The Sleeping Life

Chapter Twenty-Nine

No-one argued with Rennyn’s decision to troop back to the garden of mages. A feeling of urgency had descended, all muddled with a sense that they were hurrying off to get themselves killed. And all for a bunch of people they’d never met. By far the smartest thing to do would be to head south, have His Smugness report the find, and set a few hundred people at the problem. The mages had all been there weeks—even months—and so no-one could say it was necessary that Rennyn personally poke that nest of glass hornets.

The Pest was a different matter. He always looked a bit peaky, but now wore a spun-sugar air, as if one good knock would see him in pieces. His expression kept bouncing between bubbling-over and worried sick, and he obviously ached to explain properly what was wrong with him. His sister had tried to summon a focus and instead got herself stuck in Fallon’s dreams? Somewhere that didn’t sound like the Eferum, but certainly wasn’t anywhere even Rennyn had been able to spot. And this sister was now trapped on the mage island, while still being maintained by Fallon. Maybe.

It was a pity they hadn’t brought Sebastian along after all. Some whole new place that wasn’t the Eferum or maybe was, and sisters who only came out at night, would be just the sort of thing he’d love to dig into. And bore everyone for hours warbling on about how it all worked.

While everyone else was agreeing that the first thing they’d have to do would be to see if they could section off the glass golems, Kendall privately admitted that if they marched off south, Rennyn would probably only get vanished again. Fixing this problem was a thing Rennyn Claire couldn’t walk away from, any more than facing down Solace had been. All of the most powerful mages that Kendall had met had either been complete monsters, or stuck sacrificing themselves for noble causes.

Like the stupid Emperor of Kole.

Rennyn asked, in the mild tone Kendall knew to distrust: "Have you any further recommendations regarding separating the mages from the vine, Dezart Samarin?"

"I may," he said, equally mild. "I want to see them personally first."

Kendall was fairly certain that the Imperial Smugness couldn’t be the Emperor of Kole. The Kolans would sure as shine have kicked up a fuss if their Emperor had taken off on a jaunt to the Forest of Semarrak. But what else could Rennyn be suggesting, with her talk of transformations, and mages famous for healing lore. Had the Emperor traded places with someone? Who was ruling Kole while he was gone? Who would get up on that throne, put on that mask, and… No. It couldn’t be the Emperor, because Rennyn had been totally clear that the Emperor couldn’t leave that throne room, could never take off that mask. Not without dying.

Shaking her head, Kendall tossed the question to the back of her mind for later. Even though she wasn’t going to be casting, let alone fighting, she needed to focus. Anything might be a clue or a warning of an attack. Kellian instinct meant they could anticipate almost anything coming at them, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t help to watch Sukata’s back, and keep an eye on Rennyn and the Pest.

They marched all the way back to where they’d first stopped to peer into the cellar, with Rennyn writing Sigillics all the while. She handed one of the slates to Sukata, then looked at the Pest.

"Do you need to sleep to address whatever has changed? If so, I’ll put sleep on you briefly while we’re re-establishing the pattern of the constructs' patrols, but I don’t want you asleep while we’re making our attempt." She smiled faintly. "In case we need to run."

The Pest just nodded, and sat down with his back against the nearest rock. A tiny flicker of magic sent him off right away.

"His energy use has dropped with the relocation," Rennyn said, after a short pause. "If we can’t untangle this problem this afternoon, I think we’re going to have to sleep here."

Lieutenant Meniar grimaced. "Could we keep him awake all night and then bring him back here to sleep tomorrow morning?"

"Possibly. But even awake he’s likely being drained at a higher rate than normal." Rennyn handed a second slate to Lieutenant Meniar. "This is a guise-shield. It’s power-hungry, so I’d rather you didn’t have to use it, but if the constructs refuse to stay where we put them, I’d rather avoid combat if at all possible. For one thing, we don’t know precisely how they’re linked to the vine."

"They might be powered by it," Captain Faille said.

"Logical," Rennyn agreed, looking up at him. "Do you think we should try to simultaneously trap both patrols?"

Captain Faille and his mother exchanged glances, then Darian Faille said: "If we divide into two groups, then we have far less chance of withstanding an attack."

"Very well—we’re already gambling on their simplicity, after all. I’ll close the door to the room below as soon as the first patrol is in. Sukata can cast the binding. Unless Fallon has something to report."

Rennyn woke him as she spoke, and they all looked down at worry, disappointment, and frustration. After a pause, Rennyn simply handed him the last leaf from Lieutenant Meniar’s slate book.

"I don’t want to risk you casting unless it’s absolutely critical, Fallon. This is a variant guise shield—less powerful, but something we can try if the first fails. If trapping the constructs works, we’ll head to the centre of the garden and attempt to resolve this snare, and you can try sleeping again there if we see no other way forward."

The Pest nodded, though he was clearly now fretting his head off. He took the slate, chewing on his lip as if it was breakfast, and moved to stand a little to one side. Sukata, gripping her own slate very tight, moved to the very rim of the cellar, above the empty room they had experimented with before. They all waited without further conversation, watching the progress of the nearest patrol.

Ants. Bees. Constructs. Tools. A set of instructions given form. Kendall wondered if they ever rested. If they had nests somewhere in the vine-covered rooms, and got to sit down occasionally. Whether they had names, and if, looking down at them, the Kellian thought about the Ten.

The glass golems certainly didn’t seem to be looking up, going about their vine-grooming business without any hint they noticed or cared that a bunch of people were standing just outside their garden. They didn’t even react when Rennyn closed the door on them, after they’d entered the nearest empty room. They only tried to open it after they’d finished their short combing circuit of the room, and by that time Sukata had cast the binding Sigillic that made the stone of the door hold fast to the walls.

The first glass ant-thing that tried to leave was a small one, and when it reached the closed door it climbed up it, did a funny little waggle, then pattered off to one side and started around the room again. Another did the same, and then a third. It wasn’t until one of the largest of the constructs found the door closed that there was any difference: that one reared up and pushed at the door.

Nothing.

It made a little circle before the door, reared up again and pushed.

Nothing.

The third time, with the door still stubborn, it started around the room again, and Kendall heard Rennyn let out her breath.

The rescue party waited, still wordlessly, until the constructs had followed the same pattern three times over. Finally, Captain Faille said: "Next patrol."

They moved, repeated the exercise with all the same knotted-stomach tension, and then circled back to the entrance.

"Now we get to the guesswork and luck?" Kendall said, as Lieutenant Meniar flipped the slate and read over, for the half-thousandth time, the apparently tricky Sigillic Rennyn had come up with to get through the shield.

"I should think the Sigillic will work," Rennyn said.

"I wasn’t talking about getting in. What do we do once we’re in, when something goes wrong?"

"Well, don’t sit in one place for an extended period of time, for a start. But that’s why I’ve written the shield Sigillic on the reverse of each slate—any mage should be able to cast it, including you, Kendall, should it be necessary to run."

Kendall stared at Rennyn, then let her face show exactly what she thought of that. But there was no use pointing out that it might have helped if Kendall had even once been allowed to practice casting Sigillics before they stepped on the ant’s nest.

"I agree that it’s best to investigate the heart of the garden before working on freeing the mages," Rennyn was saying. "I’ve too many guesses on what we might find there to suggest an ideal approach."

"We will avoid conflict if we can," Darian Faille said. "But at this stage I would recommend responding to a direct attack decisively. We will attempt to take attackers alive, however."

Wondering if Captain Faille would try to fight while holding Rennyn, Kendall let herself be shuffled into a Sentene defensive formation, with Darian Faille and Sukata taking lead, and Tesin in the rear to catch any attackers coming up behind them. Unable to think of anything more useful, Kendall picked up a rock to throw if they did get to fighting.

She listened to the way the sound of the shield changed as Lieutenant Meniar cast, and made sure to step forward with everyone else when he was done, since the longer he held open the shield, the more tired he’d get. Her shoes crunched over something, and Kendall looked down to see glass, and had to push away a vision of Sukata, shattered into pieces and trampled upon. Even the first Kellian had been nothing like these bug-caterpillar-things. So far as Kendall could make out, once the Black Queen wasn’t around to give them commands, the first Kellian had been a lot like babies—deadly, six-foot, clawed babies—who just needed some time to start wanting more than to be told what to do next.

They walked down the entry ramp and then paused, listening. The play of magic was distracting, making it harder to focus on ordinary noise, and the whole place felt heavy and a bit wet. A lot warmer than it had been outside the shield, too. It smelt like a hothouse.

"An experiment first, please," the Imperial Smugness said, and pressed his hand against a relatively clear spot on the nearest wall. "And you as well, Lieutenant, and perhaps Sukata and young Tesin."

No surprise that the ivy didn’t even seem to notice Tesin, while almost immediately reaching out tiny little white threads toward Lieutenant Meniar and Sukata. Kendall stared hardest at the last hand, Samarin’s, and saw that the ivy did react to him, but only after a much longer pause.

"You might want to mind your ankles," Rennyn said.

Kendall looked down and saw that the little filaments were reaching toward her feet. In one mutual shudder, everyone moved, even those who didn’t have any mage ability. Even Captain Faille. It was like the place was trying to eat them.

"Let’s not linger," Samarin said. "Direct to the centre."

Direct didn’t mean all that fast, and Kendall’s headache started back up with the thrum, thrum, thrum of the place. Corridor, fountain courtyard, corridor. The garden wasn’t really all that big, and with the glass bugs shut away like the mages, there wasn’t anything but ivy and old stone. As they slowed near the open central space, everything felt like it was pressing down.

The last time Kendall had felt like this, it had been when the Black Queen had succeeded in her Grand Summoning, and a whole mountain of power had squashed down into the one place. This wasn’t even a tenth so bad, but it was the strongest casting Kendall had felt since that time.

"Not an attack," Captain Faille said.

"Around what I’d expect of twenty or thirty strong mages in a joined casting," Rennyn said, sounding more interested than anything else. "I’m still not clear on the intent, though, yes, definitely not an attack. The focal point is directly ahead. Is that…?"

"Statue, not person," Darian Faille said briefly.

Another step or two made this less cryptic. In the middle of the next courtyard was a statue instead of a fountain. It wasn’t nearly as worn as the ones out by the lake, though it seemed a similar enough shape. A tall woman with long braided hair, wearing a robe. She held her hands out before her, cupped together, as if praying to the Dawnbringer.

And nothing much else. A lot less ivy. The walls were almost clear of it, revealing swirling patterns etched in the stone, but there were roots growing neatly in channels leading directly to the base of the statue.

Rennyn murmured something to Captain Faille, and he took her up close to one of the walls.

"I shall be most impressed if you’re able to read proto-Efanian, Duchess Surclere," the Imperial Smugness said.

"Unfortunately not," Rennyn replied. "But this, I think, is Nameen’s Walk. It is strong enough, and has been used often enough recently, for me to make out the shape of the casting.

"What in the Hells is proto-Efanian?" Kendall asked.

"The name given to the casting language used by the Elder Mages," Sukata said, her whispery voice making clear she was impressed. "No-one knows how to read its written form."

"I could reconstruct this, I think," Rennyn added, sounding pleased. "Well, with a lot more strength I could." She paused. "I think my focus is somewhere in this room. I can feel it."

The Imperial Smugness fished his mask out from its big inner pocket, and put it on before surveying the room again. If he really couldn’t cast, maybe the mask was the reason he seemed able to hear as well as a Kellian. Whatever the case, Kendall would still bet he was a liar.

He glanced her way, so she glared at him, then concentrated on finding Rennyn’s focus. Not on a chain around the statue’s neck, which would have been too convenient—and worrying. There were precious few places to put things in the open courtyard, unless there was a hidden cache beneath the paving stones.

They all looked a little ridiculous, pacing about while still acting like they expected the jaws of some trap to swing shut at any moment. It was the Pest, entirely out of place in his grubby bedclothes, who stooped and plucked a chain out from among the roots that filled the channels leading to the statue. From the chain, in a little wire holder, was a clear stone almost the size of a hen’s egg.

"Belonging to one of the other mages?" Rennyn said. "Can this casting actually be able to make use of our focuses?"

While Darian Faille stood guard, and Rennyn continued to study the decorated walls, everyone else scrabbled about pulling focus after focus from among the roots. The first was joined by another, and another, and became a pile. Kendall shrugged off her jacket and they used it as a makeshift bag.

"How many mages did you say were missing?" Lieutenant Meniar asked, adding a medium-sized focus to the others.

"From Kole, twenty-two. Two verified as gone from Verisia. Another from Dunnesan, and that possible case from Fel Sparo. The numbers are rather complicated by false reports, the increasing panic, and those whose location is simply unknown. But these extras may be from the northern kingdoms—they rarely share information with Kole, particularly since the loss of certain of their mages would leave critical holes in regional defences."

"Or they could have been here a real long time," Kendall pointed out. "It’s not like this place is new-built."

She had paused in her poking her way along one of the channels, and flinched when she discovered a little root-hair had burrowed into the back of her hand. She picked the thing out, grimacing at the red dot left behind, but then forced herself to keep working. Next time she started thinking Rennyn was soft, she’d have to remember that she’d actually climbed back into the vines and let them stick her all over. Kendall wasn’t sure she’d have been able to do the same.

Kendall’s persistence was rewarded by another focus. She slid it out, drew her breath for a pleased exclamation, and then paused. Standing, she trotted over to where Captain Faille was patiently holding Rennyn by yet another wall, and held out not one but two smoky-dark focuses bound to the same leather cord.

Rennyn’s eyebrows lifted. "It seems my Wicked Uncle approves of my focus-summoning methods," she said, taking the cord. "And now we have a neat reversal of circumstances."

"Is he likely to come looking for it?" Lieutenant Meniar asked. He helped Rennyn work her focus free of the binding, and then pocketed the smaller focus and cord.

"He has invested far less time into that than I had in mine," Rennyn said, gripping her own focus tightly for a moment before slipping it into the little pocket on the front of her shirt. "Everything else being equal, he’s likely to simply start again."

Rennyn had gone into the Eferum nearly three hundred times to summon her focus—and at the moment wasn’t likely to survive a single transition. Getting that little black stone back was probably worth the entire trip.

"Now that you have your focus back, can we use it to remove the miscasting from you?" Kendall asked.

"It doesn’t quite fit, symbolically," Rennyn said, with a faint sigh. "If I had the false focus that caused the miscasting…but that was crushed in the aftermath of the Grand Summoning. This, at least, may mean a little less fainting when casting. Unless of course it leads me to be over-ambitious."

Rennyn looked up at the sky then, and they all copied her. Clear blue, but the shadows cast by the walls marked the progress of the afternoon.

"There’s a Sigillic divination I want to try," Rennyn said, after a moment. "While Fallon and Kendall mark it out for me, Lieutenant Meniar, perhaps you and the Dezart can make an examination of one of the trapped mages?"

Her voice sounded odd. Lieutenant Meniar frowned, then put a hand on Rennyn’s forehead. She shook him off impatiently.

"No fever that I can tell. But yes, my throat is a trifle sore. Which, at this juncture, is simply another reason not to delay."

Along with being straightforward disaster. In the best of conditions Lieutenant Meniar would be able to nurse Rennyn through a cold, but stuck out in the middle of nowhere trying to rescue a whole bunch of other people, and it would be just the thing to push Rennyn onto the downward spiral of illness and exhaustion that they’d been at such pains to avoid.

No-one argued the point. After the briefest discussion Lieutenant Meniar, Samarin, Sukata and Darian Faille went off to look at the nearest flowering mage, while Rennyn dictated an endless Sigillic which became a double ring of squiggles around the statue. Tesin continued to search out focuses, and Captain Faille succeeded in being stonier than the statue at the centre of it all.

They’d reached the point of making tiny corrections to individual sigils by the time the second group returned—and Rennyn’s voice had definitely gone croaky. Kendall could have kicked herself for not thinking to bring along something to drink.

"Any hope?" Rennyn asked, as Samarin paused to look over their chalk work.

He was still wearing the mask, so Kendall couldn’t see his face, but his voice was crisp and businesslike.

"Two options seem viable. The first will take at minimum two casters—one to remove the growth into the lungs, and the other to cauld the holes left behind. And then immediate, more substantive repair work would need to be carried out. With the resources at hand, this approach would allow us to get one or even two down by nightfall. If we chose healer-mages—and they survived and recovered with sufficient speed—they could in turn assist us tomorrow. In…between five to eight days we could have them all down, though given the conditions of operation, we’re likely to have a series of secondary issues. Infection. Blood clots. Collapsed lungs if the caulding doesn’t hold."

"I do hope you’re leading with the less desirable approach."

Samarin went on as if Rennyn hadn’t spoken. "The second option will greatly depend on what this vine is doing, and whether we are free to interfere with it. A Symbolic casting—with all the consequent risks of imprecise symbolism—could be used. Instead of removing the mages individually and repairing the damage, we could treat the separation as a natural process and…ripen them, if you will."

It wasn’t often that Herself looked startled by magic, but she gaped a little at that.

"I’d have to cast it," Lieutenant Meniar said, with the gloomiest expression Kendall had ever seen him wear as he looked down at a slate full of tiny Sigillic writing. "The survival chances of pulling these spikes out of them and patching the holes is not high. The…the possible results of option two scarcely bear thinking about, and it will require a very thorough knowledge of anatomy to manage."

"Anatomy or botany?" Rennyn said, and then offered an apologetic little grimace at Lieutenant Meniar’s pained response. "Well, we can’t make any decisions until we know more about the vine itself, and what all this power is being drawn off to do." She looked around at them, hesitated, then said: "And now we reach the point where we start hitting casting limits. I think this one is best left to you, Sukata. It’s not so power-hungry I think it will put you at risk, and I’ve structured it to allow you to cut it off at any time, but it will leave you very tired. Please don’t maintain it to the point of collapse."

Sukata, typically, went all very straight and upright, and keen to show that she would be responsible and reliable. Everyone else drew back to the archway they’d entered through, and watched her try.

The circle of sigils was so large Sukata had to walk around it—twice—to complete the casting, her attention never wavering from the chalk figures as they began to glow from the power she pushed into them. She staggered back a couple of steps as the thing completed and it began to draw on her in earnest. Kendall watched her worriedly, and then almost managed to forget her altogether as a bloom of green lifted from the circle like a curtain rising on a stage.

Instead of a paved stone courtyard they were standing on the lip of a pit—no, a whirlpool. A dim, distant sound, a muffled gale, made Kendall’s headache pound all the more. It came from the green light pouring into the room from four rivers where the root channels were marked: an endless flow that swirled and was sucked down and away.

The statue was still there, an island rising from the centre, and another tiny thin green trail of light dripped from its cupped palms. Chained to its legs was the outline of a woman who looked very much the same as the statue, except thin and insubstantial and worn. The chains were a bright white, and looked like they had to be painful, and even if they weren’t, there was a horrid, barbed mahogany-red thing—lichen with…with little mouths of champing teeth—that seemed to have grown out of the whirlpool, all up one of the trapped person’s legs and the right side of their body.

Clutching the other leg as if it was the only thing stopping her being sucked down was a weeping, terrified, and transparent girl.