Maker's Curse Page 4

  “I have another world for you to strengthen,” he said. “If you are willing.”

  She nodded, then returned to her seat and drew out her notebook from her pack. “Where?”

  As he began to describe it and the route to take there, she wrote down everything. To her relief, the task was a simple one – no local politics to deal with. She would travel close to the world of her former mentor, Tarren, too. Perhaps she could visit him.

  “I need a few good sleeps,” she told Baluka.

  “There is no urgency. Let’s make it your final restoration before you take time off. You will still be needing several days’ break?”

  She smiled. “Yes.”

  “Then I’ll see you afterwards.”

  “You don’t want me to report back?”

  “Send messages when you’re done so I can tick that world off my list.”

  “I will. I hope Prama comes to its senses, and you can tick that problem off your list.”

  “I hope so too.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Rielle knew within moments of emerging from the place between worlds that her approach had been noted. Students were watching her through the glass that separated the arrival place from the study rooms that surrounded it. She scanned the minds in the area and immediately found one of a student hurrying to inform Tarren he had a guest.

  Her former mentor’s new home was within an abandoned city. The metropolis had been carved into the surface of a flat plain of rock, linking with natural underground rivers, most of them intermittent. The complex of tunnels, corridors and thoroughfares – and the remains of the mines that had once supported the city’s existence – formed an immense labyrinth. Tarren had taken up residence in the most comfortable area. Shafts to the surface let in air, and mirrors bounced light downwards. Pipes brought clean water and carried away waste. In places, rooms were open to the sky, both naturally and carved so by the previous occupants, and the students had turned these spaces into places to grow food.

  The arrival place was one of these gardens. Glass walls faced it on all sides, allowing Tarren’s students to keep an eye out for visitors, welcome or not. Though it was night, it was early enough that the rooms were still occupied. Most of the students watching her smiled when she waved. They knew who she was, or rather, they knew what she was: the Maker, and one of Tarren’s powerful friends.

  If they hadn’t heard the rumours and stories that spread so effectively through the worlds via travelling sorcerers, they would have learned all about her from Tarren. Even if the old man hadn’t been a terrible gossip, some of his students were more powerful than he and could read his mind.

  Walking to the main door of the building, Rielle stepped from icy air into warmth. Two of the young women came over. Both were of the same world and race, their hair and eyes a pale pink and their skin white. Their colouring was not common in the worlds. Tarren had trouble telling them apart sometimes, but Rielle had noted that the younger, Dilleh, had a slight dip in the centre of her hairline, and a habit of biting her lip when listening. It was harder to identify them when they were outside, however, as both tended to wear voluminous, translucent veils to protect their eyes and skin from bright light.

  “Rielle,” the older of the two, Mwei, said.

  “Are you well?” Dilleh asked.

  Rielle nodded. “Good. A little tired. How is Tarren?”

  Mwei shrugged. “His usual self.”

  “He worries,” Dilleh added, “since… you know.”

  “I worry, too,” Rielle told them. A few cycles ago, Tarren’s home had been invaded and ransacked. The old man and his students had fled and none were harmed. The attackers hadn’t focused their attention on the occupants, instead looting and destroying. “Has anyone worked out who they were, and why they did it?”

  Mwei’s face wrinkled. “We’re certain they were from Liftre, but Tarren doesn’t agree. There is a rumour they are trying to stop other sorcerers running schools.”

  “But we have no proof,” Dilleh finished.

  “Ah! Rielle! It is you.”

  Rielle turned to see Tarren entering the room. “Yes, it is me,” she replied. “Did you have reason to doubt your messenger?”

  He pretended to pout. “Well, it has been a while. Some of us might have forgotten what you look like.”

  She shook her head. “It hasn’t been that long.”

  “It feels like it.” The old man smiled and beckoned. “Stop distracting my charges and come join me for dinner.”

  Rielle smiled at the two women in farewell and followed Tarren out of the room and down a corridor that curved around the study rooms.

  “How are your students?”

  “Mostly reasonably well,” he replied. “None are a match to Min and Goggendan.” He sighed as he remembered his two most promising students, who had left after the attack, their studies unfinished. “Min has mated and has twins to look after now, so I don’t think he’ll be back, but I still have hope Goggendan will overcome her fear and join us again.” He glanced through a window at another study room. “I have two new young ones. Both have particularly strong powers, but one is spoilt and lazy and a bad influence on the other.”

  Tarren continued chatting as he led her through sprawling, interconnected circular rooms to his private suite. The walls were mud rendered, handprints still visible here and there. The roof was woven grass plastered with more mud. It was all decorative rather than functional, designed to remind him of the home he had grown up in. Which was very different to the buildings clinging atop a spire of rock that he had occupied when she’d first met him.

  “Here we are,” Tarren said, ushering her through a door and over to one of several circular tables standing between curved benches built into the wall. A servant was setting out a second set of cutlery and crockery on one of the tables. “Take a seat,” Tarren bade. He settled onto a cushion before a half-eaten meal.

  Rielle obeyed, setting down her pack and helping herself to the contents of a steaming pot in the centre of the table. She braced herself for the burn of the spices Tarren enjoyed and tucked in.

  “So how many worlds have you restored since we last met?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure. Many hundreds. Baluka would know exactly.” She paused. “Though not correctly. My last was the world Qall trapped me in, all those cycles ago. I’m not going to tell him about that one.”

  He nodded, recalling her tale of the workers who had helped her, and her transformation from an ageless sorcerer back into a Maker. “Had it changed for the worse, or better?”

  “That depends if you think them making me a god is good or bad.”

  He chuckled. “One of the benefits of having godlike powers.”

  “Which they never benefited from.”

  “Except to gain a role model and inspiration for change, am I right?”

  “Yes. Luckily, good changes. Well, mostly. On the other side of the world they’re sacrificing sorcerers to the goddess Rel, but hopefully the return of magic will put a stop to that.”

  “Oh dear.” His smile eased into sympathy. “Your discomfort with having power over others, even unintentional power, is one of your admirable traits, Rielle, but you should not let it prevent you from helping people when you can.”

  She sighed. “I know. I’m just… I’m afraid that what I do will harm more than help. Like in Murai and Doum.” She frowned as she recalled her and Tyen’s attempts to prevent war between the two worlds. “It’s safer for the worlds to let Baluka decide which I restore.” She frowned as she recalled Baluka’s request. “Though now I’m wondering if I can trust him to make all the decisions.”

  “Why is that?”

  She told him of Baluka’s request that she strip a world she had restored. His brows lowered as he listened, and he nodded when she was done. “It disturbs me that he is willing to use such measures,” she finished.

  “Why?”

  “It seems so ruthless.” She shook her head. “Maybe only
because it seems so coming from Baluka.”

  Tarren spread his hands. “He is a man charged with maintaining peace in the worlds. Why wouldn’t he use all the tools at his disposal, if they reduce or avoid bloodshed?”

  Her stomach sank. “So you think I should have agreed?”

  His expression softened. “No. You were right to refuse. Though it is likely his intentions were good, as you believe, it would indeed make you a weapon. You cannot be the Maker if you are also destroying worlds.”

  Rielle winced as his words reminded her of Maker’s Curse. “Unless I become ageless and retain my Maker ability. Then I’ll destroy all the worlds.”

  “You don’t know if that’s true,” Tarren told her. “For all you know, the curse refers to the possibility that a sorcerer will strip a world of magic when learning pattern-shifting. It is old, this idea. It might come from a time when sorcerers becoming ageless was rare and the consequences were more of a shock than now.”

  “Well, there’s a chance the answer to that question exists,” she said, then told him of Annad’s mentor and the clues to the location of a secret library.

  Tarren rolled his eyes. “What a pointless and cruel thing for a mentor to do to his charge! Why couldn’t he just tell him where it was?”

  She grimaced. “Perhaps he was addled on his deathbed. Perhaps he guessed that Annad, having never left his world, wouldn’t recognise the landmarks a world traveller would use, so he tried to use ones he would. Perhaps he was guarding against others reading Annad’s mind by giving him clues only he could interpret.”

  “Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.” Tarren pursed his lips. “Perhaps we’d have a better chance at following the clues than Annad. Did you memorise them?”

  “I wrote them down in my notebook. Do you want to see them?”

  “Yes… but don’t show them to me. If the sorcerers who ransacked my former house are truly seeking to gather and hoard knowledge, they might seek me out again. If they find me, they’ll read my mind. As long as only you and Annad know the clues, the chances are you’ll find the library before they do.”

  Rielle had started to reach for her pack, but now she straightened and muttered a curse. “I shouldn’t have told you about it.”

  “Possibly not.”

  “I was hoping for your help.”

  Tarren shook his head. “You’re on your own with this one. Unless… unless you approach your friend, Tyen.”

  Rielle considered the old man’s suggestion, and his description of Tyen as her “friend”. Tarren hadn’t given up on the possibility that she and Tyen might resume a romantic relationship, but he now thought it unlikely. While she hadn’t dismissed the idea entirely, a part of her still resisted it. Her distrust of Tyen had sprung from believing he had been trying to resurrect Valhan for selfish reasons, despite knowing that the Raen would kill her. Though she had since learned that Tyen had been playing a dangerous game of double-spy, cooperating with Dahli’s plans of resurrection so that the man didn’t find someone else to do it, and hoping to give her and Qall time to find a safe home far away, she was wary of letting herself grow fond of him again. Or anyone, really. Especially not when she had worlds to save. She’d been unable to commit her heart to anyone before, due to her promise to protect Qall. Now she was even less free to.

  Tyen was the most obvious source of help to find the library, though. Nobody but Qall could read his mind. Although he did not have Vella, the sentient book containing centuries of knowledge, to consult any more, he was smart and well used to accessing information from libraries. He even had a school of sorts, though it had no official location.

  “Tyen is too busy to spend time hunting for information about an ancient myth,” she pointed out.

  Tarren grimaced. “Yes, you are right about that.”

  According to Tarren, Liftre’s new management had made it clear they disapproved of Tyen running a school. It wasn’t clear if this was due to Tyen’s role as a spy in two major conflicts in the worlds, or simply because Tyen wanted to stop the production of war machines, whereas Liftre was profiting from making them. Whenever they learned where Tyen and his students had settled, they manipulated the people of the world into demanding he leave. They used threats and blackmail to persuade his students to abandon their training, and made it clear that Liftre would have no association with anyone who sought his teaching. He had only a small group of pupils, all fiercely loyal.

  She frowned. “Do you still think Liftre wasn’t behind the attack on your previous home?”

  Tarren waved a hand dismissively. “If they were, they only wanted the records I took when I left Liftre, and anything else I might have gathered since. They’ve never demanded I stop teaching.”

  “Not yet.”

  “And if they do, I will ignore them.” He tapped his forehead. “My greatest treasure is knowledge and a knack for teaching. They can’t take that from me.”

  Rielle smiled. “What more does anyone need?” She drummed her fingers on the table edge and considered his earlier suggestion. If she did visit Tyen it would have to be after she had restored the next world and visited Qall. Though if Qall had decided it was time to leave her home world she had no idea what she would be doing next.

  She doubted he would leave, though. Last time she’d visited him, he had been certain he needed to stay there a couple more cycles. She had seen no troubling changes in him, only the expected ones of someone growing up and gaining in maturity and wisdom, but if he thought there was still a danger the Raen’s memories would overtake his mind, she must believe it was possible. Since she could not read his mind, he was the only person who knew what was going on in his head.

  “But there’s no proof it was Liftre behind the attack,” Tarren added.

  “Who else could it be?” she asked, bringing her thoughts back to the present.

  “Dahli’s former followers?”

  She shrugged. “Possibly.”

  She and Tyen had let people assume that they’d killed Dahli after what was now known as the Resurrection Battle. She couldn’t tell Tarren that they had let the Raen’s former Most Loyal live. They had done so, so that he could find Zeke, his new lover and a talented machine maker, and the two of them dedicate themselves to inventing ways to eliminate war machines. If others learned this from Tarren’s mind, the news would spread quickly throughout the worlds, causing chaos.

  Whenever she thought of Dahli it was with a mix of sadness, worry and anger. When angry about the deaths he’d caused – not the least being that of her friend, Ulma – she remembered that Dahli had acted out of a mad, distorted love and grief for the Raen. She hoped that he had found Zeke and mended the rift between them.

  It wouldn’t be easy, she thought. When Dahli killed half of the Restorer’s army, Zeke saw the monster he became. My lingering distrust of Tyen must be nothing compared to what Zeke would have to overcome to trust and desire Dahli again.

  And then she would worry that she and Tyen had made the wrong decision, and Dahli would return to wreak havoc in the worlds again.

  “Tyen would be delighted to see you,” Tarren said.

  Rielle looked up to see him watching her closely, a gleam of mischief in his eyes. She shook a finger at him.

  “I told you, no more matchmaking.”

  He grinned. “Can you blame me? It’s my greatest wish to see the two of you together again before I die.”

  “Die?” She made a disbelieving sound. “I doubt any of your ageless former students are going to let your body deteriorate enough to succumb to old age, and your current students can protect you very well.”

  He chuckled. “Yes. I am more concerned they won’t let me go when I’m ready.”

  She reached out and squeezed his arm. “I hope that you are never ready.”

  He patted her hand. “So do I.”

  CHAPTER 4

  A strange forest surrounded Rielle. The trees formed a maze of trunks leaning at all angles except vertical. Droplet-shaped leaves
appeared to strain upwards and a network of fine roots descended from the branches to the ground – which was perfectly flat and glossy, suggesting opaque water, or mud.

  Adjusting her position within the space between worlds, Rielle rose above the trees. As she arrived, air surrounded her, and she quickly stilled a disc of it below her feet. Looking down through this invisible support, she marvelled at the pattern spread below her. The forest was one single plant, connected by arching branches. Where each limb touched the ground, another cluster of branches sprouted. The collective effect was a pattern that echoed a river delta or fan-shaped coral, originating somewhere past the horizon.

  Incredible, she thought. No matter how far she travelled in the worlds, she still encountered new and remarkable phenomena. Whether the product of human endeavour, living things adapting to an environment or natural forces sculpting the land, the worlds seemed capable of producing endless variety and spectacle.

  But she was not here to see the sights; she was here to restore this world – the world of Telemna-vo. Once again, she sought the minds of other humans, before remembering that thoughts could not be read in worlds with little or no magic. Extending other senses, she sought magic instead…

  … and exhaled in surprise and frustration. This was no dead world. It wasn’t even a weak world. It could not be Telemna-vo.

  She shook her head. Perhaps she’d misunderstood Baluka’s directions and arrived in the wrong world. Thinking back, all the landmarks he’d described for the last nine or ten worlds had been present and obvious. It did not seem likely she had misinterpreted them. It was possible Baluka had been repeating directions given to him by another Restorer or a representative of Telemna-vo and a mistake had crept in.

  She would have to go back and inspect every location closely, seeking the place where she had taken a wrong path. The mistake must have happened in the last few worlds, as it was highly unlikely that a second route would contain the same sequence of landmarks. If that was right, Telemna-vo was probably a neighbour to this one.