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  And without another word, the mage padded in bare feet to the staircase and up it. Kordas turned to Hakkon. “Did you know anything about this?” he asked incredulously.

  “Well, obviously I’ve known he’s been working non-stop on this since your father’s time,” Hakkon pointed out. “But no, I had no idea he’d . . .” Hakkon paused as the enormity of it all hit him. “By Klathor’s Axe. He did it, didn’t he? He really went and did it!” Hakkon’s eyes widened and a wicked grin spread over his face. “We’re going to be able to do this! We’re going to get out of this place!”

  “Slow up, old friend. Not without a lot of planning and a hell of a lot of secrecy,” Kordas pointed out. “In fact—” and now the enormity of the task that faced them hit him. “The work we’ve been doing all these years is nothing compared to the work that’s ahead of us.”

  “But now we know the goal is provably possible,” Hakkon pointed out.

  He nodded. Now we can see it, not just dream about it.

  “I’m going to go check on the warehouses,” he said. “And then I need to get someone with a better head for math than I have to tell me how many thousand more hulls we’re going to need. This . . .” He scratched his head. “ . . . is going to take a lot of whiles. But first, let’s go talk to the Circle.”

  Hakkon groaned. “Not those old coots! Kordas, they’re half drunk and all crazy!”

  “They’re not as drunk or as crazy as you think they are, though they’d like you to think that,” he retorted, and led the way down the stairs again.

  The “Circle,” as they liked to be called, were six incredibly old mages who all lived in the same tower. They looked and acted today exactly the same as they had looked and acted when Kordas had first been old enough to notice them, and Hakkon had confirmed that they had looked and acted that way when he had first arrived. For all Kordas could tell, they’d been here since his grandfather’s day. When they were not asleep, they gathered in a comfortable room at the base of their tower, sitting on the floor on enormous cushions stuffed with buckwheat hulls or crushed nut shells that had molded over time to exactly fit the shapes of their skinny behinds and backs, positioned just out of slapping range of each other. Pages brought them their meals and wine. Mostly wine—although Kordas had done some discreet monitoring, and had discovered that they didn’t drink nearly as much as people assumed, or that they would like people to assume. They all went by single names—if they had last names, no one here at the manor still knew what they were. Ponu, Dole, Wis, Koto, Ceri, and Sai.

  They never seemed to actually do anything. They certainly didn’t seem to use their magical workrooms in the tower. Mostly they sat in their circle and gossiped about—well, everything. As a child, Kordas had sometimes snuck into their room to listen quietly, and somehow they seemed to know literally everything that was going on, not only in the Duchy, not only in the neighboring holdings, but even in the Emperor’s own Court.

  Most people dismissed them as senile and crazy. “Why do you keep them around, Father?” Kordas had once asked. Kordas’s father had actually gotten down to Kordas’s level so he could look his son straight in the eyes.

  “First, they have nowhere else to go that is safe for them,” he’d said, carefully. “The Emperor would use up their last years in a heartbeat if he got hold of them. But second—just because you don’t see them working, doing magic like Jonaton and the others do, it doesn’t mean they are doing nothing. If you ask the right question, if they know something they think you need to know, or if there is danger to the Duchy and us, listen to them, and they’ll tell you things worth knowing. It’s when they stare directly at you and point fingers that you had better listen carefully. They’re each wise, but put together, they’re more wise than just six people.”

  He hadn’t needed to consult them very often, but when he did . . . in between the insults and the in-jokes he didn’t understand, he discovered that his father had been right.

  “By the way, how much do you know about Jonaton’s larcenous side?” he asked as they went down the stairs.

  Hakkon coughed uncomfortably. “Uh, well . . . yes. That Snatch-Portal he talks about ‘hypothetically’ making? He already does it, when there’s something he needs. He just opens it to the marketplace, looks around to see if what he wants is there, and helps himself. Oh, it’s never anything big or expensive!” he hastened to add. “And I have finally gotten him to leave payment for what he takes! But . . . aye.” Hakkon sighed heavily. “‘Light-fingered’ is putting it mildly.”

  “Hrm. My parents told me they rescued him from a mob that was chasing him because he was wearing women’s clothing. How much of that chasing was because of what he was wearing, and how much of it was because he’d helped himself to something that wasn’t his?” Kordas wondered out loud. “Stolen dress, you reckon?”

  Hakkon snickered.

  “We’ll probably never know. He says that when he needs something immediately, he doesn’t see anything wrong with taking something that someone isn’t at that moment using.” Kordas looked over his shoulder at his cousin, to see if Hakkon was serious. It appeared that he was.

  “Well . . . that’s an original way of looking at things.”

  Hakkon shrugged. “Mages. They’re all at least a little bizarre.”

  “I—am a mage, you know,” Kordas objected.

  Hakkon grinned, a grin that said more clearly than words, Yes, I do know.

  By that time they were on the ground floor and nearly at the Circle’s tower. “The way I see it, it doesn’t matter too much if someone is ‘eccentric’ or ‘bug-jumpy moon-touched,’” Kordas stated firmly. “It matters if they’re functional. People can be any kind of weird as long as they aren’t harming anyone. Hells, that makes them victorious—that’s their truth, they get to live it.”

  “Glad you’re the Duke,” Hakkon answered. “I’d never have assembled a house like yours. I’d have frustrated the lot of ’em, and not seen their value like you do.”

  Kordas quipped, “We mages all have our spins off the beam, Hakkon,” and took a few moments to lean with his back to the hardwood inlay of the paneling. “I couldn’t really feel happy until I accepted what I’m made of, so now I play to it. My truth is that I’m opportunistic, I’m a little deceptive, and I love picking out the value hidden in what others ignore. I can’t seem to turn it off.” Kordas paused a moment, and said more softly, “You made me feel safe enough to figure that out.”

  Hakkon just replied with a silent nod.

  “Not every future mage gets to be raised as a good person. I got lucky,” the Duke concluded. He reached for the loose latch of the sub-door, and rattled it to announce visitors were coming. “Brace yourself. For pipe smoke and wine fumes, if nothing else,” Kordas said, as much to himself as to Hakkon. “Here we go.”

  4

  Things had warmed up this morning, and all the windows in this lowest room of the tower were wide open—with cheesecloth screens in them to keep out the bugs. The scent of wine was in the air, matched by the scent of the daylilies at the foot of the tower just outside the windows. As Kordas had expected, the six old men were at their usual positions, parked in their peculiar cushion-chairs, finishing the remains of their breakfast and starting on their first pitchers of wine. Each of them was a different shade of brown in skin, from river-water to deep as tree-bark. Each had a low table before him, strewn with writing instruments and papers.

  “Well, look who’s here!” Ponu cackled; since he was facing the door, he was the first to see them enter. “The lord of the manor himself! Nice of you to drop by to see if we’re dead yet!” Ponu was probably the oldest of the six; he hadn’t a hair on his head, and only one or two sprouting from a mole on his chin. All six of them wore the same things every day—fresh, clean, natural-colored linen trews and loose, wrapped shirts tied with broad linen sashes. Well, they wore those things when the weather
was warm. When it was cold, they were all shapeless bundles of blankets, from which a hand would emerge from time to time to reach for a wine-cup or a nice morsel. “Let’s have a roll call. Anyone who’s dead today, raise your hand, so he knows.”

  “Be nice to the boy, Ponu,” admonished Dole, who had an impressive crop of curly gray hair down to his shoulders, and an equally impressive nose. “When has he ever pestered us for anything?”

  “He doesn’t know what to pester us for,” taunted Wis, whose otherwise bald head sported a long, white braid at the top that coiled on the floor behind his cushion. Wis cocked an eyebrow at Kordas. “Do ya, little man?”

  Koto snorted, and continued to play with a cat’s-cradle. “He knows more than he tells. Plays things close to the skin, that one.” Koto’s head was not just bald, it was shiny, and very, very round. It looked odd on his stick figure, like he was a twig doll with a ball for a head.

  Ceri and Sai were known to be brothers, and were suspected to be twins, although they wouldn’t say one way or another. They were both stern-looking, usually silent, with massive white eyebrows and long, straight white hair. Ceri wore his in a tail on the top of his head, Sai wore his unbound and combed until it looked like a fall of ice. They both looked at Kordas and grunted.

  Kordas didn’t have a hat to pull off, but if he had, he would have done so. He walked to the center of the circle with Hakkon in tow. “Actually, I’ve come to ask you about some history. I only know a little, and Hakkon doesn’t know any of it.”

  “Oh. History.” That was Sai speaking for the first time. “I suppose you think we’re millennia old.”

  “I think you are millennia wise, actually,” said Kordas, which drew appreciative cackles from all six. “And that’s exactly the age of things that I’d like you to tell us about.”

  “Oh, the puppies want to know about the Great Mage War, do they?” asked Ceri, in a flat tone that made it impossible for Kordas to tell if he was being serious or mocking them.

  Best to assume the former. It was always best to be on good behavior with the Circle; although they didn’t often do magic these days, he’d seen them perform mind-boggling feats.

  “Yes, please,” he said.

  Ceri and Sai exchanged a look with each other, and then with the other four. Ponu just shrugged, as if to say, “Well, you volunteered by speaking up. Carry on. We’ll correct you, as needed.” Ceri responded with rude gestures from multiple cultures.

  “Not quite a thousand years ago, magic flowed freely across the world, and mages could do things that we would think of as god-like,” said Ceri, intoning his words as if he was reading out something spread before him. “A mere apprentice could craft the sort of Portal that could take you from the ground floor to the top floor of a building. A single mage could craft a common Gate. Three or four could create a Gate that could easily reach across several Kingdoms. Mages created entirely new creatures out of practically nothing—ice-drakes, gryphons, wyrsa. You’d think that would be enough for folks, wouldn’t you? But no—”

  Sai snorted. “Of course not. Because some people are greedy bastards and can never get enough. So one of these mages far out in the West decided he was going to be the Big Bad King of the World, and gathered up mages and armies to do exactly that, and started rolling across the landscape, crushing everything in his path.”

  “That sounds familiar,” muttered Hakkon. Ponu smirked at that.

  Ceri took up the narrative where his brother had left off. “Naturally, people in the way didn’t much care for that, and resisted. A different mage gathered an army of defense. And, in the end, they destroyed each other. But of course, it wasn’t enough for them to just kill each other, oh no, they had to blow bloody great holes in the earth in two cataclysms that sent a pair of terrible storms screaming in waves across not just the Physical Plane, but the Abyssal and Aetherial Planes as well!”

  “Idiots,” muttered Ponu.

  Dole decided to interject something. “Where those two sets of waves intersected, you got Change-Circles. You can still see the damned things if you know what to look for—or you’re unfortunate enough to come across one that’s trapped a pool of sick, twisted magic at its heart. They’re circles of land that can be as small as a water bucket or as big as a couple of acres, where actual pieces of land were ripped up and exchanged across vast distances.”

  Kordas glanced over at his cousin, who looked incredulous. “That can happen?” Hakkon demanded.

  “Not anymore,” said Dole. “There’s not enough pure magic around to set off something like that again, for which the Gods be thanked. That story your bedfellow told you about the tree? That was part of a Change-Circle. And if you stumble into one, and you’re not a strong enough mage, you can end up as a creature as twisted and warped as the magic itself.”

  “Seen people with their insides as their outsides, I have,” Wis reported, casually examining his wine-cup as if it were of the greatest possible interest. “Can put a body right off their feed, I can tell you.”

  Hakkon looked more than incredulous, he looked stunned. He glanced over at Kordas, who shrugged. “If they say it’s true, it’s true,” Kordas told him. He couldn’t get his mind wrapped around it, but if the Circle stood by it, then it must have happened.

  “We never lie,” said Wis. “Well, maybe sometimes. But only that we haven’t had enough wine. We never lie about history.”

  “How do you know these things?” Hakkon said, sounding a little choked, as if he really might be starting to believe the six were a thousand years old.

  “Because, unlike people who let their muscles do all their thinking for them, we read,” Sai told him, as sternly as a tutor who is chastising a slacking student. “There are a lot of books in this manor. You might try looking at some of them—oh, wait, all you know is the Imperial tongue, so I suppose you’ll have to listen to us instead. Now are you going to babble, or are you going to listen?”

  Hakkon shut his mouth with an audible snap. Apparently satisfied, Sai picked up where Dole had left off.

  “Now, this was a long, long, long way from where we are. And it was before there was an Empire, or an Emperor. Just a High King wearing the Wolf Crown ruling over eight County-sized Kingdoms. The High King knew about the war, of course, because a lot of big magic flying about makes disturbances even when people aren’t blowing each other sky-high, and he had scryers and Seers and Foreseers keeping an eye on things in case they boiled over enough to affect his realm. And, of course, when the end came, the Mage-Storms certainly did affect his realm. The mess was far enough away that it actually took about half a day for the front of the Storm-Wave to hit his kingdoms, and before that could happen, he had every mage, great or small, organized to create a shield over as much as he could—limited by the fact that shields are always circular domes, so, well, too bad for anything and anyone that didn’t fit under the dome. It wasn’t so bad for people who didn’t have much that was made by magic in their land—they only needed to hunker down for the physical storms that also came through, watch out for Change-Circles, and hope they weren’t caught in one. But anything that was made by magic and still empowered by it turned to vapor in a most spectacular fashion.”

  Sai evidently felt he had said enough and stopped.

  “Is that all?” Hakkon asked after a period of silence.

  “Well, of course that’s not all,” Wis snapped. “Don’t you even think? There’s a thousand more years of history between then and now!”

  Ponu piped up, “It’s always ‘a thousand years’ in stories, even if it was eight hundred ten or fourteen hundred eighty. ‘A thousand years’ is dramatic, and drama means more to people than accuracy, I’ll tell you that for free. That’s how you get throngs of obedient morons, while the educated have to work doubly hard to keep records accurate. Historians and librarians have saved more lives than Healers.”

  Wis and the
rest nodded, and Wis continued. “That’s the reason the High King became the Emperor and the Empire grew! The High King had the only powerful magical artifacts and constructions that still worked! And he had most of the only mages that were left, even though about half of them died keeping that shield up.”

  Dole added, “Not that the ones who died then wanted to. They had no idea what they were up against, though the High King knew. Their lives were taken from them.”

  “What was under that dome put the High King at an advantage that no one else had for centuries. Really, except for the Change-Circles, the lucky ones were the people living without much magic in their lives,” said Ponu.

  “Because nothing they had was blowing up in their faces?” Hakkon hazarded, in tones that were surprisingly timid for the big man, as if he was afraid of being yelled at again. Kordas was irresistibly reminded of one of the big guard mastiffs he had once seen encountering a tiny kitten, which had put up all its fur, spat, and sunk needle-claws into his nose. The poor dog hadn’t known what to do, and neither did Hakkon.

  “Gods be praised! It has a brain!” Wis exclaimed, throwing his arms upward. “Yes. Healing still worked just fine as long as it was the inherent Gift and not operating by magic. The same for all of the other Mind-magic Gifts. But real magic of the sort that the High King had come to depend on—” He snorted. “Eh, well, it was scattered and unreliable and very hard to control. It was slow, if it was going to be stable. Unless . . .”