Missing Piece Read online

  “But who is casting the spells?” Tharfen asked.

  “Oh, these are not modern spells, I assure you. We do not tolerate any kind of spellcraft here. It’s one thing we all agree on. Mr. Stilpkin, who runs our infirmary and who is an expert in these matters, believes that the mobility of these limbs is the result of a Spell of General Return that must have been cast fifty years ago, just as the Great Kone ceased turning.” The image of Xemion chanting over Saheli flashed in Tharfen’s mind. “It is Mr. Stilpkin’s opinion that the closer we get to the equinox the more they are blindly seeking to return to the bodies they once belonged to — bodies that are no longer in existence,” Lirodello continued.

  “Why must it have been an old spell? Why couldn’t it have been Xemion of Ilde who cast it?”

  “For one, because Xemion of Ilde has not been seen since the day of the battle. For another, it is highly unlikely he had any spellcrafting ability at all.”

  “But people said he used a spellcrafted sword in the tourney before the battle.”

  “People said many things back then. We’ve since uncovered numerous old unspun spell kones. Most of them don’t work, but if there was anything magical about that boy’s sword, it is much more likely to have been because he found a spell kone and got lucky with it than because he was a mage.”

  Tharfen remained unconvinced. She told Lirodello about the words she’d heard Xemion utter over Saheli, but Lirodello just shook his head. “He could as easily have been saying a prayer over her. And even if he was uttering a spell, no one mage is capable of a Spell of General Return. It takes seven mages. He would have to have been a polymage to execute such a thing. The truth is, Tharfen, it is quite likely he has … died.”

  Tharfen shook her head. “No, I don’t see why he would be dead. He was fully alive when I last saw him.”

  “Either way, Tharfen, I still bid you to be careful if you approach the Great Kone.”

  Tharfen shrugged and turned her head almost enough to see Atathu. “I have my sword,” she said arrogantly, “and I have a canister of Pathan fire.” She indicated the silver flask with a nozzle and a lever that she wore at her hip. “Light, heat, and steel. I think I can handle a severed hand or two.”

  “Well, do be cautious.”

  The scribe who had been staring at Tharfen, having powdered the page he was working on, stood up. “Miss,” he said, coming forward. He proffered a page, holding it by its upper edge so that the bottom rolled itself up and down a little. She stared at it sternly, then looked back at Lirodello.

  “Oh, these fellows are scribing for us,” Lirodello said curtly. “With all the refugees entering our city, we are attempting to disseminate important information about safety.”

  “You do know that there are now machines capable of producing many copies of a text quite rapidly, Mr. Lirodello?” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a slight sneer slide up one side of the scribe’s face.

  “Yes, but they have such ugly block letters,” Lirodello opined. “They are an offence to the eyes.”

  The young man smiled at this. He reminded Tharfen a little of Xemion. She disliked him. “This is for you,” he said. “Valuable information.”

  Scowling, Tharfen took the paper from his hand, unrolled it, and saw that it was covered with closely spaced and very precise hand lettering. Saying nothing, she rolled it up tighter and inserted it into an inner pocket of her jacket and turned to leave.

  “Also, I am a poet,” the young man said confidently. She looked up at him with disdain, shaking her head slightly back and forth.

  “Our finest,” Lirodello added.

  The poet nodded. “I’ve had a head start. These others have only learned to read in the past five years but I grew up in Lyess.”

  Tharfen shrugged.

  Lirodello said, “You won’t have heard Tharfen, but all these years when we thought we’d lost our literature the brave librarians of Lyess saved and hid thousands of volumes from the Pathans. The poet here grew up amongst them.”

  Tharfen shrugged again.

  “If you get a chance while you’re here,” Lirodello said, his face still utterly immobile, “you must pass by the newly restored library. We will soon be taking delivery of a great number of those very books.”

  “That is very good news for everyone,” Tharfen said, a little insincerely.

  “I am writing the first new book of the modern era,” the poet said proudly.

  Tharfen didn’t look at him. She snorted and left.

  7

  Tell Kone Spinning

  Xemion was indeed alive, and not far away. East of the wall that bisected the city, he had taken up residence in the seven-storey thorn-covered tower that had once belonged to the middle mage Vallaine. If there was a strange moth-like fluttering in his chest to match the one Tharfen had so recently been feeling, he was completely unaware of it. But then he was fairly numb. He was also much gaunter than he used to be. His cheeks were a little sunken; his eyes more hollowed. Sometimes when Vallaine’s chameleon cloak matched the grey brick of the tower’s inner walls, his face within it looked like that of a man twice his age. He was only twenty-one, but there was already a touch of grey in the hair that he wore long and unkempt.

  It had exhausted him five years earlier to do the Spell of General Return. It should have been a mass spell. It should have taken seven mages. He’d been so spellshocked afterward, he had almost died. It was like a scar in him now where he had seared himself with his own fire, burned away his own magic. Spellcraft was like a sense he had lost. And good riddance to it, he thought. Nothing in him wanted it. So he nurtured nothing in it. He left it dormant, starving. It hurt him if it stirred. Besides, he didn’t want anything to interfere with that last spell he had cast.

  Every day since he had brought Saheli here and laid her on Vallaine’s bed he had watched and waited impatiently for the spell’s completion. It had worked, in part. She had not died. But she had not come back to life either. She remained just as she had on the day of the Second Battle of Phaer Bay. Her last garment, a purple tunic, was still visible through the chain mail shirt, which, for all the dampness of these past five rainy years, showed not a single sign of rust. The hyacinths he had placed over the wounds in the middle of her chest the day he brought her here were withered and dry, but not a shred of Saheli’s beauty had faded.

  Gently he felt her wrist again; the same — not cold like death, not warm like life, but somewhere in between. He placed her hand gently back at her side and saw that his own hand was shaking. He had other ways of checking her. Sometimes he put the back of his index finger in the crook of her neck to see if there might be a pulse there where the vein pressed blue against the copper skin. Many times a day he put the mirror to her mouth and nostrils, but never in five years had it come away with the faintest trace of breath.

  Often he had the urge to kiss her to see if he could awaken her like a princess in one of the Phaer Tales. He resisted this urge for two reasons: One was the fear that such a kiss would be a violation. That it would be more to satisfy him than for any real chance that it would wake her. The other was his fear that a kiss might in some way interfere with the slow movement of his spell to bring her back. There were already too many crossed spells at work on her. He sensed that. There was never a moment when he was not desperate. When, if he was not anxiously sitting there expecting her to arise, he was pacing back and forth mumbling, twisting his fingers.

  Once again, he felt the vein in her neck. No pulse. He resolved that if she hadn’t come back to life by the equinox, he would kiss her. But then he wondered What if the only time a kiss could bring her back was before the equinox? He considered it again, and again he resisted.

  Suddenly he found himself unbolting the lock to the door as if he were about to leave. He drew his hand away from the latch as though it was red-hot. This was the fourth or fifth time this had happene
d lately. It was like waking up from a trance. And he knew where he was headed. Somewhere he did his best to avoid: the Great Kone.

  Long ago, Vallaine had warned him never to read a single item of text on the Great Kone. But he had. Just one accidental letter at first, but since then his eyes had alighted on several other letters — whole words even. Ever since, just as Vallaine had warned, he had developed a growing urge to attempt the impossible task of reading the whole unending ever-spiralling smaller and smaller text from beginning to end. The urge had been controllable at first, but the closer it got to the equinox, the more the kone pulled at him. He was strong-willed, but the raw need it ripped open in him was too hard to bear without some assistance. One thing that helped was the books.

  The walls of the west room at the top of Vallaine’s tower, from the floor to as high as Xemion could reach, were lined with books. They were of all sizes and shapes and colours. Some were hard-backed and perfectly bound, with gold embossed titles on their spines. Others were folios or codices full of strange ideograms. There were scrolls and papyri and even a collection of antler bones with markings etched into them. There were encyclopedias of thaumaturgy, training manuals, epics, treatises, poetry, books on all the sciences and scriptures. There was even an extensive collection of a kind of made-up story called a novel that was just becoming popular at the time of the Pathan invasion. Xemion had arranged them alphabetically, then in gradations of colour. And one of the things that could soothe him, however briefly, was just to look at them — to rake his eyes over the golden titles and admire the beauty of the layout.

  When they had burst from the locket library five years ago, there had been only eighty of them. Several times in his consumption of them he had drawn close to finishing the last available book, but always as this time drew near, new books had burst from the old books and he’d suddenly found himself with a reprieve. Not so today. “I’m down to one book again,” he said to Bargest, the old arrow-scarred war dog who was lying in the corner. He held the book up as though to confirm this.

  “One book again,” Bargest growled.

  “Only one book and still eight days till the equinox.” He held the book upside down, ruffling the pages and shaking it a little. “Let’s just see what pops out. There are probably a thousand more books in here.”

  “Books in here,” Bargest repeated. He lifted his huge face and quietly added a bark.

  Despite Xemion’s best efforts, the book produced no offspring. It was a big book of poetry by the great Elphaerean poet Rondell, but even if he read it slowly he couldn’t see it taking a week. Already, as he held it in his hand, the urge to rush into it and devour it quickly was upon him.

  Twice lately he’d awoken to catch himself reading the previous book in a kind of trance. Suddenly he’d find himself before the candle, the latest volume open in his hands, almost out of his control. And the closer it got to the equinox, the more the kone worked at him, coming into his dreams, undercutting his will. The thought of sleepwalking to the Great Kone, surrendering to the text, going round and round and down and down till he starved and fell just as Saheli was awakening all alone with the wound in her chest haunted him.

  “Before I begin, I think I had better consult the tell kone,” Xemion said.

  Xemion’s other distraction, the tell kone, which was about two feet high, was currently sitting in the middle of the table he ate from. A wooden framework with a crank handle on one side held it up on its point, each of its progressively smaller kones, one inside the other, fashioned from thinly hammered copper. For the first two years Xemion hadn’t dared use this device. It looked so much like a spell kone that it caused him physical pain. But then he learned from one of the books that the gift of prophecy preceded that of spellcraft. Indeed, it had been the already-existing tell kones that the first spell kone makers had adapted and been inspired by. Thus Xemion, like Vallaine before him, took to spinning the tell kone. At first it was just once a day, but soon that became several times a day, and then many times a day — and now here he was leaning forward to rapidly turn the crank handle for the thirtieth time that hour.

  The seven increasingly smaller kones, one inside the other, whirred and spun so fast that in the resulting blur they briefly looked like one thick kone. Eventually the outermost kone came to a halt. He waited and watched as some of the inner kones continued to spin. Finally all seven stopped. Now he could gaze through the eye-shaped hole in the outermost one. More often than not this would allow him to see the surface of the second kone upon which various signifying icons, letters, and numbers had been embossed. But sometimes the eyes on the first and second kones would line up, allowing him to see through to the surface of the third kone. The deeper the kone, he had learned, the more significant the telling, but not until recently had more than three of the eyes lined up at once. Skilled practitioners had used this device through the ages in the cause of prefiguration. Xemion was not a skilled practitioner, but as time had passed he’d begun to see similarities between the icons the device revealed to him and things that happened in the near future, so he began to pay much more attention to it.

  Before the civil war had begun in the west of the island, for instance, it had shown him again and again swords and crossed swords. Not long ago, for the first time, four eyes had lined up and he’d seen five layers deep. An arm. And a heel. He had encountered arms before in his many spins, but never before something as seemingly insignificant as a heel. Seven times this morning, mostly on the second and third kone, he had spun an eye with a cross through it as though to indicate a blind eye. Immediately he’d thought of Drathis and the other two spellbinders who’d each had one eye removed by Pathan scientists before Veneetha Azucena, the leader of the rebellion and hero of the Second Battle of Phaer Bay, had rescued them from the underearth. Now, as he knelt down to peer into the outer eye, he gasped. Six eyes had lined up at once! Bargest’s collar jingled as he lifted his aged head from the floor and looked at Xemion inquiringly.

  For the first time ever, Xemion was seeing through to the surface of the innermost kone. His face went ashen. Once before in this very room someone had spun the configuration known as a seven deep, and that had been Vallaine, the middle magician. The symbol revealed to him had been the Great Kone. And that is exactly what the seven deep that Xemion had spun revealed now, except this time there was also an image of a red hand superimposed over it. A chill rose up from Xemion’s feet.

  “Bargest. I must leave you in charge,” he said, his voice trembling.

  “In charge,” Bargest rumbled from deep in his massive canine chest.

  “While I’m gone you must be alert and vigilant.”

  “Alert and vigilant,” the dog thundered.

  Xemion quickly strapped on his sword and donned Vallaine’s camouflage coat. Before leaving, he stood in the stone doorway that opened into the other room, his own dark shape cut out of the late afternoon sunlight streaming in from the opposite window.

  “You will be safe,” he said reassuringly. “Bargest will be watching.”

  “Will be watching,” the massive canine said, his chest rumbling.

  Xemion descended the long staircase and set off through the dense black thorn forest with the knowledge that Bargest was not Saheli’s only protection. Poltorir, a now fully mature female dragon, was curled about the base of the tower, her scaly bulk pressed tight against the door.

  8

  Vision in Red

  As evening came on, Abiathel, the blood mage, arrived iwith his freshest boy at the Ivory Palace, official residence of Icrix, prince of the island kingdom of Cyclos. Prince Icrix was in his laboratory with his telescopes, tubing, caged dogs and mice. The blood mage did not normally deign to travel in aid of his clients, but Prince Icrix would one day be the supreme ruler, and when a ruler-to-be made a special request, who was he, a mere blood mage, to refuse?

  Wrapped in his red robe, his ruddy round face
only partially visible under the red hood, he nodded his head in reverence to the prince upon entering. At eight feet tall, Icrix was rather short for a Cyclops, but he was sturdy in build and the way he let his long auburn hair, parted down the middle just above his forehead eye, fall over his shoulders created a lengthening effect. As he and the mage conducted their business arrangement, the young boy, around eight years old and a little sallow, shivered slightly, thinking about what awaited him. Finally the blood mage turned back to him and said, “Do you want poppy this time, Noli?” Somewhere in a room nearby there was the muffled sound of a rooster crowing.

  “Not me, sir. Makes me feel all weak the next day.”

  “Very brave of you.”

  “Not at all, sir. Doesn’t hurt that much altogether.”

  The prince looked on silently as the blood mage tugged open the mouth of the canvas bag and carefully removed a shallow silver bowl. He mounted its curved bottom in a metal ring the size of a crown. From deeper in the bag he took out a leather pouch. Coiled inside this was a roll of calf gut tubing with a fixture of sharpened copper on one end.

  “Turn around now,” he told the boy.

  Despite himself, Noli sucked in his lower lip and lightly began to gnaw on it. He turned and faced away while the blood mage stretched back his right arm so that the inner elbow was exposed. With one quick jab of the copper fixture he succeeded in getting the tubing into the boy’s vein. Wrapping a white cloth about the boy’s elbow to keep the tubing in place, he began to steer the drops of blood that arrived at the other end of the tube into the interior of the silver disc. Although the disc was cold to the touch, these drops bubbled and sizzled until a fine red steam began to gather in the bottom.