Silver Mage

  Silver Mage

  CM Debell

  Copyright © 2008 C M Debell

  eBook edition published 2018

  All rights reserved

  Prologue

  At the end of the world, an old man stood alone. The night was silent around him, shrouding him in its heavy darkness. The black peaks that had once been the perches of dragons stood empty and mournful, and the welcome he had once felt in this place was gone. The birthplace of life on Andeira now stood as a herald of her end. The sadness of it brought tears stinging to his eyes but he brushed them away. There was no place now for that grief. Too many others were crowding in on him—for a friend lost, for the war that was coming, for everything he loved that was slipping away.

  For the fault that was his, for the pride that had led him to keep it to himself.

  And yet I hoard my secrets still, even now when the world is collapsing around me.

  His hands clenched tight in the folds of his white robes, the robes of his rank: the eldest, the speaker of a generation. I keep them because it is my duty, he told himself fiercely, but the reassurance was empty, worthless, for the secret he kept had brought them to this.

  ‘Duty?’ murmured a deep voice from the darkness behind him. ‘What a burden that must be, Lorrimer.’

  Cold fear slivered down his spine. He turned slowly and looked into the eyes of the other. ‘I was not sure you would come.’

  A wry smile tugged at his enemy’s mouth. ‘Then why are you here?’

  Lorrimer held the man’s gaze, straining to see past the shutters that kept out the world. There was nothing to be read there, not anymore. He shrugged. ‘Hope, perhaps. Fear, mostly.’

  ‘Fear?’ Aarkan quirked an eyebrow. ‘You fear me?’

  Lorrimer shook his head. ‘What you are becoming, not what you are.’

  A soft laugh answered him. Aarkan moved closer, youth and strength where he was old and bent, confident where he knew only doubt. Lorrimer looked at the man who had brought his people to this edge of ruin and felt a shaft of bitter grief for everything he had been. Tall and dark, black hair brushing his shoulders, Aarkan returned his gaze. His skin was coloured a deep tan by the sun, his hard, handsome features sculpted from granite. Features so achingly familiar yet changed beyond all recognition.

  A smile twitched that face to wry amusement as Aarkan permitted his silent scrutiny. Arms crossed over his chest, back resting lightly against the rock of the ledge, he was utterly composed.

  Why should he not be? Lorrimer thought bitterly. He has within him now more power than any mortal creature.

  ‘What am I becoming, Old One?’ Aarkan asked then, gently mocking.

  Lorrimer closed his eyes, holding back the emptiness. He wondered where Srenegar was and knew the great dragon would be near. Had to be near, in fact, for these two could no longer hold themselves apart for long. They had looked into the heart of creation, just as he once had. They had seen the power that it held, and they had opened the way to the river of bright power that would carry them on its soaring, glorious tide to the centre of all things. He forced himself to confront it, opening his eyes to find Aarkan’s dark gaze on his. ‘Something other than you were born to be.’

  ‘Something greater.’

  ‘No.’

  The denial was instinctive. It was utterly wrong, this thing they had done. Men were the children of Tesserion, of the maker of life, charged to stand guard over her creation not to remake it. To preserve the world as she had made it so long ago.

  Long ago, when Andeira was young, Tesserion, the Maker, had given her first gift to the new world she had made. She gave the dragons, riders of the winds, children of flame. Wild and free they roamed the empty world, wielding the elemental magic that was their birth-gift, but the world was still unfinished, and their magic incomplete. Tesserion had another gift to give, another race to birth. Humanity followed after and brought about the dawning of the Second Age. To men she had entrusted the other half of the magic that was Andeira, the elemental power that brought forth life, sustained it, and carried it home in death.

  Two halves of a whole, utter opposites yet perfectly matched. The magic that divided them brought them together. Together they took the final step when they bound themselves to one another through the magic. Earth, Air, Water and Fire, made pure at last, brought forth the last element and allowed it to pour out into Andeira—the Spirit of Tesserion breathing life into a half-made world.

  That union, the Joining, defined existence. Lives shared, made richer for the sharing. Thoughts exchanged effortlessly across great distance, twin magics wielded as one. It was a partnership that served the needs of both races, that tempered their vulnerabilities and their strengths, and it had made the world whole at last.

  But for Aarkan and Srenegar, having looked into that darkly beautiful place at the heart of creation, it could no longer be enough.

  Lorrimer drew in a breath, steadying himself. ‘Give up this folly,’ he pleaded. ‘Do not challenge the council. Return –’

  ‘To what I was? Is that why you came? Did they send you to reason with me, to beg?’ Aarkan shook his head, his smile almost kind. ‘You cannot stop me, Lorrimer. You have neither the courage nor the strength. Nor should you try, for this is my right.’

  The old mage felt he might drown in the sorrow of it. ‘Your right? None of us has that right, Aarkan. You trespass where you do not belong and if you choose not to see that, others cannot be so blind. This union you seek is wrong, worse than wrong. To seek to join one soul with another is to take creation into your own hands, and that was never the province of any save the Maker herself. Such a thing as you will become was never meant to walk Andeira’s fair lands. It takes neither courage nor strength to resist you. If we want to live, we have no choice.’

  He saw anger then, for the first time, a wildness seeping into his enemy’s eyes. Aarkan took two fierce steps towards him before control pushed back the shadows of madness—the madness that would consume him and tear him apart before it destroyed him utterly. Breathing hard, hands clenched, he recovered himself. And Lorrimer knew real fear then.

  ‘I do not bring death to my world,’ Aarkan told him, his voice rough-edged with anger. ‘Why should I wish to destroy? What would be left for me to –’

  ‘For you to rule?’

  Met by silence, the quiet words seemed to echo around them for an age. Then Aarkan threw his head back and laughed. ‘Does not the Maker rule her creation, old man? Should I not do the same with mine?’

  Lorrimer felt something break inside him at that. The last thread of hope, perhaps, or the final ending of a friendship that had spanned four centuries. He turned away, gazing once more at the world he loved. ‘I have come to warn you.’

  Aarkan laughed again. ‘How noble. What is your warning, Old One? That the council will refuse me? That my own people have turned against me?’ It was said mildly but there was sudden fire in his eyes. And somewhere out in the vastness of the night a dragon was stirring. ‘That it must be war?’

  Lorrimer shook his head. ‘What need have you of such warnings? No, I have come to show you your future.’

  ‘My future?’ Aarkan scoffed. ‘What can you show me, old man, that I have not already seen?’

  ‘You see only what you choose. Not what is, not what will be.’

  Aarkan took a step back, and Lorrimer felt the shifting strands of his magic begin to grow. ‘Do I?’ he asked silkily, and as he spoke the landscape around them began to change. Behind the mountains the sun rose, though the dawn was hours away, and its pure golden light shone down on a new world. A world that Lorrimer knew, and yet was not his. ‘I will show you what I have seen, Lorrimer, what you have seen.’ And the far-flung web of his magic settled all around them.
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  Lorrimer saw the Maker’s world brought to glorious bloom under a golden sun, even the smallest blade of grass, the lowliest creature, full to overflowing with Tesserion’s grace. The sky itself seemed to shimmer in a heat-haze of swirling magic, and the even breeze that plucked at his cloak whispered with life.

  But his eyes saw more clearly than Aarkan’s. Beneath the heady, frantic pulsing of life lay the start of the decay, and he knew this vision for what it was—the last flowering of Andeira before her decline. Before the sheer power of the magic Aarkan would unleash burnt her to a husk.

  It would pass in a heartbeat, this one moment of pure perfection, the instant in time that Aarkan’s vision held steady by force. It would pass and leave behind it a dead, decaying world, empty of the life that filled it now. But even he could not help but glory in it.

  ‘You see what I will do?’ Aarkan asked, his voice unsteady with rapture. ‘Do you not see?’

  And Lorrimer did see. He saw to the very heart of it, to the ambition that had twisted his enemy’s soul. No longer content with partnership, no longer content to be constrained by the limits of mortality, Aarkan and Srenegar believed themselves poised on the edge of something infinitely greater.

  Lorrimer ached to his bones at the tragedy of it, for he had once stood where Aarkan did now, and he too had dared to dream this dream. The man before him was no longer truly a man, and his dragon had no kinship now with others of his kind. No longer two souls, not yet one, the individuals they had been were crumbling away. In their place was something other, something that merged the patterns of their minds as one. Where two races had brought to each other one half of the elemental whole, they sought instead to make just one, born of the two, that would be the elemental whole.

  Oh, he knew their dream. He knew it well. Aarkan believed he could rise to the greatness of Tesserion herself, creator of life, and her creation would be his to control. But he was wrong, and they would all suffer for it. There would be no glorious flowering of Andeira, there would be no ecstatic triumph over their mortal natures. Instead there would be a war that would bring an end to his world, as those two became one and that one knew neither who nor what it was, only the hunger for power.

  ‘I see,’ Lorrimer replied, tearing his gaze from the treacherous vision lest it snare him too, as it had almost done, so many years ago. ‘But do you?’

  As Aarkan turned to him, catching the sorrow in his tone, Lorrimer urged gently, ‘Look closer, my friend. Look further. At the heart of life there is only death.’

  Silence fell, so cold and deep it seemed to freeze them both. Then rage rose in a sudden wave, sweeping aside that beautiful, dying world. The blackness of night crashed down, hiding the light of the burning sun, and the dragon hidden in the black mists below screamed in fury.

  ‘Even you would deny this?’ Aarkan demanded, as the darkness closed in on him. ‘Even you, who has seen what I have seen?’

  ‘Even I,’ Lorrimer replied sadly. Is that not what I have done, all these years? ‘You do not know what you have done.’

  He expected to die then. He had seen his death in Aarkan’s eyes when he had dared deny his dream. But it did not come and he would never know why. He wanted to believe that even then, at the brink of his descent into the creature he would become, there remained enough of Aarkan in the man before him that he could not murder one who had been a friend. But as Lorrimer looked one last time into his face, he saw nothing there that he recognised, only dark anger and darker purpose, and the black dragon that raised itself up behind him.

  The thundering of great wings fanned the air into eddies, snatching at Aarkan’s cloak so it whipped around him like living shadow. Then they were gone, disappearing into the night and leaving him there, old and alone at the ending of the age.

  Part One

  Amadorn

  Chapter One

  Caledan

  New Age, 2024

  Kinseris watched his prisoners approach from the shadows by the window. The Ancai hustled them across the darkened courtyard, one hand firmly fixed on the woman’s elbow. Her husband kept pace with them, his head bowed in weary submission, and Kinseris ruthlessly suppressed a surge of sympathy. Such feelings endangered them all.

  The priest felt his hand shake as he turned from the window. Everything felt wrong tonight, and for a moment he considered abandoning the couple to their fate. It was a foolhardy risk, beset as he was by his high priest’s spies and his own haunting doubts. And for what? To save the lives of a peasant farmer and his pregnant wife who had not the wits to keep their discontented tongues still until his Order’s representatives had left their village. But if their lives would serve no good purpose, neither would their deaths. And that, perhaps, was why he waited here when he should be purging his household of every man who knew his secrets and praying to his Maker that he could deflect Kas’Tella’s imminent suspicions.

  For an instant he saw Darred’s face, his friend’s forced smile barely covering fraught nerves as he had mounted his horse and ridden through the chapter house gates. The summons to attend their high priest had come almost two months ago, shattering the belief that, if not forgiven, the friends had at least been forgotten as they languished in the sail-hand’s dive that was Frankesh port. The more time that passed without word from Darred, the more nervous Kinseris became.

  Kinseris curled his hand into a fist, grinding it into the wall. Why only Darred? That was the question that gnawed at him. For his own transgression against the Holy Will, Vasa would never stop seeking ways to destroy him. Did he hope to divide them, split their loyalty, and play one against the other? Did Vasa summon Darred now to lure him with promises of promotion, power, all the things his friend desired and his low birth denied him?

  Darred’s role in their guilt was of association, incidental at most. Forgivable? Unlikely, given who he was. Kinseris at least was Safarsee—the ruling priestly class—and had once been groomed for high honours. Darred’s value was slight in the eyes of his brotherhood, raised to rank for his undeniable strength but consigned to serving the needs of his Safarsee masters. Yes, if Vasa wanted to move against him, Darred was the weapon he would use. For the first time Kinseris regretted his insistence that his friend should not involve himself in his minor treasons. He regretted even more that he could not be certain that Darred would maintain his silence if he had no share in guilty secrets to bind his tongue.

  And yet, he reflected, as the Ancai’s firm footsteps stopped outside the door, he had not compelled Darred’s lack of participation in what he did here. The Islander lacked the embracing compassion that drove Kinseris’s efforts to spare his people from the harsher injustices of his Order’s rule. He could only hope that the bond of friendship between them, already stressed by this ignominious exile, was strong enough to survive their high priest’s blandishments.

  Kinseris turned as the door opened, admitting the Ancai and his charges. He nodded once to his captain, and the big man bowed and retired, but not before the priest had seen the worry lines creased into his brow. The Ancai too sensed the sharp increase in danger that accompanied this night’s work.

  Pushing those thoughts firmly from his mind, Kinseris walked to his desk, seating himself in the ceremonial chair. Everything in his office, from the elaborate ebony desk to the rich tapestries and the bone effigies on their five altars, was designed to humble and impress any who crossed its threshold. Kinseris might stand low in his order’s favour, but in his presence in this room no outsider would ever know it.

  He laid his hands on the desk, willing them to stop trembling, and faced the terrified couple. ‘Do you understand the crime of which you have been accused?’

  The man’s head jerked up and just as quickly turned away. He shook his head. His dirty face was pinched with fright, one arm was wrapped around the wilting body of his young wife whose pallor threatened collapse. He tried vainly to comfort her as she began to cry, and Kinseris felt his heart lurch in sympathy. They were young, a
nd the woman was pregnant, but there was little enough he could do for them.

  They had been brought here under guard two days ago, and the acolyte who accompanied the party had already attested to their treason. Kinseris had almost laughed at the suggestion that these two presented a threat to the government and privately agreed with much of what the man had said. But it was a Kas’Tellian priest who had had them arrested, and in such cases judgement was already passed before the accused even made it to the courtroom—which was why they were here in his private offices. He offered up silent prayers of thanks that their accuser had already left for the capital.

  ‘Mercy, my lord,’ the woman sobbed. ‘What wrong have we done?’

  Kinseris sighed. ‘You were heard criticising the overseer of your region. As that man is a full priest, your comments reflect directly on your loyalty to your ruler. However,’ he warned, ‘I find it difficult to believe that you would have been foolish enough to say such things.’

  At that the man met his eyes at last. ‘But, my lord, he would not allow the men of the village to begin the harvest until after the rains came. The crops were spoiled. Our people will starve.’

  ‘Are you admitting your treason?’

  ‘No, my lord. We meant no disrespect to the high priest, we just –’

  ‘Silence!’ Kinseris thundered. He closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose to forestall the threatened headache. Refusal even now to distance themselves from their remarks meant there was nothing he could do for them. If they did not have the sense to recognise the lifeline he was throwing them, he could not afford the risk of sending them from his land. He hardened himself to that decision, shamed by the relief that followed in its wake, when the woman stopped her pathetic snivelling and gazed at him in impassioned appeal.

  For an instant, as those dark-lashed brown eyes locked on his, his world was rocked to its core by uncanny recognition. Kinseris blinked, shaking off the cobwebs of memory, trying hard to maintain his composure. This woman was not Shakumi. Her features were blunter, her skin rough and weathered in a way Shakumi’s would never be. But her eyes—bright jewels in her peasant’s face, hurled him back into memories far too recent not to sting him to grief. Aware that his purpose could be unstrung by emotion, he tried to bury the guilt Shakumi’s memory woke in him. A glimmer of understanding answered him as the woman pulled herself free of her husband’s protective embrace and met his gaze squarely.