The Innocent Mage Read online

  ‘Oh, but Father!’ the prince said. ‘Don’t you see? They were trying to preserve an entire civilisation. To encapsulate untold centuries of lore and learning in a single haphazard collection of books. It’s an extraordinary ambition. When I think of them struggling to decide what to take and what must stay behind … it breaks my heart.’

  Borne laughed. ‘Spoken like a true historian. And you’re right, too, about how much work it will take to properly catalogue and translate what’s here. It must be done with care, and reverence, and most importantly with an eye to the potential dangers such knowledge carries with it. It’s not a task to be awarded lightly.’

  ‘No,’ the prince said, his voice sober. ‘You’re right, of course.’

  ‘So when can you begin?’ his father added.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Yes, Royal Curator? That is, if you’d like to be.’

  As the prince stammered his delight, his surprise, his protestations of faithful duty, and the queen laughed, and the king laughed too, which was good to hear, and Fane muttered sarcasms under her breath, he held Barl’s diary in his trembling hands and gave thanks.

  ‘Durm!’ the king called, and stood behind him. ‘The afternoon fades and WeatherWorking time draws near. We should go.’

  Half turning his head, keeping the diary hidden close against his chest, Durm said, ‘By all means, Majesty, you go. I am happy to stay working unaccompanied.’

  ‘I know,’ Borne said affectionately. ‘Given the chance you’d work yourself to a collapse searching for anything remotely magical. I’d rather you didn’t. Aside from the deleterious effect on your health, I’d prefer we didn’t draw any more attention to this place than is absolutely necessary. Besides, there’s always tomorrow.’

  Argument, however mild, was too dangerous. ‘That’s true,’ he agreed.

  ‘We’ll leave the place warded. It’ll be safe enough. And tomorrow we’ll finish what we’ve begun, then decide what next to do.’ With a glance that encompassed them all, Borne added, ‘Apart from ourselves, the only person who knows of this place is the servant who discovered the breach in the courtyard. When she told me what she’d found I commanded her to hold her tongue. Tonight I shall fuddle her to make sure she loses all recollection of her little adventure. This library must remain a secret. Not a word is to be said to anybody. Is that understood?’

  The others nodded and murmured obedience. ‘As you say, Majesty,’ Durm agreed again, and slipped Barl’s diary inside his robe where it could lie against his ribs, hidden and protected. He loved Borne like a brother but that didn’t blind him to the sober truth: the king could not be trusted with this discovery. Not tonight. Perhaps not ever. The thought pained him … but never before in his life had pain stood in the way of duty. Nor would it now.

  ‘Durm?’ said Fane as she stood back to allow him and her parents to lead the way out of the library. ‘Is everything all right?’

  He smiled at her, Barl’s diary a warm and promising weight against his skin. ‘Foolish girl,’ he said, and shook his head indulgently. ‘Of course it is.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Much later that night, after dinner, having eased Borne down from his WeatherWorking jitters and wrapped him safe in a robe before a roaring fire, with the rest of the palace retired to bed and only a handful of servants scurrying like mice about the corridors, Durm locked himself into his private study and opened Barl’s diary.

  The book-lined room was hushed. A modest fire crackled in the hearth, scenting the warm air with the spicy freshness of pine. Candles scattered shadows. He’d left one window uncurtained; the glow of Barl’s Wall splashed prismed gold light on the carpet as it filtered through Borne’s soft rain and the thin glass panes.

  Comfortable in robe and slippers, a tankard of mulled wine by his side and his belly groaning pleasurably with food, he crossed his ankles on a hassock, propped his elbows on the arms of his chair and held the book as tenderly as he would a lover, had there ever been one.

  ‘Speak to me, brave lady,’ he breathed, and began to read.

  Hours later, he stirred. The candles were burned down almost to their sockets. The fire had dwindled to ash and cinders. His half-drunk wine sat cold in the tankard, and the remnants of Borne’s rain barely trickled down the windowpanes.

  ‘Barl save us,’ he said aloud; the sound of his voice was a startlement.

  The contents of the diary were … unspeakable. Borne had been right about one thing: were it to fall into the wrong hands the potential for catastrophe was limitless. Appalling. All their lost powers, in one slim, innocent-seeming volume. Spells of war. Spells of enslavement. Incantations to sear the guarded truth from a captive’s mind. Enchantments to suck a soul from its body and trap it for all time in crystal. Summonings to bring forth beasts the like of which he’d never imagined could exist as flesh and blood: dragons, horslirs, trolls, werehags. Incantations of death and destruction that would see Lur laid waste within hours. She had even recorded the most terrible words of all, the words of UnMaking, designed to unknit a man’s flesh from bone and undo his place in the world as though he had never been. A desperate spell that would undo the speaker, as well as his victim. Until this moment that incantation had been mere myth. Passed down in secret whispers from Master Magician to Master Magician and never spoken of beneath an open sky. What breed of magician could labour to bring forth such horrors? What man could bend his gifts to birth such monstrosities? Would want to?

  Morg.

  Praise Barl he was dead then, his like never to be seen again.

  The diary wasn’t all horror, though. Threaded through the incantations of insanity were more useful applications of magic. Ways of translocating animate matter. Methods of transmuting base metals to gold. Tricks of transcendence. Devices of enhancement.

  And a way to see beyond the Wall.

  In the Old Tongue, Barl had written:

  So it falls to me, as I knew it would, to keep this place safe for all time. I have made a beginning, with the banishment of all dark and greedy magics from my people’s hearts and minds, but that is not enough. There is still Morgan. His shadow has not touched us yet but I fear it will come, sooner rather than later, and only I can prevent it. There is a way. I believe the natural harmonies in this land, combined with our more militant magics, can be fused into a barrier that will never be breached, so long as it is nurtured most diligently and forever-more. Using some new magics that I have devised I will anchor this Wall in the mountains and a reef around the coastline. Sink its strength into the bowels of the world and feed it daily with the weather magic I will create. I will make this place a paradise, so that our children need cry out in fearful dreams no more.

  Rereading the hastily scrawled entry Durm felt unexpected tears prick his eyes. The heart of her. The passion, and the courage. The mastery. She was the last of the great magicians, the last to create new magic out of old. For six centuries the Master Magicians of Lur had followed the strictest guidelines, first and most sacred of which being No new magic. It was too dangerous. New magic, untried and untested, might disturb the precarious balance between the Weather and the Wall. Might bring it down and so unleash chaos. In the early days, according to judicial records, certain magicians had thought the rule did not apply to them.

  Their deaths had been slow and spectacular and were recited into memory and repeated in a litany unto this very day by the new generation of Doranen magicians in their schoolrooms.

  No new magic.

  He agreed with the rule, of course he did. But sometimes he dreamed, he wondered, of what freedom would be like. To experiment. To risk. To create that which had never before existed. To be another Barl. But for that he would need to stand on soil that was not of Lur.

  Mouth dry, heart tolling like the Great Bell on Barlsday, he opened the diary again and continued to read what she had written.

  But while a locked room is safe, without a key it is also a trap. So I have fashioned one and in time
I will use it to open a window in the Wall, that I may see what has become of the world beyond. And if it be safe, then we will go home. I swear it, I swear it on my life. One day we will all go home.

  ‘Poor Lady!’ he cried to the glowing barrier beyond his window. ‘You didn’t know the making of your Wall would kill you!’

  Home. Somewhere out there, beyond the mountains, lay home, Dorana, the birthplace of their race. Their true cradle. Somewhere beyond the mountains there was a land where magic flourished, where incantation was an artform and not a survival mechanism or a toy, where great men could labour their lives in its mysteries, untrammelled by rules and dire punishments in the breaking of them.

  And in his hands, his trembling hands, he held a way to find it.

  Six centuries ago Morgan, become Morg, had plunged his people into bloody war. He was dead now, dust and ashes on the wind. A frightful phantom, a legacy well remembered, a lesson never to be unlearned. But he was dead. And the living cried out to be set free.

  Hesitantly he turned to the next page of the diary, and looked at the sigils and syllables of the incantation that would allow him the first glimpse beyond the Wall in more than six centuries.

  If I tell Borne of this, he will say no. He will burn this book for fear of what might be. The crown has clipped his wings. For him the sky is forever out of reach.

  For him. But not for me.

  And when it is done and we stand atop the mountains and survey the world made new, he will know I did the right thing, and thank me.

  With the spell committed to memory Durm stood in the middle of his study. Prepared to start the incantation – and hesitated.

  What he was about to do was extremely dangerous, even for a magician of his talent and experience. There was a chance … a small, slim, unlikely chance … that something might go wrong. And if it did, and his study’s sanctum was invaded by strangers, or even friends, they would discover Barl’s diary.

  Which would be a disaster, for many reasons.

  His study was full of books. He selected one remarkable for its age and loosened, misshapen leather binding, summoned a narrow-bladed dagger from its drawer and carefully unpicked the back cover’s stitching. Slid Barl’s slender diary between leather and backing, conjured a needle and painstakingly stitched it whole again.

  There. Should worse come to worst, nobody would suspect the book had been tampered with. No magical residue would adhere, and there was no sign of fresh stitching. Barl’s secret diary would remain a secret.

  Misgivings allayed, he put the book back on its shelf and returned to the business of making history.

  Raising his left hand, he traced the first sigil in the warm air. Trailing fire, burning with promise, it hung before his face, waiting. And so, turning half a pace to the left, the second sigil. Another half-pace, and then the third. All with the left hand. With the right, he traced three more, with a half-pace turn between each so that at the end he stood within a wheel of burning sigils, each and every one foreign and thrilling to his eye.

  Now for the next step.

  ‘Elil’toral!’

  In the marrow of his bones and the running of his blood, magic stirred. The sigils bloomed with fresh fire and he felt his skin scorch with the heat.

  And the next step.

  ‘Nen’nonen ra!’

  The sigils quivered. Then, incredibly, began to drift counterclockwise, pirouetting midair like dancers freed from bondage. Slowly at first, then faster, and faster still, until their single shapes were lost and all were a unified burning blur.

  And the last.

  ‘Ma’mun’maht!’

  The spinning wheel of fire snapped in two. Unfurled. Plunged into his chest and transformed him into a living pillar of molten magic. Mouth wide and soundlessly screaming, eyes staring, he glared transfixed at his reflection in the window overlooking the Wall. His bones were melting, his blood boiled, it was pleasure and pain and fear and wonder and power the likes of which he’d never dreamed, never dreamed …

  And then he was streaming out of his body, leaving it behind, an abandoned ramshackle of excess flesh. Riding the arrow of fire he plunged through the window-pane, flew over the City, through the gently dwindling rain, above the fields beyond and the Black Woods at the foot of Barl’s Mountains … and through the impenetrable Wall as though it were nothing but mist.

  It was dark beyond the mountains. A darkness not just of night but of something else as well. Something unseen, yet palpable to his questing mind as it flew over tangled forests and heath-land. In the small distance, lights. Dim. Sallow. But lights, all the same.

  With a thought, his arrow of light aimed true towards them and he left Barl’s Mountains behind.

  A town. Small. Narrow streets, deserted. Iron-barred windows. Doors locked and uninviting. A central marketplace. Wooden gibbets, dangling crow-feasted bodies. Bones gleaming in the sickly moonlight.

  What did it mean?

  Onwards he flew, his mind seeking, seeking. Somewhere there was fear and a terrible foreboding, but he pushed the feelings aside.

  More open countryside. Dispirited trees. Sickly crops. The land looked poisoned. Beaten to its knees. Another town, bigger than the last but shrouded in the same aura of dread.

  Something caught his attention. Movement in the empty streets. He swooped closer.

  Horror. A patrol of … of … beasts. Men with the mouths of animals, their eyes black and merciless in their dead white faces. Demons. They carried torches. Set fire to a house. The inhabitants ran screaming, burning. The laughing demons butchered them.

  Sickened, he fled the dreadful scene. This could not be all. There was still Dorana, shining bright light in the midst of madness.

  More woodland ahead. Thick. Black. Menacing. Out of its creeping darkness a shadow, rising. Man-shaped, with eyes that glowed like the sun and a mouth opened to swallow him alive … to swallow the world. It stank of evil incarnate.

  Through the whisper-thin link that anchored him to his body he heard himself scream.

  The shadow lunged, eyes flaming fire. Words formed in his gibbering mind: Who are you?

  Terrified to the brink of unreason Durm turned tail and fled. Away from the woodland. Over the countryside. Over the second township, the first township, flying faster than thought for Barl’s Mountains and the Wall and the inviolate safety of home. The magic parted before him and he was through the golden barrier once more, flying over the City rooftops and into his study, back in his body where he belonged.

  Housed safely once more in his cage of blood and bone he fell to his knees, retching. Pain windmilled behind his eyes. Shuddering, gasping, he lay on his face, fingers clawed into the carpet, and waited for the world to stop spinning.

  At length, when he thought he could trust his legs, he lurched to his feet and stumbled into his little washroom. Splashed water into the basin and sluiced the sweat of fear from, his skin. Slowly, slowly, reason returned. With shaking hands he reached for a towel, blotted the water from his face and looked up to meet his stunned reflection in the mirror.

  He wasn’t alone.

  Behind him stood a man, shadowy and insubstantial, with eyes that glowed like the sun. Coldly handsome, with hair so pale it looked silver. Extravagant cheekbones. Imperious nose. Lips too full and sensuous. The man smiled.

  Durm screamed. Turned. Raised a hand in self-defence: to no avail. Morg’s shade lunged for him. Was on him. In him. Melted into his flesh like sunlight through snow. Durm’s curdling shriek died midbreath. For a single frozen moment he wore two faces: his own, and that of the man stealing his body.

  And then time ticked forward … and there was but one face in the mirror. Durm’s.

  But the mind and the soul behind the eyes belonged to Morg.

  ‘Master Durm? Sir? Where would you like the tray put, sir?’

  Morg, studying his outstretched hands intently, nodded to the table by the window. ‘There.’

  The servant bobbed its head. ‘Cook
said to tell you, sir,’ it said, uncovering steaming plates and bowls of food and laying them neatly on the blue tablecloth, ‘we run right out of chinchi eggs so she flipped a couple of bunties instead, seeing as how you like them almost as much, and hope that’s right as rain with you.’

  What was it babbling about? ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Now get out.’

  The servant darted him a startled glance. ‘Yes, sir.’

  The door clapped shut behind it and he was alone again. Alone with his host … and his body.

  ‘I have a body,’ he marvelled to the room at large, and laughed, and laughed, and laughed. And the pleasure of that made him laugh all the more.

  Seated at the table, knife and fork held lightly in remembering fingers, he took a deep breath – lungs! I have lungs! – and felt his head swim with the rich aromas. Eggs. Mushrooms. Beef. Gravy. Porridge, with cream and honey. Crusty warm bread soaked in butter. Spiced wine.

  Durm ate all this for breakfast? No wonder the fool was fat.

  Four hundred years had passed since last he’d tasted food. It was a memory. Less. The memory of a memory, discarded along with all other physical considerations and the inconveniences they entailed. No sacrifice was too great in the service of his higher purpose. So it could not be regret turning down the corners of this borrowed mouth. Could not be longing, remembered. It was the shock of finding himself corporeal once again after so long without flesh or form.

  There was no regret. No longing. These emotions were nothing but the taint of the mind that even now gibbered inconsequentially from its cage deep within. Above all else he was an intellect, a necromancer powerful beyond the dreams and imagination of this wittering Durm and the others, the traitorous descendants of treacherous forebears, soon to be returned to the fold.

  Soon to be punished.

  But until that glorious moment he was also a body. And his body was hungry. Saliva pooled behind his teeth, under his tongue. His belly rumbled. His nostrils flared.