Gone was the solemn silence that had once hung around the stately tower of gleaming bloodstone and polished olivine basalt. The Crimson Citadel rose high above a grove of shade yew trees that had been carefully pruned until they looked like emerald flames fanned out at the tower’s base.
The tower stood high above the land, and from its pointed crown rose a golden lightning vane fluted like a quill poised to write upon the sky. For decades, it had been a place of muttering and rumination, with no sound louder than the crack of a book’s spine or the flick of a turning page.
Now, there was a great hubbub within the spire. There were shouts of the wizard’s dismay, accompanied by clangs and muffled explosions echoing through the splendid orchards. In the lush shade of those fragrant leaves, the golem tenders bent to their work, oblivious to all but their tasks. Here and there a gout of flame would roar from a narrow window, or an ominous-looking cloud of glittering smoke might seep from another.
Just beneath the crown of the tower was the aviary, a spiraling walkway where the wizard’s falcons once slept. The roosts were vacant now, since the birds were always on the wing. As soon as a falcon returned with a leather pouch bound to its talon, the wizard would dart up the stairs to claim his prize, eyes lit with acquisitive glee.
The birds brought glittering powders and swirling orbs packed in nests of excelsior, thin vials with perilous sigils stamped on their waxen seals, all manner of arcana light enough for a falcon to carry. Some brought only answers, parchment scrawled with cryptic cipher and rolled tightly into slender tubes of brass.
There was no time for the falcons to perch and preen. Charlot always had another mission.
Into the pouch went gold or jewels or a reminder of a favor owed. He wrote his instructions in a hand as stately as any court scribe and sealed the letter with an arcane insignia that commanded more respect than that of some kings. Once his falcon was outfitted for travel, Charlot would offer a few morsels of rabbit or frog and a bit of praise, but never too much for they were haughty birds, all too aware they were exceptional.
Each of Charlot’s falcons knew at least twenty destinations, and they never got lost. Nothing less than a full blown hurricane could delay them. Once the bird had been prepared, Charlot would give the destination command and loose the falcon, then hustle back down the winding stairs to his laboratory.
Before his eyes weakened, Charlot liked to linger in the rookery after he sent a bird away and watch it disappear over the horizon. He would let his mind drift along the path, imagining all the things the falcon would encounter, his musings tinged with envy. For all the wonders he could work, Charlot suspected it all paled before the life of a falcon on the wing.
Charlot’s falcons flew to every corner of the lake, down the twisting Lie to the white minarets of Fang in the south, and over the misty moors of Aran to the floating raft-towns of the gypsies who drifted down the River of Songs. In the far east, the falcons swept through the jagged spires of Yarlsbeth where the scheming Yarlee warlocks were soon abuzz with the news that the Master Arcanist of the Crimson Citadel was back in the laboratory.
What was too heavy for the falcons fell to Charlot’s pair of silver wolves. Among the native gray and brown wolves of the Greater Cymbalwood, they stood apart like officers among footmen: taller, sleeker, and far fiercer. Their blue eyes were bright with an unnatural intelligence, and they strode with an uncommon discipline.
On a mission, they would forsake all but their quest, padding through pastures full of sheep without ever giving chase. Farmers fled at their approach, but the wolves never ran them down. Even their plump, delicious children were spared. Upon their foreheads were the black diamond blazes signaling they were Charlot’s wolves, and though few were old enough to remember the meaning, all kept their distance.
The wolves ran west to far-flung Horth’Wyrth, swimming across the Smoking Channel to return with glowing seerstones. They trekked north to the Malskernoor and returned saddled with leather bags full of rare bones and shimmering black seeds that sucked the warmth from flesh.
They even ran up the ten thousand steps to the forbidden monastery of the Manatramord at the rim of a wide and misty crater called the Abyssimus. Patient as monks, the wolves sat and waited as a black-robed acolyte carried Charlot’s instructions to his master.
The acolyte returned with a thin book of exotic leather that writhed beneath his fingers. With a grimace of revulsion, the monk tucked the tome into the larger wolf’s saddlebag and vanished without a word. The silver wolves ran back down the ten thousand steps without pause, making haste to return to the Crimson Citadel.
The lights that usually burned all night at Charlot’s tower now faded with the sun. Tonight, the sun set, and no moon rose to take its place, for it was the Void’s night. Charlot retired early, exhausted from the day’s exertions. No more insomnia now, no sleepless nights turning pages and waiting for the dawn. He was simply working too hard. It was just over a month since he’d begun his grand project, but it felt like far longer.
When the intruder slipped his newly stolen boat into the river, Charlot was asleep on a cot in his laboratory, smudges of reddish soot smeared across the right side of his face.
Once again, the orbs of peerless proprioception trilled warning of a black canoe gliding across the surface of the Cormorbo River. Charlot tossed on the cot, but he did not stir; he’d spent the day working the crucible, trying to coax three metals to become one.
The warding orbs sang of a flurry of motion as the kraken slid from its lair to strike, and the master arcanist twitched his nose, nearly waking. But just as swiftly as he’d emerged, the beast turned around and retreated to his cave, and Charlot began to snore once again.
The intruder made it to Charlot’s Island intact! He slipped up onto the sandy bank and pulled his boat from the river. The boundary wards that should have boiled the intruder’s eyes were overrun with honeysuckle, and it was too dark to see the runes of abacination. The overgrowth had disrupted the walls of mutilating force, and the intruder could simply step across the line that should have rent body and soul, tearing each to a separate hell. Intact, the trespasser slipped into the living wood.
The wood slumbered with its master. On the night of the Void, the enchanted grove slept, its creepers furled, its wicked branches stiff and still. The spell serpents were coiled up in little glittering spirals, and the lair of the silver wolves stood empty. Had the intruder stumbled over a root or trodden upon a bed of burstcaps, the wood would have awoken and strangled the life from him. But his steps were sure, even by starlight alone. He made it through the sleeping wood without a sound. Now, the wizard twisted and turned on the cot, and his eyes slid open.
No matter how silent the trespasser’s steps, how dark the cloth he wore, this was Charlot’s land, every inch of it molded by his will alone. This close to the tower, he felt the intruder as keenly as a fishbone between his teeth.
At once, he thought to summon his wolves to tear the thief apart, but he sensed they were nearly a hundred leagues away, curled around each other for warmth in the hollow of a red sapwine tree.
He’d sent them far to the north to pick up an ingot of rainbow copper from some drunken Albarian madmen who dared to mine the white wastes. He could call up the spell serpents, but they would be angry if they were woken on the night of the Void and did not feed on magic. The intruder had used none so far.
This was the trouble: Charlot’s defenses were built to defend against magicians, and many of them were dormant during the Void moon. He could not call his golems up to attack, and he could not activate the sentry orbs with their burning rays.
Normally, he would never need to. No magician would attack him on the night of the Void. Too many things changed, and the simplest spells could go wildly out of control if they were cast without regard for the missing moon. Attacking an archmage at the center of his power was suicide.
It left him open to attack by non-magicians. But the intruder couldn’t be a mundane, could he? That was an altogether different kind of suicide. A few words would incinerate any trespasser who strode up to the tower without magical protection, so long as Charlot could see him.
During the day or beneath bright lights, Charlot could still see relatively well. But on a moonless night like tonight, he was almost totally blind.
Was this an assassin? Had the Manatramord deduced he was going blind and sent one of their monks to slay him? Or an agent of the Void herself, come to drag him to the Devourer? A priest of the Void would certainly choose to attack him tonight. But why? Charlot was not part of the Manatramord’s game, nor the Void Star’s. He could not think of any reason why they should try to kill him after so many years of dormancy.
Charlot waited to see what the intruder would do. The windows of the tower were all closed and barred, the main door was an impenetrable bulwark of wards and traps that could baffle an archdemon, and the tunnels beneath the tower were deathtraps, their entrances well concealed and secured.
This intruder could do nothing to him, so long as he stayed within the tower.
Still, the urge to do something was strong. He could call down a storm of meteorites to shatter the yew grove and set everything around the tower ablaze, but this was too grandiose, too destructive. Perhaps he could summon a rift fiend.
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The eyeless mass of teeth and claws that would hunt the intruder down by the scent of his fear, crack his skull open like an egg, and feast on his brains. But rift fiends were so slippery; they gained power from the brains they consumed. If the intruder was a magician, the fiend might become a more powerful foe than the original threat!
Charlot did not like to be so passive. Fifty years ago, he would not have been hiding up here in his tower! He would have gone down there, wreathed in wrath and fury and laid waste to all who opposed him, whether they be one or a hundred.
“Fifty years ago, you would have been able to see the ones you faced,” Charlot murmured, grimacing at the bitter thought.
For want of a better idea, Charlot waited. At last, the intruder stood before the grand door to the citadel and froze in place. This was not uncommon, the door was two solid slabs of bronze seventeen feet tall, and every inch of them was covered with an intricate relief.
There were fantastic beasts, exotic plants, swirling clouds, distant peaks–all of it worked so delicately one could scarcely believe it had been done in metal. The longer one looked, the more one could see, the more the beauty of the scene tore at the soul.
The deep shadows of the stately bronze deepened into pure blacks, the highlights glittered like gold, and the world depicted on the doors loomed larger and larger until it was impossible to look away. The door was the last thing many intruders had ever seen, for as they yearned to stride across those sumptuous metal hills and swim in the smooth rivers of bronze, they failed to notice the potent sigils concealed within the fantastic landscape until it was far too late.
But it was too dark tonight to be seduced by the tower door. The intruder was merely summoning his courage and, at last, he found it and dared to rap on the brass knocker.
At once, Charlot felt the door’s call, ringing between his ears like struck crystal goblet. The enchantment could reach him nearly anywhere upon the Arc, even on the night of the void. It had taken him nearly a year to perfect the design. It had been many years since, but still he felt a slight swelling of pride when the call rang out.
Charlot decided to answer the door. He climbed out of bed, and sat cross-legged on the fine Ibexian rug, ignoring a thousand aches that cried out for his attention. He uttered the words of answering, taking care to account for the missing moon as he began the incantation.
Suddenly, all was cold and rigid and the world was a flat and empty plane, he had no substance. The spell took hold, and a warm, searing feeling spread through him as the brass plate of the door knocker grew red hot and became fluid. The metal expanded outward and the dimension returned to the world as the metal flowed into a likeness of his face, wrought in molten brass. The brass eyes flicked open to behold the trespasser, who flinched in surprise.
The door saw the world in shimmering outlines of magical force and blobs of rippling heat. A devil in disguise would be found out at once, and a rival magician would appear as a great overstuffed sausage of force, wound around and around with protective wards.
This was just a boy. Not a single thing about him was magical. He might have been keeping a brave face, but the door’s mage-sight could see his knees shaking through his ragged trousers.
“FOOL! WHY DO YOU DISTURB ME?” Charlot thundered through the knocker’s metal mouth. He was rewarded when the youth jumped a foot high. Charlot wanted to laugh aloud but stifled it. He would have to terrify this boy completely if he wanted to be able to let him leave the island alive.
Already, the archmage was wondering if he ought to take one of the boy’s hands or one of his eyes to impress upon others how foolish it was to come to the Crimson Citadel.
The boy hesitated, too frightened to speak. Charlot wondered if it would be crueler to take one of his hands, or to curse him with a pair of horns. Perhaps the word “FOOL” branded across his brow? At the back of his mind, the dark voice whispered he ought to simply kill the boy. It had to be some kind of trap. No one could be this stupid.
“I want to learn magic!” the boy blurted.
Charlot suppressed a groan. The boy was precisely this stupid. The arcane knocker did not have a hand for Charlot to bury his forehead in, nor could it shake its head. The boy spoke, and Charlot had to pause for some time to place the exact dialect. Eastern Terhaljatani. He must be practically from the border of the Martyrwood. A journey of thousands of leagues.
“I do not take apprentices. Leave and never return,” Charlot rumbled, his Terhaljatani rusty. He had not used it in a long, long time.
“Please! I came so far! I nearly died trying to get here,” the boy protested.
He certainly had. Any other night, the boy would have died a dozen times over before he ever set eyes on the door. Charlot still could not understand why the squid hadn’t eaten him as he crossed the Cormorbo. Tomorrow, the kraken would answer for this!
“BEGONE!” the door thundered.
“Kill me, then! There’s nothing else for me!” the boy wailed as he fell to his knees.
Charlot drew a deep breath, preparing to do just that. He had only to breathe out and the brass face would expel a torrent of white flame that would burn the boy to cinders. But he held the burning breath, feeling strangely uncertain. Certainly, it was wisest to end this threat, but the desire to do so was not there. At last the pressure was too much, and Charlot sighed, the flames licked harmlessly up the brass face instead of in a killing gout. He was going soft as well as blind.
“I can get you things! Anything you want. I’m a master procurer! I’ll do whatever you say!” The boy held up his hands with his palms clasped together.
Charlot snorted, and flames shot out of the door’s nose. The boy yelped and somersaulted backward. Master procurer, indeed. The intruder was a common thief. But he had aroused Charlot’s curiosity. Once more accounting for the missing moon, and now for the metal mouth, Charlot spoke the words of command, and the three orbs hanging over the door lit up with a brilliant diamond light.
Now was the trickiest part of the whole operation, taking care to speak with his own tongue and not the metal one, and never forgetting that the moon was gone. Charlot whispered another cantrip. The molten eyes of the door knocker slid shut, and then Charlot’s own ancient eyes looked out of the metal mask, squinting despite the burning lights overhead.
“Come closer, boy!” Charlot demanded, for even beneath magical lights the boy was but a dim shadow. It was a risk. If the boy leapt forward with a blade, he could take one of Charlot’s real eyes. Of course, he would die for it, but that would be little comfort to Charlot. Yet always, his curiosity was stronger than his fear.
The boy was skinny and clad in rags, and he looked half-starved. He had a wild mop of tangled black hair with a pure white blaze straight up the center. His eyes were wide set. One was a deep green flecked with hazel, the other an icy blue. Heterochromia! What an odd-looking youth! Charlot was surprised the boy hadn’t been burned as a witch.
“What languages can you read and write?”
“Ah…uhm…” the boy blithered. “I speak Terhali and Old Jata, and I’m learning Aranic.”
“You want to be a magician and you can’t even read? How old are you?”
“I’m twelve, sir!”
“Too old. Begone!”
“Please! I beg you!”
The boy was an uneducated rube, and a thief. He would be far more trouble than he was worth. Still, he had gotten this far, and Charlot didn’t want to kill him if he didn’t have to. The boy’s desperation seemed genuine.
He could remember how it felt to want to learn magic more than anything else in the world. Gods, some of the charlatans he’d had to deal with before he found a true master to teach him. The brass face grinned. Charlot had an idea of how to get rid of him.
“Boy! In Urth’Wyrth, five hundred leagues west, there is a temple called the Chak’Ur-Murrek, the Hall of Forever. The priests there have a red diamond they call the Forever Flame. They use it to start their ceremonial fires. A hundred priests and a hundred legionnaires guard the gem,” the brass face rumbled, shining in a molten grin.
“Steal it!” Charlot commanded.
“Right away, Master!” the boy cried, and he was already turning to go. Charlot’s metal eyelids blinked with a pinging sound. He hadn’t expected the boy to agree so readily.
“Wait! There is more. When you have the Forever Flame, bring it to a bookseller in the Infidel’s Quarter. Adon the Sage. Anyone in Urth’Wyrth can tell you how to find his shop. Within his vault, there is a book I have wanted for a very long time. He will take the Forever Flame in trade for it. Tell him nothing of yourself or where you came from. If he suspects you are my agent, he will not deal. The book is Ayodominadeu by Vil the Vacant. Repeat the name three times.”
“Ayodominadeu, Ayodominadeu, Ayodominadeu,” the boy uttered solemnly.
“Exactly like that. However, never let any other wizard trick you into saying something three times. Generally, it’s a trap. Speaking of traps, do not look inside of any other book within Adon’s store. Do not agree to give him anything but the diamond. Do not agree to undertake a task for him under any circumstances. Do not steal anything else from his store, it all bears his mark. Just make the trade and go.”
“Can’t I just steal the book?”
“No, you cannot! A hundred priests and legionnaires will likely kill you. Adon will certainly kill you. Furthermore, his vault is impenetrable,” Charlot’s voice was heavy with bitter experience.
“I will get the book, Master!” the boy promised. Charlot felt certain his warning about Adon would go unheeded. No matter, the point was to get rid of the youth.
“If you succeed, bring the book to the far side of this river and build a great bonfire. I will appear to you there. Do not cross to this island again on your own, or you will certainly die.”
“Then you’ll teach me magic? You’ll make me your apprentice?”
“Yes,” Charlot agreed. Surely there was no danger he would ever have to make good on it. He might as well have asked the boy to fly to the moon on the night of the Void. It couldn’t be done. “And learn to read and write at least Aranic and Yarlee before you return. I don’t have time to have to teach you everything.”
“Thank you, Master!” The boy turned around and fled before Charlot could reconsider sending him to his doom. He hoped the fool would realize it was a suicide mission and make something else of his life. Charlot realized he hadn’t even asked the boy his name.
Charlot released the door’s spell and was back in his room, in absolute darkness. He patted his face with his hands, reassuring himself that he was made of flesh again. He drew a breath and waited. He’d used quite a bit of difficult magic on a moonless night. He was afraid it might trigger a headache, but there were none of the warning signs.
Indeed, he felt better than he had in some time. The matter of the intruder weighed on him no longer. How fortunate to resolve it without immediate bloodshed! Slowly, he climbed back into bed, in a great chorus of creaking knees and popping joints.
“Steal the Forever Flame, hah!” Charlot said to the darkness. Then, he resolved to check his wards in the morning.