The Reluctant Mage Read online

  Books by Karen Miller

  Kingmaker, Kingbreaker

  The Innocent Mage

  The Awakened Mage

  The Godspeaker Trilogy

  Empress

  The Riven Kingdom

  Hammer of God

  Fisherman’s Children

  The Prodigal Mage

  The Reluctant Mage

  Writing as K. E. Mills

  Rogue Agent

  The Accidental Sorcerer

  Witches Incorporated

  Wizard Squared

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2010 by Karen Miller

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Orbit

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  www.twitter.com/orbitbooks.

  First eBook Edition: July 2010

  Orbit is an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Orbit name and logo are trademarks of Little, Brown Book Group Limited.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-08846-6

  Contents

  Copyright

  Books by Karen Miller

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Dedicated to

  Robert B. Parker

  Who lifted crime fiction into the heady realm of

  sweet, spare elegance

  Kage Baker

  One of the most gifted and consistently under-rated

  writers in the field of speculative fiction

  and

  Dick Francis

  I read Hot Money so many times the book came

  apart in my hands.

  If that doesn’t denote genius, I don’t know

  what does.

  I can’t believe we lost three of my favourite writers in

  the space of a few weeks. Thank you, thank you, and

  may you all rest in peace.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Because he was Doranen, and a Garrick, Arlin refused to avert his gaze.

  Of all the ways a man can die, I have to think this is the worst.

  Worse even than drowning in the chaos of a whirlpool.

  Kneeling on cold, glimlit flagstones, Morg’s latest victim trembled and keened as his little life was slowly extinguished.

  Arlin shivered. The first time he’d seen Morg kill like this, with magic, the victim was Father’s dear friend Sarle Baden, who’d wept so hard at Rodyn Garrick’s empty-coffined funeral he’d made himself vomit.

  Since Sarle there’d been three other killings—well, four, counting this one—all of them as gruesome, and he had to believe there would be many more. As many as it took for Morg to absorb the scattered pieces of himself until he was whole again, and entirely unstoppable.

  But Asher sundered him years ago. I wonder why it’s taken him so long to attempt this rejoining? I wonder how long it will take him to succeed?

  He didn’t have any answers. He wasn’t sure he wanted them.

  The morning after Sarle Baden’s murder Morg had ordered him to kneel. Then, glancing at Fernel Pintte and the idiot Goose Martin and the other captives, bound and gagged, he’d smiled.

  “You are Doranen, Arlin. I would not treat you like these cattle. You are free to ride behind me, unbound—provided, of course, that you behave yourself. Will you?”

  He wasn’t a fool. Swearing obedience, staring into Rafel’s haughty face, he’d seen no hint of the man whose body Morg had stolen. But then, as Morg gestured for him to stand, he’d thought he caught a glimpse of something familiar and desperate in the sorcerer’s dark Olken eyes.

  Angry with himself, he’d smothered the surge of pity and did not look for Rafel again.

  For the next five months Morg led them through the wilderness beyond Barl’s Mountains, often willy-nilly it seemed, but always edging north, league after league, over fallow fields, through woodland and across sluggish rivers. If there were villages or townships in the lands they travelled, the sorcerer kept well clear of them—and the few unbidden souls they encountered on their journey he captured and yoked to Pintte and the rest.

  But the bidden souls? The men Morg summoned with mysterious arcane ritual because they carried a small, sundered part of himself?

  Those men he killed.

  Twice, the possessed had come to them out of the night, haggard and half-mindless, and once the sorcerer had hunted his quarry to ground as though he was a harrier hound and could scent the man’s terror. Or perhaps he was simply scenting himself. Like calling to like, evil to evil. Each time Morg sucked his victims dry and moved on, but where he’d abandoned Sarle Baden, leaving the aged Doranen’s broken body behind to rot, he did not abandon Rafel. And with each death, each swallowed morsel of himself, Morg grew stronger and more confident.

  At long last, ragged and dirty and exhausted, they’d reached Lost Dorana—that almost-mythical land for which his dead father had spent a lifetime pining. And twenty-four days after crossing his ancestral land’s almost-extinct magical border they reached Elvado, the city of mages, Dorana’s cradle of knowledge.

  It was a wasteland, smashed to ruins in the great mage war and never rebuilt. There’d been no-one left to rebuild it. Morg said, carelessly, “I killed everyone who opposed me, you see. In the end there was no-one left.” He’d shrugged. “It was better that way. I do my best work alone.”

  Arlin rode through the haunted silence with his eyes closed.

  Unmoved by Elvado’s profligate destruction, Morg took his captives to an ancient, magically preserved mansion some three leagues distant from the city. “My once and future home,” he called it. There he set them to airing and cleaning the chambers and corridors, grooming the estate’s grounds and taming its fields and orchards. Forbidden to use magic, Arlin toiled alongside the other prisoners and made sure to keep his offended feelings hidden.

  Nine days later, just after sunrise, another witless soul arrived, answering Morg’s summons like a dog obeying its master’s shrill whistle.

  And now the man was dying.

  This one was young, barely escaped from boyhood, with light brown hair and not much chin, peach fuzz on his cheeks and a voice that remained lodged in his throat… though by the time Morg was done with him, like all the others he’d have screamed it right out.

  Arlin felt unwelcome fing
ers pluck at his sleeve, stirring him from memory and sour contemplations.

  “Arlin.”

  The whisperer was Fernel Pintte, who insisted on treating him with a loathsome familiarity—and was so afraid of Morg he had no fear to spare for anyone else, which meant there was no way to stop him from being familiar, short of murder.

  But murdering Fernel Pintte was out of the question. Morg had a use for him, so Pintte must stay alive.

  “Arlin.”

  He snatched his arm free. “What?”

  Fernel Pintte wasn’t faring well. After so many months of strenuous captivity he was a loose collection of bones draped in folds of sallow skin. Being Olken, and inferior, even though he was useful he was not treated kindly.

  “Arlin,” Pintte whispered, “how much stronger will this new death make the sorcerer?”

  “How should I know?” he said, making sure to keep his voice soft. “Why don’t you ask him?”

  Fernel Pintte flinched as though he’d been struck with a whip. “You’re a bastard.”

  “Pintte, be quiet,” he said, impatient. “You think because he’s killing someone he won’t hear your rattling tongue?”

  Flinching again, Pintte shut his mouth.

  They stood in the underground chamber below the mansion that Morg had chosen for his arcane slaughters. For some reason the sorcerer liked them to witness these monstrous deaths, him and Fernel Pintte and the other three Olken, whose names he’d not bothered to learn, and Rafel’s idiot friend Goose. Why Morg kept that halfwit alive he couldn’t begin to understand.

  Unless it’s to torment Rafel.

  And torment him it would, if he truly was still alive and aware within the cage of his body.

  But I’ll not lose sleep over that. If anyone deserves some torment, it’s Rafel. And why would Morg be merciful? Rafel’s father murdered him. He must want his sweet revenge.

  Peach-fuzz’s skin was peeling off his naked body now, rotting strips of human hide sliding from blood-and-pus slicked muscle as though he were already a week-old corpse. Pintte was retching. He always did at this point. Rafel’s idiot friend was grunting like a pig. The others controlled their bellies, but they were snuffling. Weeping.

  Good thing I’m made of sterner stuff. As the last surviving Doranen in this forsaken place I do have a position to maintain.

  Morg’s stolen face was a mask of physical pleasure as he consumed another lost and found sliver of his sundered soul. If he had a soul. If he was even human. Did he know how many more pieces of himself were out there in the wider world, waiting to be found and harvested? If he did, he never said so. On the whole Morg said very little—or very little to the point, at least—and Arlin knew better than to ask impertinent questions. Not of this mage.

  For I’m anything but a fool. And Father had thrashed the impertinence out of me by the time I was six.

  Fernel Pintte began moaning under his ragged breath. “Finish it, finish it, for the love of Barl just finish it.”

  Pintte was a maggot, but even maggots could be right. Morg’s lascivious lingering over what was, at its heart, a simple, straightforward task? Revolting. Obscene.

  I know why we’re here. He’s reminding us that we’re his chattels. His slaves. We’re to remember, waking and sleeping, that we breathe because our breathing amuses. And the moment we cease to be amusing…

  Dead at last—what a blessing—the young man slid from Morg’s embrace and struck the chamber’s stone floor with a wet slapping sound. Pintte gagged and turned away.

  Ignoring him, Arlin watched Morg instead. Spine and shoulders pressed to the wall, the sorcerer shuddered and quivered, the chamber’s cool air rasping in his throat as he absorbed his reclaimed powers. Just like every other time, something peculiar happened to his face, a shifting of feature upon feature, Morg’s and Rafel’s strangely combined. Blue eyes masking brown, a nose at once both straight and crooked. As though the mind inside the body wasn’t sure whose face to wear.

  And then the mind settled, and there was Rafel again. More or less. Morg indulged in a luxurious stretch, blithely oblivious to the bloody smears staining his forest-green silk tunic with its gold-and-obsidian buttons. He’d let Rafel’s hair grow so it brushed his shoulders in a thick, black mane. Very dashing. Rafel surely must hate it.

  “Pintte,” he said, with a sleepy, half-lidded smile at peach-fuzz’s corpse. “You and your friends clean this up. And once you’ve done that you can butcher the latest kill and prepare it for roasting. Arlin, walk with me.”

  At the crooking of Morg’s finger Arlin abandoned Pintte and the other Olken to their filthy tasks and fell into step beside the sorcerer, permitted that indulgence because he was Doranen, a novelty, and something like kin.

  And because he knows I have no hope of hurting him.

  They wandered out of the stinking chamber, along a wide corridor and up a flight of stairs to the mansion’s ground floor. From there they made their way through its echoing stillness and outside to the newly tended gardens, shy with autumn blooms and lavish with as-yet-uncut grass. The sky was a pale milkish blue, the early morning sun thinly veiled by cloud.

  Waiting for the sorcerer to speak, Arlin took refuge from recent horrors in the surrounding countryside.

  Morg’s mansion stood on a gentle rise overlooking wild woodland thick with birds and game, a larder on their doorstep. Beyond the woodland, Elvado’s surviving magic-twisted spires winked and glittered in the rising light. Seeing them, Arlin felt a pang of grief for the ruined city. Once it had been thriving and beautiful, with Doranen magic soaked into its bones. Riding its empty streets behind Morg he’d heard the faded power whisper, felt it sigh against his skin. Elvado had been colourful, as Lur’s Dorana City was colourful. Now only hints and echoes of its brightness remained, bleached by the long years to a mournful memory of joy.

  I’m glad Father never saw it. Ruined Elvado would have crushed him.

  It was odd to feel such a detached compassion. If the wearisome, wandering journey from the blighted lands to Lost Dorana had done nothing else, it had given him ample time to reflect on his life. On his father and their brutal, unloving relationship. On Rafel and his father, and why seeing them together had made him sick with rage.

  Not that it matters any more. My father is dead. Doubtless Asher is dead now too. And Rafel, well, he can’t survive in there forever. Sooner or later Morg will crowd him out.

  Drifting on a light breeze was the sound of Fernel Pintte’s grating voice barking orders at the other Olken as they disposed of peach-fuzz’s emptied body. It seemed he’d chosen a patch of field beyond the stables for a graveyard, and now wanted the idiot Goose to scrounge stray rocks for a headstone—an impulse of decency that must be foreign to this place.

  I wonder how many stray rocks there’ll be in that field before Morg is done here, one way or another?

  As though the sorcerer could read his thoughts, Morg rested a heavy hand on his shoulder. “I must confess, Arlin, you intrigue me,” he said, fingers briefly dabbling. “I thought you’d be more curious. About me. About my plans. Months and months of travelling—and there were no questions. We’ve been here for days and still you ask no questions. Was I mistaken? Are you a dullard? Is there nothing you wish to know?”

  When Morg wore Sarle Baden he’d been half-mad, unable to decide if he was a me or a we. But since clothing himself in Rafel the sorcerer had adopted a light, bantering tone and there was never so much as a hint of madness in him. Remarkable, given there was more of Morg in Rafel now than there’d been in poor old Sarle.

  So why is he not raving? Because he needed more of himself to be sane? Or because Rafel is truly a mage like no other, able to contain the spiteful power of this… man?

  “Arlin,” said Morg, with a bite in his fingers. “Do you really think it wise to ignore me?”

  He stopped breathing, just for a moment. The sound of his racing heart boomed in his ears.

  Show no fear. Show no fear.
/>   “Master,” he said—on pain of death they were required to call Morg “master”—“forgive me. I wasn’t ignoring you. I was merely contemplating my reply.”

  “Which is what?” said Morg, letting his hand drop.

  “I’ve asked no questions because I didn’t want to anger you. If I need to know something, I trust you’ll tell me.”

  Morg stared at him with Rafel’s wide and honest eyes. “Sink me bloody sideways, Arlin! I never took you for a prosy fool.”

  Arlin’s surprise was so great he took a step back. “Rafel?”

  “No,” said Morg, amused. “But his speech is so quaint, don’t you think? I wanted to try it. And I was curious, to see what you’d do if you thought he’d returned.”

  What would I do? I don’t know. Beg him to save us, probably.

  A lowering thought. “Can he return?” he said, careful to sound disinterested. “I wasn’t sure. In truth, I thought he must be dead.”

  “Not yet,” said Morg. Gloating malice fattened his voice. “There’s too much pleasure to be gained from his pain.”

  So Rafel was aware. “I see.”

  Morg considered him closely. “Does it please you, that he’s suffering? And he is suffering, Arlin. I’m making certain of that.”

  Does it please me? Yes. But…

  He shrugged. “Rafel’s no friend of mine.”

  That made Morg laugh. “I know. And so does Rafel. Would it astonish you to learn he bears no grudge against you? Your father’s death haunts him, Arlin. Asher’s son is soaked in grief and drowning in regret for the loss of Rodyn Garrick.” Another laugh. “When he’s not screaming, that is.”

  It was easier to do this if he didn’t look at Morg, so he kept his gaze pinned firmly on Elvado’s few, distant spires. “Master, I tell you honestly, what Rafel feels means nothing to me. He means nothing. How could he? Rafel’s an Olken. He comes from common stock. He’s inferior—and a liar.”

  “Really?” Now Morg was mocking. “And yet I chose him and not you to sustain me. Tell me you’re disappointed, Arlin. Tell me how devastated you were when I passed you by and chose him for my vessel.”