The Measure of the Magic Read online

  He reached the old cabin while it was still light, the forest surrounding the dilapidated structure thick with biting insects and deep layers of seething heat. It was not a place for the faint of heart or the unwary, but Skeal Eile was neither of these. He cloaked himself in scents to repel the insects and a lifetime of steely resolve to ward off the heat, then walked to the porch and stood waiting.

  This time, the old man did not appear. Instead, Bonnasaint walked out of the house and stood looking down at the Seraphic, his young face beatific and shining with an inner light. I am innocent of all crimes, it seemed to say. I am at peace with who I am.

  Which he probably was, Skeal Eile realized. Madness took many different forms.

  “Your Eminence,” the boy greeted him, bowing low at the waist, extending his arms. “What service can I perform for you?”

  “Do you remember the boy and girl whom I sent you to find in the city of Arborlon some weeks back?”

  “Of course.”

  “You failed in your efforts on that occasion, but chance and circumstance present a fresh opportunity. What do you say?”

  The boy smiled, his smooth face wrinkling only slightly. “I welcome fresh opportunity. In which direction does it point?”

  Skeal Eile hated looking up at the boy like this, but he didn’t want to let him know that this was a problem. Nevertheless, he climbed the steps and stood next to the other, addressing him at eye level. “It points in the same direction as before. But time is your ally on this occasion, if you make good use of it. The boy sleeps this night. You can track him when he wakes and slip ahead to set an ambush. He says he goes one way, but I am not sure he can be trusted. So you will have to discover the truth of things. Can you do that?”

  “If it pleases you, I can do anything.” Bonnasaint paused. “The task given me is the same? Both the boy and the girl are a problem?”

  “The girl is no longer with the boy,” the Seraphic advised, wondering as he did why that was so. It was his impression that the two were inseparable. He wondered momentarily what had happened to the girl, and then brushed the matter aside. “The boy is who I am interested in. I don’t want to see him anymore. Not here or anywhere. I don’t want anyone to see him ever again, and I don’t want any part of him ever found.”

  Bonnasaint cocked his head. “Not even the smallest bit of fingernail or sliver of skin? Not even the whisper of his last scream or the smell of his warm blood as it drains from his body?” When he saw there was to be no reaction from the Seraphic, he shrugged. “Consider it done.”

  “I considered it done the last time I sent you out. This time I will reserve judgment on your success until I hear it from you firsthand.”

  “Fair enough, Your Eminence.”

  The boy bowed low, but Skeal Eile stopped him midway with a soft touch on one shoulder.

  “Bonnasaint,” he whispered, and waited for the other to look up at him. “Don’t fail me.”

  WHEN PANTERRA QU FINALLY CAME AWAKE in the slow, dream-time hours that precede dawn, he was so disoriented that for a moment he couldn’t remember where he was. But then he recognized the feel of his bed and knew he was in his own home for the first time in weeks. He lay where he was, pulling together the tattered threads of his memories of the past three days. It took time and effort to do so. Nothing came easily; each step was slow and painful. Even Sider Ament’s death was a reality he could not seem to come to grips with, an event that had the consistency of smoke and lacked anything of substance.

  Even what he had become, the new bearer of the black staff, had the feel of a dream.

  Eventually, he sat up and looked around. The windows were curtained over, and where small gaps allowed hints of a lesser darkness without he could tell the moon and stars were clouded over. Even the lights of the village were so faint that they were almost not there. He waited for his eyes to adjust. He had no idea what time it was, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that he had slept, was rested, and could set out for whatever destination he chose.

  And that was the problem, wasn’t it? Where would he go, now that he had to make a choice?

  He climbed from his bed and walked to the living area and kitchen, suddenly hungry. He had slept for at least twelve hours; he was certain of that much. Long enough that some of the aches and pains and most of the exhaustion had vanished. His body was still tender here and there, but whatever discomfort remained would dissipate once he had begun his journey. He could set out as soon as he had eaten.

  And go where? To find Prue or help Phryne?

  He could stall his decision by starting north toward Aphalion, since Phryne was imprisoned in Arborlon and Prue was likely somewhere on the other side of the pass. Once upon a time, he had hoped Sider might bring Prue back to him by way of Declan Reach. But he had waited in vain for that to happen, and now he couldn’t be sure where she was or what had become of her. The difficult task of finding her himself lay ahead, and its resolution might well turn out to be unpleasant.

  Carrying a candle, he sat himself down at the tiny kitchen table and made a meal of cold meat, bread, and fruit he had scavenged from the larder of the Tracker quarters on his way home. It was not nearly enough to sustain him for long, but all he could manage. He would find something else along the way, stopping at homes where people might feed him. It occurred to him Sider must have lived like this, seeking aid and sustenance when and where he could find it. It wasn’t so different, really, from how he lived as a Tracker. There were supplies at the beginning of his long patrols, but sooner or later he always had to scavenge or hunt for what he needed. He knew how to do that. Every Tracker did.

  He had finished eating, the remnants of his meal cleaned up and put away, his bed made for his leaving and his backpack and its contents laid out atop it, when he heard the front door open. He was standing in the bedroom and could not see who entered. He picked up the candle where he had placed it on the table by his bedside, reached for the black staff, and walked back out into the living area.

  A solitary figure stood in the darkness of the open doorway facing him. He stared, a premonition rippling through him like a chill. For just an instant, he thought it was …

  “Pan?”

  He felt his throat tighten. It couldn’t be. He advanced on the speaker quickly, needing to get closer, needing to be sure he was not mistaken.

  He wasn’t. In the dim glow of the candlelight, he could see her face clearly.

  It was Prue.

  She had come back to him.

  But something about her was wrong. He held the candle higher, illuminating her face, and he saw what it was. Her eyes were a milky white, empty of light and color, fixed and staring.

  She was blind.

  WHEN THE LIGHT ENVELOPED PRUE LISS AND everything around her disappeared in its brilliant glow, she did not panic. She was fifteen, but she had been trained well enough as a Tracker to stay calm when faced with the unfamiliar and potentially dangerous. She couldn’t know what was happening to her; nothing in her life experience had prepared her for this. But what she did know was that—whatever it was—it had saved her from that old man who had hunted her through Deladion Inch’s fortress lair. That was good enough for her. It might be a different kind of dangerous, but it couldn’t be worse than what she had just escaped.

  If she had escaped, she added quickly. She didn’t know for sure that she had. She didn’t know where she was. She might even still be trapped somewhere in the complex.

  But she didn’t move, even when the light died and she was left in complete darkness. She sat very still on the hard surface on which she had been deposited, smelling the air, listening for sounds. Her intuition hadn’t flared up in warning; apparently, no danger threatened her. Though she couldn’t be sure of that either—not after the way her instincts had failed her already during the past few weeks. Three times, at least, that she could count. She had been so sure of those instincts once. But that was a long time ago, and everything had changed. What was th
en so reliable was now tinged with uncertainty. Sometimes her instincts worked and sometimes they didn’t, and she no longer knew if they would react to warn her or remain dormant.

  On this occasion, there were no sounds, smells, tastes, or hints of movement in the blackness. She had only herself for company in an impenetrable void.

  She forced herself to breathe slowly and evenly, to keep quiet and wait for the light’s source to reveal itself. Sooner or later, she sensed, it would appear to her.

  When it finally did, she was caught by surprise. A pinprick of light appeared in the distance, so impossibly far away that it felt to her as if it were miles off. Very slowly, it drew closer, working its way ahead steadily through the darkness, and her surroundings began to brighten in response. She saw that she was no longer in the fortress, but had been spirited away to somewhere else entirely. She was sitting on a patch of hard earth at the edge of gardens that spread away from her toward the approaching light, a vast rainbow of flowers that grew from bushes, beds, and vines amid carefully tended greenery of all shapes and sizes. The flowers seemed to bloom right in front of her as their petals were touched by the light, brightening as the intensity of the light grew, stretching out their slender stems in response.

  She rose, wanting to be on her feet when whatever was coming reached her. She could feel her heart beating, and she felt oddly lightheaded. A sense of wonder enveloped her, and she sensed that this was a transformative moment, life altering and wondrous in a way she had never experienced. She couldn’t have said how she knew this, but it was irrefutable. Something important was about to happen, and she knew she would never again experience its like.

  The light was very close now, and she could see that it emanated from one end of a strange metal cylinder gripped by the hand of its bearer. Yet even though the light was directed, it seemed diffuse and all-encompassing, spreading out in ways she had never witnessed, brightening a world that only moments before had been dark.

  “Good day, Prue,” the bearer of the light greeted her.

  It was a man of indeterminate age, neither young nor old, but some part of both. His features were unremarkable, his size and build and weight average, his voice quiet and soft around the edges. He was wearing robes that were white and silver, garments meant not for common use but ceremonial occasions. It did not seem wrong or unusual to find him wearing such garments; instead, it felt perfectly natural, although Prue could not have said why.

  “Hello,” she said. And then added, “Are you the one who brought me here?”

  “I am,” he replied. “Do you like my gardens?”

  “I do,” she said. “They make me feel safe.”

  It made him smile, which in turn caused her to smile in response. “They are my home,” he said. “I tend them, and in turn they tend me. Here, all is in balance, a harmony that is lacking in so many other places. Do you know who I am, Prue?”

  Amazingly, she did. She knew it instinctively. “You’re the King of the Silver River,” she said. “The legend of the Hawk speaks of you. You are an ally of the Word and a child of the Land, they say. My mother told me of you.”

  “I am what they say, but mostly I am things that no one knows. Secret things. I was a Faerie creature once, in a time long ago. I was caretaker of the old world, of the world that disappeared when the Faerie folk gave way to the coming of Man and everything changed. My space has become much smaller since then, a fraction and no more of what once was given to me. I keep it hidden now from all, but it is still here, part of a better time and better world.”

  She looked past him to the gardens. “Your flowers are beautiful. They seem to grow everywhere, as if the gardens never end.”

  “In one sense, they don’t. When you walk within them, there are no boundaries. You cannot leave or become lost or reach a point where you can see what lies beyond them. Would you like to visit them? Will you walk with me?”

  He reached for her hand, which she gave to him willingly, and he led her away from where they had been talking and into the gardens. Once there, they strolled down pathways formed of flat stones here and crushed rock there, of mossy earth and deep grasses. Hedgerows bracketed their passage at one point; vines grown thick on trelliswork shadowed their quiet walk at another. All around, the vast sweep of the flower beds formed blankets of color that radiated in a sudden wash of sunlight, their myriad scents filling the air.

  “This must take an awful lot of work,” Prue said to him finally, unable to conceive of how he could manage.

  “It takes everything I’ve got to offer, but not more than I wish to give.” He pointed. “See the rainbows formed by the sunlight reflecting off the moisture from the dew? There, where the scarlet and gold meet? I cannot imagine life without gardens. Can you?”

  The way he said it told her he already knew the answer. There were flower beds and gardens in her world, but nothing like this. Mostly there were only the forests, meadows, and rocky heights of the mountain peaks, and for her people beauty such as she saw here was solely the province of the imagination.

  “The legends say you were alive at the beginning of things when the old world was born,” she said. “That would make you very old. But you don’t look old.”

  “I don’t always look the same. This is how I look to you, but to others I look different.”

  She studied him a moment. “Am I safe here? Are you going to send me back?”

  He seemed to consider. “You are safe for now, but I am going to have to send you back at some point. Although I won’t send you back to where I found you.”

  “I’m not anywhere close to where I was, am I? Or even close to the same country?”

  “You are nowhere anyone can reach you. The boy Hawk was here once, a long time ago. He walked these gardens, too. He talked with me as I am talking to you. He asked questions of me, and I gave him what answers I could.” He glanced over at her. “Just as I will give you what answers I can.”

  They walked side by side for a few minutes, saying nothing, the man and the girl, surrounded by a profusion of colors and smells and a sense of peace. Birds flew past in bright bursts of color, and insects buzzed and hummed from within the cool, shadowed depths of the greenery.

  “You saved me from that old man for a reason,” she said, making it a statement of fact.

  “That old man is a demon come out of the ruins of the Great Wars, a creature of vast and terrible appetite, a beast with a singular vision. It lives for only one reason—to destroy all those who bear the black staff. It thought for many years that it had done so, that all of them were gone. It wandered the wastelands of the old world, seeking out any it might have missed, without success. There were none to be found. Then, one day, not so long ago, it had a dream of such a bearer—a dream that came to it unbidden and was fostered by its preternatural instincts. It sensed the presence of the Word’s magic and the nature of its source. A man who wielded such magic had ventured outside a valley that had once been hidden and no longer was. It caught a whiff of both, nothing more, but that was enough. The demon knew its hunt was not ended.”

  The King of the Silver River gestured toward a stone bench that was settled in a small circular clearing in the middle of the pathway. They walked to the bench and sat down together.

  “There were others of its kind once, hunters of Knights of the Word. This demon may be the last. Do you know of the man it hunts? Have you met him?”

  She nodded. “His name is Sider Ament. He bears a staff that was carried into my valley homeland five centuries ago by one of two Knights of the Word who came there with my ancestors.”

  “Do you know, as well, of your own heritage as a child of the Ghosts, one who was a companion of the boy Hawk and came with him into the valley?”

  She shrugged. “It was a rumor in my family history, but I did not know for sure. So is it true? Am I a direct descendant, and has the magic come to me through the girl Candle?”

  He spread his hands on his knees and studied her face. �
�All true. You have Candle’s magic in your blood, passed down to you through the generations. Some of your ancestors had use of it, some didn’t. You do. But it is a fragile gift, and it does not always serve its user successfully. It is quite unpredictable. You must have noticed.”

  “It warns when danger threatens either me or those around me. It tells me when to be careful or turn back or do something to avoid what might otherwise happen.” She paused. “But you’re right. Sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes it fails to warn me of anything. Then I am at risk—as are those who depend on me. Was it like that for Candle, too?”

  The King of the Silver River nodded. “It was. Too much so. It almost killed her. Not only her, but others, too. The boy Hawk almost lost his life because of her inability to control the magic. But that is its nature. Magic works differently for different people, and there is no way of knowing how it will respond. Even those who have used it repeatedly and come to rely on it have found that it can abandon them.”

  She wrinkled her forehead in thought and brushed at her red hair. “Do you know why that happens?”

  He shook his head. “Mostly, we have to accept it as it is.” He paused. “But there is something I can do about your specific problem.”

  She looked at him hopefully. “Do you have that kind of power? Could you make it predictable? Could you make it do what it’s supposed to do and warn me when I’m in danger? Or if Pan is in danger when he’s with me? I can’t help him otherwise, and I have to help him. He needs me to help him.”

  “Panterra Qu. Your best friend since you both were small. He’s very important to you, isn’t he?”

  She nodded quickly. “More important than anything.”

  “Did you know that he now carries the black staff? That he has become the bearer whom the demon hunts and seeks to destroy?”

  She went pale. “Why would Pan be carrying the black staff? It belongs to Sider.”

  “Sider Ament is dead, killed just outside the walls of your valley. He was hunting the Drouj who betrayed you, the one you believed was your friend.”