Magic Zero Read online

  With a jerk of his head, the rook twisted to fix him with a dark, riveting stare. “It scares me.”

  A whistling geyser of steam was released from the side of Sheridan’s head as the mechanical man began to tidy up the workroom. “Edgar speaks for all of us,” he said as he picked up Timothy’s tools. “We are all anxious about this sneaking around business.”

  Timothy was annoyed. This wasn’t what he needed to hear. He already had his own doubts about this assignment, and his friends’ fear wasn’t increasing his confidence any.

  “I have to do this.”

  “Do you?” came a wizened voice from across the room.

  Timothy glanced over to find that at some point Ivar had slipped into the workshop. Now he stood silently at a window looking out at the night, his skin as white as the moons that hung weightless in the sky.

  “Oh, Ivar, not you, too,” Timothy said. “I thought that you would understand.”

  As always, the Asura thought carefully of his answer before responding. Then he spoke directly from his heart, for he was incapable of lying. “I know of the hunt, of confrontation and battle—of victory and defeat,” he said as he looked away from the quiet beauty outside SkyHaven. “I know what it is to skulk in shadows in the camp of my enemy, or to elude capture. But to spy upon your allies because you suspect duplicity . . . There is no honor in this.”

  Timothy flushed, momentarily ashamed, but then he frowned deeply and shook his head. “This is more complicated than that. I haven’t been among other people very long, but with mages it seems pretty obvious that it’s difficult to tell who’s an ally and who’s an enemy. I know you’re all concerned for my safety, but without magic, I have to take any advantage I can get. In this world, that means knowing what the guild masters are up to. I’m sorry, but I have to do this. I’ll be careful.”

  Timothy approached his craft for yet another inspection. “I’m going to fly in, take a look around and hopefully find out something that will help Lord Nicodemus weed out those who want me dead. With my special abilities”—he smiled at his own choice of words—“or, without any, I should be practically invisible to their security systems. And since there’s no magic built into the gyro, they won’t be able to sense that either.

  “I hope.”

  Edgar flew up from the table to land on Timothy’s shoulder. He squawked as he examined the invention. Its framework was made from lightweight metal tubes, one of which rose up from the craft’s center. The lower part of this shaft was connected to a series of gears that would enable it to turn, and its top was adorned with three long horizontal blades—the rotor. There was a single seat in front of the shaft, and behind it a specially designed engine that drove both the rotor and the small propellers on the tail and each wing.

  “You’re really going to try to fly? With this?” the rook asked.

  Timothy crossed his arms, growing frustrated with Edgar’s continued doubts. “That’s the plan.”

  The familiar ruffled his feathers with uncertainty. “Not only are you un-magical,” he said. “But I think you might also be a little crazy.”

  The boy chuckled, not unfamiliar with the bird’s lack of confidence in his abilities. He leaned toward the gyrocraft and used a rag to wipe a smudge of grease from its gleaming frame.

  From somewhere close by, a clock tolled the hour, a mournful sound that reminded Timothy of the task he had yet to accomplish this night.

  There came a sudden rapping at the door, and before any could respond, it swung slowly open to allow Lord Nicodemus to enter.

  “I was wondering when he was going to show up,” Edgar grumbled, just loud enough for Timothy to hear.

  Ivar crouched on the floor beneath the window and his skin turned the color of the gray stone wall at his back. Timothy had stressed the importance of Ivar’s presence to his work and Lord Nicodemus had grudgingly allowed the Asura to travel this wing of SkyHaven freely. But Ivar knew that it did not please Nicodemus in the least and thought it best to blend into his surroundings whenever the master mage was near.

  The Grandmaster was eerily silent as he entered the room, the door closing behind him.

  “Good evening, Lord Nicodemus,” Timothy said with a slight bow of his head.

  The Grandmaster was clothed in elegant, high-collared robes the color of a fiery sunset. Timothy had never seen him in the same outfit twice, and absently wondered how much clothing a single person could have. Then he felt foolish, realizing that a mage of Nicodemus’s skill could easily alter his garments to appear however he wished. A small smile rippled across the boy’s face as he realized how vain the Grandmaster must be.

  “Timothy,” Nicodemus responded. His gaze ticked toward the boy’s invention and he studied it with a curious eye. “Is this the device in which you will . . .” He moved his hand through the air in front of him.

  “Yes, my lord,” Timothy responded proudly. “I haven’t tested it yet, but I’m sure that—”

  “You shall have the opportunity tonight,” Nicodemus interrupted, strolling around the craft, taking in every detail. “Fascinating,” he said as much to himself as to anyone else in the room. “Do you have a name for it?”

  “How about, It’ll Never Get Off the Ground?” Edgar commented, softly enough so that only Timothy could hear.

  The boy swatted him from his shoulder.

  “Caw! Hukk! Hukk!” Startled, the bird fluttered across the room and perched upon a workstation. “Kid’s kind of touchy when it comes to his gadgets,” grumbled the rook.

  “I call it a gyrocraft,” Timothy said.

  “Gyrocraft,” Nicodemus repeated, letting the word roll around on his tongue. “Are you sure that this . . . gyrocraft will perform as you designed it to?” he asked as he clasped his hands behind his back.

  Timothy looked at his invention, his mind taking it apart piece by piece, screw by screw, and then putting it back together again. “I trust it with my life,” he responded with certainty.

  “Excellent,” Nicodemus answered. “That level of assuredness will be necessary for your success.”

  A germ of doubt began to grow in Timothy’s mind, but he quashed it. Ivar had trained him well—the order’s combat mages had learned that very quickly—and as he was invulnerable to magic, he had nothing to worry about. And if I just keep telling myself that, I’ll be fine.

  As Timothy and his friends looked on, the Grandmaster wiped his hand across the air. Where his fingers passed, an image shimmered and began to take form, a grand tower rising up from a lush forest on the far outskirts of Arcanum. Yet this was no ordinary tower, not even one of the glittering spires of the city. It was not built from stone, nor of metal or wood, but rather, appeared to be organic, alive, as if it had sprung up from the earth rather than been constructed.

  “It is the Order of Strychnos I wish you to investigate tonight,” Nicodemus said, and with a wave of his hand changed the image from the organic tower to the lovely, exotic features of the Strychnine’s Grandmaster. “Mistress Belladonna,” Nicodemus uttered softly. “As beautiful as she is deadly.”

  “She didn’t seem all that dangerous,” Timothy said, referring to the guild masters’ meeting where he’d first seen Belladonna. He had found her strangely alluring then, as he did now.

  “That is but one of her many weapons, dear boy,” Nicodemus explained. The Grandmaster moved his hands again, and a closer image of the living tower appeared. Timothy silently marveled at the magics of the Strychnos guild to have created something so impressive.

  “The Strychnine exhibit a mastery over plant life. This fortress tower was grown from a single seed of the long-extinct Maximus tree. All things rooted within the earth respond to the Strychnine’s commands and the members of the guild share a fondness for poisons.”

  The image changed again to show Mistress Belladonna in a vast garden, surrounded by all manner of greenery, the wild and unusual, as well as the mundane. The guild master was collecting clippings from the various plan
ts and placing them inside a basket she carried on her arm.

  “Belladonna is a true master of crafting poisons derived from plants.”

  Timothy continued to watch the elegant, red-skinned woman as she moved among the lush vegetation.

  “At one time or another, all the assassin guilds of the world have used the poisons of the Strychnos,” Nicodemus said, as he, too, eyed the image of the woman before him. “Including the Nimib.”

  Timothy slowly nodded, now understanding why the Strychnos order had been singled out.

  The Grandmaster waved away the images he had summoned. “You will use this craft of yours to infiltrate the living tower,” he said, looking from Timothy to the gyrocraft and back again. “Once inside, you will seek out any evidence that might prove the Order of Strychnos was involved in the attempts on your life.”

  Lord Nicodemus narrowed his gaze. “And there is one more small chore,” he said, raising one long finger.

  “A chore?” Timothy asked, the muscles in his stomach tightening with unease.

  Nicodemus stepped away from the gyrocraft, hands again clasped behind his back. “Many years ago the Order of Strychnos stole something from me—from the Alhazreds.” He stopped before the boy, his expression grave.

  “I would like you to get it back.”

  * * *

  The cold night air whipped his face, but Timothy’s cheeks burned with the warm current of fear that flowed through him. His every nerve seemed to buzz with anticipation of what he had set out to accomplish. In a way, his trepidation annoyed him, for if he hadn’t been so anxious, he would have been ecstatic. The gyrocraft was functioning exactly as anticipated, but the thrill of the contraption’s success was severely limited by his destination. Perhaps on the return trip he could exalt in the wonder of flight, at the uniqueness of his own invention.

  But not yet.

  The engine purred and the propellers were nearly silent. The rotor was louder than he would have liked, but there was nothing to be done for it now. Timothy passed above the agitated ocean waters and navigated between a pair of oceanside structures nearly as tall as the spires of Arcanum. In his mind Timothy reviewed the three-dimensional map that Nicodemus had conjured before his departure, the route from SkyHaven to the living tower illuminated in scarlet. Carefully he piloted the craft northward toward the wild forest on the outskirts of the city, where the tower grew.

  With the gyrocraft’s hand controls he gained elevation, rising hundreds of feet as he left the harbor behind. The city of Arcanum passed beneath him, and Timothy was dazzled by the sight. From his bedroom window in SkyHaven, he had marveled at the countless ghostfire lights twinkling in the distance, but it was nothing compared to this. Everything was close enough for him to touch, to feel, to experience. He wished he could land the craft and explore the thriving city, soaking up the sights, smells, and sounds of the wondrous place. But that was for another time, when there were less pressing matters to attend to than sneaking into the headquarters of a sorcerous guild and stealing some kind of valuable supernatural artifact.

  Well, all right, it wasn’t exactly stealing. The Box of Vijaya had been stolen from the Order of Alhazred. Timothy was just going to take it back. According to Nicodemus, the box could be used for divining the future and had been in the possession of the Alhazred guild for well over a millenium. It had gone missing during the extravagant ceremony held to mark the raising of SkyHaven, an event attended by all the guilds. The Grandmaster had long suspected the Strychnine were responsible for the theft. They had always been jealous of the advantages the box had provided for the Alhazreds.

  The lights of a sky carriage blinded him momentarily, and Timothy expertly manipulated the controls of the gyro to climb higher. It wouldn’t do to be seen in such an unusual, nonmagical craft, so he maneuvered his invention upward into a thick cloud of mist and hovered as the sky carriage passed harmlessly beneath him.

  Timothy dropped the craft out of the mist, the gyro as well as his black clothing now dappled with glistening moisture. His mind flashed back to the moments before his departure, as he climbed aboard the gyrocraft and Sheridan wheeled it to the open window in his SkyHaven workroom.

  “To blend with the darkness one must be as the darkness,” Ivar had said, demonstrating by shifting the color of his skin to a solid black.

  “Some of us have to make do with what we have,” Timothy had replied, tugging the black hood up over his head.

  But the Asura warrior had frowned, displeased with the boy’s response. Ivar had reached over to Sheridan, sticking his fingers between the joints of the mechanical man and pulling them away covered in a dark lubricant. “Be as darkness,” he had stressed as he painted Timothy’s face with the oil.

  Timothy had left without looking back at his friends, not wanting to see the fear or disappointment in their eyes. He had chanced a look at Nicodemus though, and saw that the old man was smiling.

  Now he shivered with the recollection of that smile, and attempted to distract himself by peering down at the ghostfire lights of the city below. The structures were more spread out now, and far less modern in their design. He guessed that he was nearing Arcanum’s northern provinces and searched the horizon through squinted eyes for any sign of the Strychnos tower. Ahead, he could just make out a thick bank of fog that seemed to rise up from the ground below, the blanket of gray, shifting moisture covering a large portion of forested area, a place called the Khabanda Weald. Rising up through the mist, like the finger of some great, elemental deity, was the tower of Strychnos.

  Timothy’s heart raced and for a moment he hesitated, a new reluctance stalling him. The concerns of his friends and Ivar’s disapproval weighed heavily upon him. The rotor cut the humid air and, as if for effect, the night sky growled and lit up with a flash of lightning. Timothy flinched, but it was enough to shake him from his cautionary paralysis. He set his jaw, teeth clamped tightly together, and increased the output of power on the craft’s engine. If there was a storm coming in, he wanted to reach the tower before it arrived.

  He flew the gyrocraft into the fog bank that hung over the dense forest as the sky rumbled and flashed, oddly grateful for the thunder, as it would mask the sound of the rotor. The nearer he got to the tower, the more impressive became the sight of the Strychnos guild’s base of operations. Nicodemus’s conjurings of the tower had not allowed him to appreciate its massive size. The tower’s dark green exterior was covered in a thick bark that reminded the boy of scales on a fish, and in its multiple windows were dots of ghostfire light that glowed within its body. It was truly an awesome sight. Timothy slowed his progress as the winds increased. He didn’t want to come in too fast and crash into the building’s side.

  At first he thought the sound was coming from the gyrocraft, a low buzzing noise that hinted of malfunction. Quickly checking and rechecking his instruments, he realized that the droning sound was not coming from the craft at all. He turned his attention to the mist surrounding the organic tower, just in time to see something fly toward him out of the concealing mist.

  Timothy’s reflexes were sharp, and he dipped the gyrocraft to one side as the object buzzed past. It was an insect of some kind, the shell of its body a smooth, emerald green that glistened brightly in the flashes of lightning. Its veined, transparent wings beat the air so quickly that it produced a vibrating sound.

  Before he knew it, they were everywhere, flying around and past him at incredible speeds. He hadn’t a chance to maneuver the craft out of their path, but it didn’t seem to matter. The bugs avoided him with ease.

  Timothy watched in wonder as the insects whizzed past him; some stopping abruptly in midair, hovering very much like his gyrocraft was doing at the moment. They paid him no mind as they hung there, wings beating the air unmercifully. The bugs were eyeless, with long, segmented antennae that seemed to stroke the mist as if searching for something. He guessed they were some sort of aerial sentry, sensitive to traces of magical energies that did not b
elong in the vicinity of the tower. But there was nothing magical about Timothy’s presence, and they took no notice.

  After several long moments, during which he clutched the controls of the gyrocraft so hard that his knuckles went white, the sentries turned their antennae in other directions and flew on. Timothy let out a long, shuddering breath and ascended up the outer wall of the tower until he could look down through the fog at its rooftop, where he recognized the elaborate garden from the Grandmaster’s conjured image. Bringing the craft down toward the lush vegetation, he realized Nicodemus had not mentioned insect sentries, and with a sinking feeling in his gut, Timothy wondered what else his mentor had failed to mention, what other surprises he might encounter this night.

  Timothy landed his craft with the utmost precision in a small clearing. Swarms of large beetles flew up from the thick vegetation, dipping and weaving about him as if he were one of their own. He unhooked himself from his seat and climbed from the flying machine. Gathering some dried leaves, tall grass, and Yaquis fronds from the ground, Timothy concealed the gyrocraft. Then, satisfied that it was invisible to the casual observer, he turned and searched for an entrance to the tower.

  He found it in the shape of a large, grass-covered mound. Within the mound was a door adorned with a magical insignia, and if he had been an ordinary citizen of Arcanum attempting to enter the Strychnos headquarters uninvited, he would have gotten no farther. But Timothy wasn’t an ordinary citizen, and the magical wards on this door did not apply to him. Others would have required a key to enter. Instead he placed both hands against the surface of the door and simply pushed.

  A warm, moist air, tinted with the sweet aroma of cut flowers, wafted out from inside as the door opened onto a winding ramp spiraling down to the next level. The walls were damp and the ramp beneath his feet soft and springy, as if comprised of moss. Slowly he descended, feeling as if he were not in a building at all, but inside some gigantic living thing. At the end of the ramp, he encountered a door. In his mind he reviewed the diagram he had seen in the privacy of Nicodemus’s study. The blueprints had been quite extensive, and when he’d asked the Grandmaster how he had come to have this information, Nicodemus just chuckled. “The concept of spying is not new to the Order.”