The Phoenix Unchained (6 page)

“Then why would the captain say it was a kraken?”

Harrier grinned. “If the bondholders can prove the ship’s master was negligent, they won’t have to pay off on the damage. And running your ship up on a shoal—or into a pod of whales—counts as negligent seacraft under bond. But a kraken is the same as a storm. The bond would have to pay off then.”

“So . . . who’s going to win?” Tiercel asked, blinking slowly. “The bondsman or the ship’s master?”

Harrier shrugged. “Probably the bondsman.” He stepped up onto the timber balks holding the ship upright and pulled out his belt knife. “This ship has been badly maintained. See how soft the timber is?”

He set his knife to the hull beside one of the gashes and, without any great difficulty, carved away a long splinter of wood. “I shouldn’t be able to do that,” he explained for Tiercel’s benefit.

He stepped down onto the dock again and handed the splinter to Tiercel. Tiercel examined it. The wood
was
soft.

“It doesn’t look like any rock—or whale—damage I’ve ever seen,” Harrier said reluctantly. “But all the bondsman will care about is that the
Marukate
is a sloppy ship whose master has probably been sailing close to the wind for a long time. So he’s not likely to believe in . . . kraken.” Harrier shrugged, taking a last look over his shoulder at the ship. “It’s strange, though. The captain said he was just beyond the farthest of the Out Islands when it happened. Couldn’t have been much further out, or they’d never have made it to port, with their hull racked up the way it was. And there just aren’t any reefs out there that could do this to a ship.”

BUT there aren’t any kraken
.

Second Night Bells had just rung, and the entire Rolfort family was safe in their beds.

Except Tiercel.

He was in his bedroom, true, but not in bed.

The scrap of wood Harrier had carved from the hull of the
Marukate
sat on his bedside table, on top of the journal in which Tiercel had taken to using to keep his notes on the High Magick.

Tomorrow the bondsman would meet with the ship’s master at the port to look over the damage, and decide what part—if any—of the repairs would be paid for out of the bond. It didn’t seem fair that the man should lose his ship. Harrier had said that was probably what would happen if the bond wasn’t paid. The ship would be sold up, probably as scrap timber, and the
Marukate
’s captain would have to go to work as a hired master on a ship he didn’t own. Not the worst fate in the world, but it would be better if there were some way to prove that he was telling the truth about there being
something
out there that had grabbed his ship. Tiercel wondered if there was anything he could do to help. Maybe there was.

There were a lot of spells in the High Magick.

TIERCEL had been stunned to discover, once he’d really started digging through the books in the Closed Collection in the Great Library, that instead of being lost, or even locked up, everything he wanted to know about the High Magick was right there on the shelves, mixed in with the Histories. Spellbooks and manuals, practical information, nearly everything he needed to know.

It hadn’t seemed right somehow just to play around with it for fun, though, so even though he’d copied out several of the simplest spells—High Magick seemed to be very elaborate and complicated—he’d never actually tried to do any of it. But this would be for a good cause.

There was a spell called
Knowing
. It didn’t seem to be very complicated, and didn’t require all of the elaborate tools that some of the
other spells did, just some wine and candles and some Light-incense, and a few incantations. There were some other things—about shielding and fasting and ritual hours and proper preparation—but he didn’t really understand them, and they looked like things he could afford to skip. Besides, Mama would certainly notice if he tried to skip meals.

The description of
Knowing
said that you would understand an object in its entirety once you had cast the spell upon it. If he cast
Knowing
on the piece of the hull of the
Marukate
, well, then, wouldn’t he know how it had come to be damaged? Then he could go and tell Portmaster Gillain what he’d learned.

Assuming the High Magick was actually real, and the spell worked. Even Tiercel had to admit that sounded like a lot of “ifs” and assumptions.

WHEN he was certain that everyone had settled in for the night, Tiercel made his way down to the household Light-shrine and removed a small handful of the Light-incense from its silver box. He also took one of the charcoal cakes to burn it on. Folding both items carefully into a handkerchief, he went from there to the kitchen and took five candles from the candlebox. That should be enough—the spell just said “candles,” and he wasn’t sure how many to use. Most of the spells he’d seen seemed to do things in multiples of four, though, so he figured that four should be enough. And one for the center.

He went back to his room and made the rest of his preparations.

He rolled away the rug in the center of the floor, and used a piece of blackboard chalk from his study to carefully draw the symbol he had copied out of one of the old books into the middle of the floor. Next, he placed four candles at the corners and one in the
middle, and set the piece of wood from the
Marukate
next to the middle candle.

Then he realized that he’d forgotten something to burn the incense in.

A quick scavenger hunt through his study turned up an old pottery bowl. It was thick and heavy; a souvenir from a Flowering Fair a few years back. He used it to hold spare pen-points, and to hold down his papers when the windows were open. It would certainly do. He emptied it out, rubbed it clean with his sleeve, and carried it back into the bedroom, setting it down in the middle of the chalked diagram. There. Everything was ready.

Tiercel admitted he’d never felt sillier in his life. He was much too old for games of “Let’s Pretend.” And deep in his heart, he was sure that was all that this could possibly be. Certainly he believed that the High Magick had worked once, centuries and centuries ago. But he also believed that if it still worked, people would still be using it. After all, wouldn’t everyone want to be a Mage if they had the chance?

Still, he was committed to trying, so he sat down crosslegged beside the diagram, and opened his notebook, and carefully read out the spell for
Knowing
, slowly sounding out the unfamiliar syllables and making the strange gestures that had been depicted in the books. He knew he was supposed to have a wand for that, but doing the spell had been pretty much a spur-of-the-moment idea, so maybe it wouldn’t matter.

He finished.

Nothing happened.

Well, what did you expect?
Tiercel thought, feeling more than a little embarrassed. Even though he hadn’t expected anything to happen, he’d hoped, more than he wanted to admit even to himself, that something would.
The Time of Mages is definitely over
.

Just then he started to feel sick.

The room seemed to be getting darker.

THE year before he’d met Harrier, Tiercel had been so sick that the Healers of Armethalieh—the best in the Nine Cities—had told his parents that his only hope for survival lay in the Wild Magic.

In those days even Hevnade hadn’t been born yet. He’d been Lord and Lady Rolfort’s only child, and to save his life, they’d taken him immediately to the Temple of the Light in Sentarshadeen, hoping against hope that a Wildmage could be found to heal him. Fortunately one was there—waiting for them, in fact—and Tiercel had quickly been restored to health. He’d remembered nothing at all of his illness—supposedly you never remembered anything much about being a child, though Tiercel did—but he’d always remembered the strange dreams he’d had while he’d been ill, even though it had happened so very long ago. They’d been vividly real, yet impossible; he’d known that even then. And now, after so many years, he was having another one without even falling asleep. He was looking at a Lake of Fire.

Instead of being blue like a proper lake, it was orange. The air above it shimmered with heat, and its entire surface danced with flames, as if somebody had taken an ordinary homely hearth-fire and just made a huge pool of it somehow. It was almost pretty. And standing at the middle of it was a woman.

That was wrong, because if it was fire, she shouldn’t be able to stand
on
it, but she was. And she was utterly naked, but though he tried very hard, Tiercel couldn’t look away. And he couldn’t wake up.

He’d seen statues of naked women in museums, and he tried to tell himself that that’s all this was, but her long hair moved in the heat of the flames below her, and the fire gleamed off her skin, so that he couldn’t really tell what color it was. Somehow she saw him watching her, and when she did, she raised her arms and held them out to him. Beckoning to him.

He had to go to her, Tiercel knew he did, but as that excited,
ashamed, half-formed thought worked its way toward the front of his mind, it was met by another reaction equally strong.

Terror.

No. More than terror.
Revulsion
.

Because there was something horrible about the Fire Woman—something he could sense but couldn’t see—and the fact that he didn’t quite know what it was made it even more frightening, even though this was only a dream, and the things that frightened you—or didn’t—in dreams weren’t the same ones that scared you when you were awake.

She was beautiful, but the longer Tiercel looked at her, the stronger his desire to
run away
became. Because he knew—he
knew
—that if he stayed here one moment more, something terrible would happen. Only he didn’t know what it was. And he didn’t know how to get away.