The Unmaking (The Last Days of Tian Di, #2)(15)
Chapter
4
As the sun rolled up over the horizon, Foss knelt in his chamber and let his mind slip into the morning trance with the ease of long habit. Waiting for him as always was the black crab on the dark, wet sand. The crab scuttled up the sand, away from the water, to where five blackened, twisted stones stood upright, stretching towards the sky. The crab moved among them sideways, his black fore-claws waving and snapping. Although the sky was clear, the air tasted heavy with rain. Beyond these stones were more stones and they grew taller and more plentiful until he found himself in the midst of a forest of black stones, tortured and charred like lumps of cooled lava. He could feel how they strained from within. There came then a deep cracking sound from all around and the stones splintered and fell away. At the core of each was a Mancer, unmoving, silent. They stared out with sightless eyes and then slowly, slowly twisted and darkened into stones once again. The sky groaned deeply and seams appeared in the blue. Something dark as blood began to seep through and spill downwards in smoky threads. With his claw, the crab wrote in the sand, Kyreth does not trust you, then fled back towards the sea.
Foss opened his eyes and sighed. This was hardly news to him. When Eliza fled the Citadel two and a half years ago, Foss had spent a short time in the dungeons for letting her go (colluding with her, they’d called it – a bit of a stretch but he had not tried to defend himself) and he had been threatened with expulsion. The power of the Mancers was uniform, interwoven, and dissent was dealt with harshly. Even though he had been officially restored to his position as Spellmaster upon Eliza’s demand, he was shut out of the inner workings of the Citadel, no longer invited to important meetings. If he went to Kyreth and told him of today’s trance, omitting the coda of course, how would Kyreth interpret it? It was an unsettling vision, and once he would have reported it immediately. But today he decided to keep it to himself until he understood it better. If something were much amiss he would not be the only one to have sensed it.
The gong rang and he left his chambers, joining the manipulators of water filing out of the north wing and across the grounds towards the Inner Sanctum. They took their places and, when Aysu gave her command, the manipulators of water began to call upon the power of the seas and the rains. Anargul gave the same command and the manipulators of wood began to call upon the trees that covered the earth. Then Ka called out his command and the manipulators of fire called upon the interior of the earth, the sun and the stars. Trahaearn called out and the manipulators of metal called upon the ore that flowed in the veins of the earth. At last Obrad called out and the manipulators of earth called upon the Earth itself. Foss felt within him the deep, eternal pull of the ocean, vast and secretive. He felt the gathering of rain and the swift rushing journey of rivers making their way from the mountains to the sea. There was something in this too large to be called joy but it was a kind of joy nonetheless. In a single voice they spoke the old words, made themselves conduits for the forces of water, and the power that was drawn into them was pushed out again as Magic. Now it was for Kyreth and the Emmisariae to guide this Magic to its purpose. Kyreth had already begun the lengthy and difficult recitation of the Sperre-Tahora, the Barrier Incantation. Foss lent his entire will, his very self, to the task of channeling the Magic, and in his mind the ever-moving, overlapping layers of the Xia Sorceress’s prison came into view.
He had once tried to explain to Eliza, as a sort of Deep Math lesson, the structure of this prison. It was largely his own design and he was prouder of it than of anything he had ever done. A single barrier, no matter how strong, would eventually fall before the Magical onslaught of a Sorceress as powerful as Nia. Instead, they had created a multi-layered series of barriers, not merely flat walls but grids and spirals and cones, an infinitely complex maze that was never still, each piece following its own pre-determined rotation. At the centre of all this was the approximately fifty square feet in which the Arctic Sorceress had lived for twelve years. She had of course sent spells of seeking into what gaps she could find, to try to unlock the secrets of the maze, but there was no way out. The Sorceress’s seeking spells were lost in the continuing orbit and infinitely varied geometric patterns of the barriers. It was indeed a thing of beauty. It was, Foss believed, a mathematical perfection.
This daily task of strengthening the barriers had become more critical and also more taxing since the Sorceress had used Eliza to steal the Book of Barriers. While her thousands of seeking spells swirled and eddied, lost among the barriers, she began to make holes. Even with the Magic outlined in the Book of Barriers, she could only make a hole in one layer at a time and, because of the complexity and constant movement of the barriers, this did her little good. The layers shifted levels and slid to and fro, so that a hole she made in the layer nearest to her might soon be lost somewhere near the centre of the barriers, entirely inaccessible, useless.
However, the Mancers knew better than to underestimate the Sorceress. They were concerned by the holes. They sealed up as many as they could and added continually to the barriers. Foss had mapped out the Sorceress’s efforts on charts in the Library and often pored over them with Kyreth or Aysu late into the night, trying to determine a pattern. Her choices seemed to be entirely random. It was possible she was simply trying to alarm and distract them, to waste their power in patching holes while she worked some other Great Magic to bring down the barriers. But strong as she was, the barriers of the Mancers were nigh unbreakable. Today, as every day, with the four directions of the compass and the five elements they drew upon, the Mancers poured all their power into the task of strengthening and rebuilding the barriers, protecting themselves and the worlds from the most dangerous foe they had ever known.