Gathering of the Titans: The Tol Chronicles Book 2 (33 page)

The possibility that he had been cursed had never occurred to Ai’go’r. He knew magic existed, of course, but it didn’t play much of a role in his day-to-day life so he’d mostly dismissed matters arcane from his thoughts. Being cursed did explain a lot of things. But, who would curse him, and why? He thought back to events just prior to the beginning of the strange affliction. Nothing really leapt out at him until he started flipping through paperwork from that time.

About a week before the troubles started, Ai’go’r had rebuffed a half-hearted, or so it seemed to him, attempt from a rival on nearby Hividz across the Poltoi Strait to buy him out. The rival grocer had threatened to take punitive measures if his offer was not accepted, but as such threats were fairly customary in negotiations of the region, Ai’go’r had ignored it. The only reason he remembered the interaction at all was that rival’s threat had included employing the services of a mage—not a typical strategy in his experience.

Mages all were supposed to subscribe to a code of ethics that would preclude them from casting curses for money, but as with any group of people not all mages were equally moral. The promise of quick cash might prove irresistible in circumstances where a mage was in heavy debt, for example. There was also the possibility that family or clan connections—and the usual pressures thereto appertaining—were involved.

Presuming that his produce had been cursed, how did he go about lifting said curse? What took a mage to generate would, he guessed, require one to remove. He didn’t know any mages, and nor had he the slightest idea how to go about hiring one. He wondered if he could take out some form of classified advertisement in the local news journal. Then one of his customers told him that SagMag, the Society of Sages and Mages, had an office in the capitol city, Coestra, about two hours’ drive.

The very next day he got up before the sun and headed out in his ancient little pram. The SagMag offices weren’t even open yet when he arrived; he had to sit on a covered bench outside watching the tropical rain patter steadily while he waited. Finally someone showed up to unlock the door. Ai’go’r tried his best to be patient while the SagMag official went about the rituals associated with opening for business for the day. Things moved slowly and deliberately in the tropics; Ai’go’r was well aware of this.

When at last SagMag was ready to receive visitors, the grocer stated his business and asked about hiring a mage to remove the curse. The clerk flipped through his register and shook his head sadly. “We don’t have many mages willing to take on contracts these days. Most of them either have academic posts or are employed by governments; either way they aren’t free to take on outside work to avoid accusations of impropriety.”

Ai’go’r frowned. “You mean there are
no
mages at all who can help me?”

The clerk seemed on the verge of confirming this when he spotted an entry at the bottom of a page. “Here’s one possibility: the
Arcanium
, a mage training facility in Tragacanth that accepts contracts at all levels for the purpose of providing real-world exercises for the schola’s student mages.”

“Tragacanth? That’s a long way off,” Ai’go’r said, doubtfully. “Still, if that’s where I have to go, then I will.”

“Well, you don’t have to go there personally, of course. They do have a comm circuit listed here.” He scribbled the number on the back of a business card and handed it to Ai’go’r. “Here you are, sir. Best of luck!”

Three days later Ai’go’r received a message from the Arcanium that his contract had been accepted and a Mage First Tier was on the way to investigate and, if needed, remove the curse. He breathed a sigh of relief. Perhaps the end of the nightmare was in sight. He wondered idly if the rival whom he suspected of causing the curse to be pronounced had taken similar measures against anyone else.

“You want me to go to Grosyem? I’ve never been there before, although I’ve read about it in tourist guides. Am I traveling by conventional means or translocation spell?” Prond was discussing his latest assignment over comm with Ballop’ril, who had gone into Tillimil to meet with several other high-level mages.

“Translocation,” Ballop’ril answered. “The round trip would require in excess of a fortnight if you went by sea: and that’s only if you took direct ship, which would cost more than the contract will be worth. Look in the archives for translocation templates to Grosyem. You want to find one for Barra Tingo, ideally. Make certain it’s recent.”

“Yes, Archmage. If I find one, shall I leave immediately?”

“Yes. Don’t forget your ‘go’ bag. And while you’re there, please update the templates and perhaps even add one or two, if you get an opportunity.”

When Prond was ready to leave, he had the Arcanium clerical staff contact Ai’go’r by comm with the coordinates at which Prond would appear, so he could meet him.

“Good. That’s only half a kilometer from here. I can be there in a few minutes.”

Prond checked and re-checked the contents of his ‘go’ bag. It contained not only his personal toiletry items for overnight stays, but also implements and raw materials for a variety of magical spells, talismans, phylacteries, and so on. Following schola policies, he cast a ‘great circle’ translocation spell that would return him to his precise starting point automatically after three days if he did not manually initiate the return sooner. This was for the mage’s own safety; if he were disabled by some mechanism he would teleport home without the need to take any action.

Translocation was a curious experience. It essentially created a tunnel through The Slice connecting any two points on the material plane as though there was no physical space between them. The mage walked forward only two steps: one took him into the magical tunnel and the next to the destination. While the tunnel was located within The Slice, its walls were opaque from the point of view of the mage, so the optical sensation was a momentary blurring of vision as the scene transitioned from origin to destination. Taking only one step had no effect, because the tunnel itself was a quantum object that allowed the mage to be in superposition: in both places at once. The act of taking that second step caused the superpositioning to break down and transported the mage to the far end. If the second step was never taken, the mage remained at the original location.

Prond appeared out of thin air, from Ai’go’r’s perspective, on a deserted strip of land about a hundred meters inland from a rock shoreline on the eastern outskirts of the sleepy tropical town of Barra Tingo. He nodded in satisfaction at the destination and made a note to verify this template as still valid.

“Greetings, great mage. I am Ai’go’r Desnol. I presume you have come to help me with my problem?”

Prond smiled at him. “Yes, Ai’go’r. My name is Prond, Mage of the First Tier, and I was dispatched by Archmage Ballop’ril, Master of the Schola Arcanium, to fulfill the contract you have entered into with us.”

“Excellent, excellent,” effused Ai’go’r, rubbing his hands together. “Let us waste no time. I will take you to my warehouse, where I believe the curse to be laid.” They both got into the grocer’s tiny pram and chugged off. On the way Ai’go’r relayed all of the story he could to Prond.

“So, you believe this rival grocer in Hividz paid someone to cast a curse?” Prond asked. “It is imperative that I find out more about the mage who did this, if indeed it is a curse. Not only is it a violation of the Oath of Ethical Conduct, the more I can discover about the casting mage, the easier it will be to undo the malediction.”

“I’ll be happy to tell you everything I know about the grocer, although I have no knowledge whatever concerning the mage. His name is Riqpen and he is a gnarlignome; the only one of that race I’ve ever met in person, in fact. We’ve never been friends, per se, but up until recently we’ve at least been on professional terms with one another. I even helped him out once when a shipment of his got delayed by bad weather at sea. A few weeks ago—right out of the blue—he offered to buy me out. The price he named was fair, but I have no interest in selling right now. This is my livelihood and I enjoy it, to boot.”

“What happened when you turned him down?”

“Yeah, well, that’s why I think he’s involved. He started yelling at me and swearing by ‘Arfsweener’ that he would get even for this grave insult. I didn’t pay a lot of attention because I hear that kind of language fairly often out here. I think it’s the humidity.”

“
Did
you insult him?”

“Not from my point of view: I just declined to sell. It was pretty polite, actually. I wasn’t mad at him; I thought it was just a business proposition. He apparently didn’t take it that way.”

As he stepped inside the grocer’s warehouse, Prond immediately detected a strong magical aura. He winced at the twisted, haphazard lines of arcane force sprayed around the room almost at random. Every piece of produce in the warehouse was serving as a self- perpetuating maledictive locus. This was a very sophisticated curse, not just the result of some minor talisman’s spell discharge, as he had expected to find.

“You have a serious issue here,” Prond told the grocer, “This spell is very complex and took a long time to cast. It will be quite tedious to undo. If the mage casting it was paid at SagMag scale, it would have cost more to commission than this place is probably worth. I don’t understand the motivation here. Something’s going on beyond just the retaliation of a spurned business owner.”

“You...you aren’t going to charge me that much to undo the curse, are you?” Ai’go’r was shaking a little as he asked.

“No. We have a contracted price, and we will honor that contract, no matter how much work it takes on my part.”

“That is noble of you and reflects well upon your schola,” Ai’go’r answered, wiping his brow in relief.

Prond spent the rest of that day trying to map out the arcane force patterns in the affected area. It was hard work, because any movement of the produce changed everything around. Late that evening he sat in his room at the nearby inn, wondering if this task was not too much for him to handle. Ordinarily even a Third-Tier mage could remove a simple curse, but this one was anything but simple. It was a tangled mess, in fact. He fell asleep wondering why anyone would take this bizarre approach to casting a malediction.

About the middle of the following day Ai’go’r came back from lunch with a copy of the local news journal. “Look at this!” he said to Prond, waving the folded papers under the mage’s nose. Prond read the story he pointed to, which detailed the sudden, grotesque destruction of a grocery in Rebrugge, Hividz by what the local EE were calling a ‘magical meltdown.’

“That was Riqpen’s shop!” Ai’go’r exclaimed. “That was the gnarlignome who wanted to buy my business!”

Prond sat down heavily, paper still in hand. This changed everything and nothing at all. If the curse were tied to that physical location, it would have been altered significantly by whatever happened in Rebrugge. Since nothing here seemed to have changed, the curse was free-range now: no longer anchored. That would make it much more difficult to remove, as there was no central feed point from The Slice. Prond was seriously beginning to wonder if he possessed the skill necessary to carry out this contract. He imagined how disappointed Ballop’ril would be if he came back after having failed, however, so he racked his brain for a plan.

He decided that he needed to understand what had happened at Riqpen’s place first, as that might give him insight into the source and arcane mechanism for Ai’go’r’s curse. As he didn’t have a lot of time left, Prond contacted a mage local to Rebrugge and asked her to head over to the spot and set up for remote viewing so he could investigate without having a physical presence.

The scene in Rebrugge was shocking. There was nothing left of Riqpen’s building: the very ground seemed to be disrupted. Riqpen himself had not been seen since the incident. A team of forensic mages was on the way from Coestra to investigate the cause of the disaster on behalf of EE. CoME had dispatched its own team of investigators, as well. Apparently whatever had taken place there generated harmonics on multiple arcane planes, even in The Slice itself; ripples had been detected all over the planet.

There was not much in the way of usable evidence left, however, after what was already becoming known as the ‘Rebrugge Event.’Although the remote viewing connection was quite good, even the mage who set it up for Prond said that there was so much destruction and chaos all along the magical spectrum that it was impossible to make any sense of it. Prond did his best to sort through what little he did gather before thanking the Hividz mage profusely and closing the connection. He had just over a full day left to defuse the curse.

Since he had no central energy sink from which to disconnect the magical flow that maintained the curse, the only thing Prond could think of to do was disentangle the individual streams one by one. He started at the front of the warehouse and worked his way back. As the layout was sorted by produce type and variety, he effectively ‘uncursed’ one vegetable at a time.

As he was preparing to head back to the inn to sleep just after midnight, Prond made a disheartening discovery. Some, although not all, of the produce he had uncursed was reconnecting to the curse-generative magical energy streams. He enfolded them in a quick arcano-static field, but he knew it would not last forever. Something
exceptionally
odd was going on here. He could really use Ballop’ril’s advice right about now. He toyed with an Amulet of Summoning the archmage had given him for emergencies. This problem was vexing, but it was not an emergency, he decided at length. He sighed and headed off to bed.

Prond slept for only four hours and was back dissolving the curse before daybreak. He had only six hours left before the translocation fail-safe activated and returned him to the Arcanium.

The stasis spells were still holding; he hoped that once all of the primary energy streams had been disrupted those fields would no longer be necessary. He finished up dissociating the individual energy feeds a scant half-hour before his mandatory return kicked in.