THE CHANGE STONE: A MOST SECRET LETTER (beginning)
Most Private
To the Queen’s High Agent
By Secret Messenger
October the twenty fifth of this Year of Our Lord, 1889
My Dear Sir Robert:
The horrifying information you relate only confirms what has become clear to me, if not to the other fools in this University: the most desperate and dangerous of times has come upon us. You have requested knowledge of a secret history known only to two or three within these walls, and by my guess, to two or three powerful mages outside them; despite the singular nature of our association, I will comply only because of the horrific nature of what approaches. I also attach one absolute stipulation: I must ask you on your honor to destroy this translation (my own) as soon as you have read it. The source document itself is mystically coded, and none who could decipher it has felt it safe to preserve a version in plain language. In light of the prodigious memory you have exhibited from your student days on, this is surely a small request.
Here, then, is the full account of that final and most terrible meeting, now three hundred years gone, of the Mage’s Council.
This account I, John of Lincoln, leave to whoever of my order survives and has talent enough to read what I have committed to the clouds.
(Translator’s note: The manuscript was written on paper, wetted, mixed with seed in pellet form, and fed to seven captured crows, which were then released while the west wind blew. Although it was known that John had written an account, it was not retrieved until seventy years later, when the mage Alain De Guise reconstructed what had been done, worked out the words of the spell, and spoke them in a Lincolnshire field while releasing seven noisily cawing crows to a west wind. When the spell compelled his birds to return, De Guise watched as the shadowy presence of one of its long-dead brethren appeared beside each of the newer seven. Barely visible beyond an impression of dark feather, the older birds prompted the newer, who with great labor and difficulty, seemed to form and utter the words that had waited in the clouds all those years to be retrieved. These De Guise transcribed and donated to this University.
The spell itself shows the mastery of the mage who cast it, but De Guise’s recovery and completion of it--what a combining of magic and magical scholarship! Where is its like today?)
I was awakened from dreamless sleep to find the whole chamber about me shaking with what seemed the tolling of a deep and hidden bell. To anyone with the talent, this was as compelling an alarm as would be the pounding of soldiery on his door to a peasant. I knew at once that an act of magic more powerful than any I had known in a long life dedicated to the study of the art had been accomplished, and that it had taken place in the Great Chamber of the Mages. I hastily threw about me both clothes and what protections I could, and then requested Basquard to lead me through the Dark Pathways.
As soon as we entered, the cat headed straight for the sound of the bell.
(Translator’s note: Then as now, cats are attracted to great acts of magic. The Dark Pathways have been much theorized about, but little more is known than John says below.)
To awaken with the very stones of one’s bedchamber so shaken that the tower itself seems to tremble, and then of a sudden to step through one’s closet into the silent stability of the Dark Pathways--it seemed at first the very stuff of dream, but dream it was not. The mage lights, both the fixed and silent inward stars and the treacherously fickle Will O’ The Wisps, illuminated the darkness and outlined the sharper, harder night of the pathway beneath my feet, at the same time calling on something in me, as in every mage, to step off; shapes just out of sight in the shadows moved furtively and whispered words just so low as to tempt the walker to leave the Pathway to make them out. Somehow the traveler knew that these words promised whole worlds, paradises and hells, each filled with knowledge ready to be plucked by the adventurous mage and lying just beyond the shapes that whispered them. All this I stepped around as a mage must, treading on dark nothing as I followed the striped tail of the tabby. Before me Basquard moved at a steady pace, unhesitating in his choice wherever the dark paths divided, golden-green eyes meeting mine each time he turned his head in silent inquiry to see that still I followed after.
Of a sudden Basquard stopped, letting me stoop and take him into my arms, and then a single step took us into the Great Chamber of the Mages.
The wonder of that chamber, the pride and showcase of our art! An immense circular base of pure white stone almost a quarter mile wide, rising in seven concentric stone circle-steps to the dais at the top, yet suspended so high in the air that the purple hills and the white stone of the great city, Karas, could be seen stretching out below! Seen it all could be, for the whole Chamber was covered by a dome of glass spun so fine that only the glint of the sun’s rays revealed its presence. Up and down a massive open stone stair, the Chamber’s only connection to solid earth, soldiers and servants ascended and descended warily.
The chairs were placed around the edge of the highest and inner stone circle, and they were being filled as we appeared, seemingly out of thin air. Some had preceded me; some followed. I sat, the cat seeming content to remain in my lap when I placed him there; I then looked inward, and at what I saw endeavored to keep my face expressionless as Basquard, fur standing out stiffly, hissed. I remember dour-looking William of Widdersham arriving, glancing expressionlessly towards that same center, and saying “These always were more thrones than chairs, Astoret.”
“Thrones follow power,” Astoret responded from his chair, the highest of all the chairs, as he was the most skilled of all the Council. Tall and thin, face pale as ash like all the nobility of his race, golden hair long and swept back, clothed all in white, there could be no greater contrast to William, short, dark, broad and plain of face, dressed in coarse trousers and doublet, his short dark hair unkempt. For all that, I preferred William.
Just then Andre Malbecq, who had arrived but remained standing and staring into the center of the dais, threw up his hands and spoke in horror.
“So many children slaughtered! In the name of God, how could you?”
It was so, and their blood, some still visible on the stone to even unskilled eyes, had been infused with spells of the greatest power both before and after their deaths, so that now their tormented spirits, barely visible in swoops of motion and nearly inaudible cries, were bound to this chamber and what sat at its center.
(Translator’s note: That the mages present could see all this is not so great a proof of their talent as it might at first seem. Mages arriving not long after its completion see traces of any powerful spell; this abominable casting was so powerful that even absent the bodies, even granting the killings to have been done elsewhere and only the blood brought to the Chamber, almost any mage could have seen much.)
“The poor have many children,” were the words with which Astoret dismissed Malbecq.
Such abhorrent practices were not uncommon with the mages of Atlantis. Magic seemed to grow naturally there, like ripe fruit ready to be picked by any who walked by, and it had long been the center of our art, home to the most powerful of mages. Atlantis placed no restraints on the practice of magic; all knew that the Emperor and Council of Nobles held their places only because the Atlantean mages had little interest in the exercise of mundane power. Nowhere was the art so powerful, and nowhere so shameful.
“Was that not the apprentice Vazel?” asked William of Widdersham, nodding inward.
In the center of the dais was a chair of some plain dark wood written over with spells. On it sat a pale youth, blood upon his face, upon his dark curled hair, and spattered over his white singlet. Whether life or death held him, I could not tell, but his mouth was open and the spirits of the murdered children circled him, one at a time entering his mouth.
“It was necessary that the speaker be a mage,” Astoret said calmly. “His death brings incalculable advancement to the art which we all serve. His is a role to be taken on with pride.”
“Yet,” I found myself saying, “I wager he would willingly have ceded the honor.”
Astoret took no notice of me or my remark, instead addressing the figure in the chair.
“Vazel.”
The young man’s bloody head slowly lifted, blank eyes in a face I now confidently judged to belong to death turning to the speaker.
“I know you, Astoret,” the dead voice said.
Holy God forefend such a creature should name me so, and with such cause!
(Translator’s note: When knowledge is sought out of the mouth of the dead, the dark and horrible art of the necromancer decrees magical control of the moment of death: murder is therefore the most practical method. What speaks, some remnant of the deceased or something else, is uncertain and varying, but it is considered ill-fated to be recognized and addressed. I report all this as a scholar must, but as a man, I name this whole art foul, stinking murder.)
“Vazel,” Astoret said again, untroubled in voice.
The dead man spoke, but not to answer.
“I loved Illiana of the dark locks,” he said, his voice and face blank, and though I found that I had clenched my fists, Astoret remained dispassionate.
Not so Andre Malbecq, who with a sound of disgust and outrage, rose from his chair, turned, and vanished back into the Pathways. This also did not disturb Astoret.
“Vazel,” he said again, and when the figure in the chair remained silent, he spoke once more.
“Tell us of the Change Stone.”
At this a turmoil of voices, my own among them, echoed off stone and glass. The Change Stone! That any spell could take hold of that most powerful of objects stirred both amazement and reluctant admiration of Astoret for achieving it. In some, I among them, it stirred more of something else: fear. To attempt a spell so dark and violent on something so powerful was the height of madness.
Astoret’s voice cut through the rest.
“Silence! The Philosopher’s Stone, the Elixir of Life: what are these to the Change Stone? The Stone is the ultimate challenge to the Art! If magic is to be preeminent and the world to conform to its practice and rules, the Change Stone must be--”
His pause brought silence: silence absolute. He finished then with ’found,” but too late; all present knew his thought had been not that, but rather “controlled.”
Four of those present were Atlantean: the other three readied themselves to support Astoret. Surely control of the Change Stone would bring power absolute; such power could not be shared by many, if at all. Muttering began, hands were raised, staffs readied, even though unleashing such power in such a space as this was impractical and likely to be deadly to all.
And I? I sat motionless, Basquard on my lap. It was as if some defense of this place had enchanted me alone, and I watched helplessly, as one in a dream.