Defiant Peaks (The Hadrumal Crisis) (28 page)

Trydek’s Hall, Hadrumal

30th of Aft-Winter

M
AGELIGHT FADED AND
Jilseth felt the flagstones of Trydek’s Hall under her feet. The tolling of the tongueless Council bell shivered through her bones. She had heard that magewrought summons beginning when Planir had just bespoken her, to warn her that he was about to summon Hadrumal’s eminent mages to an early morning gathering. Archmage Trydek’s ancient spells ensured that no Council member could ignore the bell’s voice, just as no lesser wizard could waken it.

Planir was on the lofty dais, standing beside the high table. The ancient hall was deserted but for the two of them. The portraits of long dead archmages gazed down on empty tables and benches; not even the hall’s servants had risen yet, to serve their resident mages, pupils and apprentices breakfast.

Like the archmages of old, Planir wore a broad shouldered mantle over a long, high-collared tunic, all in unrelieved black save for the gems of wizardry surrounding the diamond in his ring of office. Every painted archmage wore the self-same ring.

‘Has our friend Kheda passed his first night in Halferan without incident?’

‘He has.’ The Council bell tolled again, warning Jilseth to speak quickly even though the Council Chamber was close by, built alongside this oldest of Hadrumal’s halls. ‘He has sent a courier dove to the Khusro wives, telling them to take ship for Claithe.’

‘Lady Zurenne agreed, even though Olved was unable to find Corrain in Col last night?’ Planir looked impressed.

‘She did.’ Jilseth coloured. ‘Though she made it clear that she suspected one of us was deceiving her. Was Olved lying to me?’ she asked bluntly.

She hadn’t particularly warmed to the Col mage, when she had gone to the city ten days ago to inform him of the Archmage’s instructions and to scry out Corrain herself, to show Olved who he would be looking for.

Olved had assumed that she knew nothing of Col or its people or customs. He persisted, even after Jilseth had mentioned her previous visits to Col, to use its libraries or tracing rumours of renegade wizardry or untrained mageborn on the Archmage’s behalf. How else did the wizard imagine that her magic had been able to carry her there?

‘No,’ Planir assured her. ‘He scried out their ship’s arrival and sent notes to the inn where he saw them take lodgings and to Mentor Garewin besides. It’s Corrain who’s chosen not to answer him.’

The Archmage shrugged. ‘Let’s see what lesson the noble Baron learns, when he hears the news we wished to give him from Halferan.’

The penetrating bell sounded again.

‘Archmage?’ Jilseth didn’t move. ‘Why summon the Council so early? Isn’t every wizard in Hadrumal exhausted?’

Surely the ill-tempered mages would be more inclined to argue than to agree to anything?

Planir walked down the narrow steps at the side of the dais. ‘Have you ever had a mount bolt under you, when you’ve been travelling by horseback?’

‘No.’ Jilseth sincerely hoped she never would.

‘Short of letting the beast carry you over a cliff, your best course will be to hold on tight and let it run itself out,’ the Archmage advised as he continued towards the door at the far end of the hall. ‘Then you’ll find it much more amenable to doing as you wish.’

Jilseth followed and then waited at the top of the steps, the bulk of the hall behind her, between the Council Chamber and Hadrumal’s high road. She studied the mages on their way to the Council Chamber in the cold, grey light.

Their faces were taut and weary. Jilseth also noted the silence as the first wizards to arrive went up the staircase to the Council Chamber’s metal-bound door. Conversation and speculation usually echoed back from the ceiling’s curved vault, whether whispered or incautiously, or perhaps deliberately, loud.

When a meeting had long been agreed, mages invariably sought their fellow councillors’ opinions on the topic for debate. When they were summoned unexpectedly, speculation could reach the wildest surmise between the lowest step and the topmost. This morning it seemed that no one knew, or wished to guess, what this meeting was about.

Jilseth caught sight of Canfor’s prematurely white hair heading up the stairs. He was as silent as the rest and looking straight ahead. She would have been expecting him to be glancing this way and that, noting which wizards were present and which Council members had sent a proxy. There were, she observed, very few proxies arriving this morning.

She joined the last of the mages answering the bell’s summons. As she reached the Council chamber, she saw that Canfor had claimed a visitors’ seat to the offhand side of the door. Ely and Galen flanked him, both looking intently over towards Despin who was sitting hunched in his Council chair.

Hearth Master Kalion had already taken his own seat of honour in its ancient niche on the far side of the circular, high-vaulted room. His heavily jowled face sagged with weariness and dissatisfaction. So his chosen nexus had had no more success than anyone else in cracking an ensorcelled artefact’s secrets.

Not that Jilseth was inclined to gloat. She had been forced to abandon her hopes of cracking that arm-ring’s secrets as the Archmage had sent her to Relshaz, to deliver Velindre’s letters, to follow the magewoman’s subsequent instructions and to meet up with the Archipelagan Kheda, before escorting him to Halferan.

Nolyen, Tornauld and Merenel had continued without her. Gedart had taken her place and he had been studying in Suthyfer under Usara, a mage widely expected to succeed Planir as Stone Master. Regardless, the change in their nexus had won no tangible results.

‘Jilseth.’

Velindre and Mellitha sat on the other side of the door, an empty chair between them. Both women looked even more short of sleep than the Archmage.

‘Join us.’

Jilseth accepted the invitation, looking across the council chamber to Planir, now sitting silent in the Archmage’s carved seat, his expression unreadable.

Almost all the seats were taken now. Cloud Master Rafrid was talking in a low tone to his neighbour. Troanna’s chair remained vacant.

‘What do you suppose has delayed the Flood Mistress?’ she asked Mellitha discreetly.

The elegant magewoman snorted gracelessly. ‘Yet another futile attempt to unmake some ensorcelled artefact?’

Nolyen had told Jilseth that Troanna made no secret of her intention to learn how to destroy such things. She had reminded the mages who shared her affinity of her authority over them, commanding that they reveal any insight or understanding which might further her endeavours.

What did Planir think of that? Jilseth’s gaze circled back to the Archmage. He showed no sign of weariness, despite the spreading silver at the temples of his short cropped dark hair or the deepening lines at the corners of his eyes and his bearded mouth.

A frisson ran around the room as Planir gestured towards the entrance. The door’s metal fittings flowed into an unyielding sheet of metal sealing everyone inside the chamber.

Jilseth breathed a little more easily. Equally impenetrable spells would protect the Council from any Soluran scrying. Like every pupil mage, she had tested her own skills against that challenge. She had failed, just like everyone else who admitted to doing the same in that first rush of arrogance which followed their elevation from mere apprenticeship.

Though scrying was water magic and Flood Mistress Troanna was the foremost practitioner of that affinity in the past handful of generations. Unlike the Solurans, she had quintessential magic within her grasp. Was she absent because she had found some way through the ancient, arcane wizardry, to learn what was said here this morning?

Jilseth slid a sideways glance at Mellitha. Given her abiding dislike of Troanna, Mellitha would surely be alert for such a possibility. Before she could whisper a question though, Planir stood up and strode to the round stone platform in the middle of the room.

‘Good day to you all. Who would like to share some revelation as to the nature of the artefacts we are studying?’

No one spoke or raised a hand. Expressions around the room varied from veiled irritability to barely concealed anger.

Planir grimaced. ‘My sympathies. I have nothing of any significance to report.’

Sannin raised her hand, sitting elegant and composed in her own council seat. If any shadows darkened the scarlet-gowned magewoman’s eyes, her immaculate cosmetics concealed them. She rose gracefully as the Archmage acknowledged her.

‘How much longer must we exert ourselves to so little purpose? We have other calls on our time, not least our responsibilities to our pupils.’

As Planir glanced around the chamber, Jilseth saw a growing number of mages inclined to agree.

‘Please.’ Planir’s nod invited Nicasis to speak.

‘We cannot expect our pupils to continue to instruct our halls’ apprentices without our guidance,’ he asserted with an emphatic shake of his head, ‘still less to keep this recent influx of mageborn arrivals from the usual mischief or folly.’

‘What of our obligations to future generations of mages? To bequeath them the secrets of this wizardry?’ Vedral sprang to his feet. Always careless of his appearance, the wizard didn’t look as though he had shaved or bathed since the bespelled artefacts had first come to Hadrumal.

‘How can we turn away from such a challenge?’ He appealed to the entire Council with outstretched hands. ‘Never mind any significant discovery. Has anyone at least discerned something new, however trivial? Share it and perhaps that will be the spark to the tinder of someone else’s insights?’

As Vedral’s voice broke to betray his desperation, Jilseth noted that many other mages still found the notion of abandoning the challenge of the artefacts intolerable. She glanced upwards to the sphere of magelight hovering high in the windowless chamber’s domed vault.

There would be protracted struggle when those in favour of giving up their current endeavours sought to dim the magelight while those opposed bolstered it. Each side’s conviction would bolster their wizardry; Trydek had considered a mere show of hands insufficient for Hadrumal’s purposes.

Everyone looked at the Archmage, waiting for his response. He turned slowly on the central platform, looking around the chamber.

‘I am mindful of our obligation to wizards yet unborn, just as I am well aware that we cannot sustain our current commitment to the study of these artefacts. We risk failing in our duty to those who need our guidance through the hazards of their unsought, inborn affinity.’ Planir paused, reflective. ‘Perhaps it is time to look beyond our own shores.’

‘To Solura?’ Kalion couldn’t help glancing triumphantly at Troanna’s empty seat.

Planir shook his head. ‘I was thinking more of Col.’

‘Col?’ The Hearth Master stared at him, astonished.

‘I have had a good many enquiries from our fellow wizards, from as far afield as Selerima and Inglis.’ Addressing the whole Council, Planir smiled ruefully. ‘News of the recent upheavals in the Archipelago hasn’t only spread far and fast among those guild masters and petty lordlings who now long to get hold of a bespelled blade which can cut through steel or obtain a ring to allow them to pass unseen on their way to their lover’s bed.’

The ripple of weary laughter around the chamber told Jilseth which mages had heard those same tavern ballads as she had and who, clearly bemused, had never encountered such mainland tales.

‘Col?’ Vedral was on his feet again, his voice ragged with anger. ‘Any curiosity there is prompted by Solura’s mages!’

Planir nodded. ‘Various Soluran Orders of Wizardry have long-established ties with Col’s university—’

‘Always wheedling for Hadrumal’s lore,’ Vedral snarled. ‘You may be willing to yield the secrets of quintessential magic in return for Soluran insights into magecrafting artefacts but this Council will never consent!’ He sat down heavily, shaking his head in vehement denial.

Looking around the chamber Jilseth saw that opposition to sharing nexus magic with the Solurans would certainly prevail. Hearth Master Kalion’s face sagged, betraying his disappointment.

‘I have not made any such proposal, Master Vedral,’ Planir pointed out with stern courtesy.

‘We cannot contemplate any such trade.’ Rafrid stood, shoving his hands in his breeches’ pockets, cobalt tunic carelessly askew and unlaced at the neck. ‘We know full well that the Solurans would use quintessential magic against their Mandarkin foes. Indeed, I would wager that they’d do so sooner rather than later. That renegade Anskal cannot have been the only wizard sent scouting south of the mountains with swordsmen at his side last autumn. As soon as the spring weather allows, I’ll wager good gold that either the Mandarkin will attack in force or the Solurans will take the fight to them, in hopes of cutting their enemy down before they can draw their swords.

‘If they have quintessential magic to use, once the summer sees traders coming through the Great Forest to Selerima, such news will follow their wagons and mules to every other town in Ensaimin.’ The Cloud Master shook his head. ‘The mainlanders are already fretting like hens who’ve caught the scent of a fox, for fear of unbridled wizardry let loose among them. I take it we’ve all heard of this recent law passed by Caladhria’s parliament? The Lescari lawgivers are discussing much the same proposals, and of course we know of the antagonism towards mages in Relshaz.’ He acknowledged Mellitha with a courteous bow.