Mage's Path 2 Page 2

  He and Melinda had never ventured up onto the first floor, and the idea of going there made them both feel interested and excited.

  Ivan nodded. “That’s right. Lachlan said he’d be in his study. Don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe. Since our encounter in the core chamber, the tower seems to have entirely given up on its usual habit of making abrupt changes to the layout. More evidence, as far as I can see, of the tower herself being exhausted and retreating into rest. The sensible thing to do!”

  He glared at Jack as he delivered this last sentence rather heavily.

  Jack smiled. “Don’t worry, Ivan, I’ll take it easy. We’ll go see Lachlan once we’ve had a quick look in the workshop. There’s something I want to check there.”

  “Hm, very well,” Ivan said. “You’ve heard my advice, and if you refuse to take it, I can’t be held responsible! Honestly, young mages nowadays…” He made a theatrical hand-washing gesture, grabbed up his apron, and headed back toward the kitchen.

  As Ivan marched off, Jack thought he caught a glint in the goblin’s eye and a sly smile forming on his sharp-featured little face. Despite Ivan’s matronly, overbearing act, Jack suspected that the goblin was secretly pleased by Jack’s quick recovery. It was a testament to the goblin’s skill as a healer, after all, as well as to Jack’s resilience.

  “Come on,” Jack said, heading for the main hallway and the workshop. “I just want to take a quick look in before we go see Lachlan.”

  “What are you wanting to check?” Melinda asked curiously, jogging a few steps to catch up and then falling into step beside him.

  “I’ll tell you when we get there,” Jack said, then changed the subject. “So, I guess you don’t have any remaining doubts about Lachlan now?”

  Melinda colored slightly and her mouth tightened, but she shook her head. “I don’t have any doubts. I overreacted. It was foolish of me. I’m still not one hundred percent comfortable with the idea of the dark arts, but I don’t judge Lachlan for having the magic.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Jack said, glancing over at her with a smile. “His dark arts seem to have been keeping us safe in ways that neither of us realized. And besides, we could do without a repeat of the adventure with the tower.”

  The truth was that Jack was not entirely comfortable with Lachlan’s dark arts either. Having seen them on display, it was hard to imagine anyone being entirely comfortable with them. Lachlan was a warlock, and the dark magic he used manifested in some truly disturbing ways. But for all that, it was how Lachlan was made. Jack would not condemn his teacher for that.

  Melinda had gotten a bad shock when she first saw Lachlan’s magic on display. The tower had noticed her anger and fear. Then when Melinda confronted Lachlan, the tower picked up on Lachlan’s hurt at being judged harshly by Melinda. Dungeons absorb emotions as well as magic and materials, and as far as Jack could surmise, the tower’s core acted much the same way as a traditional dungeon core in that respect. The tower was open to emotions.

  The only problem was that in this case, the tower core was a bit too open.

  The tower had absorbed Melinda’s horror and Lachlan’s pain and begun broadcasting them far and wide without meaning to. Melinda, picking up on the reflected emotions, had become more and more angry and afraid. The tower had become more afraid in turn, setting up a terrifying feedback loop of negative emotions that Jack had needed to use all his strength to resist.

  Only when Melinda had stormed out of the tower had the feedback loop been broken, but by then it had been too late. The tower was in full defensive mode and was ready to attack anyone and anything within its aura of influence.

  “It is very powerful magic,” Melinda said consideringly, breaking into Jack’s thoughts as they pulled up in front of the hidden door to the workshop.

  “What is? You mean Lachlan’s dark arts?”

  She nodded.

  “Yeah,” Jack said consideringly, “I think that’s true. Lachlan’s a warlock, and they always have had a reputation for being incredibly powerful and versatile mages. And he has a past, of course.” Jack pushed the hidden door open and together he and Melinda stepped into the narrow corridor that led to the workshop.

  “He does,” Melinda said, coming along behind Jack, “but I know next to nothing about it.”

  “I don’t know much either,” Jack said. “Only what Ivan told me a while ago, that Lachlan was a great warrior in his youth, and helped win some magical war but was then cast out.”

  “That’s not much to go on,” Melinda mused.

  They stepped out together into the cozy, bright, cluttered space that was the workshop.

  Jack looked around the room. It was a generously-sized chamber with a floor-to-ceiling window in one wall and many candle holders that could illuminate the room during the night-time hours. A fire crackled in a small hearth on the opposite wall from the window, and there were two comfortable chairs on either side of it.

  Running the full length of one wall was a long workbench cluttered with tools, bottles, and pouches of magical ingredients. On the other side of the room nearer the window was the round enchanter’s table, glittering with crystals and gleaming with arcane, brightly colored runes. On the other side of the window there was a short, low bench with various bottles and test tubes, and a big mortar and pestle of black stone fixed in the middle of it.

  Jack walked to the workbench and looked at the clutter of tools, then up at the shelves all packed with neatly labeled bottles and jars and piled with old scrolls and funny-looking tools that Jack could not identify.

  “What are you looking for?” Melinda asked. She sounded very curious.

  “I’m not sure yet,” Jack said, “but I’ll know in a minute.”

  He held up his right hand and focused for a moment.

  At the heart of his being, right down at the center of his soul, Jack found his mana pool. This was the most important resource of any mage, a deep reserve of raw magical power that a mage could draw upon to power spells. Every mage had one. Indeed, anyone with even a scrap of magical talent had at least the beginnings of a mana pool, but Jack’s had grown and deepened with practice since he’d come to study with Lachlan.

  Now it lay still as a deep pond but as ripe with potential as a dammed river. He was shocked at first to see just how much it had grown, but then when he remembered the supreme effort he’d used to calm the tower core he decided it was not all that surprising. Anyway, that was not what he’d come here to check.

  With a careful application of his will, Jack drew a strand of mana from his pool and let it flow up the pathway from his pool to his right hand. He smiled as a slight light began to glow above his extended palm, as if he were holding a pale flame in his hand.

  “Your Guiding Light spell!” Melinda said breathlessly as the eerie light shone out into the room. “And it’s brighter and more stable than ever!”

  Jack smiled, the pale light of the spell illuminating his face with a mysterious radiance, casting black shadows around the angles of his brows and cheekbones. “I want…” he said slowly, then paused, thinking about how to phrase the question right. “I want to find something in this room that will help me to identify its former occupant.”

  Melinda’s eyes went wide.

  Jack held up the light and gazed through it. There was the familiar silver guiding line that he had been expecting. And it led straight from his chest to a flagstone in the corner of the room beside the fireplace.

  This was the first spell Jack had discovered. In his very first moments after absorbing the dungeon core in the forest near Oakwood town, he had experimented with pushing mana from his pool out to the palm of his hand. At first it had just seemed to generate light, but he soon realized that looking through the light at the space beyond revealed something that couldn’t be seen with the naked eye.

  Something magical.

  This was the silver guiding line, like a wavering thread of beaten silver imbued with moonlight, that guided Jack
to his objective. By asking the right question of the spell, Jack could find things that had been lost, could find people, and could even find things that everybody had forgotten existed. That was why he called it his Guiding Light spell.

  Melinda knew about this, of course, though only Jack could actually see the guideline. She understood that if there was something in the room that would offer a clue to the workshop’s former owner, the Guiding Light spell would be able to seek it out.

  “Why do you want to know?” Melinda asked quietly as Jack carefully followed the line toward the fireplace.

  Jack frowned. He was not entirely sure; he just knew that he did. He crouched by the fireplace. The silver guideline went down to one of the flagstones and stopped. Jack reabsorbed the mana from the spell, extinguishing the light, and began to explore around the edges of the flagstone with his fingertips, searching for any trace of movement in the heavy, well-laid stone.

  “It came to me while I was asleep,” he said quietly as he worked. “You remember how cagey Lachlan was, how upset he seemed when I found that brooch? I had been experimenting with my Guiding Light spell when I found an abandoned area of the tower grounds where there was the ruin of a small cottage. I’d asked the spell to let me find something that had been lost, and it led me to the well beside the cottage. There, I found that brooch.”

  “The brooch you later converted into your belt buckle,” Melinda reminded him.

  Jack glanced down to where the beautiful piece of jewelry cinched his belt. It was enchanted with a spell that gave him a boost to his mana capacity, and since he rarely wore a cloak he’d converted it to a belt-buckle that went with the new suit of clothes Ivan had made for him. Now it was there permanently, and his mana pool’s capacity and regeneration speed were noticeably enhanced by it.

  “That’s right,” Jack said. “Do you remember when I showed Lachlan the brooch? He was upset, but then he immediately took us and showed us this workshop. Ivan said the brooch and the workshop had belonged to someone Lachlan was very close to, but who had been lost. Well, I think that I have a right to know a little more about this person if I’m going to be using their workshop and studying under their old master. Who were they? What happened?”

  “But wouldn’t it be better to just ask Lachlan about it?” Melinda said. She had come over and was crouching beside Jack, probing the flagstone without much success.

  “I could,” Jack said, “but it’s obviously a very painful subject for him. It feels kinder somehow to find out on my own if I can, and it’s also a good test of my spell… hey!”

  Suddenly, his fingers had found something. A smoother area on one side of the flag stone smoothly gave below his questing fingertip. It slid silently inward and then stopped with a soft click like a well-oiled mechanism working. The flagstone swung upward as if it was on a spring and folded back, leaving a black opening in the floor about a foot square.

  “That worked!” Melinda said, whistling in appreciation and settling back on her haunches.

  Jack immediately activated the Guiding Light spell and held it down into the hole, illuminating a small square space. At first it looked empty but when he leaned over and looked closer, he saw something at the bottom of the hole.

  It was a single sheet of paper.

  With great care, Jack leaned in and lifted the sheet up from where it lay. It was curled and brown with age, but to his relief it didn’t crumble as old parchment is sometimes prone to doing. It was a fine, heavy paper made from beaten reed or wood pulp, rather than animal hide.

  Holding it carefully, he took it to the workbench and laid it flat. Melinda came and stood beside him, leaning over his shoulder to see.

  It was blank.

  “What in the…?” Jack said. He must have made a mistake, there must be something else… He held the spell up again and, to be certain, repeated his objective out loud. Immediately, the silver guideline appeared.

  It led unerringly to the blank sheet of paper on the workbench.

  “Well, that’s perplexing,” Melinda said.

  Jack nodded. “I expected something more. I wonder if…”

  But there was no time to wonder. A loud tapping on the door caught both their attention, and they turned to see who it was.

  Framed in the doorway was the black-robed and sinister figure of their mentor, teacher, and guide in the magical arts—the warlock Lachlan Woe.

  Chapter 2

  Lachlan Woe was a tall man, well-built, alert, and straight-backed. He was dressed in robes as black as midnight, with fold upon fold of dark weave wrapped about him, secured at the waist by a broad belt of black leather. His robes were ragged at the hem, showing black pants and gleaming, well-worn boots of black leather. As always, his hands were hidden within thin, close-fitting black gloves.

  He was completely bald and beardless, and his skin gleamed a deep ruby red that always reminded Jack of the red of the coals in a smith’s forge. Across his face and head, thick lines of black skin scored through the red as if he had run a fat brush loaded with paint across the red of his skin. His brow was crowned by two short horns of yellow bone.

  But Lachlan’s eyes were the strangest of all. Though they were almond-shaped like the eyes of a normal human, they were colored as strangely as the eyes of a cat. They were a uniformly bright, vivid yellow, save for the black slits of his pupils.

  Lachlan the tutor smiled curiously at his two students. Behind his striped red and black lips, he had a set of unnervingly straight, white teeth that gleamed as he smiled at them and fixed them with his searching gaze.

  “Ivan said you’d be here,” he said in his deep, expressive voice. “I’m sorry to interrupt whatever you’re doing, but I need to hurry you up. I thought we had a bit more time, but I’ve just seen something… What’s that you’ve got there?”

  “Oh, nothing,” Jack said hurriedly, moving to block Lachlan’s view of the workbench and the strange blank sheet of paper. “Just an experiment.”

  “Ah, well, as I said I’m sorry to have to interrupt, but I would appreciate your presence upstairs immediately. Come on.”

  Lachlan turned and stepped back into the hallway. Melinda and Jack looked at each other. Despite their teacher’s easy-going manner, it was clear that there was something bothering him. The restrained tension in his stance spoke of immediate danger, or at least of some quickly approaching threat.

  Melinda went out of the workshop, but before following his tutor and his fellow pupil Jack quickly pulled out one of the drawers that lined the underside of the workbench. A glance inside showed him nothing but a jumble of crystal shards of various sizes, and a small golden item with a cracked glass face that looked like a broken compass. He slipped the mysterious paper inside and slid the drawer closed.

  Out in the hallway, he jogged a few steps to catch up with Lachlan and Melinda. The warlock was striding along at a good pace, his black robes sweeping out behind him. He did not seem inclined to talk.

  They walked with Lachlan through the thickly carpeted hallway and up the stairs. At the main first floor landing Lachlan turned right, marching quickly down the corridor.

  “Library’s there,” he said shortly, gesturing to a red door on the right. “I should probably have shown you that before now but, well, there’s nothing that can be done about that now.”

  He waved to a door that was painted black on the left. “That’s my bedroom and study.”

  The next door on the right was also red. “That’s my own personal workshop,” he said, then strode ahead until he came to a stop in front of the last door on the left.

  “This,” he said, gazing at the nondescript, black-painted wooden door, is the control room.”

  Jack opened his mouth to ask a question at that, but Melinda spoke first. Her voice had a strange, almost sing-song quality to it. Her tone was oddly distant, as if she were thinking out loud, or remembering a half-forgotten dream. “The doors on the right are red, the doors on the left are black,” she half-chanted,
like a singer remembering an old song. Then her eyes snapped clear again and she looked straight up at Lachlan. “Why is that?”

  The corner of their tutor’s mouth twitched upward in a small smile. “Red for study of magic in the workshop and the library, black for application in the study and the control room,” he said. “I can teach you more about that in due time if you want, Melinda. It’s an application of magic that I wouldn’t have thought you’d have been interested in pursuing.”

  Melinda took a breath and Jack could see an excited question forming on her lips. Lachlan was smiling down at her now, as if she’d pleasantly surprised him. Jack knew that his tutor could easily be drawn into a discussion on magical theory, even at the most inappropriate times. He saw now that they were in extreme danger of getting drawn into a convoluted explanation of some new point of magic while standing here in the corridor, the urgent purpose forgotten.

  Before Melinda could ask her question, Jack cleared his throat sharply and stepped between the two of them, putting his hand on the handle of the black door. “The control room, you said, Lachlan? Sorry to interrupt, but there did seem to be some level of urgency…”

  The tower shivered into life as his hand touched the door handle. Sudden as the sun breaking through a clouded sky, Jack felt the feminine presence of the tower in his mind, rippling through his magical awareness and subtly coloring all his sensations like ink through a jug of clear water. It was the first time he’d felt her presence so clearly since the battle.

  “Hello,” he said out loud.

  A wave of greeting and affection flowed through to him from the tower. She did not speak exactly, but she communicated with him as clearly as if she had spoken in plain words. She was awake, she was his ally, she was pleased to see him.

  “What was that?” Lachlan said curiously.

  “The tower,” Jack replied. “I’d not felt her presence since the battle. Ivan thought she must be resting after all her efforts. But I felt her strongly in my mind just now, when I touched this door.”