The Summon Stone Page 4

  Karan often visited their graves, the saddest place on her estate. She imagined a seventh headstone, sulien, and it was more than she could bear. She hurled the contents of the box into the library fireplace and set everything alight. Good riddance!

  Galliad’s records were another matter. She had loved her big, handsome, half-Aachim father; he had been the mainstay of her life until he had been killed up at Carcharon, pursuing the same obsession. Karan went through his papers and picked out everything that was even remotely related to what he had done at Carcharon. At the library table, she watched another part of her childhood burn, then crushed the ashes so nothing could be read from them and went out.

  She had to use the disembodiment spell and the sooner the better. Should she tell Llian? There was a strong probability that she would not make it back and she could not deceive him about that. He would be in agony and would try to stop her, but Sulien must come first.

  At three in the morning she rose and prepared carefully in the empty guest room. She was crouched in the dark, bracing herself for the agony of Malien’s disembodiment spell, when she heard a quavery moan coming from Sulien’s room. Karan leaped up. Was the magiz attacking?

  The bedroom door was wrenched open and Llian burst out, his face contorted in terror. He hurtled past without realising she was there and down to Sulien’s room.

  “Daddy!” she was howling as Karan ran in. “Daddy, Daddy!”

  “It’s all right,” he said, holding her. “I’m here.”

  Sulien’s green eyes took up half her face; she clung to him desperately. “Daddy, I saw you,” she said, gasping. “And… and…”

  A shiver made its way up Karan’s spine. She sat beside them and took Sulien’s hands. “What’s the matter? Was it another nightmare?”

  “I saw Daddy,” said Sulien, her small chest heaving, “and he was dead!”

  It knocked Karan sideways. Her eyes misted and her breath congealed in her lungs. She threw her arms around them both, crushing them to herself. It could not be true – it could not!

  “I’m right here,” said Llian to Sulien. “It was just a bad dream.”

  Karan put her hands around Sulien’s head and lifted the nightmare from her. It was much harder than it had been the first time and when Karan finished her head was throbbing. Sulien’s eyes returned to their normal size. She gave a trembling shudder.

  Karan pulled the covers around her. “You’ll be all right now. We’re not going anywhere.”

  Sulien looked puzzled; the lifted nightmare was already fading.

  “Go back to bed,” Karan said to Llian. “I’ll look after her.”

  He went still. Had she just reinforced her earlier rejection, and given him the impression that his life did not matter? She had not meant to. She reached out to him but Llian’s face had already taken on the familiar closed look he used to protect himself. He nodded stiffly, kissed Sulien on the forehead and left.

  Sulien’s brow wrinkled. “What’s the matter with Daddy?”

  “He’s all right. Go to sleep, it’s late.”

  Sulien closed her eyes. Karan sat with her until she slept, then tiptoed out and back to the guest room. Her insides were burning again, but her hands were frigid and her bare feet were icy lumps. What had Sulien really seen? Was Llian going to die?

  She restarted the nightmare and, in an image illuminated as if by a flash of lightning, saw him lying in the middle of an expanse of polished flagstones. He bore no visible signs of injury and she could not tell what had happened to him, but he looked dead.

  Karan wrapped her arms around herself and rocked from side to side. She wanted to run to Llian and never let him go, but she had to know what was going on, and if it was real. She checked the image again, scarcely able to look at his lifeless body, but it told her nothing more. Could it be true? Or was it a threat?

  She continued the nightmare, praying that it would reveal something hopeful. Another series of flashes showed the Merdrun army, led by Gergrig, charging up a mountain road towards a square fortress made of black iron and blue stone. The magiz’s artificers blasted a fifty-foot-wide hole through the nearest wall, hurling dozens of sentries to their death, and the troops swarmed in as they had stormed the domed city in Sulien’s first nightmare. But this time – flash, flash, flash – the blood-drenched nightmare followed them in.

  During the Time of the Mirror Karan had seen more mayhem than she cared to remember, though it was nothing like this. On Santhenar warring armies normally did their best to spare civilians, but the Merdrun appeared to glory in bloodshed and destruction, as if the existence of ordinary people living everyday lives was offensive to them.

  They butchered everyone they came across; only by doing so, it seemed, could they ease their own pain. The only people they spared were taken for torture, and they did not live long. And as the magiz stood by, gleefully drinking each life, she became stronger and the Merdrun more powerful.

  It was awful, yet Karan had to watch the whole nightmare in case it gave her a clue to Llian’s fate, or Sulien’s – or indeed her own. But it did not.

  Towards the end, when all the occupants of the fortress were dead, the Merdrun headed up through a rugged mountain pass towards a second fortress several miles away and half a mile higher. It was a breathtakingly beautiful castle carved from golden stone, with many slender towers and defensive platforms curving out over the walls. Another mile higher stood a third fortress, a vast curved structure hung with ice – or perhaps carved from ice. But what was it guarding?

  She peered deep into the nightmare, up and up, and then she saw it. High above the curved fortress, on a flat-topped peak that stood above every other peak on barren Cinnabar, through drifting snow she made out a big blood-red trilithon – two tall standing stones with a third stone resting across their tops. Was it the gate that would let the Merdrun into Santhenar at the time of the triple moons?

  “Mummy! Daddy!” screamed Sulien.

  Karan raced into her room, dreading what she was going to find. Llian burst in after her.

  “My head,” Sulien gasped, clutching at it. “It’s cracking open.”

  Karan’s blood froze. The magiz was trying to kill her.

  “What’s happening to me?” Sulien whispered.

  Blood gushed from her right nostril, then the left. Her eyes rolled up and she fell back on the bed.

  7

  I’M RESIGNING

  “You’re what?” cried Esea.

  They were in the vulgar Pink Chamber of the citadel, a room so garishly overdecorated that Tallia bel Soon normally avoided it. The cornices were three feet deep and painted in a dozen colours, and each of the six glittering chandeliers would have filled a hay wain. Tallia had chosen it because no one would think to look for her here.

  She turned away from the window and the streetscape of old Thurkad, the fabulously wealthy capital of Iagador and the most corrupt city in the world. For most of her time as Magister she had worked well with Yggur, the age-old warlord and mancer who had ruled Iagador for a dozen years.

  But his mental breakdown and abrupt withdrawal six months ago had left Iagador leaderless and without an army, and the Magister had neither the authority nor the finances to fill the gap. Since then Tallia had spent all her time trying to hold back the warring barons who wanted to seize Thurkad for themselves, and the scum who just wanted to plunder it. Like the yellowcloaks she could see now on every corner. Who was their overlord? No one knew.

  “I’m resigning as Magister and head of the Council of Santhenar,” said Tallia. “Tonight.”

  For fifteen hundred years the council of mancers had been a powerful force in the west, but it was just a fractious rump now with little power and even less influence. It felt like her personal failure.

  “Why?” said Esea, a small, striking blonde and a reshaper of rare skill, though neither attribute could prove her worth to the sternest critic of all, herself.

  “Things are getting worse, not better.
The council needs fresh blood and new ideas.”

  There was a long silence. Tallia looked from Esea to her seated twin, Hingis, who had been kicked by a mule as a boy. His head and upper body were as ugly and misshapen as she was perfectly formed; the left side of his chest was caved in and his face was a tilt-boned monstrosity. It was not a mirror to the inside.

  “The Magister can’t resign,” said Esea. “He or she can only be dismissed by the council or—”

  “Die in office,” said Tallia. “Too bad! I’m going. That’s why I invited you two to this meeting.”

  “Why?” Esea repeated.

  “I’m going home to Crandor.”

  “But you’ve lived in Thurkad for as long as I’ve known you. Longer.”

  “And I hate the place.” A tremor crept into Tallia’s voice and for once she did not try to conceal it. “My soul aches for my homeland: the tropic heat, the warm torrential rain, the wild and fecund jungle.” She looked away and said softly, “And even more for my family. I can’t bear it any longer.”

  “What will you do there?” said Esea.

  “I don’t have the faintest idea.” Tallia stared through the grimy window as if she could pierce the distance to Crandor, four hundred leagues north. “Ryarin’s murder tore the heart out of me. We were childhood sweethearts, did you know?”

  “I didn’t,” said Esea. “I’m so sorry.”

  “We made promises to one another, and I kept putting him off – and he was killed because of what I am. I keep asking myself why I stayed here, and what it’s all been for… and I have no answers.”

  “But we need you. In a corrupt world, a strong, decent Magister really matters.”

  “Thurkad would be better off if I’d been as ruthless as my predecessor. Anyway, I want children and I’m running out of time.”

  “You can have a family and still be Magister.”

  A faint drumming sounded in Tallia’s head. She rubbed her tired eyes. She was always tired these days.

  “The role of Magister is all-consuming. No one can do both.” She kneaded her forearm. “My mind is made up.”

  “But who’s going to replace you?” cried Esea.

  Tallia glanced at Hingis, who used words as sparingly as gold tells, as if each syllable came at a cost and had to matter. Despite his ugliness, or perhaps because of it, he was a master illusionist so grounded in reality that he never succumbed to the lure of his art.

  She had often heard Esea plead with him to fashion himself a more pleasing likeness. Perhaps she, afflicted by the rarest kind of beauty, truly believed such an illusion would help him, but Hingis always refused. Though hideous and in constant pain, he bore his affliction with a serenity his sister could not hope to echo.

  Tallia, now uncertain, weighed their fitness. Hingis’s illusions could make beauty from ugliness, something from nothing, order from disorder. But could a little, sickly man make peace between the warring factions who would rise as soon as she resigned?

  Esea was his antithesis in the Secret Art as well. As a reshaper – a master of transforming matter from one form to another – she refashioned reality as well as he did illusion. Did she work so hard at her art because of the childhood dare that had led to Hingis’s maiming and the guilt she could never escape?

  Neither Hingis nor Esea could be Magister on their own. Their true worth lay in their ability to combine their separate arts – the shaping of both illusion and reality – into spells far greater than the sum of their parts. Mancers were rarely able to work together, and the twins’ ability to do so made them invaluable. They were Tallia’s worthy successors – as long as nothing ever came between them.

  Hingis remained silent apart from the rasp of each indrawn breath into his good lung. He was hard to read.

  “You don’t have anything to say?” said Tallia, meeting his golden-brown eyes.

  “You’re impossible to replace.” He spoke deliberately, in a hoarse and breathless voice, for the misshapen jaw and withered left lung made speaking an effort. “You’ve given your all to Santhenar, and we’ll miss you. I wish you joy in your new life.”

  “But who will lead us?” Esea repeated.

  “That’s up to the council,” said Tallia. “Though if you’re willing to take the Magistership on I’ll argue for you.”

  “I can’t do it!” cried Esea. “I don’t deserve it.”

  “I meant the two of you.”

  “It’d never work. We’re not ready.”

  Tallia had not expected this. Esea was the reckless one, constantly trying to prove herself. Why was she being so timid? Had Tallia made a terrible mistake? She had no other candidate; the local councillors were utterly unworthy, and the others were far off and seldom made the long journey to Thurkad. “No one is ever ready to be Magister. I certainly wasn’t when Mendark was slain.”

  “But you’d been his assistant for years.”

  “You and Hingis have been my assistants for four years,” said Tallia. “May I put your names forward?”

  Hingis exchanged glances with his sister and something unsaid passed between them, perhaps each agreeing because they felt the other wished it.

  Esea nodded stiffly. “You’ll stay to help us with the transition. A month? Two, even?”

  “The new Magister needs a clean start,” said Tallia. “Whether you two are confirmed as joint Magister or someone else is elected, my time is over. When I walk out of the council meeting, I’m leaving Thurkad.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “For good?” Finally Hingis showed some emotion.

  “Crandor is two months away by ship. I don’t expect to come back.” She smoothed down her shoulder-length black hair, now threaded with silver, and took a deep breath. “We’re late. Let’s go in.”

  Hingis levered himself from his chair. His curved spine left him no taller than his sister. Tallia, lean and long-legged, towered over them both. She headed down the long hall to the iron-bound double doors of the council chamber, eased the left door open and stopped, looking into the vast room. Another Magister might have thrust the doors wide to crash back against the inner wall, but it was not her way to make entrances.

  Seven councillors were seated at the table, a massive construction of ebony wood twenty feet long, six feet wide and weighing half a ton. They were bickering, as usual. Petty fools! There wasn’t a man or woman here she would miss, not even her occasional allies, the triple-chinned glutton Lemmo Avury and squat, sour Cantha Pluvior. How could she have wasted a quarter of her life weaving paths through their small-minded opposition? She hoped she never saw them again.

  The drumming sounded again, louder than before. Tallia surveyed the hall behind them, which was empty save for a pair of bent-backed clerks lugging armloads of journals on some pointless errand.

  “What’s that noise?” she said.

  “Can’t hear anything,” said Esea.

  “It’s a thumping sound in my head,” said Hingis, “and I don’t like it.”

  Tallia put the niggle out of her mind. “Evening, Lestry,” she said to the guard on the door. There were fresh bruises on his kindly face. “Long day?”

  “Too long, Magister, but there’s no help for it.”

  “We’ll be quick tonight. You’ll be home with your kids by eight.” And your nigah-addicted shrew of a wife, poor man. Nigah, the narcotic bark of a tropical tree, stained the teeth black, and its addicts were violent and unpredictable.

  “Thank you, Magister.”

  She passed her knife to him, and her staff. He put them in the Magister’s compartment of the weapons cabinet. She went in and sat at the head of the table, nodding to the councillors. Hingis and Esea took their positions further along. Tallia looked down at her brown hands. Was she doing the right thing? Or selfishly putting her own interests above the welfare of Thurkad and the west?

  Could Hingis, crippled as he was, and Esea, whose reckless streak seemed to grow worse each day, take her place? Or would one
of the other councillors seize control and undo what little good she’d done in her decade as Magister? Tallia’s resolve faltered. No, she had to stop finding excuses to cling to the past. No one was irreplaceable. It was long past time to go.

  The drumming grew louder. Hingis clapped his hands over his ears; his broken face was twisted in pain. Esea stared at him, uncomprehending.

  An argument broke out between Cantha and Rebnell, a red-faced little man with a big black mole on his chin. He slammed a fist down on the ebony table and cursed her, using the foullest oaths Tallia had ever heard. Cantha punched him in the face, squashing his tiny nose flat.

  “Stop it!” yelled Tallia. “What’s the matter with everyone today?”

  A heavy thump on the locked door at the far end of the chamber. Boom! The door went skidding across the granite flagstones, its iron hinges squealing and leaving a trail of sparks in its wake. Splinters peppered the window drapes, the table and the councillors.

  A band of armed men surged in, followed by a rail-thin mancer wearing a purple mask and one of those parchment-yellow cloaks she kept seeing on the street. Purple and yellow – what did that remind her of? Tallia leaped up, cursing her rule that weapons be left outside. She was a master of both armed and unarmed combat but there were far too many of them.

  She kicked her chair aside, extended her right arm and cast a block on the running troops, who piled up as though they had run into a wall. The masked mancer directed his staff at her. Zzztt! Tallia’s knees buckled and her block failed.

  “Cut her down!” he roared. His voice was vaguely familiar.

  Rebnell, who was at the far end of the table closest to the intruders, fell out of his chair, struggled to his feet, stumbled a few steps and was killed by so violent a blow that his little head struck the floor fifteen feet away, spinning like a top and spraying blood in all directions. Cantha was quicker but it did not avail her – a barrel-chested brute of a soldier thrust his sword through her chest and out her back. It made a ghastly crunching sound. He jerked the blade out, shouldered the falling body aside and ran at Hingis.