Jude Fisher - Sorcery Rising (Fools Gold, Book 1)

Sorcery Rising

Jude Fisher

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Joy, Dick, Jim, Emma, Mike and Jo for their encouragement on this long road; to Henry Treece, J. R. R. Tolkien and the saga-makers, who started me dreaming; to Viggo and Iceland for ravens, words, and warriors; to sea cliffs, gritstone outcrops, limestone towers and granite domes and the wild places of the world; to Armoricon, Saxon, Treason, Croton Oil, Front Line, and The Holdless Horror for gifting me with a sense of my own mortality and survival; and to Russ, Danny, and Betsy, for the care they take.

CONTENTS

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Prologue

THE day the Master showed him the world was the day Virelai became a man, which was a dangerous thing indeed, and not at all what the mage had intended.

* * *

WHEN the great ice door swung open before him, Virelai experienced a moment of pure terror. He felt the chill air inside reach out for him, as if the pitch-dark heart of the tower room contained a sucking vacuum that might swallow him up forever. Rahe's grim intonation as he ushered him inside"Welcome, Virelai, to my world"had hardly been encouraging, either, for the mage had been acting very strangely of late. Virelai had caught him on numerous occasions setting small firesin the grounds, in the kitchens, and once in his own studyfires which gave off noxious fumes and left behind in their ashes scraps of charred hide and stinking hair; roots and tubers, claws and teeth, and little bits of bone. Which had been alarming, to say the least, since the only other occupants of Sanctuary, to Virelai's sure knowledge, were himself and the Master's familiar, a black cat he called Bte. And things had been disappearing, too: scrolls and parchments, tomes of magic, journals, and notebooks gone from the library; collections of plants and vials taken from the herbarium, torn down in such a hurry that dried leaves and flowers were left scattered on the ground, smashed underfoot along with shards of pottery and dried smears of something that looked suspiciously like blood. And in the curiositar, the chamber in which Rahe kept his most prized objectsrow upon row of specimens (fine crystals, cut and uncut; rocks of every size and shape and hue; ores and metals and gems, all labeled with their names and magical properties; artfully-worked figurines and jewelry, knives and swords, spearheads and arrows, as well as many items mysteriously unnamed and defying any attempt he could make to categorize them) all elegantly arrayed under the thinnest sheets of translucent ice (no doubt to prevent his clumsy apprentice from laying his grubby hands upon them)where there had been the most exquisite order, now there was a chaos of destruction. Nothing, it seemed, had been left intact. The artifacts were broken and twisted; the stones and metals fused together into a horrible, misshapen lump with what must have taken an immense blast of spellcraft. Even the great wired skeleton of a beast that Rahe called the Draco of Farem had been torn asunder and strewn around the chamber as if in a giant's fit of rage. Virelai could only deduce that the Master had caused this terrifying destruction, but to what purpose, he could not imagine. And if the Master had at last gone completely mad, then how long could it be before he began to vent his murderous spleen upon his companions?

So now, as he stood at the dark threshold, panting after the long climb up the narrow, winding stairs, feeling the cold air leeching his body heat away and the hot breath of the mage on the back of his neck, Virelai thought seriously about taking to his heels. But just as he felt the first tremor of his intent to flee run through his thin frame, the Master clicked his fingers and a pale blue fire limned the chamber, revealing the oddest sight Virelai had seen in all his twenty-nine years in this odd place.

In the center of the chamber lay a huge oval bowl of light; and inside it lay what he could only describe as a world. Clouds floated over expanses of blue and green and brownoceans and islands, lakes and continents. Sunshinefrom no source that could be determined from this vantage pointlined the clouds with burnished gold and rose and cast moving shadows over land and sea alike. Virelai gasped. He took a step closer.

"Touch nothing, boy!" Rahe placed a restraining hand on Virelai's shoulder. For once, Virelai did not bridle at the term, so entranced was he by the sight before him. "What magic is this, Master?"

The mage made no reply. Instead he reached beyond his apprentice and pulled on a cord. There was an abrupt change in the light in the chamber, and when Virelai stared up, he saw that a great contraption of levers and pulleys and crystals had been constructed around the open top of the ice tower. Where the sun struck the crystals, prismatic beams shot down at a myriad of angles into the bowl, and as the angles changed, so did the view. And where before there had been oceans and swaths of land seen from the greatest distance, now Virelai found himself staring down into a more intimate landscaperooftops of wood and turf, cows and sheep dotted over steep pastures, people like insects scurrying about their tasks. A gull slid past in a flash of white and involuntarily Virelai shied away.

"The island-kingdom of Eyra," the Master declared. He pulled another lever and the ground swarmed up toward Virelai with dizzying speed. Children ran laughing across a shingle beach, pursuing a small brown dog; women hung washing out on long lines across an enclosure. Boats bobbed in a sheltered harbor.

"And this is the southern continent, wherein lies the Empire of Istria and the great wastes"

Now there was a city of towering stone and hundreds of people in bright clothing milling about its streets; then the light became harsh and bright and a broad sandy vista stretched across the bowl, its braided pattern of dunes undisturbed except for a single line of dark figures trekking across the sands. Another twitch of the levers, and Virelai was stunned to be confronted by an old woman with a white topknot of hair adorned with shells and feathers and a dozen or more silver chains around her thin brown neck. She stared right at him and opened her mouth to say something he could not hear, and then he was whirled away, up into the clouds and over a range of magnificent snowcapped mountains.

"It's beautiful," he whispered, awed. "But I don't understand."

"VirelaiVirreh lai. Think, boy, think. It's Elda." The mage pulled back the focus so that the view became once more a sketch for a world, all abstract shapes and blurred color.

Elda.

Virelai thought suddenly of the maps he had pored over in the studyancient, curled things all brown with age on which had been scrawled ideograms of mountains, crude triangles repeated over and again, little wiggly lines to denote the ocean's waves, abstract patches of brown amid the blue to represent land, the word "Elda" emblazoned in a rayed sun at the top or the center or off to one sideand something clicked in his head. How stupid never to have understood that those flat marks represented anything more than themselves. To think that Sanctuary was all there was.

"Can I go there?" He gazed back at the mage, his face rapt. The Master laughed, not kindly. "Oh, no. I think not. You wouldn't last a minute. Look"

The crystals realigned themselves and there followed another vertiginous descent. At a market, a woman wrung a chicken's neck and reached for the next bird while the first lay flapping disjointedly. In a dark chamber a man lay upon a flaming rack and another applied vile instruments to his flesh. Somewhere elseit was impossible to tell the location, the images changed so swiftlymen fought each other on a blood-soaked field. Virelai watched in horror as a man's arm was sheared off. Another pull of the levers, and now he saw two men hold down a slight figure in a full black robe while a third rent the fabric to reveal pale flesh and a fourth man pushed the writhing figure's legs apart and inserted himself with a grunt. Under a pitiless sun, chained men hacked stone and metal from a gaping hillside, watched over by mounted guards with whips and goads. Virelai stared and stared. He saw a mountain village overrun by soldiers, women and children pierced by spears; a man hanged from a tree; people and animals with their throats cut and shrouded women catching the spurting blood in great dishes; he saw a group of folk adorned like the old women with shells and feathers and silver chains being stoned to death by an angry mob; he saw women burned on pyres and men pinned to masts of wood in the baking heat; then the view changed and he was on a ship far out at sea, watching as a speared whale was hauled in close to the waiting boats and men made the water run red as they hacked it to death.