As if I didn’t have enough on my plate, I’d been neglecting my duty with regard to the book that was stolen by the heretics. It’d been a week since I last went to the library, and I was beginning to feel guilty; Timesnatcher, knowing my proclivity for all things full of pages and words, had made me chief investigator, and I should have been before Yearseve, really. Now, with Nighteye’s visit and the second set of twin archmages burning in my brain, uncovering the plots of the heretics was at the forefront of my thoughts. As the second of Yearsend dawned, I headed to the Maginox and stopped by the librarian’s desk, giving my soul-fixed password for a key before descending the stair to the masters’ vaults. The perimeters of these subterranean chambers were sealed by spells that barred casual access with wraith-form and other such intangibility effects – well, barred to those I could employ, at least. But armed with one of the special black-iron keys, admittance was no issue – I turned the tumblers, peeled open the huge, heavy oaken door and stepped within.
I turned in the darkness to lock it behind me, and, while I did so, the nearest torch flared into life, casting solid, unwavering shadows across the white-painted walls. The skirt of my robe spilled over the stairs as I descended, and soon I was in the bowels of the library, the small rooms where the most expensive tomes were kept like treasures, stowed away far from the sight of even the magical elite.
Ibaran, that was what she’d called her accomplice. Timesnatcher had decreed that sorcery was used to trespass in this place, to steal the text the killers sought for months, and by the sounds of it Ibaran was the sorcerous perpetrator. Whatever magical tools the heretic had used in order to effect such a feat I was uncertain. There were traces of planar doorways, but, when I tested it with a trip to the otherworld, the spells on the masters’ vaults seemed to prevent travel across the boundary. Several areas of the library were inaccessible, no matter where I chose to reappear in material reality.
In any case, discovering the secrets Ibaran had employed wasn’t in my remit – I was to find out what was contained in the book.
Getting the name of the book had been simple: cross-referencing the volumes contained in the library against the inventory, which was handily supplied by a coral-haired elf-maid of middle-aged appearance (likely two hundred years old or more, I fancied). A number of imps, under strict orders to open no text nor read any word save for those on the spines and covers of the books, were able to sort through them in short order and reveal the missing volume to be The Ten-Spoked Wheel.
The name itself alarmed me, knowing what I knew – knowing what Vardae and the heretics didn’t know.
Whilst I could guess that the reason for the book’s significance was its lore on the twins, guess that it contained material suggesting that there would be five sets, ten in total – this conjecture was proving impossible to evidence. The books in here weren’t designed for public consumption: some were relics too delicate for the same spells that forced the ones upstairs to respond to a searcher’s intentions; others were relics too dark and twisted in content to be safely imbued with such ensorcellments.
The texts down here were left in a completely disorganised state. Nonetheless, thanks to a helpful bibliography and my team of imps, I’d come across a total of five other books that referred to various passages from The Ten-Spoked Wheel. In addition, in the main library building above me there were at least three commentaries with large excerpts – but nothing relevant was to be mined from the innocuous-looking paragraphs. The book dealt with Magisterium policy, primarily, with emphasis on expansion both geographically and in terms of the guild’s purview. If there was some clue to the ‘Time of the Twins’ buried within The Ten-Spoked Wheel’s mind-numbing, desert-dry assertions, no previous scholar had thought it worth quoting.
I had the room to myself at the moment – there were less than a hundred people in all of Mund with a valid password, apparently – so I had my feet up on the redebon desk, poring over A History of Magistry: Collected Edition V, cradling the heavy book in my lap. It was truly boring. There were extensive treatises covering inter-departmental structures, economic models… thankfully I only had to flick through, really. There were far more interesting texts, both historical and theoretical, sitting right there on the shelves near my head – and of course I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t sampled some of their obscure knowledge during periods of immovable apathy – but I was doing my best to stay focussed today.
Unfortunately, focussing on such a monumentally monotonous book had its side-effects. I’d just finally started to doze off when I heard a key turn in the lock upstairs, and quickly put my boots back on the carpet. I didn’t want to look too disrespectful.
“Ciraya!” I said in some surprise, looking up at the pair of sorcerers descending into the shelf-lined room. “And you…” I didn’t think I’d ever seen her grey-robed companion before. “Happy Yearsend.”
“Is it really?” the sorceress drawled. She was moving ahead of her colleague so that the long skirt of her overlarge black robe didn’t trip him, and her hood was pulled low, hiding most of her tattoos.
“I know, right?” her male friend said in a Hilltown accent, refined but not over-the-top with it. He had his hood cast back to reveal short twists of black hair; he was average height and handsome, his creamy brown skin marked with dark patterns almost as extensively as Ciraya’s pale flesh. He didn’t have the branching tattoos across the brow and temples like her, but he did have triangular shapes stretching from under his ears along his jawline and down his throat, shapes crawling with miniature demons. There was no Magisterium wheel on his robe. “You said being in Mistress Arithos’s good books would be a great thing for us.”
He spoke casually, but his bleary eyes were fixed on me as he followed her down, his gaze tracing the smiling mouths threaded into the dark green outer layers of my robe. Those only half-awake eyes were slowly widening in recognition.
“Let me guess: you became best buds with the boss, and now you get to do extra work over Yearsend for no credit.” I grinned genially at them as they reached the bottom of the stairs.
“Something like that,” Ciraya muttered, looking at me questioningly, then finally aired her concerns: “What did you do with the mask, man?”
“Oh,” I shrugged, “it doesn’t really seem all that necessary now. Everyone who matters knows who I am, and anyone who’s going to matter in the future could find out in ten seconds flat. It’s over.”
“Th-this – you’re Feychilde!” the male sorcerer cried at last.
“Good gods, am I?” I exclaimed in my best posh-old-man impression, half-jumping out of my seat and looking down at myself in shock.
“Emphasis on the ‘child’,” the sorceress croaked, sliding into a chair. She stretched her upper body across the table and laid her hooded head on her arms.
I settled back down, smiling. “Hey, you think you’re tired. I’ve been up twenty-four hours, and spent half of yesterday dealing with the killer of my parents. Cut me some slack.”
“Heard about that.” Ciraya’s head shifted slightly, so as to look at her prancing companion. “Oh, do sit down, Ronuth. Champions don’t bite. Not this one, anyway.”
The over-excited sorcerer sat down near me, leaning forward eagerly. There was no bleariness in his eyes now.
I sighed inwardly.
“But you – you never told me you knew Feychilde!” Ronuth said. “M’lord Feychilde, if I could just ask –”
“This is my real voice,” I cut him off, “in case you were thinking I really am a posh old man. There’s no need for any ‘m’lord’-ing around here.”
He loosed a short bray of over-enthusiastic laughter. “Well, gosh… Feychilde… What really happened in Zadhal? Did you really crush a lich-lord’s heart using the Glove of the Horned One?”
“Eight lich-lords, and first I dressed them up as fairies.” I beamed, and Ciraya snorted, but it took Ronuth a second to realise I was joking, his confusion visible for a few moments. “No, really it was just Nentheleme. She fixed the undead-killing artefact and took out the Prince of Chains. Then me and Shadowcloud bought ourselves some time while Winterprince did the heavy lifting. It was him that did all the work, in the end…”
“Shadowcloud… and Winterprince,” Ronuth murmured in a reverent tone. “Long may they be remembered… Did you know Winterprince well? He seemed so mysterious.”
I chuckled humourlessly. “Let’s leave that topic for another day, shall we?” The memories of our disagreements hurt, especially now that I was one of the few in the city who knew he was still alive, held by our ancient enemies…
“Sure, sure… So, this undead-killing artefact –”
Ciraya stood suddenly, scraping her chair loudly across the carpet, cutting off her friend abruptly.
“Come on, Ronuth,” she croaked, grabbing him by the arm. “Sorry, Feychilde. We’ll leave you to your work.”
I raised a hand to indicate the fact I wasn’t fussed. “Oh, I don’t mind. If you guys hadn’t shown up, I’d probably be asleep by now.”
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
I tapped the boring-ass title on the cover of my book suggestively; Ciraya released Ronuth and sank down into her chair, sitting back this time and popping her legs up over the arm, crossed at the ankle.
“So, what are you guys doing down here on the morning of the second of Yearsend, anyway? Got some juicy bit of demonology to look up, or something?”
“Something,” Ciraya muttered. “We’ve been tasked with finding The Science of the Past. So big –” she indicated a book about as large as the one I was reading “– with a harpy-wing cover… night-blue. Gold lettering on the spine.”
“The Mistress just loves her history books,” Ronuth said dryly.
“Yeah, they’re her babies,” the sorceress said in agreement, though her voice sounded slightly troubled.
“Well, it’s got to be at least a bit juicy if it’s being kept down here,” I said. “Do you want some help?”
Ciraya waved her hand nonchalantly, but Ronuth’s ears started wagging in excitement.
I popped up the stairs and opened the door, crossing the threshold briefly so I could summon my eldritches, then came back down with a train of my most studious imps on my heels.
“Funnyfingers, you start on the left. Oldbeard, there. Blandface, this side. And Bilgebreath… good…”
I continued to give instruction until I was assured they all knew what they were looking for, and, more importantly, that they wouldn’t go opening the books, or reading any that happened to fall open… thereby learning secrets of which I had no notion… secrets that might be dangerous in the wrong hands, binding the same imp decades later and unlocking gods-knew-what…
Satisfied at last, I sat back down, and the three of us watched them work, making small talk.
The Seven-Star Swords, it turned out, were the best demon-summoners amongst all the sorcery colleges – as two of the school’s adepts would have me believe, at least. Ronuth’s family hadn’t approved of his choice of career, but he’d been making it work for five years now. Ciraya, on the other hand, was an orphan who’d travelled to Mund on the back of a wagon from the Westerlunds; aged twelve, she’d managed to sneak into the city, and she stole her first sorcerous text from some old guy’s book-store. Evidently self-taught, she’d managed to impress one of the elders of the Seven-Star Swords with some street summoning, and within a month she was climbing the ladder of Mistress Arithos’s favourites. Payment of her Maginox fees was being loaned from the college’s coffers, to be repaid out of her own labour on an ongoing basis.
“Didn’t realise it meant Yearsend duties,” Ronuth sniffed. “Not for me, at least.”
“It doesn’t for anyone, usually.” Ciraya sounded troubled again. “The Mistress really wants this book, and she seemed to be in a rush. It’s not like her.”
“Probably wants to quote something out of it for yet another super-long Yearsend speech,” Ronuth said, then affected an older, womanly tone of voice: “’Let us learn from the lesson of Abethild and Gorastar, whose tragic experiment was not in vain, yet whose –‘”
“Enough already!” Ciraya barked. “That’s a very important lesson, actually, if you’d bother to read between the lines. It’s not the dark ritual itself that is banned – it’s executing it improperly. And state of mind is just as important in execution as word and gesture –“
“Really?” I asked, intrigued. “I thought that was just an archmagery thing.”
Ciraya shook her head vehemently. “No, no, it goes all the way down into the spells themselves – consider the twenty-first canto of the Black Rose Calling, which –“
“I’m sorry, what?” Ronuth brayed, jerking his head up as if he’d been sleeping. “Gods, Ciraya, you’ll bore the champion’s head off.”
I just stared at him levelly.
“You were saying?” I asked the sorceress.
“Master! Master, I have it, I have the very book!”
Blandface, his tiny mouth agape and sunken nostrils flaring, came half-hopping, half-flying out of the corner behind Ronuth, struggling with the heavy tome.
“Here – thanks -”
I leaned across the arm of my chair and took it from him with one hand; despite its weight and the unnatural angle, my augmented strength easily won out, and I brought it up and set it down on the table.
“The Science of the Past,” I read, musing. “Could I take a peek?”
Ciraya shrugged. “Don’t see why not. You’ve saved us the awesomeness of going over this place for who knows how many hours. Take your time. You think it might be… relevant?”
I chuckled. “Can’t tell you what I’m working on, sorry.”
“No, but it looks just thrilling,” she drawled, eyeing my abandoned History of Magistry with barely-concealed loathing.
“Trust me, it’s… juicier than it looks.” I spun around The Science of the Past and opened its smooth, dark leather cover.
The words filling the pages were written in Infernal, both language and alphabet. Interesting.
Ciraya cocked her head, looking into the corner behind me, and muttered: “Rhu ak’r, zi gharar dwa grel zlond okk onnog sa kasagren olg phax.”
‘Hey guys, I don’t think you should be making a mess in here.’
I turned to follow her gaze, and saw that Funnyfingers had been building a fort out of books, standing and stacking them like walls and towers – he hadn’t broken my rules, hadn’t opened them or anything like that, but I’d given him no warnings against constructing castles.
Oldbeard growled in agreement. The withered-looking imp had black whiskers sprouting from his chin that would stretch a good twenty-four inches, outstripping his height from horn-tip to tail-barb by at least half a foot. He was floating near the others with a scowl on his red-skinned face.
“We must put them back!” he snapped at his fellow minion, then dove down, deciding to pull out one of the keystone books.
The pile went tumbling down, the central gate-house collapsing, then the towers on either side. Oldbeard appeared to find this absolutely hilarious; Funnyfingers proceeded to leap on him, and soon the two imps were wrestling through the chaos. Bilgebreath went over to them and started cursing each of them in turn, trying to rile them up further, while Blandface came to float beside me, crossing his arms in disapproval.
“And people say fey are hard to deal with.” I yawned. “Okay, all of you. Put every book back except the ones on the tables – exactly where you found them, please. Then line up quietly and stop moving around until I tell you otherwise.”
“Yes, Master,” chorused the chirping little voices – then they were off, about their task.
I saw that Ronuth, having fallen silent since his weird interruption earlier, was watching them go about my orders with pure jealousy in his gaze. Was it just that I’d summoned them with such ease, that I had no fear of them subverting my control?
“Don’t see arch-sorcery much, Ronuth?” I asked, returning my attention to the book. I flicked to the back, checking the appendixes out of habit.
“Not since Hellbane,” he replied, a little brusquely.
“He was allied to your college?”
“For a time.”
I nodded absently.
Temptations of the Darkness; Ten Rhymes of Time, The; Ten-Spoked Wheel, The…
“Well, how about that,” I marvelled. “Now you’ve got me wondering just what your boss is researching… hmmm…”
I followed the footnotes back, searching for the reference; it was near the end, not far to go…
My eyes scanned the page…
Gods below!
I checked other parts of the book at random, jumping back fifty pages at a time.
“What in the Twelve Hells is this about?” I asked in disbelief, checking the front insert to make sure the book wasn’t in the wrong cover.
“What’s wrong?” Ciraya almost managed to sound concerned as she swivelled and brought her feet down from the arm of the chair. It was like she’d suddenly come awake; her icy eyes glinted in the hood’s shadows as she leaned forwards.
“It’s, well…”
I closed the book, ensuring they couldn’t reopen it to the same page just to be on the safe side, then sat back and drew a breath.
“Feychilde…”
I held up my hand to stop her. “It’s a history of, well, secret societies…”
So, The Ten-Spoked Wheel contains an appendix full of commentaries on prophecies.
“… and the kinds of things they were rumoured to get up to…”
Prophecies deemed likely to impact on Magisterium policy.
“… plenty of material for your Mistress to come up with another interesting ‘lesson’ for you all, I’m sure…”
Commentaries on prophecies about ‘the Ten’.
I fell silent, and Ciraya and Ronuth continued speaking to me, speaking to one another, taking the book from in front of me and spinning it around to study it themselves – but my mind was elsewhere.
‘Yet despite our awareness of the meaning of ten in our iconography, its duality for day and night, light and dark, its representation of the five main disciplines of magery – despite this, there are sceptics. It is often noted that the use of the plural form in most contemporary accounts of the oracle’s words indicates discrete components rather than a singular entity. We find the lines “When rise the Ten” and “Ere the Ten fall”, not “When rises the Ten” and “Ere the Ten falls”. Yet we must take such portentous passages at face value, and consider survival our first duty. This use of ‘Ten’ cannot indicate any other entity than the Magisterium, a fact which is borne out by such other studies…’
The text went on, and I was probably already misremembering the exact wording, but I had the meaning.
This book could only quote so much, but the original, full copy of The Ten-Spoked Wheel likely contained many references to ‘the Ten’. The Science of the Past even straightforwardly discussed the fact that any account from a prophecy regarding ‘the Ten’ was acting like the phrase meant ten individuals. To me, knowing what I knew, it appeared that ‘the Ten’ never referred to the Magisterium after all.
Would that be enough to clue Vardae in?
I almost smiled to myself, realising just what this all entailed… For centuries, perhaps the best part of a millennium, the Magisterium had used the ten-spoked wheel, or the ten-rayed sun or star. It was the magic-guild’s emblem, its almost-holy symbol, all over the world, branded into the face of the plane, stamped into every available soft surface like no sigil had ever been stamped before.
And it was all a lie.
They told themselves they used the symbol because something-something-five-types-of-magic, because something-something-night-and-day… When in reality, they used the symbol in the first place because the whole dropping organisation existed principally to control the Ten. The twins – those already here, and those still to arrive.
If she figures it out, she will be after Orieg and Arxine… I need to know where he left them… Can we let the Magisterium look after two pairs, or is that too much risk?
I had none of the answers. I had to talk to Timesnatcher. And I couldn’t even talk to him about Everseer’s message, not till Killstop had chance to.
I got to my feet suddenly, interrupting Ciraya and Ronuth’s conversation. “Nice seeing you both,” I murmured. “I know it might be hard, but do try to have a happy Yearsend.”
“I’ll be happy come the fifth,” Ronuth said in a grumbling but good-natured tone.
“Party time…” Ciraya drawled.
Ronuth eyed her. “Does everything you say have to sound so sarcastic?”
“Hey, how’d you take the words out of my mouth without enchanting me?” I asked him.
He barked really awkward-sounding laughter, looking a little crazy, and I regretted saying anything.
“Oooo-kay.” I stepped around the table and waved my imps to follow me. “Good luck with the book, and everything.”
“If only this were all I had to do,” Ciraya muttered, again sounding like she was hiding something; then she nodded to me and immediately returned her focus to the tome in front of them.
Ronuth was slightly less cool.
“Oh, bye, Feychilde – you have to go? Where is it you’re going? Secret champion business? I bet it’s interesting? Feychilde?”
Before I got to the top of the stairs and unlocked the door I heard her deliver a solid expletive under her breath, and Ronuth instantly shut up.
Smiling, I stepped out into the hall, dismissed my eldritches, and spread my wings while turning the key in the lock behind me.
Just another hour or two. Then I’ll let myself sleep.
Stifling another yawn, I made my way over to Timesnatcher’s.
A champion’s work was never done.