decided that she needed to learn how to read Doranic – something else the books could help her with.
Perhaps she would have been happier if they had provided her with a room in the Wizard's Quarter. There at least the building style was familiar. They had straight lines and were built of brick and stone. The streets were straight too – even if they did have wooden floorboards instead of cobbles or grass. By contrast in the Sorcerer's Hall the buildings were made of wood, they had seemingly been grown together rather than nailed, and they bowed and bent and curved in strange ways. Some looked to be ridiculously top heavy and she had felt sure they would soon fall over. The streets were as bent and twisted as the buildings, and they were paved with grass instead of cobbles. But oddly the grass was still inside the building. A glass roofed building.
But even in the Wizard's Quarter, though some things were familiar, she would still be trapped there and might remain so for the rest of her life. Trapped in a place where magic was everything and she had none. Trapped and unable to help her mother. Was it any wonder she needed to escape from time to time?!
The spot she had found to hide away in this time was a garden bench nestled between two cherry trees. It overlooked fields full of wheat, and was probably as close to freedom as she was ever going to find. At least as she sat there, pretending to read but mostly staring out into the distance, she could imagine a possible life for herself even if she couldn't claim it.
The sight of a young man running along between the fields three times as fast as he should be able to reminded her yet again that this wasn't her home. Normal people couldn't run like that. Not where she was from. But she watched him do it regardless of what was possible, awed by his speed. Surprisingly, it turned out that the man was coming to see her.
The young man was a shaman, his magic coming from the animal spirit that lived and breathed inside him – at least that was her understanding of them. But wherever it came from, he still had magic. He was a part of this place while she never would be. And he had freedom too! Freedom to bother her when she just wanted to be alone. But it would have been rude she supposed to tell him to just go away, even if she felt grumpy enough to do just that.
“Greetings.”
“And you.” She smiled politely but barely lifted her nose from her book. Even though she wasn't really concentrating on it, she didn't want to be disturbed. Really, she just wanted to sit and stare at the distant fields and the trees and the mountains beyond and let the hours roll on by. She had enough problems in her life.
Besides, he was young. All the students were young of course. And while he wasn't the youngest around – she thought he might have been eighteen, and just about ready to graduate and return to his people – he was young enough to annoy her. A young man with too much vitality for her to deal with just then. All shamans had too much vitality. It was part of their gift.
Then again was that true, she wondered? Or was it her? Had she been born old and serious? A crone before her time? And had the years of being locked away in a dungeon, and before that in a slightly bigger prison camp, simply robbed her of her strength? She thought it might be. Because she was only in her twenties. She should be enjoying her life. Doing something with it. But she wasn't and he was. That annoyed her.
“You come here a lot lately.”
“I like to read out in the sunshine.” She showed him the book she was reading and then returned her attention to it. Unfortunately he didn't seem to get the hint. Instead he sat down beside her.
“You were with the escaped prisoners from the Eternal City, weren't you?”
“I'm not supposed to talk about that.” And really she wondered, how did he even know that? Though of course people here gossiped just as they did everywhere else. Magic didn't change the basics of peoples' nature.
“So I was told. But I really only wanted to hear about the lion. Is it true he defeated a fell witch in battle?”
Camille stared at him evenly, wondering just what she was supposed to say. Whatever she said would undoubtedly be wrong. Her aunt would not thank her for saying it was true and the Oracle would tell her off if she lied about it – or if she admitted the truth. In any case it was another thing she wasn’t supposed to talk about.
Not that she was interested in talking about it anyway. Ever since she’d arrived here three or four weeks before, her thoughts had been solely focused on her mother and the very real possibility that she would soon be flung into that accursed Tri-consular Orb. Damned body and soul. Even though Thorm had hurt her mother, it didn't matter compared to that. Nothing else mattered.
Eventually she decided on evasion.
“Why do you want to know about that?”
“Because there are all sorts of stories about it, and they’re being spread right across Erisen. Some are even calling him a sphinx. And of course here in Strongheart the sorcerers and the wizards are both now trying to claim him as one of their own. But we don't think he is.”
“We who? And you don’t think he’s what? A wizard, a sorcerer or a sphinx?”
“The student shamans.”
“Let me guess,” she sighed as she finally put aside her book and focused her attention on him. “You think he's a shaman.” She knew he did, just as she knew why he was asking. There was a rivalry between the students in the various quarters. Sometimes it ran to magical challenges, sometimes to sporting contests – which naturally enough the shamans won. But why would the shamans want to claim Thorm Endorson as one of their own? Why would anyone? He was anything but a hero. After all, he had hurt her mother. Even if it might have been some sort of accident. Or because her mother had attacked him. He was still responsible for her injuries. She knew it. Everyone should know it.
Her aunt knew it of course. But she was bound to the Oracle's service and therefore could not act. Elspeth knew Thorm was dangerous. She still had nightmares of the green eyed lion trying to kill her. And Mara had told her of the man's cruelty and coldness. That he seemed like a good man to those who barely knew him, but that he was a liar. And a very capable one at that. Of course, she was somewhat biased. Perhaps though the young shaman hadn't heard that he was a teller of untruths? Maybe he believed Thorm’s lies? Or rather the lies that had been spread about him.
Or maybe he believed the strange stories about the lion wizard battling the Eternal King. And of his having discovered – or rediscovered – an ancient war spell. Ever since then each arcane college had tried to claim the wizard lion as one of their own. They really did think he was some sort of hero. A shining beacon of hope in a dark world. They seemed to think that the spell might actually help them defeat the Eternal King once and for all.
That annoyed her. She understood that it was a powerful spell. That it was ancient. A spell that had somehow made it through a thousand years of the Eternal King's rewriting of history. And even that it was a wonder that Thorm had somehow stumbled across it. But in the end it was just a spell. And they were facing the Eternal King. He was called that for a reason. He had never been defeated. He never would be. Not by time. Not by the temples. Not by armies. And not by wizards with a shiny new spell. He simply couldn't be killed.
But every time she went to the library she was greeted with a barrage of student chatter about the spell of falling star! These days it was almost the only topic of conversation they had. The people here – well the magic users to be precise – thought it was some sort of wonder. Really though, it was just a damned spell! And Thorm hadn't created it – he'd just found it in a musty old book!
“Well, of course he’s a shaman.” The boy shrugged and then nodded as if wondering why she should even doubt it.
“He doesn't have a human form and as far as I know shamans don't change shape. And he has green eyes and casts spells.” She reminded the young man of the obvious problems with his theory.
