Allin shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “Velindre thinks it’s just some confidence play to trick gullible Lescaris out of their coin.”
“Why Lescaris?” Temar was puzzled.
Allin sighed. “Trying to see something of the Otherworld, it’s rather a Lescari obsession. Everyone’s lost so many friends, families get split up, sons go off to fight and never return. People use all manner of divinations to try and find out what happened to loved ones; rune-telling, Soluran prediction, Aldabreshin omens.”
“I am confused.” Temar rubbed a hand over his hair. “What has this to do with Demoiselle Tor Arrial?”
“I wondered if it might be aetheric enchantment if it wasn’t elemental magic.” The plump girl set her jaw, giving an unexpected strength to her round face. “I wondered if the Demoiselle might come with me?” Allin raised hopeful eyes to Temar.
He didn’t think it fair to tell her the scathing response she’d probably get. “Will Velindre not accompany you?”
“She has a dinner engagement,” said Allin regretfully. “Tormalin mages gather for Festival like everyone else and there are wizards she wants to ask about the status of magic hereabouts.”
Temar was diverted by sudden curiosity. “What do wizards do in Tormalin?”
Allin looked at him with faint surprise. “They earn a living, same as everywhere else. Those with fire affinity help metalworkers and foundries, those linked to water find work with shipbuilders or something like that. But there’s still a lingering suspicion of wizards in Tormalin, so they’re only ever given short-term work, for a specific project usually.”
“The mages in Kel Ar’Ayen are none too ready to lend magical aid to such mundane tasks. They always make it out to be some great favour.” Temar shook his head. “But why are mages so suspect on this side of the ocean?”
“After the Chaos?” Allin looked puzzled. “Hasn’t anyone told you this?”
Temar smiled appealingly at her. “We are generally too busy with the day-to-day business of living in Kel Ar’Ayen for idle chatter.”
“Oh.” Allin looked round the room for a moment before visibly making a decision. “I don’t suppose it reflects very well on wizardry, so that’s probably why no one’s mentioned it. Some warfare in the Chaos was backed with elemental magic. Fire and flood, lightning, they were all used on battlefields. Other magic was wrought against encampments, armies found themselves mired in bogs where they’d been riding through pasture, that kind of thing.”
“So Houses backed by wizards had a significant advantage,” nodded Temar with interest.
Allin grimaced. “Magic’s a powerful ally in the short term, but in the longer term it’s not that crucial. You can drive an army off a battlefield with waves of flame but magic won’t help you hold the land you win. A single spellcaster soon exhausts himself; Cloud-Master Otrick makes sure every apprentice mage learns that. In any case, there were never that many wizards willing to turn their talents to warfare and once other Houses started banishing any mage-born — or doing worse—there were even fewer. But prejudice against magic in Tormalin persists.”
“But Artifice held the Empire together.” Temar frowned. “Adepts in aetheric magic were highly respected. Everyone acknowledged that their work served the greater good.”
“And the magic went away and everything fell into Chaos?” Allin raised her eyebrows. “Who do you suppose they blamed?”
“If what Guinalle says is true, they were right to do so.” Temar bit his lip. “It seems the struggles of the Kel Ar’Ayen Adepts against the ancient Elietimm somehow undermined the whole aetheric balance underpinning Artifice.”
“I heard some scholars visiting Hadrumal from Vanam arguing about that,” Allin nodded. “Wizardry did some truly dreadful things, before Trydek brought the mage-born under his rule, and the tales are still told, doubtless exaggerated with each repeating. It’s small wonder all most people believe is magic is magic and it’s suspect, whatever its hue or origin. There are precious few people outside Hadrumal who even know about aetheric magic and its role in the Old Empire. The world has moved on, more than you know.”
“More than I am allowed to know, it would seem,” said Temar lightly, but anger sparked a gleam in his eye.
Allin looked at her hands. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“I will not tell anyone you did.” Temar looked thoughtfully at Allin. “The wizards I know mostly want to live in Hadrumal pursuing their scholarship. You are not much like them.”
Allin hesitated. “Scholarship’s important. Velindre spends her life trying to understand the work of the winds, what happens to air when it is warmed by fire or cooled over water. The more she understands, the more precise her magic can be, the more exact her control over the element of her affinity. It takes little more than instinct to raise a gale if you’re mage-born, but to use air to cool a sick child’s fever, to carry a word across a thousand leagues, that takes a depth of understanding that only study can give. That’s the whole reason for Hadrumal’s existence.”
“But such study is not for you?” guessed Temar.
Allin blushed. “I want to learn enough to make my magic useful, but I’m no scholar.”
“Then what will you do with your useful magecraft?” asked Temar, teasing a little.
“I’d like to go home but magic’s even more suspect in Lescar than anywhere else.” A hint of tears shone faintly in Allin’s eyes. “Each Duke’s afraid someone else will enlist a wizard to fight on their side.”
“Which might at least bring all that sorry warfare to an end,” said Temar curtly. He waited a moment for the girl to regain her composure. “Forgive me. So, if you can not go home, what would you do?”
“There are Lescari in exile all over what you knew as the Empire, mostly in Caladhria or Tormalin.” Allin looked at the paper lying on the table. “Some do very well for themselves, settle and grow rich, but others struggle. There must be some way to use magecraft to earn a living from the wealthy and to help the weak better themselves.”
Temar studied the handbill himself, the silence in the room like a held breath.
“But Velindre dislikes you associating with other Lescari?” He set his jaw.
“Oh, no,” said Allin, flustered. “She just doesn’t think this is worth pursuing, and in any case she has other calls on her time.”
Temar looked at the handbill again and clicked his tongue absently against his teeth. “This could be Artifice, used to read minds, tell people what they want to hear. There would be a value in determining that.”
“Whoever’s doing this might have some way to find people, maybe even people sleeping in an enchanted artefact,” suggested Allin tentatively.
Temar looked searchingly at the girl. “Are there not people you wish to find?”
Allin knotted her hands on the table before her. “I’m luckier than most,” she said determinedly. “I know where my parents are, my brothers and sisters. When the fighting finally rolled our way at least we managed to stay together. But I had uncles, aunts, cousins in and around Carluse. They were scattered to the four winds when our new Duke decided it was his turn to claim the Lescari throne and his Grace of Sharlac slapped him down.” She cleared her throat but said nothing further.
Temar felt a pang at the thought of his own family, long lost to him beyond Saedrin’s door. “What if this person can really contact the dead?” he wondered aloud. “What if I could speak to Vahil? To Elsire?” What if he could speak to his mother, his grandsire, ask their advice once again?