Clouds kissed the Uncrossable Mountains, but never ascended their stratospheric heights. Air thinned to nothingness on those frozen peaks. Winds died on those slopes like ocean waves turned back by the swell of land.
So it had been for eternity.
Until now.
A newly summoned magical jet stream accompanied sorcerers and their mountaineering guides as they trekked across frigid ice, using magic to stay warm and prevent hypoxia. But this is not a story about traversing deadly mountains in an era of unprecedented magitech progress. This is a story about an entirely new magic.
For greatness is born in times of change.
Sorcerers hiked down the northern escarpments of the mountain range, descending into a mysterious land of rocky foothills and griffon roosts. Their magical jet stream flowed past them, over bighorn sheep, over herdsmen who survived in the steppes as they had always done.
A chi station attracted the torrent with hex runes. The station’s spokes exhaled lesser helixes of chi-infused wind, channeling magic to public founts interspersed in an emerging urban skyline. Most of the cubes and step pyramids were still being erected on skeletal scaffolding.
The excess chi dispersed over ancient castles and meager hamlets.
The now-ordinary wind continued to gust eastward, over scrub brush, over grasslands. It gathered into a storm that chased pronghorn antelopes over the horizon. Curtains of rain fed marshlands. A cold night transformed the storm into stippled clouds, and at dawn, those clouds breezed over farmsteads, bluffs, and a woodland that appeared untouched by the changes affecting the rest of the world.
Oag held his journal open on a sunlit window ledge of his family’s castle. He dipped his quill in ink, detailing an experimental equation. He wanted to define the mathematical concept of a derivative with exactitude.
“You slew me!” a little girl shrieked playfully. “I’m dead!”
Another girl giggled. “Okay, fine, let’s go again. This time you’re the evil archmage and I’m the prince.”
“Fireball!”
Wood clacked against wood. Two of Oag’s little sisters burst into the storeroom, shouting and whacking mops and brooms together like boys sparring in the practice yard. Oag knew those sounds all too well. He’d been obligated to spar against his older brother.
A chambermaid trailed after the girls, looking amused. She was roughly their age, but her rough-spun dress and apron differentiated her from the adolescent noble ladies.
“Oag, save me!” Sorily wailed with playful exaggeration. “The prince is too strong!” She fended off Alismay, blocking her mop with a broom handle. “I need help!”
Alismay glanced at Oag and laughed with teasing scorn. “That knight won’t help you. He doesn’t even have a sword.”
“Lady Anna!” Sorily hollered. “Give the knight a sword!”
The chambermaid shyly approached Oag. Anna was no lady in waiting, despite the fake title her mistress had given her. “Milord?” She offered an extra broomstick.
“No, thanks.” Oag closed his math journal and put it out of harm’s way.
The air was humid and scented with grass and clover, with a hint of pine from the woods. Geese honked on the lake. Most of the castle’s windows were open to the weather, since glass was an expensive foreign luxury.
“Oag, come on!” Sorily begged. “Why are you always scribing? Don’t you want to rescue a princess?” She faked a swoon, flinging one skinny arm over her forehead. “Oh, save me, sir Oag! I don’t want stupid Ermire. I want a real knight to come rescue me!”
Oag stretched out his long legs, pretending to trap Sorily. She was eleven. At eighteen years old, Oag had grown taller than everyone else in his family, even his father—but he was half the width of his brother and father. The cook liked to describe him as skin and bones.
Not a compliment.
Oag did try to force himself to eat bread and other hearty foods. He really did try. But although such food tasted good, he always felt sharp pains of indigestion within minutes of swallowing a bite. Oag had to spend time on the latrine whenever he experimented with foods. He had decided that putting on manly weight just wasn’t worth so much suffering.
He tried not to envy his knighted brother too much. Ermire never seemed to get a stomachache.
“I thought you were the archmage, not the princess?” Oag teased his youngest sister. He tugged her off balance with his legs.
Sorily fell into his embrace, giggling.
“She’s right, you know.” Alismay put a hand on her hip. “Don’t you want to get knighted?” Alismay was fourteen and getting good at mimicking the regal mannerisms of their mother. “It won’t happen if you spend all your time scribing.”
Oag was not going to tolerate a lecture from his little sister. “Swords are boring. I prefer magic.”
“Magic?” Sorily twisted around to gaze up at Oag with concern. “I thought you were doing sums.”
“There’s magic in mathematics,” Oag said, not expecting his sisters—or anyone in the castle—to understand. “It’s a way of quantifying and measuring the world and everything in it.”
Sorily looked impressed.
“Well, I’m glad you’re not a sorcerer,” Alismay said. “Magic is evil.”
Right.
Oag’s father and brother had survived a magical onslaught last summer, and they had returned from that battle shaken, having witnessed men burned alive in their armor. Magic was all that anyone talked about. It was the reason why crops failed, why sheep died, and why soldiers failed to return from campaigns.
The mysterious sorcerers had first begun to arrive a few years ago.
Now every king or queen had their own court sorcerer, or else they had rejected one and were threatened by a magic-fueled insurrection or invasion. The number of sorcerers seemed to increase every year. No one knew where they came from.
Or whether they would take an apprentice.
Oag had written furtive letters. He had secretly entrusted them to two different messengers, not quite daring to offer bribes. Extra payment would only arouse curiosity. Learning magic was akin to treason, and his father was staunchly against magic of any sort.
In the privacy of his own mind, though, Oag did not understand why.
Why was throwing magical fireballs more evil than swinging a broadsword?
Why was magical armor evil while steel armor was good?
The sorcerers won almost every battle. It seemed to Oag they weren’t actually evil, per se. They just had better equipment.
“Not all magic practitioners are evil,” Oag said experimentally. “In ancient times, wizards used to do good deeds. They would save entire cities from monsters.”
“Those are fairy tales.” Alismay sounded nonplussed. “Our ancestors were the real heroes.”
In ancient times, indeed, lords and kings used to fight off giant porcupines and ice trolls. There were tapestries depicting such noble battles. It was always good versus evil, noble versus monster.
“The sorcerer of Iveness turns horses into ravening monsters,” Alismay went on. “And that sorceress in Lamm imprisoned a king. You’re not like that.” She giggled at the absurd idea of Oag wielding dark powers. “Don’t you want to be a knight like Ermire?” She flexed her bicep, pretending to be their brother, although she wore a blouse and a corset.
“I just want to be left alone.” Oag was tired of justifying his interests. “How about if you let me finish what I was doing?”
He hoped his sisters wouldn’t tattle on him. The last time Lord Eagan had caught his son avoiding military lessons, he had knocked the journal out of Oag’s hands.
And that was fair. As a lordling, Oag was expected to become a military leader of men, not a hunched accountant who devoted his life to legal contracts and ledger books. The faraway king was dealing with a bloody insurrection. He would soon demand more knights and officers to help him defeat his rival—and that rival’s sorcerer.
The problem? Oag didn’t want to die from a flaming arrow on some muddy battlefield.
He also despised the coarse vassals who bowed and scraped for his father and brother. He didn’t fit in with men like that.
He wasn’t fond of horsemanship, either. He got itchy eyes and wheezing breath whenever he was near the stables.
Sorily moved off Oag’s lap. “Guess what?” She bounced on the bench seat, kicking her stockinged feet, apparently unwilling to leave. “There’s a peddler.”
Oag tried to mask his excitement. “Really?” The ducal road was all but impassable through the long winter, but the snows were melting.
“So we heard,” Alismay confirmed. “The peddler is that green-skinned newt. You know, the one who comes every few years?”
Oag could hear his own heart pounding. That peddler tended to deliver correspondence.
And books.
Books did not usually survive the long, hard journey, of course. Peddlers got waylaid or sold their wares before they wound up in the hinterlands. Neither Oag nor his scholarly correspondents could pay royal sums to hire an armed merchant company. So in total, Oag had only received three books from faraway friends, but he was always hopeful for more.
“Is there a crowd?” Oag jumped to his feet, towering over his adolescent sisters. “Is the peddler carrying books or letters? Do you know? None of the mayors showed up, I hope?”
Sorily giggled at his enthusiasm.
“How would we know?” Alismay said with a note of despondence in her tone. “We are not allowed to leave the keep unescorted.”
If the peddler did carry a book, then Oag absolutely needed to get there before the mayor of Grindlebuck could hobble over and make a bid. That old mayor was literate, unlike most of the local peasantry.
“Thanks for telling me.” Oag raced towards the doorway.
“Wait!” Alismay called. “Will you escort us?” She tempered her voice with an attempt at maturity. “I would like to consider a purchase or two.”
Sorily gasped with delight at the idea. “Yes, please!” She latched onto Oag and gazed up at him with her big gray eyes. “Please, please, please? Take us to the peddler?”
Oag did not want to mind his sisters in a crowd. But their desperate hope was too much to bear, and he supposed some household guards might help. He caved in. “All right.”
“YAY!” Both sisters shouted, jumping with joy.
Oag laughed in spite of his worries. “Go put on your boots and cloaks and meet me in the bailey.”
The girls raced towards their quarters, laughing and chatting in excitement. Their chambermaid hiked up her thick skirts to keep up.
Oag rushed in the opposite direction, stopping in his bedchamber. He unlock the chest where he kept his precious sheafs of paper, jars of ink, and goose quills. He removed the false bottom. Lord Eagan gifted a silver to each of his lesser children on their annual name days, so Oag had a coin purse that was mostly full. He pocketed it.
From there, he detoured to the windowless armory where he hid books and journals. A lost book could not be easily replaced. Ermire was likely to toss a book out a window just to see it fall, so Oag had learned not to leave his precious journals laying about.
He shifted aside the wooden screen that served as the door. The hallway shed just enough light so he was able to step past rolled tapestries, crates, and pieces of armor. He made his way to a cabinet full of old accounting ledgers.
Oag slipped his journal onto the shelf. A few actual books were interspersed among the ledgers.
Most people prayed to their ancestors for a good marriage, or a good harvest. Oag prayed for new things to read.
Not that his ancestors would care. They must have been illiterate. As nobles, they’d had the means to hire scribes.
Ah well.
As Oag closed the cabinet, he saw that his book on number theory was missing. Perhaps his mother had borrowed it? Strange. She had no interest in integers, as far as he knew.
But she was the only fully literate inhabitant of Oswick Castle other than Oag himself. She had taught him how to read.
He stepped between rolled carpets and pieces of armor, making his way towards the door. And he caught sight of a slinking shadow near the wall.
Oag assumed it was a cat and gave it a wide berth. Cats were necessary in all castles, to cull the rat population, but he had major allergies to felines.
The creature was carrying the missing book.
Oag stopped.
It was not a cat, but a tiny man the size of a barn owl. His orange eyes reflected the dim light. He wore suspenders over a rumpled shirt. Sparse fur grew out of his face, like tufted whiskers rather than facial hair. Those white whiskers contrasted with dark gray skin, like wet granite flecked with mica.
Was this a forest pixie?
Or maybe a mountain gnome?
Oag had seen a few odd things in his eighteen years of living at the edge of the monster wilds. Slimes occasionally scooted out of the Knearwood. Flame tails might terrify a farmer before Lord Eagan sent vassals to kill the beasts.
He had seen weird people, as well. There was an ossified man in one of the peasant villages. And everyone had seen the tribal nomads with silvery green skin and pointy ears. They had a word for themselves, but most folks called them newts.
As for this tiny man…
Oag had glimpsed him once before, hadn’t he? He had caught this gnome, or whatever he was, stealing a slice of bread.
But that was many years ago. Oag had been a small child. He had reported the tiny thief to the cook and her scullions, as well as to his mother. Everyone had reacted with derision or laughter, assuming young Oag was telling a tale.
Now the gnome eyed Oag with an expression that was not quite fear. “Danger,” he said in a croaking, gravely voice, almost like that of a bullfrog, “simmers within your castle.”
The encounter felt so otherworldly, Oag needed a moment to figure out how to react.
The gnome grunted and continued to haul away the book. It must be a great burden for his tiny arms.
“What danger do you mean?” Oag asked, following the tiny man.
The book-toting gnome went behind a shield painted with the goose crest of Oswick. Oag waited for him to emerge.
He did not. Oag heard a very faint thud, then nothing.
“What shall I call you?” Oag asked. “My name is Oagmalo.” He offered his full name, formally introducing himself. “May I know who you are?”
No response.
Overcome by curiosity, Oag moved the goose shield aside. He uncovered a broken stone at the wall’s base. When he pulled that out, he revealed a hole, barely large enough for a cat to wriggle through.
Faint sounds hinted that the gnome was moving farther away.
Oag dropped to his hands and knees. Candlelight flickered far down the miniature passageway. He felt like a fairy-tale giant.
“I don’t mean to scare you,” Oag said, trying to peer past the bend where the tunnel dropped off. “Are you from the Knearwood? What is the danger you spoke of?”
He listened and heard nothing.
Was the tiny man cowering in fear? Was he simply ignoring the giant?
“Am I the only person who ever sees you?” Oag muttered, no longer bothering to speak to the gnome. He stood and dusted off his hands and knees. “Well, enjoy the polynomial equations, little man.”
Oag moved the broken stone into place, sealing the hole. He put the shield back, then walked out of the old armory.
“Milord?” A chambermaid curtsied. “Who are ye meeting with?” She slid a look at the armory entrance.
“Ah…” Oag blushed. He hadn’t guessed that anyone had overheard his one sided dialogue.
And this was the one maid he preferred to avoid. Uma had ravenous eyes. She tended to look at Oag like he was a morsel she wanted to devour, and he had no idea why.
She was giving him that look now.
“I, ah, thought I saw a cat.” Oag dragged the wooden screen back into place, sealing off the old armory.
The chambermaid looked at him as if she thought he was joking.
Oag hurried away. “I’ve got to go!”
Uma’s soft laugh followed him down the hallway.
