Serpent Mage

  “I think we are near the Chebal Malen,” Shiafa said. “Can you smell the snow?”

  Michael sniffed the air but could not. “It’s a little colder,” he said. “That might be the seasons changing again.”

  “I don’t think so.” Shiafa said.

  At the end of that day, they came across the nearly empty basin of what had once been a huge lake, perhaps fifty miles wide and as much as a mile deep, with scattered ponds of water glistening green and stagnant at the basin’s bottom. “Nebchat Len,” Shiafa said.

  “Someone once described this to me as a sea,” Michael mused, rubbing his cheek with one finger. “I wonder what drained it...?” Then he shook his head and grinned “I think I know. The Pelagals lived here, didn’t they?”

  “Here, and in the brazen ocean at the edge of the world,” Shiafa said.

  “Most of them are on Earth now. They crossed over in a cataract.”

  “You saw that?”

  He nodded. “Why haven’t all the Faer left the Realm yet? Many are already on Earth.”

  “You are the teacher,” Shiafa said quietly.

  “That means you don’t know.”

  “It means I don’t know.”

  “All right. We travel around the lake, across the forest called Konhem—am I right?—and after that we’ll find the Chebal Malen, the Black Mountains. And somewhere in the Chebal Malen is the Sklassa, the fortress of the Maln.” He drew his brows together and reached out again to feel for the humans. His heart sank. Beyond any doubt, that was where they were being detained. “We’ll have to go there,” he said.

  “There may not be time, and it is very difficult to reach the Sklassa. It is protected.” The emotion in her voice went beyond caution. For the first time, Michael detected unease in Shiafa.

  “That’s where we’re going,” Michael said. “That’s where all my people are being held. Have you been there?”

  “No,” she said. “I was raised in Inyas Trai and the Irall.”

  “What sort of difficulties can we expect to find there?”

  “You are the teacher,” Shiafa said, somewhat forcefully.

  “But you do know,” Michael persisted.

  “I am not supposed to know.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Shiafa averted her eyes, and an odd, defiant expression—chin outthrust, eyes narrowed—crossed her face. “When I was a child, I listened to the Mafoc Mar when I was not supposed to. They talked about the Sklassa. It is not a place for young Sidhe.”

  “But you’re Tarax’s daughter,” Michael reminded her.

  “It is not a place even for me.”

  “Somehow, I doubt that,” Michael said. “What are the difficulties?”

  “I cannot tell you.”

  “I am your teacher,” Michael prodded.

  Shiafa’s eyes widened, and her mouth became a tight, thin line. “We will learn together, then,” she said.

  Michael shook his head and smiled. Beginning of the discipline, he thought. Rattle the student, the initiate, and strip away preconceptions. Ultimately, terrify her. That’s what the Crane Women had done to him. But who was rattling whom?

  If Tarax’s daughter was worried by the thought of going to the Sklassa, then what should his own attitude be? Michael started the horse on the long journey around the drained basin of Nebchat Len, uncertain now whether they could keep up such a torturously slow pace—or whether they would have to use the horse’s erratic talents again.

  “Perhaps we should hurry,” Shiafa said an hour later.

  He sighed, then squinted at the empty blue sky. “I agree,” he said. “Are you prepared to aband?”

  “Anything,” Shiafa said nervously. “You are the teacher.”

  “The teacher asks you not to say that any more.” Michael leaned forward. “Hang on.” He whispered in the horse’s ear, “Abana!”

  This time, the ride was much worse.

  They rested in the shadow of a rock overhang, the horse gasping and trembling, its eyelids drooping. Shiafa had collapsed on her side. Michael sat down heavily beside her. They did not move for an hour. “Next time, we’ll just try the gallop.” Even speaking was a chore. With an effort of will, all his muscles protesting, Michael finally stood and walked out into the glare. Shading his eyes with both hands, he turned toward the black rock of the lower slopes of one of the mountains of Chebal Malen. No foothills, no gradual ascent to the peaks beyond; the Chebal Malen began abruptly as huge, jagged black monsters, mottled with snow up their sides and capped with solid sheets of snow and ice, partly hidden in clouds dipping and wheeling like huge gray and white birds.

  “The Sklassa is on the opposite side of the Chebal Malen, isn’t it?” Michael asked, as he stepped back under the overhang.

  Shiafa rolled over on her side, head weaving slightly, and said, “Yes.”

  “We’re closer to the Stone Field on this side, aren’t we? Where male initiates are taken to be trained.”

  She nodded.

  The Sklassa was where he had instructed the horse to go; obviously, it had been unable to comply. So one could not simply aband into the fortress of the Maln. He doubted that the horse could make such a climb by galloping, however miraculous an epon’s gallop could be.

  Worse, he could not feel the human auras; he had lost them totally since the last abana. “We don’t have time to climb the mountains,” he said. “And we don’t have time to go around them, that’s for sure. I don’t think we should try to aband again.”

  Shiafa sat up and crossed her legs. “No.”

  “Any suggestions, then?”

  She simply looked disgusted.

  Her reaction dismayed Michael. “I’ve never been here, either,” he said. “It’s obvious we’ve run into one of those barriers you mentioned. If you can’t tell me what the barriers are, then—” He shook his head vigorously. “This whole stunt is ridiculous. Your father must be a fool.”

  Shiafa continued to stare at him.

  “So how do the Maln get there? A password, specially bred horses? A secret path? A stepping stone?”

  Still no reply. Michael paced angrily, then kneeled and closed his eyes, feeling, thinking, reaching out to their surroundings. Again he could sense the borders of the Realm inexorably closing in. They had a few days, at best, and toward the end, time would be uncertain.

  “All right,” he said. “Now is as good a time as any to begin your training. Come with me.” Shiafa followed him onto a patch of snow that had filled a shallow, narrow canyon. The black rock reached to twice his height above the snow on each side; at the end of the canyon, about a hundred yards beyond, the walls met in a V.

  “What do you think Sidhe magic is?” Michael asked her, taking a stance two paces in front of her, arms folded.

  “It is putting yourself in sympathy with the Realm. When your thoughts breathe in, they should match the breathing of the world.”

  “What if the world isn’t so cooperative?”

  “You mean, the Earth?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then magic is more difficult, but not impossible.”

  “Is it impossible for humans to work magic?”

  “They are not known for being magicians.”

  “I’m mostly human. There’s some Sidhe blood in all humans by now. So is it necessary to be a Sidhe?”

  Shiafa shook her head, unsure.

  “Obviously not. But Sidhe, even Breeds, would like to keep humans in their place. And the humans who come here—or who have been brought here—are deliberately kept in the dark. I’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter what you are. Concentration is the key, and seeing without preconceptions. Do you have preconceptions?”

  “I must,” Shiafa said, all too reasonably. He had expected some youthful bravado, but then he remembered: she was three times older than he was.

  “I certainly do. I believe I’m weak. That makes me weak. I believe in things being a certain way, and they are. Each time I truly brea
k through...” He smiled. He was formulating thoughts heretofore scattered and unorganized. Teaching was also learning, or at least realizing. “Each time I break through my preconceptions, I dare something new. Sometimes I succeed. I gain a new ability.” There were no flowers nearby. He stooped to pick up a rock the size of a golf ball. “Sidhe dislike casually written words. Writing fixes reality and creates stronger preconceptions. It’s dangerous. But any language involves preconceptions. Any communication. That’s why words are powerful—they convey the thoughts of others. And the thoughts of others can get in your way.” He opened his palm. “What is this?”

  “A rock,” she said.

  He closed his palm...trying something he suspected the Crane Women had used on him...and opened it again. She smiled at his legerdemain. The rock was a butterfly.

  “And what now?” He opened and closed his palm again. His powerful evisa seemed to impress her no more than a child’s toy.

  “A rock,” she said.

  “Do you know how to be a butterfly and remain a rock?”

  “I cast a shadow.”

  “I’m going to attack you,” Michael said abruptly, stepping back from her half a dozen paces. It was time to discover what she was capable of. Shiafa was starting out substantially more sophisticated than Michael had been. “Prepare yourself.”

  Shiafa stood, hands hanging at her sides, head lowered slightly, still a little woozy from the abana. Fine, he thought. Jerk her up out of her uncertainty, just as the Crane Women had done to him.

  Suddenly, five Michaels surrounded her. She looked from one to the next, turning, raising her hands. One Michael moved in toward her; the next seemed ready to send a sharp probe in her direction; and the next began to circle, grinning. “You can’t predict humans,” all five said. Then, one by one in the circle, “They’re dangerous that way.” “They don’t know the discipline.” “They don’t know magic, and they have all the guile and unpredictability of the weak and fearful.” “They have emotions even they are not aware of.” “They can become angry in a flash. Some are ill-trained and ill-educated, and because of that they are under-privileged, and that makes them vicious.” “They can turn on you without warning. I imagine even a few Breeds won’t miss a chance to take revenge on you.” “And some Breeds know the disciplines. They can assault you with magic.” “Humans and Breeds may join forces to hunt you down. When you go to Earth, that’s the way it could be—hard and bitter times.” “Especially when humans find out their real history. No mercy. No style, no dignity. Just revenge.” “Are you ready for that?”

  “No,” Shiafa said, facing the shadows one by one. They closed in.

  “Which one of us will you fight first?”

  “The real one,” Shiafa said.

  “How will you know the real one?”

  She shook her head, agitated.

  “Think,” the shadows intoned together.

  “What purpose?” she demanded. “I have told you I do not know how to defend myself.”

  “I think you do,” Michael said.

  She frowned and bore down hard with a single probe—aimed at a shadow. The effort seemed to exhaust her. She shook her head and made a weak probe at another shadow She had wasted her energy by making the first probe too strong. She should have feather-touched the entire circle in one sweep, as if politely in-speaking for an item of information, something Sidhe did all the time by instinct. Instead, she had panicked.

  Michael considered probing her at this weak moment, breaking through whatever personal barriers she might have set up and taking the information he needed about the Sklassa. He would have been justified; a great many lives were at stake, and as Shiafa had stated repeatedly, they had little time. But he did not. The shadows continued to move in, a step at a time, menacing her.

  There was something deeper, stronger, far below the surface of her exhaustion and youthful inadequacy. He could sense it without probing. She was Tarax’s daughter... and if he could get her to reach that far down, he might be the one to learn a lesson.

  She straightened. “You are not going to hurt me,” she said. “You are a teacher, not an enemy.”

  There! He had it. A strong preconception. One of the shadows turned black as coal and swung a long, night-colored swath at her from shoulder-level. The swath wrapped around her head. She struggled to tear it away. It soaked up her breath. Michael could feel her discomfort. It was not wrong for a teacher to inflict discomfort on a student; it was wrong, however, not to share the discomfort. The Crane Women felt all my pain when they trained me, and all my confusion and fear, he realized. They did what I am doing now when they left me under the path of the Amorphal Sidhe.

  Shiafa was genuinely afraid. She could not breathe and she was close to fainting. “Come on,” Michael said under his breath. “Dig deep.”

  She cried out, her voice muffled. Michael felt faint himself and had the urge to run to her and tear away the veil. Then something snapped within her. There was nothing animal within the Sidhe to be unleashed, since they had never been animals, but there were deeper and more primitive layers of Sidhe-ness. Shiafa reached into one of those layers to perform instinctive magic that—he now knew without doubt—had once been the common heritage of all peoples.

  She left a shadow-self wrapped in the black veil and stood outside the circle of Michael’s shadows. Lightly, swiftly, she probed the remaining figures and located him. She then reversed the black shadow’s net and shot it toward him, tinged red with her own anger.

  Michael dodged the veil—but just barely—and dissolved his shadows. They stood facing each other across the snow. “Your feet are cold,” he said. “Bring up your hyloka.”

  She fell to her knees. Her cheeks and neck were flushed. “Why?” she asked, voice harsh.

  “Did you feel your strength?” he asked, reaching out to help her stand again.

  She did not look at him for a long moment. He had given her a scare. “I felt something...”

  “That’s where we have to begin. You have it in you. It’s closer to the surface than it was in me. You have to find it and make it yours. It’s like an epon. You must impress it.”

  He led her back beneath the overhang and watched her closely as she sat and controlled her energy levels. Her normal skin color returned.

  There was hardly any time to bring out her talents and train her, even less time than the Crane Women had taken with Michael. He had to play with an even more delicate balance, between the trust, or at least respect, necessary between teacher and student and the harsh techniques urgency required.

  “Since you won’t tell me how we can get into the Sklassa, we’ll go to the Stone Field. We’ll try putting the horse into a gallop. We’ll leave as soon as you’ve recovered.”

  “I feel it now,” Shiafa said, looking at him with wonder. “It’s within me. It burns. I wonder I never knew it before.”

  “Good,” Michael said. At the center of his stomach, he felt slightly ill.

  At a gallop—if it could be called that—the Sidhe horse was much slower than during an abana, but the effects of the Realm’s disintegration were much less apparent. They half rode, half flew through the passes of the Chebal Malen, looking for the trail that would take them to the Stone Field. The horse could not simply scale the tall peaks at a single bound; its flight relied on stable ground in a way Michael could see but not yet understand. The Sidhe horses had flown away from the Tippett Hotel on Earth; they had lifted from the prairie before the startled horse trader. But they could not simply rise tens of thousands of feet up sheer rock precipices.

  Shiafa genuinely did not know where such a trail was, or even if one existed. Michael tried again to search for the human or Sidhe auras, but the mountains from this angle seemed absolutely barren. There was only monotonous black rock and snow, under the pale sky gone curiously cold in this region.

  During their pauses to rest. Michael instructed Shiafa in the proper fine control of her hyloka. At the end of the second day,
when they had traversed thousands of miles through and around the Chebal Malen and still had not found a trail, he guided the horse to ground beside an ice-glazed stream of snow-melt. “Get off,” he told Shiafa. His patience was at an end.

  She dismounted and stood beside the horse.

  “Something has to give,” he said, squinting up at the sky. “Someone has to give. We’re all carrying honor and honesty a bit far. And we’re getting nowhere. We can’t even reach the Stone Field. I’ve lost the sense of human auras I felt from far away.”

  Shiafa looked down at the undisturbed snow around her feet.

  “Do you have any suggestions?”

  She shook her head.

  Michael swore under his breath. “Then that’s it,” he said. “We go back to the Earth. You’ve defeated me. We leave the humans here; I doubt the Maln will bring them to the Earth with them. So they’ll die in the Realm. All because of a young Sidhe’s honor.” He thought of Nikolai, of Helena and Savarin and all the others in Euterpe. And he thought of the thousands of humans selected from Earth over millennia, kept in the Realm—humanity’s finest. Not even his discipline could quell his anger and frustration. He leaned over to bring his face closer to Shiafa.

  “Damn you and your father,” he said. “I was an idiot to think there was any possibility—“ He couldn’t express himself through his anger.

  “You will not teach me?” Shiafa asked evenly.

  “Hell, no. You can stay here and freeze. I’m going back to Inyas Trai. Maybe I can find a stepping stone there...in the few days I have left.”

  “There is a stepping stone here,” Shiafa said.

  Michael stared at her.

  “You cannot get into the Sklassa or the Stone Field from the passes below. You must return to Inyas Trai through the stepping stone, and then you can take a stepping stone to the fortress. Now there is no other way to enter Inyas Trai. The city is forbidden.”

  “Why are you telling me this now? Why not earlier?”

  “Because I need to be trained,” Shiafa said. “Whether I die or not is unimportant, but I need to be trained by you. Your training me is more important than my betraying knowledge I should not have.”