Defiant Peaks (The Hadrumal Crisis) (69 page)

Jilseth retreated from the doorway as the Council members and other mages hurried from the chamber. Watching Planir on the dais, shoulders sagging and his bearded chin on his chest, she feared that the Archmage’s weariness now verged on despair.

He was the last to leave. She stepped forward

‘What should I do, Archmage?’Jilseth asked urgently. ‘None of the mages I’m used to working a nexus with are here.’

Planir rubbed a shaking hand over his face. ‘You had better come with me.’

Corrain had pressed himself against the opposite wall to allow the anxious wizards to pass. He nodded at Despin, still lying unconscious on the stone floor. ‘What about him?’

Planir gestured and the doors closed, sealing themselves with ensorcelled metal. ‘He can stay there. Trydek’s magic will save him from hurting himself or anyone else when he wakes. If he wakes.’

The Archmage headed down the stairs without looking back. Jilseth and Corrain followed.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-
F
IVE

Trydek’s Tower, Hadrumal

14th of For-Spring

T
HEIR PATH BACK
to Planir’s refuge was crowded with clamouring mages, pupils and apprentices of all rank. Thankfully everyone stepped aside for the Archmage. Jilseth found herself running to keep pace as she followed in his wake. It was scant consolation to hear Corrain out of breath at her shoulder.

Most of the throng shouted frantic, gabbled questions at the Archmage. A few yelled Jilseth’s name. She had no answers for them. One mage she didn’t recognise stepped into her path, enraged at being ignored. He reached for her arm, ready to shake a response out of her. Corrain shoved the unknown wizard backwards to stumble and fall over someone’s feet.

‘Thank you,’ she yelled gratefully.

Planir cut through an alleyway back to the quadrangle below his tower. Once again, he ignored the wizards milling around the entrance until one voice rose above the hubbub.

‘Archmage!’ It was Sannin, with Canfor at her shoulder. Galen was sheltering Ely from the jostling crowd.

‘Upstairs.’ Planir jerked his head and the tower door opened. As they hurried inside, no other wizards dared enter without the Archmage’s invitation.

The door slammed behind Galen. The only sound in the stairwell was harsh breathing as they walked up to the empty sitting room. Planir entered and the shutters opened themselves, admitting the noise from outside. The Archmage scowled and the racket was muted.

‘We need an earth mage for our nexus,’ Sannin explained. ‘Galen—’

Planir waved that away. ‘Jilseth?’

‘Of course.’ She looked at the burly wizard and was appalled at the misery on his broad face.

Sannin snapped her fingers to reclaim her attention. ‘Follow my lead.’

Before Jilseth could reply she felt warmth spread through her, from head to toe, as Sannin’s fire affinity bonded to her own earth magic. Now she could feel the lingering glow of those ancient fires which had first moulded Hadrumal’s rocks.

At Sannin’s nod, she turned to look at Ely and felt the fire magewoman curb her own affinity, so antagonistic to water, to allow the innate sympathy of earth to unite with Ely’s magic. Jilseth felt the surge of the waters around the island, smoothing reefs and headlands and shaping the drifting sands.

In the instant their three elements were united, Sannin’s affinity surged towards Canfor, claiming fire’s ready union with elemental air. Jilseth felt the invisible abrasive power of the wind scouring at the stones of the ancient tower.

In the next moment, she felt the scintillating brilliance of quintessential magic. Jilseth resisted the temptation to take command of the nexus. A sapphire shiver though the magic suggested that Canfor was similarly restraining himself.

‘We will not permit the Solurans to come here uninvited.’ Sannin was adamant.

She swept their quintessential magic outwards from the tower. As Jilseth stood in the sitting room, looking at the other three mages, her wizard senses soared across the island. They yielded to Sannin’s lead as the magecraft cut through the air like an arrow, swift and sure. Hadrumal’s magical mists lay ahead; not merely a visible barrier to unnerve sailors but a warding where elemental water blended with fire to confine and confound translocation worked by anyone other than an island mage.

Even with her earth affinity, Jilseth could see that the warding hung frayed and thin. Her mage senses showed her antagonistic spells attacking each individual element within the ancient wizardry. Soluran fire sought to sear away the moisture endlessly drawn up from Hadrumal’s seas to replenish the warding, while Soluran water as cold as mountain snows swirled and circled to drain away all warmth.

More than that, she felt a stealthier magic woven from the earth, loading the mist with rocky fragments finer than dust. As droplets formed and coalesced, the malicious burden weighed more and more heavily on the already frail air element of the warding.

Sannin wielded the immutable quintessential magic like a diamond blade. Their united strength bolstered her innate sympathy with fire as she severed the scorching Soluran spells to allow Hadrumal’s magic to surge up from the seas once again.

‘No!’ Ely protested, outraged.

The Soluran water magic fastened onto that renewed strength, sucking at it leechlike. The ice-cold malice swelled and coiled, strangling the fire within the warding.

Jilseth felt Ely take control of the nexus, using her water affinity to focus their quintessential strength and cut through those noxious tendrils sucking the heat out of the warding spell.

‘If you please.’ Sannin took back the nexus to throw up an impenetrable wall as Soluran fire roared into the elemental void left as the water magic flowed away.

They were making progress but no more swiftly or easily than a man climbing an ice-covered slope, slipping back one step for every two he managed to take.

‘Jilseth!’ Canfor looked across the room to her.

She nodded. Air and earth alike were poised between fire and water. Like her, he could feel these violent oscillations putting ever more strain on this ancient magic devised to work in harmony with the natural world’s eternal rhythms.

She reached through the nexus for his affinity, to combine their strengths and re-unite the warding. First she felt the heat and cold of the Soluran magics revive as soon as the nexus was no longer turned against them. Secondly and more insidious, she felt that subtle earth magic trailing after her, drawn like iron filings to a compass needle. Even so slight an imbalance redoubled the antagonism between air and earth. It took all Jilseth’s strength and skill to stop her affinity tearing free of Canfor’s and she could feel him fighting just as fiercely.

‘Stop.’

Sannin dissolved the nexus so abruptly that they were left gasping.

‘What happened?’ Planir demanded.

‘The Solurans cannot use quintessential magic but they have devised some interesting ways of harrying it,’ Sannin said grimly.

‘We can sustain the warding,’ Ely protested.

Canfor nodded. ‘And renew it, little by little.’

‘Only as long as our strength holds out.’ Jilseth wasn’t looking to triumph over either of the others. She was merely stating the bitterly regrettable truth.

‘We have more wizards than they do,’ Galen growled.

‘How long will the
sheltya
allow us to tear at each other, stirring elemental turmoil to corrupt the tides and the wind and the rain?’ Planir countered.

Ely screamed and Jilseth barely managed to swallow her own startled shriek. The room was full of wizards.

Not Solurans. Jilseth’s first instant of terror subsided as she recognised Merenel and Usara of Suthyfer, though the other three were strangers.

‘Shiv.’ Sannin ran to embrace the tallest of the newcomers, a sallow man with long black hair drawn back off his face.

Shivvalan. One of the two mages who’d founded the Suthyfer Hall.

‘Lady D’Alsennin.’ Planir bowed to the unassuming young woman in the same sort of workaday Tormalin garb which Guinalle Tor Priminale wore.

‘Just Allin, Archmage, please.’ She blushed rosily before turning to her companion, a bright-eyed youth. ‘May I make known to you Corristal Austorn, the first of Suthyfer’s mageborn to advance from apprentice to pupil?’

‘Your affinity is with the air?’ Planir stepped forward to shake his hand.

‘It is, Archmage.’ Even in those few words, his Dalasorian accent was apparent.

Jilseth noted Canfor looking at the youth with measured reservation.

‘You are very welcome.’ Planir turned to Usara, ‘though we are somewhat preoccupied,’ he added drily.

Usara wasn’t amused. ‘So was I, when I had half a hundred mages trying to bespeak me to ask about Mountain Artifice. Then I saw what was happening to Hadrumal.’

‘What can Suthyfer offer to help? Sannin demanded.

‘Additive magic,’ Shiv said promptly. ‘You need to utterly disrupt each Soluran spell, not just drive it off. You’ll only achieve that through the union of mages with a common affinity.’

‘A moment, please.’ Jilseth was alarmed. ‘Didn’t the Mandarkin use additive magic?’

Helplessly enmeshed in Planir’s fourfold nexus, she had seen the renegade Anskal ruthlessly battening onto his enslaved apprentices, drawing all their power into his own wizardry, only stopping when they fell dead at his feet.

Shivvalan looked at her. ‘He did, but we have perfected its use through co-operation not compulsion.’

‘A knife can slit an innocent’s throat or save a man’s life in the wilderness.’ Corrain spoke from the corner where he was standing, disregarded.

Jilseth narrowed her eyes at him. Why were those words so familiar? She couldn’t recall, though she couldn’t deny their inconvenient truth.

‘That’s true,’ Planir agreed with the Caladhrian. ‘But we know the Solurans have additive magic of their own. Can your skills outweigh theirs?’

‘We believe so, Archmage,’ Allin said earnestly.

‘If we can persuade enough of Hadrumal’s mages to trust us, and each other.’ Usara looked around the room.

Jilseth wouldn’t have imagined that his mild eyes could be so penetrating.

‘Baron Halferan.’ Planir smiled. ‘Kindly go downstairs and ask every mage you can see to come up here if they wish to share in Hadrumal’s salvation through the use of newly devised wizardry from Suthyfer.’

Corrain considered this. ‘They’ll ask me what that means.’

Planir shrugged. ‘You can’t possibly know, so what they have to ask themselves is how urgently they want to save Hadrumal and how much faith they have in their fellow mages.’

Corrain answered with a shrug of his own. ‘Let’s see.’

As the Caladhrian disappeared down the stairs, Planir challenged the mages in the room. ‘Who’s willing to be first?’

To Jilseth’s surprise, Galen stepped forward to offer Usara his hand. ‘For what little use I’ll be,’ the burly mage said miserably.

‘More than you’ll know,’ Usara assured him as he clasped his wrist.

Galen’s eyes widened with surprise.

‘Ely?’ Shiv offered her his hand. She swallowed hard and took it, exclaiming with astonishment.