The End of Magic - Chapter 22
Apr. 27th, 2022 08:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desastristaThe End of Magic is an original multichaptered fantasy work that I am currently publishing on both AO3 and Dreamwidth. You can find the master post of all chapters here or just click the "end of magic" tag. (AO3 link here)
The room they had put him in was dark and small. Ahmad had tried pushing and kicking against the door, but it did not budge. He thought he could hear guards outside, and he shouted at them first in Kadehirden and then, when he grew tired of that, swore at them freely in his mother tongue until he tired of that too.
He could not see anything here. It was not just the dark (although it was very dark). It was the walls too. Ahmad recognized the material, or at least its effect. It was the same stone that Ozal had said the Stand used in the Nursery -- the one that blocked magic. For the first time in a very long time, Ahmad could not see any magic around him.
The guards had walked him far below the trees. There had been so much magic in that place that it had been almost blinding. The first time he had set foot in Kadehir he had been amazed at how much magic its soil could hold, and yet even that was nothing compared to the tunnel they had walked him down.
And in the middle of such a wondrous space these Kadehirdens had built a horrible box that cut off magic completely and that was where they had put him.
It was terrible. It did not make any sense. Of course, the same could be said of many things that he had already seen in Kadehir, but this was particularly maddening. And worse still was that this time Mahir was not here to explain. Or at least try to explain.
The thought of Mahir cut deep across his chest and stole his breath. Where was he? Was he alright?
Ahmad kicked the door again. It did not budge. It just made his foot hurt.
He turned away from the door and raked his fingers through his beard. He had to find Mahir. He had to get out of here. He had no idea how he was going to get out of here. It felt so strange to be completely without magic. He’d been able to see it as a child, before he knew anyone else could see it, before he even knew what it was called. There was not much magic in the lands his tribe travelled, but there had always been something. This cage was monstrous. He was going to go mad in here.
And then came the sound of the door’s hinges creaking opening. Ahmad turned on his heels but the moment he saw light peaking through the door – the moment he felt the damp touch of Kadehir’s magic – he also felt the cold touch of metal against his throat.
“Don’t try anything,” the guard warned.
Ahmad weighed his options. The man took a step closer and the blade pressed a little more firmly against his throat.
A minute went by and neither of them moved. Then the guard made a gesture and Ahmad knew he was supposed to follow. “He wants to see you.”
Two more guards waited for him in the hallway with their swords drawn, and they followed Ahmad closely as the first man directed him down the tunnel. It was a cramped space to fit four; whatever this place was, it did not look like it had been designed to fit more than one person at a time. The ground closed in tightly around them. A few torches on the wall provided only a little light, although Ahmad could still make out the faint light of the roots of the trees in the direction from which they had arrived. But these were all minor details, compared to the one inescapable fact about this tunnel: it was alive with more magic than Ahmad had thought possible. The walls themselves seemed to radiate with it. Ahmad found it difficult to concentrate. If he could just reach out and grab a little, before the guards could notice –
“Stop,” the guard barked. “We’re here.”
He opened a door that Ahmad had been too distracted to notice and shoved him roughly inside. Ahmad was still trying to get his footing when he heard the door slam behind him. When he finally looked up, he was greeted by a room bathed in a faint white light. An old man sat on a jutting of rocks against the wall and smiled at him.
All Ahmad’s half-formed thoughts of escape vanished.
“It’s you,” he said instead, the words coming out of his mouth as sharp as an oath.
The stench of rot filled the air.
“People are usually on their best behavior when meeting the Sheikh of Magicians.” The man laughed, “But you are a foreigner. Perhaps you can be forgiven for not knowing this.”
Ahmad frowned. “I know you. You are the Master of the Nursery.”
It had to be the same man. Ahmad recognized that rotten magic, just like he’d recognized it from all those years ago. Could they be the same man? Surely Mahir would have said something if he had been talking to the Sheikh of Magicians that day.
The man let out a croak of laughter. Ahmad instinctively took a half step back. Then the man lifted his hand in front of his face. As Ahmad watched, the man’s eyes moved, his nose widened, his cheeks thinned – and he became a completely different man. Then he lifted his hand again, and his face returned to how it had been. Ahmad stepped back again until his back was at the door. Whatever spell that man had used, Ahmad had never seen anything like it before. And he never wanted to see it again.
“You know, the state of magic has deteriorated so much that the Stand now believes face-changing is only a story for children. Can you believe it?” The man scoffed. “So many times I’ve walked down the halls of the Stand with my second face, waiting to see if someone would recognize me or at least recognize the spell. And it has never happened.”
“Why do that?” Ahmad’s tongue seemed to slip on the words. His mouth had gone very dry.
“Perhaps it may seem strange to you, but I needed a new face to be able to walk around the Stand and see the truth for myself, not the truth that men wanted the Sheikh of Magicians to see. That is why I invented the title of the Master of the Nursery. I thought it would be more difficult than it was, actually, to take on a new face. You would be surprised about the questions that people do not ask of an old man who seemed like he could have been there forever.”
The Sheikh’s voice rasped as he spoke. Old. Ahmad repeated the Kadehirden word to himself, let it roll around his mouth. And then he said, “You’re not old.”
The man gave him an approving nod. “Finally, someone who notices. You’re right. I’m almost a hundred and fifty years old. I’m not old. I’m ancient.”
That had to be the source of the rot. A life unnaturally extended. Magic, distorted and misused. Ahmad felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck.
“You’re a quick study,” the man continued. His smile had all the warmth and generosity a wolf would give a cornered rabbit. “Have you worked out how I did it?”
“Magic,” Ahmad answered at once. The man made a dismissive voice. Obvious. “A lot of magic,” he guessed.
“I am not proud of what I did,” The man sighed. “But it was the only way. The amount of magic that it takes –”
Ahmad frowned. The way the man spoke – the amount of magic that it must take to extend a life for so long – surely someone would have noticed a spell of such magnitude.
Then he remembered his first trial at the Stand. The white trees with all their magic stolen, and the men who looked at him with suspicion for saying that anything was amiss.
“You robbed those trees.”
“It’s true,” the man noted with regret, before contorting his mouth into something like a smile. “Perhaps it was mere superstition, but I always did leave the Shadow alone.” He shook his head. “But after a while, even that was not enough.” The man lifted his palm into the air. As Ahmad watched, a tendril of light unwound itself from the wall and nestled in the man’s hand. He closed and opened his hand again, and the light was gone.
“You would not survive outside Kadehir,” Ahmad said, his eyes never leaving the man’s palm. He felt hypnotized.
“It’s getting hard to survive outside this room.” The man made a dismissive noise. “I’m told the Stand complains that the Sheikh of Magicians is so rarely available. But their bickering does not matter to me anymore. I needed to make sure I lived long enough to find someone who could succeed me. Someone who truly understood magic. Someone like you.”
There was a long pause while Ahmad repeated back the words to himself silently. He must have misunderstood. Kadehirden had a lot of nuances that could make it hard to understand. “Someone like me?” he repeated, hopeful he was mistaken.
Unfortunately, the man nodded in agreement. “An unorthodox choice, maybe, but I am running out of options. There were others, in the past, who I thought had potential, but none of them were quite right. The last one, I had such high hopes for -- a kishah, who first discovered his magical abilities when his life was on the line.”
Ahmad forgot his surprise and his lip curled. “You brought Savaner kishah here.” He remembered for the first time the story that Mahir had told about being brought underground. Had Savaner kishah really walked willingly into the place they had dragged Ahmad?
“That was his name, yes.” The man sighed. "I forgot -- you must know him. My men mentioned his name as the one who requested you be arrested. I'd been just waiting for the right opportunity to bring you here."
He spoke as if the arrest had been merely a detour. Ahmad thought of Nadide janum screaming at the guards and how the blood had drained from Mahir's face when he realized the men intended to take him away. Ahmad ground his teeth. “The right opportunity?” he muttered, but the man continued as if he had not spoken.
"I brought Savaner kishah here some years ago and gave him the same test I gave you. He came in here talking about how relaxing it had been in that cell. How meditative. Was that your experience?"
“That cell is an abomination,” Ahmad growled.
The corners of the man’s mouth lifted. "Exactly. When that material was first discovered in Kadehir, it was thought to be cursed. The cell was meant to be a torment. Put a magician in the very heart of Kadehir, the very heart of magic in the world -- and cut him off from it all." The Sheikh’s lips curled. "When I heard those words from the kishah, I knew then that the Stand had already ruined him. I think I waited too long. He already had a Mucevhed by that point. It all comes back to the Mucevheden."
Ahmad bristled. “What does this have to do with Mahir?” It had not been Mahir’s fault that Savaner kishah was an idiot.
“You’re from one of the very furthest provinces, right?” The Sheikh ran a hand through his beard. “You were probably a man grown before you ever met a Mucevhed.”
Ahmad nodded slowly. He did not like this man's tone. He was speaking with barely concealed disgust about the best day of Ahmad's life. Meeting Mahir had been the first time Ahmad had met someone who wasn't afraid of what he could do, someone who could give a name to those abilities and told him about a faraway place where magic was the most ordinary thing in the world --
"I didn't learn magic with a Mucevhed either. The ones who first came from across the ocean -- none of them had a Mucevhed either. I think I was a child when the first Mucevheden were born on Kadehir’s shores.”
Ahmad was not sure he could trust his ears. “You are one of the settlers,” he stuttered. The Kadehirdens always spoke of their settlers with such reverence. Yet here was one still clinging to life, and they had not even noticed.
The man’s nostrils flared. “Not quite. It was my grandparents who came from across the sea,” he corrected. “But I told you that I was old. When I was growing up, Kadehir was still a new land. It had only been mountains before. No one lived there. But they contained an unimaginable amount of magic. And so when the settlers flattened the rocks and made it so people could actually live on such blessed ground, they found that some of Kadehir’s children soaked in more magic than others.”
Ahmad’s eyes widened. “That is why Mucevheden are only born in Kadehir.”
The man nodded, as if it was obvious. It had not been obvious to Ahmad. When Ahmad had first met Mahir, he’d been dazed at the amount of magic that seemed to cling to him like a fog and the jewels that dotted his skin. Mahir had only laughed and said that there were lots of people like him where he came from. He’d never mentioned that there was a time before people like him existed. Ahmad had never suspected. Maybe Mahir didn’t know either.
“In the beginning, Mucevheden were just a curiosity. But a simple experiment changed all that. You see, a lot of children my age were struggling to see magic. It is so hard to notice a thing if you never know its absence. And we’d grown up with so much magic. I myself never saw magic until one day I went swimming too far and thought I might drown. That panic, that terror – it gave me the clarity I needed. It was the same for Savaner kishah. Perhaps that is why I had such hope for him. Did you ever have a moment like that, when you first learned to see magic?”
Ahmad thought back to his childhood. He’d grown up always by his mother’s side, a second wife forever anxious to impress her husband and his first wife who ran the household. Ahmad had gotten very good at noticing things that no one talked about.
“No,” he said. “I just watch people very carefully.”
The man’s lip curled. “You could watch people carefully in Kadehir all your life and still not be able to see magic. The magic in the soil drowns it all out.” Ahmad shrugged; that seemed right, but it was of no concern to him. “But I forget myself,” the man shook his head. “As you can imagine, it was hard to find students in my day. So an alternative was proposed, when I was still a student. Partner up the most promising children with these new Kadehirdens – these Mucevheden. That helped out many children. Having a dedicated source of magic to look for made it easier to call upon magic more consistently.”
“I was only distantly aware of these changes at the time, of course. I didn’t bother myself much with anything regarding magical education in those days. I was a scholar. I was a soldier. I dedicated myself utterly to the study of magic and to the defense of my empire. It was only when I was much older that I started to notice that there was anything amiss. I am sure you have noticed it too in your time here. Men would tell me that it was not possible for them to do magic without a Mucevhed. I realized too late that the Stand had changed right under my nose. It had become filled with men who could cast the flashiest spells but could not see the subtle workings of magic. And there I was. An old man, realizing I could see the end of magic in my lifetime.”
The man’s voice wavered. He spoke as if Ahmad should pity him. Ahmad did not.
“What did you do?” he asked, trying to hide his disdain. He suspected he already knew the answer.
“I needed more time. Time to find someone else, someone else who could ensure magic continued in Kadehir. I had begun to truly despair when that kishah proved to be just as bad as the rest of them. I have already lived too long – I do not have much longer. But then you arrived. Even a well-connected patron could not hide you forever. People began to talk. At first, I did not believe you would be any different. After all, there was that Mucevhed who called you master.”
“Mahir,” Ahmad corrected, but the man appeared not to hear.
“Then for the first time in generations, I saw someone else magic-walking.”
Ahmad gave a start and the man laughed. The sound came out low, raspy. Dying. But still he sounded content. “I am sure you saw me. You thought you were alone.”
With everything that had happened, Ahmad had forgotten what Nadide janum had said when she described magic-walking. There was someone else.
Could this man really not tell the difference between him and Nadide janum? Maybe he never imagined that there could be another magician in Kadehir that the Stand had overlooked. Maybe he had also assumed a woman could never be a magician. Either way, Ahmad thought it would be wiser not to correct him.
“I can tell you that the magic-walking you have done is just the beginning. I may not have as much time left as I wanted, but I can still show you a sampling of how magic used to be. Come here.” The man beckoned to the wall he sat against. Ahmad hesitated for a moment and then walked over. He had come to Kadehir to learn magic, after all.
The man put his hand against the dirt and a tendril of white unfurled itself from the ground. Ahmad fought the urge to stare. It looked familiar – like one of the roots of those white trees. Pure magic, given a form. Unthinkable anywhere the Dubbhazel called home. And yet it seemed almost unremarkable in Kadehir. The man made a gesture with his hand, and the tendril moved in Ahmad’s direction.
“Think of a place you know. Or any place you’ve been. And then grab hold."
Ahmad whispered a prayer to the Sun and the Moon and then reached out his hand.
It felt like his body had been pulled violently forward. He let out an oath in his native tongue. And then he looked down and found out he had been wrong. His body hadn’t been pulled along, he simply no longer had a body. This was horrible. Nadide janum had really chosen to do this to herself? More than once?
There was a sound that could have been a laugh that echoed from everywhere at once. “It is quite something, isn’t it? You’ll get used to it. You’ve chosen to go very far indeed.”
Ahmad cast a look around. It was pitch black around them. The only light came from a faint white mist that surrounded them, which did not do anything to the darkness except make it worse. But Ahmad’s gift had always been in seeing what others could not. He stared long enough that he could start to make out faint pinpricks of light in a sea of darkness. And then he stared longer, until the darkness rearranged itself into familiar shapes. Shapes that he had seen only a few months before.
He was back in Bak Liwahar. A journey of several months, and he’d done it in an instant.
“What devils –,” he started, but the man interrupted.
“It is one of the gifts of Kadehir. Or at least the heart of Kadehir. If you tried magic-walking in this place, you could not do it. There is too little magic in this soil to call upon. It would be like trying to swim in a puddle. But if you are in Kadehir, it can be done.”
“Have you ever wondered why there is so much magic in Kadehir, when so many places have none? Magic flows through all the world, but in most places so faintly as to be all but invisible, even to the most discrening eye. But all that magic pools in one place before it returns back to whence it came. Think of that place as the beating heart of magic in the world. That was what the settlers in Kadehir first realized when they looked across the ocean. That is why they changed the world – they wanted to live atop that beating heart. The possibilities seemed endless. One of them you are seeing now. Take a small bit of magic that flows into Kadehir, see where it wants to return – and you can go anywhere.”
Ahmad’s head felt light. Or it would have, if he had had one. But he’d heard the word he needed. Anywhere. He latched onto that word. And as his thoughts changed, so did the darkness around them. The pinpricks of light vanished. The shadows of the buildings changed and were replaced by the soft curve of a mountain range that extended as far as the eye could see.
“An odd place,” the Sheikh remarked, after a moment. “There is no one here.”
"My tribe passes through these mountains in the summer," Ahmad said. He did not think he even had a tongue or a mouth in this realm, but still he would speak. "You were here too, once."
There was a damningly long pause. "Yes, years ago, around this area...there was some instability in this province at the time. The governor was threatening to rebel. The Imperial Magician at that time was worse than useless. He said Wakamir was too far away for magic to be of any use. As if any place could ever truly be too far from Kadehir. I helped install a new governor, and this province’s loyalty has never waivered since.”
"You sent storms," Ahmad pressed. He had to hear the words for himself. He had to know.
"Oh, storms and much worse." The man sounded so pleased with himself. He still hadn’t realized.
"One of those storms killed my cousin. It almost killed me."
The scenery shifted one last time. Ahmad was in his body again, and the force of the impact made it feel as if his chest had been slammed against the wall. His legs threatened to buckle but he forced them to stand. He would not let the Sheikh out of his sight.
“I did not realize –,” the man stuttered. His voice sounded strangely hoarse. Ahmad cut him off before he attempted to excuse himself further.
“You must know that some people died because of what you did.”
An odd expression passed over the man’s face. It was not sympathy and it was not regret. Instead, it was recognition. For the first time, he was seeing Ahmad as he really was – not merely a magician he could mold into his successor, but Ahmad ji Musayeib ji Bayhas ji Hazzar Dubbhazhel, a man with a mind all of his own.
The Sheikh lipped his licks nervously. “I fear you might be losing sight of the larger picture here. I admit I have made mistakes. But I am offering you an opportunity. As Sheikh of Magicians, I am in charge of the Stand. If I give you that title, there is no limit to what you could do. If you hold a grudge against Savaner kishah, a word from you and you could see him hang. If you want the Stand to change, a word from you and things will be different.”
“You led the Stand for generations and it did not change.”
The Sheikh laughed, a thin, wavering sound that echoed too loudly in the room. “Maybe I have been too cautious. You can be different. You can do things differently from me.”
The man was right. Ahmad could do all that and more.
He thought of the life his cousin might have led, if the man in front of him had not quarreled with some distant governor he had never met. He thought of Mahir and the sadness in his eyes that he thought Ahmad never noticed. Ahmad made up his mind then and there about what he could do with what the Sheikh had taught him.
He reached out a hand to feel the magic of Kadehir again and said, “I do not need your title to do that.”
This time, it did not feel like his body had been dragged behind him – maybe because he knew what to expect this time, or maybe because this time he had not traveled very far at all. He stood in the middle of Kadehir, at the entrance to the Stand, and there was so much light everywhere. It was so different from where he had been only moments ago. But he could not afford to be blinded for long. There was work he needed to do.
He felt but did not see the presence of the Sheikh alongside him. The man was watching him but not trying to stop him. Yet.
A beacon of light walked right past Ahmad. If he focused, he could just make out the features of a man: a Mucevhed, older, with traces of white starting to show under his cap. A fainter light, another man, that Ahmad assumed to be his magician, walked a few paces ahead, paying no heed to either his Mucevhed nor Ahmad. Ahmad looked closer and he could just barely make out what he was looking for – yes, there it was. A faint ribbon of light around the first man’s neck. The collar and its spell. Ahmad concentrated and called upon the spell that he had used against Savaner kishah only a few days ago.
There were a few glorious seconds in which he watched the magic around the collar unravel itself. Then the smell of dirt filled his air. He was back in his body again. The Sheikh of Magicians had dragged him back.
“What are you doing?” The man cried out.
Ahmad reached for the wall again. “You said Mucevheden are the problem. But it is not them.” He returned again to that strange realm and walked until he found another light that shone brighter than the crowd around it. “It is the Stand, those collars, and the magicians who need them. That is the problem. I am fixing it for you.”
“But if you do that, you will take magic away from these magicians! There will be no one left in Kadehir who knows how to command a spell. It will be the end of magic in Kadehir!”
Ahmad felt the tug of the spell trying to return him back, and this time he planted himself more firmly amongst the light of the crowds. “Magic will be fine,” he scoffed. “It is only the Stand that will worry. And even then, only until they remember how to really do magic. That is what you wanted, isn’t it?”
He was not sure how long it took. After all, Kadehir was a large city and – as everyone seemed so fond of telling him – it was home to many magicians. And the Sheikh fought him every step of the way, trying to drag him back to his body, or away from Kadehir, or redoing the enchantments that he undid. But while the Sheikh might know how to command more spells than he did, Ahmad was a young man and the other man was fading. Ahmad could and would outlast him.
Ahmad was pretty sure he had reached everyone in Kadehir when he noticed that the counterspells had stopped. At first, he stopped and waited with suspicion. Was this some last, desperate trick?
Then he felt a tremor below him, and he returned to his body at once.
The sudden weight of his limbs made him lurch. After so long magic-walking, the dim light and stench of the earth almost overwhelmed him. It was a moment before he recovered his senses, and that was when at last he noticed.
The scent of rot was gone from the room.
As Ahmad’s eyes adjusted, he could make out the shape of a man sprawled out before him. The cave gave another lurch and then the body of the man who had until recently been the Sheikh of Magicians fell to the ground.
Ahmad drew in a sharp breath. The man had told him that he did not have much time left. Ahmad hadn’t realized he’d been willing to squander it all to try and stop him.
He took a step towards the body – to do what he did not know – but stopped when he noticed a tendril of magic growing beside the former Sheikh. As Ahmad watched, it grew and divided and divided again. What had started out as a thin, almost ghostly thread of white became a net that covered first the Sheikh, then much of the ground itself. One branch tried to grow around Ahmad’s ankle; he kicked it free only to notice another had grown around his other ankle. He stumbled back until he felt the outline of the door. Before his eyes, the room was growing overrun by this white light. And as they grew, the ground itself shook and split as more and more tendrils emerged.
It took Ahmad a moment to understand exactly what he was seeing. The Sheikh had said he relied on the magic he could access in this room, that he relied on the magic of Kadehir itself. With his death, all that magic was returning back to Kadehir. It was going to devour this room. Who knew where its appetite would stop?
Ahmad hesitated and then ground his teeth. He had to get out of here. But he couldn’t leave just yet. He did not know how long he could stay down here, but he needed more time. He’d traveled up and down Kadehir, but he knew there had to be somewhere he missed. Someone he missed. Taking a deep breath, he said a quiet prayer for the room to hold just a little longer, and then he called on the magic of Kadehir one last time.
He had to find Mahir.
Ahmad searched in vain among the crowds of Kadehir. There were so many people out now. Of course Kadehir had always been crowded, but now it seemed even more so. Had the people taken to the streets? If Ahmad concentrated, he could feel their agitation. Their restlessness. The ground was shaking underneath them, and they had to know why.
Ahmad tried not to pay them too much heed, but he might as well have been a blade of grass trying to ignore the wind. The crowd was walking towards the Stand. Reluctantly, Ahmad moved that way too. And that was when he saw them, off in the distance, peeking above the horizon: the white branches of the trees, grown tall enough that they seemed to rake the clouds. The magic of the trees had returned. For the first time in what must have been generations, the trees were growing. It was a wonderous sight. That kind of growth, unchecked, might wreak havoc. But it was still magnificent to see.
It was only when Ahmad found himself staring at the Stand a little longer that he finally realized his mistake. He’d been so sure he’d checked everywhere in Kadehir. And he had gone everywhere – except he hadn’t bothered to check where he had been. Or more accurately, right above where he had been. He had not walked among the trees.
The magic of Kadehir meant that he had to do little more than think of the spot and there he was. Seven trunks glowed around him. Everything seemed covered in a white fog; it really did feel like all the magic of the world was flowing through him. But within that haze, he was able to make out two points of light. One stood and the other knelt. The one that was kneeling shone much brighter than the other.
“Mahir!” Ahmad called out, even though he doubted the other man could hear him. Once, in the desert, he’d been able to see Mahir from a thousand miles away; now, it was hard to see him from only a few feet away. But Ahmad was not going to lose him again.
He could feel the roots start to shift underneath him. Any minute now, the trees would grow strong enough to tear this courtyard apart. Ahmad tried to call on the magic to settle it, just for a minute. He didn’t need that much time to cast the spell he had come here for. It was the easiest thing in the world for him now, he’d already cast it a hundred times by now –
And that was when Ahmad looked at Mahir, really looked at Mahir for the first time in this strange realm, and saw that the collar he was wearing did not have any spell on it.
Ahmad returned to his body with a smile on his face. He stood there for a long minute with that lopsided grin on his face before dirt began falling on top of his turban and he remembered that he had to run.
It was a confusion of an exit, but Ahmad emerged back to the surface not too far from the trees. As the salt from the sea whipped his nose, Ahmad reflected that he’d never before been so glad for something as simple as breathing.
Once he’d had a moment to catch his breath, he turned back to see what had become of the courtyard. There was not much left to see. Crushed rocks lay scattered where walls had once stood. And towering above the remains of the old world were towers of white, magic made visible. They could not really be called trees anymore. The influx of so much magic so suddenly had twisted them and made them lose their form, but they were so much more vibrant and alive than when he had first laid eyes on them. It was truly a sight to behold.
A crowd had gathered around the former courtyard and from the dark mutterings of the men around him, it seemed not everyone shared in his good spirits. Ahmad did not need to check the color of the men’s turbans to know that most of them were magicians. He wondered if any of them had worked out exactly what had happened. What the Sheikh had done. What Ahmad had done. He doubted it.
But he was not here to worry over the men of the Stand. He started to walk alongside the edge of one of the ruined walls, his eyes roaming over the crowd in search of the one person who did matter to him now.
“Mahir!” Ahmad cried out when he finally spotted him, and his heart leapt to his throat.
Mahir was one of the few people not staring towards the courtyard. Instead, he was hunched over in a quiet, hurried conversation with his companion. It took Ahmad a moment to recognize Nadide, with her fine dress in tatters and dirt smeared across her face and arms. Ahmad frowned. He noticed for the time that Mahir’s skull cap was askew and his hair disshelved.
But that was all he noticed before Mahir ran into his arms. “You’re alive!” Mahir exclaimed with open disbelief. Ahmad could have laughed. But then his mouth found Ahmad’s, and Ahmad was much too stunned to laugh or to do anything at all. After weeks of Mahir shying away from his touch whenever there was the possibility that anyone would see, Mahir was leaning in eagerly to kiss him again in front of what must have been the entire Stand and half the city. It took half a moment for Ahmad’s mind to start working again, and then his arms were around Mahir and he was kissing him like he had been wanting to since they arrived in Kadehir.
“I can’t believe it,” Mahir muttered when he finally stopped to breathe. “When the men took you, I was so afraid, I thought -- where have you been?”
Ahmad tried to come up with words to explain the events that had happened since the Sheikh’s men had forced him underground, either in his native tongue or in Kadehirden. Nothing seemed quite right to describe it. He wrinkled his nose instead. “It is a long story,” he said. And then, on a sudden suspicion, he asked, “Where is Savaner kishah?”
Mahir shared a look with Nadide that said much in a tongue that Ahmad knew he could not hope to understand. “Gone. But it is also a long story,” Nadide finally answered. She gestured towards the ruins of the courtyard. “Do you know what has happened here?”
Ahmad looked again at the rubble. The Sheikh of Magicians had taken much from Kadehir over many years because he had been so afraid of what the Stand would lose if he did not. But in the end it was exactly what he had stolen that had destroyed the Stand.
Ahmad kept one arm drawn tightly around Mahir. “Something overdue,” he shrugged. “Now, let’s go home.”
The room they had put him in was dark and small. Ahmad had tried pushing and kicking against the door, but it did not budge. He thought he could hear guards outside, and he shouted at them first in Kadehirden and then, when he grew tired of that, swore at them freely in his mother tongue until he tired of that too.
He could not see anything here. It was not just the dark (although it was very dark). It was the walls too. Ahmad recognized the material, or at least its effect. It was the same stone that Ozal had said the Stand used in the Nursery -- the one that blocked magic. For the first time in a very long time, Ahmad could not see any magic around him.
The guards had walked him far below the trees. There had been so much magic in that place that it had been almost blinding. The first time he had set foot in Kadehir he had been amazed at how much magic its soil could hold, and yet even that was nothing compared to the tunnel they had walked him down.
And in the middle of such a wondrous space these Kadehirdens had built a horrible box that cut off magic completely and that was where they had put him.
It was terrible. It did not make any sense. Of course, the same could be said of many things that he had already seen in Kadehir, but this was particularly maddening. And worse still was that this time Mahir was not here to explain. Or at least try to explain.
The thought of Mahir cut deep across his chest and stole his breath. Where was he? Was he alright?
Ahmad kicked the door again. It did not budge. It just made his foot hurt.
He turned away from the door and raked his fingers through his beard. He had to find Mahir. He had to get out of here. He had no idea how he was going to get out of here. It felt so strange to be completely without magic. He’d been able to see it as a child, before he knew anyone else could see it, before he even knew what it was called. There was not much magic in the lands his tribe travelled, but there had always been something. This cage was monstrous. He was going to go mad in here.
And then came the sound of the door’s hinges creaking opening. Ahmad turned on his heels but the moment he saw light peaking through the door – the moment he felt the damp touch of Kadehir’s magic – he also felt the cold touch of metal against his throat.
“Don’t try anything,” the guard warned.
Ahmad weighed his options. The man took a step closer and the blade pressed a little more firmly against his throat.
A minute went by and neither of them moved. Then the guard made a gesture and Ahmad knew he was supposed to follow. “He wants to see you.”
Two more guards waited for him in the hallway with their swords drawn, and they followed Ahmad closely as the first man directed him down the tunnel. It was a cramped space to fit four; whatever this place was, it did not look like it had been designed to fit more than one person at a time. The ground closed in tightly around them. A few torches on the wall provided only a little light, although Ahmad could still make out the faint light of the roots of the trees in the direction from which they had arrived. But these were all minor details, compared to the one inescapable fact about this tunnel: it was alive with more magic than Ahmad had thought possible. The walls themselves seemed to radiate with it. Ahmad found it difficult to concentrate. If he could just reach out and grab a little, before the guards could notice –
“Stop,” the guard barked. “We’re here.”
He opened a door that Ahmad had been too distracted to notice and shoved him roughly inside. Ahmad was still trying to get his footing when he heard the door slam behind him. When he finally looked up, he was greeted by a room bathed in a faint white light. An old man sat on a jutting of rocks against the wall and smiled at him.
All Ahmad’s half-formed thoughts of escape vanished.
“It’s you,” he said instead, the words coming out of his mouth as sharp as an oath.
The stench of rot filled the air.
“People are usually on their best behavior when meeting the Sheikh of Magicians.” The man laughed, “But you are a foreigner. Perhaps you can be forgiven for not knowing this.”
Ahmad frowned. “I know you. You are the Master of the Nursery.”
It had to be the same man. Ahmad recognized that rotten magic, just like he’d recognized it from all those years ago. Could they be the same man? Surely Mahir would have said something if he had been talking to the Sheikh of Magicians that day.
The man let out a croak of laughter. Ahmad instinctively took a half step back. Then the man lifted his hand in front of his face. As Ahmad watched, the man’s eyes moved, his nose widened, his cheeks thinned – and he became a completely different man. Then he lifted his hand again, and his face returned to how it had been. Ahmad stepped back again until his back was at the door. Whatever spell that man had used, Ahmad had never seen anything like it before. And he never wanted to see it again.
“You know, the state of magic has deteriorated so much that the Stand now believes face-changing is only a story for children. Can you believe it?” The man scoffed. “So many times I’ve walked down the halls of the Stand with my second face, waiting to see if someone would recognize me or at least recognize the spell. And it has never happened.”
“Why do that?” Ahmad’s tongue seemed to slip on the words. His mouth had gone very dry.
“Perhaps it may seem strange to you, but I needed a new face to be able to walk around the Stand and see the truth for myself, not the truth that men wanted the Sheikh of Magicians to see. That is why I invented the title of the Master of the Nursery. I thought it would be more difficult than it was, actually, to take on a new face. You would be surprised about the questions that people do not ask of an old man who seemed like he could have been there forever.”
The Sheikh’s voice rasped as he spoke. Old. Ahmad repeated the Kadehirden word to himself, let it roll around his mouth. And then he said, “You’re not old.”
The man gave him an approving nod. “Finally, someone who notices. You’re right. I’m almost a hundred and fifty years old. I’m not old. I’m ancient.”
That had to be the source of the rot. A life unnaturally extended. Magic, distorted and misused. Ahmad felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck.
“You’re a quick study,” the man continued. His smile had all the warmth and generosity a wolf would give a cornered rabbit. “Have you worked out how I did it?”
“Magic,” Ahmad answered at once. The man made a dismissive voice. Obvious. “A lot of magic,” he guessed.
“I am not proud of what I did,” The man sighed. “But it was the only way. The amount of magic that it takes –”
Ahmad frowned. The way the man spoke – the amount of magic that it must take to extend a life for so long – surely someone would have noticed a spell of such magnitude.
Then he remembered his first trial at the Stand. The white trees with all their magic stolen, and the men who looked at him with suspicion for saying that anything was amiss.
“You robbed those trees.”
“It’s true,” the man noted with regret, before contorting his mouth into something like a smile. “Perhaps it was mere superstition, but I always did leave the Shadow alone.” He shook his head. “But after a while, even that was not enough.” The man lifted his palm into the air. As Ahmad watched, a tendril of light unwound itself from the wall and nestled in the man’s hand. He closed and opened his hand again, and the light was gone.
“You would not survive outside Kadehir,” Ahmad said, his eyes never leaving the man’s palm. He felt hypnotized.
“It’s getting hard to survive outside this room.” The man made a dismissive noise. “I’m told the Stand complains that the Sheikh of Magicians is so rarely available. But their bickering does not matter to me anymore. I needed to make sure I lived long enough to find someone who could succeed me. Someone who truly understood magic. Someone like you.”
There was a long pause while Ahmad repeated back the words to himself silently. He must have misunderstood. Kadehirden had a lot of nuances that could make it hard to understand. “Someone like me?” he repeated, hopeful he was mistaken.
Unfortunately, the man nodded in agreement. “An unorthodox choice, maybe, but I am running out of options. There were others, in the past, who I thought had potential, but none of them were quite right. The last one, I had such high hopes for -- a kishah, who first discovered his magical abilities when his life was on the line.”
Ahmad forgot his surprise and his lip curled. “You brought Savaner kishah here.” He remembered for the first time the story that Mahir had told about being brought underground. Had Savaner kishah really walked willingly into the place they had dragged Ahmad?
“That was his name, yes.” The man sighed. "I forgot -- you must know him. My men mentioned his name as the one who requested you be arrested. I'd been just waiting for the right opportunity to bring you here."
He spoke as if the arrest had been merely a detour. Ahmad thought of Nadide janum screaming at the guards and how the blood had drained from Mahir's face when he realized the men intended to take him away. Ahmad ground his teeth. “The right opportunity?” he muttered, but the man continued as if he had not spoken.
"I brought Savaner kishah here some years ago and gave him the same test I gave you. He came in here talking about how relaxing it had been in that cell. How meditative. Was that your experience?"
“That cell is an abomination,” Ahmad growled.
The corners of the man’s mouth lifted. "Exactly. When that material was first discovered in Kadehir, it was thought to be cursed. The cell was meant to be a torment. Put a magician in the very heart of Kadehir, the very heart of magic in the world -- and cut him off from it all." The Sheikh’s lips curled. "When I heard those words from the kishah, I knew then that the Stand had already ruined him. I think I waited too long. He already had a Mucevhed by that point. It all comes back to the Mucevheden."
Ahmad bristled. “What does this have to do with Mahir?” It had not been Mahir’s fault that Savaner kishah was an idiot.
“You’re from one of the very furthest provinces, right?” The Sheikh ran a hand through his beard. “You were probably a man grown before you ever met a Mucevhed.”
Ahmad nodded slowly. He did not like this man's tone. He was speaking with barely concealed disgust about the best day of Ahmad's life. Meeting Mahir had been the first time Ahmad had met someone who wasn't afraid of what he could do, someone who could give a name to those abilities and told him about a faraway place where magic was the most ordinary thing in the world --
"I didn't learn magic with a Mucevhed either. The ones who first came from across the ocean -- none of them had a Mucevhed either. I think I was a child when the first Mucevheden were born on Kadehir’s shores.”
Ahmad was not sure he could trust his ears. “You are one of the settlers,” he stuttered. The Kadehirdens always spoke of their settlers with such reverence. Yet here was one still clinging to life, and they had not even noticed.
The man’s nostrils flared. “Not quite. It was my grandparents who came from across the sea,” he corrected. “But I told you that I was old. When I was growing up, Kadehir was still a new land. It had only been mountains before. No one lived there. But they contained an unimaginable amount of magic. And so when the settlers flattened the rocks and made it so people could actually live on such blessed ground, they found that some of Kadehir’s children soaked in more magic than others.”
Ahmad’s eyes widened. “That is why Mucevheden are only born in Kadehir.”
The man nodded, as if it was obvious. It had not been obvious to Ahmad. When Ahmad had first met Mahir, he’d been dazed at the amount of magic that seemed to cling to him like a fog and the jewels that dotted his skin. Mahir had only laughed and said that there were lots of people like him where he came from. He’d never mentioned that there was a time before people like him existed. Ahmad had never suspected. Maybe Mahir didn’t know either.
“In the beginning, Mucevheden were just a curiosity. But a simple experiment changed all that. You see, a lot of children my age were struggling to see magic. It is so hard to notice a thing if you never know its absence. And we’d grown up with so much magic. I myself never saw magic until one day I went swimming too far and thought I might drown. That panic, that terror – it gave me the clarity I needed. It was the same for Savaner kishah. Perhaps that is why I had such hope for him. Did you ever have a moment like that, when you first learned to see magic?”
Ahmad thought back to his childhood. He’d grown up always by his mother’s side, a second wife forever anxious to impress her husband and his first wife who ran the household. Ahmad had gotten very good at noticing things that no one talked about.
“No,” he said. “I just watch people very carefully.”
The man’s lip curled. “You could watch people carefully in Kadehir all your life and still not be able to see magic. The magic in the soil drowns it all out.” Ahmad shrugged; that seemed right, but it was of no concern to him. “But I forget myself,” the man shook his head. “As you can imagine, it was hard to find students in my day. So an alternative was proposed, when I was still a student. Partner up the most promising children with these new Kadehirdens – these Mucevheden. That helped out many children. Having a dedicated source of magic to look for made it easier to call upon magic more consistently.”
“I was only distantly aware of these changes at the time, of course. I didn’t bother myself much with anything regarding magical education in those days. I was a scholar. I was a soldier. I dedicated myself utterly to the study of magic and to the defense of my empire. It was only when I was much older that I started to notice that there was anything amiss. I am sure you have noticed it too in your time here. Men would tell me that it was not possible for them to do magic without a Mucevhed. I realized too late that the Stand had changed right under my nose. It had become filled with men who could cast the flashiest spells but could not see the subtle workings of magic. And there I was. An old man, realizing I could see the end of magic in my lifetime.”
The man’s voice wavered. He spoke as if Ahmad should pity him. Ahmad did not.
“What did you do?” he asked, trying to hide his disdain. He suspected he already knew the answer.
“I needed more time. Time to find someone else, someone else who could ensure magic continued in Kadehir. I had begun to truly despair when that kishah proved to be just as bad as the rest of them. I have already lived too long – I do not have much longer. But then you arrived. Even a well-connected patron could not hide you forever. People began to talk. At first, I did not believe you would be any different. After all, there was that Mucevhed who called you master.”
“Mahir,” Ahmad corrected, but the man appeared not to hear.
“Then for the first time in generations, I saw someone else magic-walking.”
Ahmad gave a start and the man laughed. The sound came out low, raspy. Dying. But still he sounded content. “I am sure you saw me. You thought you were alone.”
With everything that had happened, Ahmad had forgotten what Nadide janum had said when she described magic-walking. There was someone else.
Could this man really not tell the difference between him and Nadide janum? Maybe he never imagined that there could be another magician in Kadehir that the Stand had overlooked. Maybe he had also assumed a woman could never be a magician. Either way, Ahmad thought it would be wiser not to correct him.
“I can tell you that the magic-walking you have done is just the beginning. I may not have as much time left as I wanted, but I can still show you a sampling of how magic used to be. Come here.” The man beckoned to the wall he sat against. Ahmad hesitated for a moment and then walked over. He had come to Kadehir to learn magic, after all.
The man put his hand against the dirt and a tendril of white unfurled itself from the ground. Ahmad fought the urge to stare. It looked familiar – like one of the roots of those white trees. Pure magic, given a form. Unthinkable anywhere the Dubbhazel called home. And yet it seemed almost unremarkable in Kadehir. The man made a gesture with his hand, and the tendril moved in Ahmad’s direction.
“Think of a place you know. Or any place you’ve been. And then grab hold."
Ahmad whispered a prayer to the Sun and the Moon and then reached out his hand.
It felt like his body had been pulled violently forward. He let out an oath in his native tongue. And then he looked down and found out he had been wrong. His body hadn’t been pulled along, he simply no longer had a body. This was horrible. Nadide janum had really chosen to do this to herself? More than once?
There was a sound that could have been a laugh that echoed from everywhere at once. “It is quite something, isn’t it? You’ll get used to it. You’ve chosen to go very far indeed.”
Ahmad cast a look around. It was pitch black around them. The only light came from a faint white mist that surrounded them, which did not do anything to the darkness except make it worse. But Ahmad’s gift had always been in seeing what others could not. He stared long enough that he could start to make out faint pinpricks of light in a sea of darkness. And then he stared longer, until the darkness rearranged itself into familiar shapes. Shapes that he had seen only a few months before.
He was back in Bak Liwahar. A journey of several months, and he’d done it in an instant.
“What devils –,” he started, but the man interrupted.
“It is one of the gifts of Kadehir. Or at least the heart of Kadehir. If you tried magic-walking in this place, you could not do it. There is too little magic in this soil to call upon. It would be like trying to swim in a puddle. But if you are in Kadehir, it can be done.”
“Have you ever wondered why there is so much magic in Kadehir, when so many places have none? Magic flows through all the world, but in most places so faintly as to be all but invisible, even to the most discrening eye. But all that magic pools in one place before it returns back to whence it came. Think of that place as the beating heart of magic in the world. That was what the settlers in Kadehir first realized when they looked across the ocean. That is why they changed the world – they wanted to live atop that beating heart. The possibilities seemed endless. One of them you are seeing now. Take a small bit of magic that flows into Kadehir, see where it wants to return – and you can go anywhere.”
Ahmad’s head felt light. Or it would have, if he had had one. But he’d heard the word he needed. Anywhere. He latched onto that word. And as his thoughts changed, so did the darkness around them. The pinpricks of light vanished. The shadows of the buildings changed and were replaced by the soft curve of a mountain range that extended as far as the eye could see.
“An odd place,” the Sheikh remarked, after a moment. “There is no one here.”
"My tribe passes through these mountains in the summer," Ahmad said. He did not think he even had a tongue or a mouth in this realm, but still he would speak. "You were here too, once."
There was a damningly long pause. "Yes, years ago, around this area...there was some instability in this province at the time. The governor was threatening to rebel. The Imperial Magician at that time was worse than useless. He said Wakamir was too far away for magic to be of any use. As if any place could ever truly be too far from Kadehir. I helped install a new governor, and this province’s loyalty has never waivered since.”
"You sent storms," Ahmad pressed. He had to hear the words for himself. He had to know.
"Oh, storms and much worse." The man sounded so pleased with himself. He still hadn’t realized.
"One of those storms killed my cousin. It almost killed me."
The scenery shifted one last time. Ahmad was in his body again, and the force of the impact made it feel as if his chest had been slammed against the wall. His legs threatened to buckle but he forced them to stand. He would not let the Sheikh out of his sight.
“I did not realize –,” the man stuttered. His voice sounded strangely hoarse. Ahmad cut him off before he attempted to excuse himself further.
“You must know that some people died because of what you did.”
An odd expression passed over the man’s face. It was not sympathy and it was not regret. Instead, it was recognition. For the first time, he was seeing Ahmad as he really was – not merely a magician he could mold into his successor, but Ahmad ji Musayeib ji Bayhas ji Hazzar Dubbhazhel, a man with a mind all of his own.
The Sheikh lipped his licks nervously. “I fear you might be losing sight of the larger picture here. I admit I have made mistakes. But I am offering you an opportunity. As Sheikh of Magicians, I am in charge of the Stand. If I give you that title, there is no limit to what you could do. If you hold a grudge against Savaner kishah, a word from you and you could see him hang. If you want the Stand to change, a word from you and things will be different.”
“You led the Stand for generations and it did not change.”
The Sheikh laughed, a thin, wavering sound that echoed too loudly in the room. “Maybe I have been too cautious. You can be different. You can do things differently from me.”
The man was right. Ahmad could do all that and more.
He thought of the life his cousin might have led, if the man in front of him had not quarreled with some distant governor he had never met. He thought of Mahir and the sadness in his eyes that he thought Ahmad never noticed. Ahmad made up his mind then and there about what he could do with what the Sheikh had taught him.
He reached out a hand to feel the magic of Kadehir again and said, “I do not need your title to do that.”
This time, it did not feel like his body had been dragged behind him – maybe because he knew what to expect this time, or maybe because this time he had not traveled very far at all. He stood in the middle of Kadehir, at the entrance to the Stand, and there was so much light everywhere. It was so different from where he had been only moments ago. But he could not afford to be blinded for long. There was work he needed to do.
He felt but did not see the presence of the Sheikh alongside him. The man was watching him but not trying to stop him. Yet.
A beacon of light walked right past Ahmad. If he focused, he could just make out the features of a man: a Mucevhed, older, with traces of white starting to show under his cap. A fainter light, another man, that Ahmad assumed to be his magician, walked a few paces ahead, paying no heed to either his Mucevhed nor Ahmad. Ahmad looked closer and he could just barely make out what he was looking for – yes, there it was. A faint ribbon of light around the first man’s neck. The collar and its spell. Ahmad concentrated and called upon the spell that he had used against Savaner kishah only a few days ago.
There were a few glorious seconds in which he watched the magic around the collar unravel itself. Then the smell of dirt filled his air. He was back in his body again. The Sheikh of Magicians had dragged him back.
“What are you doing?” The man cried out.
Ahmad reached for the wall again. “You said Mucevheden are the problem. But it is not them.” He returned again to that strange realm and walked until he found another light that shone brighter than the crowd around it. “It is the Stand, those collars, and the magicians who need them. That is the problem. I am fixing it for you.”
“But if you do that, you will take magic away from these magicians! There will be no one left in Kadehir who knows how to command a spell. It will be the end of magic in Kadehir!”
Ahmad felt the tug of the spell trying to return him back, and this time he planted himself more firmly amongst the light of the crowds. “Magic will be fine,” he scoffed. “It is only the Stand that will worry. And even then, only until they remember how to really do magic. That is what you wanted, isn’t it?”
He was not sure how long it took. After all, Kadehir was a large city and – as everyone seemed so fond of telling him – it was home to many magicians. And the Sheikh fought him every step of the way, trying to drag him back to his body, or away from Kadehir, or redoing the enchantments that he undid. But while the Sheikh might know how to command more spells than he did, Ahmad was a young man and the other man was fading. Ahmad could and would outlast him.
Ahmad was pretty sure he had reached everyone in Kadehir when he noticed that the counterspells had stopped. At first, he stopped and waited with suspicion. Was this some last, desperate trick?
Then he felt a tremor below him, and he returned to his body at once.
The sudden weight of his limbs made him lurch. After so long magic-walking, the dim light and stench of the earth almost overwhelmed him. It was a moment before he recovered his senses, and that was when at last he noticed.
The scent of rot was gone from the room.
As Ahmad’s eyes adjusted, he could make out the shape of a man sprawled out before him. The cave gave another lurch and then the body of the man who had until recently been the Sheikh of Magicians fell to the ground.
Ahmad drew in a sharp breath. The man had told him that he did not have much time left. Ahmad hadn’t realized he’d been willing to squander it all to try and stop him.
He took a step towards the body – to do what he did not know – but stopped when he noticed a tendril of magic growing beside the former Sheikh. As Ahmad watched, it grew and divided and divided again. What had started out as a thin, almost ghostly thread of white became a net that covered first the Sheikh, then much of the ground itself. One branch tried to grow around Ahmad’s ankle; he kicked it free only to notice another had grown around his other ankle. He stumbled back until he felt the outline of the door. Before his eyes, the room was growing overrun by this white light. And as they grew, the ground itself shook and split as more and more tendrils emerged.
It took Ahmad a moment to understand exactly what he was seeing. The Sheikh had said he relied on the magic he could access in this room, that he relied on the magic of Kadehir itself. With his death, all that magic was returning back to Kadehir. It was going to devour this room. Who knew where its appetite would stop?
Ahmad hesitated and then ground his teeth. He had to get out of here. But he couldn’t leave just yet. He did not know how long he could stay down here, but he needed more time. He’d traveled up and down Kadehir, but he knew there had to be somewhere he missed. Someone he missed. Taking a deep breath, he said a quiet prayer for the room to hold just a little longer, and then he called on the magic of Kadehir one last time.
He had to find Mahir.
Ahmad searched in vain among the crowds of Kadehir. There were so many people out now. Of course Kadehir had always been crowded, but now it seemed even more so. Had the people taken to the streets? If Ahmad concentrated, he could feel their agitation. Their restlessness. The ground was shaking underneath them, and they had to know why.
Ahmad tried not to pay them too much heed, but he might as well have been a blade of grass trying to ignore the wind. The crowd was walking towards the Stand. Reluctantly, Ahmad moved that way too. And that was when he saw them, off in the distance, peeking above the horizon: the white branches of the trees, grown tall enough that they seemed to rake the clouds. The magic of the trees had returned. For the first time in what must have been generations, the trees were growing. It was a wonderous sight. That kind of growth, unchecked, might wreak havoc. But it was still magnificent to see.
It was only when Ahmad found himself staring at the Stand a little longer that he finally realized his mistake. He’d been so sure he’d checked everywhere in Kadehir. And he had gone everywhere – except he hadn’t bothered to check where he had been. Or more accurately, right above where he had been. He had not walked among the trees.
The magic of Kadehir meant that he had to do little more than think of the spot and there he was. Seven trunks glowed around him. Everything seemed covered in a white fog; it really did feel like all the magic of the world was flowing through him. But within that haze, he was able to make out two points of light. One stood and the other knelt. The one that was kneeling shone much brighter than the other.
“Mahir!” Ahmad called out, even though he doubted the other man could hear him. Once, in the desert, he’d been able to see Mahir from a thousand miles away; now, it was hard to see him from only a few feet away. But Ahmad was not going to lose him again.
He could feel the roots start to shift underneath him. Any minute now, the trees would grow strong enough to tear this courtyard apart. Ahmad tried to call on the magic to settle it, just for a minute. He didn’t need that much time to cast the spell he had come here for. It was the easiest thing in the world for him now, he’d already cast it a hundred times by now –
And that was when Ahmad looked at Mahir, really looked at Mahir for the first time in this strange realm, and saw that the collar he was wearing did not have any spell on it.
Ahmad returned to his body with a smile on his face. He stood there for a long minute with that lopsided grin on his face before dirt began falling on top of his turban and he remembered that he had to run.
It was a confusion of an exit, but Ahmad emerged back to the surface not too far from the trees. As the salt from the sea whipped his nose, Ahmad reflected that he’d never before been so glad for something as simple as breathing.
Once he’d had a moment to catch his breath, he turned back to see what had become of the courtyard. There was not much left to see. Crushed rocks lay scattered where walls had once stood. And towering above the remains of the old world were towers of white, magic made visible. They could not really be called trees anymore. The influx of so much magic so suddenly had twisted them and made them lose their form, but they were so much more vibrant and alive than when he had first laid eyes on them. It was truly a sight to behold.
A crowd had gathered around the former courtyard and from the dark mutterings of the men around him, it seemed not everyone shared in his good spirits. Ahmad did not need to check the color of the men’s turbans to know that most of them were magicians. He wondered if any of them had worked out exactly what had happened. What the Sheikh had done. What Ahmad had done. He doubted it.
But he was not here to worry over the men of the Stand. He started to walk alongside the edge of one of the ruined walls, his eyes roaming over the crowd in search of the one person who did matter to him now.
“Mahir!” Ahmad cried out when he finally spotted him, and his heart leapt to his throat.
Mahir was one of the few people not staring towards the courtyard. Instead, he was hunched over in a quiet, hurried conversation with his companion. It took Ahmad a moment to recognize Nadide, with her fine dress in tatters and dirt smeared across her face and arms. Ahmad frowned. He noticed for the time that Mahir’s skull cap was askew and his hair disshelved.
But that was all he noticed before Mahir ran into his arms. “You’re alive!” Mahir exclaimed with open disbelief. Ahmad could have laughed. But then his mouth found Ahmad’s, and Ahmad was much too stunned to laugh or to do anything at all. After weeks of Mahir shying away from his touch whenever there was the possibility that anyone would see, Mahir was leaning in eagerly to kiss him again in front of what must have been the entire Stand and half the city. It took half a moment for Ahmad’s mind to start working again, and then his arms were around Mahir and he was kissing him like he had been wanting to since they arrived in Kadehir.
“I can’t believe it,” Mahir muttered when he finally stopped to breathe. “When the men took you, I was so afraid, I thought -- where have you been?”
Ahmad tried to come up with words to explain the events that had happened since the Sheikh’s men had forced him underground, either in his native tongue or in Kadehirden. Nothing seemed quite right to describe it. He wrinkled his nose instead. “It is a long story,” he said. And then, on a sudden suspicion, he asked, “Where is Savaner kishah?”
Mahir shared a look with Nadide that said much in a tongue that Ahmad knew he could not hope to understand. “Gone. But it is also a long story,” Nadide finally answered. She gestured towards the ruins of the courtyard. “Do you know what has happened here?”
Ahmad looked again at the rubble. The Sheikh of Magicians had taken much from Kadehir over many years because he had been so afraid of what the Stand would lose if he did not. But in the end it was exactly what he had stolen that had destroyed the Stand.
Ahmad kept one arm drawn tightly around Mahir. “Something overdue,” he shrugged. “Now, let’s go home.”
