Finally they finished, and Vandaris rose. “That’s everything? All right, let’s see if Eltiron’s in good enough shape to look at it yet.”
They made their way to Eltiron’s chambers, where Tarilane informed them that the castle physician had just left. He had left a message for Vandaris, saying that she could see the King for a few minutes but was not to tire him. Vandaris snorted and knocked on the chamber door.
To Jermain’s surprise, it was Amberglas who answered. She appeared to be almost completely recovered from her exertions of the previous day; the only signs of the experience were the fine lines at the corners of her eyes that Jermain was sure had not been there before. She tilted her head to one side and blinked at them for a moment.
“Very good. I thought perhaps you would be getting here soon. Come in; Eltiron’s been asking for you.” She stood aside, and they went in.
Eltiron was sitting in a large chair by the window. His right arm was splinted, he had a number of nasty-looking bruises and a black eye, and he appeared exhausted, but he looked up and grinned as they approached. “Vandi! I’ve been waiting for you. I didn’t think Darinhal would be able to keep you out much longer.”
Eltiron regretted his impulsive greeting almost as soon as it was uttered. Amberglas had succeeded in reducing the throbbing in his head, but she had not been able to dismiss it entirely, and even the mild effort of calling out sent a stabbing pain up the back of his skull.
“What makes you think Darinhal could keep me out at all?” Vandaris demanded as she strode inside and swung herself into a chair next to Eltiron. Jermain, Crystalorn, and Amberglas followed more slowly as she went on, “Or did all that rock scramble your brains?”
Despite his aches, Eltiron grinned again, but he was more careful about speaking when he answered. “Not so you’d notice, although Amberglas and Darinhal both keep telling me I’m lucky to be alive.”
“I’m not surprised. How bad’s the damage?”
“The arm is broken, and so are two of my ribs; Darinhal’s got my chest wrapped so tight in bandages that I can hardly breathe. Plus assorted bruises and a headache you wouldn’t believe even if I could describe it.”
“Better than I’d expected,” his aunt said without sympathy. “The only reason I can think of that your brains weren’t mashed is that three quarters of the Tower of Judgment seems to have disappeared on the way down. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”
“Not exactly,” Eltiron said uncomfortably. “The towers couldn’t seem to hold all of the Matholych, but I don’t know why.”
“Towers? The only one that fell was the Tower of Judgment,” Jermain said. “The rest of the castle towers are intact.”
“There were seven towers, one in each of the Seven Kingdoms somewhere,” Eltiron explained. “Amberglas says a wizard named Galerinth built them, but they only had half the magic they should have had, so they didn’t work properly. The Matholych was the other half of their power.”
“I thought the Matholych was a creature or a disease or something,” Crystalorn objected. “How could it be part of a bunch of towers?”
“It wasn’t,” Amberglas said. “Which is precisely the problem. Not that it’s at all surprising; things like that happen quite frequently when one believes one knows more about magic than one actually does, which is far more common than it ought to be.”
She looked directly at Eltiron as she finished speaking, and he found himself wondering how much she knew or had guessed. He had not mentioned the link he had felt with Carachel’s mind; nor had he spoken of the knowledge of magic and sorcery that had come to him through it. Most of what he had learned had faded quickly from his conscious mind, and he could not have said whether his nightmares the previous evening had come from the encounter with the Matholych, from the few remaining scraps of Carachel’s memories, or simply from having been hit on the head by a large number of rocks.
“Of course not,” Amberglas said, and Eltiron realized that he had missed someone’s question. “The power was still shaped by Galerinth’s spell, but only by the wrong half of it, which is why it was so very much the opposite of the towers in most ways.”
“So the Matholych could move, and the towers couldn’t,” Vandaris said. “And the towers had solid forms, and the Matholych was just a red cloud. But why did it kill people? And why in Arlayne’s name did it keep coming north?”
“It came north because of the towers. I believe it wanted to get back where it belonged, if something that isn’t really alive can want things, which I suppose might be possible even though it doesn’t happen very often. The rest was really just an extremely unpleasant side effect.”
“A side effect? Dragonfire and starflowers, that thing ate halfway through the outer wall of the castle in less than a minute! And you say that’s a
side effect
?”
“Exactly. Galerinth was trying to make the towers totally good, you see, and not being totally good himself he wound up with an exceedingly peculiar mixture. Though I’m afraid the Matholych didn’t precisely
eat
through the wall.”
“It certainly looked to me as though it were eating!” Crystalorn said, shuddering.
“What a thing looks like is frequently quite different from what it is. Those odd little insects that look like dry twigs, for instance, and very bad pastry that’s been covered in whipped cream, and the crown jewels of Mournwal.”
“The crown jewels of Mournwal?”
“About half of them are paste. At least, they were the last time I saw them, but that was rather a long while ago, so I suppose a few more of them might have been replaced by now. I can think of a great many better ways of paying for one’s government, but then, perhaps whoever is the King of Mournwal just now doesn’t have a great deal of imagination.”
“They’re
paste
?” Crystalorn sounded outraged.
“I believe I did say they weren’t what they seemed,” Amberglas said gently.
“About the Matholych,” Vandaris prompted.
“Yes, of course. You see, Galerinth apparently had excessively grand ideas, which isn’t at all surprising, because if he hadn’t been that sort of person, he wouldn’t have tried to cast that spell in the first place, and everyone would have been spared a great deal of trouble and inconvenience. I believe he wanted to use the towers to control all the magic in the Seven Kingdoms.”
“I don’t think I see how that explains what the Matholych was doing,” Jermain said.
“It was the other half of the spell on the towers,” Amberglas said patiently. “But I’m afraid they were quite out of balance in a great many ways, so of course the towers didn’t do enough and the Matholych did far too much. I rather doubt that Galerinth expected the Matholych to be quite so active about soaking up magic, though he really ought to have realized that destroying things and killing people can generate a good deal of power, which of course his spell would have to deal with somehow if it were going to control
all
the power in the Seven Kingdoms. But unfortunately, he didn’t.”
“I still don’t understand why the towers collapsed,” Eltiron said.
“Dear me, I thought that was quite obvious. The Matholych had been sucking up power for years, and so of course it grew bigger, though I believe it took rather a long time to assimilate everything it took in, which is perfectly reasonable since the spell wasn’t designed for that sort of thing in the first place. So it was entirely too much for the towers to absorb all at once like that, and the whole spell came apart, which is really the best thing that could have happened under the circumstances.”
“How long have you known all this?” Crystalorn asked suspiciously.
“If you are referring to the details of the spell on the towers, I’ve known most of it since yesterday, though of course I’ve studied them for years and it was quite evident that they had
some
connection with the Matholych even if it wasn’t clear precisely what it was. Spells are so much easier to understand when one can watch them being put together or taken apart.”
An unpleasant thought crossed Eltiron’s mind, and he looked at Amberglas. “You lived in one of them, didn’t you?”
Amberglas nodded absently. Eltiron said, “I’m sorry.”
“That’s quite all right,” Amberglas said vaguely. “There wasn’t anything particularly interesting about it, except of course itself, and one can say that about nearly everything, whether it’s magic or not.”
Crystalorn looked from Amberglas to Eltiron and frowned. “Well, if Amberglas’s tower is gone, what are you going to do about it?”
Eltiron winced as the rising note in her voice stimulated his headache again. “There isn’t much I
can
do! I can’t put it back up again; I’m no sorcerer.” He did not feel like bringing up the bits of knowledge he’d acquired from Carachel.
“But—”
“King Eltiron is quite right,” Amberglas interrupted firmly. “And besides, there are a great many other places I haven’t tried living in yet. The capital of Navren, for instance, or that odd little seaport in northern Vircheta that changes its name every few years for no particular reason. Though I expect I will start with Sevairn, since it’s much more convenient at the moment.”
“I’m glad you’ll be staying,” Eltiron said. “I may need a sorceress around when the rulers of Vircheta and Mournwal and Tar-Alem and the other kingdoms start asking why their towers collapsed. Most of them weren’t exactly in out-of-the-way places.”
“You don’t have to worry about those flea brains,” Vandaris broke in, grinning.
“What makes you say that?”’
“I’ve heard the talk going around Leshiya. By the time the kings hear it, I doubt that any of them will want to offend the Wizard-King of Sevairn.”
“What?”
“You heard me, granite ears.”
“But I can’t—I mean, I’m not—” Eltiron broke off, took a breath that made his ribs ache, and tried again. “
Carachel
was the Wizard-King! I don’t want his title!” He saw Crystalorn frown in puzzlement and Jermain nod slowly in understanding. Then Vandaris shook her head.
“You don’t have any choice. People think you’re a wizard, so Wizard-King is what they’ll call you. If you forbid it, they’ll just do it behind your back and make up stories about the things you do in secret.”
“Vandaris is right, I’m afraid,” Jermain said. “Carachel never titled himself Wizard-King; others did that for him.”
“I suppose so, but I don’t have to like it,” Eltiron grumbled.
Jermain nodded again, and Eltiron looked at him for a moment. “What are your plans now, Jermain?”
“I have none, Your Majesty.”
“Then would you resume your position in Leshiya as King’s Adviser?”
Jermain hesitated. “I’ll . . . think about it,” he said at last.
Eltiron started to reply, then looked at Jermain and stopped. They had not spoken privately since Jermain’s return, and this was not a good time or place for whatever else needed to be said between them. But he had made a beginning, and perhaps that was all he could expect for now.
There was a moment’s silence, then Vandaris looked at Crystalorn. “There’s one thing still bothering me about that fight yesterday. Why did Carachel let himself be distracted like that? He risked his neck to save yours, and from all I’ve heard, that’s just not like him.”
“I don’t care whether it was like him or not,” Crystalorn said. “I could feel the Matholych coming after me, and I knew I couldn’t get away in time, and then I felt Carachel throw his spell. I don’t know why he did it, but I’m glad he did!”
Vandaris did not look away. “It still seems odd to me.”
“It
was
odd,” Eltiron broke in. He had to get Vandaris off this subject. “But since Carachel is dead, we don’t have any way to know his reasons.”
“That may not be precisely correct,” Amberglas said. “But I really wouldn’t recommend that anyone try learning Black Sorcery just to ask Carachel questions that it’s extremely unlikely he’d remember the answers to anyway, particularly since I very much doubt it would make any difference now.”
Vandaris shrugged. “All right, then, let it be.”
If Vandaris had not been watching him, and if the bandages around his chest had not been so tight, Eltiron would have breathed a sigh of relief. He knew why Carachel had helped Crystalorn. He had known since the impossible moment of oneness when the sorcerer had drawn on all his power to save her, and had drawn Eltiron into his mind along with it. Crystalorn was Carachel’s daughter; Carachel had been unshakably certain of it. That was why Crystalorn had been able to feel Carachel’s magic, and the Matholych, and the magic of the Tower of Judgment earlier. How Carachel had seduced the Queen of Barinash, and how he had kept his secret so long, Eltiron neither knew nor wanted to know. His only real concern was to make sure the secret remained a secret, for Crystalorn’s sake.
He saw Vandaris watching him closely, and for a moment he was afraid that she had somehow guessed the direction of his thoughts. Then she said, “Fire and ice storms, you look exhausted as a day-old corpse! Here’s the list we came to give you; Trevannon’s marked the nobles he thinks knew what they were doing when they supported Terrel Lassond. We can discuss it tomorrow or the day after, when you’ve had time to go through it.”
She dropped a folded paper on the table beside Eltiron, then turned to Jermain and Crystalorn. “Come on, we’ve done enough damage for one day.”
Jermain glanced at Eltiron and rose; Crystalorn followed. “A moment, please,” Eltiton said. “I would like the Princess Crystalorn to remain.” He looked at Crystalorn and added, “That is, if you’d be willing to.”
Crystalorn turned and looked at him uncertainly. Vandaris shot him a sharp look, then grinned and took Jermain’s good arm and hauled him along with her, out of the room. Amberglas surveyed first Eltiron and then Crystalorn with an absentminded air that nearly made Eltiron laugh. She nodded once and turned toward the door.