The Obsidian Mountain Trilogy Read online

  Well, it was time to pass some of that irritation back to the appropriate recipient.

  “Sit down, and take out your notes,” Anigrel continued. “You can take notes, can’t you? Your mind hasn’t gone so dull that you can’t write your letters?”

  The boy flushed again, and this time there was a flash of anger in the dark eyes. Good. He’d finally struck a nerve.

  Anigrel waited while the boy took his seat at the small table just under the single window in the workroom, and took out the book of blank pages in which he was supposed to take notes while Anigrel lectured. Anigrel regularly inspected this book to be certain that the boy understood the lectures delivered to him—or at least understood enough to note down the salient points of each lecture. And to be certain the boy wasn’t just doodling or writing nonsense.

  “Power,” he began, pacing slowly back and forth while he spoke, “and by that I mean magickal power, does not arise out of nothing. As you know, every Mage has his own personal reserves of power, and this is all very well for small matters, but for greater Workings, power must be pooled. This is part of every Mage’s training, how to cooperate and meld the power each one holds into a greater whole. But even this is not enough to supply the needs of our City and its people. Therefore, in the distant past, the Arch-Mages discovered and learned to harvest a still greater source of this power.”

  He paused in his pacing to glance aside at his pupil, whose head was bent over his book, his pen scratching diligently on the pages.

  Well, regardless of how absentminded the boy was today, the information that Anigrel was about to give him should certainly wake him up.

  “You know that every Mage has his own personal reserve of power,” Anigrel continued. “But you may not have realized it is not only Mages who have stores of this power. All people have it, although of course they can never use it themselves.”

  The boy looked up sharply at that. Anigrel smiled slightly. It was about time that the boy began to understand how the world really worked! Perhaps some inside knowledge would give him the motivation to succeed! “Yes, you may well stare! Now, do you know why a Mage needs to learn how to share his power with others?”

  Kellen shook his head mutely.

  “Because, boy, only one born to the power of a Mage can resist someone trying to take his power from him, and he instinctively does so when he feels his power being drained from him. It takes training and will to overcome that instinct. The ordinary person, one who has no notion that he has this power, does not resist when it is harvested. And that is what we do, we Mages in the service of the City. Fully half of us spend all our waking time harvesting the power of our citizens to serve the City itself.

  “Not, as you may have thought, in using our own little stores of power in long and involved spells that make the maximum use of tiny amounts of it, in order to do the work that we must. No, we constantly harvest the power of the people of the entire City, storing it, so that we need not deplete ourselves in order to do the work of the City.”

  Rather elegant, he’d always thought; like an invisible tax. Take from the citizens to do the work that they insisted in having done: purifying water, destroying vermin, creating the Golden Suns that Armethalieh spent so lavishly in trade with the outside world. And if the Mages siphoned off a bit here and there to make their own lives easier, well, that was only fair. Nothing in life was free.

  The boy gaped at him, as if he didn’t quite understand what he had heard. “You mean, you take it from them? Without asking? Without them even knowing?” he asked incredulously.

  “And what would be the point of telling them?” Anigrel demanded sharply. “Half of them wouldn’t believe it, and the other half would want to be paid for it, somehow—as if living in the City weren’t payment enough. Ridiculous—they don’t use it, they can’t use it, they don’t miss it, and if it weren’t harvested, it would just drain away, accomplishing nothing. All things have their price, and the good of the City is paid for by the power of its citizens. Why should we deplete ourselves for them, when they can supply the power instead?”

  “But—we should tell them, at least,” Kellen persisted, then shut his mouth as Anigrel frowned at him furiously. Had the boy no higher instincts at all?

  “Stupid sentimentality!” Anigrel snapped. “They are beneath us; uneducated, without the wisdom that knowledge gives to us; they are not fit to make decisions in this regard. Yet they are pleased to accept all the benefits that living within the walls of Armethalieh brings. They must pay for it somehow—just as they pay other taxes, this is a tax that they must pay to the Mages and the Council. That they do not know they pay it is irrelevant. Everything has a price. Everything. And that is the way that the real world works.”

  KELLEN bent his head back down over his book and scribbled Anigrel’s words down verbatim, hiding his unease as best he could. So this was how all the magick of the City was fueled! He was very certain now that none of the Mages ever used his innate personal power for anything except his own personal needs. Why should they, even though the Mages benefited as much as anyone else from all of the municipal magicks, when they could save their own power for themselves and use the power of the citizens instead?

  The problem was, The Book of Moon seemed to say that whenever you were the one who benefited from magick, you were the one who had to pay the price. Maybe that was only true in Wild Magic, but Kellen had to wonder. Wasn’t all magick essentially the same, all governed by the same underlying rules?

  He guessed that was why High Mages and Wildmages—if there still were any—couldn’t agree about anything, if they couldn’t agree about that. From his lessons with Undermage Anigrel, Kellen already knew that the larger the effect of the spell you cast, the higher the price in terms of raw power you had to pay for it, and where High Magick was utterly indifferent to the possibility of a personal price, Wild Magic seemed to say that not only was there always one, but that it had to be paid, and by the person casting the spell.

  He bet the High Mages hadn’t liked hearing that, if anyone had ever told them.

  It had taken him a good part of last night to get his mind wrapped around that concept, but once he’d managed it, it seemed both logical and inevitable, if not precisely something that made him comfortable.

  The personal price wasn’t directly related to what was being done—that was what had been so hard to understand. So in Wild Magic, the more powerful the spell, the more likely it was that you’d have to do something besides supply your own personal power—like copy out and bespell those three Books, for instance, in exchange for, perhaps, creating a well or healing an injury.

  The thing was—yet another concept he’d had trouble with—there was just no way of telling in advance what the price of any given spell would be. And if paying the “price” for a spell involved casting more spells, you could spend all your time in an endless cycle of “Magedebt” to the Wild Magic that way, always trying to “pay off” obligations for magick you’d used to pay off previous obligations! My head hurts, Kellen thought. It all seemed so complicated!

  The Book of Moon said that the reason the price was never the same was that the caster of the spell wasn’t the same person he was the last time he cast it, which seemed, well, kind of an odd thing to claim. How could you be a different person today from the one who’d cast, oh, say, a Finding Spell yesterday? People didn’t change overnight!

  Kellen knew that people changed, of course. He wasn’t the same person at seventeen that he’d been at seven. But that was normal. Everyone changed while they were growing up.

  But then they stopped. His father had been the same person for as long as Kellen had known him, and if Lycaelon lived another fifty years, Kellen was sure that he wouldn’t change a single habit or opinion.

  Kellen tried to imagine people continuing to change all their lives—and for that matter, changing quickly. It would be like, like …

  Like waking up one morning and finding you were living in a s
trange and unfamiliar house.

  He felt a faint thrill of excitement at the thought. Could the Wild Magic make that happen? What if the prices you had to pay somehow changed you? What if the price was to change?

  That would be another thing the High Mages wouldn’t like. As far as he could tell, the whole point of High Magick was to keep anything from changing. Ever.

  Anigrel blatted on about how the citizens of the City owed their energies to the Mages, his face set in an expression of self-satisfied arrogance that just made Kellen sick. He didn’t want to listen to it. Didn’t the Mages get rewarded enough, being paid for the work they did, and handsomely, too? There wasn’t such a thing as a poor Mage in the entire City—once you were a full Mage, you had as good a house, servants, food, and clothing as any well-off merchant in the City, and for a lot less work, too! A nice life … no wonder everyone wanted it.

  Everyone but Kellen, maybe.

  “Kellen!”

  The sharp tone of Anigrel’s voice brought Kellen’s attention back to his tutor, and the annoyance in Anigrel’s face made it very clear that while he’d been thinking, his pen hadn’t been moving …

  “I do not know what could possibly have gotten into you, boy,” Anigrel said with smoldering irritation, “but you clearly are not prepared to pay attention—and I am not prepared to waste my valuable time on a pupil who doesn’t wish to learn.”

  Oh, grand. Father is certainly going to hear about this, Kellen thought with a sinking feeling. And what could he say? That he didn’t like the way the City was run? But he had liked it, mostly, up until now.

  He guessed …

  Anigrel made a shooing motion with his hands, frowning exasperatedly. “Get out of here, boy. Go play, since that is obviously the only thing you’re fit for today. I shall attempt to salvage something out of this morning while you idle your way about the City, child that you are. Be grateful I don’t call for a nurse to take you to your room to play with toys.”

  Release, but with a sting in it.

  Kellen picked up his notes and strode out of the room before Anigrel changed his mind.

  Release—but at the cost of being treated like a child, like an infant, at being insulted and abused by a fatuous prig who thought he was owed everything he got!

  Kellen set his chin stubbornly and left the workroom.

  He stopped on the way out of the College and deposited his books in his locker, hoping he wouldn’t run into any of his year-mates at the Mage College who would wonder why he wasn’t still at his morning’s lessons with his tutor—or worse, that he wouldn’t run into his father, who sometimes visited the College between Council sessions to check up on some of the more promising senior pupils.

  He thought of going home, but the thought of going back to Tavadon House, to the chilly corridors and grudging servants, nearly made him ill. He had to get out, somewhere far from here, from there, from Mages and magick. He needed free air and—if there was such a thing in this City—free talk.

  There was only one place to go for both of those things.

  Kellen opened his locker again and pulled off his robe, wadding it up and stuffing it in atop his books and tools. Where he was going, it would be a disadvantage to be recognized as a Student-Apprentice of the Mage College of Armethalieh.

  A definite disadvantage.

  WHEN the foreign ships from the Out Islands and the lands beyond the bounds of those claimed by the City were in, there was one place in Armethalieh where there was little or no chance that anyone would recognize him for who and what he was. The docks were the one place where Mages didn’t go if they could help it.

  Sailors distrusted them, captains did not like having to depend on the magicks that they bought at such high prices from them—the Talismans that brought fair following winds, the Amulets that directed storms to move out of the path of a ship, the Runestones that dispelled fog, the Wands that warned the man at the tiller of shoals and dangerous rocks. Yet those who failed to purchase such aids often came to grief—far oftener, said the whispers, than mere bad luck could account for …

  And as for the merchants, well—it was the Mages who dictated what could and could not be sold. It was hardly to be expected that they would welcome the sight of those who restricted their ability to profit.

  Foreign sailors were confined to the area of the docks; only the merchant-captain of a ship—or better still, his City-born representative—was allowed into the City proper to present samples of the cargo for inspection or deliver promised goods. The dock even had its own market, plenty of taverns and inns, and in any case the sailors were kept busy enough even in port that they didn’t have much time to spend wandering the streets of Armethalieh.

  The citizens were not encouraged to wander the docks, either, and generally everyone had heard tales of drunken sailors quarreling with peaceful citizens, starting fights, and generally behaving in an uncivilized manner. That was enough to keep most folk away. But Kellen had learned—by going there himself—that very few of those stories were true, and of the rest, well, people got drunk and got into fights, robbed and were robbed across the breadth of the City every day. Sailors and foreigners were as apt to be victims as victimizers.

  But the area of dockside was a rough neighborhood, and a Mage who wandered in there, if he kept his nose in the air as most did, was apt to be greeted with jeers and rudeness. If the sailors and travelers weren’t welcome in the City proper, well, they returned the favor in their own territory. So when Kellen went to the docks, he was careful to do so wearing inconspicuous clothing. He watched what he said and who he said it to. Mostly, he just looked and listened, and tried to stay out of the way.

  The boundary dividing the dockside from the rest of the City was nothing more than a very wide boulevard, but it was patrolled by regular City Guards, who questioned anyone who crossed that particular street quite closely, and turned back anyone going in either direction if he didn’t seem to have appropriate business where he was going. And “I’m just going to look around” was not considered to be appropriate business.

  However, there were other places the guards didn’t bother to check; one of them was a section of large warehouses that, rebuilt after a great fire a hundred years ago, had spread across the boulevard into the City. There was always so much coming and going there, wains being loaded and unloaded, men and boys heaving bales and barrels of goods about, that the guards couldn’t have questioned everyone, and didn’t bother trying. Kellen slipped across the border there, along with a gang of men and an empty wain; once on the dockside, he separated from the group and headed for the wharves.

  He knew by now how to move out of the way of the stevedores and stay out of the way, and before too very long, he was perched on a piling in a disused slip, with the salt breeze blowing his hair away from his face, looking out at the harbor and the sea beyond.

  If he squinted into the sunlight, it was possible to see a sort of shimmer across the mouth of the harbor—if he had used the spell that allowed him to see magick in action, he’d have seen what that shimmer really was. A curtain of power hung across the mouth of the harbor, the result of a spell that protected the harbor from the waves and winds and storms—but could also be “tightened” to keep everything, including ships, out … or in.

  It could have been made completely invisible, of course, but the Mages of the City didn’t want that. They wanted the foreign captains and their sailors to see that faint shimmer, to feel a little tingle as they crossed it, and know that while it protected them, it could also exclude them if they became too troublesome. The City was a huge, voracious creature. It devoured entire cargoes, disgorging in return other goods and minted gold coins so pure and so exact in weight that they were the standard against which all other currencies everywhere in the world were measured. The square Golden Suns of Armethalieh were accepted everywhere, for thanks to the special magicks worked at the City Mint, they could not be melted down, debased, shaved, or otherwise adulterated—unless
another Mage broke the spell, at which point they lost their stampings and ceased to be Golden Suns, becoming only blank shapes of gold.

  The foreign ships were in, and Kellen watched the pre-approved cargoes being unloaded. The wharf was full, every mooring place taken, and the masts of all the ships formed a kind of leafless forest, stripped of the sails that had carried them all this way. In their holds were things that would never be allowed to leave the confines of the ships; perhaps perfectly ordinary things, perhaps wonderful things. Kellen would never know, for he would never be permitted to see them. No one except the Mages of the Council would ever be permitted to see them. He could only wonder what might be there.

  Still, even to be close to so much freedom made him feel better. He took a seat on a piling, out of the way, and watched the sailors of the ship nearest him unloading their cargo. Are there things in that hold that Wild Magic made? he wondered. Or things that Wild Magic has touched? He wouldn’t be able to tell, not from here, not with the aura of High Magick everywhere, overwhelming anything subtle. And Wild Magic was nothing if not subtle. Did anyone outside of the City know about Wild Magic? Surely they must.

  High Magick—the Mages were more disciplined than the soldiers of the Council’s Army, and they imposed their will upon the cosmos to the exclusion of any other possibility with the iron of that discipline. There was no room for error, for creativity, even for much experimentation in High Magick. A Mage could work for years, decades, just to develop a single variant in an existing spell, and even when he had spent his life upon it, it still might not be approved by the Council.

  Kellen was supposed to feel comforted by this; the fact that nothing changed, nothing would change, was supposed to make people feel secure. But he wasn’t—

  The slip next to the one that Kellen sat beside held a slim little trading vessel of the sort that specialized in speed rather than bulk to make a profit. It rode high in the water, and was in the process of being loaded with small casks—probably distilled spirits—and wooden boxes—which would be spices, incense, and medicines, particular specialties of Armethalieh. The ship’s master himself was at hand, helping to load the cargo; a vessel like this, Kellen had learned, seldom had a crew larger than ten, with perhaps a passenger, and since it dealt in cargoes of small valuable objects easy to steal, the crew never allowed anyone to load or unload but themselves.