Thief (The Key to Magic Book 7) Read online

And, in spite of Mar's professed total disinterest in his welfare, nhBreen was confident that the young wizard would keep close watch upon him.

  On the evening of the thirteenth day, as his most recent dream had reiterated, Mar returned.

  Without rising from his rough-made stool, nhBreen gestured towards the large flat rock that he had dragged adjacent to the coals of his fire. On it the remaining filets from his simple evening meal lay. "There is baked fish, if you are hungry."

  Somewhat to the sorcerer's surprise, Mar walked to the stone, squatted to scoop up a larger piece, then began to pluck small bites with thumb and forefinger. These he chewed in a distracted fashion, his thoughts clearly in other times and places. Such was the way of wizards.

  It was not quite dusk, but the sun was behind Mar and deep shadow shrouded his expression.

  "I have found no seasonings as yet, I am afraid, but that species is reasonably palatable all the same," nhBreen offered genially, using the same bland tones and quirky expression as had Waleck when waste miner and thief had camped together. "For future reference, there is another species in the lagoon that looks nearly identical save for a few greenish-blue stripes on its dorsal fin. It is all but inedible. Its flesh is terribly bitter and I suspect toxic."

  Mar's outward appearance and nhBreen's dreams suggested that more than a month of linear time had passed for the Emperor of the Glorious Empire of the North. His clothing, not the same that he had worn when last seen, had a begrimed and distressed look, as if he had crawled over rough ground in it or charged through a thicket or both. The man himself had a similar distressed and begrimed look. nhBreen's guess was that Mar had missed more than one night of sleep and many more than one meal.

  In his own time, nhBreen had met but a single wizard. That woman had frequently evidenced what senior sorcerers had termed "temporal disassociation." She had lived her life in a thousand different times and places and while nhBreen's encounters with her might have been separated by only minutes or hours, she had always looked different and, on occasion, often years older.

  "How long has it been for you, Mar? A month? A year?"

  The young wizard continued to eat and only answered after the fish had been entirely consumed. "Six weeks, a day less or more. I don't keep track of the journeys, only the moments to which I must go."

  "Choosing the right moment is difficult."

  After another lengthy pause, Mar said, "Yes."

  This was not an admission, just an acknowledgement.

  nhBreen knew that for it to be most effective, his next statement must be devoid of any preamble.

  "You must allow the flux overload in the bow to deplete naturally into the background ether over a period of at least eight hundred but no more than one thousand years. This must take place in an isolated area away from all magical influences and any possibility of flux reinforcement. This course has the highest possibility of reducing the ethereal blast to a level that you can mediate."

  Mar displayed no surprise that nhBreen had provided a solution to his unspoken problem. "Go on."

  "Two nights ago I had a dream that refined my understanding of the reinforcing flux loop that inhabits the weapon. The return of the quaestor's family will, as you have surmised, disengage the natural flux modulation that his grief has been generating to continuously add energy to the loop. It will not, however, reduce the stored and multiplied flux potentials that already exist. As you have planned, you must inform Eishtren that his kith and kin did indeed survive the fall of Mhajhkaei. This will prevent a final surge of self-destructive anguish from causing an exponential increase in the ethereal release and thereby mitigate the scope of the disaster, but this alone will not be sufficient to prevent an unregulated ethereal outburst that will cause catastrophic destruction over one forth of the civilized world."

  Mar made no reaction to nhBreen's pronouncement and the sorcerer knew that Mar had observed that potential future disaster more than once.

  "I can take the bow from Eishtren?"

  "No. He cannot be separated from it even for as much as a full day. As strange as it may sound, he serves the purpose of a Binding -- the flux containment bond in more technical terms. Think of him as part of the spell. If bow and bowman are parted for too long, the ethereal link that has grown between them will be severed and the full force of the stored flux will be released at once. Until the instant the bow must be destroyed, Eishtren is chained to it. He must live as a hermit, far from mankind and from the ethereal upsets that men generate."

  "The quaestor cannot live a thousand years."

  "My dreams tell me that with the aid of the medic and your wizardry, he can."

  "The wood would rot in a millennium."

  "A spell that you will derive after two days of effort will place the bow in a form of stasis."

  "No man can survive a thousand years in utter isolation."

  "Eishtren can, if he knows that his reward is the return of his wife, his sons, and his daughters."

  "What sort of man will he be when his thousand years as a hermit is done?"

  nhBreen allowed a slight smile. "A happy one."

  Though the young man's expression revealed nothing, nhBreen could tell that Mar had been swayed but remained distrustful. It was now full dark and thus time to send Mar away to dwell on what nhBreen had said.

  "That is all that my dreams have revealed up to this point. I hope to be able to provide more guidance later. Now, sad to say, it has been a long day and if you do not mind I think I shall retire and perhaps dream."

  Mar nodded and stepped away from the fire into nothing.

  He was back before the coals of the fire had completely gone out.

  nhBreen stirred from his pallet of rushes and peered through the open doorway of his hut, trying to make out Mar in the darkness. "There will be a storm."

  "Yes."

  "I will not survive."

  "It's a big storm. All of the storms here are big, but this one will be huge. The island will be cut in two by a new channel and everything will be pounded flat."

  "I have had inklings of this disaster for two days." nhBreen settled back to his repose with an unconcerned air and started to close his eyes as if he were just going back to sleep. "Farewell, Mar. I wish you well."

  Mar grinned, a fierce flash of predatory teeth. "You will not escape your punishment so easily, old man. Get up. I have another prison awaiting you."

  FOUR

  143rd Year of the Reign of the City

  Tenthday, Waning, 3rd Springmoon, 1645 After the Founding of the Empire

  Bridge over the Sand River

  Awarded a brief respite by the wondrous and horrible charge of the Gaaelfharenii, after the three giants perished Eishtren found that he could not maintain a rate of fire sufficient to halt the relentless advance of the Monks.

  He walked to the right, set his feet to get a better stance, and put two shots through the slit at the front of the lead vehicle, aiming for the men that he could perceive but not actually see there. Straightaway, the war machine slewed to the right, crashed into the guard wall, and lodged in place. Projectiles continued to burst from the near side, but the angle was wrong and none came near Eishtren.

  The steel beetles continued to charge onto the bridge.

  Shrikes screamed in, ripping the roadbed and the wrecks with black cylinders, and he had to shift his aim from the following vehicle to this new danger. Fire flashed at the front of the steel beetle and he heard an odd sound as he twisted to the left to loose at a Shrike blazing towards the archway from the northwest. The skyship blew apart and the pieces whirled overhead a few armlengths above the top of the archway, shedding smoke and sparks as they crashed into the riverbank a hundred paces to his right.

  "Aelwyrd, run to the far side," he ordered, turning to draw once more upon the second beetle.

  When the boy did not respond, Eishtren rotated his head slightly and found Aelwyrd's lifeless form sprawled a body length behind him.

  Having
to steady a sudden shiver that seized his hands, Eishtren gritted his teeth and turned to face the assault once more.

  Another war machine charged, shifting rapidly from one side of the bridge to the other to throw off his aim. Even after he had put seven holes in its rounded forward end, the machine did not stop, veering right only at the last moment to crash into the south pillar of the archway.

  More of the armored beasts surged across the bridge.

  Then, he heard the king's voice. "Quaestor Eishtren, you must destroy the bridge now! Break your bow."

  With many regrets, Eishtren lifted his grandfather's magnificent legacy and brought it down with all the force that he could muster.

  A strange feeling came upon him then, and it seemed as if the world about him had ceased all movement and fallen completely silent.

  A hand caught his bow, arresting without a bobble its descent to destruction, and Eishtren saw that it was the hand of the king -- a man miraculously made whole with two good arms and legs and now dressed in fine raiment -- who now stood before him.

  "My lord king, are you the emissary of the Gods in a familiar semblance? Has my hour of everlasting condemnation finally come?"

  "No, Quaestor, I'm not a servant of the Forty-Nine nor am I here to punish you for whatever sins you may feel deserve eternal damnation, but I have come to lay a harsh task upon you."

  Then the king told him at length what must be done and why.

  When the king spoke to him of the paradise that lay at the end of the prodigious labor, Eishtren wept.

  "What is your answer, Quaestor?" the king demanded.

  Hands still clasped upon his bow, which the king also still held, Eishtren said without hesitation, "Yes, my lord king. I will endure a thousand years in any dark underworld, accomplish any toil, suffer any pain, and submit to live ten lifetimes of penniless solitude, if I can but see my wife and children alive again."

  The king nodded as if he had already known the answer. "Come with me."

  FIVE

  Mar pointed through a doorway guarded by two unsmiling Mhajhkaeirii'n marines. "If you attempt to leave your rooms without permission, use magic in any way, or interfere with any of the armsmen or workers, I will summarily execute you."

  nhBreen nodded. "I will obey all that you command. It is not my fate to cease to exist in the heart of undertime."

  Mar gave a half grunt as nhBreen meekly moved to enter his cell, then walked away.

  Though his nightly dreams had provided no information concerning the complex, nhBreen had seen enough of such installations to know that he was now housed in a military bunker of a vintage that would place its construction in own era -- the few decades before the final war. From the entropic flux state of the walls, floors, fixtures, and furnishings, read clandestinely over two days by glacially passive means, he decided that Mar had not trans-located him significantly in time. Furthermore, the guards who stood silent, ever vigilant watches outside his door and the equally mute staff who brought his meals were all Mhajhkaeirii or other similar peoples of the Empire and by all appearances contemporaries of said timeframe. Postulating that Mar, in order to avoid anachronistic complication, would not have dragged his subjects far from their own proper time, he was either coincident with his original linear timeframe -- marked most recently by the assassination of the wizard Zso -- or just shortly in arrear or advance of it.

  Aside from this clandestine examination of his surroundings, for the first several days, he did nothing more than luxuriate in the comforts provided by modern technology -- hot water, consistent air temperatures, and a relatively soft, equally warm cot.

  Then, grown bored and with naught else to do in the otherwise bare rooms, he began to investigate the magics of the place, passively divining flux modulations through his ethereal sense as he pretended to nap.

  All of the magics of his suite of three rooms -- a small alcove with plumbing fixtures, a large room with his cot, and an entry room with a single wooden chair -- were in perfect working order. The spells for lighting, waste disposal, and environmental control were robust and hardened against casual tampering, but none had countermeasures that were too strong for him to overcome, should he so desire. However, he interfered with none of these in any way.

  One interesting discovery was that the suite had access to a centralized information retrieval system that remained fully functional and active. While the virtual control console would have appeared at a specifically timed wave of his hand, he left the magical device alone until a more auspicious time.

  Five days after his arrival, the greying medic, whose identity nhBreen already knew from his most recent dreams, entered and introduced himself in a roguish fashion as "Llylquaendt, resident conscience." The watchful legionnaire that accompanied him placed a rolling stool and then departed, leaving the door open.

  nhBreen stood and bowed. "Waleck, of Gh'emhoa and various and sundry places."

  "I have convinced Mar," the surprisingly energetic and limber geriatric proclaimed as he gestured for nhBreen to resume his seat, "that civilized convention requires that prisoners, whether of war or otherwise, be afforded a certain minimum level of fair treatment and given respect of their fundamental rights. One of those rights is to receive routine physical care. With your consent, I will begin a standard examination."

  nhBreen nodded with a smile. "Of course."

  Llylquaendt puttered about nhBreen for some moments, rolling on his stool as he utilized several ethereal devices that he produced from a drab shoulder satchel. nhBreen readily recognized these as battlefield medical gear.

  Eventually, Llylquaendt pronounced, "You are in good health for someone of your apparent physical age -- I understand that your chronological age is quite astonishing -- though in future, if at all possible, I would recommend that you have your sprite payload reprogrammed."

  nhBreen raised his eyebrows to feign amazement at the ancient phrase. "You are of the magical age!"

  The medic nodded as he put away his devices and then gestured in a vague way at their surroundings. "Yes, I am -- or was -- of Pyra."

  "We were allies then! Before the end, I was known as nhBreen of the City."

  Llylquaendt's eyes widened slightly. "I knew that name back then! You were a powerful sorcerer, a high officer in the Alliance."

  nhBreen shrugged. "That man is long gone. Now, I am just Waleck, traveler and sometime miner."

  "Once, on leave, I visited the City," the medic said, his eyes shining in remembrance. "I saw the Spires of Magaram."

  "They were magnificent, yes, but a terribly expensive place to live," nhBreen said, as if he had only just left the cloud-piercing towers a few days before . "Did you also have an opportunity to visit the Pools of Akaa?"

  Llylquaendt laughed. "Of course! What soldier could bypass the coeducational baths!"

  For nearly an hour, most of which the sorcerer spent simply listening, nhBreen spoke to the medic of long vanished glories. At times, they lapsed into Common. Having not spoken the language in many thousands of years, the sorcerer often found the words difficult on his tongue and the phrases grating to his ears. In between discussions of things lost to time, Llylquaendt related the broad details of his own journey from the ancient time to the present -- he admitted that he had already been informed of nhBreen's -- and expounded on, with grumbling amusement, the innumerable drawbacks of his current polygamous status.

  Eventually, though, as their talk turned, as it inevitably must, to the war that had ended magical civilization, Llylquaendt's enthusiasm for idle chatter quickly evaporated.

  "Well, all of that is much too depressing." The medic stood and began to repack his gear.

  "Ah, indeed. Much was lost."

  Llylquaendt nodded. "I have found that it is best to let the past and its dead rest in peace. I will come regularly to check on you. Are all of your basic needs being met? I will advocate for you as well as I can and do my best to insure that you are not treated in a way that would violate acc
epted convention."

  "I am well fed and the accommodations are amenable," nhBreen said. "Perhaps my only lack is some means to pass my time. If I could have a few books of any sort to read, I would be extremely grateful."

  "Oh, that is quite easy to do! There are tens of thousands of books -- a great many that I myself added over the years -- in the Bunker's library. Have you not tried the console reader?"

  "I did not know that one was available. Am I allowed?"

  "Certainly! Even Mar could not deny a man such a basic necessity! Do you know how to access it?"

  "It has been such a long time that I am not sure," nhBreen lied.

  "Here, I will show you."

  Llylquaendt walked to one side wall and made a sweeping gesture with the open palm of his left hand. When the console reader appeared, he crooked an index finger to drag the ephemeral construction in front of nhBreen.

  "It uses standard controls." The medic's hands danced across the access keys, and a variety of pages and images flickered through the display area. "The search function will accept voice or text commands."

  "Yes, it is coming back to me," nhBreen said, extending his hands in a hesitant fashion to halt the scrolling pages on one dealing with geology.

  "Good, if you have any difficulty, just send a message by one of the marines and I will come by as soon as I have a chance. Mar had given me charge over the civilians and they consume a great deal of my time, both as a medic and as a mediator."

  Once Llylquaendt had gone, nhBreen began to use the console reader to peruse a randomly produced work called Travels by some obtuse Imperial geographer.

  At the same time, he began with delicate, precise ethereal strokes to subvert the device's auxiliary functions in order to gain magical control of the Bunker's master systems.

  Only another highly ranked sorcerer who likewise had been trained in informational magic warfare could have detected his efforts. The flux modulations that he used would appear to Mar as natural ripples in the background ether.

  nhBreen read and subverted through supper, then closed the console, went with concealed triumph to his cot, gave the finger twitch that dimmed the lights, and prepared to sleep.