CHAPTER FOUR #2
Even though it had been.
Melliandra, you are such a dimskull.
She reached the stairs and, despite not wanting to go anywhere near Lord Death again today, headed back down to Boura Fell’s lowest level.
The lower floors were usually the most likely to have the most revolting surprises in their bins, so whenever it was her turn to run the refuse carts, she always preferred to start at the bottom and work her way to the top.
That way, no matter what retch-inducing foulness she found in the bins, she could tell herself the next floor would be easier.
It wasn’t always true, but at least it gave her something to look forward to.
* * *
When Melliandra reached the level of Boura Fell that housed the High Mage’s offices, she pulled the floor’s refuse cart out of its storage closet and rolled it along with an almost light-hearted feeling in her chest. She’d just learned that the High Mage was away from Boura Fell.
He’d left a little over a bell ago to visit one of the other Bouras—Koderas and his great new fortress, Toroc Maur, if the rumors she’d overheard in the Mage Halls were correct.
Apart from the fact that his absence meant his refuse bins would be empty (which was always a great relief; she hated finding those small, lifeless infants whose blood he used to communicate with his Mages afield) the great, crouching malevolence of his all-seeing presence was gone, too, and with it the probing worms of his consciousness, digging into her soul, rifling through her thoughts, poking, spying. Owning.
Melliandra could not recall a single day of her life when Vadim Maur had not been near.
But since he’d incarnated into Master Nour’s younger, much fitter body (and, oh, the cursing and Rages that had erupted in the Mage Halls over that!), he’d become much less reclusive.
Much more likely to be found roaming the halls of Boura Fell rather than simply sitting behind his desk or locking himself away in his spell rooms.
When she reached Master Maur’s offices, the guards were standing at their usual posts, but a trio of Primages were arguing beside them.
Two of the Primages were attempting to gain entrance to the High Mage’s office on some pretext—fabricated, no doubt—while the third Primage, Master Maur’s assistant, Zev, was steadfastly refusing to admit them.
“My orders are clear,” Zev was saying. “No umagi enters unsupervised, and no Mage enters at all until Master Maur returns. If you need something from his office, you may submit your request to me. I will communicate your desire to Master Maur, and if he approves it, I will bring the item to you.”
Outraged and grumbling, the two Primages stalked off.
Primage Zev turned, swift as a tunnel snake, and speared her with a sharp look. “Why are you here, umagi?” His will, like a dark, suffocating cloud, pressed down on her, tendrils of command and inquiry prodding at her mind.
Melliandra swiftly shoved every free thought and emotion back into the private space in her mind and slammed the door hard shut.
She filled her mind with umagi concerns.
She was hungry. She’d have to find someone weaker to sit beside at dinner tonight and steal their portion. Who best to single out?
“Mistress sent me, master.” No need to feign that tremble in her voice. She was really frightened. Zev was no Maur, but he was still a Primage, and still perfectly capable of shredding her body and mind if he discovered even a hint of her desire to kill Vadim Maur.
The tension in her chest didn’t begin to ease until the Primage grunted and turned to face the office doors.
A dark glow massed around his hands, a cloud of shadow shot through with slivers of light, like shining threads in a dark cloth.
More threads began to glow about the door.
She only saw them for an instant. A strange web of light and dark plaited together in a complex and oddly beautiful pattern.
Then she blinked, and the vision went away.
The Primage opened the doors to Vadim Maur’s office and motioned her to go inside. “Do what you came for, and be quick about it.”
He followed her in and watched her as she crossed the room to the High Mage’s great desk.
She glanced furtively around the office as she went, looking for more threads of shadow and light.
She knew she’d just seen magic: the weave this Primage had spun and the weave he’d unraveled to let her pass.
She’d actually seen it—the individual threads and their pattern, not just the hazy glow visible to anyone when someone wove strong magic.
She recognized it because she’d heard the appearance of magic described many times.
The novices in the Mage Halls were young and chatty, and not yet learned enough to spin effective privacy weaves.
She couldn’t see any other magic in the room, not even around the door at the back of the office.
Umagi weren’t allowed across that threshold.
So far as she knew, no one was. If there was going to be more magic anywhere in this room, she would have expected it to be there, warding that door.
But perhaps wards only showed themselves in the presence of other magic?
Aware of Primage Zev’s eyes upon her, Melliandra emptied the waste bin by Vadim Maur’s desk, bobbed a quick bow in the direction of the Primage, and scurried out.
She pushed the cart down the hall to the next door, pausing to look back and watch the Primage reseal the wards protecting the High Mage’s room.
There. She could see them again. Those shining threads of magic.
Eld ~ Koderas
Vadim Maur walked beside Primage Grule, the Mage he’d tasked with restoring Koderas to its full, pre-Wars capacity.
He’d already visited the enormous forges, where blacksmiths hammered sel’dor ingots into swords and armor, and the foundries where molten sel’dor was cast into barbed arrowheads, spears, and the like.
Now, the two Mages passed through an archway and down a series of railed walkways that overlooked Koderas’s siege workshops and the various machining and assembly rooms where thousands of umagi toiled round the clock constructing the massive battering rams and trebuchets that would be used to grind enemy fortresses into dust. No less than three full rooms were dedicated to the manufacture of bowcannon and their massive, tairen-killing bolts made from tree trunks jacketed with barbed sel’dor sheaths and razor-sharp spearheads.
“You have done well, Grule.” Praising those who served him wasn’t Vadim’s strong suit, but Grule’s last centuries of effort had exceeded even Vadim’s highest expectations. “Not even during the previous Wars did Koderas operate with such seamless efficiency.”
“Thank you, Most High. There is no prize I value more than your approval.” A flush of pleasure touched Grule’s tanned cheeks.
Unlike most sun-bereft Mages, who toiled all their lives beneath the surface of Eld, Grule had spent the last year aboveground, overseeing the start of Vadim Maur’s next great achievement.
They had reached the end of the elevated walkway.
Grule opened the door at the end of the walkway, and the Mages stepped out of the hot noise of the production floor into a cool, dark corridor.
From there, they climbed a flight of stairs that led to a pair of heavy double doors covered with swirling patterns of rune-etched silver and bloodred crystals in the sigils of Seledorn, God of Shadows.
Grule reached for the heavy, intricately wrought silver-and-sel’dor handle and murmured the words of a release spell while his fingers traced an unlocking weave in the air.
Unseen bolts shifted with an audible click.
“After you, Most High,” Grule murmured, and with a wave of his hand, the doors swung open.
Vadim Maur stepped over the threshold and into the gray light of the cloud-filtered afternoon sun.
He squeezed his eyes closed against the brightness.
It was the first time he’d stepped foot aboveground since the scorching of the world a thousand years ago, and even much-filtered sunlight was a hundred times brighter than the dim, sconce-lit shadows of Boura Fell.
“Forgive me, Master Maur.” Grule leapt forward to block the sunlight with his body and cast the High Mage in his broad shadow. “Shall I weave screens for your eyes?” He lifted his hands in anxious anticipation.
The old Vadim Maur, trapped in his aged and decaying body, would have snapped in rage. But the newly incarnated Vadim Maur, housed in a body both young and fit, was not so quick to anger.
“No need.” Already Vadim’s new, younger eyes were adjusting to the abundance of light. He lifted a shading hand over his eyes and squinted at the world around him.
They were standing on a windswept point of land formed by the confluence of two great rivers: the Frost heading down from the Mandolay Mountains in the north, and the Selas, flowing east from its source near the Rhakis.
Vadim turned in a slow circle, drinking in this long-unseen world.
Behind them lay the mile-long open sel’dor pit that housed the new, much-improved, Koderas.
Clouds of thick black smoke boiled up from Koderas’s great fires.
What trees might have once surrounded the pit had long since died away, and all that remained was thick brush, covered in heavy gray layers of ash and sel’dor dust.
Vadim’s chest swelled with pride. Some who looked upon Koderas might have seen ruin in the ash and soot and poisonous gases choking the life from the surrounding forest. But not Vadim.
He saw Koderas for what it truly was: power.
His power. Raw and brutal and ugly, perhaps, but indisputably great nonetheless.