Maker's Curse Read online

  Mai shook her head. “If they go back to their old ways, they will not find people as willing to bend to their demands.”

  “So you don’t mean to restore the magic?” Bel asked, turning back to Rielle. “Or do you need to be completely sure it won’t do harm first?”

  Rielle shook her head. “I doubt I would ever be completely sure. Perhaps if I were a god I would be able to predict the future, but I am not. And since I am not a god, and not of this world, the decision is not mine to make.”

  Annad took a step towards her, opening his mouth ready to list the reasons he wanted to give in favour of restoring magic, but the three women frowned at him in a warning against interrupting and he bit back the words, bowing his head respectfully.

  “Whose decision is it?” Vai asked.

  “The people of Infae.” Rielle smiled. “But since it would take too long to ask them all… their representatives.”

  “Would we suffice as those representatives?” Bel asked. “We and your guide together.”

  “You have the good of all people at the heart of what you do. That seems the best qualification I can think of.” Rielle looked at Annad. “And my guide speaks for sorcerers from the other side of Infae. I think we can tell what he wishes.” She turned back. “What do you want me to do?”

  The trio exchanged glances. Rielle saw from their thoughts and doubtful faces that they had discussed many times what might happen when magic returned to Infae, though they had figured it would happen slowly over many centuries. They’d considered many possible consequences, both good and bad. They’d consulted men and women whose wisdom they respected, and debated their advice.

  Bel regarded Rielle thoughtfully. “You’ve restored worlds before, haven’t you?”

  “Yes. Many times.” Always at the behest of another. This was the first time that burden of that decision had shifted to her, and here she was fobbing it off onto these three young women. Yet it felt like the right thing to do. “I have seen enough to know I can’t predict what will happen. All I am certain of is that it brings great change.”

  “Then…” Mai glanced at her two friends. “I say we should do it. We’ve weathered one change. We will survive another. There is much good in magic. We may need it, when we deal with the Followers. And we will deal with them. They sprang from our actions, and we must be the ones to stop them.”

  Vai nodded. “I agree. We have built the foundations of a fairer world. I’ve been cynical about the chances of it staying that way, magic or no magic. People will always try to take advantage of others. So we may as well have magic.”

  “Then we are united,” Bel said. She didn’t elaborate, just smiled and turned to Rielle. “I ask, humbly, for you to return magic to our world.”

  Rielle bowed her head. “I will do so.”

  A cheer erupted from Annad, earning him looks of amusement from the women.

  “Do… you need us to bring you anything?” Bel asked.

  “No, I came prepared.” Rielle started towards the centre of the room. Shrugging off her pack, she opened it and drew out a board, a sheaf of paper and a drawing stick. The materials always seemed too humble in the face of the task she would be performing, but she handled them reverently, glad for this chance to exercise her skills.

  “I think another portrait will do,” she said. “In those chairs over there, where the light is good.”

  As they obeyed, she drew a deep breath, composed a picture in her mind and began to transfer their likenesses to paper.

  CHAPTER 2

  “That’s all I can teach you,” Rielle told Annad late the next day. “Remember my warnings and take every precaution, but my strongest advice is to find someone with experience travelling between the worlds to give you more guidance, and show you the signs and clues that indicate you are about to enter an uninhabitable or dead world.”

  Annad placed a hand on his heart in a gesture of thanks. “Thank you, Rielle. I will be careful. I am in your debt. If I find the library, I will send a message through the Restorers.”

  She smiled. “If I find it, I will seek you out and take you there. But I doubt I will be free to search for it any time soon. There are still many more worlds in need of restoration.”

  Annad nodded. “I will visit the temple as often as I can to check if you have left any messages for me.”

  “Farewell, Annad.” Taking a step back, Rielle inhaled deeply, let a breath out, then drew in another and held it. Pushing out of the world, she skimmed upwards, located the tower roof on which she had first arrived in Annad’s city and sped towards it. Once there, she immediately pushed out of the world, following her own path back to the arrival place with its bloodied altar, then straight into the whiteness of the place between.

  The arrival place she had travelled from towards Infae began to reappear. She placed herself in the middle, arriving a little higher than the ground where the plants she had trampled had begun to recover and stand upright again. After a quick pause to fill her lungs, she pushed onwards to the next world.

  She hadn’t thought she would miss being able to pattern-shift, but she did every time she travelled between worlds. Using it, she could have stayed in the place between for as long as she needed without suffocating. Well, that’s not entirely true. I’d have died eventually when I ran out of magic.

  The other times she had missed it were when she caught a common cough or cut herself on a sharp object. So far she hadn’t suffered greater injuries or illnesses, since she could use magic to shield herself from most dangers, but many times she had regretted not being able to heal someone else.

  The knowledge that she was no longer ageless did not bother her much. She would age and die, but so did most humans. When she started to feel the effects of age, she would probably feel the loss more, but for now there was no point dwelling on it. Especially since she could always sacrifice her Maker ability and become ageless again.

  But not yet. Her Maker ability was unique and, as she’d said to Annad, many more worlds needed to be restored. She had always left choosing which was next up to Baluka, since he was the Restorers’ leader; Infae was the first world she had decided to restore without his direction.

  Doing so brought a sense of completion she had craved for a long time. Not only because of the way she had left the world five cycles ago, but also because of why she had been able to.

  When she’d first visited Infae, she had been ageless, having lost her natural Maker ability when she’d learned pattern-shifting. While trapped in Infae, she had used the last of the magic she had carried not only to remove her pattern-shifting ability and restore her Maker gift, but also to enhance that gift far beyond its former strength, until she could easily and quickly restore entire worlds. So she felt strangely indebted to Infae, because but for her time there she would not be able to restore other worlds. She’d owed it that same help.

  One day there would be no more worlds needing her help, and she would swap her Maker ability for pattern-shifting and become ageless again. The worlds that had been drained of magic in the battles of the last ten cycles would be restored: from those that had suffered in the chaos after the Raen, the ruler of all worlds, had died, to those affected by the confrontation between Dahli and the Restorers. The latter were close to the location of the conflict, but other dead worlds – emptied of magic when sorcerers, no longer restrained by the Raen’s laws, had attempted to learn pattern-shifting – were scattered throughout the known worlds.

  Refugees from these worlds had made their way to Baluka over the cycles to beg for help, each waiting to have their home world restored. Some had waited many cycles for that help. Thinking about that brought a sense of urgency. Her visit to Infae had been spontaneous – she’d recognised a world near to it and realised she had a rare chance to visit. She didn’t regret taking the opportunity – or for spending time teaching Annad – but it meant she would be late returning to Baluka, and her next restoration. The Restorers’ efforts to maintain peace oft
en depended on good timing, and for Baluka to have his most valuable tool disappear for a few days could upset any number of plans. Still, if she travelled efficiently, she might cut that back to a day.

  The arrival place in the next world was a raised dais within a city square, watched over by street urchins hoping to earn a gemstone or slip of precious metal in exchange for providing information about their world or descriptions of travellers who had passed that day. This was a common kind of arrival place in a living city – wide and open so that large or simultaneous groups could enter the world with space to spare.

  The next world’s arrival place was a glade within a forest. Locations with no sign of human habitation nearby were common, too. They were often connected to a city arrival place. Chances were low for a path leading directly out of a city in one world to lead somewhere perfectly suited to human settlement in the next. Sometimes cities arose where that path arrived that relied entirely on travel between worlds for their existence, but they were always more vulnerable to abandonment and ruin.

  The following arrival place was another ruin. Ruins were the most common setting of all. Civilisations rose and fell, but the paths that connected them remained in use if they still made convenient, safe links between worlds.

  Less common locations for arrival places included temples, and she passed through one next. It was no surprise that the materialisation and disappearance of people of varied and sometimes strange appearance gave arrival places an aura of mystery and mysticism. People living near one not of their making might consider their visitors deities, but they did not remain uneducated in the ways of sorcerers and worlds for long. Though the truth was more humble, the habit of attributing divinity to supernatural occurrences was hard to break.

  Rielle had come to accept the probability that the Angels of her world had been sorcerers, who long ago set down the rules of the religion she’d grown up with in the hope that her world would recover from the great wars that had stripped it of magic. But though she believed this was the likely truth, she still felt a superstitious fear whenever she thought about it, and wondered if she would be struck down by angry Angels if she ever returned to her home.

  Maybe that was the true reason she did not like people thinking of her as a god.

  Pushing that thought aside, Rielle travelled on until exhaustion dulled her concentration. By then, the feeling of hunger that returned whenever she arrived in a world was intense. She stopped in a world used to catering to sorcerous visitors to buy food and accommodation, arriving in the middle of the night and resuming her journey not long after dawn with her body still aching with tiredness. Dozens of worlds later, she slowed again when dizziness forced her to stop and breathe for a while.

  At last she arrived in the Restorers’ base world, Affen. As always, her appearance at nearby arrival places had been noted and messengers sent to inform Baluka. He was waiting for her in the large main hall of the Restorers’ headquarters.

  “Rielle,” he said, stepping away from a small group of sorcerers who had taken the opportunity to talk to their leader. “You’re late.”

  She nodded. “I had a little private business to attend to on the way back.”

  He frowned, the lines between his brows deepening. But it isn’t time yet, he thought. Once every cycle she disappeared for several days, always refusing to explain why. Did she go early this time? When she met his gaze and remained silent, he put his questions aside, frustrated but respecting her right to have a private life outside of working for the Restorers. He hoped her silence meant she wasn’t reading his mind.

  She almost blushed. She had promised him that she wouldn’t, but some habits were hard to break. Withdrawing her senses, she looked at the sorcerers he’d been speaking to.

  “Do you want me to come and see you later?”

  He shook his head. “No, I’ve rearranged my schedule. Let’s go down to the planning room.”

  “Another world to restore?” she asked.

  “No. There is something else I’d like you to do.”

  Rielle reined in her curiosity and fell into step beside him as he started towards the stairs that led down to the building’s numerous underground levels. Baluka glanced at her and paused before beginning the descent.

  “You look tired.”

  “I haven’t had much sleep over the last few days,” she replied. The concept of days was vague, when every world’s cycles of time were different. The period between one sunrise and another could be as short as a few hours by her world’s measure, or as long as a year. How did one measure a day when there were two suns, or more? And many worlds had moons – a phenomenon she had never experienced before she left her world.

  World-travelling sorcerers measured longer stretches of time by cycles, which was the length of time it took the Travellers, an ancient race of merchant sorcerers, to do a circuit through the worlds they traded in. The Traveller tongue, their unifying language, was also the common language among sorcerers. Baluka had once been a Traveller. She glanced at him, recalling the young man who had found her, stranded in a desert world. Now the curious lines the Travellers imprinted under their skin were faded, and new creases emphasised his mouth and eyes. He looked older than he ought to. The constant hard work and demands of leading the force that maintained peace in the worlds had aged him. In appearance he reminded her, more and more, of his father, Lejikh, though he was still of a very different nature.

  “I’m not sure I can give you time to rest,” Baluka said apologetically.

  “This task is urgent, then?”

  “Somewhat.”

  They had descended five floors. Baluka led her through an open doorway into a familiar meeting room, closing it behind him. Collapsing into one of the large, cushioned chairs, Rielle sighed at the simple comfort of resting a tired body. Moving to a chair that faced hers, Baluka perched on the edge.

  “Do you remember restoring a world called Prama?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “It was more than two cycles ago. Prama was drained by a sorcerer seeking to become immortal. He failed, twice.”

  “Ah, that’s right. He took all the magic of one side of the world in the first attempt, then travelled to the other and tried again, even though it was obvious that he would be gathering less magic the second time, since it had spread out around the world while he was travelling.”

  “Magic ability doesn’t guarantee intelligence.” Baluka smiled wryly.

  “I brought him to you, at the request of Prama’s leaders,” she recalled. “They knew he’d try again once I’d restored their world, and they didn’t want to execute him.”

  Baluka nodded. “We put him in Dearn.”

  Along with many hundreds of other sorcerers who had stripped worlds for their own gain. Rielle often wondered what it was like there now, populated by a mix of foolish and greedy sorcerers with no access to magic.

  “Prama has given us trouble since we restored their world,” Baluka told her. “They had regarded one of their neighbouring worlds, Whun, as an enemy for hundreds of years. For the last three quarter-cycles they’ve threatened to attack Whun over petty grievances. We have assured both sides that we will not allow the other to harm them. Now the Pramans have made good on their threat, claiming that if they hadn’t attacked Whun, the Whuns would have attacked them first.” He shook his head. “We need to made good on our promises to protect and punish.”

  Rielle frowned. “You want me to protect the Whuns? Surely your generals can deal with this.”

  “The Restorer armies are stretched thin, as always.” He shook his head. “There is a simpler solution. I want you to strip Prama again.”

  “Strip…” Rielle stared at him. “You can’t be serious.”

  His gaze was hard but his expression was regretful. “I am. I know this is not the sort of task you offered to do for us, but it is a better alternative than sending in fighters, for us and for the Pramans. Nobody would be killed or harmed.”


  “Except people whose livelihoods rely on magic, whose sicknesses and injuries are being tended by sorcerers, or whose defence depends on magic.”

  “There will be far more sick, injured and besieged if we intervene with force, or allow the two worlds to descend into war.”

  Rielle pushed herself out of the chair, her legs protesting, but her weariness seemed insignificant compared to what Baluka was asking her to do. He made it sound so reasonable, but…

  “This is not what I do, Baluka. This is the opposite of what I do. I restore worlds. I don’t wreck them.”

  “You won’t be wrecking this one; you’ll be subduing it.”

  If she agreed to this once, he would ask again. And again. Perhaps she would be doing good, ultimately. Perhaps once Prama had learned its lesson she could restore it again. She didn’t have to see Baluka’s thoughts to guess that this was his hope and intention. Withdraw magic to control rogue worlds. Restore it to those who cooperate.

  I’m just a tool, she told herself. Well then, if I don’t get to choose my actions, I don’t have to shoulder the responsibility for the lives they affect. Baluka does.

  But the thought was not convincing. She was more than a tool. She was a person, with a conscience and reputation she must live with. Passively allowing herself to become a weapon was no different to actively becoming one. She shook her head.

  “No. I won’t start down this path. I can’t.”

  He radiated disappointment and acceptance. She caught the snatch of a thought: There are other ways. He would send several sorcerers to Prama to strip it. Using Rielle would have been faster and involved no risk…

  She turned away, both physically and mentally, to hide her scowl. No risk? Had he forgotten that she could no longer pattern-shift? A wound could still kill her. Suffocation between worlds was a constant danger, and if an unexpected threat caused her to use all of her stored magic in a dead world before she could create more, she would be as vulnerable as any non-sorcerer.