Secret Of The Sixth Magic m-2

  Secret Of The Sixth Magic

  ( Magics - 2 )

  Lyndon Hardy

  Lyndon Hardy

  Secret Of The Sixth Magic

  PART ONE

  Robe of the Master

  CHAPTER ONE

  A Matter of Style

  JEMIDON'S pulse quickened as he stepped from the creaking gangplank onto the firmness of the pier. Finally, he had arrived at Morgana, the isle of sorcery. He must have scanned a hundred scrolls to make ready, but he felt as uncomfortable as if he were totally unprepared. And this time, unprepared he dared not be.

  As the other passengers disembarked from the skiff and jostled past, Jemidon drew his scholar's cape tight against the onshore breeze. His hair was raven-black, combed back straight above a square and unlined face. With deep-set green eyes, he scrutinized whatever he saw, seeming to bore beneath the surface to discover the secret of what lay within. He had the broad shoulders of a smith, but pale skin and smooth palms marked him as one who did not toil in the sun. Although the purse at his belt bulged with a respectable thickness, his brown jerkin and leggings were threadbare and plain. Around his neck on a leather thong hung a smooth disk of gold, the features of the old king long since worn away.

  At the end of the planking, Jemidon saw a brightly painted gatehouse, guarded by two men-at-arms who collected a copper from each one who passed. On either side, all around the small harbor, rough-beamed buildings crowded the shoreline and extended precariously over the water on makeshift piers. Warehouses and property barns, canvas mills and costume shops, tackle forges and mirror silveries, and all the services for both the sea and the inland mingled in disarray.

  In the bay, three ships lay at anchor; from each, a procession of small boats shuttled men and cargo to the shore. The land rose sharply behind the harbor, first to a wide ledge and then into a jumble of heavily vegetated hills and valleys that Jemidon knew hid the lairs of the sorcerers. He dug into his purse for a coin. With a mixture of reluctance and anticipation, he joined the end of the line paying the landing fee.

  "Which path to the hut of Farnel the master?" he asked the guards as he dropped his coppper into the pot. "I see there are many trails up into the interior, and he is the one whom I must find."

  The guard on the left shook out of his bored lethargy. "All visitors are confined to the shorelands," he said, "lord and bondsman alike. Stay among the houses of the harbor or on the path that runs from the bazaar to the keep. The hills are for the masters and tyros only." He paused and stared at Jemidon. "For your own protection, they are forbidden."

  Jemidon frowned back and clutched at the coin around his neck, running his thumb and fingers over the smooth surfaces. Too much was at stake to be impeded by petty restrictions. Too many years already had been wasted.

  "Then how does one meet a master?" he asked carefully, trying to remove all emotion from his voice. Somehow it was important that no one else knew the significance of what he sought. If, by some unthinkable chance, he failed once again, failed for the final time, he wanted no mocking smiles and whispered sniggers when he returned to the harbor to sail away. "How do I engage Farnel in conversation? Talk to him long enough so that I might present a proposition that is to our mutual benefit?"

  The second guard looked up from his tally sheet and laughed. "To come eye to eye with a sorcerer other than in the presentation hall is not something that most would wish."

  Jemidon tightened the grip on his coin.'"Nevertheless, I must," he said.

  "Then wait near the entrance to the hall." The guard shrugged. "Wait in the hope that Farnel decides to come out of the hills this year and give a performance. He is less likely than most, but it would be your only chance with safety. Along the shore, all of the masters have sworn to cast their illusions from the stage and nowhere else."

  "But it is for the very fact that he has stopped entering the competitions that I have chosen Farnel," Jemidon said. "If he presents alone, then he might have no need for what I can offer as a tyro."

  Another skiff banged into the pier, and the guards' faces warped in annoyance. One returned his attention to completing the tally sheet and the other motioned Jemidon on through the gate before the onset of the next arrivals.

  Jemidon started to ask more, but then thought better of it. He turned to follow the rest of his landing party through the gatehouse and onto the beach. In a slow-moving queue, he crossed the narrow stretch of sand and climbed the wooden steps placed in the hillside. Several tedious minutes later, he reached the broad ledge, some ten times the height of a man above the level of the sea.

  The native rock of the ledge was covered with a bed of crushed white stone that led away in two directions. To the south, the path angled around the bend of the island to where Jemidon knew the keep and presentation hall for the lords stood. To the north, the trail ended abruptly against a cliff of granite that thrust into the still waters of the bay.

  On the beach at its foot stood the bondsman bazaar. Two wavy rows of tents stretched across the sand. Some were grandiose and gaudy with panels of bright colors supported by three or four poles, but others were no more than awnings covering rough podiums, counters, and simple frames. The path between the tents was deserted and the cries of the hawkers silent. Nightfall was still six hours away. In the distance, beyond the bazaar, the hazy outline of mainland Arcadia could just barely be seen.

  After looking about for a moment to get their bearings, most of the landing party headed south, carrying goods and trinkets. The rest soon disappeared around the curve to the north, chattering excitedly about last year's glamours and what had caught the fancy of the high prince. Jemidon paused for a moment, deciding which way to go, then finally started in the direction of the presentation hall, but more slowly than those who preceded him.

  The advice of the guard was not at all what he had wanted to hear. Waiting for Farnel could take the rest of the season, if the man came down from the hills at all. Convincing the sorcerer to accept him as tyro immediately had been what Jemidon had hoped to accomplish.

  As tyro to a sorcerer, he would study cantrips and enchantments rather than incantations, formulas, ritual, or flame. And then, when the instruction was complete, he would become at last a master, to fulfill what had to be his destiny, to make amends to his dead sister, and finally to cleanse away his guilt-to end at last the quest that had started almost as far back as he could remember.

  Jemidon's thoughts tumbled as the rock crunched beneath his tread with a hypnotic cadence. He had been precocious as a child, solver of riddles, puzzle maker, and lightning-fast at sums. He would have a choice of crafts, his father had boasted, possibly even give the archmage a challenge or two. He was the gleam of hope for the family, the way out from the oppressive toil of the wheat-lands to lives of their own.

  But when the time for testing had come, he had failed at thaumaturgy, the most straightforward and least complex of the arts. And the less remembered about his trials the better.

  Then, four years later, when a traveling apothecary came through the village, he had a chance to see if alchemy was his match. For thirty-two months he toiled, scrubbing glassware, digging roots, and grinding powders, just for the chance to try a simple formula from a common grimoire.

  There was always an element of chance with alchemy, as everyone knew. No activation could be expected to succeed at each and every attempt. But after a dozen failures with a formula that usually worked nine times out of ten, he was booted out in a shower of hard words about wasted materials and improper preparation.

  For two years more he wandered the inland seas, finally taking up a neophyte position at a small magic guild.

  The precision and symbolism of magi
c ritual appealed to the bent of his mind. But after he tripped over a tripod and hit a gong one time too many, the masters shunned his aid in the costly and time-consuming rituals that provided the guild its wealth. Without the practice, he languished while others moved with certainty into the deeper mysteries of the art.

  He ventured to the south, hunting for a wizard and the secrets that held sprites and devils in thrall. But after a year of defocusing his eyes on a flame, trying to penetrate a barrier that was tissue-thin, he gave up in disgust.

  For each of the arts he had tried, he had been sure that he had the aptitude. He had been quick to learn and he found the theory easy, easier than to many others who had started much earlier than he. Each time, hope had blossomed anew that he had at last attained his craft. But somehow the practice escaped him; when it came time to perform the spells, to implement what he had learned, he had been strangely clumsy and unsure. With a string of mumbled incantations, formulas that went awry, imprecise rituals, and missed connections through the flame, he found he could not exercise any of the four crafts. For none was he suited.

  And now he sought to try sorcery, the craft that required the greatest understanding of one's inherent capabilities and limitations. Sorcery was the only art that was left-his last chance to become a master.

  If one wanted to study sorcery, then Morgana was obviously where he should come. Nowhere else was the craft of illusion practiced so freely. Nowhere else could Jemidon receive so much instruction in so little time. And by looking through the popular broadsides as well as the arcane scrolls, he had deduced which master more than any other would need what he had to offer-if only he could get to Farnel before it was too late to prepare for this year's competition.

  Jemidon stopped his slow pacing. The pathway was totally quiet. Those up ahead were not to be seen. Evidently all of the skiffload behind him had gone to the bazaar. No one else was on the trail, and the flanks of the hills cut the gatehouse from his line of sight. He looked at the beckoning dirt path directly to the left of where he had stopped, a path that wandered away from the bed of crushed stone up into the notch between two cliffs.

  "Without risk, there is little reward," he muttered aloud as he made up his mind. "Master Farnel will have a visitor, even if he chooses to spend the entire season away from the hall," Without looking back, he clambered up the path.

  The stubby shadows of midday grew into the slender spires of evening while Jemidon followed the random patchwork of paths through the hills. He encountered no one, and the signposts were few and well weathered. It took him many hours to find the one that pointed in the direction of Farnel's hut.

  The sun slid toward the jagged horizon as Jemidon climbed the last few lengths to his goal. As he did, he gradually became aware of angry voices from some point farther up the trail. His view in front was blocked by a boulder tumbled onto the path and resting in a litter of smaller stones and snapped branches. The scruffy underbrush on the hill face to the left bore a slashing vertical scar that marked the huge rock's passage. The rise on the right was not nearly as steep, but the vegetation was sparser, with stunted trunks and tiny leaves growing from fissures in a monolithic slab of rock.

  Cautiously, Jemidon approached the barrier and squeezed between the dislodged boulder and the adjacent hillside. As he peeked up the trail, he saw a group of youths surrounding two older and taller men who alternately waved their arms and pounded their fists to emphasize the words they were hurling at each other.

  The encircling band all wore simple robes of brown, the mark of the tyro, and the two they surrounded were dressed in master's black. On one of the masters, the logo of the sorcerer's eye was old and faded. The other's emblem sparkled with embroidered gold. Behind them all stood a small structure of rough-hewn planks. Thin sheets of mica filled lopsided window frames, and a curl of smoke snaked from the top of a mud-brick chimney on the side.

  Farnel's hut, Jemidon thought excitedly, and the master is probably one of the two who are arguing in front. He had done far better than waiting at the hall. Slowly he crept closer to determine the best moment to speak out. As he did, the others paid him no heed; they were totally engrossed in the loud conversation.

  The more plainly dressed master growled with a husky voice. His face was rough and deeply wrinkled, like crumpled paper. A fringe of white circled his bald crown. Age should have bent his back and stooped his shoulders, but he stood straight as a lance, refusing to yield as a matter of principle.

  "Simple thrills and no more," he snorted. ''Pockmarked monsters, bared bosoms, spurting gore. Your productions are all alike, Gerilac. A moment of sudden shock and then they are done. Hardly anything of substance to add to the legacy of the craft."

  "Like your renditions, I suppose," Gerilac answered. "With colors so mute that even the tyros fall asleep." He stroked his precisely trimmed goatee and smoothed his shoulder-length hair into place. On the mainland he could have walked in the company of the lords and none would have noticed. "By the laws, Farnel, it is well that the rest pay your antiquated theories only polite notice. If all were to follow your lead, the rich purses from the mainland would have stopped coming long ago. No one chooses to pay a sorcerer who is a bore."

  "But it is not art," Farnel shot back. "We do only cartoons of what was performed a decade ago. In another, stick figures jerking around the hall will capture the accolade."

  "And how valuable is this art of yours?" Gerilac fingered Farnel's robe. "Sewing your own mends. Rationing your meals between the private charms in the off season and the charities of your peers. Compare that with the elegance of my chambers and the number of tyros at my beck and call. I have won the supreme accolade for the last three years running, while you enter no productions at all. Is it because you choose not to compete, or perhaps because you cannot, even if you tried?"

  "I was first among the masters of Morgana long before you earned your robe," Farnel growled. "If you doubt it, look me in the eye. I will stand with you in the chanting well in any season."

  "Strike out again and Canthor and his men-at-arms will see that you spend more than a single night in the keep." Gerilac hastily flung his arm across his face. "You know the agreement among the masters. And lack of control is bad for the reputation of the island and the traffic from the mainland that rides with it."

  "Drop your arm, Gerilac. Another few nights on a cold slab just might be worth it."

  "Farnel, Master Farnel!" Jemidon called out suddenly. "You are the one I seek."

  The sorcerers stopped abruptly. All eyes turned to see who was responsible for the interruption. One of the tyros, older than the rest, tugged another on the sleeve.

  "Get Canthor," he said.

  The second nodded and bolted from the circle. In an instant, he disappeared around the next bend in the trail. Jemidon watched him go, pushing away the upwelling of last-minute doubt. He set his jaw and stepped forward boldly. Speaking to Farnel without a large audience would have been better, but he must seize the opportunity when it presented itself.

  For a moment the others watched him advance. Then the ring of brown robes dissolved and regrouped in a line between him and the sorcerers.

  "I am Erid, lead tyro of master Gerilac." The one in the center pointed a thumb to his chest. "And my master does not take kindly to interruption." He paused for a moment and then leered a crooked smile. "For my own part, however, I welcome the opportunity, before the bailiff comes to snatch you away."

  "My dealings are with master Farnel," Jemidon said. "A tyro will not do."

  "You should have heeded the warnings and stayed within the confines of the harbor," Erid said. "Here in the hills, we practice glamours of our own choosing." His smile broadened. "Even if you have a taste for art, you might find the experience somewhat, shall we say, disconcerting."

  Laughter raced across the line, and menacing smiles settled on the tyros' faces. Jemidon squared his shoulders and straightened to full height. He was five years older than any of the youths,
but several stood a full head higher.

  "My intent is not to provoke," he said slowly. "And I did not come to be the subject of your experimentation."

  "Then your prowess is remarkable indeed," another of the tyros said. "Tell us how you plan not to look one of us in the eye or keep your ears always protected against a whisper."

  "Enough. Leave him be," Farnel cut in. "You do your master no credit and waste what is most precious besides. Your talent should be channeled toward pleasing the moneyed lord, not baiting a bondsman who wanders away from the bazaar."

  "I am no bondsman," Jemidon said. "I am free to study what I choose. And my knowledge of the lore of Arcadia, the sagas of Procolon across the sea, and the chants of the savage northmen can be of great value to you. Let me speak more of my merit and you will be convinced."

  "I am indeed the master you seek," Farnel said. "But I see not merit but folly in one who wanders here alone. It is true that all the masters of Morgana strive to dispel the reputation of fear that sorcery enjoys elsewhere. Indeed, the livelihood of our small island depends upon it. The lords of the mainland would not come and pay good gold for our entertainments if there was a hint of greater risk involved. But our craft must be experimentally manipulated as well. Only near the harbor have we forsworn all glamours; only in the presentation hall do we enchant with consent. Here in our private retreats, one can rely only on the good judgment of whomever he encounters. The tyros cannot be kept under constant watch to ensure that they stay within the bounds of prudence.

  "And your luck today was not the best." Farnel turned and cast a frown back at his peer. "You may be noted for your prizes, Gerilac, but your students in particular set no standards by their conduct."

  "An easy thought for one who has no tyros of his own." Gerilac flicked some dust from his rich velvet. "Although with no accolades in a decade, not even a minor mark of merit, one can understand why there would be none."