Wizard (The Key to Magic) (24 page)

He watched her trek for leagues without food or rest into a forested hill country, and then watched her collapse finally in the middle of a dusty road. He saw her birth a son and then perish as her life drained from her.

He saw a man-like creature rescue the babe and cremate the mother, saw the creature bear the infant to a hidden cottage, saw what became of it, and then he knew the reality of what Old Mar and Mortyn had told him.

Feeling no temptation to indulge in a grief that he did not feel, he did not linger in that tragic past. The couple that had brought him into existence had lived and died in their proper time, no less phantoms than any of the people, both those who had earned his loathing and those that had enticed his sympathy, that he had met in Dhiloeckmyur. He could not feel sadness for parents that he had never known.

An orphan he had always been and an orphan he would always be.

TWENTY-NINE

Clinging to the shallows, he let the inevitable flow of undertime carry him forward, peering out at a world of doomed magic. He saw many things that he did not understand: spells for purposes unknown in his own age, skyships that flew
above
the sky, devices that were creatures and creatures that were devices. He also saw many things that he did understand: cruelty, hardship, brutality, and, increasingly, war.

Another scene drew him in.

A man, a woman, and a baby, appeared in a port station.

Wrapping both arms around the baby, the woman dug in her heels, pulling away as the liveried man tried to drag her off the platform toward a trail leading uphill into a forest.

"Stop, Rhynn! Tell me what's going on right now!"

"The City is about to be destroyed, Eilia! Every bit of magic is going to go unstable and our only chance is to get away from all of it now!"

Clearly panicked, this Rhynn surged up the hill, nearly carrying Eilia, now white and shaking.

As they made the top of the hill, Eilia screamed.
"My anklet! It's burning me!"

Only seconds before it exploded, Rhynn ripped the jewelry from her and threw it away.

Then the entire sky to the south bloomed in ruptured flux.

Wind and earth heaved, lashing the cringing refugees, as the assaulted ether rebelled. The uproar quieted for a moment, but then another concussion swept through, staggering the two.

"We have to get farther away,"
Rhynn said.
"It's not over yet."

Eilia looked back, wiping tears, and then said in a voice flat and cold,
"It's all gone. They're all dead. Mother and everybody."

"But we're still alive and so is our son."

The family moved on, climbing higher into the hills. They spent the night in the rough, but the next day they reached a well appointed but vacant small farm that had obviously been their destination. Their refuge provided food and shelter and seemed safe from the raging storm that tore apart the background ether. Their story would not end in tragedy.

Mar skipped ahead.

For reasons that were not apparent, Rhynn left Eilia and the child and retraced his steps along the trail toward the devastated city from which they had fled. While still high in the hills, he met a band of refugees attired as he was -- all, men and women alike, were armsmen -- and then watched in shock from a prominence as the sea consumed the ruins and made a once great land an island.

Rhynn watched the disturbed sea and the wrack that tossed upon it for only a moment, then turned from the disaster, steady and resolute, and sought out the leaders of the band, an older man and a
dangerous
man -- Mar's
unease
told him that the man was a weapon, sharp and lethal -- who had but one arm and who all addressed as nhBrenl, though that was not the name that he had been given at his birth.

The older officer looked haggard but steadfast.
"Rhynn. I thought you dead."

Rhynn nodded.
"I would have been if I hadn't come here, Commander Karhle."

The dangerous man watched Rhynn with care.
"You have a place here in the Reserve? All the homesteads are working farms, are they not?"

Rhynn shook his head in firm rebuff.
"It's not large enough to support all of you. I'm sorry Vice-Commander nhBrenl. You'll have to find your own way."

"We'll clear land to expand your farm,"
nhBrenl said, gesturing at the trees that covered the hills.
"We'll hunt and scavenge."

"I'm not so foolish as to try to order you to help us,"
Karhle said
, "but I am also not so proud that I won't plead if necessary. There are three hundred and twelve of us. We have enough food for three days and potable water sufficient only for one. We have sixty-two wounded, many severe, including Commander nhBreen, who we expect to die. He gave you leave to depart, Comm Spec, and thus I am sure saved the life of your family. We are your comrades, men and women with no place to go, and we beg you to help us."

Rhynn's stoney expression did not falter.

"You won't be able to hold your farm on your own,"
nhBrenl said
. "There will be more survivors and few of them will have a place to go. They'll be hungry and cold and they'll come for your farm, Comm Spec, and you won't be able to fight them off without magical weapons, which I'm sure that you don't have.
This band can help you keep it."

"With what? I know that you can't have magical weapons as well."

"Swords, spears, arrows and blood. We will make the first and our courage will provide the last."

"I will not be put under your orders,"
Rhynn stated with crossed arms.

"The City and the Defense Service are no more,"
Karhle agreed.
"Loyalty will be won by the support that we give one another. We are no longer soldiers, but we can become kin."

After a long moment of silence, Rhynn gave a still reluctant nod of his head.

The march to the farm was slow. Most of the wounded had to be borne on litters. One of these, a blackened corpse that did not stir or seem to breathe but was not quite dead, drew Mar's particular attention.

In no more than a day, the survivors that nhBrenl had prophesied began to appear. At first, the bedraggled individuals and families came as supplicants and were taken in and enlisted in the feverish work of building and feeding the nascent village, but then larger groups came with demands and were turned away with blood and steel. By the time the first freezing rain of winter left a layer of ice on the log walls of the palisade that the one armed man had had built to circle the farm buildings, new and old, no more wanderers from the vanished city appeared at the gates.

Mar let the days roll into years.

Life for the band was difficult. They were nearly all
magenfolk
, accustomed like the denizens of Dhiloeckmyur to a life of splendor abetted by luxurious magic, but none were sorcerers and though they could perform some small enchantments and alchemies to ease the toil, they had no magical devices of any sort and had to learn to depend on the strength of their arms and backs and the keenness of their ingenuity to provide their daily sustenance.

Strong backs were needed in the fields and fleet legs to give chase to the deer and boar, and it became left to the childbearing and the grandmothers to preserve and employ the few spells that had been saved. The daughter that Lilia bore to Rhynn, Amra, was exceptionally skilled in this endeavor and she and her descendants became the prime stewards of magic for the place that was first known as Rhynn's Farm and later as
Rhyfm
. In time, the carefully hoarded spells became secrets that were handed down from mother to daughter generation after generation.

A decade after the end of the world, Karhle died of a blood disease that his people were unable to cure without the magic that they had lost.

Thirty years on, the one armed man who had been given the name nhBrenl died in an ambush, but only after piling thirteen dead enemies around him.

After long lives that were not desolate of joy, Rhynn and Lilia died within hours of one another in their own beds while surrounded by their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

The corpse persisted in the same state, not healing but not dying, year after year. At first, it was cared for with great dedication by the band, then watched over with reverence by their sons and daughters, and finally, when there was no one to remind them of the lost glories of their heritage, entombed and forgotten by those who had never seen magic.

The band prospered and multiplied in a magicless world, becoming a clan among clans whose cotholds spread to cover the hills and mounts of the island that was spoken of as Gath lem Hoem, or
Place of the Survivors.

When there were more young men than cotholds to leave to them, the islanders took to the waves, became fishermen and seafarers and built the port of Gath'l'hoema.

After a few more generations, a doddering codger gave up the sea, landed in Gh'emhoa, and went home to die with his people.

One night, the codger and a stripling disturbed the corpse in its tomb and it crawled into the day, gained life from the sun, and began finally to heal. After many days, the corpse stood and walked away wearing the face of the man that Mar knew as Waleck.

Mar lost the old man from time to time as seemingly random images, sights of people in varied places doing varied things, intervened, but his view always returned to trace Waleck along his uninterrupted trudge through history.

His clothing varied, his hair was longer or shorter, and his fortunes appeared to rise and fall, but it was always Waleck and he was always the same as when Mar had known him, neither older nor younger, heavier nor leaner. None of the images provided any great store of information and no two were of the same temporary life. In one, the old man strode determinedly on a stone highway, eyes locked ahead while a group of pack-laden porters followed. In another he sat at a sumptuous but rough table, contending with a group of fierce seeming young men and women dressed in furs and hides. In yet another, wearing rags, he slept untroubled in a half-ruined tower that served as a hay loft, while a heavy snow fell without.

These incomplete visions provided no bit of information that would permit Mar to locate his adversary in his own proper time.

With a mental lurch, Mar drifted farther from the shore, dispersing a vignette of a youth rowing Waleck across a calm sea. He had finally named the old man as what he perhaps always had been -- his enemy.

The evidence was unimpeachable that Waleck had striven both behind the scenes and openly to manipulate Mar and those around him and there was no doubt but that the deranged sorcerer had conspired with the Brotherhood. Men who had sworn the Blood Oath had died because of the madman. Waleck might not be an undertime diving meddler like Oyraebos and this new threat, Zso, but he had certainly created death and ruin in pursuit of his obsession to restore magic.

No accommodation could be made between the old man's goals and Mar's. Waleck wanted to shape the world into an image of something that was dead. Mar was determined to see what the world would make of itself.

If he were to shape his own future, Mar could not allow any of those who interfered to continue in their efforts. The wizards and Waleck must be stopped.

By his own admission and by the proof that Mar had seen from the shallows of undertime, Waleck had persisted in his obsession for five millennia and it was undeniably clear that nothing short of death would stop the old man.

And that meant that Waleck must die.

THIRTY

Along the way, Mar left undertime only once.

To increase his speed through the ethereal deluge, he shifted away from the boundary and into a stronger current. This made him feel that he was speeding along at a good clip but left him with no way to gauge his progress and he was compelled to wade back towards the shore from time to time to identify a landmark.

In several of these visions, he discovered the last scions of magic, who had by luck or skill escaped the devastation in deep bunkers and hidden installations on the outer periphery of a much abridged northern continent, much as had Llylquaendt's Pyrai. These scarce few were able to maintain a high level of magic, including much
technology
and over the years reestablished pockets of civilization. The prime impetus of these efforts was not, it soon became clear, to rebuild something lasting from the ashes but rather to prepare to wage war once more. Mar felt no surprise when they annihilated each other in a conflict so brief that it lasted only a relative moment, but he did wonder why they had bothered.

Over the centuries, from Gh'emhoa and other pockets hidden in magicless nooks about the waist and foot of the world, a new people, ignorant of and unable to perceive the ether, expanded into changed and desolate lands. What little remained of the old world was torn down to build the new. His visions continued to follow the descendants of the people of Rhyfm and nearly all seemed to center on the Silver Sea. He saw no scenes that he could identify as located beyond the known bounds of the Purple Ocean and the Silver Sea and wondered if no living soul existed in those unmapped spaces.

When the dress and activities of the people in his visions began to resemble the illustrations that he had seen of those of the Early Empire, he decided to linger in the shallows again, drawn by the temptation of being able to see firsthand the events that had enthralled him in the histories that he had stolen as a youth.

At first, his views were centered on the Imperial Seat in the subsided caldera adjacent to Lake Nhy as the successors to the first emperor, Rhazkek, grandson of Klendhor the Great, Fourth Supreme Chieftain of the Orange Mountain Freehold, Champion of Justice, Ender of Kings, and so on and so on, sent their legions to annex the lands of the coastal plains and expand into the Silver Sea.