Frostborn: The Broken Mage (9 page)

The others nodded, lifting or adjusting their weapons.

“Also,” said Ridmark, “Calliande would not have been alive for me to save had she not prepared so thoroughly. Else Shadowbearer would have slain her long ago, and we would not be having this conversation.” 

Calliande smiled at him and kept walking.

“There is light ahead,” said Mara.

Calliande saw it a moment later. The tunnel came to another turn, and a pale blue light glimmered in the darkness ahead. She tensed, fearing that creatures of the dark elves lurked there, but relaxed a moment later. Large mushrooms clung to the floor and the wall, and a pale blue glow shone from beneath their broad caps. 

“The mushrooms are glowing,” said Antenora.

“They are called lukhaldenmorr by my kindred,” said Caius.

“That name is not known to me,” said Antenora. 

“Ghost mushrooms,” said Ridmark as they went around the corner. “They grow throughout the Deeps. Useful for light.”

Calliande followed Ridmark around the corner and came to a sudden stop, the others halting around her. 

The tunnel opened into a large natural cavern easily the size of a cathedral, its bowl-shaped floor sloping towards the walls. A clear pond filled at least a third of the floor, and around the pond grew vast thickets of ghost mushrooms. Bigger mushrooms grew further up the slope, some of them as large as trees, their caps like the roofs of small houses. Here and there wandered fat lizards that looked like sheep with scales in lieu of fur. At the far end of the cavern opened another tunnel, its smooth walls lined with more ghost mushrooms. 

“Splendid,” said Caius. “This cavern was a farm.” He pointed at the pond, and Calliande glimpsed silver flashes within the water as sleek fish darted back and forth. “I suspect snowmelt feeds it. Likely it began as a stock pond, and my kindred of Khald Azalar farmed mushrooms around it.”

“Ghost mushrooms are edible?” said Gavin, blinking.

“Yes, but only barely,” said Caius. “They pass swiftly through the body, and tend to result in glowing…ah, discharges.” Jager snickered. “Ironstalk mushrooms, the big ones, are far more edible. If grilled properly, they are not that different from bread.” 

“We’ll rest here for a while,” said Ridmark. “We should have a few hours before the Mhorites break through the doors.”

“You thought that about the Dormari Market,” pointed out Arandar.

“I did,” said Ridmark, “and I was wrong there. Stopping is a risk, but here…I think it is less of a risk. We need rest, and it is clear no one has entered this cavern for some time.”

“What are those lizards?” said Antenora, giving one of the murrags a suspicious look. 

“Dinner,” said Caius. 

Arandar frowned. “We have no fire to cook the meat, and I doubt it would be safe to eat their flesh raw.”

“Pardon, Sir Arandar,” said Gavin, nodding to Antenora, “but I suspect we shall have all the fire we will ever need.” 

Arandar blinked, and then laughed. “Of course. Forgive me.” 

“There is nothing to forgive,” said Antenora. “I am a traitor, and deserve neither honor nor respect.” 

“That may be true,” said Calliande as gently as she could manage, “but you have kept faith with us, Antenora, and proven yourself to be a valuable companion.”

Antenora stared at her with yellow eyes, blinked once, and then offered a deep bow.

“The Keeper is kind,” she said in a quiet voice.

“If you are done complimenting each other,” said Morigna, lifting her bow, “someone has to kill dinner.” 

She drew back the string and took aim at the nearest murrag, which stared at her with placid incomprehension.

###

Morigna had never eaten meat cooked by elemental fire before, but it turned out quite well. 

The meat itself was indifferent. Despite all the praises Caius had lavished upon murrag meat during their travels, Morigna found that it tasted like particularly stringy mutton. The pheasants she had hunted during the years she lived alone in the Wilderland had been far tastier. Still, the meat was hot and filling, and Caius carved slabs from the sides of the towering ironstalk mushrooms and grilled them on a flat boulder Antenora heated with blasts of fire. Morigna ate and drank her fill, and she admitted that it was the most pleasant evening she had spent since they had left Khorduk for the High Gate. 

Still. It would have been better if she and Ridmark could have been alone. But one could not have everything.

“There are, in fact,” said Caius, gesturing with a thigh bone from the murrag, “over one hundred and fifty different ways of preparing murrag meat.”

“Truly?” said Calliande. “I had no idea.” 

“We always ate it on Days of Remembrance, sacred to the gods of stone and silence,” said Caius. “According to the records of the stonescribes, when the dark elves first summoned our kindred here, we nearly starved. Fortunately, the nine kings found herds of murrags in the Deeps, and were able to provide sustenance for their people. Ever since, we have eaten murrag in memory. And for its own fine qualities, of course.” 

“The dwarves have their own traditions and rituals,” said Morigna, “yet you seem to have turned your back upon your kindred.”

“Morigna,” said Ridmark.

“No, it is all right,” said Caius. “I have not turned my back upon my people.”

“You have forsaken the gods of stone and silence for the God of the church of Andomhaim,” said Morigna. She was not sure why she was pressing him about this. Perhaps she was tired. Perhaps she didn’t want to hear about the damned murrag meat any longer. Perhaps she was frightened by what the dark magic had done to her, and she wanted to take some of that distress out upon Caius. “That surely counts as abandoning the dwarves.”

“It is my wish to share what I have learned with my kindred,” said Caius, “just as I did with Azakhun and his retainers when they asked for baptism.”

“So they too will abandon their ancestral gods for the God of the church, for the Dominus Christus,” said Morigna, “who was not even from this world.”

“I suppose if one is to be accurate,” said Caius, “none of this are native to this world. You remember what the Warden told us. Of all the kindreds that dwell upon this world, only the high elves and the dark elves are native. So among us, only Lady Mara had a claim to be a native.”

Mara laughed. “I confess I had not considered it in that light, Brother Caius.” 

“Have you known many dwarves, Morigna?” said Caius. “Before you met me, that is?”

Morigna shrugged. “Some. From time to time some bolder traders came to Moraime. They were dour and grim, and I ignored them for the most part. You seem much more cheerful, annoyingly so.”

“My kindred,” said Caius, “rarely laugh.” 

“You laugh quite often, Brother Caius,” said Gavin 

“It was a skill I learned late in life,” said Caius. He considered for a moment. “You must understand, the khaldari are different from humans or orcs or halflings. Perhaps it is because we live much longer than you, three or four or five hundred years. An orcish man can be born, come to maturity, become an elder, and die while a dwarf is still in the first third of his life. You seem…so changeable to us, so mercurial. The same King has reigned in Khald Azalar in the time a dozen of High Kings have ruled over Andomhaim. And we are much more prone to despair than you are.”

“The dwarves I have met in the past seemed solemn,” said Ridmark, “but they did not appear to be despairing.” 

“Despair is not as poisonous for us as it is for orcs and humans and halflings,” said Caius. “For you, despair induces paralysis and bitterness. For us, it is…something akin to a state of mind, or perhaps a philosophy. It is part of the teachings of the gods of stone and silence. A dwarf is born of the stone, he labors, he dies, and he returns to the stone, to endure forever in darkness and silence. All things die in the end, and a son of the khaldari must bear this truth and not flinch from it.”

“That is not such a bad creed,” said Arandar. “If I remember my lessons about the books of Old Earth, the ancient teachers of the cities of the Greeks and the Empire of the Romans taught such things.” 

“It is a noble creed,” said Caius, “but one of ultimate despair. Despair saturates my kindred, Sir Arandar, and I fear it has made us stagnant. A noble creed, perhaps, but one without joy or hope. The teachings of the Dominus Christus offer us hope, both in this life and in the next. That is what I wish to bring to my kindred, the hope that I now have.”

Morigna scoffed. “And you really think that the Dominus Christus will bring salvation to the dwarves?”

“He said to gather all nations in his name, did he not?” said Caius. 

“A myth,” said Morigna. “A lie told by the priests to control the ignorant.”

Arandar scowled. “In Andomhaim you could be arrested for saying such things.” 

“We are not in Andomhaim, are we?” said Morigna, gesturing at the blue-lit cavern. Caius regarded her with placid calm, which only irritated her further. “It seems the gods of stone and silence were right. There was no hope for Khald Azalar.”

Caius did not even blink. “Are we hearing your words, or the words of Coriolus the Eternalist?”

Morigna narrowed her eyes.

“He told you many things that were false,” said Caius. “Perhaps his thoughts upon the church and the Dominus Christus were simply yet another lie to control you. Perhaps he wished to ensure that you would have no hope, so you would not leave Moraime and he could possess you at his leisure. He employed more than words to ensure that you had no hope, did he not? He murdered your parents and your lover, and…”

“Enough,” said Morigna, her hands curling into fists. She wanted to strike him, wanted to draw upon her magic and silence him. Suddenly she was aware of the dark magic stirring in the back of her mind, and fear flooded through her.

She closed her eyes and took deep breaths, trying to calm down.

“Forgive me,” said Caius. “I should not have spoken so harshly.” 

“No,” said Morigna, forcing herself to look at him. “A man who picks a fight cannot blame his opponent for punching back.”

“Does that apply to women as well?” said Jager.

Her irritation came flooding back. “It seems it does. Shall we find out together?”

Ridmark looked at her. There was no anger on his face. Just…concern. Morigna felt a sudden wave of guilt. What was she doing? Why pick a useless fight with Caius over his choice of god? Morigna believed what she believed, he believed what he believed, and they were not going to change their minds. 

“I shall walk for a moment,” said Morigna, rising. “One suspects the murrag does not digest well.” 

She strode away before the others could speak, vanishing into the mass of the ironstalk mushrooms. It was a bit like walking through a forest, albeit a forest made of giant mushrooms and illuminated by a pale, unearthly blue glow. Morigna leaned against one of the stalks, closed her eyes, and let out a long breath. 

What the hell was wrong with her?

She was frightened. She could admit that to herself, even if she could admit it to no one else. Morigna had not been this frightened at the Iron Tower, or even when walking into the Warden’s grim stronghold. That had been before she had taken the dark magic into herself. There had been no immediate ill effects, but perhaps it was like a slow-acting poison that took its time. 

What if it killed her? What if it transformed her into a monster?

What if it drove away Ridmark? 

That frightened her more than she wanted to consider. 

Morigna would have to see this through to the end, to help Calliande recover her staff and her powers. Even with the powers of just a Magistria, Calliande had been able to help Mara. Perhaps the restored Keeper would be able to help Morigna, maybe even exorcise the dark magic from her entirely.

Morigna took another deep breath and opened her eyes, and found Antenora standing a few feet away, the sigils in her staff shining as if she held a killing blast of flame ready. Morigna flinched in alarm, and as she did something seemed to shift and twist within her. 

Shadows rose up at her call, enveloping her. 

For a panicked moment Morigna stood in a shell of shadows, watching the world around her through the dark haze. She concentrated, pushing away the shadows, and they collapsed into nothingness. Yet even after they vanished, she could feel the shadows around her, sense them as if they were candles putting out heat. If she wanted, she knew, she could call to the shadows, and they would obey her.

“Interesting,” said Antenora in her raspy voice.

“It is the dark magic, is it not?” said Morigna, trying to keep herself calm. “Another thing that changed about me?”

“This is correct,” said Antenora. “However, it may cheer you to know that your transformation has not progressed further. It seems an aspect of the damage already done. When I startled you, the power reacted in defense. I suspect the shadows were some kind of shield.”

“You…know what is happening to me?” said Morigna.

“It is obvious to anyone with the Sight,” said Antenora.

“Did you tell anyone?” said Morigna, wondering if Antenora had spoken to Ridmark, or worse, Calliande. 

Antenora shrugged. “I warned Gavin Swordbearer that you might be dangerous, but he chose to spare your life when you lost control of your dark magic during the fight against the urvaalgs. I am not a king or a magistrate. It is not my right to decree whether you live or die.”

“I see,” said Morigna. “Thank you.”

“If the Keeper recovers her power,” said Antenora, “she will regain the Sight as well. Then she can decide what to do about you.”

“One finds that less than comforting.”

“Do not be alarmed,” said Antenora. “The Keeper is inclined to mercy. She has a generous heart. This is all the more remarkable, given that you are both in love with the same man.”

Morigna scowled. “How is that your concern?”

“It is not,” said Antenora, “but I am old beyond reckoning. Not blind.” 

Morigna sighed. “Thank you for not betraying me.”

“As I said, I have no right of command over you,” said Antenora. “A word of warning, though. If the dark magic corrupts you, if you betray the Keeper, than I will kill you.”