"I think… I'm not sure," he said, "but I think someone may be planning to destroy the towers, and I wanted to know just how much trouble that would cause."
"Destroy them?"
"Yes. If they can."
"They probably can't, but still – who is this? Who is insane enough to attempt anything like that?"
"I can't tell you."
"Young man, you are being extremely annoying."
"I know. I'm sorry."
She stared at him for a moment, then sighed.
"All right," she said. "I'll tell you what I can, and when I'm done, you tell me as much as you can. Agreed?"
"Agreed," Emmis said, relieved. "That's perfect."
"Oh, it's anything but perfect, but it will have to do. Sit down; this may take awhile."
Chapter Twenty-Four
Emmis sat on the bed; Ithinia took the room's only chair.
"At the dawn of time," she began, "the universe, unable to contain so many opposed forces in its original compact form, tore itself in half. One piece became Heaven, home of the gods, the realm of light and…"
"I know this," Emmis interrupted. "The gods in Heaven, demons in the Nethervoid, and the leftover bits in between formed the World. What does this have to do with Lumeth?"
"As we wizards tell the story, this middle realm wasn't just left over; it was where the gods and demons collected the impurities they cast out of their own realms. All the good that had been in the Nethervoid was put here, and all the evil that had been in Heaven. Gods and demons watched as it all combined to form a new place, and were amazed to see it was possible for something to exist that was such a blending of light and dark, of good and evil – after all, hadn't the universe itself just ripped apart because it couldn't hold both? But this new creation didn't show any sign of repeating that.
"So they wanted to see what else it could do."
"And they created people," Emmis said. "Yes, I know. I learned all this when I was a baby."
Ithinia calmly continued, "But the middle realm was such a mess, such a disorderly collection of cast-offs, that nothing could live in it."
Emmis had been going to say more, but he stopped and closed his mouth. This wasn't part of the traditional creation story.
"So the gods and demons used all the forces at their disposal to make it habitable – or at least make the part of it we call the World habitable. We don't know how much they left a poisonous wasteland, but they raised up an immense plateau in the middle, where they divided land from water and cleansed the air above. And they did this using all the different powers that we now call magic – the power of the gods made the sun and set the cycles of days and years in motion, and the power of the demons made decay and death so that the World wouldn't ever be overwhelmed by its inhabitants. They used the chaos outside the universe to make life – we call that kind of power wizardry. They used witchcraft and dance and song and all the other magics to get everything just as they wanted it."
"Warlockry, too?" Emmis asked.
"No. Warlockry didn't exist; it's new. Which is why we weren't sure at first it was really a kind of magic at all, when it appeared twenty-two years ago. It must have come from somewhere beyond the universe, somewhere in the chaos."
"Oh."
"So no, they didn't use warlockry. But they did use sorcery. Sorcery draws on order the same way that wizardry draws on chaos, so the gods and demons used both, to keep a balance. They used sorcery to make air that could be breathed. The original gases that had covered the World were poisonous fumes; I'm told that if you go to the edge of the World and look over, you can still see them covering the wastelands below. They're said to be greenish-yellow and very unpleasant."
Emmis blinked. He had never heard of anything at all beyond the edge of the World.
"The thing about sorcery," Ithinia said, "is that it uses talismans. That's inherent in it; the power it uses, a force the sorcerers call gaja, must have a physical core, or it dissipates and stops doing whatever magic it's supposed to be doing."
"And the towers in Lumeth…"
"Are the talismans the gods and demons created more than five thousand years ago to make the World's air breathable."
Emmis stared at her for a long moment, then said, "Oh."
"And the Wizards' Guild has been guarding them for as long as the Guild has existed, to make sure that nobody is ever stupid enough to damage them. We like being able to breathe."
"Oh," Emmis said again.
"So now, if you don't mind, just who is being stupid enough to risk sucking the air from the entire World and leaving it all a poisoned wasteland?"
"I can't tell you," he said.
She glared at him. "You do understand that if they're destroyed, the air will be deadly poison here in Ethshar, don't you? It won't just affect the Small Kingdoms."
"Yes, I understand that. I'm trying to think what I can tell you."
"You're working for the Vondish ambassador – is it Vond that's planning to destroy the towers?"
"Vond went off to Aldagmor years ago."
"Not the warlock, the empire."
Emmis hesitated.
"It is, then," Ithinia said, disgusted. "Why?"
"Well, I don't know for certain that they're going to try. I'm sure you could convince them not to."
"Why would they even consider doing something so insane? And how do you know about it?"
"They… I'm not saying it's the empire, all right? I never said that. But the people I'm talking about know there's a source of magical power in Lumeth of the Towers and they want to destroy it so it can't be used against them, and I think the source they're looking for is the towers."
"You think?"
Emmis sighed. "Yes. I was… a wizard was hired to identify the source, and said he couldn't, because there's magic interfering, so I asked a theurgist to tell me everything in Lumeth that had protective spells on it, because I thought that would narrow it down, and he told me that there are protective spells on their government palace, and on a tunnel the Cult of Demerchan uses, and on a few personal things like spell books, but most of all on the towers. They've got a lot of protective spells on them. So maybe this magic source is in the Demerchan tunnel, or in the palace, but I'd expect to find protective spells on those anyway, and it seems more likely that the mysterious power source is these gigantic sorcerous talismans. Which would explain why the source has been so hard to identify."
Ithinia stared at him silently for a moment.
"A source of magical power, you said?"
"Yes."
"The towers aren't…" She stopped and frowned. After another moment of thoughtful silence she said, "If anyone asks, I cast a spell on you that forced you to tell me this. You resisted as best you could, but of course you were helpless against high-order wizardry."
"Of course," Emmis quickly agreed.
"I won't deny it. Just as well if everyone thinks we have such a spell handy, and that we're ruthless enough to use it on innocent bystanders."
Emmis blinked, hesitated, then asked, "Don't you have such a spell?"
"Not really, no. I wish we did. We have a few spells that could get answers to specific questions, but they aren't entirely reliable. Witches are much better at that sort of thing, but I'm never going to tell anyone the Wizards' Guild had to ask witches for help." She sighed. "Though if you stop cooperating, I will ask a witch for help. Which would be awkward for all of us."
"I'm trying to cooperate, but I promised never to reveal certain things, and it's understood that if certain people learn them my life is forfeit."