Tenebroum

Chapter 164: Soon

“This is what I wanted to show you,” Jordan said finally, unwrapping the dirty cloth that covered the manacle that he’d kept hidden for so long and showing it to Taz for the first time.

The archmage didn’t look at the cursed thing, though. Instead, he simply stared deeper into Jordan’s eyes, searching for something. The silence lingered for almost a minute before the ageless man said, “Why didn’t you bring this to me earlier?”

“Because I wasn’t sure I could trust you,” Jordan said, mostly truthfully. “Not after… well, you know…”

The truth was that it wasn’t the way that this man had ended Sister Anisse without a second thought. It was the way that he continued to sniff around and ask probing questions. Taz knew that Jordan was hiding something from him; he just didn’t know it was the book. So, Jordan was offering him this as a gambit to try to muddy the waters. While he doubted the archmage would be happy to discover that an artifact of the Lich had been smuggled into his domain, he was certain that he would be much more upset if he found out that Jordan had been hiding a book that told the future all this time.

Of course, it was also hard to trust Tazuranth, given the things the book had been hinting at lately. Jordan pushed those thoughts from his mind, though, as he met the other man’s gaze, lest he somehow sniff out Jordan’s stray thoughts.

“After all this time you still think I mean to hurt you?” Taz asked with a cold smile, pretending to be hurt. “You’re my apprentice, of a sort. I could never do that. Besides, now that the Collegium has fallen, you might be the last mage left on the continent beside me. When I ascend and beat back the darkness, I’ll need you to refound the school for me.”

“I… what?” Jordan gasped, his mind reeling. “The Collegium fell? But how? I thought that it was holding up better than expected?”

This was hardly the first time they’d talked about the place. For a time, it had been flourishing, at least according to Taz. His divination spells had shown him a valley of lights, which had become a bastion against the darkness that had swept across the rest of the land, and now all that seemed to have reversed, and somehow, the ageless man didn’t seem particularly upset by the news.

“It was,” Taz nodded, “But the Lich unleashed some new weapon that undid the very rules of magic itself. Things fell apart rather quickly after that.”

“But that shouldn’t be possible,” Jordan answered, uncertain if that was true but even more uncertain as to whether or not Taz cared very much about what he was saying. Jordan had certainly never been taught such a thing, but then, his education was far from complete. “Is that what injured the moon, then?”

Taz had reached down to pick up the corroded manacle. He was busy studying it, but as soon as Jordan spoke, his gaze lifted back up to meet Jordan’s eyes. “How do you know about that?”

“You can s-see that something has happened, even without your fancy telescope,” Jordan stammered, realizing he’d tipped his hand a little too much. “There hasn’t been a full moon in over a month now, and there’s a growing stain in the lower quarter.”

In truth, it was barely more than a dark smudge through the naked eye, but he’d seen much more detailed drawings in the book. Though all it would say is that ‘the Lich struck a blow that could not be healed,’ as it showed off the worm-like cancerous growths that were spreading on the moon, which was either the body of the goddess or the place where she lived, depending on which page of the book he read.

“It might be related,” Taz said finally. “It’s hard to say. She hasn’t spoken to me since the incident. She may yet recover from it, or this might be the first sign that I’m about to replace her. We should know soon in either case.”

Soon was, of course, an impossible measurement when dealing with Tazuranth. He might mean a few months or a few decades from now, so Jordan simply ignored the statement.

“So what will you do then?” Jordan asked.

“I will be patient, as always. I will study this bauble you’ve brought and see if we can find some way to turn it to our advantage, and I will learn what I can so we can be ready when the moment arises.”

Some version of this was Taz’s answer to almost everything, and Jordan fought to avoid rolling his eyes. It said exactly nothing, which was probably exactly what the ageless wizard meant to say.

“Do you think this will be useful to you?” Jordan said finally, gesturing toward the manacle, “Or do you think we should destroy it before the Lich uses it to track us down?”

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“Through the barrier?” Taz laughed. “If it can manage a spell that leads it past the edge of the world, I would be very impressed. No, it should be safe enough. It’s a crude thing, but it certainly gives me some insight into the magic it prefers to use. This is a hentarctic formulation. Very basic stuff. It tells me that we might be misreading this situation altogether. Perhaps what we face is no mastery of sorcery but some other kind of aberration.”

Tazuranth started an impromptu lecture and length then. Sometimes, when you wanted an answer the man would dodge and weave avoiding anything that might appear conclusive, but if your discussion happened to tread into magical theory, he might spend an hour, or even two discussion the minutia of ancient history, and the merit of different theoretical approaches.

Jordan paid attention as best he could. At times, he would try to return the topic back to the fate of the Magica Collegium, but the most detailed answer that Jordan could get from Taz was that “Scrying spells became unreliable several months ago and only recently started to work again.”

Even that wasn’t enough to hold Jordan’s attention, though, and his attention began to wander, he stood up and wandered around the room instead. He still answered Taz’s questions as best he could, and even tried to ask some semi intelligent follow-up questions where they were appropriate, as Jordan struggled to remember his ancient runic languages.

Still, as he worked his way around the room, he noticed that the ancient mage’s telescope was pointed down toward the beach and not up at the sky where it usually was. He didn’t approach it directly, and he definitely didn’t look through the eyepiece. That would have shown that he noticed. Instead, Jordan continued his slow loop around the room, looking at different odds and ends while he discussed the nature of binding rituals on unquiet spirits with the other mage.

Still, when he was in the right spot, across from the wide picture window, he looked down and noted the part of the beach the telescope was pointed at. Jordan immediately recognized it as the place where the children held their practices and tourneys when the tide was low. Right now, the tide was high, so the sandy strip was almost completely underwater, but still, the fact that the man had been watching… It was the first confirmation of some of the things the book had been hinting at for a while now.

Jordan tried to push the thought from his mind, at least until he got back to the little farm he called home, but it distracted him until Taz had finally had enough of the conversation. Then the ageless wizard assigned him some light reading from three massive tomes about the nature of rune construction and then sent him on his way as the last sun was heading toward the horizon.

Though the meeting had largely been boring, it had given Jordan much to think about. Really, he should have been obsessed with the school. If he’d returned there as he’d planned to do so often, he’d be dead right now.

Or maybe I would have managed to turn the tide somehow, he thought to himself. As if one more apprentice could have done anything useful.

In the end, it wasn’t the Collegium’s fall, or even the moon’s wound, that he thought about, though. It was the children. He spent the whole walk back worrying that what he’d read was going to come to pass. It almost had to at this point. There was no way around it if Tazuranth was studying them discreetly from a distance. He really was going to use them in some sort of twisted experiment. Maybe not soon, but someday. The book had been very clear about that.

In a place where time has little meaning, someday is forever, but someday, just the same, the mage that covets their light will try to find a way to take it for himself. Given that he is entirely undefeatable, such eventualities are unavoidable.

However, the thoughts never left him, even when he came home to find the older children already cooking a fish stew. Still, he tried to keep the worried expression off his face for their sake. Instead, he listened to them as they told him about their day. They were a large and unruly tribe at this point, and he was likely to be the only parent they ever had.

One by one, between different fights and bouts of bickering, each one of the twelve light-eyed children told him about their day, and he nodded, asking questions as he pretended to be interested and engaged. They’d all spent the earliest part of the morning looking for a lost lamb once their drills had been done at dawn, of course. That was a devotion that never wavered, even if Brother Faerbar hadn’t been around in more than a year now.

After that, though, they’d gone in half a dozen different directions to help the good people of Sanctuary and earn their keep. Toman and his brother had mended nets, Cynara and some of the other girls had helped the village’s wise woman gather herbs that were just coming into bloom for the season, and Reggie and some of the other boys had helped to weed the fields. All in all, it was a productive day, and it might have sounded like a hundred others they’d had since they’d come to this strange place.

Indeed, the weather was better than average here, and most days were cool and clear, so they really did start to blend together. In the end, as they all ate, everyone got the chance to tell their story. The only one who didn’t say a word was young Leo. That was to be expected. He’d talk if Jordan asked what he’d done today, but there was no need to do so. The young man had almost certainly spent the day praying and training just like he always had.

He was frighteningly intense for a boy of eleven. Technically, he was almost two years older than that now, but the boy didn’t age beneath the barrier the same as everyone else, which made his focus and maturity all the stranger. Jordan had never planned on being a parent, and certainly not to twelve children, so he had no idea what to do about that sort of behavior; in the end, he resolved simply to ignore it in the face of larger issues, though he knew that wasn’t healthy either.