Erienne’s heart raced and she dived for the orchard. She’d seen enough poorly maintained static spells to know the illusion was decaying towards the point of collapse.
Something was badly wrong. Surely the Al-Drechar’s strength could not be so seriously impaired this soon. A failing illusion was worse than none at all, sending flares of mana whipping through the spectra. To the trained eye, they’d be like a beacon fire in the dead of night. No clearer signal would be needed. All it would take was a master mage searching the southern coasts of Balaia and out to sea.
And then Dordover would come in force. It would be no contest.
Chapter 7
Two days after leaving Ilkar and The Unknown Warrior, Denser sat in his chambers, a warm fire heating the small study, its crackling frequently drowned out by the storm assailing Xetesk. Lightning flared and spat across the darkened heavens, thunder rolled and crashed, reverberating through the stone of the College, while rain drove against the shutters like the furious knocking of a thousand angry demons.
But no sound came from the pair in the study; Denser at his desk and the promising young lore diviner, Ciryn, in a chair by the fire. She was one of a relatively new breed trained to develop an empathy with certain aspects of another lore, in this case Dordover’s. And scattered around the room was every text and scrap of information Xetesk had on Dordovan lore and its meaning. It amounted to precious little but they had shed fragmented light, held together by educated guesswork, on one of the Tinjata passages Denser had stolen. It had been easy to see why Vuldaroq had ordered the translation removed.
Denser seethed at the danger Lyanna had unknowingly been in every day of her stay in Dordover, a death threat hanging over her. And Erienne could not have known of it, though she would surely have researched Tinjata during her years in Dordover. But, he reasoned, Vuldaroq would have seen this abhorrent passage withheld from her just as he had from Denser.
He reread the words they had pieced together, his anger and relief clashing uncomfortably. ‘. . . silenced forever . . . ritual . . . order of casting . . . and only then can the breath be stopped and the celebration begin . . . scattering of ashes accordingly . . . lore demands. ’
‘There’s no mistake in this?’ he asked.
Ciryn shrugged, her lank brown hair lifting on her shoulders as she did so, and looked at him though dark eyes set in a face too long to be anything but plain.
‘Almost certainly in the words, Master Denser, but not in the meaning.’
He shouldn’t have been surprised, he supposed. But the ritual magical killing the words implied made the Dordovans no better than the Black Wings. Just a little more precise.
Denser returned to a passage towards the end of the prophecy. So far, Ciryn had determined that it dealt with another danger to the Dordovan order. There were words describing some odd type of shielding but no apparent reference to a casting. It also suggested, Ciryn thought, that the shielder would die as a result of the process, or at least become what she called, ‘irrevocably altered’, but that the One Mage would grow in some undefined manner.
Much as Ciryn did, but less logically, Denser scoured the texts at his left hand, looking for anything that might unlock just one of the words of Dordovan lore for which they had, as yet, no clue. Their knowledge was so frustratingly slight. And the Prophecy was written in a lower lore. Had it concerned spell construction or generation, they would have read nothing whatever: the higher Dordovan languages remained completely closed to Xetesk.
Denser sighed and Ciryn looked up, frowning, her finger propping open a scroll, her teeth irritating at her bottom lip.
‘Master Denser?’
‘Sorry, but I can’t make any sense of this.’
‘But I’m afraid I think I can,’ said the diviner.
‘Why afraid?’
‘Because you are the child’s father. I’ll write down the piece I have translated,’ said Ciryn.
‘No, just tell me,’ said Denser.
‘Oh. All right.’ She took in a deep breath. ‘I don’t think it’s a shielding, I think that was the wrong interpretation. But it’s a way of bringing a One Mage from Night undamaged.’
‘How?’ A chance to really help his daughter was there for him to grasp.
‘By the father opening his mind to the storm and surrounding his child with the power of his mind, so showing the light the mage needs to complete Awakening.’
Denser felt suddenly cold. ‘But that would mean I would d—’
‘Be irrevocably changed, yes.’
The Circle Seven had taken Denser’s words in complete silence the following mid-morning. Deep under the Tower of the Lord of the Mount in the Laryon Chamber, they had granted him unwilling audience then sat transfixed as he recounted recent events in Dordover, spoken of Erienne’s letter and the work he and Ciryn had completed the night before.
The Circle Seven, Xetesk’s Tower Masters, chaired by Dystran, the fortunate incumbent of the Mount, had been expecting more pressure for research. What they heard was a cry for help and the raising of the spectre of a threat from another College.
‘How long since her disappearance?’ asked Ranyl, an ageing master, hairless and hunched but still vital in his magic.
‘More than sixty days.’ There was a hiss of indrawn breath.
‘And you still hope to find her,’ said Dystran. His tenure had aged his young face, his eyes looked heavy and his black hair was shot through with grey.
‘Yes,’ said Denser firmly. ‘There seems little doubt who she has gone to.’
Dystran chuckled. ‘Indeed, but we are now entering the realm of myth and blind belief. And we have no idea where these one-magic mages of yours live, should they turn out to be real.’
‘You should read more,’ responded Denser. ‘Ilkar says there’s significant evidence that they’re on or near Calaius and that’s backed up, albeit tenuously, by the leads we found in Dordover.’
‘So what do you want of us?’ Dystran regarded Denser over steepled fingers, affecting a pose of studied contemplation. Denser almost laughed. This Lord of the Mount was a ridiculous figure who had done nothing but engender political instability since his surprise tenure had begun more than five years before. A bigger surprise was that he remained alive. Ranyl was doubtless the architect of his continued survival. Denser wandered how long it would be before the old man made his move.
‘I need Xetesk to keep Dordover away. Their intentions are clear enough and we can’t let them take Lyanna back, or worse.’
Dystran’s eyes flashed fanatically cold. ‘Oh we’ll keep Dordover away, all right. We can’t have them meddle any further with the natural order. And you clearly understand your role. It’s certainly fortunate we’ve delayed implementation of the volunteer release plan your Unknown Warrior so desires, isn’t it?’
Denser shuddered. The Protectors would be marching again. The Unknown wasn’t going to like it.
Selik rode with a guard of eight Black Wings, his journey from Dordover to Arlen pausing in the ruins of Denebre. He wanted to show his men what it was they were fighting for. Not that they were wavering. It just never hurt to reinforce beliefs.
But what he saw didn’t merely do that, it added a whole new dimension. And for Selik personally, it set his anger raging afresh and brought an ache to his dead eye. The nine men rode slowly around the edges of the once beautiful lakeside town. They couldn’t even get to what had been the centre; chasms in the earth blocked their way.
And perhaps that was fortunate. The stench of death was everywhere. Above the wind, the buzzing of myriad flies was a warning to keep away and everywhere they looked, rats scurried. Disease would be running into the rivers and soaking into the ground. Selik hated to think about the state of the poor innocents lying dead and unburied.