29th Orovost, 998 NE
Liebor chuckled. “It was all good. Vardae sent us, so the champions never even knew we were there with our invisibility potions. I completely saved Shallowlie’s ass.”
He was sitting on Aramas and Cull’s table, swinging his lanky legs – he was probably in his early twenties, while his sister, only slightly shorter than him, was probably five years his elder. Sibling archmages were a true rarity.
Ibaran didn’t look too pleased at her brother’s words; she was leaning back against the desk beside him, and she turned and glowered at him. The two of them were like night and day.
“What? It’s not like I like her.” Liebor rolled his eyes at her. “If I’d let her die, Roseoak woulda been worse.”
“And now Mal Tagar will have another soul to devour upon his return,” she said bitterly.
“Nah – Vardae said they would’ve got more than just Smouldervein, ya know? Anyway, I’ll kill her, someday.” Liebor waved a hand disdainfully. “Hey, Ari, look what I managed to find.”
Aramas sat forwards on his bedding, and Cull, on his own pallet, almost imperceptibly shrank back. They pair of them had been in enchantment-class, but the adept in charge let them both go early when Aramas told her the arch-sorcerers were visiting again on Ithilya’s orders. As much as Cull protested that he enjoyed these little get-togethers, Aramas could tell his friend was more frightened by demons than he was.
Liebor gestured. A ring of blood-red fire birthed a clot of darkness, vaguely bird-shaped. A crimson cloud in perfect miniature detail formed behind it as it hovered in the air before its master.
“Folkababil?” Aramas asked, confused.
Folkababil, the blood-birds, were one of the few types of demons Fin had seemed interested in.
“Oh no!” Liebor chortled. “Far more potent than those little scavengers. This is a pedheliorph. Rare as all hell.” He grinned happily. “If you didn’t like me, you wouldn’t even be able to look at me while this was out. It’s even more-discerning than a shield – you’d see little bits of lightning in the cloud behind it, and then you’d start drooling, watching it like a glyphstone.”
Ibaran was staring at the pedheliorph in fascination. Liebor glanced at his sister worriedly – the moment he noticed her, she clapped him around the back of the head.
“Ow!”
“More discerning, and less,” she corrected him. “It doesn’t sense ill-will, it senses general attitude. It won’t stop someone who loves you from attacking you.”
“Aw, you love me…”
“I love you so much, if you keep this up, the day you die I’ll bring your corpse back to do my laundry – eternally. We are supposed to be adepts, Liebor. Behave appropriately in front of the neophytes.”
Liebor sighed, dismissing the pedheliorph. “Where were we at?” he said grudgingly.
Ibaran straightened up. “Look, Aramas, the truth of it is that the average archmage cannot perform their role to their utmost, cannot perceive all the uses to which their abilities might be put. If you pay attention to the wrong people, the wrong principles, you’ll go astray, because that’s what they did – they paid attention to the wrong people. But, if you utilise your own scrutiny, perform your own investigations into the extent of your power, you will within days already exceed the abilities of those who learned their craft by rote over years. Pay no heed to ancient texts, or even us, when we contradict what you yourself discover. You’ll often sense that a sorcerer knows less than you,” she looked at her brother archly, “and you must be ready to dispense with their advice the moment it reaches your ears. But if you sense that a sorcerer knows something you do not, then treat them with respect… at least until you’ve drained them of their lore.”
Liebor was nodding, accepting her jest without response. “And lore isn’t always true,” he said. “I mean, the truth gets repeated, distorted, over time. Popular opinion is a load of bunk, nine times out of ten. A book can’t make you a good arch-sorcerer, especially one that tells you it can.”
“What we are saying,” Ibaran cut in, “is that only putting theory into practice yields self-transformation. You must experience sorcery in order for you to improve at it.”
“Yeah, but a load of good that’s gonna do him for now.” Liebor put his feet down and stumbled as he turned to face his sister –
His foot crunched on something.
Looking down, Aramas saw Wendy beneath the desk, beneath the archmage’s boot.
Wendy didn’t react as a full quarter of her body was snapped, crumbled – just sat there.
Dead.
It was seeing it – seeing her –
He heard of the huge spider-legs that the Magisterium had been forced to destroy after Fin’s attack on Firenight Square. The ones bigger than any of the others.
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The ones that had been hers. Before Feychilde mutilated her.
Now he saw it replayed in miniature before him, the broken form of the giant spider, serene in its acceptance of its end.
She is gone.
The tension that had boiled within him since that day after the meeting in the Hall of Embrace, when the crowd had torn them apart and he’d waited, waited for her – and Wendy, Wendy had waited too – all of that tension was released in a flood, a wave of steam venting through his flesh, coursing through his face and his eyes and his hands and every pore of his skin –
“Ah, man, I’m sorry…” Liebor started to apologise.
Wendy, five-legged and missing a large portion of her meat, scuttled over towards Aramas.
“Ari!” Cull shrieked, half-terror, half-shock, half-elation.
Aramas looked blankly from the reanimated, undead giant spider up to the pair of arch-sorcerers looming behind her. “But – what –“
I – I did it?
“This is an unfortunate turn of events,” Ibaran commented, folding her thin arms across her flat chest. “Unless I am much mistaken – which, if you have been listening, is entirely possible – this will make it surpassingly-difficult to properly train your perceptions now.”
“Aw, you’re done for mate!” Liebor chuckled again.
Ari looked blankly between them.
Did I just screw up?
“There is a spectrum of life, of course,” Ibaran said smoothly, “and you, my young friend, have just identified with the animals. Your affinity will serve you in good stead when animating them or working their spirits. It ought not inhibit your ability to raise other entities from the dead, of course, even sense them – but your ability to refine these senses, hone them? I am unsure now.”
“You – you mean, you two couldn’t sense she was dead?” Cull piped up.
The siblings exchanged a glance, then both shook their heads.
Aramas sighed. He’d expected it to go differently to this. More of a fanfare. Less of a let-down.
I’m an arch-sorcerer.
He reached out a hand to Wendy and she contritely came towards him, flopping all over the place.
“Let’s get you fixed, girl,” he murmured.
“What was that?” Cull asked in an awed voice.
“What?” Aramas returned, frowning in confusion.
“What you just –“
“He speaks the Netheric tongue,” Ibaran explained. “It will come naturally to him, and he won’t understand the difference at first.”
“You mean, I just…”
“You’re one of us now,” Liebor said in a tone of congratulation. “Welcome to the club, eh?”
“Welcome to being part of the problem,” Ibaran muttered.
“Well… well done, Ari,” Cull said haltingly.
Aramas looked from the undead arachnid to his best friend’s face.
He’s jealous, he realised.
“We’re gonna do it together,” he promised Cull, “like always.”
Cull nodded sombrely, then put a small smile on his lips after a moment’s struggle.
“I can help show you how to put her back together, if you like.” Liebor’s smile was genuine. “We might need to find some more giant spider parts, though…”
Aramas nodded to him and looked back to Wendy. “And then, Ithilya willing, we’ll go get your mummy’s ghost.”
“Oh dear gods no.” Ibaran sounded offended all of a sudden.
“What?” he demanded, staring up at her. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Well, her soul must pass on – surely, you understand this, neophyte? To reanimate a corpse is one thing, but to capture the true essence, the intelligence… That is blasphemy. Something best saved for your enemies, certainly.”
“He’s not even at that stage, yet, sis,” Liebor said in a conciliatory manner.
“I don’t get…” Aramas hadn’t really been thinking it through properly. “You mean she… I could stop her going to Celestium –“
“Whither the soul is bound is not for those in the Mist to tell,” Ibaran cut him off. “Tome of Understanding, chapter one, verse one-oh-one.”
“Oooh-ooh, yes.” Liebor adopted a mockingly-serious expression and a faux-highborn accent as he quoted: “’In the land of the blind… the one-eyed man… is the king’s fool!’”
“You’ve been reading the compilation again.” Ibaran chided him. “That’s actually from Brother To Nothingness…”
Aramas ignored them as they continued their verbal sparring-match, deep in thought. If it meant he’d be stopping her from moving on, he wouldn’t be able do it – he knew that much. With a sad smile on his face, he put Fintwyna’s ghost firmly from his mind.
Suddenly the door banged open, making everyone jump, and Vardae was there, her arms held casually at her sides. Ithilya was behind her.
Aramas sensed rather than heard as Cull backed away some more towards the corner of his bed.
“See, Vardae?” Ithilya asked.
“I told you, I saw it already,” the seeress replied, scowling somewhat. “So, you’re one of us now, boy.”
“I was just saying that,” Liebor cut in.
She turned the scowl on him, and the adept-sorcerer sealed his lips, his smile fading.
“It’s good timing,” Vardae continued, eyes moving back to Aramas’s face. “I’ve just found out exactly when you’ll get to go up against your bitter enemies. Feychilde, Winterprince… There’ll be opportunity for you to get some live action, some real training beforehand – I assume you’re up for it.”
It wasn’t a question. It didn’t need to be. She was a diviner, one of the highest calibre. She already knew the answer.
He stood up, and clenched his fists. He blinked as glowing blue lines started forming in the air around his hands.
His eyes met Vardae’s again, and the pallet he was standing on gave him a couple more inches in height. Ranks be damned – this time when he spoke, for the first time he felt he spoke almost as her equal.
“When?”
Her thin lips were pulled down, an expression which on any other face would be one of displeasure, distaste; but this was her smirk, he knew.
“A month today. It’ll be an intense spot of combat. We’re going in force.”
“Consider us volunteers,” Ibaran said quietly. Her brother was nodding alongside her.
“I too will put myself forward to attend,” Ithilya said. “It has been almost a year since I last engaged with enemies worth fighting, and Mountainslide mistook Oferine for me when they duelled. If, as you say, we must go in force, I should show them my true capabilities. Mountainslide shall not make the same mistake again.”
The smirk on Vardae’s face only deepened in its intensity, the demented leer becoming terrible to behold. She turned to her fellow master.
“Well, well. You’d truly join them?”
Ithilya just smiled distantly in response.
“In that case, who knows?” Vardae spread her hands. “I may even join you myself – see a few old faces.”
“What…” Cull’s voice was raised timidly from the corner of the room in which he was still huddled, the only one of them in the room that was not standing now. “What about me?”
“We always need some neophytes,” the seeress said contemptuously, not even looking at him.
But Aramas stepped off his mattress, then sat down beside his friend; he turned to look up at the four archmages in the room.
‘Other’ four, his mind corrected him gloatingly.
“No,” he said. “Me and Cull – we go together.”