Salamander (10 page)

“Correct. The element for fire, but also the glyph for fire. As an element it can be used in constructing other glyphs, as a glyph it can be used in constructing spells. It also has one other use, although I do not know if any of you would have encountered it yet.”

He looked around the room. At last Ellen raised her hand. “In theoretical magic, it stands for the Salamander.”

She was rewarded with a nod from the magister. “Correct. Most of you will not encounter the symbolic use of the elementals until later this semester, or perhaps next year, but when you do there will at least be a few symbols you can recognize.”

He turned back to the board, sketched a simple circle, turned back to the class. “And what is this?”

Jon again raised his hand, but this time Simon ignored him, gestured to another student.

“Earth. The element and the glyph, just like for fire.”

“Correct.” Magister Simon added to the board the symbols for air and water, writing the name of each underneath twice, the second time as a syllable in the true speech. “We start with these four elements, as mages have started for hundred of years. Suppose we combine them. What, for instance, is this?” He wrote two symbols: Fire and earth.

Again Jon raised his hand. Simon looked around, saw nobody else, nodded to Jon.

“Lava, sir. Burning rock. Or a volcano.”

“Very good. Did you work that out yourself?”

Jon shook his head. “
In
something I was reading in the library, sir.”

The magister gave him an approving look. “I am happy to see that at least one of you takes some interest in your studies.”

He erased the symbols on the board, replaced them with the symbols for air and water. “And this?”

To his surprise, it was Mari who raised her hand.

“You have an answer, Lady Mariel?”

“Mist. Clouds. Something like that?”

“Correct. Both. Have you too been spending your spare time browsing the library?
She shook her head. “No. But it seemed to make sense, after Jon gave his answer.”

“Very good. It does indeed make sense. It is the nature of the true speech, whether spoken or written, to make sense.”

***

Ellen looked up at the sky. Almost dark; the gate would be closing in half an hour or so. Finding Mari again might take longer than that; Mari could find her way home alone.

She was just passing Master Dur's shop when she heard someone calling.

“Ellen. Come in. Quickly.”

Nobody was in sight, but the shop door was ajar. She stepped to it, looked through.

At the back of the shop a figure slumped in a chair; a second was lying on the floor barely a foot away. She thought she smelled a faint odor of burnt meat.

“Ellen.” It was the figure in the chair.

“I’ve been stabbed. Pull out the knife and weave together the wound.”

She hesitated.

“You are a weaver. Weaving can heal. You must be quick.”

The voice was faint, but she thought she recognized it: Dur, the master jeweler who owned the shop and crafted its contents. He had spoken to her once or twice. But so far as she could remember, he had never heard her name.

“Be quick.”

Coming closer, light from the open door showed her the handle of the knife protruding from Dur’s side, the dark stain spreading below it. She put her hand hesitantly on the cloth.

“The skin. Working through woven cloth makes it harder.”

That made sense, however he knew it. She slid her left hand in through the open front of the wool robe, up under the shirt, against the skin over the wound, fingers either side of the blade. She closed her eyes, felt her way into the wound. The pattern of the flesh either side was clear, and the abrupt break, iron where there should be flesh. Iron.

“You can’t work with the blade in. When you are ready pull it out, and be quick.”

She took a deep breath. With her right hand she groped for the hilt of the dagger, found it, pulled it out. One fair sized vessel had been cut; she knotted both ends. Crude but fast; knots were the first thing you learned. Then she worked her way along the cut, starting where it was deepest, weaving the flesh back together, matching the ends of the tiny vessels that the knife had severed. She reached the skin, felt it moving, knitting together under her hand. She let her perception sink back into the wound, undid the knots and wove the final vessel together. Stood up. For a moment the world spun around her, then came steady. She stepped back, almost tripped over the body on the floor. She bent down to look at it.

“Don’t bother; no healer on earth could help him now. The idiot thief didn’t see me sitting here with my eyes closed and the door open. The idiot me didn't see him either. Until he stepped on my toes, panicked, and knifed me before I could kill him.”

There was a long silence. Ellen looked at the man she had just healed.

“You’re a mage.”

She hesitated a moment, sniffed the air again.

“A fire mage.”

He nodded.

“Useful for killing people. Not so useful for healing them. Give me the knife.”

She handed it to him. He slid down from the chair to a kneeling position by the corpse, drove the knife between two ribs deep into the body.

“I don’t want people to wonder what killed him. You had best get back to the College before they close the gates. Come again when you are free and we can talk.”

“And until then, you would rather I not …”

“Until then, I would rather you not.”

He did not seem greatly concerned that she might go back to the college and inform the magisters that Dur the jeweler, unknown to them, was a secret fire mage. It would be easy enough for him to kill her and blame it on the dead thief; fortunately the idea did not seem to have occurred to him. She walked out the door, down the street in the direction of the path leading to the college entrance, and started to breathe again.

Dur pulled himself back into his chair, closed his eyes. For a moment Ellen was invisible to him. He found her, with a thought thinned the barrier she had built around herself. She showed to his sight as a pale tower of woven flame. His side throbbed but, looking back at himself, he could see no more bleeding inside or out. Her mother would have done it faster and better, but it was, so far as he knew, the first time the girl had used her talent to heal a serious wound. After a time, he saw her reach the woven flame of the dome, pass into it through the gate.

Opening his eyes, he pulled a strip of cloth from the top of the display counter, spilling several rings onto the floor. He dipped the middle of the cloth into the pool of blood by his feet, bound it tightly around his body with the stain over the wound. A minute to catch his breath and drop onto his knees on the floor, moving towards the hammer. Three sharp blows on the alarm gong. He considered trying to make it back up to the chair, decided against.

It took only a few minutes for the street watchman—Dur, as the most likely target of theft, paid the largest share of his salary—to arrive.

* * *

On her way to her room Ellen suddenly remembered Mari's account of Alys at the jeweler’s shop. Not an accident after all.

A pity that she couldn't share the joke.

***

"You wanted to speak to me, Magister Coelus? One of the porters brought me a note."

"Yes."

Ellen looked at him in surprise. His face was white, drawn, angry; she had never seen it like that before.

"Did you do this?"

"Do what?"

He held out the wax tablets, open. They were blank. "My notes, observations from the past weeks of experiment, ideas for other approaches to take. I've been working on trying to figure out what happened to Maridon, how to keep it from happening to me next time I try the experiment. All gone, erased."

She shook her head. "I didn’t even know you used a tablet for your lab notes. We've been doing theory; I knew you did experiments but I don't think you ever showed me one."

"Someone blotted them out last night. You are the only
strong
fire mage in the college. I doubt any of the others have enough fire, or enough control over it, to melt the wax without scorching the tablet. And you have told me enough times that you disapprove of my project."

"I do. Perhaps if I had known what was in your tablets I would have erased them; I don't know. But I wouldn't have done it secretly then, and I wouldn't lie about it now."

For a moment Coelus seemed to relax, then something else occurred to him. "Where were you last night?"

"Asleep in bed, of course. Where else would I be?"

"I don't know, but you weren't in your bed a little after midnight. I went to your door and looked through it—not with my eyes—after I found the tablets. There was no-one there. You weren't in your bed. Whose bed were you in?"

There was a sudden silence; Ellen's face turned as white as paper, whiter than the mage's.
"I do not think it is for you to put that question to me. As it happens, I was in my own bed."

"I looked, I tell you. I know you well enough by now, veil and all. You were not there. Nobody was."

Ellen reached out to the lamp burning on his desk, pulled out a thread of flame, drew it in a quick gesture down her body.

"Close your eyes, Coelus, and tell me where I am."

He looked puzzled, but after a moment his eyes closed. His voice was more puzzled still.

"You aren't there."

He opened his eyes.

"That's impossible. How do you do it?"

"With your eyes closed, how many people in the village—mages or not—can you see from here?"

"None, of course; they are outside the dome. I'm inside it. The dome is … ."

He looked at her again, closed his eyes, opened them.

"You have a way of blocking magic, like the dome?"

"Very like. I've slept behind a barrier for three months now, ever since Maridon tried to kill me."

His mouth fell open; it occurred to her that, for an air mage, he looked strikingly like a fish.

"Since Maridon what?"

"Since Maridon tried to kill me. I was not sure at first who it was or why, but he was the only decent earth mage here and the attempt was obviously earth mage work. After he tried to seize the Cascade and use it for his own power, it was obvious why. You must have told him that you told me about the effect; he wanted to be sure nobody knew about it who might persuade you not to give him control of the pool."

Coelus hesitated, torn between two questions.

"How do you know about the experiment and what happened to Maridon? All anyone in the college knows is that something went wrong with a spell."

"It was obvious you would try to test the Cascade; why else were there three outside mages here, all guest friends of Maridon? I was behind the strongest barrier I could weave, watching. Do you think you are the only one who can see with his eyes closed?"

Coelus shook his head, as if to shake off distractions.

"You said he tried to kill you, months ago. Why didn't you say something? Why didn't you tell me?"

"I did not tell because I had no way of proving it. I was a student, he was a magister; why should they believe me instead of deciding I was crazy and sending me home? I did not tell you because I did not know whether or not you were behind it. You and he were working together, he was an earth mage. You had good reason to want me silenced."

She fell silent, looking defiantly at him. Coelus was silent as well, speechless. He drew several long, slow breaths.

"You thought I would try to murder you, to keep you from telling people about the Cascade?"

"It was one possible interpretation of the available evidence."

"I couldn't try to hurt you." He hesitated, the moment passed. He gave her a weak smile. "Killing you would be like burning a library or smashing the only instance of a precision instrument." He hesitated again. "For one thing, you are the only person in the whole college I can talk to without feeling as though I need a translator."

She nodded.

"I know. I feel much the same. It is one of the reasons I have not killed you, which would have been the simplest solution. And not unjust, considering the scale on which you have violated, and intend to violate, the limits of magery."

He looked at her indignantly.

"You. Kill me? How?"

"For a brilliant man you are sometimes very stupid. You know what I am."

She turned, pointed at one of the unlit candles on the shelf above his desk. It went up in a blaze of flame; an instant later, where the flame had been was nothing but a faint mist of grey ash.

***

The next morning was breakfast, Constructions, Ethics, a free hour, lunch. Two temptations: To skip Ethics or use it to hint at Magister Coelus' project, in the hope of getting the other magisters to stop it. She resisted both. Two hours would be enough, and Master Dur's shop was a few doors down from the cookshop. She had been considering the puzzle of Magister Coelus' tablets, and it had occurred to her that although she might be the only
strong
fire mage in the college, there was another one not far away.