Read Online Magesong by James R. Sanford - Free Book Online Page A

heaved in the churning waves. 
Ephemeris climbed over the side and down into it easily, without much thought. 
He had been orphaned and sent to sea as a cabin boy at the age of ten, and
although only two years passed before he was noticed by a supplicant of the outer
circle and brought to the tower, he never lost his sea legs or the desire to
master a ship of his own.
    After landing at the tiny beach just inside the sea cave,
the only place within thirty leagues a boat could get ashore, the crewmen
hauled the boat halfway out of the water, and Ephemeris stepped onto the black
sand.  The flow of the Essa was strong here, strong as it was in the tower; he
had forgotten how good it felt.
    He sent the men back to the ship then found the crevasse at
the back of the cave.  A step up onto a boulder, a quick scramble up another
slab, and he was out, facing a gargantuan swath of undulating black rock.  The
pocked and pitted landscape looked like the surface of an enormous black
sponge, with every delicate flair of stone sharper than a sword.  Even the
smooth places hid tiny knife points.
    There was no path across the ancient lava flow as very few
of his brothers and sisters ever arrived by the Sea Gate.  Ephemeris himself
hadn't come this way in years.  Like most of his fellows, he usually docked in
Port Toscarbi and made the three-day journey across the island, but this time
he wouldn't be staying long.  They all thought of him as more mundane, less
spiritual, for maintaining a private yacht.  They saw it as a weakness, as a
tie to the material, and not for what it really was:  an object of power.  Sure
as any enchanted ring or eldritch book or any great device made in the high age
of the magician, his ship gave him a power few others had.  The inner circle
remained defiant of this scientific age, but Ephemeris would seek power in the
unseen future as well as the forgotten past.
    He came to the entrance of the tower a quarter league beyond
the edge of the Black Tongue.  A smaller, man-size door had been cut into a
huge iron-strapped gate blackened by age.  He waited there, chaffing slightly
at the affront because whoever was doorkeeper these days had certainly been
told of his coming by the novices in the watch windows.  This was his penance
for arriving in a worldly costume.
    The little panel in the small door opened to reveal a
lovely, girlish face within a hood.  It was Anemone, in the white and yellow
robes of the outer circle no less.  Being of no great talent in the art, she
had climbed above the rank of initiate rather quickly, he thought.  The fanatic
types often did.
    "Speak traveller," she said, demanding the ritual
from him.  If he said anything but the formal response, she had the right to
refuse him admission.  He could tell by the dancing light in her eye that she
would do it too.  Fanatic.  He would have to do something about her.
    "I come as a pilgrim, to supplicate myself before the
Unknowable Forces."
    "How are you known?"
    "By the sign of the seventh essence," he said,
tracing the symbol on his forehead, "and by the name Ephemeris, of the outer
circle."
    The panel slid shut and he heard the snap of the bolt.  The
small door swung open, Anemone standing there with the doorkeeper's staff in
one hand.  Ephemeris remembered when he had stood his year as doorkeeper.  That
staff could paralyze with one touch, and he had thrilled with its power each
time he admitted someone.  That had been ten years ago.  He had learned enough
since then to know how foolish he had been.
    She looked at the glove tucked into his belt and cleared her
throat.  "Enter as a petitioner, Ephemeris."
    He started to walk past her when she said, "You seem to
be in a hurry this time.  Some cause for excitement?  Important news?"
    "I have no word of it , if that is what you
mean."
    "I simply meant, is there anything a sister should
know?"
    "No," he said, "there's nothing you should
know."
    She looked hard into his eyes,