Читать книгу Hot Obsidian - Olga McArrow - Страница 5

“Teach me

Lots of all sorts!

Teach me

New facts, new thoughts!”

I dreamt,

I questioned,

But I was taught by Fate’s contempt -

Taught my lesson.

I didn’t know I’d see

the day’s end

When malice and night on me

descend.

But the thrawn mind

learns night-lore too;

A new teacher I’ll find

When I’m new.

Milian Raven, from the “Thorn poem”

Aven Jay Zarbot heard two young voices crying out her name. Again. And just when she was finally going to have her lunch! Those students! Those stupid, stupid kids… Aven took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “I’m a Crimson Guardian on duty, an experienced mage, and a responsible adult,” she repeated her daily mantra in her mind. “I’m going to be super patient with those kids even though all I want is to strangle them both. Let’s consider it a punishment for me being a stupid kid myself once…”

“Master Zarbooot!” the young mages cried again.

Aven stifled a curse.

“What!” she roared, the soothing mantra instantly forgotten.

“Take a look at the road! There are visitors. What do we do with them?”

Aven sadly glanced at a sweet diadem bun she had been hoping to eat in peace and put it into her pocket, with much regret.

“What do we do with them! Hah! Oh, why can’t these youngsters just work it out for themselves for a while? I can’t babysit them all day!” she grumbled as she was making her way upstairs to the lookout tower. Once there, she grabbed a spare pair of binoculars and took a look at the visiting party.

Great! More stupid kids!

The visitors in question were ten young Lifekeepers. The youngest of them must have been six or seven. The oldest looked like a pureblood Faizul. And all of them looked like trouble. Aven had seen enough during her service to know how much trouble even one ambasiath can be and there were ten.

“Follow the standard welcoming procedure, boys,” said Avenge with a sniff, then she fished the bun out of her pocket and took a bite. She bit through the white dough into the soft jam core at the first try. The diadem stuffing was honey-sweet and bloody-red.

The young Lifekeepers carried no forbidden items and seemed just a bunch of ordinary neophytes on a quest. With the Temple of Life being so close to Firaska, their kind visited the city often. The leader of the group – a young Faizul – was the only unusual thing. Aven decided to ask him a couple of questions, just to be sure he was who she thought he was. There was no harm in asking and the young mages under her supervision could use the opportunity to learn a thing or two.

“I greet the great warrior! May his blade be praised by the Moon!” she recited the only Faizulish phrase she knew. The young man’s reaction surprised her. His wide shoulders drooped, his cheeks blushed as if he was ashamed.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t give you a proper answer,” he said in her own language, without even a trace of foreign accent. “I barely remember the language of my people. I grew up in the charted Omnis, my lady.”

He seemed like a genuinely good boy. The way he responded to her simple test… it was not play-acting, the Faizul did feel ashamed for failing to return the greeting. Immediately, Aven felt bad for hurting him so. She did not remark on the incident and proceeded with the usual questions instead.

“What is the purpose of your visit to Firaska?” she asked.

“We want to buy a Transvolo here,” said the young Faizul.

“Where to? And what for?” Aven continued.

“To Torgor, to fulfil our mission,” was the Lifekeeper’s answer, as truthful as it was vague.

He wasn’t stupid, that one, even though he looked like a simple savage, Zarbot thought. The boy didn’t even try to deceive her, the head of the Firaskian Crimson Guard, but he wasn’t going to be open with her either. Aven had a hunch about the boy and his followers; something in them made her heart tingle with that subtle sense everyone serving on the edge of the No Man’s Land has: the sense of hidden danger. But she had no evidence against them, no logical reason to send them away.

Aven let the Lifekeepers pass, of course, but made a note to herself to keep an eye on them. That tingling sense of hers had never let her down before. Those ten kids were trouble.

***

Most cities of the charted Omnis have peacefully spread beyond their armoured shells ages ago, for their inhabitants had nothing to fear from the outside world anymore. But Firaska was one of those who still needed all the protection it could get. It had thick walls, lofty watchtowers, and massive gates that it kept closed all night. Also: strict curfews and brightly lit streets patrolled by mage Sevens.

What was the city like within the walls? Crowded. Ancient. Noisy. A labyrinth of tall, sometimes dangerously overhanging buildings flooded with pedestrian traffic by day but empty by night when only the Crimson Guardians were allowed to stay outdoors.

To avoid losing each other in the crowd, Juel and his teammates had to walk in a single chain, holding hands. Milian was the last one in line, following Orion who was carrying Jarmin on his shoulders to keep the little boy away from the frenzied crowd.

Milian had not liked Orion in the beginning but things were different now.

Orion’s grasp on Milian’s hand was firm but careful; to him, young Raven was just another little kid that needed to be kept safe. That seemed both awkward and heartwarming to the twelve-year-old boy who couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to have a family and a father…

Several sharp turns of the alley later, the Lifekeepers found themselves at the central square of Firaska, the only open space inside the city walls. In the centre of that luxury, shining like a precious gem, was the heart of the city: Helga-Vlada’s College of Battle Magic. Originally, the building was a fortress Firaska had grown around. It had narrow windows, a moat filled with water to the brim, and a drawbridge. But now it looked as peaceful as an old warrior who had retired to spend his remaining years playing with his grandkids. Students were throwing paper birdies and magical sparks from the fortress’s windows; tangerine and diadem peels – a whole fleet of them – floated in the moat’s water; swift little fishes nibbled on them; colourful dragonflies soared above the moat.

Pai looked at the college with wide eyes full of awe. The young self-taught mage was seeing a proper magical establishment for the first time in his life; to him, it felt like beholding a lovely oasis in the middle of a desert.

“Let’s go?” said Orion, a tinge of uncertainty in his voice.

“What? All ten of us?” laughed Oasis. “I’d say you don’t need an army to storm this thing now,” he added with a grin and a sharp nod in the direction of the old fortress.

Juel pondered that for a moment. They already had drawn too much attention to themselves at the gates, so he didn’t want to make things worse. Both Sainar and Kangassk Abadar told him to keep quiet. There was another thing to consider: Juel Hak knew nothing about magic.

“Pai,” Juel addressed the boy. “You’re our only mage. Go there, investigate the place, find someone who knows Transvolo.”

“I will!” Needless to say, Pai practically shone when he said that. “Will you go with me, Milian?”

Raven nodded.

“Meanwhile, I’ll look around the city, if you don’t mind,” Oasis, the urban jungle specialist, chimed in. “We may have to stay here for a while, so a cheap apartment can come in handy and…”

“Go. Learn what you can. Just be careful,” Juel stopped his cheerful chatter. “Today, we will stay in that inn,” he gestured toward a long narrow building at the edge of the square. “Meet us there.”

“Sure! I’ll be back before the curfew. See ya!” said Oasis with a careless smile.

Before diving back into the crowd, he left his sword with Orion to keep. Right: when you are exploring an urban jungle, a long sword only slows you down. The boy didn’t go unarmed, though, for he still had his knife with him.

Orion shook his head and smiled as his eyes followed Oasis rushing toward an adventure.

“It may take us some time…” Pai hesitated under Juel’s heavy gaze, “but… but we will do our best!”

“Let’s go!” Milian pulled at his sleeve.

That was how the young Lifekeepers split for the first time.

As Pai and Milian made their way to the college doors, the students in grey cloaks lined with crimson noticed them. Some even followed the two young Lifekeepers to find out what they were up to but everyone kept their distance.

It rained briefly over the square as if some young mage were practising water magic. Their clothes dotted with water droplets, Milian and Pai reached the moat and stopped there, fascinated by a neat underwater ecosystem that kept the water crystal-clean.

Those beautiful violet sponges, cultivated by the worldholders themselves, according to the books, were filtering the filth away. Green and red algae provided oxygen and food for the fish. The fish cleaned the sponges of parasites, etc. There were many more other species, too small to see with a naked eye, involved in the maintenance of the system’s balance but who ever remembers them when there are those huge violet sponges that look so alien and so cool…

“Lycopersicon abberata,” Milian couldn’t miss a chance to show off his biology knowledge, “a true masterpiece of bioengineering.”

“What’s bioengineering?” asked Pai.

“It’s a branch of science that messes up with life-things’ genetics. And ‘genetics’ means everything we inherit from our parents and pass on to our children,” explained Milian gladly. “Water-cleaning systems are super new, I heard.”

“Must be,” Pai made a wry face. “I still remember that time when I visited Lumenik with my master. The moat was so filthy there… and I fell in it…”

“Ugh!”

“Ugh indeed!”

Milian imagined that too vividly for his own good. Falling into the moat of the biggest industrial city in the world must have been quite a lifechanging experience. Near-death lifechanging experience, probably.

“Maybe even Lumenik’s moat and sewers are clean nowadays,” said Pai with a hopeful smile on his lips. “I like it that moats are just little city lakes now and no one expects wars and sieges anymore.”

“Same,” muttered Milian. He was more concerned with the fact that his friend was standing too close to the water and leaning forward too much. In his daydreaming state, Pai could fall into this moat as well, so Milian carefully took him by the shoulder and led him away, toward the bridge.

The ancient blocks the college fortress was made of were cool to the touch and so infused with magic that even a non-mage could feel it (as a childish sense of wonder or a gloomy foreboding of impending doom – it all depended on the person’s character). If someone were to take even a small piece of that stone into the No Man’s Land, it would certainly explode somewhere beyond the border.

The narrow windows didn’t allow enough sunlight inside the building, so the mages compensated for that in their own manner: light spheres of all sizes and stages of perfection floated everywhere. Seeing so many active spells in one place was too much for poor Pai. He just froze there, his mouth agape, his eyes wide with wonder, and nothing Milian would say or do could make him snap out of it.

One of the battlemage magisters noticed the curious boy and stopped by.

“This is a Liht spell, kid,” he explained in a kindly manner.

“I know,” said Pai, his voice sad and yearning, “I’ve always wanted to cast one myself.”

The magister raised his brow, surprised, and gave the boy a closer look. Judging by the handguardless sword and a simple cloak, it was a young Lifekeeper. Most of them were ambasiaths.

“Did you ever try?” the magister asked, very carefully.

Pai nodded.

“Can you show me?”

Pai nodded again.

It was the second time that Milian saw Pai cast his Fiat-lux. Just like the night before, he waved one hand above the other and quietly sang a wordless song over them. The spitting, hissing ball of light appeared above Pai’s palm; he made it float near one of the perfect corridor Lihts. But if the Liht was staying in place, Fiat-lux kept bobbing up and down like a cork on the waves: Pai’s levitation spell was different from the classic one as well.

The magister was surprised, to say the least, but he did his best not to show it. He scratched his chin thoughtfully, frowned, then turned back to Pai.

“What a curious little thing,” he said. “A hybrid between the classic Liht and a battlemage’s fireball. Very, very interesting. Did you invent the formula yourself?”

“Yes!” Pai couldn’t help being proud.

“Oh well…” the mage made a wide welcoming gesture. “My name is Einar Sharlou. I’m a junior magister of battle magic. I teach here. How can I help you?”

Einar was surprisingly nice to the two seemingly useless boys (kids of their age are too young to be accepted into a magical college). After a tour of the college, he took them to his study where he treated the boys with the best Southern coffee and sweets and asked them a lot of questions about their life. Milian got tired of stepping on Pai’s foot under the table every time his friend was about to say too much. Sharlou didn’t notice that or maybe just didn’t show that he noticed: he just moved on to the next topic.

When the Transvolo question resurfaced again, the magister had to disappoint his guests: there were only two mages in the college powerful enough to cast such a difficult spell and both of them were away now.

“How hard is it to learn Transvolo?” asked Pai.

“Very. It’s a spell few people can master. I can only hope to be one of them someday,” Einar sighed.

“May I try?” Pai continued.

“Ah, you are a very talented lad, Pai Prior,” laughed the mage, “but don’t try to jump too high too soon. Anyway, if you, both of you, would like to visit our library, you have my permission to do so…” he hesitated. “You see, I firmly believe that every ambasiath is a potentially powerful mage. People like you are extremely rare. So if you want to… Of course, our senior magisters are away now, but we can accept you both even in their absence by assembling a junior magisters' council and voting. Just say a word and you’ll become students here. No exams.”

Milian half-smiled sceptically at that. Pai grinned, his eyes shining. But despite their reactions to Einar Sharlou’s offer being so different, both boys jumped at the opportunity to see the library. Pai grabbed all the books about Transvolo he could find and lost himself in reading. Milian wasn't so quick in choosing his subject. After wandering among the tall, dusty bookshelves for a while, he felt a familiar warm feeling flicker under his heart; that was how he usually picked a book to read. Today, it was the newest edition of Encyclopaedia of the No Man's Land. Milian disliked its simplistic chapter summaries at once but enjoyed the chapters themselves immensely.

Through the desert of scientific lingo and the jungle of diagrams, through the dry, emotionless text and the iridescent lens of his young imagination, Milian Corvus saw the No Man’s Land so vividly that he forgot about time itself while he was reading.

It took him only four hours to read the whole book but, as he returned the encyclopaedia to its place, he knew that the memories of what he had just read would not fade in his mind for many years to come.

Upon his return to the real world, Milian saw the library drowning in the reddish light of a young sunset. It was time to go. Raven quickly found Pai, he even raised his hand to shake the young mage by the shoulder but froze, having seen him read.

Four hours. Four hours it took Milian to finish reading just one book. Pai had already been through six. Astonished, Raven shook his head and looked around, hoping that no one else had noticed… But no, the whole crowd in the library did, the librarian included. All eyes were on Pai now; there was a whole spectre of emotions – from horror to wonder – on the adult mages’ faces.

Gerdon Lorian, may his soul rest in peace, always found the ambasiaths amusing and compared them to elephants trying to quietly tiptoe through a pottery store. A talent combined with ambassa is always so horribly visible that trying to hide it only makes things worse.

“Let’s go, Pai,” whispered Milian. “It’s evening already. We must get to the inn before the curfew or we’ll have to spend the night with Crimson Guardians.”

“Yes… yes, of course.” Pai nodded obediently and closed his book. He still looked like he wasn’t all there, though. “I’ve read so much! I just have to share my thoughts with someone or I’ll explode.”

“Sure, sure, no problem,” muttered Milian as he helped his friend return the books. “You can tell me everything on the way.”

Pai was so excited with the possibility of finally learning some real magic that he lost all caution; he was barely in touch with reality. If he had been alone, he wouldn't even have found his way to the inn. Milian had to drag him through the evening crowd by the hand and keep the conversation going at the same time because Pai would not shut up about what he had read that day.

So passionate was the self-taught mage’s speech that it made Milian doubt his choice of the ambasiath path in the end. Milian Corvus did what he had never thought he would ever do: he dared to consider becoming a mage himself! But the fragile idea had been broken almost instantly: some thug, annoyed with the tardiness of the crowd, smacked Milian on the head as he was elbowing his way through. It hurt, both physically and emotionally, but it helped Milian sober up and get back to reality. He and Pai had things to do, they couldn’t both have their heads in the clouds.

Thanks to Milian, they reached the inn just in time.

It got very quiet in the room when they closed the door behind them. Everyone dropped what they were doing, only Orion kept cleaning the sword Oasis had left him for safekeeping, but there was a silent question in his eyes as well.

“Well, what did you learn?” asked Juel.

He was looking at Pai as he said that because it was Pai’s mission. But Pai Prior was in no position to speak coherently, so Milian had to do the talking.

“We talked with one of the magisters,” he explained. “He told us that the mages powerful enough to cast Transvolo are out of the city now, they may not return for months.”

Pai was sitting cross-legged on the carpet, busy with following a pattern of dancing tigers on it with his eyes, his thoughts still somewhere far away. His voice sounded very far away too when he said, “That’s enough time for me to learn Transvolo myself.”

Nobody dared to laugh.

“How much time do you need exactly?” inquired Juel.

“A month. Maybe two,” mused Pai, his idle fingers brushing through the carpet’s fur.

“Too long,” the Faizul shook his head.

Orion gave Oasis’s sword, now as shiny as a new mirror, a last look, sheathed it, and cleared his throat.

“As far as I remember,” he said in a matter-of-factly way, “Sainar gave us no deadlines.”

“Yes! And Transvolo may prove useful!” Bala joined him.

“Agreed,” nodded Lainuver. “We could use some more time as well. While Pai is busy with Transvolo, we can learn a thing or two about the No Man’s Land and its dangers. I’d hate to go there unprepared, if you get what I mean.”

“We can’t afford that,” Juel stopped the arguments. “We don’t have enough money for rent and food…”

Someone knocked at the door. Hard. Probably with a boot.

“And here goes the hero that will solve our rent money problem,” guessed Orion. That said, he stood up and headed toward the door.

The late visitor turned out to be Oasis. The team’s urban jungle specialist was tired, bruised, sweaty, and angry (for being left behind the door for too long) but glad at what he had found.

“Hi, pal!” Orion greeted him cheerfully. “I've cleaned your sword. Take good care of it from now on.”

“Who’s beaten you up?” asked Jarmin, his eyes wide with worry.

“Ah, that…” Oasis waved his hand and made a bored face. “Local street urchins. A whole gaggle of them, strength in numbers and all… Well, I think I’ve taught them a lesson. Knocked down five of them; the rest ran away. Scum.”

Another ambasiath elephant made a jingly run through a pottery store. Just great…

“I hope you haven’t killed anyone?” frowned Juel.

“Of course not.” Oasis sprawled himself on the soft carpet, pure joy on his dirty face. “To tell the truth, I almost grabbed my knife when they started throwing stones but I managed without it. Ah, it’s been years since I’ve had a proper street fight. I used to be good even before my apprenticeship; now, it’s all child’s play.” Oasis rolled to the side, his face suddenly serious again. “Almost forgot: I found us a cheap place to live. No carpets there but it’s still cosy.”

Juel and Orion exchanged glances. Pai watched them both with burning hope in his eyes.

“Fine,” yielded the Faizul. “We’ll stay here to learn about the No Man’s Land and Transvolo.”

“Huzza!” Orion winked at Pai, “Do your thing, mage!”