Scott J Couturier - [The Magistricide 01] Read online

  “Aye, but why this road? No magister has ridden into the Umberwood without an armed escort in the last century, and then only to worm out stray Aks or put a chastising dent in the bandit population.”

  Kelrob actually chuckled at this. “I expect you’re right. It was all Salinas’s doing; we were on the highway north, stuck behind a slow-moving caravan. He wanted to ride forward and claim right of passage, but I was content with the pace, and furthermore didn’t want to deal with all the confusion and proclaiming. But Salinas was angry, furious at having to trudge through the leavings of oxen, so we took a side-road and tried to get ahead of them. The side-road became another side-road, and another, and another, until after two days’ meandering ride we found ourselves entering the fringes of the Umberwood. Several times I suggested backtracking, but Salinas would have none of it, so we agreed to make our way north in search of a decent-sized settlement. Instead we found the House of the Setting Sun.”

  Jacobson nodded, took a swig. Kelrob fervently hoped he would let the matter drop; instead the big man turned to him and said, in a slightly slurred voice, “So are you bound on some journeyman’s work, then? You said your training was ‘variegated.’ What’s your specialization?”

  Kelrob scooted his chair closer to the fire, hoping to conceal his waxing blush. “I,” he said softly, “am a Hedgewizard. Or at least that’s my currently declared path. I was heading up north to become my father’s accountant.”

  Jacobson blew out a disbelieving breath. “Hogwash! The lowliest Circle in the Arcanum, the haven of clerks and scholars? Forgive me lad, but you don’t seem the type who’d be content to bury himself in the work of others. I saw what you did to that Taskmaster; you’ve got great power, if limited sense.”

  Kelrob smiled bitterly. “Yes. I was singled out when I first came to the Rookery. Master Huerton, head of the Mentatii, took an active interest in me, and at twelve years of age I began training in the Mentatis discipline.”

  Jacobson clapped his hands together. “Knew it! Child prodigy. To be picked out for the innermost Circle, and at such a young age...but what happened, lad? Clearly you liked the dish, but not the seasoning.”

  Kelrob shrugged, looked away. “By the time I turned sixteen I’d grown...weary of mind-delving. I shifted my specialization to Biomancy, thinking I could learn how to increase the grape yield in demesne Kael-Pellin, but this path also proved tiresome.” Here Kelrob paused, unwilling to relate in full or part the shameful events that had brought him under Master Kenlath’s influence. “In the end,” he said slowly, “I decided to accept the title of Hedgewizard and devote myself to certain personal studies that are not condoned by the Order. Studies which are, in fact, frowned upon.”

  Jacobson’s eyes glittered. “What kind of studies?”

  “That is my business. Already I have said too much.”

  “Hm. What about the Gyre Itself, then?”

  Kelrob blushed unaccountably at the question. “What of It?”

  “Have you seen It? I know most apprentices pay at least one visit to Ithenmere during their training.”

  The question made Kelrob uncomfortable, but he saw no reason not to answer. “Yes, I have gazed upon the Great Font. I traveled to Ithenmere in my fifteenth year, when I was still in favor with the Masters. The Gyre Itself emerged from the tower of Ithen, concealed behind seven veils of golden cloth, and spoke to us. The address was brief, but every word rang like a bell in my mind. I could only see Its feet, but these glowed with such a fierce radiance that I think, if not for the veils, we’d have all been struck blind.”

  Jacobson nodded, impressed. “And what did the grand protector of Thevin say to you, praytell?”

  Kelrob fixed Jacobson with a hard stare. “It reminded me that discussing Isdori matters with nithings is strictly prohibited, as spelled out in the Doctrines. Now let’s change the topic.”

  The drums thrummed loudly in the ensuing silence. Jacobson sneered and took a long pull, kicking off his boots and stretching his stockinged feet towards the fire. The bottle of sickly yellow liquor was already half-empty; Kelrob watched as Jacobson set it beside the already-uncorked jug. “May I ask you a question?” the mage said, when he’d found the words.

  Jacobson grunted. “You can ask, though I might not be able to answer. Wouldn’t want to give away any super-secret nithing matters.”

  “Very well. Jacobson, why are you locked away in this room drinking yourself to death?”

  Jacobson frowned. Hoisting the jug, he sloshed it between his hands and said, “Listen, lad. I’ve been from one side of this benighted land to the other. Fought for others, fought for myself, killed more men than my mind can reckon.” He nodded towards his blood-stained sword, secure in its sheath and tucked away in a shadowed corner beside the hearth. “Over time, a man becomes weary of wreaking death. Especially if he’s nothing to show for it.”

  Kelrob remembered Kirleg’s description of his time on the Barrier. “You were a mercenary?” he asked.

  “A man for hire, aye. In all ways. When I was young I made my coin down on the wharves of Aguar, my birth-city, servicing seamen and the like. My mother was a seamstress in the garment district; she slaved all her life stitching the most opulent britches, working with velvet and satin and ermine and gold-trim, all in the hopes of getting an offer from some guild-house. She died still hoping for it. When I grew old enough to really use a sword, I went from unlacing breeches to cutting throats. Made a tidy sum in the early years, hiring my services out to warring villages and petty lords, killing folk for no other reason save that I got paid for it. Blood for gold, a simple equation. But then the number of men I’d killed began to sicken me. Hungry for honor, I went out to the Ilarks and did my time on the Barrier, as most fledgling mercenaries do. I thought it would be easier, as Aks were supposed to be less than men, but that was a lie.” Here Jacobson paused in his tale, taking a long, long drink. The jug sloshed as he tucked it back between his knees. “The air over the Barrier stinks, always, of death. The raids come often, more often than most folk think; no sword goes unblooded for long. I spent most of my pay on drink, and after five years came away penniless with more gore on my hands than any bottle could wash away. Eventually I came here to the Umberwood to make my fortune preying on the rich, or at least the reasonably well off. Ended up ambushing tinkers and outcasts, folk with even less coin than I had. Aye, I was a bandit, and a damn good one, for the few years I could stomach the work.”

  Kelrob absorbed the story in silence, knowing he should feel threatened but experiencing only an inexplicable sense of kinship. “So,” he said softly, his voice half-lost in the drone of the drums, “you grew weary of taking life, and came here to die.”

  “That was the idea. Thought it would be simple, doing myself in — I’d killed so many others, how hard could it be? Turns out I’m too much of a coward to fall on my own sword. So I figured, ‘Why not drink?’ I’ve always had a fondness for the bottle, or rather it’s had a fondness for me.” Jacobson caressed the jug lovingly, imbibed, and spat into the fire. “So here I’ve squatted for four months, doing my best to still this weary old heart. And then you come along.”

  The music-makers were drawing nearer. Kelrob looked out the unbroken window, saw bodies weaving between the shadowed boles of trees. He stiffened and turned his focus to the ring on his finger, was almost panicked to find it absent. “Jacobson,” he said, speaking the man’s name around an overwhelming sense of vulnerability, “without my ring I’ll need a guide to Tannigal. Someone who knows these roads, this land. Someone with a sword. Will you travel with me?”

  Jacobson looked at him as if he were mad. “You just stopped speaking sense,” he said with a gruff laugh.

  “I mean it. I DO need a guide. Once we reach Tannigal I can compensate you handsomely. As I’m sure you’ve observed, I’m a soft idiot when it comes to my purse.” Kelrob grit his teeth, newly ashamed at
his guilt-driven generosity yet knowing it was one of the things that set him apart from men like Salinas. He wondered anew at the Taskmaster’s claims about Kenlath: an image came to him of his Master’s old, wizened face bending to kiss the waiting lips of a child. Other children crowded around the archmagister, scantily clad, their fingers shoving aside his opulent robes and revealing a frail body trembling with desire. Kelrob hissed and drew back in his chair, the image spreading like a cancer to all quadrants of his brain.

  Jacobson watched him in some concern, waiting until the fit passed. “You went somewhere,” he said when Kelrob managed to steady his breathing.

  “It happens sometimes. Nothing to worry about.” Kelrob passed a shaking hand over his eyes, stared over the crook of his thumb. “Well? Will you travel with me to Tannigal? I am bound for the house of Lord Azumana, at my father’s behest; they are old friends. At the very least I can promise you a much higher grade of alcohol in which to drown yourself.”

  Jacobson stroked his whiskers, his eyes sharpening behind the miasma of drink. “I can’t promise to protect you. I’ve no weapon I’ll wield, only my wits, which I’ve done everything to dull in the last four months.”

  It’s your wits that I want. Aloud Kelrob said, “I plan on doubling back to the highway, taking the long way around. I’m not looking for a warrior, only someone to share, and show, the way.”

  Jacobson smiled in sudden understanding. “I’ve intrigued you,” he said.

  Kelrob opened his mouth to make a denial, but his aversion to hypocrisy dealt the lie a killing blow. He wanted to talk to Jacobson about many things. Not just about the big man’s past, which Kelrob suspected was heavily edited, or his uncharacteristic intelligence, which shone through his drunkard’s haze like a star piercing some low-lying fume; really what Kelrob desired most was to talk to Jacobson about philosophy. He’d recently read Kenlath’s book himself, and was pining for someone to discuss it with, particularly concerning man’s assumed right to harness nature. The other books had opened similar pathways of thought, all worth the delving: he’d done plenty of reading on the trail, often to avoid intimate conversation with Salinas. Kelrob wanted to ask Jacobson his opinion on things, test the drunkard’s limits, investigate the apparent capaciousness of his mind, no matter how deliberately pickled.

  “I will admit that you interest me,” he said.

  Jacobson raised the jug to his lips, but waited to drink, his eyes peering into the receptacle’s reeking interior. “I warn you, I’m obstreperous at best.”

  “Consider my most recent traveling companion.”

  “I could knife you in your sleep.”

  A coldness passed through Kelrob, but he discounted it. “Sounds unlikely. I thought you were tired of killing?”

  Jacobson contemplated for a long moment, took a generous swig, and passed the jug to Kelrob. “It’s a deal. Escort to Tannigal in exchange for some nebulous boon. We’ll drink on it.”

  Kelrob eyed the offer with open horror, one hand clutching over his stomach. “No, I can’t.”

  “Afraid of a little flush?”

  “Afraid of my stomach dissolving. I have an ulcer.”

  Jacobson jiggled the jug under his nose. “Just a tiny sip. ‘Tis necessary to seal the bargain.”

  Kelrob grimaced as he accepted the jug and raised it to his lips. The potent stink of alcohol reminded him of the pickling tanks at the Rookery, where all the disparate fauna of Thevin were preserved and labeled. He took a sip, and his stomach erupted into flame; for a moment the mage resisted swallowing, the coarse liquor searing the inside of his mouth. Then he gulped.

  Jacobson took the jug back with a grin. “There, was that so bad?”

  Kelrob wiped a hand over his panting mouth. “Yes.”

  “Well, what can one expect from a rich brat raised in wine country? Don’t particularly care for the stuff myself, no offense. Looks too much like blood.”

  The stew was going sour in Kelrob’s stomach. He knew a glass of milk would ease the pain, but he was loathe to issue any order, or even a request, to Jacobson. He was tired of giving orders. The wine would be fine, a relief after the noxious liquor.

  Jacobson poked at the fire, tossed a few fresh logs into the blaze. “You’re quite the oddest magister I’ve ever met,” he said. “Are you sure you don’t want to order me around a bit? I could spit-shine your boots, curry-comb that jittery thing you call a stallion, or mend that little tear I noticed on your robe-hem.”

  He can read my mind. Wonderful. Kelrob shook his head and looked out the window. The sun was definitely well into setting, golden light streaking down to vanish in the music-haunted woods. He noticed with a weird pang that the gourds were unlit. “I just want to listen to the music for a while,” he said. “You...could get me a cup of wine, and maybe light the pumpkins. I would like that.”

  Jacobson rose to his feet and swept a majestic bow, only partly interrupted by a drunken stumble. “My lord,” he said, “I am your humble and ineffable servant.” Lighting a taper from the fire, he lit both gourds, then began rummaging around behind the stack of empty liquor bottles, muttering to himself. “I know the damn thing’s here, where did I put it...ah!” Reaching down, he plucked up a genuine piece of Jeneni crystal and held it up to the firelight. “And no dull cup for my lord, no no. This comes from Meela’s private collection. In fact, it is her private collection. She was most grateful to you for saving the inn, by the way.”

  Dimly Kelrob remembered his final confrontation with Salinas, the faulty spell of confinement and the deflection of the Taskmaster’s furious assault. It had all nearly faded from his mind, crowded out by strange thoughts and borrowed memories. “I suppose I really did save it,” he said in some bewilderment.

  Jacobon filled the glass half-way, watered it, and handed it to Kelrob. The wine shone in the embrace of the crystal, molded by facets of red-tinted quartz into a fiery, fluid gem. Kelrob raised it to his lips, resolving to quietly return the precious gift before his departure. The glass was worth a full polgari in itself, a surprisingly sophisticated spoil from far-off wars.

  6: Tamrel

  The next hour passed in relative silence, with few words spoken. The music swelled from the forest, a frantic cycle of energy that frightened and infused Kelrob at turns.

  He had three glasses of wine and began to feel stronger. The pain in his stomach subsided, to be replaced by a burning of nameless anticipation. The sun had fully set; through the window Kelrob could see carven lanterns being lit, some carried by unseen hands and others secured in the notches of tree-trunks, filling the forest with a luminous parade of grins. Voices rose to join the music, droning chants and joyful yawps and ululations of an almost animal nature. There was stirring in the inn below; Kelrob heard tables being shoved into place, and voices raised in seemingly merry conversation. It gladdened his heart, even as he was the more sorrowful for the stain cast on this sacred night. The money he had given Kirleg in compensation for Salinas’s degradations seemed suddenly paltry, a cold metal bandage laid over a bleeding wound.

  At length Kelrob shifted his chair to the window, and watched the gathering with ever-increasing awe. He could see bodies flitting between the trees, some clothed and some naked, bright whorls of paint accentuating their pale flesh, and felt a mirroring nakedness in his own senses, his trained perceptions crumbling away like some cumbrous weight. The wine sang in his blood, in his brain, making him feel flushed and weightless. Finally Kelrob began to tap his feet in time with the drums, and before long he was swaying in his chair, face pressed to the glass with a curiosity he had no strength or desire to impede. He could feel Jacobson watching him, and didn’t care. All the long nights of gazing from his window in house Kael-Pellin came back to him, and with them the strange longing that had once compelled him to knot his sheets together in a desperate ploy to sneak out and join the distant celebrations. Of course he had
shied from his resolve at the last, untied the rope, and laid himself shamefully to bed, listening to the distant music until it had borne his feverish mind off to an equally feverish sleep; but tonight he would not sleep. He’d done three days of sleeping. It was time to come awake.

  At length the revelers began to emerge from the trees, streaming towards the inn in great flickering tributaries. Kelrob saw humans emerge from the wood in the midst of fabulous creatures of legend, beings whose depictions the Isdori had forbidden to the point that they were lost to city-dwelling minds: great wicker dragons and tottering Jacks-In-The-Green, spirits clad in embroidered funereal sheets, children arrayed like elves and wood-sprites capering about the lithe parade. Kelrob was on his feet, eyes leaping to a man and a woman copulating on the cold earth, their costumes hitched up around their midsections as they rolled in the loam like rutting beasts. There was no unmasked face; even the naked revelers wore disguises, their eyes glittering from behind masks of animal or vegetable or spiritual guise. One proud elder entered the clearing drawn on a cart, his face and body obscured by an enfolding costume of leaves and woven twigs. The revelers bowed to him, and he descended from the cart with tottering grace, the archetype of the hour whose elderly gait made him seem all the more inhuman. Kelrob had a brief flash of Salinas blasphemously donning the Green Man’s face; it had seemed a minor defilement in the face of so much human suffering, but now he felt that usurpation the most odious of all Salinas’s crimes, though the Taskmaster had surely not known it. Ignorance is the destroyer, came Kenlath’s voice, heavy with age and wisdom and, perhaps, the lingering headiness of his hidden pleasures. Kelrob’s eyes flared, and he cast his revered Master into the pit of his mind, sealed the abyss, and returned his full attention to the gathering cloud of celebrants.

  A shadow loomed at his shoulder. Kelrob looked up to see Jacobson standing at his side, the nearly-empty jug dangling from his fingers. “It’s a beautiful sight,” he said slurringly, his body and breath exuding the raw stench of spirits.