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Rich looked at the nighttime Hierophane library, with its ornate wood furniture and silver trinkets gleaming softly in the lamplight, and breathed a quiet sigh of comfort. He looked at his space, beyond the dividing line of the scry, to the dark, rocky expanse that came with being in the foothills of the Eural Mountains. Once again, he wasn’t putting up his fair share.
He looked at Rew. Lovely in her green nightgown, her smile told him she didn’t mind at all. Dark curls framed her face. Sexy.
“You,” Rich said, “this... it’s the best part of being on the road.”
Truth be told, the scry was the only good thing to being on the road. They had left Nev Shahir as quickly as they had arrived, using the cover of night to make a clean break with Jason huddled under his brown robe. Once clear of the city, they traveled along the foothills of the Eural Mountains, to some unknown destination Jason felt in his bones.
After only one day of walking over rock-strewn ground with wind gusts blasting dirt and small gravel in their faces, he already missed Rew and their time together in Nasreddin.
“You feel this is the best part of our separation?” Rew asked, her smile sly. “Because I was planning to make it much better.”
Her hand reached out to him. Rich looked on in shock when her fingers kept going past the dividing line of the scry to touch his face. All this time, he had just assumed they couldn’t go past the line. He had never bothered to test the boundary. He thought about this new discovery and the needing a bowl of water to scry thing and came to the conclusion that he needed to stop guessing at the rules.
He welcomed the surprise as eagerly as he welcomed Rew into his arms. Her kisses were hot, passionate. He met them with equal ardor.
She pulled away. Her look was one of absolute horror.
“What?” he asked in alarm. “What is it?”
Rich saw his reflection in the library’s full mirror. He looked down at his hands, gnarled and covered with liver spots. Then he looked back up in the mirror and his trembling, wrinkled hands touched his face, a face now decrepit and withered with age. His eyes were sunken into bony cheeks. Thin strands of gray hair clung to his liver spotted skull.
Rew laughed at him. She was still young, still beautiful.
“How did you think this was going to end?” she asked. “Rew Majora is virtually immortal and you—you already have one foot in the grave.”
Rich felt his teeth falling out, one by one. The nature of all this unnatural horror made it clear what this was. He pointed a bony finger at Rew, his voice husky with age.
“Richard Bates,” he said.
Rew smiled. “Richard Bates, Rew Majora, I am both of these and neither. I’m the cost, Razzleblad, here to remind you that power comes at a price.”
Rich’s horror turned to anger. Using Rew to get under his skin felt like a low blow, nothing short of a mental kick in his balls.
“That the best you got?” Rich asked, his geezer voice cracking as he spoke. He shook his fist, “I’ll get you, you young hooligan!”
“You think this is funny?” Rew asked, her face turning serious. “This isn’t some random villager up in flames, mage. What you’re looking at is your heart’s reality.”
Now Rew laughed, a sharp, derisive knife in Rich’s ears.
“You stupid kid,” she said. “You’re not looking at some theoretical future of what happens if you go mad. You’re looking at fact. You will see Rew Majora forever as this, while you become that ancient, decrepit bag of skin and bones you see in the mirror. This is your future together. And that is unchangeable, no matter what you do, no matter how sane you are.”
Rew circled him, talking in a taunting whisper.
“How funny do you think it’ll be for her? A woman locked in the prime of her life watching you waste away; cleaning the shit and piss you soil yourself in, wiping the dribbles of slobber from your wrinkled lips.”
Rew got in his face, close enough to smell the sweetness in her breath as she whispered venom.
“She’s lived for over three hundred years. What makes you think she has it in her to suffer through burying another lover? What makes you think she’ll want to put her heart into you, Razzleblad? You’re just a kid with most of his life already eaten away. Gone,” Rew said, snapping her fingers, “just like that.”
Rich roared, enraged. He pushed at Rew, wanting to push away the reality she presented.
Instead of pushing, his hands came up wielding fire. The fire spread to Rew’s face. She screamed in pain.
They were no longer standing, but sitting next to each other as they had been when the scry first started. Only now the magic fire was burning Rew. She screamed at Rich and reached for him, but was unable to touch him through the dividing line of the scry.
“Why?” she screamed through the fire. “You’re hallucinating! Stop the spell, please!”
He didn’t know how to stop it. The cost had come in the middle of the scry and—
“No!” Rich cried, “God, no! I can’t! I don’t know how!” he yelled. But his words didn’t help Rew, who had opened her mind to him and received uncontrolled mage fire as result.
Rich yelled again, this scream following him into the waking world. The sun was just beginning its climb above the foothills. Melvin and Jason stopped stowing their gear to look at him.
“Glad to see you’re violently awake,” Jason said.
Rich grabbed his chest, where his heart was thudding in panic. He didn’t know for sure, he just didn’t know.
Was what just happened all cost, or part cost? Did he leave a real scry with Rew burning?
He looked around for something, anything to think it through. The sun’s light answered his question. It was night in the scry, even near the end. It had been all cost.
Only now did he let out his bated breath. Melvin and Jason had begun packing again. Melvin spared a moment to look at Rich.
“You OK?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m OK.”
“Those must be some seriously twisted dreams.”
Rich swallowed and nodded. He didn’t bother to explain or elaborate. He got out of his bedroll and began to stow his gear.
This is how day two started in the foothills of the Eural Mountains.
Time passed slow and uneventful. The only sound between conversation was the click of their boots against loose rocks and the occasional howl of wind gusts. Conversation could only last so long. The dead space of silence seemed like a heavy burden they all shouldered as they made their way down one hill and up another.
“Anybody else got that going to Mordor feeling?” Jason asked.
They all laughed. And the mood lightened. The next round of conversation lasted a while, relieving them of the burden of silence until dusk approached.
Rich cast a fire. They all settled down around it, watching the remaining day seep away as they ate pack rations. When Rich was done, he took out the Song of Ardor Swain and his spellbook.
He had always liked puzzles, ciphers, and cryptograms. Trying to translate Kaftar Friese’s spell page was a welcome diversion. He kept his spellbook open to the transcribed page, and placed the Song of Ardor Swain between the spell book pages, looking for words that matched.
By the time his eyes lifted from the pages, he had made serious headway. He had found a few words for most of the spells, including one of the words for the spell he had to cast. The spell was called “Something Something Chain”.
Rich looked past the campfire to Jason and Melvin, both sound asleep in the dark of night. He hadn’t realized how much time had passed since dusk.
Apparently, Jason and Melvin had nominated Rich for first watch. Jason had left out his hourglass, one of his rewards from the Sentry Triptoe fiasco. All the sand had settled to the bottom for who knew how long.
He woke Jason for watch before settling into his bedroll. But Rich didn’t want sleep. The thought was there, hovering. He knew what he wanted, and ignoring the thought only made it buzz louder.
Rich gave into it. He created a bowl of water and set it down next to his bedroll. The he cast the spell for a scry.
He turned and saw Rew’s bedroom. She was sitting on a bed of soft looking white blankets, wearing the green nightgown he had recently set her on fire in.
“Rich,” she said, smiling. “I was hoping you would scry with me tonight.”
Rich thought of their kiss in Nasreddin. “You were?”
“Of course,” she said, brushing loose strands of hair from her cheek. “Portaling you all to the base of the Eural Mountains with no resupply or transportation was far from the perfect way to enable your quest. How do you all fare?”
“Not bad,” Rich said, a little let down her hopes were business-oriented. “Jason feels we’re really close to the monster, maybe a couple of days walk.”
“Excellent,” Rew said. Silence prevailed between them for a moment before Rew smiled and spoke.
“I know your customs are as foreign to me as my customs must be to you, but here you’re supposed to say ‘thank you’ when a girl invites you to her bedroom at night.”
Embarrassment hit Rich like a hammer. “I, I’m sorry, I didn’t know it was your bedroom.”
“I knew it. And I still invited you. There are only a couple of things a woman expects from a man she invites into her bedroom at night, and a ‘thank you’ is one of that couple.”
“Thank you,” Rich said smiling.
Rew wasn’t smiling. Her face was ashen, aghast.
Rich looked down at his hands—wrinkled, spotted, old. His eyes came up to the mirror, where he was a raspy, rickety, ancient man.
Rich looked at Rew Majora, his new Richard Bates, as she laughed with glee.
“C’mon,” Rich said with his age-rusted voice. “Isn’t the same thing a bit tired?”
“There’s a lesson to be had in the same thing,” Rew said. “And after you’ve paid, I’m sure you’ll come up with the theme. You are, after all, a smart boy turned clever old man.”
“So, this is how I’m going to spend this cost? With your grandpa jokes?”
“Why, Razzleblad, I’m offended,” Rew said smiling. “I’m being generous. I’m giving you another future look at a tender love moment.”
Rich felt his right side go numb. He tried to yell out but the words all came out as mush. Then he collapsed on the floor. His brain burned with pain and was unable to speak, unable to do anything but convulse as the pain shook his body.
Rew kneeled over him, concern etched in her features. “Rich!” she shouted. “Rich!”
Richard Bates in his black suit stood over Rich as he convulsed and Rew as she knelt over him crying in panic.
“You’re having a stroke, old man,” Richard Bates told him. “This is how you die, Razzleblad. This will be Rew Majora’s last memory of you—you decrepit, tired, spasming to death on the floor.
Rew was crying, asking Rich to say something, to come back to her. Rich fought against the paralysis, raged against the helplessness he suffered.
He was able to lash out and grab Rew. But his hands came up with fire. The fire spread to Rew’s face, where she screamed in pain.
Now they sat on her bed, as they had been when the scry first started. And the scene played out as it did last time, with Rew burning and Rich unable to stop the destruction he had caused.
Rich woke up just like before, screaming and unable to determine if any of it had been real. This time it was still night out, no sunlight to answer the question.
Melvin came over, it being his watch.
“I’m sorry, about what you’re going through,” Melvin said.
Rich nodded. He looked down beside his bedroll. The bowl of water he had conjured was still there.
“I don’t know,” Rich said. His eyes searched the darkness frantically for a way to work through it. “I just don’t know.”
“Know what?” Melvin asked.
Rich didn’t speak the problem. The bowl told him he had set up to scry. The cost didn’t start at any place identifiable. When did the real Rew stop speaking and the cost Rew start? Did he ever get to speak to the real Rew at all? These questions bandied back and forth in his brain but the big question loomed, ever-present, unanswerable.
Did he burn her mind away?
“I don’t know!” Rich yelled in anguish.
“Shaddup,” Jason muttered half asleep as he turned away in his bedroll.
Feminine arms came from behind him to circle around his chest. A soft, beautiful voice next to his ear whispered.
“Calm. Remember, it’s not real. Calm.”
Rich leaned back into the embrace. He couldn’t trust what he saw. The cost wanted his madness. So he put faith in the voice. It told him it wasn’t real; he wanted desperately to believe in that. Rich closed his eyes and relaxed in the arms that held him.
Before Rich knew it, he was stirring awake to the others packing in the morning sun. Wordlessly, he got up and stowed his gear.
The mood was even more somber today than it was yesterday. Silence sat on all their shoulders, heavier than the packs on their backs. Jason tried to introduce conversation, but Rich and apparently Melvin didn’t feel like talking.
Rich felt old. He looked over to Melvin. He noticed her looking at him, concern and something else on her face, and whenever he met her eyes, she’d look away.
She. Rich had grown so used to seeing Melvin as a beautiful woman he almost forgot there was a dude underneath. He couldn’t recall Melvin’s real face. He could only see Zhufira, smiling or being worrisome or looking beautifully fierce. She felt realer than the kid from the burbs he used to know.
The landscape failed to change. Only Jason could measure progress. “Almost there,” he said as the day waned, the sun setting over the mountains.
He looked at Rich. “Campfire time,” he said.
“No.”
Jason smiled. “C’mon. You’re playing, right?”
Rich dug in his pack for his ornate tinderbox, the only gift he had accepted from the people of Triptoe. He tossed it at Jason.
“You want a fire, get to work.”
“Seriously? You want me to smack rocks together and blow at sparks all night when it takes you half a second to make it happen? C’mon dude, get it crackling before it gets dark.”
“Don’t you fucking get it?” Rich snapped. “I’m only casting one more spell,” he said, holding up a finger. “One. And this isn’t it. You want a fire, make a fire.”
Rich walked away from the camp and from Jason’s mumbling remarks. He looked down at the red gemstone on the ring Druze had given him. If it was marginalizing the cost, Rich sure couldn’t see it. He paid the same price for conjuring a bowl of water and a camp fire as he did for going super Razzleblad and cleaving apart a piece of the High Fane.
That was it.
This was the lesson Richard Bates wanted to teach him. Small magic, big magic, it didn’t matter—his price would be the same.
This ran contrary to what Rew had told him and what he had read in the Birleshik Arcana. Cost grows as spell power grows. Mages simply can’t cast above their present level until they’ve mastered the level they’re on. And once you master a certain level, the cost for levels below becomes almost negligible.
But he had never mastered any level. He was a novice, inside a body that touted some of the highest levels of spellcraft a human could wield. Razzleblad’s mind was tempered to the cost. Rich’s mind was baby fresh and raw to it.
He looked out at the barren landscape, darkening quickly as the sun threw its purple-hued death throes. Rich turned around to the camp, where Jason’s sour look was illuminated by a small, sad campfire.
Jason tossed Rich his tinderbox as he approached the campsite.
“I hope this means you won’t scream us out of our sleep tonight and you’ll start tomorrow off without your period,” Jason said.
“You never know,” Rich said. The period remark made him look at Melvin, who looked away, cheeks reddening.
Rich did the same thing he did last night, attempt to translate Kaftar’s spell. He managed to translate three other spells on the page.
The first was called “Equal Hardship” and it was ludicrous. The spell turned someone to stone at the cost of turning yourself into stone as well. Why the hell would anyone do that?
The others two were better, still a bit crazy but not outright suicidal. “Cursed Footsteps” made the caster lame for two hours but paralyzed everyone in the immediate area for twice as long. The other was “Mind Erosion,” where he could erase a selective memory from another mind at the expense of having a random memory of his own erased. That seemed kind of useful, but kind of dangerous too.
None of this helped him figure out his spell. He got another word out of the title, leaving him with the ominous sounding “Life Something Chain.”
He looked up from the books, his eyes strained and his body fatigued. Everyone else was out again, with the hourglass out of sand. Rich settled into his bedroll after waking Jason.
Thoughts of Rew started to buzz in his head. Was she OK?
He stopped himself. Not knowing was murder. But finding out could kill her.
One more spell, he told himself.