Born to Magic: Tales of Nevaeh: Volume I Read online

  A dozen memories flicked through her mind. “She used the weapon to help as well as fight. One day we had been traveling past a farm where we saw a kraagen pulling a tiller. They were skirting the edge of a pond because the farmer wanted to plant as much seed as possible. As they worked, they’d hit a buried boulder. The lead leather bindings on the tiller snapped, and the kraagen lunged forward, lost its footing and went into the pond.”

  She paused for a breath. “The bottom was quickmud. The kraagen was stuck and by the time we got there, it had only its mouth and horns above the water. My mother knelt beside the pond and closed her eyes. A moment later the water around the kraagen bubbled and then the kraagen began to rise. She lifted it from the water and set it gently on solid ground twenty feet from the pond. That too was her weapon.”

  Areenna’s face brightened with the memory. “When I asked her how it was she could use her weapon to help, she simply smiled at me. ‘There are always two. Nothing is simply one thing.’ When I said I didn’t understand, she explained how, with understanding everything becomes clearer and what can be done is there to be learned.”

  “All good and well, but how does that help me?”

  “Your weapon can be used to protect you, to fight an enemy, but it can also be used to help.”

  “If you know how to use it,” Mikaal said, his voice rough edged.

  “When she trained me, she chased me, hurling rocks and sticks at me. At one point it was raining hard sharp pebbles and small rocks. They struck me everywhere. The pain was bad and I couldn’t find a way to stop it or her. I was desperate. I ran, trying to get out of the rock storm when one hit me harder than the others, right in the center of my back. I fell, badly scraping my shoulder and arm, and I got angry. I rolled over, jumped to my feet and screamed at her. ‘No more!’ I shouted. My fists were balled tight and the power came alive in my belly. The next thing I knew I was holding two glowing orbs in my hands. They were hot, and when I looked at them, I knew what they were and flung them at my mother.”

  She paused within her memory. “She evaded them easily, for her abilities were great, but I was too stunned to even think.”

  “And you knew how to do this after that.”

  “No, it took me a few days to understand. Once I did, my weapon was always ready.”

  “How?”

  “That’s the problem. You have to replay it over and over until you find the exact instant it happened. Remember the feeling, see it and recreate it.”

  He looked at her and then at the horizon. “A simple enough task. We have plenty of time for me to figure it out—all the way until tomorrow morning,” he added sarcastically.

  “Sometimes, Mikaal, you are an idiot.”

  She spoke so calmly he could only stare at her. “Really, why so?”

  “You should ask why that isn’t so.” She gave Hero a slight kick with her heels and the kraal moved forward past Mikaal.

  Behind her stiff back, Mikaal smiled. He sobered a moment later. He had only been half-joking about the time they had left. Taking a deep breath, he concentrated on the previous night, and did the best he could to relive what had happened.

  He remembered the way his lower belly had flared when his power came to life. He remembered the burning in his veins, the heat and the pain, and tried to replicate it. He called up his power, which had become increasingly easier with each day’s practice, but when he tried to raise the weapon, nothing happened.

  What did I do? he asked himself for the twentieth time.

  He spent the next three hours working on the problem, going back over it time and again, but no matter how hard he tried, nothing seemed to work.

  They stopped at what they estimated was midday and ate what was left of their morning meal. He watched Areenna clean a small bone with her teeth, and a flash of memory from last night slid across his mind. He had dug his hands into the earth and had called for help. Was that it?

  Kneeling on the rocky ground, he tunneled his fingers past the small rocks covering the dirt below. There was coolness on his skin, and something else. He closed his eyes and drew up his power. Then he concentrated on the fiery growth he had felt last night. It came explosively, and fire erupted everywhere.

  “Stop!” he shouted, jerking his hands from the ground. The words barely crossed his lips and the fires went out.

  Areenna stared at him, the clean-picked bone held in one hand. “It’s a start.”

  <><><>

  Later, as the horizon grew close, Areenna turned to him. “It is not that you need what is in the ground. It’s the earth itself…it gives you the power. This is true for all women.”

  It took him a moment to realize she was continuing their earlier conversation. “How can the ground give power?” he asked, although he knew it was what had allowed him to create the fires.

  “Women have always believed all life was created from what lay beneath our feet. We call it sister, for our world is built from and upon it. Existence is held by it and we but accept its gifts.”

  “Even if it is so, how can I use my gift if I must stop and sink my hands into the ground each time?”

  “I tried to tell you before, when I spoke of my training. It’s not what enabled you to first use the weapon. It’s what is in you that allowed it to awaken…to come alive.”

  Mikaal exhaled sharply, but said nothing. Instead, he thought about what had happened when his fingers entered the earth. He recreated the sensation, but nothing happened.

  “What about a formula? What formula do you use, perhaps something—”

  “Stop! There are no damned formulas! There never have been, not in the way you perceive such. Men always want to know how we do our magic. The truth is it’s our minds. Everything we do comes from our minds. If we are fortunate enough—or perhaps unfortunate—to have received a gift of strong power, we have to learn how to control what we do by controlling our minds, not our power.”

  “But you use formulas to bring forth the magic.”

  “Have you learned so little these past days?” she bit off her words tersely, her voice barely above a hoarse whisper. Within it was a depth of sadness he had never heard from her.

  Her tone and inflection shook him so badly he closed his eyes to stop from showing the emotion. But when her hand touched his cheek, he opened his eyes to find her face inches away.

  “Listen to me, Mikaal, no formula can possibly ‘control’ our gifts. What we do is to join with the power and use our minds—our thoughts—to make use of the powers we have been gifted. It is what I have been hoping you would learn when you discovered your power.”

  He stared into the ovals of her eyes, the warmth of her hand still on his cheek. Her breath washed across his face and he began to hear what she had been saying these last days. It took barely a heartbeat for him to see. I understand.

  Smiling, she lowered her hand. “It’s about time.”

  “Why is this secret? Why hide your abilities with talk of formulas?”

  “It can be confusing because there are what you think of as formulas as I have tried to explain more than once. But they’re more like…notations. I construct one for everything I can create with my power. The notation allows me to visualize the process. The formula does not create. The formula allows me to practice until I need nothing to remind me of how to accomplish the task. It is nothing more.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Better if I show you, yes? I can create fire, too, but not as a weapon.” She dismounted Hero and went over to a lone patch of brownish weed where she crouched and spread her hands to both sides of it. Move the air, swirl it fast, spin like a storm. Close together heat will grow, spin air, spin faster and faster and faster. Heat grows strong and flame will burn now.”

  The dried out weed burst into flame and Areenna stood and turned to him. “I made that up when my mother taught me to build fire. She explained how, when the air moves very fast, faster than you can imagine, little particles we can’t see are in the air a
nd the speed of the air heats them until they ignite. It is science, is it not?”

  “What I know of science is what I learned from my father. He told me many stories about science, and about how science destroyed his world. But it is—no was—nothing like this.”

  “So now you know our secret.”

  “No, Areenna, now I have learned our secret. We need to go,” he said. “It’s best if we reach the Landing before dark.”

  “Create a formula for your weapon while we ride. We will practice at the Landing.”

  <><><>

  The instant they crossed the border into the wasteland the air changed. Roth stopped the kraal and withdrew a map. It was a hand drawn copy of the computer generated map he’d made almost two and a half decades earlier. The map was well detailed for he’d had a lot of downtime in the year he’d orbited the earth.

  “We will not make it to the Landing today,” he told Enaid after he spotted a landmark allowing him to gauge distance, “unless we ride through the night.”

  Enaid began to mind search for Mikaal, hoping now that they had crossed from Aldimor’s protection she could find him. She pushed herself, ranging her senses as far and as fast as possible. A few minutes later she found Mikaal’s familiar emanations. It was a sensation she had known since he’d been growing within her womb. She withdrew. “They are safe and in the wasteland. We may be able to reach them before they cross to the Island.”

  “You are still certain we will be able to stop the attack?”

  “Do you still feel your premonition?” When he nodded she said, “Then we must try. What she has created is far too dangerous for them to handle alone.”

  “Are you certain it is not just your—our—need to protect him?”

  Enaid’s eyes blazed angrily, her body stiffened. Then her features softened and her muscles unwound. “Do you think this is for him…for them? Solomon, you are the smartest man I know, but you are still only a man. How could you consider I would risk everything, risk Nevaeh itself by doing this? They will never know we are there. They cannot. Our purpose is to protect them. To hold back the horror she has released on them. They must reach the Island. My—our—responsibility is to give them a chance to gain the knowledge they seek, or we are lost. What happens to them on the Island, whether they succeed or fail is something we cannot interfere with—the duty is theirs. But the danger is enormous. Even you feel it is so.”

  He sat silently on the back of his kraal, listening and reading her face and body language and, when she finished, said, “I needed to hear that. You, above all else, are his mother. There are times when a mother’s love causes irrationality, and it could be that I feel.”

  “In this matter, I cannot allow such—” Enaid stiffened; at her kraal’s feet, her gorlon released a high pitched howl.

  “What?” Roth asked, moving closer.

  Enaid’s eyes had rolled back, her hands were balled into fists; fear crawled coldly along his spine. “Enaid,” he shouted reaching out and shaking her.

  Her eyes returned to normal, but her skin was pale and damp. “She has found us…and them.”

  CHAPTER 26

  IT WAS LATE afternoon when Areenna and Mikaal halted their kraals near to the edge of ruins far older than either had seen before. Contrary to the warnings, they’d crossed the most desolate part of the wasteland without seeing a single outcast or for that matter, anything alive.

  The ruins before them were the remnants of ages of deterioration. Piles of rubble stretched like small hills as far as the eye could see. Interspersed within the millennia old ruins were what appeared to be the skeletons of large structures reduced to shambles of fallen stone, glass, and twisted strands of metal.

  All his life, Mikaal had heard stories of the strange ruins of ‘before’, but had never seen them himself and had only half believed they existed. What they rode through now, what surrounded them, could be nothing other than the evidence of those legends.

  He stopped Charka by one large ruin and went over to a long deformed piece of metal, perhaps a foot thick. It looked as if two giant hands had grasped it and twisted it in opposite directions. Rust flaked from it in dust-like puffs that broke apart at his lightest touch. “I cannot imagine how old this is. The metal is held together only by rust.”

  Astride Hero, Areenna looked around. “I do not like this place. Mikaal, we need to go.”

  In echo to her words, Mikaal heard a scuttling a few feet away beneath another pile of rubble. What at first glance looked like a misshapen coor stuck its head out. It was smaller than a coor, but with a similar head shape—which was where the resemblance ended. It had a single, large eye. There was no white, only the jet black of the pupil. The eye socket was extended from the head on a thick stalk that moved in all directions. The ears were several holes at each side if its head.

  When it spotted Mikaal, its lips drew back, exposing large, pointed teeth. A low growl issued from its throat. As it slunk forward toward him, the rest of its body became visible. Perhaps three feet long, it had triple-jointed forelegs with what appeared to be two knees on each leg. The body was long and muscular, yet emaciated at the same time. The hind legs of the small beast were thicker than the body itself and unlike a coor, there was no tail.

  Within the rubble came movement, enough for him to turn and jump on Charka. As he mounted the kraal, a dozen of the mutated coor-like animals appeared. They joined together in a pack and turned their eyes toward him and Areenna.

  Saliva dripped from their jaws in thick drools of foam. They inched forward, anticipation of a meal emanating from them.

  From a camouflaged opening ten feet behind the one-eyed coors, Mikaal saw two sets of amber yellow eyes peering out. A moment later a misshapen hairless head, followed by a deformed hairless torso astride three stubby legs stepped from the darkened opening. It stood perhaps four feet tall. Another like it followed. Their arms were almost as long as their entire bodies and they held spears in large hands that scraped the ground.

  Areenna looked at Mikaal. Those were once people.

  Mikaal looked around. Ahead of them, toward their destination, were more ruins. To the left, the ruins went as far as he could see. Straight, or to the right appeared to be the only clear paths. Follow me to the right.

  Above them, Gaalrie circled. Through her eyes Areenna saw what lay ahead in all directions. To their left and to their right, more of the mutated animals and men were coming from beneath the rubble. No, straight, she corrected and pushed Hero forward.

  Mikaal had no choice but to follow.

  Urging their kraals into a gallop, they moved through the ruins’ twists and turns, always staying on the narrow dirt road and avoiding the blockages ahead with Gaalrie’s help. Behind them the pack of deformed coors and what once might have been men followed. Racing along the edges of the ruins, they jumped from one pile of rubble to the next in their mad effort to catch the riders, but they were no match for the kraals.

  Minutes later, Areenna and Mikaal reached the edge of the ruins and burst onto a road that reminded them of Bekar’s ‘highway’. Ten feet ahead, the road dipped. Reining in their kraals, they inched the large animals forward before stopping to look around. Behind them, the mutations were no longer on the chase, but stood together at the very edge of the ruins, howling with rage.

  Ahead and far below, barely visible in the far off mist, was their first sight of ‘the Island’, a distantly discernable, dark shape floating in water, its entirety veiled in a reddish mist. The Island extended to the left for as far as they could see, but to the right it went on for only a short distance. There were strangely shaped silhouettes standing on the Island, many reaching upwards into the high mists; all seemed to be twisted and broken. What they were or even how large they were was uncertain, for the distance made judgment difficult. To their left, at what appeared to be miles distant, was a wavering outline of a high bridge. It arched upward from the Island and reached westward. But a quarter way between the Island and the
land across from it, the bridge stopped and hung in midair.

  Mikaal studied the landscape. They were on a palisade high above the water and the road they were following was carved into the palisade. The road ahead twisted and turned on itself all the way down—the entire area was bleak and desolate; he was certain nothing lived there, yet there was something about it that did not fit.

  “The Landing,” Areenna said, rising in her stirrups for a better view.

  Mikaal looked at the eastern horizon. Purple-black bands heralding the night were rising upward. “We need to get down there and set up camp before nightfall.”

  Areenna’s eyes darted everywhere. She shivered. “There is an evil here, a darkness far worse than the night. We must be alert. The Landing will be safe, Enaid has told me so, but between here and there I sense….something.”

  Mikaal released the tension tightening his muscles and breathed deeply. A strange sensation piqued the edge of his mind. He pushed it and received a gripping chill. “I feel it.”

  He drew his longsword and grasped it in two hands before pressing his knees to Charka’s flanks. A rush of strength flowed to him from the kraal. He gave his aoutem a gentle push to start them down the road to the Landing.

  <><><>

  She paced frenetically within the entrance of the cavern. Deep in the confines a fire roared, producing shapes upon the walls no human eye had ever seen and lived after. An hour before she had received a message from her masters across the sea. Roth must die and the ones who had defied her at Tolemac must be destroyed. Their message was clear. And with it came the news of her masters’ impending voyage.

  Her bitter laugh, echoing loudly in the air, reached no other ears. Destroy them I will do my masters. It will be as you command. She turned and started into the cavernous mouth of the home she had chosen fifty years before, as a young outcast woman. While her body had changed over the years, age had had no effect on her. Her masters had blessed her when she had come to them, a broken woman cast out by her family because of the powerful abilities which she used for her own desires, refusing the training so often offered. Although her face and skin had aged, giving her the appearance of an old woman, her body was stronger than when she had arrived here at the age of twenty and found Mother Tashra, the masters’ chief priestess—the woman who took her in and gave her the most powerful gifts imaginable.