Mystic Empire Read online
Copyright © 2006 by Tracy Hickman and Laura Curtis All rights reserved.
Aspect
Warner Books
Hachette Book Group
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The Aspect name and logo are registered trademarks of Warner Books.
First eBook Edition: April 2006
ISBN: 978-0-446-55936-2
OTHER WORKS BY THE AUTHORS
Tracy and Laura Hickman
THE BRONZE CANTICLES
MYSTIC WARRIOR
MYSTIC QUEST
Tracy Hickman
(with Margaret Weis)
DRAGONLANCE CHRONICLES TRILOGY
DRAGONLANCE LEGENDS TRILOGY
DRAGONLANCE: DRAGONS OF SUMMER FLAME
DRAGONLANCE: WAR OF SOULS TRILOGY
DARKSWORD TRILOGY
ROSE OF THE PROPHET TRILOGY
DEATHGATE CYCLE SEPTOLOGY
THE IMMORTALS
REQUIEM OF STARS
STARCRAFT: SPEED OF DARKNESS
Laura Hickman
(with Tracy Hickman)
DRAGONLANCE: DRAGONS OF WAR
RAVENLOFT
(with Kate Novak)
DRAGONLANCE: LOVE AND WAR
“Heart of Goldmoon”
This book is lovingly dedicated to Our Children Angel, Curtis, Lani, Tasha, and Jarod
Who bring to life joy and magic far beyond the covers of our books
Contents
Copyright Page
Acknowledgments
FOLIO XXV: The Outsiders
1: The Bards
2: City of Dreams
3: Calsandria
4: The Watchers
5: Sisters
6: Revelry
7: The Gates
8: Famadorian
9: The Lyceum
10: Two Worlds
11: Obsession
12: Ivory Towers
13: Visible Means
14: Darkened Door
15: The Crescent Coast
16: Blind Guide
17: Common Ground
18: Diminishing
19: Beyond Roads
FOLIO XXVI: The Rifts
20: Captives
21: Wheel of Judgment
22: Escape
23: The Storm
24: Paths of Least Resistance
25: Detours
26: Walls of Skurea
27: Convergence
28: Losses
29: Narrow Visions
30: Soft Words and Silence
31: Realm of the Gods
32: Desperate Acts
33: Beginnings and Endings
FOLIO XXVII: The Tally
34: Stalkers
35: To See and Not Be Seen
36: My Enemy’s Enemy
37: Choices
38: Into the Unknown
39: Two Roads
40: Dragon-Talker
41: Little Sacrifices
42: Songstone
43: The Seer
Appendix A: Genealogies
Appendix B: The Disciplines
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
No book is conjured out of thin air; each bears the touch of many craftsmen and professionals to bring it into being.
We express our deep thanks to Maureen Egen, Jamie Raab, and Beth de Guzman for supporting the sunrise on our worlds; to Bob Castillo and Penina Sacks for smoothing over all our rough spots; and to Devi Pillai for your indispensable aid.
We are also grateful to Jim Spivey for taking the words we sent in and turning them into a real, live book; to Huy Duong, Donald Puckey, and especially Matt Stawicki for his thrilling cover art.
Books do not live until they are read. Our express thanks to all those who worked so hard to get our books in your hands: to Bryan Cronk in online marketing, Rebecca Oliver and Peggy Boelke in subrights, Christine Barba and her fabulous sales team, Karen Torres and her marketing group, Martha Otis with her entire advertising and promotions crew, and Chris Dao for her work in publicity.
To our agent, Matt Bialer, and his assistant, Anna Bierhaus, our gratitude for catching the vision of these books. You took us in and believed in us; we’ll never forget that.
Finally, our deepest thanks to the one and only Jaime Levine—whose long hours, sharp talent, red pen, and gallons of encouragement have guided us through these three books. You allowed “the fire to show through the smoke.”
Thrice upon a time
there was a world that was three worlds
One place that was three places
One history that was told
in three sagas all at the same time.
Thrice upon a time . . .
the gods foresaw a time
when three worlds would become one . . .
When the children of their creation
would face the Binding of the Worlds.
Thrice upon a time . . .
Three worlds fought to survive.
Their children would be armed
with the cunning of their minds
their fierce will to endure
and the power of newfound magic.
Thrice upon a time . . .
came the Binding of the Worlds.
Not even the gods knew
. . . which world would reign . . .
. . . which world would submit . . .
. . . and which world would die.
Song of the Worlds
Bronze Canticles, Tome I, Folio 1, Leaf 6
FOLIO XXV
The Outsiders
1
The Bards
The 591st year of the Dragonkings was to mark the centennial of the Election Fields Rebellion—a celebration of the moment that put the spark of life into the embryonic ambitions of the mystics. The hundred-year anniversary was to be a cause of tremendous celebration everywhere the mystics called home. All prepared to commemorate the Election Centenary with whatever revelry they could manage. Most of those who claimed allegiance to the mystic guilds could boastfully trace at least one of their own ancestral lines back to the founding mystic clans and thereby laid their special claim to the festival as well. The tales of their ancestors who made the arduous journey to the heart of the lost and fallen Rhamasian Empire and claimed its ancient capital as their own had moved beyond pride to political necessity; power and social status had become a question of heritage.
The mystics had expanded their influence from the security of their mountain citadels high in the Forsaken Mountains to the distant settlements in the Eastern Marches and the Provinces—places whose names sounded more solid than the tentative huts that clutched at those wild lands. There was the sense in every mystic community that the promise of a magical empire was within their collective grasp, especially evidenced by the widely anticipated union of two of the most powerful guild houses in that same year—the House of Conlan and the House of Rennes-Arvad.
Yet, even as the eyes of all the mystics were fixed on their own triumphs and glory down the hundred years of their history, one alteration went unnoticed: the Deep Magic had been changing, too, like a sealed jar of water left on coals long thought cold.
Quiet and forgotten, it was about to explode.
BRONZE CANTICLES, TOME VI, FOLIO 1, LEAF 25
The slats of the wide closed door rattled under the banging fist.
“Hold on! Hold on!” yelled the cooper. He stood stooped over, fitting the staves of the large barrel together carefully inside the temporary upper metal hoop, the bottom ends of the staves gouging into the dirt floor of the shop. Fitting the “rose”—the setting of each stave inside the metal hoop at the base of the barrel—required his concentration; it was certainly no
time for him to be disturbed. “Mera! Could you see to the door?”
“I’m gettin’ the supper on!”
The fist slammed several times into the door in quick succession.
“Hold on there!” cried the cooper once again toward the door. The banging stopped. “Mera—just leave it to the girl and give us a hand, will you?”
“I’ll not be leavin’ this stew, Hengus, were it for the Dragon-Talker hisself calling,” the woman’s voice called back from the open doorway into what passed as their home. “Last time the girl burned the stew, and you gave us the what for!”
“Damn, woman! It’s the door!”
“Then answer it! I’m trying to make us a home in this forsaken place!”
Hengus shook with frustration, his hands slipping. The carefully crafted barrel rose collapsed, the ring falling and rolling loudly into a corner of the shop as the staves splayed outward, clattering against the packed-dirt floor. The cooper would have liked to swear more but knew that he would call more of his wife’s ire down on him if he did. This frustrated him all the more, so he raised his wide stained face toward the roof of the shop and roared incoherently toward the ceiling.
The door rattled again, the blows from the outside sounding more insistent than before.
“Coming! I’m coming,” Hengus rumbled. He was a large man—largest in the village—and stronger than any two of the local farmers put together. He was naturally large of frame, but bending staves from dawn to dusk had accentuated his already broad shoulders. Sweat glistened from his black curly hair, which he preferred kept short, though lately, it had become more difficult to find anyone who could cut it properly. He also preferred to be clean-shaven, but, as evidenced by the thick stubble on his face, that, too, was becoming a rare extravagance in his life.
He straightened up, turned, and started for the door, then hesitated. Reaching down, Hengus picked up his cooper’s hammer, hefted its weight, and then reached for the door latch with his left hand, the hammer cocked back over his head in his right.
“Who’s there?”
“Please let us in,” came the high-pitched voice.
“It’s late—we keep decent hours here. Come back when it’s light.”
“Please!” The voice was muffled but urgent through the slats of the door. “We need help!”
Hengus set his jaw. They all needed help, he thought, but he reached forward with his hand and pulled back the heavy wooden bolt that held the door closed.
Two men tumbled into his shop through the door, each seeming to support the other as they fell to the dirty floor. They were young, Hengus could see, having barely seen two decades by the look of them. They were coated in dust from the road and smelled as though they had not had a reasonable cleaning in over a month. Still, both wore sandals of remarkable, if somewhat worn, craftsmanship and carried packs on their backs beneath their drab cloaks of sturdy, dull green cloth, but it was their tunics that drew the eye of the cooper at once; even through the coating of powder over them he could see that they were white and that the cloth itself shined in places.
Hengus raised his hammer menacingly. “What do you want?”
One of the young men rolled over, his slender chest working hard as he gasped for breath. His face was pinched and hawkish with small, narrow eyes. The youth’s beard had once been carefully trimmed but was now showing itself as having had neglect for some time. It was his high voice Hengus had heard through the door. “Where—where are we?”
“You come banging down my door in the dark of night and don’t even know where you be?” Hengus’s voice rumbled menacingly as he spoke.
The narrow-faced youth held up his open hands, whether in surrender or defense, Hengus couldn’t judge. “Please—we just need to rest for a while—and find out the name of this place.”
“This be Wellstead,” the cooper answered cautiously, gripping his hammer tighter, his muscles drawing taut in anticipation. “And I be Hengus—and that’s all you’ll be asking until I get some answers of my own!”
The second youth, drawing himself up on all fours, spoke haltingly in a richer, baritone voice. “Wellstead, eh? We’re still in the Eastern Marches, Gaius. Somewhere around a hundred miles south of Traggathia, I think.”
“Taking me to places I’ve never heard of again, Treijan?” Gaius asked through a gulping breath.
“It’s a place a good deal further beyond ‘never heard of,’” Treijan replied. “‘Never heard of’ would be relatively close comparatively.”
“That’s enough out of both of you,” Hengus growled. He reached down with his free hand, gathered up the back of Gaius’s tunic, and dragged him to his feet. “Out with you both—back to wherever you came from.”
“Hengus Denthal, you put him down at once!” His wife stood framed in the doorway to the kitchen. She was a good foot shorter than he was and moved like a bird. She had every appearance of being frail, but Hengus knew better through long experience.
“Mera! Strangers and trouble are one and the same,” Hengus whined. “We’ve enough problems on our own without taking on theirs.”
“And whose fault is that?” Mera replied, her dark hair stuck out at odd angles from her thin face, quivering as she spoke. “Come out to the frontier, you said; let’s get us a new start, you said; leave our troubles behind, you said. So we listened to that Pir Aboth talk about how wonderful it would be to serve Satinka in the Marches and came on those stinking colony ships and dragged what little we had out here—and for what?”
“We’re the only cooper in this village!” Hengus shouted.
“We’re the only anything in this village!” Mera shot back. Her dark eyes were blazing but softened suddenly as she turned toward Gaius, still hanging from Hengus’s grip. She smiled slightly, self-conscious of her two missing teeth. “Please pardon my husband—he don’t know no better. Ain’t seen as much of the world as I have in my time.”
“That’s quite all right, madam,” Gaius said as Hengus slowly lowered him to the ground. “We don’t mean to bring you any trouble.”
“Oh, ain’t that nice,” Mera cooed, patting down her rebellious hair. “No need to worry about the trouble; we’ve got a surplus of it—could make a living off of it, if there were a market, you might say.”
“Perhaps we can help with that,” said the second young man as he stood. He was slightly shorter than the first, with close-cropped dark hair that seemed to bristle from his head. The man’s beard showed signs of careful crafting, its edge extending from in front of the ears in a graceful sweep down a strong jawline before it turned abruptly upward and joined at his mustache. A single tuft of hair nestled in the cleft of his chin, an island beneath lips that seemed to naturally smile. His cheeks were apple-rosy, matching his warm, shining eyes. He extended his hand to the slack-jawed and obviously entranced woman. “Please call me Treijan. This is my companion, Gaius. We are—”
“Bards.” Mera giggled suddenly as though she were a girl half her age. “I recognized the tunics.”
Hengus frowned deeply. “Bards? Then you’re mystic heretics come to plague us in our misery.”
“No, Master… Hengus, isn’t it?” Treijan said in his smoothest voice. “We come to sing the songs of the ancients; tell tales of forgotten heroes and search for those who long for a better life.”
“Which we would gladly do for you another time,” Gaius interjected quickly as he extracted his tunic from the cooper’s slackening grip. “Treijan, say good-bye to the nice family. We don’t know how long it will be before—”
“But this good man is a cooper,” Treijan replied at once, gesturing with a warm smile toward Hengus. “Coopers are esteemed highly in the councils of Calsandria; in fact, as I recall, there is a desperate need for coopers. It would be disrespectful not to return his hospitality and that of his family.”
“It would be disrespectful to wait until our problems caught up with all of us, Your High—”
Treijan shot a warning glance at his t
raveling companion as he abruptly held up a warning finger.
“-and-mighty fellow bard-singer,” Gaius finished lamely. “We must be going at once.”
“We’ve seen no sign of our friends for a while,” Treijan said in a voice smooth as oil on still water. “I think we might afford the courtesy of answering these good people’s questions regarding the doings in the world beyond Wellstead. And who might this be?”
Hengus turned toward the kitchen door once more. His daughter’s dirty face was peering wide-eyed around her mother’s skirts.
“I’ve something to show you,” Treijan said to the little girl, crouching down as he reached into his pack.
“We’ll have none of your tricks, mystic,” Hengus said quickly, though he suddenly realized that the hammer in his raised hand was getting a bit heavy. “If the priest were to find you here, he’d as soon burn down my shop as see you breathing.”
“No tricks, Master Hengus.” Treijan nodded, still smiling at the little girl. “And believe me, your local priest would rather not know that I was anywhere near him.”
The young man pulled out a small folded tapestry cloth which measured barely the length of both his arms. From where he stood Hengus could not see what image the threads made, but he saw the eyes of both his wife and his daughter go wide in wonder.
“Please, Master Hengus, come around and see.”
Hengus lowered the hammer and carefully stepped around to where he could see the tapestry. Light from the fires cooking the bound barrel staves he had made earlier in the day illuminated the glittering threads, but he was astonished to see that the threads seemed to be in constant motion, weaving and reweaving themselves in a blur of speed.
“Satinka protect us!” Hengus muttered in awe.