Stained Glass Monsters

Chapter Four

Rennyn found Sebastian sleeping on the window-seat in the Map Room. There were black circles under his eyes, ink smudges on face and fingers, and his hair stood out in spikes where he’d pulled on it. She touched his forehead, which was damp but not feverish, then stroked his cheek gently.

"You didn’t have to do them all," she murmured. He’d make himself sick, if she didn’t watch him. "You’re just like I was, little brother. And Father not here to teach you when to stop to take a breath." She’d been Seb’s only family for five years now, and found it hard to be glad he was as consumed by their task as she’d ever been.

Turning to the map of Tyrland, she studied the scattering of thumbtacks Seb had added, each carefully numbered and bound to the spindle which marked Falk by a long strand of black hair. Most of them were close to the capital, as expected, but she had to shake her head at the location of the tack painted with a minute white 1.

"Almost all the way back along the road just travelled," she murmured. "I think I’ll take a carriage this time." She’d more than enough chafing from the first trip.

Seb had chalked rows of sigils on the wall, the core structure of the spell they’d been training all their life to cast, unchanged since their Great Grandmother had devised it. Rennyn reviewed the transcription for accuracy, then left to wander about Little Mutching cancelling milk and meat deliveries, selling her horse, arranging for a carriage and a cart, for boxes, for people to lift them. She stopped for spiced tea at Miss Cavendish’s shop and made sure the biggest gossips in the town heard all about how the two they knew as Taren and Severian Justane were off to stay with their Aunt Letitia in Braidford.

Only then did she return to check the map location calculations, which took her well into the afternoon. At least it was easier to confirm the math than it was to work it out in the first place. Seb woke while she was carefully dabbing every tack with a drop of her blood, and drawing her finger along each taut hair. She worked in reverse order, finishing with the spindle, then looked at her gloomily silent brother across the wide expanse of the map.

"Ready?"

He pulled a face. "As I’ll ever be."

Rennyn smiled, and stood still as he pricked his own finger and pressed it between her brows. She didn’t watch the sigils light with power, but instead closed her eyes and thought of a white-haired woman lying in grass. A beautiful face.

Around her the air grew heavy, and she lifted her eyelids enough to watch each thumbtack sink heavily into the map. The spindle followed suit, descending with a crushing weight improbable for such a small object, until the model of Tyrland buckled and cracked all around it.

One of the tacks competing for space in Asentyr began to glow, the light spreading through the fine black web to each of the surrounding points. In response, Rennyn’s hair gently lifted away from her head, each strand surrounded by a blue-white nimbus. The ground seemed far away and uncertain, and she had to steady herself with the table edge and concentrate on breathing, proud of Seb because he was not looking at her, was glowering at the wall with a fixity of purpose, with the determination he needed to finish the casting cleanly.

Then it was over, the thumbtacks just bits of metal with a few melted wisps attached, the weight gone. The spindle had been driven so deeply into the map and the table beneath that only its tip remained visible. Seb dropped to the ground beside her, panting and white.

"Well done."

"Was it?" His eyes were dark. "Why was it leaking on to you?"

"I think that might be inevitable. To be a conduit for this thing, and expect no physical side-effect, is asking too much."

"But this is it in small scale, Ren. What happens to you when the whole weight of the Grand Summoning is behind it?"

Rennyn stood looking down at him, then reached out to haul him to his feet. "When that happens, side-effects will probably be the least of my worries." She switched determinedly to practicalities. It was so much simpler to just do the things they had to do. "Can you feel any residue?"

"N-no."

"Good. That’s two steps taken. Let’s go have something to eat and get started. We’ve a lot of packing to do. I’ve booked us on the mail carriage in the morning, and we need the luggage for the cart ready before then. Worry about that now."

Falk was home to one hundred and thirty-seven people, too many fowl, dogs, goats, five horses, several cows and somewhere in the order of fifty dozen cats. A troop of militia from Sark had been given charge of removing everything that could possibly be moved and transporting it to neighbouring villages, or back to Sark. And that was only the beginning, for Lady Weston had spoken of evacuating other villages.

A lot of people simply didn’t believe. Even the Troop Captain didn’t act like he really believed it, though that hadn’t stopped him from emptying Falk in less than a day. Only a few had resisted, most not willing to say boo to the Queen’s troops. Some had refused to go further than the cordon which had been set up well beyond Falk’s circle, even though the sun was setting and they’d be unprotected from Night Roamers. In such numbers they’d probably not be at risk unless they slept, but the ban against being outside a circle after dark was so strong that even the presence of two Sentene and the Grand Magister couldn’t stop Kendall from watching the slowly bleaching horizon as much as the silent village.

She almost missed it, would have if she hadn’t caught the scent of a storm and realised what it meant just in time to turn her eyes back.

ShhooTHuMP!

Falk exploded. Not in flames, but into splinters. The outer buildings were shredded by fragments of the houses that were closest to the White Lady, only a few remaining upright. Pieces of wood flew well beyond the village’s circle, spearing into the ground after crossing more than half the distance to the cordon. The first wave of destruction passed in a moment, but among the buildings which hadn’t been completely destroyed there followed a series of sliding crashes, as walls collapsed and settled.

"Stronger than the last," said Captain Faille, as if he watched homes being shattered every day.

"Yes." Lady Weston shaded her eyes to peer through the night, ignoring the cries of astonishment and dismay all around. "Danress, prepare the same divination at its edge please."

"Yes, M’Lady." Lieutenant Danress took two of the outriders and headed into the edges of Falk’s ruin as both the Troop Captain and Mayor Dorstan approached the Grand Magister’s carriage.

"Captain Vesan, I will perform some further divinations here before heading into Sark. One of the Queen’s Hands will reach here from Asentyr by morning, and will take charge." Lady Weston nodded at the militia-man, then turned a softer look on Mayor Dorstan. "I’m sorry for your loss, Sir. I wish I had been able to prevent this."

Mayor Dorstan was a ghost of himself, hollow and without his usual force. He touched his hand to his forehead, and muttered something, then added: "We’re all whole, M’Lady. That’s as much as any man can hope for, when such a thing’s visited on him. It will – you say it will keep expanding? Could you reckon how far? There’s some who are fixing to set themselves up in Morebly, and I mislike uprooting them twice."

"The size will depend on the quality of the caster. The first Grand Summoning, that of Queen Solace, formed the basin of Lake Surclere. I would not depend on Morebly."

The Mayor took a step backward, then bowed and faded into the twilight. Kendall didn’t know how big Lake Surclere was, but she did know that there used to be a town there, one which had had thousands of people living in it. And three hundred years ago the Black Queen had cast the Grand Summoning, trying to increase her power. The spell had let all kind of monsters loose on Tyrland and, the stories said, the town and all the countryside around it had been sucked down into a pit, into the Hells outside the world where the Life Stealers lived.

Examining this idea, Kendall followed Lady Weston and Captain Faille to the new edge of the heaviness, where Lieutenant Danress had cleared and compressed a section of dirt, and marked out a circle of magic writing among the ruins of Falk. It was easy to tell where the heaviness started, because that was where the ground began to slope downward. The gleaming white figure was now about three feet below them, in the centre of a rubble-strewn cone sunk into the earth.

"Guess we should have slit her throat while we had the chance," Kendall said to Lieutenant Danress, as Lady Weston once again began to cast. "Could we have stopped her from finishing her spell if we’d understood sooner? And why did she decide to do her spell in the middle of Falk instead of somewhere people didn’t live?"

"It’s a little complicated." Danress glanced at the shadowy stillness which was her senior officer, then moved a few feet away. "Before the expansion, Lady Weston thoroughly examined the White Lady and found little in the way of a physical element, for all she appears to be directly in front of us. That may be what the caster looks like, but she isn’t really here. The apparition is a distortion out of the Eferum, and no weapon would have been able to even scratch her."

"She’s in the Hells?"

"If you want to call it that. The proper name for the world surrounding this one is the Eferum. While Efera flows from there to here constantly, like water through a sieve, magi risk their lives to enter the Eferum to Summon their focus stones, to increase the amount of power they can call upon. It’s only possible to stay there for a short time, and it’s dangerous. Queen Solace – the Surcleres were pre-eminent experts on the Eferum, and the Queen discovered a way to prolong the amount of time she could endure in the Eferum, immensely increasing the strength of the focus stone she would be able to summon. But the Grand Summoning, as well as the obvious destruction, caused the barrier between the Eferum and this world to weaken, and there were a great many incursions. Most natural breaches aren’t open wide or long enough for many Eferum-Get – what you’d call Night Roamers – to get through, but the Grand Summoning created rifts of dangerous length."

"Night Roamers are going to come out of Falk?"

"No. This projection is something unique to the Grand Summoning, a physical manifestation of the spell, of the amount of power the caster is drawing to bear. What you can feel when you come into its range is the weight of the Efera itself. It is…the strength of it will dwarf all of Tyrland’s mages, make us into ants. Whoever is casting this will be like a god to us if they complete the Summoning."

"How do we stop it then?" Kendall asked practically. "Prince Tiandel stopped Queen Solace didn’t he?"

"Prince Tiandel knew the precise construction of the Grand Summoning, witnessed its casting, and had been entrusted with Queen Solace’s younger focuses, which he used as a tool against her. He would not share the knowledge after; we don’t even know precisely what he did to kill her beyond disrupting the Summoning with the focuses. Then – there was a great backlash against the Surclere line after Queen Solace’s death, and Tiandel Montjuste-Surclere renounced claim to the throne and withdrew from society. Hero and villain. It was Tiandel who assisted her, Tiandel who helped prepare the spell, who had custody of her library, all her researches. There were frequent attacks against him, calls from the Court to have him brought to account, many stories that he intended to attempt the Grand Summoning himself. Yet it is believed that it was actually loyalists of the Black Queen who set fire to his home. The entire Montjuste-Surclere family were killed, and that library, all the primary records of the Black Queen’s researches – gone."

"Oh." Kendall stared through the increasing gloom at the White Lady. "So what can we do? Just wait till whoever she is finishes and hope she’s nice?"

"It may amount to that," Danress muttered. "Of course, there is this mess, and there will be the incursions to deal with. Beyond that – you realise how important it is to find that woman, don’t you? She knew, before any of us, that the Distortion circle would expand, that this was a Grand Summoning. She must know the caster, probably knows the initiating point. If we’re to do anything at all, we need to find that place, and be ready for the caster’s return from the Eferum."

"I guess," Kendall said unenthusiastically. She hadn’t been entirely convinced that silly woman was really involved at all until one of the Ferumguard – the Sentene’s outriders – had returned from Morebly with a blank scrap of paper. Lady Weston said the writing must have been conjured, so it couldn’t be used to trace her, even if she was close enough to trace. "I don’t see how we’re going to find her, though. She’s long gone. Are you going to collect all the black-haired girls in Tyrland for me to look at?"

"Not that improbable an idea," Danress replied. "All the black-haired mages, at least. We will certainly be combing the Register for anyone who fits the description you gave."

"What about the White Lady? You saw her up close, didn’t you? Lady Weston didn’t recognise her?"

"No. And she’s certainly distinctive. An outland mage, perhaps? It’s more than confusing, because the White Lady sightings have been occurring for centuries. The most recent was in Loise, almost sixty years ago, but there was no expansion in any of the previous cases. It’s a greatly confusing thing to discover this White Lady is related to the Grand Summoning – they’ve been occurring innocuously for so long that we have no explanation as yet."

Lieutenant Danress sighed, then moved back to watch Lady Weston doing nothing visible. It was almost full dark now, the moon not yet risen, and the night broken only by the lanterns held by the militia and Ferumguard. Kendall shook her head, tried not to think about Night Roamers, and went to sit in Lady Weston’s carriage.

She didn’t want any part of this, and maybe would have taken the chance of ditching the Sentene once they reached Sark if not for the memory of Ma Lippon’s face as she herded her brood down the road toward Morebly. Lippons had been living in Falk since forever, just like the Stocktons. Ma Lippon might’ve been bossier than anyone could care for, so sure she knew what was right. But Kendall would no more have seen her turned out of her home than she would have struck the sun from the sky. Ma Lippon belonged in Falk, and Falk wasn’t there any more.

Kendall made a practice of looking after herself, of not poking her nose into other people’s doings. This wasn’t her business. Not her job to fix wrongs or try and protect kingdoms. Not her problem if the Lippons no longer had a home to go to.

But if she had the chance she’d point out the woman who knew about the Grand Summoning, all the same.