Defiant Peaks (The Hadrumal Crisis) Page 6

  As the magelight faded, she looked down to see what she had landed in. What was it her first teacher in Hadrumal had said so often? Chance can always be relied on to curb any mage’s inclination to arrogance.

  At least whoever had celebrated the solstice so early and so unwisely wasn’t still here vomiting. Jilseth scraped the noisome mess off the side of her boot as she looked around to see if anyone might have noticed her arrival.

  Kerrit Osier’s house was a narrow three-storey dwelling, one of a handful surrounding the yard tucked back from the bustling street. This was one of Relshaz’s more humble districts. The buildings were white with lime wash not marble, brick-built tenements five and six storeys high. The residents lived their lives on their balconies and with open doors and windows rather than hidden behind high walls and gates.

  Looking through the yard’s entry to the street, Jilseth saw the festival’s jollities well underway. Leather and clay flagons of wine were passed from hand to hand and tossed from one garland-bedecked window to the next.

  Directly opposite this alley, locals sat upon a sturdy flight of steps leading up to the first apartments built above the damp-prone cellars. Sharing wine and stronger liquors, they gnawed on skewers of spiced and salted meat cooked over a charcoal brazier set beside the steps.

  ‘Fair festival, fair maiden!’ An exuberant youth noticed Jilseth. He raised a glass bottle to salute her, the contents sloshing in the flickering light of torches lashed to the balcony overhead. Despite the seasonal chill, he wore only loose cotton trews in the Archipelagan style, his bare chest bronzed with mixed mainland and Aldabreshin blood.

  Jilseth cursed herself for a fool for catching his eye. She climbed the steps to Kerrit’s front door and lifted the brass ring to knock briskly.

  ‘Fair maiden!’

  She turned to see the bare-chested youth running towards her with the graceless ease of the spectacularly drunk. Jilseth knocked again but the door stayed obdurately shut, the windows still dark.

  ‘That’s not a festival dress,’ he scolded.

  Jilseth could hardly deny it. Her grey wool gown was buttoned high to the neck and tight to the wrist, wholly unlike the loosely draped and low cut dresses which Relshazri women favoured, in silks dyed every colour to be found in a sunset and often slashed to reveal curves of bosom and thigh.

  She knocked on Kerrit’s door again. Where was Master Resnada?

  The lad sprang up the steps and slid an arm around her waist. Before Jilseth realised what he intended, he pulled her close and kissed her hard. When she cried out in instinctive protest, his tongue slid into her mouth. The pungent fumes of white brandy nearly choked her as he dropped his bottle to grope for her breasts.

  Jilseth didn’t know whether to be more outraged or astonished. She punched the bare-chested youth hard in the midriff with an unseen fist of elemental air. He collapsed and tumbled coughing down the steps to sprawl amid the shards of his brandy bottle.

  A key turned in the lock and the door opened to reveal Master Resnada’s bearded face and the tip of a wickedly pointed knife.

  ‘Madam Mage?’ Alarmed, he opened the door wider. ‘Are you all right?’

  The apothecary was a sturdily built man of common height with greying hair and tidily trimmed whiskers. He could have passed without comment through any marketplace across Ensaimin or Caladhria, though the leathery tan of his skin and his accent indicated a lifetime spent in Relshaz.

  ‘It’s nothing of consequence.’ Jilseth left her would-be assailant fighting for the breath to curse his misfortune. ‘Where is Kerrit?’

  ‘This way.’ Resnada relocked the door as she entered.

  ‘Are you alone?’ Jilseth was surprised not to see the usual covey of apprentices eager to learn whatever the master apothecary could teach them.

  ‘Since I’m tending a wizard, yes.’ Resnada led her through the tidily furnished sitting room where Kerrit was accustomed to debate with his friends and visitors.

  Not only to debate. Jilseth noted a small table with a white raven board and all the other pieces set ready for a game. The carved and painted wooden figures waited motionless to see if the forest fowl could drive the fabled bird out of the woodland or if the raven could find sanctuary from their mobbing amid the trees and thickets. She wondered which side Master Kerrit preferred to play.

  Resnada continued into the neat, tiled kitchen at the rear. ‘Upstairs.’

  ‘Do your other customers resent you tending Kerrit?’ Jilseth wondered if Mellitha and Velindre knew that the apothecary’s trade was suffering from his association with wizardry.

  ‘Some have seen fit to rebuke me.’ Resnada smiled without much humour. ‘Their indignation generally fades when they find themselves in need of more medicaments.’

  ‘The Archmage will make good on your losses as well as paying for your care of Master Kerrit,’ Jilseth began stiffly.

  He waved her to silence. ‘Kerrit is my friend. I’ve known him since he first came to the city. I would no more abandon him than I would my own brother and I assuredly don’t look for payment. Upstairs, if you please.’

  Dropping her cloak on a chair, Jilseth followed the apothecary up the boxed staircase curving through a tight half circle to reach the upper floor. Two doors set at right angles stood open. One revealed the larger chamber at the front of the house. It was lined with crowded bookcases surrounding a leather-topped table thickly layered with papers. The rear room was Kerrit’s bedchamber, although at first glance, the only difference was the bed amid the book-laden shelving rather than a table.

  A single lamp burned on a hook beside the door. Resnada skirted the bed to lay his surgical knife on the windowsill beside a sturdy leather coffer holding other mysterious instruments, a multitude of small bottles and a silver cup for mixing doses. The window overlooked an alley where revellers ran back and forth, hollering and whooping.

  ‘Master Kerrit?’ Apprehensive, Jilseth approached the rumpled bed. ‘How are you this evening? Is your ankle troubling you?’

  The stick Kerrit had been using ever since he’d been so brutally attacked was propped against the bed. The apothecary had guessed that the wizard’s foot had been repeatedly stamped on, to break so many of the small bones as well as his ankle itself.

  Kerrit lay amid the pillows and quilts in breeches and a creased shirt. He hugged a tattered shawl around his hunched shoulders and glared at Jilseth. ‘Who are you? How did you get into my house?’

  Jilseth raised placating hands. ‘Master Resnada—’

  ‘Meddling fool!’ Kerrit spat at the apothecary.

  Jilseth was startled. Kerrit had always been an amiable and courteous patient, even in those most painful early days following his injuries.

  Resnada ignored the mage’s hostility. ‘How is your headache?’

  ‘Murderous.’ Kerrit clutched at his thinning hair.

  Jilseth could see a lurid scar beneath his pale fingers. She recalled the gash in Kerrit’s scalp which had bled so long and so profusely. She also realised that he had lost weight markedly since she had last seen him. With sagging jowls and dark shadows under his eyes he looked far older than his middle years.

  ‘Master Mage! Do you not remember me?’

  Kerrit looked up, blinking. ‘Of course. You... you are...’

  Jilseth saw a haunted look in his eyes. In the next instant, he snapped at her.

  ‘Of course I remember you, though I do not recall inviting you into my home. Please leave. I have a most tiresome headache—’

  ‘Drink this.’ Resnada passed him the silver cup.

  Jilseth was both surprised and relieved to see Kerrit dutifully swallow the nostrum.

  ‘I’ll see Madam Jilseth to the door.’ The apothecary nodded towards the staircase.

  Kerrit merely grunted, settling himself amid his pillows and quilts.

  Jilseth took the hint and went downstairs. Resnada followed her as far as the kitchen. He took a bottle of wine from a high shelf along with two
goblets of coloured Aldabreshin glass.

  ‘These headaches are getting worse and his memory and temper alike are becoming more erratic.’ He took a small knife from the drawer in the well-scrubbed table and pared the wax from the bottle’s neck.

  Jilseth sat on a stool. ‘If he’s in a great deal of pain—’

  ‘That’s not the reason.’ Resnada’s tone allowed for no argument as he levered the cork out with the knife tip. ‘I have seen this before following a head wound, even long after the patient seems to have recovered. There’s more besides. He hasn’t touched a book for the last four days. He says that he’s too tired but I believe he now struggles to read. He will not admit it though so I cannot establish if the problem is with his eyes or his ability to comprehend the words on the page.’

  Now Jilseth was seriously worried. ‘What do you want from Hadrumal?’

  The apothecary poured two modest glassfuls of wine and hooked a second stool out from under the table with a deft foot.

  ‘You are a mage born to the earth?’ He betrayed the usual mix of curiosity and nervousness of the mundane born broaching the subject of wizardly affinity.

  ‘I am.’ Jilseth took a sip of wine to allow Resnada a moment to ask his next question.

  ‘Do you have any skill with bones?’ He rolled a pellet of wax between his stubby fingers.

  ‘Bones?’ Jilseth hadn’t expected this. ‘No, I’m sorry.’

  She knew of earth mages who made a study of skeletons of men and beasts, striving to understand the slow processes that bound minerals into living tissue. Some of those pursued the challenge of crafting spells to mend broken bones or to reshape those which had mended awry. It was a slow and painstaking process, according to the few accounts in Hadrumal’s libraries.

  Such studies held no appeal for Jilseth. She had been fascinated from the first by the far more complex magic of necromancy. Only an earth mage could use the infinitesimal traces which lingered in dead flesh to discover how a life had ended. Precious few of the small number who tried proved able to master the necessary spells.

  Resnada swallowed a mouthful of wine. ‘I fear the fracture to Kerrit’s skull has left something amiss within. There may be slow bleeding or some splinter of bone making mischief.’

  The fine vintage soured on Jilseth’s tongue. ‘Let me bespeak Hadrumal.’ Planir would know of any mage with the skills to help.

  The apothecary shook his head. ‘If you cannot help with your own magic, we’ll be better served by the temple. Can you bring one of Ostrin’s priesthood here?’ He glanced up at the ceiling. ‘I dare not leave him alone.’

  ‘Tonight?’ Jilseth hadn’t thought that Kerrit looked mortally ill.

  Resnada looked at her, beseeching. ‘If his brain is swelling, the longer that goes unchecked, the more his wits will suffer. I can try a trepanning but that brings its own risks. Ostrin’s priests will be able to learn what Kerrit cannot tell me, so we can decide the best course of action.’

  Jilseth wondered if the apothecary realised that the local priests’ healing lore was in truth aetheric magic, the last tattered remnants of the Artifice which had once underpinned the Old Tormalin Empire. Those arcane enchantments were now reduced to meaningless syllables learned by rote and mouthed over the sick and dying to inconsistent and often indifferent effect.

  This was what Kerrit had studied for these past ten years, filling his house with gleanings from temple and shrine archives, ancient letters sent between Relshaz’s merchant houses, even copies of the Magistracy’s proclamations from generations ago.

  Jilseth had no argument with seeking knowledge for its own sake. That ideal underpinned Hadrumal’s existence. But she was at a loss to see the value of studying an obsolete magic which Kerrit couldn’t even use, precluded by his own magebirth from working even the most insignificant aetheric enchantment.

  But if the apothecary was confident that Relshaz’s priests could help show him how best to succour Kerrit, Jilseth would ask for their help without delay.

  ‘Is there anyone particular I should ask for?’

  ‘Brother Tinoan,’ Resnada said promptly. ‘One of Ostrin’s senior deacons.’

  The title meant nothing to Jilseth. Hadrumal had no shrines and she was Hadrumal-born, her family settled on the wizard isle for five generations. She looked around the immaculate kitchen. ‘Please open the window.’

  Ordinarily she wouldn’t risk a translocation from within a building but at present she judged it would be more hazardous to be seen working magic outside this house.

  Resnada shoved at the metal window frame. It squealed open to allow muted music and sounds of celebration into the silent kitchen.

  Jilseth wove her spell. This time she sought the hidden niche which Velindre had first shown her, tucked between two buttresses on the seaward side of Relshaz’s great marble temple. She took care to ward her magic against the elemental power of the waters, bolstered by the tidal surge summoned by the Greater Moon’s full. Jilseth could only be thankful that the Lesser had barely reached its first quarter.

  As soon as her affinity was safely balanced, Master Resnada’s inarticulate astonishment faded from her hearing. All sensation was overwhelmed by the spell and then she felt solid ground beneath her boot soles once again.

  She stood on the temple’s wide foundation. Jilseth could sense that this ground had once been the highest hillock in the delta, even before the river had been tamed by the Relshazri network of canals linking the inland wharves facing Caladhria and Lescar with the deep-water docks for sea-going vessels.

  She smelled the salt wind from the sea. For a timeless instant, the elemental power of those boundless waters surged into her spell. She didn’t merely feel the sullen brine confined within Relshaz’s harbour walls, nor even the greater expanse of the Gulf of Lescar, bounded to the east by Tormalin’s long thrust southwards and to the west by the bulwark of Caladhria overlooking the northernmost Archipelagan islands.

  Jilseth’s mage senses brushed against the immensity of the oceans, beyond the Cape of Winds to the east and past Cape Attar to the west. She could even feel, infinitely faint and some impossible distance away, the ties between those two oceans, divided by the Archipelago. Every sea and ocean was ultimately linked through the endless circulation of water through river and tide, cloud and rain.

  Gasping, she thrust out a hand and welcomed the cold shock of the temple’s marble wall, luminous in the moonlight. Her affinity drew her backwards through the rock’s aeons-old existence. She felt the ring of the mason’s chisels and then the shuddering crack as the block was prized from the quarries in the hills above Feverad in distant Tormalin. The tremors faded, soothed by the calm of countless undisturbed generations until she felt the warmth of the rising fires deep beneath the earth which had transformed the once humble limestone into this radiant marble.

  Jilseth opened her eyes and smoothed her skirts. Shivering, she realised that she’d left her cloak on the chair in Kerrit’s kitchen. There was nothing to be done about that beyond summoning up a breath of elemental fire to ward off the cold sea breeze. She took a cautious step forward and looked to either side.

  The harbour-side path separating the temple from the low wall lapped by the gulf’s dark waters was deserted. Jilseth made her way cautiously along this windowless face of the mighty temple. The uproar from the crowds in the vast square on the inland side grew louder.

  As she turned the corner and walked to the front of the temple, she contemplated the unruly celebrations swirling around the two great fountains in the centre of the flagstoned expanse. Silk-clad Relshazri bedecked with jewels mingled unconcerned with the city’s ragged and filthy, bottles and flagons passed from hand to hand.

  Snatches of music rose above the tumult. Jilseth picked out several huddles of pipers and viol players around the fringes of the crowd. In the open space between the fountains and the temple, jugglers tossed rainbow knots of tasselled cords and glittering glass balls. Painted tumblers display
ed their skills; girls flipping themselves from hands to feet and back again before their partners tossed them high onto a waiting strongman’s broad shoulders.

  Would-be worshippers waited quietly in long lines four and five abreast. Every few moments they advanced a little further up the steps towards the temple’s great double doors. Torches burned in brackets high on the white marble pillars supporting the pediment laden with statues of the gods and goddesses. The flames struck a golden sheen from the hammered bronze sheathing the recessed entrances all across the front of the temple.

  The hollow darkness within was guarded by priests and priestesses barring every one of those thresholds. No one entered without dropping some offering into the deep wooden bowls presented by these guardians.

  Jilseth recalled that her coin purse was in her cloak pocket in Kerrit’s kitchen and besides, it only held a few silver marks and pennies for Hadrumal’s wine- and cook-shops. Mainlanders in taverns claimed that Archmage Planir could pluck solid coin out of thin air but if that was truly one of his secrets, he’d never shared it with Jilseth. Drawing pure metal from ore-bearing rock was a slow process by wizardly standards and besides, she no more carried such ore around than she did gold coin.

  Would these supposedly pious men and women let her into the temple without paying their fee? She might be doing the Relshazri religious a disservice but Jilseth doubted it.

  Since she had embarked on her travels around the mainland at the Archmage’s request, Jilseth had met priests and priestesses as varied in character as any other selection of humanity. Among those nobles who so often inherited a shrine and its obligations with the rest of their holdings, she had encountered both the truly devout and the mindlessly sanctimonious. Among those who had chosen to swear their life away in the service of some unseen, unquantifiable deity, she had met both the calculatedly venal and those whose dedication was clearly rewarded in some intangible fashion far beyond the food and shelter bought by the alms given to their shrine.

  Master Resnada had said that time was of the essence. Jilseth retreated into the shadows and wrapped a veil of air around herself. Walking out unseen into the torchlight, she headed for the nearest door.