Balancer (Advent Mage Cycle) Page 14

  “I’ll make it my top priority to find it,” he promised me, no hint of guile in his face.

  I eyed this helpful Kartal warily; this was completely out of character for him to consider anyone but himself. “You’re being rather agreeable.”

  “Of course I am,” he retorted in more Kartal-like tone of exasperation and superiority. “If this mission doesn’t get resolved soon, then I will most likely get dragged into it as well. I’d rather not be out tramping all over the wilds of Chahir, thank you very much.”

  I just knew there’d been an ulterior, self-serving motive lurking in there somewhere. “I see. In that case, I’ll be going.”

  ~*~

  Early afternoon saw me almost to the Chahir-Hain border when the mirror broach in my pocket started talking. My first reaction was panic—they knew I was already on the way back, so if they were contacting me while I was still on the earth path, it meant that something serious had happened. I yanked the mirror out of my pocket with lightning speed. “What? What’s wrong?”

  “It’s not that bad,” Chatta answered in soothing tones. “Well, not for us, anyway. A tidal wave hit Movac, in Echols Province. Apparently quite a bit of damage was done to the shoreline and the waterfront. Vonlorisen wants you to go over there and see how much reconstruction you can do.”

  I eyed the mirror in resignation. Clearly, Vonlorisen and Guin have spent too much time talking to each other. Vonlorisen was beginning to get ideas. I altered my course for the west coast. “Understood. I’m on my way.”

  It neared the dinner hour before I arrived in Movac. The city was a trade city, mostly between Bromany and Q’atal. With all of the trade and cultural influence, it didn’t look like the typical Chahiran architecture. I caught influences of Bromanian architecture and Q’atalian design here and there as I came up just outside of the city gates.

  Chatta hadn’t mentioned that I needed to go talk to someone in particular, so I just walked down the main thoroughfare until I reached the waterfront.

  The place was in shambles. Huge cracks in the street where the bedrock foundation had either split or moved forced portions of the street up or reversely, down. Buildings leaned sideways or half-crumpled so that they gaped open. Mud seemed to be everywhere, along with odd bits of seaweed, shells, and dead fish. People of all ages were digging through the mud, trying to find different pieces of their lives that had been scattered. Most of them were either pale with shock or softly crying. It broke my heart just watching them.

  Further ahead, there was a long line of men that were passing heavy sandbags one to another. I could see a part of the line in between the houses. Perhaps I could find someone in charge over there.

  Quickening my pace, I reached the end of the street and paused, looking down. Most of these men seemed to be civilians drafted into the work, but there was one man in the black and forest green colors of the national army. I headed straight to him.

  He stood on a slight rise, made from a displaced group of boulders, with a map in his hands, calling out orders on what section needed reinforcement next. From the looks of him, he seemed to be in his early forties, although the wrinkles around his eyes and mouth could be more pronounced because of the deep tan. Three small triangles were along his collar, which at least told me his rank.

  “Captain!” I called when I was a few feet from him.

  He paused in mid-sentence and turned to frown down at me. “Yes?”

  “I’m Magus Rhebengarthen,” I introduced myself with false calm. Everyone in the line abruptly froze when they heard me. The people who had been too far away muttered about the holdup. I didn’t dare look at anyone else to see how they reacted but kept my gaze locked with the captain’s piercing blue eyes. “King Vonlorisen sent me down to help.”

  The Captain slowly folded up his map before hopping lightly down from his perch. “Did he now.” For a long moment, he just looked at me with intense scrutiny. “I’m Vanrossien, Captain of the 504 Squad. Tell me, Magus, what can you do to help?”

  The question was not hostile but simply neutral. Not the best reception I’ve received, but far from the worst. I took in a breath to steady my voice before speaking. “I’m an Earth Mage, Captain. If it is made of dirt, stone, or sand I can manipulate it. Metal is a little harder on me, but I can work with it too.” I gestured to the line of sandbags that were in place. “I can save you a lot of time and work right now by restoring the shoreline.”

  “This whole shoreline. By yourself.” His tone was still neutral but his eyes were a little wide, giving away his incredulity.

  “Yes,” I made my tone firm, confident.

  I’m not sure if he actually believed me, but he waved a hand toward the sea. “Be my guest.”

  “Thank you. Do you have a map that shows what the shoreline originally looked like? It will help speed the process along.” The whole area here was so disturbed that I wasn’t sure if I could reconstruct the original look of the place by feel alone. The whole area just felt like upset bedrock to me.

  Without a word he handed the map in his hands to me.

  I unfolded it and looked at it for several long moments, glancing up to look at the area around me. This harbor had once had an almost crescent shape to it. Right now, it looked like someone had hit it with several giant wrecking balls. Without this map, I never would have been able to guess the original shape.

  With a deep breath, I reached out with my full magical sense, unleashing the core of magic within my chest. I started with the ground under my feet and extended to everything within my reach, calling every particle of dirt to return to its original place. The bedrock shook and groaned as it moved, the sand hissed as it crawled along the broken pavement, and the mud made wet, sloshing noises as it rolled back toward the shore.

  People either danced around in panic, avoiding the moving earth as much as they could, or simply stared at me in awe as their world moved at my call. I paid them no heed. I stayed intensely focused on every particle of sand until I could feel the last piece in place with an almost audible click. Then I relaxed my concentration and looked up with a satisfied smile.

  Within fifteen minutes, the shoreline had been restored.

  The Captain seemed to have some difficulty keeping his jaw hinged. I resisted the urge to tease and simply handed him the map. “I’ll start working on the streets.”

  He managed to find his tongue long enough to croak, “Please do so.”

  I walked to the nearest street and started shifting the cobblestone back into its proper order. While I worked, I had to wonder—had I just created another legend for myself?

  With my luck, I probably had.

  Shaking my head, I focused on the task at hand. Practically every street near the water was torn up or split in some fashion or another. I methodically went from one to another, putting the pieces back together. Sometimes one of the citizens would stop me, offering me advice on how it was supposed to look. One brave enough woman stopped me to ask to put her half-buried well back in order. That was too good of an opportunity to pass up. If I could convince these people that true magicians were good people, willing to help, then it would be another fatal blow for the Star Order. So for anyone brave enough to approach me, I did twice the amount of work they asked for.

  I could almost see the word of my actions spread like wildfire.

  Without anyone around to remind me of the time, I got rather wrapped up in the work. I’d started at the south section of the shore and worked my way steadily northward, and the sun slipped behind the horizon as I did so. When the mirror in my pocket buzzed, I realized in shock I had been working over four hours. Whoops. I should have checked in before this… I brought the mirror out, resigned to the fact that I was probably in trouble. “Hello.”

  “Garth, are you going to be much longer?” my fiancée asked, a note of worry in her voice.

  “I shouldn’t be. The shoreline is restored, as are most of the streets. I think I have about two blocks left to check on and
do some repairs. Shouldn’t take more than another hour or so.”

  “Well, that’s good to hear. How bad was it?”

  “Pretty bad,” I admitted, still walking to the next street. I started to describe the scene when I first arrived. When I rounded a corner, a wave of magical energy hit me full in the chest, robbing me of breath. I lost the words I was about to speak. My eyes automatically looked for the source of that energy. If felt…wrong. It grated against me like sandpaper against a sunburn. My mage sense cried out in revolt.

  “Garth? Garth, what’s wrong?”

  “Chatta, there’s something very wrong here.” I tried to swallow past a dry mouth. “I can’t describe it. It’s this…powerful, malignant wave of energy.”

  “That’s…disturbing,” she responded with alarm. “Do you see the source?”

  “No. Is Raile still there?”

  “Well, yes, he is. He’s been helping us all day.”

  “Get him. Do a scrying on my location. I don’t know what this is, but when I find it, I want him to look at it.”

  “Good idea. Wait, I’ll fetch him.” I could hear her open a door, the thump of her feet as she ran calling out Raile’s name.

  I broke into a run as well, following my senses to see if I could find the source. It wasn’t difficult. I just listened to what my survival instincts were saying, the direction they wanted me to run to, and went the opposite direction.

  People gave odd looks to this man with long white hair running along their streets, but no one tried to stop me. I turned three corners and went up a slight hill to a higher section of the town before I almost ran straight into it.

  The building stood on top of a slight rise, on the corner of two cross streets. It had a low, iron fence around it to keep people from casually entering. It was a Star Order’s building, although judging from the amount of weeds and overgrown grass in the small front yard, it had been abandoned for at least several weeks. The source of the power pulsed like a beating heart. In truth, it was making me nauseous as well. I swallowed hard, several times, to keep my empty stomach from heaving.

  Feeling unsteady on my feet, I forced myself to walk on the sidewalk around the building. As I made my way to the back, the feeling became more distinct, so I knew I was heading in the right direction.

  “Alright, Garth, I’m here. Where do we need to scry?” Raile asked, sounding unnaturally calm.

  “Movac, north edge of town. There’s a dark grey building that belonged to the Star Order. It’s built on a rise, on the corner of a cross street.” It would take Chatta at least a few minutes to find the place, so I kept walking.

  “What do you see?”

  I turned to face the back of the building. What I saw made my stomach contort into knots. “Raile, there’s this huge inscription carved into the back of the building. I’ve never seen anything like it. It must be two feet long and a foot wide.”

  “That’s the source?”

  “It certainly feels like it.”

  “Found it,” Chatta said from somewhere in the background. “Raile, what is that?”

  There was grave silence for several moments before Raile answered. His voice shook with every word. “That, children, is our death unless we stop it.”

  ~*~

  I stood guard over the place until Dassan arrived. Tyvendor brought him, so he actually arrived within a half hour of being called. Tyvendor didn’t stay, just dropped him off and then flew back immediately, citing the need to be available for transport duty for the others.

  That inscription on the building was my priority.

  Dassan didn’t utter a word of greeting to me, just stalked to where I stood. I pointed at the inscription and let him draw his own conclusions. I had commandeered as many lamps from the town as I could to illuminate the area. It had garnered more strange looks, but the townspeople had complied. The sigil seemed to writhe under the flickering light. Dassan’s eyes roved from the top to the bottom and back again, carefully, slowly, as if he were reading some pattern to it. I’d stared at it for the past thirty minutes and it only looked like elaborate scroll work and ancient symbols to me. Then again, my training at school hadn’t covered anything like this, so it’s no wonder it didn’t make sense to me.

  It apparently made a great deal of sense to Dassan, as he abruptly started swearing in the vilest language I’d ever heard. He shook in rage, teeth bared in a feral snarl, veins popping at his temples. But under the anger lay another emotion—fear so strong it was almost palpable.

  “What is that thing?” I demanded, tired of getting only cryptic answers.

  He turned to me, breath coming in and out in short pants. “Do you know what a sigil is?”

  My blood ran cold. “Yes.”

  “That’s what it is. I’d lay odds that there was a powerful glamour of some sort over this thing before the tidal wave hit and impacted the building.”

  It was true that the building had suffered quite a bit of damage. Actually, most of this street had. If the glamour or shield or whatever it had been had been tied to the building, then no wonder it had failed when the outer walls were destroyed. I rubbed a hand over my eyes and tried to force myself to think. It’d been a while since I studied about sigils, but from what I remember… “Don’t these things have to be in some sort of directional alignment to work?”

  “Either tri-directional or quad-directional,” Dassan confirmed. “I don’t know which one it is just by looking at this. I need to sit down and crunch some numbers to guess the locations for both possibilities.”

  “I’ll wait for you,” I responded grimly. “As soon as you have it figured out, we’ll go to each location until we can confirm it one way or another.”

  He nodded in thanks, and then sat down right there on the sidewalk, taking paper and pencil out of his breast pocket. Paying absolutely no heed to me, he started scribbling numbers out at an alarming speed.

  The mirror in my hand lit up with Xiaolang’s voice coming through. “Garth, we’re dying from suspense over here. What is going on?”

  “We’ve found a wall sigil here that was created by the Star Order.”

  “Break that down for us non-magicians,” Hazard requested.

  I blinked. Was the whole team listening in? “Alright, this is complex magic, but I’ll try to simplify.” I paused for a moment, trying to formulate the explanation in my head, before talking. “There are different levels of magical theory that involve complex spells. The more powerful the spell, the less often it’s a spoken incantation. Sometimes they’re sung, so that you can add the power of several people. An easier way is to simply carve the spell into something so that anyone within range of the carving can be drawn into the spell’s power.”

  “That part we followed,” Aletha offered.

  “These engraved spells are called sigils. Now, if you have a single sigil then you can only draw power from anyone within immediate reach. However, if you set up several sigils in different directions, sigils that are within direct line of each other, you can set up a resonance. Anyone within the boundary of those lines is automatically drawn in, whether they are touching the sigil or not. The most powerful resonance that can be established is a quad-directional alignment. A sigil is put in the north, south, east and west directions and aligned with the others.” There was a deathly, still silence all around me as I finished. Unnecessarily I added, “There’s more to it, of course. In fact, putting these up requires a great deal of magical knowledge and mathematical equations. This is the layman’s explanation.”

  “That’s scary enough,” Shield muttered. “So, are you saying that these sigils can be set up over long distances? Around a whole city?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, in theory, a blood magician can draw upon the power of a whole city’s population.” Xiaolang spoke the obvious conclusion with a painfully level tone.

  “It’s more than theory,” Chatta whispered, voice shaking. “They plan to draw upon a capitol’s life force to fight bac
k. Garth—the elderly, the children, they won’t be able to survive that kind of drain!”

  “I know.” Everyone had magic in them, but most didn’t have the minimal magic to do spells. Most people’s magic instead functioned as their life source. It’s why a magician had to be so careful when working magic; if they ever overdid it, and drained too much of their core, then they could very well kill themselves. For a magician to borrow another’s core power…well, stabbing someone through the heart would have about the same effect.

  Dassan abruptly stood up, leaning over the mirror in my hand. “Raile, are you there?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m going to give you some locations to look at. Most glamours are weak to scrying, so you might have an easier time of finding these things than we do.” Dassan rattled off a series of coordinates that made no sense to me, but apparently did to Raile. “Got that?”

  “We’ll look. Chatta, get that bowl of yours back out.”

  I looked to Dassan for direction. “Where to?”

  “Go directly south from our location. If it’s quad-directional—and I have a hunch it is—we’ll stumble across it near the outskirts of the city.”

  I took us down on the earth path and went south, as ordered. I didn’t go as quickly as I normally do, not wanting to accidentally zip right past it. With it being under such a heavy glamour, I didn’t expect to feel anything. And I didn’t.

  “Garth, there’s a city garden directly ahead of you. The air shimmers oddly there. We think that’s it.”

  Gardens have their own distinct feel. Most gardens have imported soil, all of it constrained by stone or planters and so whatever is grown there is disconnected from the ground. And yet, because it rests on the ground, I can still sense it. The larger the garden, the more distinct this out of sync feeling is, and so I found the place they mentioned with relative ease. I rose up when I felt it, being very careful to rise up in a very clear section.