High in the sky, slicing the night in an arc, was a shooting star. Even as he watched, it completed its journey from the heavens to the earth. The glare illuminated distant tall trees like twigs in a campfire-for just a second, then the light was snuffed out. Sunbright thought he felt the earth under his boots shake, but that was his imagination. He wasn't on the earth, but floating a mile above it.
On trembling legs, he staggered back to his plain chambers and tousled bed. He closed the bedchamber door and bolted it, then wedged a heavy chair under the latch.
He collapsed on the sodden bed, tried in vain to recall Greenwillow's face and sweet voice.
"What do you mean, you want to go down to the forest? There's nothing down there but-but trees!"
"I want to see a tree." Sunbright sounded petulant. His head ached and he was dizzy. He wasn't sleeping well, and never would until he stood on firm ground.
"Walk in the gardens! We have nine of them! What about our agreement, our working together? Do you know how many artifacts I have to interpret?"
"No." The barbarian's tone suggested he didn't care, either.
"I'll show you!" Candlemas ignored Sunbright's reticence as he marched across the big workshop.
Sunbright followed. Slowly he was learning his way around Castle Delia, or Candlemas's small corner of it. The mage's realm was mostly this tower on one corner of the floating mountain that supported Delia. The tower was a dozen stories high, big enough inside for a chariot race on any floor. Candlemas's workshop occupied the topmost floor, a room bigger than Sunbright's village. Tables and screens and partition walls split the chamber into smaller areas, but always the high windows loomed in all four walls. The floors below, Sunbright had seen, contained more rooms and workshops where some thirty lesser mages worked at dirty, complicated, and arcane tasks per Candlemas's orders. The pudgy mage was an Inventive, he'd explained, one of the empire's leading experts at creating and destroying artifacts, and so a favored employee of Lady Polaris. Secondly Candlemas was a Variator, but the barbarian hadn't grasped that word's meaning. There were more flavors of magic in this society than colors to the forest, and everyone from the mightiest archwizard to the dumbest stable hand practiced magic. Everyone except Sunbright.
And this single tower was only a tiny fraction of the castle, for Candlemas's other realm of responsibility was steward, overseer of the holdings of Lady Polaris. Below and far out of sight were farms and orchards, plantations and ponds, mills and mines that belonged to this one woman who, it was carefully explained by the maid who'd fetched his breakfast, was one of the supreme archwizards of the empire, but not the uppermost: merely the tenth or twelfth. Archwizards spent most of the time scrambling to one-up their rivals, to step upon their enemies while climbing the ladder.
Like salmon hurrying to mount a cataract and spill into a fisher's trap, Sunbright thought.
Castle Delia was almost a square league in area, and the mansions, outbuildings, and battlements on it ran for acre upon acre, stacked six and seven stories high in places. Two hundred and sixty rooms made up the main house, a maid had breathed. Or so it was rumored: no one knew for sure. Over two thousand servants kept it tidy under the all-seeing eye of Umeko, Acting Chamberlain (the former chamberlain, Sysquemalyn, had vanished) for those few occasions when Lady Polaris actually visited. For it stunned Sunbright to learn that this vast castle was only one of seven such keeps owned and maintained by Lady Polaris, in addition to her mansions in many of the larger floating cities, including one in the capital city of Ioulaum. To the tundra-dwelling barbarian, who owned a sword and a blanket, the idea of so much wealth-and the power it brought-was incomprehensible.
And his difficulties with the city-mansion were immediate and irritating. For one thing, in the few days he'd been here, healing, resting, and arguing with Candlemas, he'd consistently gotten lost. Many rooms and hallways had no outside windows, being lit by magically illuminated globes. In such conditions Sunbright had no way to tell north from south, east from west. He felt like an addled child every time he fetched up in some dead-end hallway or dusty cellar, which was often enough. A maid had offered to assign him a boy as a guide, but the barbarian's pride had bristled at the idea. Eventually, he decided to stick to outside hallways to keep his sense of direction, even though the yawning windows with their precipitous drops made his stomach ache and his bowels pinch.
And now he'd told Candlemas he wanted to be on the ground a while, and had sounded whiny. If it weren't for needing to find Greenwillow, he'd climb the Barren Mountains and take up shepherding.
"Here!" The wizard led him around a trio of ornate gold-leafed screens that depicted heroic battles and quests from the distant past. Behind the screen were odd statues and rolled rugs, glass chandeliers hanging from temporary wooden frames and a dozen or more mismatched chests, both plain and fancy. Planting his sandaled feet before one, Candlemas uttered a cantra to spring the lock and flung back the lid.
Sunbright peered. Inside were gadgets and gewgaws, velvet pouches, long wooden boxes, bundles wrapped in cloth and tied with ribbon. Candlemas plucked one up at random. To Sunbright it looked like something cut from a reindeer's guts, bulbous and tubular, but crafted of silver, now tarnished black in the crevices. "Do you know what this is?"
The barbarian shook his head.
"Neither do I," snapped the mage in disgust. "But it's magic. I have three apprentices who do nothing but detect for magic. Everything in these chests is enchanted, and I don't know what any of them do!"
Sunbright watched as Candlemas opened another chest, then another. Most were full. "Where did you get these things?"
"They're found in odd rooms in the castle, bought in markets, won by Lady Polaris in gambling dens, and from her neverending wagers. She wins a pot of gadgets and sends them to me, and I'm supposed to interpret them!"
Sunbright was mildly interested. "And do you?"
"Sometimes." The mage slammed the lid. "I work on whatever problem or question she hurls at me today, then drop it for tomorrow's emergency. Most I can fob off to underlings, but sometimes I must work nonstop to glean the workings of some piece of arcane junk. I once spent three weeks analyzing a jeweled poker-sort-of-thing. Polaris-excuse me-Lady Polaris insisted it would harden quicksilver to silver. Do you know what it did? It curled one's hair! It came off some fop's vanity table!"
"Why would someone want to curl their hair?" asked Sunbright.
Candlemas rolled his eyes. "Never mind. That's not the point." He swept his arms to encompass the jammed chests. "I had hoped you, with your promise of shamanism, could help me solve some problems. The wheat rust, for one. Blight, actually. One assistant thinks it's attacking rye now. Shamen are supposed to understand growing things. I had hoped that, among other experiments, you could assist me in sorting these gadgets, perhaps find one that cures plant disease. There are enchanted tools here that resemble farm implements. Maybe one deters crop rot. A magic sifter, or wand of rowan wood, or a stone that, buried in the field, sucks up evil influences…"
Idly, Sunbright touched the top of an iron-strapped chest. The glyph protecting it shocked his hand. Sucking a scorched fingertip, Sunbright opined, "I couldn't even break one of these locks, let alone puzzle out your-gaj-dits. Blight is part of the natural order of things, you know. Plants grow strong, are attacked by disease, but fight it off and grow stronger. Or they die and are replaced. All things scribe the circle eventually, come from earth and return to it. Us too."
Candlemas rubbed his head, work-roughened, chemical-stained hands rasping on his bare scalp. "I don't need a lesson in barbarian philosophy. Yes, things pass away. And I'll pass away, and so will thousands of peasants, if we don't cure this blight! Don't you understand? If we can employ magic properly, we can undo all these ills and make the world a better place! The point is not to give in to despair, but to best it! Magic can solve everything given enough time and effort! There's no limit to its power!"