Death's Mistress

CHAPTER 55

The land was dead and desperate. Victoria knew that the harm would take decades, maybe even centuries, to restore … if left on its own. That was unforgivable. She could not forget what the self-centered, shortsighted Roland had done, how that pathetic man had killed the land … and murdered her dear husband.

But Victoria knew magic, had memorized countless secrets of arcane lore. As the most prominent memmer, she held a wealth of magical information in her mind, and now she searched for a faster solution to revitalize the great valley. The answer was within her—she knew it!

Simon and his scholars could fool themselves that they were experts. They could read books and study spells, but that didn’t mean they understood that knowledge. Just because a starving man looked at a pantry filled with food, he did not have the nourishment he required. The memmers, though, had all that information inside them, part of their being, their heart, their soul.

Ancient wizards had built this hidden archive to preserve history and lore for all future generations to use. Everything a powerful gifted person could imagine was inside these vaults, written down in volumes, stored on shelves … and locked in the minds of the memmers.

That knowledge was part of Victoria.

After the group visited the site of the final battle, the sorceress had seemed so smug, so triumphant about what she had done. Death’s Mistress! Yes, Nicci might have killed the Lifedrinker’s ravenous need, but she had not restored life by any means. That was a much more difficult and time-consuming task.

Victoria found the spindly sapling deeply disappointing, even pathetic. Such a small thing, without any magic? She had hoped for much more from the Eldertree. From when she was a young woman, she recalled the rolling hills covered with thick forests, the fertile basin with sweeping croplands and thriving towns. Though the isolated inhabitants of Cliffwall had only rarely left their hidden canyons, they knew the way the real world was supposed to be.

One of the first outsiders brought back to the archive after Victoria had dispelled the camouflage shroud, Roland had been an intense and nervous researcher, an innocuous scholar who read volumes of spells and dabbled with minor magic. He had been quiet and good-natured, and Victoria’s husband had considered him a friend.

Early on, Bertram had noticed that Roland was growing gaunt and thin. Victoria now realized those were signs of the wasting disease devouring him from within. But Roland had refused to accept his fate; he had made a bargain with magic he did not comprehend. Without understanding what he was about to unleash, he had turned himself into a bottomless pit of need that siphoned away all life, not just his own.

Victoria winced as she remembered the fateful day she had come upon Roland after he met her husband in the corridor. Desperate, begging for help, he had clasped Bertram’s hand, but was unable to control what he unleashed, and the magic kept stealing more and more from her poor husband. Bertram could not pull away, could not escape no matter how hard he struggled … and the monster Roland purloined his entire life, gorged himself on Bertram’s essence.

By the time Victoria saw them, it was too late. Roland fled in terror, and she rushed forward to catch her husband as he collapsed in the corridor. She held him, pressing him against her breast and rocking him back and forth as he faded swiftly. Bertram’s skin turned as gray and dry as the old parchments in the archive. His cheeks sank into dark hollows, his eyes shriveled into puckered knots of flesh, his hair fell out in wispy clumps. In her arms, her husband turned into nothing more than a mummified corpse.

From where he had retreated down the corridor, Roland had watched in horror and revulsion. He held up his hands, denying his own deadly touch. “No, no, no!” he screamed.

But after draining all the life energy from Bertram, he did indeed seem stronger, invigorated by what he had stolen. Roland, fast becoming the Lifedrinker, had fled Cliffwall, running into the vast valley. Only later did Victoria learn that he had killed ten other scholars in his frantic, blundering attempts to keep himself strong, trying to get away from the isolated archive.

Now the Lifedrinker was dead, but that was not enough for Victoria. She could not bring Bertram back, but she needed to restore the fertile valley and reawaken life, and she was sure she had the power to do so. Unlike the deluded, inept Roland, she would not make any mistakes.…

By the time the expedition returned to the plateau two days later, Victoria knew what she had to do. Sage, Laurel, and Audrey were her three best memmers, but she also had Franklin, Gloria, Peretta, and dozens more students, all of whom were repositories of knowledge. Even now that she had brought down the camouflage shroud and made the wealth of knowledge available to any student who could read, Victoria insisted on keeping the memmer tradition alive. Maybe her acolytes would remember something even more important.

Back inside the great Cliffwall library, Simon insisted on holding a celebration feast, but Victoria could not pretend to be as overjoyed as the others. There was still so much work to do, centuries of work—and that was much too long to wait.

Much as the researchers had scoured the archive for a way to destroy the Lifedrinker, Victoria now sought a fecundity spell, some powerful magic to restore everything the evil wizard had taken. If a corrupted spell could steal life away, could not another spell bring it all flooding back? Victoria needed to find that type of magic. Surely some solution lay among all the wisdom preserved here from the ancient wizards.

She spread the word among her memmers, who pondered and sifted through the countless books they had committed to memory. They talked to additional scholars, who combed through now-forgotten volumes from the deepest vaults and dustiest shelves, incorporating that knowledge into their own memory archives.

There had to be a way!

Victoria met privately with her trusted acolytes, keeping her voice low as if they had started a conspiracy. “You are all fertile, all throbbing with life. I can sense it in you. You must create life.” She smiled at them, feeling the warmth within her. “And you have gone to Bannon Farmer?”

The three young women looked both eager and embarrassed. “Yes, Victoria,” Sage said. “Many times.”

“We are trying,” Laurel said.

Audrey smiled. “Trying as often as possible.”

Sage said, “But none of us is pregnant. Yet.”

Victoria sighed and shook her head. “The seed sometimes goes astray, but it will happen in the normal course of things. It is not enough, though. We will have to try something else. The ancient wizards must have known a spell to restore life, magic to encourage growth and rebirth.”

“Restore life?” Laurel was astonished by the idea. “You want to bring back the dead?”

“I want to bring back the world,” Victoria said. “A fertility spell to remove the blight and corruption out in that desolation. I want to bring back the forests and rivers, the meadows and croplands. I want to fill the streams with fish. I want to summon flowers and then bees to pollinate them and make honey. I want the land to thrive again.” She drew a breath and looked at her followers. “I refuse to wait decades for that to happen.”

While Cliffwall scholars as well as the other canyon villagers engaged in giddy revelry to celebrate the end of the Lifedrinker, Victoria’s special memmers meditated, sifting through the vital information in their perfectly preserved memories, searching for some way to accelerate the process.

Victoria spent her every waking moment wrestling with the mountains of words she had locked inside herself. Her head pounded, as if the proper spells were struggling to break free, but she did not have the key to release them. Not yet.

Standing outside under the great cliff overhang in the gathering dusk, she watched shadows fill the finger canyons. Evening lights glimmered from the windows of other alcove settlements across the canyon. Insects buzzed in a low contented music, and she heard the whisper of wings as two night birds swooped by. The world seemed at peace, awakening.

Victoria reflected on the damaged tower that had held the prophecy library. She could remember the terrible day when an inadvertent spell had liquefied the structure and drowned the hapless but foolish apprentice wizard in a flood of stone. Such incidents, even though they were rare, frightened the other scholars from attempting major spells.

Now, standing in the cliff grotto, she looked at the damaged tower with scorn. She had no respect for the clumsy student who had failed to understand the power he unleashed. Another disaster, just like Roland.

Victoria would never allow such a thing. She had higher standards.

As she thought of the mistake that had been made here, something clicked in her mind and she remembered part of an old fertility spell, not just for a woman to have children—perhaps to reawaken the womb of a barren woman, like Victoria herself—but a creation spell, a fecundity rite tied to deeper magic that could increase crops, expand herds, rejuvenate forests. She felt the tickle of faint memory, a spell buried deep among so much other knowledge. Victoria tried to sharpen the arcane thoughts at the distant edge of her mind.

She remembered her stern mother, whose angular face looked like the wedge of a hatchet. While her mother had forced Victoria to memorize the lore word for word, she had never bothered to make sure young Victoria comprehended what she knew; her mother cared only that she could accurately repeat every line, even if it was in a language neither of them understood. The woman had repeatedly whipped Victoria with a willow switch, raising red welts, spilling blood. Sometimes, she had cuffed her daughter across the face, boxed her ears, or made her bleed from the nose in an attempt to make her try harder to remember, to use her gift and make no mistakes.

Mistakes caused harm. People suffered when an error was made, even an innocent error. Weeping with sincerity, young Victoria had promised her mother she would make no errors. And she had watched that woman shove her good-natured father out of the cliff overhang to his death—a deserved fate, according to her mother, since he had made a mistake, a potentially dangerous mistake.

Victoria could make no mistakes.…

Now, once she touched the scattered, ancient spell and followed the memories buried in her past, Victoria could see the words unfurling in her mind. The arcane language, the unfamiliar phrasings, couplets with pronunciations that seemed to defy the letters with which they were written. Victoria remembered the fecundity spell, repeated from generation to generation, passed from memmer to memmer. The thoughts were faint and wispy, frayed from disuse, but she possessed the knowledge. She could use it.

Satisfied, Victoria reentered the main library fortress and hurried to her quarters. Though she had committed everything to memory, she lit her lamp and bent over the low writing desk. On a scrap of paper she began to write, preserving the words she had brought to the forefront of her mind, rolling them over in her mouth, making sure each detail was correct. She spoke the sounds carefully aloud to be sure she got every nuance correct. After she wrote down the fecundity spell, she read it and read it again until she was sure she was right.

Victoria braced herself. She knew what she had to do, and she understood the instructions perfectly.

The land had already been bled dry. What did a little more blood matter?