CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN

“Stop,” Joshua snapped. He held up a hand, halting the bookstall owner in his tracks. “What are you doing?”

Master Faye could command respect through fear. Joshua would have to hope that his apprentice carried the same weight. The bookstall owner glared at him, but didn’t seem inclined to grab the frozen Elyria and drag her off to the City Guard. But then, it was Joshua’s master who would stand in judgement over her.

“She bought some books from me with unmarked coins,” the bookseller snapped, producing a set of familiar golden coins from his pouch. “I tested them and they bore no mark.”

Joshua scowled, inwardly. Normally, the only person who could test coins was Master Faye – and he would only test large sums of money brought into the city, because otherwise he wouldn’t have time to get anything else done. They’d overlooked the bookseller, who had a little magic of his own, and he’d tested the coins he’d been given. In hindsight, perhaps they should have asked him to report anything odd to Master Faye.

He tried to think quickly, cursing his own ignorance. If the whole incident had been arranged as a provocation, no matter how absurd that seemed, taking Elyria into custody might trigger a challenge against Master Faye. But if she wasn’t taken into custody, the bookseller would have strong grounds to complain – and damage the city’s economy. Forged coins could not be tolerated. There was no precedent for golden coins that were perfect, apart from lacking the verification mark.

“Then we shall take her to Master Faye,” he decided, finally. The bookseller would probably want to take her to the jail, but it would be several days before she would face Master Faye in Court. Jail was no place for a young girl... besides, his instincts kept telling him that Elyria had no evil intentions. He looked over at Elyria and frowned. “I’m sorry about this, but there is no choice.”

The bookseller gave Joshua a nasty look as he worked his way through a simple levitation spell, lifting Elyria up into the air. She looked oddly vulnerable as she span in front of them, a reminder that those with magic would always be superior to those without. Joshua looked down at the books she’d picked up and then left them on the table for the librarian to return to the shelves. When she returned, if she returned, she would have no trouble finding them again.

Master, he said, using his mental voice, something has happened.

He filled Master Faye in as he pushed the floating Elyria out of the door and into the streets. Thankfully, there were few people around as he started to walk towards Master Faye’s house, but he was very aware of unseen eyes. The bookseller followed, muttering nastily to himself in a language that Joshua had barely started to learn. If Elyria was convicted of a crime, he would claim the right to punish her – although Joshua honestly wasn’t sure if she was guilty of a crime. The coins weren’t actually fake, even though they bore no mark. Maybe a Scion had found a seam of gold somewhere outside the city and was starting to mine it to produce coins. But if that was the case, why not simply have them verified at the nearest mint?

Master Faye’s servants opened the doors as they approached, allowing him to manipulate Elyria inside and close the door behind him. The bookseller started to complain loudly to Master Faye, only to be silenced by an angry look. If the whole affair was a deliberate provocation, Master Faye would have more important things to worry about than a single bookseller, even if the Booksellers Guild was the most powerful one on Darius. Joshua put Elyria down in the centre of the room and watched as Master Faye tested the coins. They were just like the ones they’d seen earlier.

“Odd,” Master Faye said, finally. He dismissed the bookseller with a promise that his books would be recovered, if they couldn’t be paid for with real money. “Let’s see what we can find out about your friend.”

Joshua watched with some interest as Master Faye started casting complex analysis spells. It started to go wrong almost at once. A spell intended to reveal the girl’s hometown simply refused to work, while a spell that should have determined her age produced an answer that was flatly impossible. No one, not even a Pillar, could live over a hundred years – and the girl seemed to be one hundred and fifty. Joshua took another look at her and shook his head in disbelief. He would have been astonished if she was any older than eighteen.

“Very odd,” Master Faye said, after casting yet another spell. “She’s in perfect health, without any real scarring; eyes and ears and nose are perfect. And she’s stronger than she looks too. What does it mean?”

There was a pause. “And there isn’t a single trace of magic on her,” he added. “What does that mean?”

Joshua winced inwardly, trying to keep it off his face. He’d never seen Master Faye unsure before; Pillars were never unsure. They determined everything from law to acceptable standards of behaviour in their bailiwicks. Whatever they said went, even if they changed their minds every second day. And yet Master Faye just didn’t understand what he was seeing in front of him. Elyria didn’t seem to fit into any normal pattern at all.

“I think we will have no choice, but to interrogate her,” Master Faye said, finally. “And we will have to deal with the consequences when they materialise.”

It would be picking up the gauntlet, if indeed a gauntlet had been thrown at them... it struck Joshua, suddenly, that the whole idea might have been to make Master Faye doubt himself. If so, it was working perfectly. He said so out loud and Master Faye nodded, sourly. They’d just have to be very careful. Besides, the mystery spying spells didn’t seem to be able to peer inside Master Faye’s house. It would give them some time to decide what to do next.

He looked back at Elyria and felt a flash of guilt. Using truth spells was not something that would make them popular. Everyone had something to hide – and while Master Faye could have used them on anyone he chose, there would be consequences. They could only be used after there was strong proof that they were needed.

“Yes, Master,” he said, reluctantly.

***

They knew the coins were forged?

Elyria had given up struggling against the invisible bonds that held her. Without her implants to monitor her body’s condition, her best guess was that the locals had some way to use the quantum foam – their magic – to hold her prisoner. It had to be targeted very specifically, or she wouldn’t even have been able to breathe, something that would have been fatal even with her enhanced physical structure. The Confederation’s medical science might have been able to revive her afterwards, but it might well cause brain damage. Even the Confederation had problems fixing that.

Where had they gone wrong? The bookseller had talked about the coins being unmarked, which meant... what? They’d duplicated observed coins right down to the subatomic level, producing perfect copies of local currency. There hadn’t been any numbering system to indicate that each individual coin was completely unique; local technology didn’t have the ability to do that properly, let alone keep track of the coins afterwards. But they’d obviously missed something... silently, she cursed their own prior experience. They knew so much about blending into primitive societies that they had missed something obvious.

Elyria had been in trouble on primitive worlds before, and she’d spent time in local jails. Standard procedure was to monitor the jailhouse; if something went badly wrong, the prisoner could teleport out before the locals managed to execute her. It was more common to identify someone who could be bribed to extract the prisoner. This was different; her technology hadn’t worked, even when she’d been carried out of the library. Her best guess was that whatever was holding her immobilised – and helpless – was also disrupting her technology. It was quite possible that none of the others knew where she was.

Master Faye bent over her and made a few passes with his hand. Elyria felt nothing, but suddenly she could move her head freely, even though the rest of her body felt as hard as stone. She was suddenly very aware of his breath; it smelt unpleasant, as if he’d been chewing something nasty. Or maybe it was simply old age. For all of the magic flowing through its society, Darius was still very primitive in any number of ways.

“I need to ask you some questions,” Master Faye said. His accent was slightly different to his apprentice’s, suggesting they’d been born far apart. Or it would have, anywhere else. “Where do you come from?”

Elyria hesitated. If Darius was a normal world, the cover story would have held up perfectly – or at least it would have taken them several months to verify it, during which time she could be extracted from the jail, leaving the locals with nothing more than a mystery. But if there was something wrong with the coins, there might be something wrong with the cover story too. In hindsight, maybe they should have taken more time to survey the planet first, even though they’d never been so exposed before landing on Darius. The whole situation was as unprecedented as the rest of the planet.

“Athol,” she said, finally.

“I fear not,” Master Faye said. He started to make more passes in front of her face, chanting in a language that seemed to bear no resemblance to the English-derived language used all over Darius. “Now. Where were you born?”

Elyria’s mouth opened of its own accord. “Sunrise Ring, Greenland,” she said. She caught herself a moment later. “What?”

Master Faye gave her an oddly superior smirk, although it was tinged with puzzlement. The words meant nothing to him; Greenland, a world seven thousand light years from Darius, wasn’t even a pinprick in his sky. And the Ring surrounding the planet, playing host to most of the population in that star system, would be utterly beyond his imagination. Elyria took some solace in that, even as she tried to figure out what he’d done to her. The words had just come out of her mouth, completely against her will.

Joshua leaned forward. “Where is Greenland?”

Elyria found herself answering his question, only to be greeted with a stare of absolute disbelief. The thought would have been amusing, if it hadn’t been so serious; they thought that she was somehow evading the truth spell, even though it was working perfectly. And they didn’t understand just what a light year was; at Darius’s general level of development, they were probably still convinced that light moved at infinite speed.

Master Faye scowled down at her, making more passes in front of her face. “What are you doing here?”

The answer – a full and complete answer – came out of Elyria’s mouth. This time, she felt something prodding at her mind, pushing it to give an answer. It felt rather like the emergency mental pattern scan she’d made back when she had been preparing for her first undercover operation on a primitive world, practising for when they might have had to back themselves up in a hurry. That had felt rather like a Thule mind-ripper. This wasn’t too different at all.

“I don’t believe it,” Master Faye said, finally. “How can you live without magic?”

***

Joshua was half-inclined to think that his master was right. Elyria had to be messing with them somehow, even though Master Faye’s increasingly frantic checks on the spells compelling her to speak the truth – and pushing her into speaking when she was reluctant to speak – proved that they were working perfectly. Any magician, even an untrained talent, would be able to struggle against the compulsion spell. Elyria seemed to have no defences at all.

Either that or she’s a vastly more powerful magician than anyone else, he thought, shaking his head as he tried to understand what she’d told them. A society without magic, watching them to determine just how they did what they did? It made no sense. Magic was a universal force, dominating every part of the world... and yet they claimed to come from the sky. There were a handful of eccentrics who claimed that the stars were suns, just like the sun Darius orbited, but they hadn’t really proved anything. He looked at Elyria and shivered. The proof might be right in front of him.

Master Faye didn’t believe her. In a desperate attempt to prove that she was lying, he was tapping into stronger and stronger compulsion spells, including several he’d told Joshua never to use unless there was no other choice. Some of them risked permanent side effects, from servitude to outright mental damage. He wanted to protest, but he couldn’t find the words. Master Faye’s desperation was alarming.

“Master,” he said, finally. “She’s telling the truth.”

His Master fixed him with a gimlet eye. “And how do you know that?”

Joshua found himself floundering, and then the answer dawned on him. “Because if she was a spy for a Scion, or a Scion herself, she wouldn’t have come up with such an absurd story,” he pointed out. “They’d tell us that her family had found a hidden gold seam, or something believable, not a story that we must consider absurd. The more you poke and prod at her, the more likely it is that you’d identify her true nature.”

“Scions are not always rational,” Master Faye said, coldly. He looked down at Elyria, dark eyes peering at her face. “And yet, I do not understand how one could come up with such a story.”

“And there was the spell we did, intended to locate the spies,” Joshua added. “The spell doesn’t work so well if the target is far away. How far away would they be if they came from another star?”

He found it hard to wrap his head around the concept, but if the stars were suns, just like the one that illuminated Darius, they had to be a very long way away, or the planet would overheat. They’d certainly be further away than anywhere on the planet’s surface – and the spell didn’t work so well when targeted on the other side of the world. No one was quite sure why.

“And they’re spying on us,” Master Faye said. His gaze sharpened as he addressed Elyria. “Why are you spying on us?”

Her voice was dulled, the effect of the spells. “We want to learn about how you manipulate the quantum foam,” she said. “We need to learn how to do it for ourselves.”

Joshua blinked. “The quantum foam?”

“Magic,” Elyria said. The dull hopelessness in her voice tore at Joshua’s heart. “You call it magic.”

“We could trade,” Joshua said. He’d known the world was a sphere, but to see it from high overhead... he’d never even dreamed of the possibility. “We could teach you magic in exchange for what you know about the world.”

“That might require an agreement with the other Pillars,” Master Faye said, before he could get too carried away. “Right now, we have to decide what do with our friend.”

Joshua looked at Elyria. “What will happen if your friends discover that you’re missing?”

“They’ll search for me,” Elyria said, still in a dulled voice. “And when they find me, they’ll take me back.”

“I think we should at least talk to them,” Joshua said. He was still reeling inwardly from discovering that Elyria was over a hundred years old. “They could teach us a great deal.”

“We could teach them a great deal,” Master Faye said, flatly. “Can you imagine a society without magic?”

Joshua couldn’t. It was a basic fact of life that those with magic ruled those without. The strong ruled, the weak obeyed. If there was no magic... even the strongest muscle-bound idiot would have problems enforcing his orders outside the range of his fists. Besides, a bow and arrow would cut one down almost effortlessly. Or disease... how could one hope to maintain his rule? None of Elyria’s answers about how her society worked made sense. If everyone was involved in making decisions, how did anything get done?

And yet the whole idea fascinated him.

“Take her to a guest room and give her time to freshen up,” Master Faye ordered, finally. “And then we can decide how best to approach our visitors.”

Joshua would have expected him to be relieved. They might be facing a completely unanticipated problem, but at least a Scion wasn’t about to walk into the city and demand that Master Faye face him in a formal duel. Besides, Elyria had made it clear that their society had no magic. They’d be able to use magic to defend themselves if necessary, with as much ease as Elyria herself had been captured. Master Faye should have been delighted to discover that there was no upstart young magician about to try to unseat him.

Instead, he looked worried, as if something else was nagging at him.

“Yes, Master,” he said. “Perhaps we should just walk up to them and introduce ourselves.”

He released most of the spells binding Elyria and invited her to walk upstairs in front of him, although the remaining spells would ensure that she couldn’t escape. It was unbelievable that she was over a hundred years old; his older sister was only twenty-five, the mother of four children, and she looked much older. And yet the alternative was believing that truth spells could be so easily deceived.

This is an opportunity, he told himself firmly, as he opened the guest room. It wasn’t exactly a prison, but anyone who went inside would be under careful observation. We shall make the most of it.