Dannyl gestured toward his house, a grand two-storey building he had rented since retiring from the position of Guild Ambassador to Elyne. Though it was known that Dannyl and Tayend were more than mere friends, little was said about it these days. Dannyl had chosen to live in the city rather than the Guild grounds because, as he said, “it’s an agreement of sorts: the Guild pretends blindness, so we give them nothing to see.”
“Do you need to return to the Guild first?”
Lorkin shook his head. “No, but if you need to give Tayend and the servants some warning—”
“No, they won’t mind. Tayend brings unexpected visitors to the house all the time. Our servants are used to it.”
He beckoned and started toward his home, and Lorkin fell into step beside him.
Chapter 3
Safe Places, Dangerous Destinations
“His desk is always such a mess,” Tayend told Lorkin. As Dannyl frowned at the scholar, Tayend grinned, the few lines crossing his forehead smoothing out. Nobody would guess that he’s more than forty years old, Dannyl thought. I’m turning into a wrinkly skeleton while Tayend... Tayend looked better than ever, he noted. He’d put on a little weight, but it suited him.
“It only looks disorganised,” Dannyl said, not for the first time. “I know where everything is.”
Tayend chuckled. “I’m sure it’s just a ploy to ensure nobody can steal his research and ideas.” He grinned at Lorkin. “Now, don’t let him bore you to death. If you feel your mind is starting to shrivel up, come talk to me, and we’ll open another bottle of wine.”
Lorkin smiled and nodded. “I will.”
The scholar waved a hand in farewell, then effected a jaunty walk as he left the room. Dannyl resisted rolling his eyes and sighing, and turned back to Sonea’s son. The young man was eyeing the piles of documents and books on Dannyl’s desk doubtfully.
“There is order to the madness,” Dannyl assured him. “It starts at the back. That first pile contains everything relating to the earliest records of magic. It’s full of descriptions of places like the Tomb of White Tears, and a lot of conjecture about what the glyphs suggest magic was used for.” Dannyl took out the sketches Tayend had made when they had visited the Tombs over twenty years before. He pointed out the glyph of a man kneeling before a woman, who was touching his upraised palms. “This glyph means ‘high magic’.”
“Black magic?”
“Perhaps. But it might be Healing magic. It may be only coincidence that our predecessors called black magic ‘higher magic’.” Dannyl leafed through the pile and another sketch, this time of a crescent moon and hand, flipped into view.
“What is that?” Lorkin asked.
“A symbol we found in the ruined city of Armje. It was a symbol that represented the royal family of that city like an incal symbolises a Kyralian House. Armje is thought to have been abandoned over two thousand years ago.”
“What was the symbol written on?”
“It was carved above house lintels, and we saw it once on what I suspect was a blood ring.” Dannyl smiled as he remembered Dem Ladeiri, the eccentric noble and collector he and Tayend had stayed with in an old castle in the Elyne mountains, near Armje. Then he felt his smile fade as he remembered the underground chamber he’d found in the ruins, called the “Cavern of Ultimate Punishment.” Strange crystalline walls had attacked him with magic and would have killed him if Tayend hadn’t dragged him out just as his shield had failed.
The former High Lord, Akkarin, had asked Dannyl to keep the Cavern a secret to prevent other magicians stumbling inside to their death. After the Ichani Invasion, Dannyl had told the new High Lord, Balkan, of the Cavern, and the Guild leader had ordered him to record what he knew, but also to keep it secret. When the book was finished, Balkan would reconsider whether to allow others to know of the place.
Has Balkan sent anyone there to investigate? I can’t imagine the Warrior would be able to resist trying to find out how the Cavern works. Especially as it has so much potential as a defensive weapon.
“So they knew how to make blood rings two thousand years ago?”
Dannyl looked up at Lorkin, then nodded. “And who knows what else? But that knowledge was lost.” He pointed to the second, smaller pile. “This is all I have relating to the time before the Sachakan Empire conquered Kyralia and Elyne, over a thousand years ago. The few records that we have only survived from that time because they are copies, and they suggest that there were only two or three magicians, and that those had limited skills and power.”
“So if the people who knew how to make blood rings, and whatever high magic was, died without passing that knowledge on...”
“... whether because they didn’t trust anyone enough to teach them, or they never found anyone gifted enough to teach.”
Lorkin looked thoughtful – and definitely not bored, Dannyl noted with relief. The young magician’s attention moved to the third pile.
“Three centuries of Sachakan rule,” Dannyl told him. “I’ve more than doubled the information we have from that time, though that wasn’t hard because there was so little to begin with.”
“A time when Kyralians were slaves,” Lorkin said, his expression grim.
“And slave owners,” Dannyl reminded him. “I believe that the Sachakans brought higher magic to Kyralia.”
Lorkin stared at him in disbelief. “Surely they wouldn’t have taught their enemy black magic!”
“Why not? After Kyralia had been conquered it became part of the Empire. The Sachakans didn’t kill every noble, only those who would not swear allegiance to the Empire. There would have been intermarriage, and mixed blood heirs. Three hundred years is a long time. Kyralians would have been citizens of Sachaka.”
“But they still fought to regain their land, and to get rid of slavery.”
“Yes.” Dannyl patted the top of the pile. “And that is clearly recorded in documents and letters leading up to and following the emperor’s decision to grant Kyralia and Elyne their independence. Both countries abolished slavery, though there was some resistance.”
Lorkin looked at the pile of books, documents and notes. “That’s not what we’re taught in the University.”
Dannyl chuckled. “No. And the version of history you were taught was even less sanitised than what I learned as a novice.” He tapped the next pile. “My generation never knew that Kyralian magicians once used black magic, taking strength from their apprentices in exchange for magical teaching. It was one of the most difficult truths for us to accept.”
The younger magician eyed the fourth pile of books with cautious curiosity. “Are they the books my father found under the Guild?”
“Some of them are copies of what he unearthed. With any dangerous information about black magic removed.”
“How are you going to write a history of that time without including information about black magic?”
Dannyl shrugged. “So long as there’s nothing instructive, there is no danger of anyone learning how to use it from what I write.”
“But... Mother says that you have to learn black magic from the mind of a black magician. Surely you can’t learn it from books?”
“We don’t think it can be, but we’re not taking the risk.”
Lorkin nodded, his expression thoughtful. “So... the Sachakan War is next? That’s a big stack of books.”
“Yes.” Dannyl regarded the generous pile of books and records beside the “independence” one. “I sent out word that I wanted records from that time, and I’ve received a steady stream of diaries, accounts and records from throughout the Allied Lands ever since.” At the top of the pile was a little book he’d found in the Great Library twenty years ago, that had first alerted him to the possibility that the Guild’s version of history might be wrong.