Batshit Mages - 9. Contemplation and Coma

"Please, I have to see him." Kjeld was visibily worried. The scaly man sitting on a low stool in the broad frame of the door blinked at him. What enthusiasm this young man had. It was surprising to him.

"Your agitation is quite unwarranted," he said patiently, "the boy is undamaged, according to the Magisters."

"Undamaged? Teague is undamaged?!" Kjeld knew by now that the scaly man was a nameless servant to the Magisters, a mage who had at one point undergone the Stunting and been magically crippled. Some, if not a lot of his emotional capacity apparently had gone along with his magical talent and left him a shell as stony inside as he looked on the outside. Still. Teague was a person, he had been found lying unconscious in the open door of Kjeld's room with a small blood stain at the back of his head. This was no way to talk about a student in your care. "Why can't I see him, then? If he's healed, why can't I talk to him?" Kjeld insisted. He wouldn't even talk this much if this broad man who looked as though he consisted partly of granite weren't blocking his way through. He would just go in and see Teague, whatever the Magisters said.

"Access is restricted," explained the scaly man blandly, and left it at that.

Yeah, no shit, thought Kjeld with a glaring once-over of the big man sitting before him. Rubbing the back of his head, he turned around and left.

At the door to his dorm room, Kjeld paused to glance at the dark little speck of drying blood on the hallway floorboards. And hoped dearly that whatever had happened to the boy had nothing to do with Siw. Contrary to what he had told Teague, his wife's ghost was not imaginary, but indeed very real and anything but benevolent. Since he had asked Teague whether he knew how to interpret flower messages he had searched the libraries for any information on that himself and eventually learnt what Siw had really told him. He closed the door and sat down at his desk, where the yellow rose and the letter lay. His note lying under the flower read:

'Lukewarm affection to jealousy

mutinous and envious in tone

rift, infidelity in love

waning passion, bloodless love

word of caution

I mean you harm.'

He stared at it thoughtfully. These were the hints he had gathered while trawling the tower's books for any meanings attached to yellow roses.

He had called her, initially. Grief and loss were common in Ordara with its endless war among its tribes, but he had always fancied himself above it. His clan was large and wealthy, Siw and he had been powerful, and Siw had always been victorious, always. Her sword dancers had been an elite force in their army, strong and capable, each and every one of her troops a seasoned, reliable veteran, and Siw herself had been the most cunning and resourceful of all. Despite the obvious hopelessness of her last order, to retake and defend Ardenshin, a useless old ruin, nothing in him had ever really understood that she could be defeated and killed. So instead of mourning his loss like all the ordinary people, he had been utterly convinced that Siw still existed somehow, and dedicated himself to finding a way to bring her back, or at the very least communicate with her. Law and custom be damned – Siw was exceptional, a heroine during her lifetime, the great love and centre of his, and it was simply wrong, an error in reality, that she was dead now. She couldn't be.

She had been following him ever since, like an invisible second shadow. She had been listening to him and sometimes even replied. He had shared more with her than even when she was alive. He had told her all about Teague.

For the first time now he wanted her gone.

He picked up the letter from cousin Oda. Her handwriting was small and neat, it reminded him of Teague's. But hers was more embellished, with elegant curves and spikes as their native language commanded. If Teague knew Gadok script, he mused, it would probably look like this. Only the boy would never express himself like this. He would not implore and appeal to sympathy and clan honour with artful little tricks of word flipping, alliteration and poetry. His letter wouldn't be half as long and it would simply list the things he wanted to tell Kjeld, then end in: "You are cleared. You may come back home." And Kjeld would come. Oda's longwinded way of asking him to come back to see his father on his deathbed – and her convoluted detailing of how the elders had agreed to suspend his death sentence that would ordinarily fall on him the moment he got off the boat and set foot on Ordaran soil – somehow felt wrong to him. It seemed uneasy, too constructed, too full of distracting superfluousness. It was like a written glamour charm that attempted to disguise the true purpose and meaning of the text. A labyrinth mask of words where most of the sentences were meaningless dead ends. It sounded so wrong. If he had any reason to suspect his own clan of this, he would be certain this was the lure to a trap set up to kill him. But what would be the purpose? His clan had nothing to gain from his death. They were a large but still close-knit family that loved and trusted everyone in it. He himself had broken part of that trust by practicing spirit magic, sure, but he had never endangered them in any way. None that he could see, anyhow. And why now? Why wait an entire year? This was how long his exile had lasted now, his sentence for calling on the dead. He had been in the tower for the better part of it and his closest relatives and friends, like cousin Oda and his father, had known how and where to reach him.

Maybe it was really just as she wrote: His father was dying and required him there, and the council of elders of all Ordaran clans had agreed to allow the visit for his father's sake. It was not unthinkable.

It stank of wet ash. The weight on him was not worth mentioning, but the smeary, crumbling sticks and lumps that covered him poked into his neck and his back, and slid around with some eerie creaking and moist smacking sounds whenever he moved. It was cold and wet, and the greyish water that kept dripping down pooled right under his face, rising ever so slightly until it touched the tip of his nose with a freezing prickle. Eventually he would have to move and get up, as much as the noises crawling through the gaps in the debris heaped on him made him want to drop unconscious again. There were wet thuds and splashes from boots and naked feet on the muddy ground, thin wailing and keening from far away, and the occasional shriek... grunts and gurgling, or snarling, he couldn't tell. And always the faint crackle of small fires, all around.

Teague had no idea where he was exactly, what this place was called – had been called – or whether it was even real. Something cold dripped on the back of his head and ran down his neck, down his throat and into his tunic. He shivered. His neck was stiff with trying to keep his head raised enough to keep his face out of the muddy puddle. He had to move. Maybe he could just walk away. If this was what he suspected, he would have nothing to fear, not for himself, anyway. Nothing permanent, anyway. Mala loved terrorising him, but his body always mended well and fast.

His limbs wouldn't obey him. They were stiff and shivered with tension and cold when he leaned sideways on one arm and brought the other up to shield his face from the bones and flesh that came tumbling down. Some of it was still warm and had a waft of roasting tallow about it. With a controlled swallow he forced down the bile. Vomiting wouldn't help. Magic would. He stared at the glistening black lump that sat in the ribcage he was supporting with his lower arm, inches away from his face.

I'm sorry, he thought as he poked his fingers through the ribs, digging into the stinking, warm mass trapped behind them.

"Dry," he whispered.

The flesh and bone he was gripping began to warm up a little bit and petrified, shedding small flakes and billows of dust. When he closed his hand into a fist the stiff human remains he was holding crumbled and rained down on him. With his other arm held over his face for cover he waved his hand slowly in a circular motion above himself, and any charred bodyparts that slid down and settled on top of him after one another cracked and crunched and trickled down around him as black grit and sand.

"Will you look at this?!" a familiar voice exclaimed excitedly. "I didn't know you'd be joining in! Look! Look! Your spell is magnificent! Look!"

Teague sat up in the ashen dust as it settled and wiped his face before he could see anything. Mala stood at the edge of this ex-pile of corpses with her arms spread out and a wild beam on her face. She wasn't looking at Teague, but rather beyond him, and he quickly scrambled up to his feet to look around as she asked him to. He was still surrounded by burned carcasses, but now they only piled up in a neat ring around a round patch of ash that the drizzling rain was now slowly turning into tangy black slush. His long tunic and breeches were covered in it, as were his hair and face, and his bare feet stood up to the ankles in it. It was so cold.

He looked back at Mala. The dust had settled on top of the corpses and the muddy ground around her but not touched her at all. Her black and brown robe with the rich silver embroidery along the hems looked clean and dry, as well as her beautiful wheat-and-brown hair. Pristine. She smiled at him.

She was rather pretty and her smile looked warm and friendly, but this only made him more nauseous when his gaze followed her encouraging nod and fixed on the black shapes trudging through the mud not twenty yards ahead. There were ruined, smoldering huts scattered all around them, smoking and steaming in the slow rain, parts of them still burning, and between them, between the piles of debris and corpses, of humans, goats, sheep, birds... there were people still standing. And walking.

A handful of them slowly shambled towards them. Their arms swayed uselessly along as their legs jerked forward. Every sudden lurch made a little slurping and splashing sound on the ground. Every thick droplet of rain that hit their charred skin hissed and dissolved into a tiny twirl of steam. The closer they came, the more details Teague could make out: Thin streaks of pink through deep cracks in their flesh, and brilliant red liquid oozing out of them. The polished sheen of smooth black arms, thighs and chests that looked like delicate obsidian armour plating. The short, sudden tremor that halted them once in a while and rippled through them under their stiff black sheet of skin. But they had no faces.

"… That wasn't my spell," Teague whispered. Mala laughed softly. She was really standing too far away to have heard him.

"Aw, don't you recognise it? I knitted it into a few elemental ones, and look! We created life!" She pointed at the blindly lurching bodies.

"You left, what are you doing here?" he asked, not knowing why exactly. He thought he might have sounded accusing but could not be sure with this overpowering nausea and dizziness obscuring his thinking. He just had the acute sense that Mala did not belong here. Neither did he, really, this was not the mages' island, but something about Mala's presence felt even more unsettling than it usually did. Her voice was stranger, too. It was not affected by the sounds and wind around them. As if it did not need to travel from her to him. He tried to ignore the shambling, hissing bodies and focused on her.

She had no presence. He could see and hear her clearly, but with the rain and mud not touching her, the wind and water not ruffling her hair or robe even a little bit, the flickering firelight not reflecting off of her skin or the silver thread on her clothes... it was as if she had been cut out of a very lifelike canvas painting and put out here as an ornamental addition to the scene. An afterthought of beauty to alleviate an otherwise complete nightmare. Her brightly smiling face turned to him again.

"Why, what am I ever doing? Trying to show you the right way. All you lack is the right amount of ambition. You could achieve so much," she drawled with an eerily intimate smile and tilted her head a little bit. Teague's stomach turned and he doubled over.

The ground he touched when he landed on all fours was dry. Rough and scratchy, but pliant in his grip. Softly rustling folds of stuffed fabric.

It was so quiet and dark. And warm.

"Finally," groaned Magister Braegan's dry, continually irritated voice. "You're backed up three days on the blood measurements." It rustled and creaked as she got up from the rickety chair standing in the otherwise bare corner of the quarantine cell. "Have those done by midnight," she commanded from the door before opening it and letting it fall shut with a hollow bang.

Slowly, gingerly, Teague turned around and sat up in his cot.