A Sudden Wild Magic

Incense or something abruptly clouded the air, thick and sharp as woodsmoke — pine smoke, Flan thought. By this time she was feeling more than a slight tug of curiosity. She had spent the last two days professionally trying to improve the way these mages moved, and yet she had still no idea what the movements were needed for. When music struck up, the wavery, jangly sort favored by Arth, she yielded to her curiosity. Just one look, she told herself. She bounced to her feet and ran downward to crouch by the balustrade at the edge of the gallery.

She got there just as the High Head swept into the room through the archway opposite. Flan dared not move. His eyes were moving all over, now high, now low, checking up on everything, and the look on his face scared Flan. She stayed in a crouch, with her chin on the plain cold stone of the coping, and cursed Brother Nathan all over again. At the same time, she was frankly fascinated.

She was looking down into blueness, a hundred or more blue- uniformed mages in a blue stone room clouded with rising blue smoke. The nacreous metal of the incense holders ranged in a double star around a space in the center was the only thing that was not blue, apart from hands and faces. Around the central space, the Brothers were standing in a complex zigzag pattern, some facing the center, some lined up sideways to it. As the High Head raised his sword-wand, they sang, long bass notes that vibrated through Flan’s knees on the floor and her chin on the coping, while the musical instruments, still out of sight underneath, jangled a bewildering shrillness around the song. The effect was to make Flan decidedly dizzy, and for the first time, she found she was ready to credit all this talk of vibrations in Arth.

She did not at first notice the young man being hustled through a narrow corridor between the standing mages. She saw him only when the blue-clad men leading him thrust him out into the star-space in the middle and hurriedly retired. Even then she had trouble recognizing him. He seemed dazed and his face was slack. As he staggered into the very center of the space, Flan saw that he was the young fellow who had been so cheerful and kind when they first arrived. Zillah’s friend. She forgot the name. She wondered what he had done — no, that was silly. It was just a question of who with. Zillah?

The mages began to move. Again Flan became fascinated. Each line of men took its own path of difficult curves and strange zigzags, wheeling smartly at the corners, emerging from the complex of movement at the edges to gesture, bend, and sidestep, then plunging back into what seemed a living, walking maze. They were making, Flan was astonished to see, actual, living sigils of power on the floor of the room. Signs she knew well and signs she had never before seen formed before her eyes, were marked by the deep notes of the song, ratified by the gestures of those mages at the edge, and then re-formed to a new sign. No doubt to the mages down there it was just a muddled sort of dance they had to learn, but from up here she could see lines and patterns of pure power. She could also see, quite as clearly, the mages who slipped up and muddled a gesture or muffed a turn, as many did. They were so slack. Tomorrow she would—

The young guy in the center fell heavily to the floor. Flan looked at him almost irritably, for distracting her from the faults of the dance. But what she saw stretched her eyes wide and kept them that way, strained open and staring as if they would never shut again. Blood ran from a knuckle she did not know she was biting. He was melting. No, changing. under her stretched eyes, he rose into gray, jellylike hummocks, heaving and mounding and shifting, trickling pulpily, until he was a big, slug- colored shape like a frog or a toad, except that, like a slug, the surface of him ran with some kind of slime, glistening stickily in the blueness.

The creature lay humped and pulsing faintly while the dance went on around it, quicker now, with fewer pauses between the deep, sung notes. Smoke gusted upward and stung Flan’s staring eyes. Her hair moved and crackled, and she smelled ozone mixed with the smoke. Through the blue wreathing haze, she saw the reptile shape writhe. The slime on it was oozing to big, frothy bubbles, which burst and re-formed and burst again. It flung one desperate paw-thing out as it writhed, clutching for a hold on the smooth flagstones. God, he was in agony! It was like pouring salt on a slug. He was twisting all over.

He was gone.