23rd Orovost, 998 NE
He looked down, and felt the hardness of his own gaze, watching them mill about down there.
The Thirteen Candles. It was not what it seemed. He sometimes caught himself wondering whether he’d just missed something everyone else had known, or whether it was true that genuinely nobody knew the place was primarily a school.
And what a school! What a place. Sometimes he just had to stop what he was doing and be amazed at the fact he was here.
From outside it looked quite straightforward. Thirteen flame-topped towers making a scabrous tree-shape, teetering in the midst of a desolate zone – an emptiness within the boundaries of which nothing dared trespass, human or animal. To tend the courtyard surrounding the Tower of Mourning was to court death at the hands of Illodin’s priesthood, whose mandate it was to preserve that place in its wasteland state. Entering the desolation about the Thirteen Candles would get you killed, but not for any such sanctimonious reason. Nothing to do with the gods. No, going near the Thirteen Candles would just kill you, flat out dead. And unless you’d been endowed with the correct selection of spells, you wouldn’t be aware of the safe distance. Everyone went, as far as Aramas could judge it from his window, at least five times farther around the Candles than they had to. He could see them down there, the people like ants, milling around on the lime-green grass beyond the scorched earth, the lush hill-ring that marked the definitely-safe zone.
Milling around, trading, cavorting… pickpocketing…
Waiting to be devoured.
He could see them, but he couldn’t pity them. Not from way up here. Not with what he now knew.
Inside? It was a mess of ideas. Thirteen worms climbing up and over and around each other. The warren of a deranged rabbit-god. Cull said he heard off one of the journeymen that the planning of the Candles had been turned over to an imp who misunderstood his instructions, and modelled the structure of the place on the imprint of an architect’s decomposing brain. Neither of the boys were capable of being sure it was a joke. Not having seen the place, lived in it.
Their door opened onto a short set of steps, rather than a level passageway, even though there would’ve been no need for it if you’d moved the door two feet across. No fewer than three separate stairwell-corridors – tunnels, really – led to the floor on which their small twin-cot room could be found. Yet as far as Aramas was able to tell none of those tunnels would meet again on their winding journey zigzagging up and down the Candles’ interiors. Other sections of his floor, areas that should’ve been just around the corner from his door, were separated off behind walls and by spells so that you’d have to use entirely different sets of staircases. In at least one spot the corridor was so dark it stopped the breath in the throat, stopped the heart beating, and even archmages wouldn’t pass that way without an arch-sorcerer in their group. He thought of it as ‘at least one spot’ because the same corridor seemed to appear in different locations, even in different towers… In the end it was impossible to tell for certain: the tunnels were all almost identical in their disorder of stone and wood and unfinished paint, and none of them had windows, all lit by a hodgepodge of light sources both ordinary and spellbound.
He supposed he’d get used to the place eventually.
He did want to go home. It was against the rules: only journeymen and above were permitted to actually leave the Candles, and, even then, leaving without a master’s permission could get a journeyman executed. Even if he were to risk it, to see his family, tell them the truth of things, explain his absence, explain everything – that would achieve nothing other than to put them in terrible danger, Ithilya had said. Leaving on his own whim, not that of an arch-diviner, would only put everyone he’d ever known in the sights of the champions. Anyone who spoke up in his defence could be executed along with him, apparently. And he believed her – he’d seen magisters in action a couple of times, and they were worse than the watch. She said that just the merest whiff of Heresy on you meant your head would be flying off across the room quicker than you could get on your knees.
All because of the true joke.
‘Dragons are going to rise up and eat everyone.’
It was such a simple thing, to say it. You could say it and no one would even recognise it as Heresy! It would just be another one of the madcap theories that went around: ‘Mund’s going to drown in a tidal wave!’ ‘Mund’s going to be swallowed into the Twelve Hells!’ ‘Mund’s going to get devoured by mega-dragons!’… People would roll their eyes, maybe snigger at your expense, and that would be that.
Make someone believe you? Like, actually believe? Welcome to the shadowland, hope you had a happy life…
He heard footsteps, then a knock on the door.
“Ari?” Fin called through.
He spun away from the window and drew the curtain, blocking ninety percent of the light. “Come in!”
Instinctively, pointlessly, he tried to smooth down his rumpled old neophyte’s robe as the door swung inwards on its hinges.
More than the mystery of this place, more than the fear of the constant danger in here or the vigilant champions out there, Fintwyna was what made him want to stay.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
Short. Weird. Cute as a button. And she liked him. He hoped she wouldn’t freak out too badly when he let her know what Ithilya had told him yesterday. Fintwyna was a member of Hirazain’s faction, allied to Ithilya’s; they were permitted to enter each other’s domains without being attacked, and they’d attend classes together once he got his act together. It would get awkward quickly if she decided she hated him after all.
“Where’s Cull at?” she asked, glancing around at the cluttered table and empty pallet-beds as she stepped into the room.
“I – ah – I think he’s in the Night Garden?”
The nightmarish botanical chamber contained a number of extremely vicious and extremely fragile species, apparently, and it was kept in absolute darkness except for those brief times when the experts would allow a little spell-light into the place. The neophytes had to pick up a pair of goggles from the basket when they entered, glasses that would allow them to see what they were doing. The druidry lessons were hard and often more than a bit disgusting; Aramas didn’t envy Cull this week’s class-rota, which took his friend up to the Garden four days in a row.
He wouldn’t mention the fact he thought they were disgusting around Fin, though.
“Night Garden… cool,” she said evenly. “So, what’re you up to?”
“I was…” Staring out the window, daydreaming. “I was reading –“ He seized on the heavy tome sitting half-open on the desk, placed his hand on it for reassurance. He could only understand one in five of the paragraphs, really, and decided to say something honest. “Wizardry’s really hard, isn’t it?”
“It is when you’re reading in the dark,” she said, eyeing the hastily-drawn curtain.
“Oh, I’ve got good eyes – er – might even give the goggles a miss, next time I’m in –“
“You were looking at them down there?” Fin moved to the window, reached out her hand to twitch the curtains open an inch, then let them swing shut again.
“… Yeah,” Aramas gulped. “Thinkin’, you know. They’re like… like ants.”
“No they’re not,” she answered at once. “Ants – do you know much of them?”
He stared at her, shook his head blankly.
“Ants are far superior to humans. They live as one, a society where everyone knows their place, does their best. If they invade another queendom,” she caught his questioning expression and smiled, “yes, they live under the rule of their queens… If they sack another colony, they take the eggs of the defeated in tribute and raise them as their own. Don’t look at me like that – they do! And did you know,” she lowered her voice, “they don’t have ears? They feel everything around them, their touch…” Fin raised her hand, twitched her fingers, and when she continued it was with a heavy breathiness, a tone of wonder: “Their touch tells them everything they need to know…”
He looked at her hand, noticed the mud under her closely-chewed nails, but before he could bring himself to speak, before he could find words worth saying, she withdrew the hand and looked away, huffing. He moved his gaze back to find hers, the dark eyes swimming in the centre of her round, olive-skinned face, but she was distracted already.
“Nothing on my spiders, though,” she murmured, spreading her hand on the page near his, peering at the lettering.
“You, uh, any good at this stuff?” he croaked, finally managing to speak. He tapped the page, its arcane, cursive script unreadable from his angle. “I don’t have any idea how the Principle of Efficacious Drawing is supposed to, what’s it called? interact – I don’t know how it’s supposed to interact with the Third Law of… of…”
“Harmonic Ideals?”
“Locus, is that how you say it?”
“Well, how were you pronouncing it?”
“Harmonique iddeals?”
He loved making her laugh. She sort of snorted, her mouth making a weird ‘v’-shape, and every time she made the face and accompanying sound he subconsciously ticked off another little win on his score-card.
Tick.
She even placed her hand on his arm. “Oh, Ari. You’ve got a long way to go. This is just the Initiate’s Handbook… The Third Law simply states that unequal reactions will result in catastrophe of… Don’t!” She stammered, almost laughing as he raised his eyebrow. “Don’t! I remember this… A catastrophe of a severity proportional to the original inequality. If you don’t use the Principle in your spell-construct you’ll draw too great a quantity of energy, and when your spell expends you’ll blow yourself up.” She noticed his eyes widen and smirked. “Oh yes – and, just so you know, it’s efficacious, not effy-cacky-ous.”
“What? I’ve only seen mosta these words written down before…” And even that is something of an exaggeration, isn’t it, Ari? “Anyway, I won’t need it soon, like you. Not all of us were born with the brains, Fin – but, the blood? I got that too.”
“Everyone’s got it,” she said, frowning.
“You know what I mean…”
She nodded by blinking.
Part of him thought it was only because she knew he was going to be like her one day, an archmage, that she was hanging around with him. Gods knew, there were few enough of them in the Candles in comparison to the mages – but there were still perhaps half a dozen their age she could’ve hung around with instead of him. Proper archmages, their power already manifested, adherents of other factions in the alliance. The fact she kept coming here; that had to mean she liked him, didn’t it?
“Ithilya found out what kind I’m gonna be, too,” he said, knowing this information was new to her – and he saw her eyes light up.
“Let me guess – not a druid, or you’d have told me already… Not a diviner, obviously…” She moved her lower lip to the left and chewed on it. “You’re studying wizardry, but that’s just because of the test…?” She regarded him for a moment longer then relented, clapping her hands in frustration. “Never mind – tell me!”
“Are you sure you want to know?”
“Ari! Oh…”
Seeing that she was in the process of realising, he blurted it out: “Sorcerer.”
He winced in anticipation. She had to find out sooner or later, right?
“Okay,” she said, “okay…” Then she fixed her smile. “It’s okay, really!”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course, you dunce.”
“You aren’t going to let Wendy in here when I’m asleep, are you?”
“Don’t give me ideas, sorcerer.” She was still smiling good-naturedly, and he started to relax, until –
“You really wouldn’t, would you, Fin?” He’d already had one very vivid nightmare about Wendy, her favourite tarantula, which she kept the size of your average dog most of the time. She’d actually brought it to visit him once, said it liked him…
“Of course not, Ari!”
She grinned wickedly, then turned as though to leave; he went to chase her towards the door –
But she was only withdrawing to tease him. She kept facing him. Her lips glistened.
What might’ve happened as they entered the narrow space, confined between the shelving either side of the doorway, he never got to find out. The door swung in, narrowly missing Fin as she backed up, and Cull entered, his eyes wide, chest rising and falling rapidly. He’d run here.
“Guys! Have you heard?”
Aramas shook his head.
“What is it, neophyte?” the arch-druid asked.
“Meeting!” he blurted. “The Hall of Embrace… I think we’re doing somethin’!”
Aramas watched as Fin’s grin tensed into a grim smile.
“About time.”
* * *