Guild Mage: Apprentice [Volume One Stubbed] 174. The Garden of Thorns

Liv used her frozen warriors rcilessly, throwing them at every threat that manifested itself between the ti her party entered the rift, and their arrival at the wall of thorns that surrounded the tower. She lost the first to a pair of diving hawks grown to enormous size: their talons, nearly as large as arming swords, pierced and then cracked the ice of a swordsman’s body, leaving nothing but chunks of ice scattered across the road.

Her two spearn pinned the hawks before they could ascend back up into the sky, but when a bear nearly the size of a house charged them, those soldiers were lost as well. By the ti that fight was done, Liv had only a one-ard soldier with a warhamr remaining.

Still, she considered the tactic successful. For a modest cost in terms of her mana reserves – less than she stored in her set of rings and bracelet – Liv had seen the party through not only the press around the fortifications in the gap, but through most of the valley and the shoals, as well. The ice warriors had preserved her friends for the more difficult challenges of the depths ahead.

Though of course, the terms were sothing of a misnor during an eruption. After losing the last, crippled conjured soldier against so sort of overgrown weasel, Liv was certain that they’d entered an area of mana just as dense as the depths of Bald Peak. The eruption was throwing out so much magical power that she began to worry about whether her friends would succumb to mana sickness.

For Liv, adapting her body to this kind of extre density was now almost second nature – in fact, it felt oddly familiar. There were strange side effects, however. She examined her left hand, where she could swear that her fingernails had noticeably grown in length. When she glanced over at her friends, Liv had the distinct impression that every one of them was in need of a haircut.

Liv pulled Steria off to one side and held the mare back for a mont, so that she could ride next to Arjun for a mont. “Keep a careful eye on everyone for signs of mana sickness, please,” she told him, in a low voice.

Arjun nodded. “Have you noticed the effects of the rift?”

“I notice you're getting a little shaggy,” Liv told him, with a smile.

The healer reached up to run a hand through his dark hair. “I’m not sure whether it's a deliberate spell, or simply the design of the rift,” he said. “But the mana doesn’t seem to discriminate between crops and people. I have a guess - I think that if we look over people’s injuries, we’ll find they’re healing up more quickly than normal.”

“Do you think they’ve worked Cail into it, sohow?” Sidonie asked, drifting toward their conversation.

“Cail makes things whole,” Arjun said, shaking his head. “I don’t feel any trace of it here. I suspect this is more a consequence of accelerating growth.”

“Your healer is correct,” Aira broke in. “When my mother originally created this rift, she designed it with everything necessary to produce crops in great quantities, all worked into enchantnts in the tower. Cer accelerates growth of all kinds – from the germination of seeds, to the actual size of the fruit produced in those orchards. Savel modulates the intensity of sunlight coming into the valley, which is why the entire rift is warr than the surrounding area. Ved purifies water of contaminants, Cem keeps the soil rich, and Ve ensures the precise weather required for each growing season. An entire array of enchantnts, built with the cooperation of half a dozen gods, when the world was still a place of wonders.”

An earthworm the size of a river-eel slithered up out of the ground at the side of the road, and cast about blindly. Rosamund kneed her horse forward, drew her sword, and sliced at the beast until it retreated, allowing them to ride past.

“If you grew up here, you know how it all works, don’t you?” Liv asked, from the front of the group.

“Not as much as you might think,” the old woman admitted. “It’s been a very long ti, long enough to forget. And I was so young.”

“Did she raise you speaking Vædic?” Liv asked.

Aira nodded.

“Blood and shadows,” Liv couldn’t help but curse. “You might be the only one still alive – other than Ractia, I an. There’s so many words I’ve wanted to make a spell, but don’t know. Larger numbers, for instance. I know Decm is ten, but what about a hundred? Do you know the word for wings?”

The old woman laughed. “Fetia, or Fetim, is what you want for wings. If I told you how to say a hundred or a thousand, would you imdiately try to conjure a thousand of those ice soldiers of yours, child? I don’t think you could handle it.”

Liv glanced back at Sidonie to see the other woman’s hand twitching, just above the notebook she kept strapped to her belt. She understood the urge, because she felt it as well. After this all was done, they needed to learn everything they could.

But not now. As the riders drew near to the wall of thorns, the last skulking mana beasts slinked away, keeping their distance as if by so common instinct from the barrier, with its wicked-looking points. Here, Liv could feel the mana growing yet more dense again, and it put her in mind of the expedition into the depths of the Well of Bones.

“Ring counts,” Liv said, just like Matthew had done on the way into Bald Peak over a year before.

“Twelve,” Arjun answered first, followed by Sidonie and then Rosamund.

“Eleven.”

“Six.”

Liv nodded; Rose had never had the greatest mana reserves among them, for all that her word of power could be quite impressive. “Rose, hold back on casting except for an ergency,” she commanded. “Arjun, conserve your magic for healing. Sidonie, from here on in focus on defending the elder with mana shields, and nothing else. I’ll handle offense, but if you can keep any enemies out of my face, Rose, that will help.”

“It won’t be animals you need to worry about – not from here on,” Aira said. She lifted her hand, and with a simple wave, Liv felt her authority extend to the wall of thorns. The vines creaked and groaned as they pulled back, until finally a round tunnel had parted for the group’s passage. Liv steered Steria forward, and Rose took a place at her side on her own horse. The two of them led the way through the tunnel.

The wall was thicker than Liv would have expected, from a first glance. She guessed that it asured perhaps thirty feet, enough to cast the middle into shadow. The thorns themselves almost reminded Liv of caltrops: they jutted out from the thick, woody vines in all directions from clusters, with sotis as much as a foot of space between. Each individual thorn looked like a sort of curved sword, and narrowed to a wicked point. At the edges of the tunnel, where the most light entered, Liv could see that every one glistened with a sort of oily, leaking sap.

“That’s the poison,” Aira told them. “Whatever you do, don’t touch it.”

“What would it do to us?” Arjun asked.

“Lucanian doesn’t have the correct words to describe the effect accurately,” the old woman complained. “It will cause your skin to be burned by the sun. To blister and burn, as if the affected area had been held to a torch.”

“And your mother grew these things on purpose?” Rose exclaid. “What a rusting stupid idea. Why would she do that?”

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“To keep away unwanted visitors,” Aira remarked.

Carefully, they rode out through the opening the old woman had made on the inside of the wall, and into the garden itself. The air was thick with the scent of flowers, which Liv saw scattered in great profusion all around, of all kinds. There were trees and bushes and grasses, so bearing fruits, so wrapped in vines. There were streams wending their way through the garden, and ponds. A bee flew up to Liv and landed on Steria’s saddle for a mont.

“It hasn’t grown large,” Liv remarked, staring down at the little insect.

“Mother had them designed that way,” Aira explained. “Adapted to the mana density without any propensity for increased size. They’re here to pollinate, not to be guardians. Hold up a mont.”

Liv and her friends all reined the horses in. There shouldn’t have been any path left after a thousand years, and yet there were wide flat stones, cracked here and there, sowhat overgrown or sunken into the earth in so places, yet recognizably once a road, all the sa. Up ahead, she saw a grove of trees with strange, spiky nodules nearly covering the entire trunk.

“What are those?” she asked.

“The roots of the trees are pressure sensitive, and they extend beneath the path,” Aira told them. “If they detect enough pressure, the outer bark of the trees explode outward, sending those spikes flying with the force of a crossbow bolt.”

“We could throw a rock,” Rosamund suggested, “and take cover. Let them use up all their – ammunition? – while we’re safe a ways back.”

“Don’t underestimate how far those things can travel, or at what speed,” the old woman cautioned Rose.

“Better not to set them off at all, then,” Liv decided. She drew her wand and conjured a disk of mana atop the ancient road just ahead of them, larger than she usually created. By her ntal tally, she herself had fourteen rings left, without drawing on any of her storage devices.

They crowded the horses onto the disc, which Liv then lifted up to skim along the ground about half a foot high. The horses hated it, of course, and it was all they could do to keep the animals from bolting, kicking, or rearing up. There was a mont, passing through the heart of the grove, when Liv looked at just how many of those small spikes were around them, and wondered whether even one of Jurian’s mana shields would be able to stand up to them all without being shredded away into nothing.

When she finally lowered the mana-disk on the other side of the grove, then allowed it to dissolve into motes of mana, Liv could tell she was not alone in breathing a sigh of relief. “We’re almost to the tower,” she said, as much to encourage her friends as anything else.

“We have to go around it a ways, however,” Aira pointed out, “in order to reach the entrance. We ca into the garden a bit off center. You’re all going to have to ride single file, through this stretch.”

“What does this one do?” Sidonie asked, as they approached a patch of plants whose enormous leaves, in thin, semi-circular pairs with thorns standing up at the edges, lay across the path, or in so places hung vertically so that they almost enclosed a passerby.

“If you touch them, they close like a mouth,” the old woman said. “So don’t touch them.”

“We could cut our way out though, right?” Rose asked, holding her horse back for a mont before she followed Liv, who took the lead.

“You could,” Aira confird. “But not before they begin digesting you.”

Liv had already erged from that section of the path when she heard an audible impact sowhere behind her. She whirled Steria around, picturing Arjun or Sidonie torn limb from limb, imprisoned, or already dead. Instead, she saw that Sidonie had dismounted, and held a handful of small stones.

“Fascinating,” the other girl said, adjusting her glasses before throwing another pebble. The leaves of the horrifying plants closed with such speed that Liv couldn’t even track it with her eyes.

“Sidonie. Really?” Liv chided her friend. “Co along.”

Aira Tär Keria, in the anwhile, had approached the great stone gates set into the white stone of the tower. Liv saw, to her dismay, that the tower had weathered the long centuries far better than the small rift up in the mountains. She saw no convenient cracks that could be used for frost wedging, to break their way in.

But the old woman simply slipped down out of her saddle and approached the door. She reached into her cloak and removed a circlet of wood, smooth on the inside, with thorns pointed out and up like a kind of crown. Very carefully, Aira put the circlet on her head.

“Is that the key?” Liv asked. She dismounted from Steria and handed the reins to Sidonie, then stepped up behind Aira.

“My mother gave this to when I was still just a little girl. It is proof of her authority and her trust.” Aira raised her hand, and the doors swung open in complete silence. “The tower recognizes the bearer as the hand of my mother, and will obey just as if any command was given by her.”

The horses were tied up together, and Liv and her friends followed the elder into the ancient halls. Unlike at the bottom of the Well of Bones, there were few signs of battle. Instead, vast empty rooms, where cloth and wood had long since rotted away and left only dust, opened before the party.

Aira moved as if almost in a trance, through beams of sunlight that fell down from windows set into the outer wall of the tower. “The lower levels here were her nurseries,” she explained. “This is where we cared for new seedlings, where we planted cuttings. There were tables upon tables of pots,” she recalled, perhaps as much to herself as to anyone else. “There’s a private waystone that way.”

Liv followed the direction of the old woman’s waved hand, committing it to mory in case of ergency. “We couldn’t have used the stone at Al’Fenthia to co directly here?”

The old woman shook her head. “No. That stone was for large scale agricultural transport, to move the crops out to all parts of the world. Mother didn’t want just anyone able to just appear in our ho. You could get back to the city from here, however.” She led them to a shaft at the heart of the tower, rising up, up, like a sort of hollow needle. Without hesitation, Aira stepped forward, not even waiting for the mana-disk to appear.

They stepped into the shaft, and the glowing platform rose, carrying them up past floor after floor. “Our rooms,” Aira said. “We used to eat our als out on one of the balconies, so that we could look out over the valley and see all the growing things. But today we want the control room.”

“Did every rift have one?” Sidonie asked.

“Every one that was built before the war, at least,” the old woman confird. “They were used to make adjustnts to the mana flow. Most of the ti it wasn’t necessary, but they always wanted to be able to take control in an ergency.”

“Could you stop eruptions from happening? At all?” Liv asked. The mana disc finally ca to a halt at the top of the tower, and the entire group stepped out into a control room that looked much like the one they’d found in the mountains, with great panes of glass covered in moving, glowing Vædic sigils. Aira walked up to the glass without hesitation and reached her hands up. The writing responded to her fingertips, and the elder began moving sigils about rapidly.

“If the ring was whole, perhaps,” Aira said.

Liv heard the scrape of a quill on paper, and was unsurprised to see that Sidonie had finally taken out her book, after having to hold back for the entire journey. The other journeyman was scribbling furiously, trying to take down everything the elder said.

“Everything is connected, you see –” Aira did sothing, and the center pane of glass was suddenly absent entirely of sigils. Instead, Liv saw a rotated ball, surrounded by a ring. On the ball were shapes – the continents. It was a picture of their world, the entirety of it, and at the old woman’s command, spots of light erupted from places Liv recognized: Coral Bay, Freeport, Bald Peak, and in the furthest north of Isvara, the Tomb of Celris.

So of the lights were green, but only a very few. Most were yellow, orange, or red – and the ring was shaded in the sa way. Liv could actually see the break, where the trinity had thrown down pieces onto Varuna.

“The ring absorbs power from the sun,” Aira explained, “and sends it down to what we now call rifts on the surface of our planet. So of the rifts gather power, as well, chiefly from wind or water. In addition to whatever other purpose they had, each one would convert that power into mana. Together, they were ant to raise the ambient mana density of the entire world to the level that would support Vædic life.”

“What’s left of the ring still collects power,” the old woman continued. “That power has to go sowhere: it can’t simply be stored indefinitely. So the ring attempts to send power down to the rifts on our planet.”

“Only a lot of them aren’t there anymore, are they?” Liv recalled. “Destroyed or damaged during the war.”

Aira nodded. “With the result that too much power is sent to the remaining rifts. That excess power erupts in great waves of mana when the rifts are overloaded. If I wanted to prevent this rift from erupting, I would stop any further transfer of power from the ring around our world. But that would only intensify eruptions elsewhere. And if we prevented too many rifts from erupting, the ring wouldn’t be able to expel enough power.

“Which would cause what, exactly?” Rose asked, from where she’d found a place to sit on one of the ancient benches.

“Eventually it would burst like an overripe fruit. Explosions of mana and wreckage would fall from the sky, uncontrolled, and where they hit –”

“Godsgrave,” Liv said.