Of Limited Loyalty: The Second Book of the Crown Colonies Page 12

  Which made no sense. Prince Vlad sighed. It made no sense unless an entrenched group of magickers within the Church of Norisle had conspired with King Robert in creating his version of the Good Book. It seemed so monstrous and yet elegant a plan that Vlad did not know whether to be horrified or pleased with the work done by his ancestor. It appeared that the Church might have turned the Good Book into a grimoire. This put the key to magickal power into the hands of everyone, since the book had been printed and widely distributed. As primitive as Mystria was, Vlad doubted there was a village where at least one copy of the Good Book couldn’t be found, and many were the families who cherished their own heirloom copies.

  He rubbed his eyes. How often had he seen the sign in the cathedral, where Bishop Bumble had posted a list of Scriptures to be read and contemplated during the week? His sermons were liberally sprinkled with Scriptural references—some of which made no sense to Vlad, and now he understood why. The printed version of those same sermons often included footnotes that referenced yet other passages.

  Anyone who knew the key to deciphering the verses could learn new magicks. The Church had, in essence, adopted the same sort of book-based code that the Prince shared with his father and with Owen, but in this case the key was also the message. And since books and verses were independent of page counts, any Good Book, big or small, in multiple volumes, would serve, provided it faithfully reproduced the King Robert Version text.

  It seemed clear from Fire’s writing that he felt his discovery of these spells within Scripture were confirmation of God’s hand in their original transcription and in the KRV translation. Prince Vlad had no difficulty seeing the Church having a different reaction—primarily one of panic to learn that a madman had somehow cracked their code. This meant that anyone who learned it could use their grimoire, even Tharyngians. And some Church officials must have seen the even greater ramifications of Fire’s work. He’d discovered the key by looking at nature, which meant anyone could rediscover the key.

  Vlad shivered. The implications of all that were beyond his ability to fully comprehend. He wondered, however, if basic magick principles worked in ways he’d not considered before. The Law of Sympathy, for example, or the Law of Contagion. Could the Church use a person of a certain bloodline to control others in that bloodline? The Church encouraged—and often selected—members of noble families to enter its ranks. Vlad had seen that as a measure the nobility had taken to guarantee that the Church would not betray political leaders, but what if it was reversed? What if his father, for example, was a means through which King Richard could be controlled? And not just because he might be a hostage, but through some sorcerous influence that Prince John might not even understand. What if my father’s prayers for his brother constituted a formula through which the King was magically controlled?

  Though that thought disturbed Vlad the most—primarily for its implication for his children—he set it aside for the consideration of a greater issue. He went back to Fire’s texts. Fire had used his observations of the natural world as confirmation of patterns in Scripture. Prince Vlad reversed that. He found a formulation that most closely approximated the words used to teach him to shoot a musket. He copied out the lines and included the numbers. The jumble of verses read, “The sun stood still and lit the way, shadows growing small.”

  He compared the words and data to plants, animals, and anything else he could think to use. Correlation escaped him at first, then he closed his eyes and composed a mental picture of what the words suggested. The sun was standing still, so he visualized it at its zenith. That would naturally make shadows small, but not completely invisible. Depending upon how far north one was from the equator, the angle of the shadow to the base of a rod would vary. It struck Vlad that while the image mirrored the noonday sun, it did so without invoking the sun directly. He suspected it did so because the image created would trigger magick sufficient for lighting brimstone and because, somewhere lost in the annals of time, a sorcerer invoking the power unleashed by the sun’s direct image had accessed incredible power or caused a disaster, or perhaps both.

  So the image we are trained to focus upon limits us. Prince Vlad frowned. The reason a musket spat fire when shot was because not all of the brimstone used in the charge was consumed before the ball left the muzzle. More powerful magicks might consume the brimstone completely, creating more pressure. That might burst a gun barrel, but were the breech strong enough, the greater propulsion would make a bullet go further and faster.

  The reverse engineering of the spell cracked the door on an area of study that was at the root of all magick. The Tharyngians, when they overthrew the King and Church during their revolution, had begun to use scientific methods of measurement and observation to study and quantify the basic principles of magick. Had they had Fire’s notes, they might well have understood everything and be so far beyond any other nation in the ability to control magick that they would be unstoppable. There was no doubt that the infinite power granted through magick could so thoroughly corrupt one that he might attempt to take over the world—and make him believe he might be successful in that attempt.

  The Tharyngians’ study had uncovered several things. Guy du Malphias had been able to reanimate the dead. Owen’s reportage about what Prince Vlad took to be a control center suggested the Laureate could control his pasmortes at range. Owen had also seen du Malphias move objects with magick. This meant that either the dictum that magick only worked by touch was wrong or that du Malphias had managed to redefine touch. The idea that magicians were taught that magick only worked at touch certainly limited their ability to use it, but exactly how one could redefine touch escaped the Prince.

  And then he heard Mugwump give his usual trumpeted bellow to welcome the wurmwright and dinner. In his laboratory, the sound came muted because it had to travel through the wall. Outside it would be crisp and clear and in the wurmrest it would be deafening. Then he remembered the times he’d ridden Mugwump while the dragon dove for fish in the river, and how the bellow had sounded different in water. Then it struck him.

  Magick did only work by touch. The key was in defining the medium through which it moved. Just as water and the wall changed the nature of the sound so, too, might magick be changed by communication through another medium. Depending upon range and air pressure one might have to adjust a spell, just as one would have to speak louder to be heard over a storm. The cost paid for invoking such a spell might well be greater, too, so that limiting spells used at range would be a way to guarantee that magicians did not exhaust or kill themselves.

  And using little devices, as du Malphias did for controlling his pasmortes, that used the laws of magick might make invoking those spells easier. If like spoke to like through channels that didn’t involve air or, somehow, the intervening space, then magick might become even easier at range. Two halves of the same stone, no matter how far apart, might react within magick as if they were still part of a whole.

  Vlad closed his eyes. Tangents and angles, symbols and their duplications, and the implications of all that spread through his mind. He could see the spells he knew lining up in a new order. If the spell to shoot a gun was near the top of the sun spells, then the spell to light a candle would be much lower. And, not surprisingly, he’d always visualized that spell as the sun dawning. The spell to extinguish such a flame he saw as the sun setting.

  He saw what Ezekiel Fire had seen, though he doubted Fire had completely understood what he discovered. Prince Vlad could peel the limitations that clothed magick and take it back to its most raw and powerful form. He could provide greater access more simply for more people, which would make their lives infinitely easier.

  And give everyone the chance to be corrupted by that power. In a heartbeat he understood why the Church had done what it did. In the next he feared what their knowledge would allow them to do. They had distributed grimoires so their selected agents would have access to advanced magicks as needed. Until Vlad knew who those peo
ple were, and why they were being given knowledge forbidden to the average man, he couldn’t judge whether their effort should be encouraged or destroyed.

  And he wondered, as he opened a blank notebook and began to outline his own system of magick, if he would fall victim to infinite power or if his purpose—balancing the Church’s tyranny—might somehow save him from magick’s corrupting influence.

  Chapter Fifteen

  1 May 1767

  Antediluvian Ruins

  Westridge Mountains, Mystria

  “I hain’t never seen the like.” Nathaniel stared up at the edifice carved into the side of the mountain. The arches over doorways were formed by squids linking tentacles. More tentacles dangled from atop pillars. Even the way the stones had been carved to sluice away rain water had a tentacular pattern. Nathaniel had never much taken to the sea and sea life, and was more than happy nothing squidlike inhabited lakes and rivers.

  Even odder than the general theme of the architecture were the two figures decorating the twenty-foot-tall and half-opened bronze doors. Age had imbued the doors with a green patina, but they didn’t appear to be weathered nearly enough for having existed under the water for more than a couple of years. The nearby mud didn’t have the sour stink of age, either. Given that he’d never heard of the place in Shedashee tales—and some of them recounted events centuries old—something definitely strange was going on.

  The figures were male and female, right and left as one looked at them. The female, on the lean side, had ample curves to her and wasn’t wearing much more than the bronze patina. Aside from her being nearly naked, she could have walked down any street in Temperance Bay without attracting a considerable amount of notice. Her strong jaw, noble nose, and deep-set eyes suggested she’d be a hatchet-faced crone by the time she got old, but in her youth, she definitely presented a handsome image that any man would be happy to have enter a dream.

  The male, on the other hand, would have attracted notice and most of it hostile. Despite being clothed in something falling halfway between a fancy gown and the sort of vestments Bishop Bumble wore on high Holy Days, there was no mistaking the fact that the man was skinny to the point of looking consumptive. If there was an ounce of fat on him it was because he pulled it out of some animal’s carcass and tucked it in a pocket. His long-fingered hands rested on the head of a staff. It rose to the middle of his belly, making it a bit longer than a gentleman’s walking stick. Though it wasn’t easy to see, the stick had a squidlike thing worked at the head, and that design matched the ring on the man’s left hand.

  His face and expression concerned Nathaniel more than anything else. He had more chin than he did nose, and that wasn’t because his jaw was particularly strong. His nostrils tended more toward slits, and his nose looked closer to that of a bat than it did of the woman. Sharp angles defined his face, including cheekbones and peg-teeth seen between half-opened lips. His ears sharpened and his hair had been pulled back tight to his head. Had the patina been any thinner, Nathaniel would have assumed he was bald. The eyes, sunken back, projected a venomous glance.

  Owen started up the steps. “Not the welcoming type, are they?”

  “I reckon not.” Nathaniel bent over and wiped a finger on the Temple steps. “No grit here, no mud.”

  Kamiskwa pointed to a rough semicircle that ran around that end of the courtyard and then on up to the mountainside. “A dome protected this place. I can feel the residual magick and see traces of it still.”

  Makepeace crossed himself. “I reckon I’ll not be going in. I’ll just keep watch out here.”

  Rathfield looked at him. “I would have hardly thought you susceptible to cowardice.”

  The Virtuan drew himself up to his full height. “Don’t take a coward to recognize that this here is an unholy place. The Good Lord wants me going in there, He’ll give me a sign. Until that point I ain’t seeing why I should risk Perdition right here and now.”

  Nathaniel smiled. “Ain’t no reason you should. Fact is, I was gonna ask you and Hodge to stay out here to keep an eye on things. See anything, fire a shot and we’ll come running.”

  Hodge nodded and Makepeace moved off in the direction the footprint had pointed toward.

  Owen stepped up first and entered the Temple, with Kamiskwa close behind him. Rathfield and Count von Metternin went next, and Nathaniel brought up the rear. He kept his rifle cradled in his arms and forced himself to watch their backtrail. He checked on the doors, visually measuring the opening, and dreaded seeing them close.

  The doorway opened into a tall and long corridor carved from the native granite. At least that’s what Nathaniel wanted to believe, but he couldn’t see any chisel marks. As with the statues outside and the settlement’s building blocks, everything had been joined seamlessly. Just the way Kamiskwa kept to the middle of the corridor, as far from the walls as he could, suggested he was feeling magick coming off the stones. Nathaniel didn’t want to be thinking about what kind of power it would take to have shaped what he saw.

  Owen rubbed his nose. “Dry, musty air; not at all what I’d expect.”

  Every ten yards or so a pair of statues had been placed to support the walls. They alternated male and female, repeating the figures from outside, save that all of them held a glowing stone ball about a yard in diameter. The stone looked similar to those used to build the settlement, and yet was a thin-enough shell that Nathaniel imagined he could see shadowy creatures swimming through the interior. He took comfort in the fact that he didn’t see anything at all squidlike, but he didn’t enjoy the fact that something lived inside those stones.

  Halfway into the structure the corridor widened, quadrupling in size to create a cavernous room. Statues continued at regular intervals, now freestanding pairs back to back, holding more lights. At the far end they discovered a raised dais, an altar and a tabernacle structure, the latter of which lay open. Something had once resided in there, but since the Temple’s interior showed no sign of decay, Nathaniel couldn’t begin to guess how long the tabernacle had been empty.

  Nathaniel smiled at Count von Metternin. “You seen its like in Auropa?”

  The Kessian frowned. “For scale, yes, but…” He pointed to vast expanses of blank wall. “Any cathedral would have murals there and in the ceiling vaults. In the building outside the water washed images away, but here they should have been intact.”

  Owen shook his head. “Maybe the water didn’t wash things away. Maybe they were all rendered in magick. Kamiskwa, can you feel it?”

  The Altashee brave nodded slowly, and Nathaniel recognized how much conscious control his friend was exerting. Only seen that a time or two, when he’s been in powerful-bad pain.

  “Yes, it is magick. The walls tell stories.” Kamiskwa exhaled slowly. “What you would see in a painting, the magick makes you feel. Over there, it must be a battle. I can feel the wounds. Screams are whispers, but they are there.”

  Rathfield turned and stared toward the panel Kamiskwa faced. “Impossible. You would have to be touching that to get any magick sense from it.”

  “The Shedashee, Colonel, they don’t exactly cotton to the rules of Norillian magick.”

  “Do you, Woods, feel what he feels?”

  “No, but that don’t mean what he feels ain’t true.” Nathaniel’s eyes narrowed. “You just think of him as someone what was born to magick the way you was born to reading Norillian. You had to learn and got good at it. I ’spect iffen we done learned the right magick, we’d be feeling the same thing. And if we learned more we’d be seeing and hearing and maybe smelling what was coming off them walls. Ain’t something I’d be looking forward to, mind, but I reckon it could be done.”

  Rathfield chuckled. “I envy you the innocence of your world view, Woods. This couldn’t have been raised by magick.”

  “And you know that exactly how?” Nathaniel looked around. “I seen some darn good masons working in Temperance Bay, and hain’t nothing they done been even close to this. That the
same in Auropa, my lord?”

  “I am forced, Colonel, to agree with Mr. Woods.”

  “But the Church, gentlemen, instructs me that such uses of magick are quite impossible.”

  Owen laughed. “And you would know if they had decided that you needed know whether or not it was possible.”

  “Careful, Strake, you approach blasphemy.”

  “I reckon, Colonel, it ain’t blasphemy he approaches, but common sense. We know this ain’t natural. We cain’t see no sign that masons did this. Kamiskwa says he can feel the magick, and we ain’t got no cause to question his judgment. That leads toward a powerful conclusion. You need to think on this, Colonel…”

  “Yes, Woods?”

  “Mayhap be that your Church done told you what they thought was true, but this here settlement and what it represents is outside their knowing.”

  Rathfield folded his arms across his chest. “It is a point worth considering.”

  “Well, here’s another two. Ain’t but one entrance here, and that strikes me as peculiar. There has to be other ways in and out. And the other thing is this: we don’t know what made this place, but we know it look powerful magick. That being so, I’m of a mind to wonder, just what in the name of Heaven was powerful enough to melt the city out there.”

  The latter thought sobered them for a moment. Nathaniel moved off and started looking for anything like a door or perhaps a place where a door had been sealed over. He found nothing until he met Owen over by the right side of the dais. “What have you got?”

  Owen, on a knee, traced a fingernail along an almost invisible seam in the floor. “It’s fitted flush. I cannot find anything to open it. Magick would seem to make sense.”

  “I hope not.”