The Golden Griffin (Book 3) (22 page)

This time, Talon didn’t resist, but moved beneath her touch as if the two of them had flown for years. He leaped into the sky with Daria on his back, and the two of them raced south.

Chapter Seventeen

Chantmer opened his eyes a fraction and saw that the eunuch still watched him. Chantmer hadn’t slept in the two days since his arrival in Marrabat in an attempt to exhaust Faalam, but the man had yet to fail. He never left the wizard’s side.

Chantmer sat in the shade of an orange tree with his legs folded. He’d meditated for three hours in the sun, which was still hot this far south, despite the lateness of the season. The orange grove grew in one of the dozens of patios that graced the sultan’s palace. A small fountain sat on each end of the courtyard.

Chantmer rose to his feet, stretched, and turned a critical eye toward Faalam. “You look tired, my friend. I release you from your duties so you can sleep.”

Faalam bowed. “But then I would not be able to serve you, learned master. Sultan Mufashe, light of my life, wishes me to stay with you at all times.”

If Chantmer had recovered even a portion of his magic, he’d drop a spell on the eunuch’s shoulders that would make him sleep for a week. And then the wizard could get something done, start to gather allies. Mages and conjurers who would help him regain control of the Order and fight Toth. Right now, he only had the confidence of his rescuer to work with. And Roghan’s loyalties were suspect.

Chantmer turned his back on the eunuch and walked through the gardens. He inspected the orange trees, studied the engravings on the pillars. Kill the eunuch with boredom. Chantmer had lived for two hundred and eighty years; he knew how to be patient.

“Chantmer?” a voice asked behind him.

The wizard turned, dismayed that his senses were so dull that someone else had entered the courtyard without his hearing.

It was one of Roghan’s tattooed apprentices. A young mage, perhaps forty or fifty years old. “The master wishes to speak with you.”

Chantmer nodded and gave Faalam a half-smile. “I will come, but I must bring my servant. He wouldn’t dare leave me alone with your master.”

Chantmer and Faalam followed the young mage to the fountain, where the three men washed their feet before entering. Delicate pillars supported the interior walls. They passed a group of young women from Mufashe’s harem, and the girls giggled to see Faalam following the two wizards. The eunuch silenced them with a stern glance, while a second eunuch urged the girls to hurry in the opposite direction.

They found Roghan in a large chamber with a raised platform at the center, surrounded by his apprentice mages. The glowing tips of a hundred burning incense sticks lit the dark corners of the room. Spread across the platform were square boards lined with nails, and some twenty of Roghan’s apprentices sat cross-legged on top of them. The men were naked except for loin cloths, while the three female mages in the group also wore cloths tied across their breasts. Roghan sat in the center of them on his own board.

Two of the apprentices tattooed the head mage’s body. One man took a needle and dipped it into a brazier of coals and then smoked the faded inks from Roghan’s skin, leaving behind burned flesh. Working at a second location further down Roghan’s back, a second man used needles dipped in dyes to inscribe a new tattoo over the pink flesh only recently cleaned by the other. The markings themselves consisted of fanciful scenes of battles, runes, geometric designs, and calligraphic writing in the old tongue. Roghan gestured for Chantmer to sit next to him on an empty board.

Chantmer eyed the nails. “Unnecessary pain disagrees with me.”

Roghan smiled. “Members of your order destroy their hands to summon spells. That isn’t painful?”

“Quite. But we focus and bind that pain.”

“And this is where my order gains its strength. We meditate on nails, we suffer tattoos with no wine or poppy seed to dull the pain.”

“Minor discomfort compared to the destruction of one’s own hand in face of immediate need.”

“The strength drawn from a thousand pricks can be as great as anything that your order draws.”

Chantmer didn’t doubt it. Roghan had raised him from the dead, carved a safe passage through the Desolation, and battled Markal to a draw on the Tothian Way.

“Nevertheless,” Chantmer said, “your ways are not mine.”

“So you have nothing to learn here?”

“I didn’t say that. But I am loyal to my ways. I don’t care to replace them.”

“Augment. Not replace.”

The other mages in the room were studying the two men, and a look of irritation flickered across Roghan’s face as he seemed to notice the same thing.

“Very well, I’ll listen,” Chantmer conceded. “Can you free me of my unwanted helper?”

“As you wish.” Roghan turned to Faalam. “Leave us, eunuch. We have wizardly business to discuss.”

To Chantmer’s surprise, Faalam bowed and made his way toward the door. The apprentice who had summoned Chantmer from the patio waited until the eunuch was in the hallway and shut the iron-bound cedar doors.

Chantmer eyed the empty bed of nails. He stripped to his loin cloth and tentatively stepped onto it. Pain shot through his foot, and he withdrew.

“Spread your weight or you’ll drive a nail through your sole,” Roghan urged. “Sit down first and slide your body onto it.” He slid from the board in a single, fluid motion, then helped support Chantmer’s weight while the wizard positioned himself. When Chantmer was seated, Roghan returned to his own board. The tattooists started in again.

Nails stabbed all along Chantmer’s legs and buttocks. He forced himself to remain calm and condemned the pain to a back corner.

“Where do you store the magic until you need it? In the tattoo?”

“In the skin itself. The ink of the tattoos weaves across my body, and I imbue it with my life force. When I’m fully empowered, an enemy cannot touch me without a killing jolt, and no man can poison me. This rune,” he said, pointing to a mark on the left breast, “will draw the poison to the skin and bleed it from my pores.”

“Interesting.”

“Tell me, wizard,” Roghan said. “How many years weigh on your shoulders?”

“Two hundred and eighty-three. And you?” It was a question that had drawn Chantmer’s curiosity since they’d met in the Estmor swamps.

“Somewhere between two hundred and sixty and two hundred and seventy. I don’t know the exact year, but I was born during the Great Drought.”

“I was a child during the drought.”

“After my parents died in the famine, Elvelom brought me to Marrabat to train.”

“Elvelom the Wise?” Chantmer ignored the stares of the younger mages. “He survived the wars? I thought the entire council was destroyed.”

Elvelom had been one of the five members of the Blood Council during the first Tothian Wars, second only to Memnet the Great.

“Elvelom survived. He called himself Sendarpho when I knew him. I only learned his identity later.”

“I have heard of Sendarpho. A powerful wizard. He disappeared about eighty years ago, didn’t he?”

“That’s right. They say he entered the Wylde to hunt for Toth’s wight.”

Chantmer scarcely felt the nails against his flesh anymore. “A dangerous pursuit, chasing after dead souls. A task better left to the Harvester.”

“This from a man whose body was found rotting at the bottom of an Estmor swamp.”

Chantmer ignored the barb. “Necromancy destroyed Cragyn. It will destroy you, too, if you’re not cautious.” He considered. “You’re sure this Sendarpho was the same as Elvelom the Wise? That he somehow survived a century of war and famine in the wake of the Tothian Wars?”

“I’m certain. It isn’t unprecedented. There are several others who did the same. Narud and Markal of your order, of course, plus two others who took refuge in the Cloud Kingdoms.”

“Yes, but those others were young when Syrmarria fell. Narud was a child, apprenticed less than a year when a ravager killed Memnet the Great. Markal wasn’t much older than that freed slave he has taken as an apprentice.”

“Then there is Toth himself,” Roghan said.

“He didn’t survive, he was killed. If not for Cragyn, he’d still be dead.”

“Even so.”

“My point is that magic was almost lost,” Chantmer said. “A hundred years passed between the end of the wars and the rise of the next orders of wizards. Narud and Markal taught themselves. Then they trained Nathaliey Liltige and me. You must have been training at roughly the same time.”

And that raised suspicions of Roghan’s claim to have trained under Elvelom the Wise. More likely this Sendarpho had been another child at the time Memnet and Elvelom fell, which would explain the passage of another century before he’d come into his powers sufficient to take on students.

Chantmer looked around the room. “So many apprentices—how do you manage them all?”

“Don’t be nervous—I trust them. We may speak freely.”

“I wasn’t nervous, but now that you raise it, how can you be sure?”

“I’ve seen so many sultans come through Marrabat that I’ve lost count. I have suffered the misguided, the good, the weak, and the truly evil.”

“And what about Mufashe? Which kind is he?”

“He’s a glutton for food and girls,” Roghan said. “Other than that, his taxes are high but not stifling, his soldiers ruthless but not cruel. But even the best of sultans lack a quality possessed by you and me.”

“The same could be said for our kings, as well. Or the khalifs. They live for the moment. Do they understand the consequences for the ages? If they do, they don’t care.”

“But what about your Citadel? Didn’t King Steven build it to last a thousand years? That’s what they boast, anyway.”

“It was built for a thousand years because we insisted,” Chantmer said. “Men and women of power formed the Brotherhood to stand by the Order’s side. It had nothing to do with King Steven.”

“Ah, but he wished the Citadel to be completed within his lifetime, did he not?”

“That is true,” Chantmer agreed.

“Any goal, whether it is mine, yours, or Sultan Mufashe’s, only compels when one can see the idea brought to fruition.”

“Perhaps.”

“The difference is, wizards live for generations. We straddle the centuries. We can enact change that will sweep across the face of Mithyl.”

“Those who are farsighted enough to envision such things, yes,” Chantmer said.

“Alas, the wizards of Elvelom’s generation, including Markal and Narud, are obsessed with the Tothian War and its aftermath. It is only our generation and our apprentices who look to the coming centuries. Who can shape the world to our own purposes. Forget this obsession with the dark wizard.”

“You consider the dark wizard a trifle?” Chantmer said. “If we ignore him, will he simply go away?”

“Of course not,” Roghan said, “but Toth is only one wizard, no matter how powerful. And even Toth has the vision of the ages. Take the Tothian Way itself, for example. If he had not built the Way, the cities would never have been rebuilt, and the people would still speak hundreds of mutually unintelligible languages. When he learns of my purpose, he’ll turn from his destructive ways and join us.”

What a strange concept this mage held, that the dark wizard could be reasoned with. It wasn’t so different from Narud’s foolish request that Chantmer submit to penance at the hands of the Order.

“And what is this purpose of yours?”

“No less than to bring Mithyl under complete control of its rightful owners.”

“You mean wizards?”

“Wizards. Mages. The torturers guilds of the khalifates. All manner of conjurers. Those with power and the wisdom and foresight to wield it.”

“Why do we own Mithyl any more than anyone else?” Chantmer asked. “Millions earn their living from the land in one fashion or another. The Martyr taught that every man owns the world and every man owes the world a debt for his existence.”

Roghan smiled. “Come, Chantmer. Surely you are not so naïve as that.”

“Convince me.”

“Who owns the pasture? Is it the sheep who graze on its bounty, or the shepherd who tends them?”

“The shepherd,” Chantmer conceded.

“A man’s sheep produce wool, give lambs, and when they are aged, become mutton to feed the shepherd and his family. Long after the sheep are gone, the shepherd will tend new flocks, or perhaps even turn his lands to wheat or timber. Have we not the same right?”

“So we are shepherds, and the common people are sheep?”

“Our lives are longer and our knowledge deeper. The ordinary man is less than a sheep to us, his kings little more than dogs who guard our flocks.”

“We’re not even in harmony amongst ourselves,” Chantmer said. “We have different beliefs and codes of honor. Some are evil, some foolish. Some withdraw to the Cloud Kingdoms, some fight for the dark wizard. How will we agree on anything, let alone a law to rule all people and all lands?”

“Have you ever noticed that all wizards originate from the same region of Mithyl?”

“What do you mean?” Chantmer asked, somewhat disingenuously. He knew what Roghan was driving at. “Look around you. Some of your acolytes are dark skinned. A few are almost black. Others are fair, as if from Eriscoba.”

“Yes, but there’s something different about them, isn’t there? They resemble each other as much as they resemble the people from which they come. We originate—each of us—from the same narrow strip of land between Balsalom and the Dragon’s Spine. A land now become wasteland.”

“Magic is not a birthright. It chooses a man or woman to serve it. A gift of the Brothers.”

“That coincidentally falls upon the children of Aristonia and the sons and daughters of Syrmarria.” Roghan smiled. “I’ve read your writings. You know this already.”

“There does seem to be a concentration of wizardry originating in one part of Mithyl,” Chantmer admitted.

“And your conjecture as to the reason?”

Chantmer sighed. His guess would validate Roghan’s assertion. “The greatest concentration of these wizards once lived in Aristonia, but they weren’t Aristonians. They were the original people of that land. Magic flowed in their veins, and they called it naturally from the earth.”