Previous Chapter

Roy took the news that Low Noon would likely empower von Nighburg with his typical grace and good humor, stalking off to retrieve his skiff while grumbling under his breath. Proud Elk went with him, both to keep him out of trouble and likely to ride the skiff again. Johan watched them go, bemused. When Roy had joined the Regulars as a kid he’d had a much more positive attitude and outlook but time had changed him a lot. It was tempting to say it was the war that did it but even during the Summer of Snow he hadn’t been quite so… intense.

From the rumors, most people thought that intensity was what made Roy successful in his work. Johan worried that it was a sign of strain. He’d tried to work out what was bothering Roy when he came to Leondale for his wedding but hadn’t gotten anywhere. Given the constraints they were under at the moment Johan assumed he wouldn’t get another chance. At least not before they went up the tower.

He finished marking up the mirrors and moved over to the crystal itself, examining the burnt out candles the sheriff had left there. As if the thought conjured the man, Warwick appeared. “I can get those out of your way.”

“They’re not an issue, sheriff,” Johan said, handing him the stump of wax. “These are a tool to show things that normally go unseen, correct?”

Warwick slipped the stub of wax into a pouch on his belt. “That’s the idea.”

“We might be able to combine them with the mirrors and work out exactly what is inside the prism before we use the sunstone to dissolve it,” Johan said. He pointed to the child trapped inside. “If nothing else it will let us see if the child is poisoned or injured in some hidden way before we restore him to normal time.”

“They’re intended to reveal magic, not wounds or poison,” Warwick said, moving around the prism. “Besides, I’ve never heard of a candle of revealing and a mirror being used together, much less a candle and a magic mirror. We don’t know as it will do anything.”

“Can it hurt to try?” Tanner asked.

“Mixing magic is always dangerous,” the sheriff said, scooping up the last candle stub, “even magics that exist only to look at things.”

Johan nodded. “There are many very dangerous entities in the world that know when you are looking for them. That’s how people like von Nighburg typically get their start. They go looking for the forbidden and the forbidden finds them eventually.”

“Beyond that,” Warwick added, “I only have three of the things left and we might very well need them. The more magic the candle needs to do its job the faster it burns.”

“Only three?” Johan raised an eyebrow. “Why so few? I would think a druid as skilled as yourself would have many of such a useful thing on hand.”

Warwick spread his hands. “The wicks are very hard to come by since Morainhenge fell and the climate here isn’t right for me to grow the ingredients myself. I reached out to someone I know who tries to keep us supplied with such things months ago but… well, it’s not so easy to find what I need these days. I’d like to have a hundred of the things on hand all the time.”

“That’s unfortunate.” Johan pressed his face against the side of the prism, his nose pressing flat against the surface of the spell. Nothing he saw inside spoke of poisons or wounds. The problem was that both the First Son’s magic and the older Teutonic magics he derived it from excelled at illusions. “Could you spare just one of your candles?”

The sheriff joined him, his frown clearly visible in his reflection on the prism’s surface. “You’re very fixated on this.”

“A moon prism is a very flexible kind of magic, sheriff,” Johan said, stepping away from the crystal to look the other man in the eye. “There are many applications for them in the literature. They were used to preserve food, to keep people from dying until they could be healed and, very often, to create boobytraps. With what we know of von Nighburg I can’t imagine he spent the time and effort to make one of these with no purpose. You know him better than I. Why do you think that was?”

Warwick wordlessly reached into a different pouch, pulled out a new candle and offered it to him. Johan took it and opened up his lightbox, removed the sunstone and replaced it with the candle. Once he had it in place he held it up to the sheriff and said, “Is there a correct way to light this or can I just use a match?”

“The trick isn’t in lighting them it’s in putting them out,” Warwick said. He struck a match and lit the candle for Johan. “I’ll show you how to do that later, for now just try not to breath too deeply. The smoke’s not toxic but if you don’t have the tolerance eventually it will make you see things that just aren’t there.”

“This shouldn’t take more than five minutes.”

“Then you shouldn’t see any side effects if the candle burns steady. Just remember they burn faster the more you draw on their magic and when I was scrying the crystal they burned pretty fast indeed. That won’t just burn through the candle faster, it will strain your mind in the same way.”

The Fairchild siblings approached as Johan adjusted his lighbox. “Good morning, Mr. van der Klein,” the young lady said, her voice sounding unusually scratchy that morning. “Can we assist you?”

Johan spared them a glance as he checked the box’s alignment by feel. After meeting Roy’s friends on the train he’d taken some time to probe the extent of their abilities and experience. Not a great sacrifice given they were stuck on a train. Still, he’d guessed from the look and feel of them that they couldn’t help meddling in Roy’s affairs so he figured he’d best have a good read on them and it seemed his intuition was correct. “I appreciate the offer but I don’t believe so. Both my own magic tradition and the Teutonic school that the moon prism comes from specialize in the manipulation of light. I don’t believe either of your areas of expertise will contribute to that. A river seer would be even better than this candle but I’m afraid we don’t have any of them handy.”

Brandon gently took his sister by the arm. “As I said, Cassie. Besides, you’ve been pushing yourself very hard the last few days and I’m worried about your voice. Take a few minutes to rest.”

He led her several paces away and coaxed her into sitting on a bench outside one of the town’s saloons. Honestly, Johan was glad to see it. It was true that neither one of them had magic that would directly contribute but there were always precautions they could help with. But, if the name was anything to go by, a stone singer relied heavily on their voice and hers sounded markedly strained at the moment. He’d rather not push them if he didn’t have to.

There was also the nature of the magic at hand. On a fundamental level all magic was the combination of a source of power with a vessel to give that power a purpose. That said, regardless of the tradition it was founded in, almost all understandings of magical forces mixed those two concepts. In the druidic tradition fire, water, earth and air formed the basic elements of magic. Of these, fire and air were the forces and water and earth the vessels.

However fire had both a form, in flame, and an energy, in heat. Likewise with air, which was always in motion yet also tangible in the form of wind. The Teutonic tradition spoke of thought as the power and pattern as the vessel but both things were said to reside the mind. All aspects of Teutonic magic thus must be contained by a single vessel. For the Sons of Harmon it was a bit different.

Rembrandt’s magic came from the contrast between light and darkness, with light as the power and the darkness around its edges the vessel that gives it meaning. Most practitioners considered them the purest forms of power and vessel in existence. It was a very different kind of magic, built as much on contrast and negative space as powers and vessels. In the centuries since the First Son’s death many of his followers had tried to integrate other traditions into their own methods with little success. The few successes that did exist all revolved around traditions that had some kind of light source among their paraphernalia. Avery Warwick’s magic candles, for example.

To Johan’s delight, it worked. As he adjusted the lightbox’s mirrors to focus the candle’s light on the larger perimeter mirrors he felt a subtle shift in the way the magic normally felt but no actual rejection like the treatises mentioned when they discussed failed experiments. The perimeter mirrors split the light to form an almost solid ring around the moon prism. The world outside the ring was cast in harsh, impenetrable shadows that turned Tanner and the other townsfolk watching them work into vague silhouettes. Only the sheriff and the Fairchilds were inside the ring and visible.

Cassandra’s mouth opened slightly in wordless amazement. Her brother lifted a hand to shield his eyes from the harsh glare but Warwick nodded in grudging admiration. “Not bad,” he said. “But the candle won’t put out that kind of power for long. You have a minute, maybe more, so make it fast.”

“Hold this, please, Mr. Fairchild.” He put the lightbox in the druid’s hands, gently pressing up on his elbow to keep the box perfectly positioned. Then he reached down to the perimeter mirrors and began to add the last few lines in was on the glass to finish the spell he had in mind.

From its position in the graveyard Jonathan Riker’s statue was in the perfect position to see everything as it happened. At the north end of the cove a flying skiff came into view. A minute later a harsh light glinted off the windows of the houses down by the docks, as if late morning had suddenly transformed to high noon. Something glinted at the top of the lighthouse.

And rising high and distant over the cove, barely audible over the rolling waves, came distant echoes of wild laughter.

Avery watched in amazement as the light suffused the crystal, causing it to almost entirely fade from view. There was still nothing to see inside but Hank. “Looks clear to me. How do you plan to check for poison or the like?”

“Trying a few things,” van der Klein said, scribbling on his mirror and erasing the scribbles a few seconds later. “Let me know if the light changes colors. That means the scrying has discovered a poison or spell at work.”

The sheriff snorted and started counting in his mind. At the rate things were going they were definitely going to need at least one more candle to get through this. He took it out from the pouch on his belt and handed it to Brandon. “No changes so far.”

“That’s poisons and diseases done,” van der Klein said, dusting his hands off and getting up to carefully switch the old, burned out candle for the new one. Fifteen seconds later he finished making his marks with no changes in the color of light from the prism. “No enchantments at work in there either. No point taking the whole thing down and starting over.”

“You’re going to break the prism now?” Avery asked, watching the mirror man carefully scribbling things on his glass.

“Melting might be a better way to put it.” Van der Klein moved around the mirrors in the circle and started to draw on them. “The boy may be a bit disoriented once the prism melts. Miss Fairchild, would you be so kind as to help him if he needs it?”

As the Son of Harmon finished his work all the hair on Avery’s head suddenly stood on end. “Wait.” Suddenly it occurred to him that there was something he hadn’t tried. He scrambled in the paraphernalia in the pouches of his belt, dragging out a thistledown candle. “Wait a moment, Mr. Van der Klein.”

He froze, one hand still on the top of his mirror. “What do you mean? It’s already melting.”

Avery’s stomach did a flipflop, anxiety inexplicably squeezing him like a vice. He jammed the candle into his candle holder with fast, jerky motions. “Something’s wrong here.” Brandon and van der Klein were both staring at him in bafflement and for a brief moment Avery doubted himself. Then he met Cassandra’s eyes and saw they were wild and fearful. “What do you hear, stone singer?”

“Laughing,” she whispered. “A song like laughter – no, like everything was taken away until all that was left laughter or extinction.”

The candle snapped to life with a sputtering flare and Avery centered himself on the flame, intending to probe Hank’s mind. But as soon as he touched the magic there a surge of malicious glee hit his mind so hard he dropped the candle holder.

“Sheriff?” Brandon asked.

For a moment, as Avery collected himself, he saw everything around him with perfect clarity. He saw the moon prism vanish – not melt, just cease to exist. He felt the magic of his two candles meld together, pulling thoughts out of the air and forcing them to reveal themselves to the human eye. He saw dozens of mouths full of rows and rows of blunt, horselike teeth gaping wide in gruesome grins. He saw Hank’s head snap up as he came free of the prism.

Saw the boy’s lips peel back in an ugly grin. Then watched his mouth open wider and wider, his jaw stretching then tearing itself apart with a wet crack. Peel after peel of malevolent laughter filled the square.

Weekly writing vlog is out! Not much to report this week but things are grinding forward.

Previous Chapter

As full night fell on Riker’s Cove something subtle shifted in the waters of the Cove. To the discerning eye it might have looked like the moon was slowly growing closer and closer to the surface of the water as the light it reflected there grow brighter and covered more and more of the waves. A discerning eye was necessary because the moon above did not change from its normal route through the heavens.

Yet as the lesser light reached it’s zenith the rays that shone from the water seemed to catch in the reflectors of the lighthouse, glancing off the surface meant to direct the beacon within out to sea. The reflector turned slowly away from the waves and towards the Cove. No human hands moved it yet move it did. In the market square above the docks, where the fishermen sold the day’s catch, the beam of unearthly light focused to a point.

A few minutes later the light faded and the lighthouse reflector turned back out to sea leaving a five foot tall crystal pillar behind.

In his time working with Books, sorting out lost shipments, tracking down pirates and quietly exterminating foreign blood cults, Roy had worked with a lot of aluminum skiffs. The principles were simple. Heat a sheet of aluminum up until it floated then used tin to propel yourself and there you go. A flying platform to take you over land and sea.

He hadn’t realized how hard it was to find one of the things on short notice, usually Books handled that part of things. It took him the better part of the two days preparatory time they had – not to mention a great deal of his personal silver – to locate a skiff he could buy. Not rent, buy. Some pretty clever banking was necessary to get the money ready to actually make the purchase. Hopefully he’d be able to liquidate the thing later.

In the meantime he had his ride back in to Riker’s Cove and hopefully up to the lighthouse. Flight metal was difficult to refine and its use in transportation quite novel. Roy hoped that novelty would translate to a blindspot for both the sheriff and von Nighburg.

It turned out Johan wasn’t quite ready for it either. Once they got the thing off the ground he took one look over the side, moved to the center of the eight foot by fifteen foot skiff, sat down and refused to move. “If I wanted to fall to my death,” he said, “I could’ve done it at home.”

“I’ve been to Leondale,” Roy said with a smirk. “It’s flatter than flapjacks.”

“Falling off a roof will do the trick nicely.”

“There is no trick to dying,” Proud Elk said. “It happens every day and will happen to us all soon enough. Now flying? That is something special.” The Sanna man leaned against the back wall of the skiff, a smile on his face as he stared up at the sky. He hadn’t wound up steering the skiff but he didn’t seem upset at that.

Roy envied him a bit. He had to spend most of his time looking down for landmarks to ensure they actually reached their destination. Flying a skiff was much different from riding in one. But he’d done his fair share of both whereas this was Proud Elk’s first flight so Roy couldn’t really hold his friend’s wonder against him. Flying really was magic in its truest sense.

In the interest of approaching the Cove from the direction most conductive to stealth Roy looped out to sea for most of the flight south. He stayed about five feet over the waves, which he’d had impressed on him as the optimal height for stable flight. Too high for most waves, to low for sudden breezes.

Lighthouses weren’t common along the shoreline that far south so when they caught a glimpse of one peeking above the horizon line Roy assumed it was the Cove’s and moved the skiff over land and set it down. The whole trip took less than an hour. As they climbed out and Johan shook feeling back into his limbs he remarked on the brevity of the trip.

“Skytrains are huge and heavy,” Roy said. “They take forever to get going and they aren’t that fast once they do. Our skiff has good top speed and gets up to it faster than a locomotive so of course the trip is faster.”

He got a grip on the fist sized sulfurite crystal built into the skiff’s rudder. First he coaxed all the heat still in the vehicle’s underside back into the sulfurite. Then, once he was sure he’d reclaimed all the loose magic left in the skiff, he pulled the crystal out of its setting and carefully put it in a special carrying pouch in his bag.

“How much fire was lost?” Proud Elk asked.

“About two fifths of what it holds,” Roy said. “We’ll need to restoke it before tonight if we’re taking it up to the lighthouse.”

“Must we?” Johan asked.

“It’s the simplest way to get up there, especially if we don’t want to cross paths with the sheriff.” Roy slung his pack over his shoulder and took stock of their location. Large spurs of rock jutted out into the ocean ahead of them, old ridges of volcanic stone well worn by time and tide. They were sheltered from the elements by the stone ridge to the north and dunes in the other two directions. Only a passing ship was likely to catch sight of them. They’d just have to hope no one headed towards Riker’s Cove thought to report their presence there to Sheriff Warwick. “Guess I should try and whistle up the Fairchilds.”

“How exactly do you intend to do that?”

“Watch and learn, Johan. Watch and learn.” The Henge and Hills was an old Avaloni tune that many knights from their Stone Circle learned, although Roy wasn’t quite sure why. It was kind of a slow tune and not suited for march or drill. It opened high and clear, with a rising set of notes that stopped abruptly before opening out into a wider, deeper melody that carried the weight and purpose of the old country’s chivalric tradition. During the gold drinker hunt Brandon had taught it to him. It was the traditional tune used to signal your location to Fairchild stone singers and, while he wasn’t entirely on key, Roy managed to whistle the first six or seven bars correctly nine times out of ten. After hiking up to the edge of the hill, at a place where the dunes still hid him from sight, he repeated them twice then settled in to wait.

The other two collected their things from the skiff and came to join him. Proud Elk had found a dousing rod and collected samples of the local flora in Loewenburg but he’d also drawn several samples from the local water table which he carried with him in a series of flasks. The Sanna divining traditions he drew on were exotic but, in Roy’s experience, not very offensive in nature. Roy hoped the man hadn’t gathered all that for nothing.

Johan had a backpack full of dinner plate sized bundles wrapped in heavy cotton cloth that he’d kept a death grip on during the flight out. The magic system devised by Rembrant, son of Harmon, relied on mirrors to direct and amplify light, the aspect of fire the hardest to transform into practical magic. Roy wondered if he’d had something in mind when grabbing them or if he’d just wanted to hedge his bets. Either way, he hoped van der Klein hadn’t laid out too much of his own money. Von Nighburg’s bounty probably wasn’t even going to cover the expenses they were incurring on this part of the job, to say nothing of transportation costs. Unlike Books or Roy himself, Johan wasn’t in a position to spend money freely.

If he was worrying about his finances Johan didn’t show it when he sat his bag down next to Roy and joined him in peering over the top of the dunes. All he said was, “This wasn’t what I thought you meant by whistling them up.”

“What else did you think I meant?”

“I presumed you had a signal prearranged with them.”

“You presumed correctly.”

They hadn’t waited more than ten minutes when the sound of hoofbeats built over the dunes. Roy frowned. He had expected the Fairchilds to make a more discreet approach. Roy got to his feet and peeked over the top of the hill to spot a short, rather portly man approaching on a horse. He reached down for his sword, an old falcata he’d carried in his younger days before Books had imported his Alexopolous made blade. He’d broken that masterpiece a few months ago. In fact, now that he thought about it, he’d gone through a lot of swords in the last four months or so.

The many grisly fates of his cutlery weren’t germane at the moment, however. What was important was the man coming over the dunes and, from what he could see, that man had the look of a sailor rather than a townie. He was wearing a light blue vest, canvas pants and a battered cotton shirt with no collar. There was no weapon at his side or strapped to his saddle. Roy got to his feet and raised a hand in greeting. The rider pulled up about ten feet away and said, “Hello there! Any one of you go by the name Roy Harper?”

“That’s me.”

“Chester Tanner.” He touched his battered sock cap as if he was tipping a hat although his own headgear wasn’t suited to the motion. “Miss Fairchild asks you join her down in the square by the docks.”

“Is that a fact?” This wasn’t nearly what he’d expected as a result of his signal but perhaps the sheriff had left town or something over the last couple of days. He turned to the other two. “You heard the man, let’s get going.”

Unfortunately Tanner hadn’t brought horses for all of them so they were forced to walk briskly as the local man kept his horse at a very restrained trot next to them. At that pace it took them less than fifteen minutes to make the trip down to the docks. To Roy’s surprise they found both Fairchilds and Sheriff Warwick there. To his even greater surprise, they found them walking around an eight foot tall crystal pillar that looked like it contained a boy of about ten years old.

Roy tilted his hat back and stared at the surreal thing. “What is this?”

“The penalty for our good deeds,” Warwick said, his hands on his hips as he stared at the crystal. A set of eight burnt out candles were laid around the crystal in a circle, the smoke from their burning still ringing the unsettling monolith.

As far as Roy knew a magic candle didn’t burn any different from a normal one. Whatever Warwick and the others had been doing here they’d been at it for hours and hadn’t found a solution. There wasn’t anything for it. Roy took the direct approach and walked up beside the sheriff, folded his arms and stared at the crystal, saying, “What good deed have you done recently?”

“Agreed to save some children.” Warwick hooked a thumb at the Fairchilds, who were a quarter way round the crystal and also studying it with incredible intensity. “Those two found one of von Nighburg’s hostage kids in town and freed him. I met your friends when they returned the boy to his parents and they talked me into working with them – and you lot – to save the others. That was last night.”

Roy nodded. “And this morning the town woke up and discovered how he responded.”

The sheriff turned and spat on the ground. “Dust and ashes, that blackguard gets worse every coalstoking day. The day we drown him in the stormwracked bay can’t come soon enough.”

The torrent of sacrilege took Roy by surprise. The sheriff had never struck him as the type to speak so coarsely, especially in public, but maybe he felt von Nighburg had escalated. A mistake on his part. After crossing paths with several groups of black magicians Roy had largely written the hostages off as dead already. He’d have to try and keep the sheriff on track. “Looks like you’ve already taken a good, long look at it. Have you been able to figure out what Nighburg did here?”

“I’m stumped,” Warwick admitted. “Whatever he’s done it’s not rooted in the earth or its fruits, no matter what the thing itself looks like. Your friends have been humming at it but don’t have anything either.”

“I wouldn’t underestimate that humming, sheriff,” Roy said, tapping on the crystal with his knuckles. “That lady’s voice is something else.”

In spite of Warwick’s insistence that the crystal wasn’t earth or stone it felt like any other piece of quartz Roy had touched in his life. Admittedly he didn’t often handle such things but it was also unavoidable in his life of work. He’d chosen to leave his wendigo bone necklace in his armory at home since he wasn’t sure how such a thing might interact with whatever strange pacts von Nighburg wielded but he still knew magical ice when he saw it. That wasn’t what this was either. There was no voice to the crystal so if there was an element of fire to the thing it was very, very small or similar to the sheriff’s candles and its magic kept the flame silent. His intuition told him there was just no fire.

Light glinted off the crystal next to his hand as he ran it along the crystal facets. Glancing behind him he saw Johan setting up and one of the spare mirrors he’d brought along on the ground. “Sheriff,” Roy said, “this is Johan van der Klein, the Son of Harmon I told you about.”

Avery turned away from the crystal and walked over to van der Klein. The two men shook hands as the sheriff said, “Mr. Harper speaks very highly of your abilities, sir. Do you think you can help us with our problem here?”

“Depends.” Johan manipulated the pieces of his lightbox, the reflective inner panes of glass pivoting and sliding on hidden hinges and poles made of silver, the metal animated by the magic stored within. The six sides of the box split and folded into a formation halfway between a flower and the mirrored sides of a lantern. In the middle was a sunstone.

No one outside the Sons was quite sure how Rembrandt Harmonson transformed sulfurite into sunstone, the process was one of the order’s greatest secrets. But the change in the stones afterwards was unmistakable. Where the average piece of fully stoked sulfurite burned with a dull, rich, red-orange light a sunstone shone with a clear, pale yellow glow. Unless the person wielding the stone put it to work.

Johan adjusted his lightbox a fraction of a degree then it unleashed a vibrant, clearly visible bar of light at the crystal, which caught that light and refracted it in a dizzying spray of colors. Roy and the others around the crystal flinched at the display but van der Klein ignored it entirely. Instead he studied the pillar in his mirror. After about fifteen seconds the mirrors of his lightbox shifted slightly, then shifted again after another thirty seconds. Then the light faded and the box closed.

“It’s a moon prism,” Johan said, tilting the mirror on the ground so that the crystal and only the crystal filled the pane.

“You’ve seen one of these before?” The sheriff asked.

“Not directly but they’re very common in the literature and some of the principles in them were inverted when the First Son invented sunstones.” Johan handed Tanner, Brandon and Roy mirrors. “Place those at the other compass points, please.”

Warwick peered over Johan’s shoulder as Roy and the others moved off to their positions. He heard the sheriff’s questioning continue as he worked to position the mirror he’d been entrusted with as van der Klein had.

“Is Hank okay in this moon prism of yours?”

“Hard to say without knowing how von Nighburg constructed it,” Johan replied. “Most of the references to them outside our own order come from very early Teutonic wizardry, stuff they discovered in even older records from the Forever War. Nothing I’ve seen of them says going in one would be dangerous. But there’s no saying your Hank was in good health when von Nighburg put him in it, either.”

“Fair. Is he gonna get hurt if you tinker with it now?”

“There’s several methods I could try to dissolve the crystal and they should all be perfectly safe, save for the last one. Which is why it will be last.”

“Should?” Tanner perked up. “How should are we talking here?”

“If the boy was healthy going in he should be healthy coming out,” Johan said, carefully drawing a series of precise marks on the glass of his mirror with waxy white chalk. “Save the last one methodology where there’s a chance we could set ourselves on fire. Roy, you’ll be our insurance against that if it comes to it.”

Roy got up from his mirror dusting his hands off. “That’s not how it works, Johan. If you start burning I can move the flames off somewhere else but you have to be burning before I can do it.”

“Well let’s not try that one, then,” Tanner said, folding his arms over his stomach. “If my sister’s boy burns to death on my watch she’s liable to send me him. He’s alive now, isn’t he?”

“Not necessarily. A moon prism holds the things inside it in stasis, so there’s a lot of things that could be wrong with him right now that we cannot even see. For example, the air frozen in there could be full of poison gas, like you’d find in a mine.” Johan moved to the next mirror in the circle and started marking it up, too. “In the hands of a malicious person there are any number of ways you can make an empty looking prism incredibly dangerous.”

“That’s a nasty bit of magic,” Roy muttered, looking at the crystal again. From Warwick’s testimony von Nighburg was exactly the kind of man to bait a boobytrap with a kidnapped child.

“It’s worse.” Johan looked up from his work on the mirror. “Remember why we came back here today instead of yesterday? It’s a moon prism.”

Avery spat again. “Dust and ashes, Low Noon’s comin’.”

Roy sucked in a breath. “I don’t suppose an eclipse will make the kind of magic you use to manufacture a moon prism weaker, will it?”

“Unfortunately, it does just the opposite.”

Weekly update is almost weekly.

A brief update on my publishing fortunes and talk about other projects!

This week’s vlog brings you an update on Memorial Day productivity and a hint at where I’m going next. Bonus content: A bit of process. Give it a look here:

This week’s vlog is pretty short, because editing. Full details below:

A quick update on my two major projects for this week in my latest writing vlog.

Previous Chapter

Roy watched as Avery snuffed out the candle, licked his fingers and pinched the wick between them. “Can I ask you something you may find inappropriate?”

Avery set the candle on his desk in the Cove’s lockup. “What’s that?”

“What’s the candle’s magic?”

The sheriff gave him a quizzical look. “What makes you think it’s a magic candle?”

“Well for starters, it’s not even dusk yet but you’re walking around with it lit.” Roy leaned against the wall and folded his arms. “The obvious reason for that is because you’re working some kind of druid tricks with it. I can’t be the first person to notice how many of the old knights had ‘wick’ in their names and there’s a strong tie between those names and people who work magic via candles. But the first clue was how quiet it was.”

“Quiet?” Avery settled into his chair and put his boots up on the desk. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m a dolmen burner, sheriff. Druids called us fireminds but it’s essentially the same thing. One of our gifts? We can hear even the smallest flames whispering the secrets of Primeval Fire.” Roy pointed at the candle. “That is the first thing I’ve heard burn in silence in the last ten years. It’s gotta be magic.”

“A firemind…” Avery drummed his fingers on his arm for a moment. “That does explain a few things.”

“Want to share any of them?”

“No.” The sheriff unbuckled his sword belt and leaned the weapon against the desk. The working space was incredibly clean. At least it wasn’t cluttered with correspondence, wanted posters, souvenirs that hadn’t found a home yet, half used bottles of ink and loose papers. In other words, it wasn’t like Roy’s desk.

That didn’t mean there were no similarities between their desks. Avery reached down to the bottom drawer of the desk, opened it and pulled out a roll of papers which Roy instantly recognized as wanted posters from the local Storm Watch outpost. “What do you know about Nighburg?”

“Just the basic details the Watchers have on hand. He’s dangerous, wanted dead or alive and likely to use powerful magic gained through pacts with various otherworldly forces.” Roy pushed off the wall and approached as close as he could. Rested his arms on the bronze bars between the two, careful to avoid the iron bits. Waved a hand to encompass everything outside his cell. “He shouldn’t be out on that side of things. Want to explain why I’m locked up rather than out there working to get Nighburg in here?”

Avery found a specific poster in his roll and pulled it out. It showed a grim faced man of late middle age with bushy hair, eyebrows and beard that Roy recognized as his quarry. “Eight hundred silver marks dead or alive. A little less than the typical Roy Harper bounty these days, isn’t it? Stories say you got fifteen hundred when you brought in the Blue Mountain Bandits.”

“They were a three man team and I worked with the Packards to do it,” Roy said. “Besides, that’s not the reason why I’m here.”

“The bounty? You’re a firespinner, Harper, you only do this for money. You got a side contract on this guy?”

“In a manner of speaking.” Roy hooked a thumb at the bars of his jail cell. “Seriously, Warwick, what’s this about? Right now it looks like you have a side contract with Nighburh. I can’t imagine a Knight of the Stone Circle, sworn to seek truth, defend the innocent and destroy evil, just signed on with a wanted murder and black magician. What’s going on here?”

“You fought for Columbia and Vulcanus during the war, Harper,” Avery said, heat tinging his voice. “Don’t pretend you understand the first thing about the way the Stone Circle works.”

Roy turned away from the cell door and paced around it once in frustration. His stint in the Regulars during the war was no secret. With all the bad blood the Lakeshire war had engendered between the Provincials and the rest of Columbia this wasn’t even the first time it had been thrown in his face that month. All a part of having a name out in the Western Counties these days. But so far the seven or eight actual Knights of Morainhenge that he’d met had been fair minded and reasonable people, grudges not withstanding. You weren’t let through the Trials and squired if you couldn’t keep personal motives in check to Knightly duties. Perhaps there was an angle he could try there.

Roy completed his trip around the plain, wooden walls of his eight by eight cell and addressed Avery again. “You brought me here on false pretenses,” he said. “Made it sound like you wanted to discuss my bounty then, once you had the home field advantage, you tell me I’m under arrest and make me give up my weapons. I may never have been squired but I know truth is a druid’s first responsibility. It doesn’t feel like you’re upholding it.”

Avery had pulled more things out of his desk while Roy was pacing. A half a dozen candle stubs now sat in front of him. The wanted posters had been pushed to one side of the desk and Avery was carefully clipping the charred ends of the wicks with a pair of scissors. “Not an ideal solution, I admit, but not a lie. I do want to discuss your bounty with you, after all.”

“I thought it was because you wanted to help bring the man in.”

Avery trimmed the final candle stub and put the scissors away. “Understandable but incorrect.” The sheriff leaned back in his chair and gave Roy a searching look. “Do you know all five tenants of Avaloni Chivalry?”

The direction of that question was promising but Roy hoped didn’t have to answer it perfectly. “All my knowledge on the topic is hearsay, you know.” Avery spread his hands in a nonplussed manner. “Just something to keep in mind. As I recall, they were, ‘Seek the truth, defend the innocent, destroy evil and strive ceaselessly after those goals.’”

Roy paused then counted them on his fingers. “Although that’s only four things so I guess that’s not all of them.”

“You’re close, although ‘strive ceaselessly’ is an old way of saying the last one. When I was initiated we were sworn to seek truth, defend innocence, uphold good, destroy evil and pursue the unattainable from first to last.” As he spoke Avery moved his candles until five of them lined the desk in front of him. “The last bit, ‘from first to last,’ means the five tenants are hierarchical. Seeking truth is the most important, pursuing the unattainable the least.”

“Fair enough,” Roy mused. “You can’t defend the innocent until you know who the innocent are. The same is true of good and evil.”

Avery touched the fourth candle in the row. “You’ll notice that the admonition to destroy evil is the final of the four concrete commandments. The last is more a reminder that the goals are never truly reached and you should always work to get a little closer to them, so in order of importance retribution against the wicked is last.”

Roy leaned on the bars of his cell again. “Of course. Those who would destroy evil at the expense of truth, innocence and good will just replace the evils they sought to expel.”

“I’m glad to see you understand.” Avery took the five candle stubs, arranged them in a circle on his desk and added a sixth. Then he struck a match and lit them. As the smoke rose into the air and formed a ring between Roy’s cell and the front wall of the jail. The sheriff said, “These are candles of revealing. Properly used they can pierce many veils and show things normally hidden.”

As promised, as the smoke settled in shape Roy was able to look through the ring and out into the town beyond the wall. He saw the bright adobe walls of the town’s buildings, the bustling docks and white sails on the waters of the Cove. Beyond them, on a rocky promontory that was thrust out into the water, was a weathered but proud lighthouse.

At least, the bottom three quarters of the building looked like a lighthouse. The remaining portion ballooned outwards in a bizarre collection of rooms, stairways and protruding brass devices including a telescope and lightning rod. None of them had walls along the outside. It looked almost as if someone had peeled the outer walls of a castle tower like an orange and stuck the resulting structure on top of the lighthouse. It sat firmly there in defiance of architecture, gravity and logic. The whole surreal thing wavered like some kind of fog or haze surrounded it. Roy was certain he hadn’t seen anything like that when he looked out at the cove on his way into town.

“That explains the bit about consorting with otherworldly forces,” Roy muttered.

“Is it safe to say that you weren’t aware that von Nighburg has fortified his position by setting it outside our world?” Avery asked.

Roy sat down heavily on the bench in his cell. “No, can’t say I was. Surly he has to leave at some point, though, at least to get something to eat.”

“At first he had a servant that went out and bought most of what he needed like food and firewood, so he didn’t have to leave that place at all. I’m not sure how he got in the lighthouse in the first place or connected it to wherever that place is without anyone noticing but he’s there now and he’s only left on two occasions that I know of. Or at least can guess.” The sheriff blew out the candles and dispersed the viewing ring then licked his fingers and began pinching out the wicks. “I didn’t even know he’d come to town until the first bounty hunter arrived on the sky train.”

Roy surmised he wasn’t the first firespinner to come after Nighburg. “How did that hunter track Nighburg if he’d hidden himself so well?”

“Nighburg’s servant was a runaway girl from the mines up in Winchester County. That hunter was following reports of von Nighburg, extrapolated his path across the West and came here. He recognized the girl from the reports and set about locating where exactly von Nighburg was staying. Once he worked it out he approached the town sheriff.” Avery pulled a tin star half melted into slag out of the top drawer on his desk. “This was before I was sheriff. My illustrius predecessor died trying to breach the lighthouse and I was promoted from deputy to sheriff after his failure. Once it was clear we knew he was there, von Nighburg revealed himself, warned us not to irritate him again and blighted the cove, killing every living thing in its waters. We smelled rotting fish for almost a month.”

“What happened to the serving girl? If he relies on her for supplies you could arrest her and flush him out.”

“She stopped coming into town after that. You can probably guess what that means.”

Roy grimaced. Black magic was a catch all term for any kind of magic that involved taking a human life and Nighburg was wanted on over a dozen counts and that was just the ones authorities knew of. So what if he added another just to blight the waters of a small cove in the southwest? “I suppose that would be enough to discourage further attempts to meddle with him.”

“Maybe, although I suspect you’d keep trying and I wasn’t any different.” Avery folded his arms over his chest, the turn of his brow more regretful than accusatory. “I did some research. Recruited a new deputy and a couple of firespinners from the county over. That went even worse than before.”

“Really? You came out of it better off than the last sheriff.”

“Technically I came out the same as last time – I was the only survivor. Von Nighburg collapsed the town’s biggest pier and abducted three kids from their families in retaliation.” Avery shook his head ruefully. “Now those kids do his errands and the town keeps interlopers out.”

Roy was quiet for a long moment, weighing the sheriff’s words. No matter how he examined them the same message came through. Avery Warwick had an obligation to the town and its children and that meant the sheriff wouldn’t let Roy do his job. “So what are my choices, sheriff?”

“You can leave town on the skytrain of your choice. I’ll walk you to the landing and return all your weapons there, no hard feelings. Or you can stay where you are.” Avery shrugged. “Either one is fine with me.”

“Is that so.” Roy mulled it over, considering his options and his own obligations. “Well, I don’t blame you for your choice, sheriff, it’s a mighty hard place to find yourself. The regular L&K train stops here in a day and half, doesn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

“I suppose we’ll just have to be good friends until then.” Roy fished a small, leather bound book out of his jacket pocket. “Now do you have any paper and ink? I have a little writing to do in the mean time.”

Brief update in this week’s vlog. Spare a couple of minutes if you’re interested!