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  Terak shrugged. He knew nothing of magic. And now never will, he thought glumly as he crouched. The sky was turning brighter with the rising sun, and somewhere, the birds of the mountain were starting to call.

  “Here.” The Chief External threw Terak a wrap of food—dried meats and cheese and a small cheesecloth bag of dried berries. “Eat. You’ll need the energy.”

  As Terak ate, realizing he was actually hungry for once, the external talked.

  “The question is what does the Enclave guard and protect?” he said loudly, as if lecturing. “And why the Enclave has to do it so far up here, right at the top of the world, leagues away from other people and nations?”

  What people? Terak thought. He knew distantly that there were other kingdoms and races, like elves, but the Chief Arcanum had kept them concentrated—fixated—on the Black Keep and Enclave lore, suggesting that “All things will be known when you are ready.”

  The Chief External took a deep breath, as a chill wind pulled through their secluded dell.

  “The world that you are growing up in is a broken place, young elf. The races—humans, dwarves, and yes, even the elves—can barely tolerate each other. It is different the further south you go, but up here, the old rivalries and wars linger . . .”

  What rivalries? What wars?

  “What is more important for you right now, Acolyte, is this fact: The Enclave guards and protects the other nations and kingdoms below us. It guards and protects knowledge,” he said.

  The Chief External looked up for a moment, as if looking for the right words. “There was a time, long before you or I were born, when knowledge was used very, very unwisely. We’re still paying for those mistakes even now . . . And so, the Enclave was created to make sure those same mistakes never happen again. You are taught how to fight in order to defend the grimoires and scrolls that the Enclave has amassed. And you are taught how to study in order to understand them one day.”

  “But there is another part of the Enclave’s work—the external work we do—actively leaving the Black Keep to hunt down rare pieces of lore to bring back. That is the work that I represent, and also why you have never seen me about the keep,” the man said.

  “My name is Father Jacques. What you will be doing today, Acolyte, my test for you, will continue that fine and noble tradition.”

  The Chief External’s eyes met Terak’s.

  “You will be recovering for me something called the Loranthian Scroll—an artifact that the Enclave has been after for a long time, but up until now has never been able to reach.”

  Terak nodded that he understood.

  “We needed a null to get to it.” A pause. “But it will be dangerous.” The Chief unclipped a long-handled dagger and accompanying scabbard from his belt, setting it on the floor next to the now small carry-sack. “In here are the supplies you will need. A cloak, bandages, salve, alchemical compounds that I am sure you are familiar with thanks to Chief Arcanum—"

  “Why is this Loranthian Scroll so important?” Terak asked.

  It seemed the natural question in such a circumstance. He reached for the dagger. It was long handled, the blade wide for most of its length but curved toward the point. Almost a shortsword.

  The Chief External swallowed a cough of merriment. “You might be special, Terak, but you’re still only an acolyte. There’s a limit to the questions I’ll answer from white-belts.”

  5

  Complications

  Elsewhere, dawn’s early light was filtering through the barred windows of the Black Keep. The windows had no glass, just iron bars crossing their gap. All the better to balance and target through for the wall-defending fathers of the Enclave. This was one of the three windows that looked out of the westward monks’ tower, built directly into the outer walls and affording a view of the landscape below.

  Instead of those stern men and women the Chief Martial had selected for that task, this topmost tower room held a collection of very different people.

  “There. You see?” whispered the creaking sigh of a voice that belonged to the Chief Arcanum. The old man had never manned these walls—not even during the final days of the Orcish Incursions, when tides of the cruel creatures roamed the wilds on some strange and furious crusade.

  No, the Chief Arcanum hadn’t thrown spears or shot arrows from on high. He had been below in his halls, cooking up concoctions with which to blister, confuse, and burn.

  To be quite frank, despite all of his prodigious powers, the Chief Arcanum had never been a fan of heights. But the old man still forced himself to the task, because the stakes were so dear . . .

  “I don’t see,” murmured the voice of one of those he had summoned up here.

  It was Acolyte Torin, soon to be Novitiate Torin. He was blond-haired and good-looking, tall and full of the charisma of youth that the arcanum had never enjoyed. Beside this acolyte stood Acolytes Mendes and Reticula, both of them also looking forward to their new novitiate status.

  “I see,” the sharp-eyed, black-haired Reticula said, crowding in front of Torin. Down below, where the edge of the western walls started to climb back up the northern slopes, was a tumbled gorge of boulders, partially wooded with dense, scrubby trees. Through its heart snaked a roaring torrent of a river, which seemed to disappear straight under the foundations of the keep’s walls.

  Movement at the edge of the gorge showed two small figures making their way from the boulders. They struck out toward the ridgeways to the southwest. The black-garbed figures resembled ants to the spectators above.

  “You see below the Null Terak and a father.” The Chief Arcanum’s voice quivered with barely controlled contempt. “The father believes that he can test the null and prove that such a creature is of use to the Enclave! We cannot allow that to happen!”

  Reticula and Mendes shared a confused look. This outcome appeared to be the very worst that the arcanum could envisage.

  “Chief, sir . . .” Reticula bobbed her head in respect. “You have always taught us to ask questions, to know what our weaknesses and obstacles are.” She took a breath. “What is a null, and why is one so bad?”

  “Idiot girl!” The Chief Arcanum turned to confront her with a hiss.

  Although Reticula was as tall as the chief and no girl at eighteen or nineteen summers, she still blushed furiously and stepped back.

  “Remember your lessons!” the old man snapped. “Every living being is filled with magic. Everything of this world is filled with magic—every stone of the mountains, every tree, beast. From the fish in the River Tar down there to the river itself!” The chief swept a hand to the window, forcing his three students to observe. “Magic is the force that animates, creates, and sustains us! Without it . . .” The arcanum shook his head, seemingly lost for words.

  “Every now and again, once a generation perhaps, there is born one who is . . . wrong,” the arcanum spat. He squinted at the two shapes below. “They are called nulls. They have no natural magic. They shouldn’t even be able to breath or walk or think—and yet they can.

  “It is customary for nulls to be . . . set aside at birth when their abomination has been discovered.” the arcanum said darkly. “They are closer to the evils of the old sorcerers—the undead and the unliving—than they are to you and me.”

  The arcanum continued speaking.

  “The nulls present not just an insult to everything that lives on the world but a danger as well. Nulls have no natural gift for magic, and indeed, they are antithetical to magic.”

  Reticula, Mendes, and Torin looked puzzled at what that word meant.

  The Chief Arcanum snorted his disgust. He was always surrounded by ignorance! “All three of you saw what happened during the testing, did you not?”

  “Yes, sir,” the three would-be novitiates affirmed.

  “It seems that if you are to understand the gravity of the situation, I must give you a piece of novitiate-lore early. Those stones that I used to determine your magical aptitudes are made of a
substance called ochullax—a very rare mineral that responds, reflects, and concentrates magic, as wood enhances fire.

  “You saw how they were destroyed just by the hands of the null? That is the severe, existential danger that one such as Terak presents. At the moment, he is young and has not grown into his full being, but were he allowed to live, eventually he would be able to unravel magic itself!”

  The acolytes’ faces showed understanding. The Chief Arcanum was satisfied that they knew why he was so affronted by Terak’s existence. The elf was born to be the exact opposite of the arcanum.

  The exact opposite of life itself, if life was magic.

  “Worm,” muttered Torin, glaring at the form below. The Chief Arcanum said nothing to correct him.

  “I sensed it,” Reticula whispered in agreement. “There was always something wrong about him.”

  The Chief Arcanum nodded gravely. These three acolytes understood what even the great chiefs of the Enclave and the magister herself did not.

  “And so, I have chosen you three to be my emissaries. To be the hands of justice and sanity in these dark times,” the old man said.

  A fire kindled in the acolytes’ eyes.

  “The father, you see, believes that the null can do something that no other person can do. You three, I have chosen to prove him wrong. You will leave this place, and you will follow the null. You will retrieve the object he thinks he can get,” the arcanum said nobly.

  “And if it so happens that the null does not make it back from the task, it would be a blessing for all of us. For all of humanity!” the arcanum snapped. He added on a more satisfied note, “Do not think your services to the Black Keep will go unrewarded, Novitiates.”

  It was Torin who met the Chief Arcanum’s eyes and nodded with deadly seriousness.

  6

  Beastial

  The plan was simple, or so it seemed. All I have to do is to follow this path to an old shrine, where this Loranthian Scroll is supposed to be, Terak told himself.

  What, under heaven, could go wrong?

  Despite Terak’s continued questioning—Why does it take a null to get this scroll? How long has the Enclave known about the scroll? If it was so close by, then why has it taken this long for anyone to get it?—everything that he asked was met by a good-natured silence from the Chief External, who accompanied him until midday.

  Despite his limp and his age—sixth decade, perhaps?—the Chief External set a punishing pace that ate up the leagues. They stopped only twice in the long hours that followed, and only to drink from the nearby mountain streams, to eat a morsel of food, and to continue.

  By the time the sun reached its zenith, the pair had passed from the higher crags and into the sparsely wooded foothills with thin patches of grass on their ridgetops. Often, Terak would raise his head to look at the sharp pinnacles of the Tartaruks rising behind them. The air lost its chill and became somewhat warm, although the sharp mountain breeze teased the tops of the trees around them. Their view of the Black Keep became more distant as they curved westward from its cliffs and gorges. Eventually, it vanished altogether.

  “Here is where I must leave you, Acolyte,” the Chief External said seriously.

  They had reached the bottom of one of the ridges and stood beside a tall, black obelisk of Tartaruk stone.

  “A keep way-marker,” the Chief External explained, nodding at it. Terak saw the strange swirls and dots carved into its face. They were long-weathered and eroded by time, too much to see what picture they may once have created. Ahead of the way-marker lay swathes of wild meadows, before the dark curtain of forest ahead.

  Terak paused, an old habit from his training. If unsure, hold still. Practice your exercises. He could feel the apprehension and nervousness in his belly, as well as an undercurrent of excitement.

  The Chief External must have spotted these warring feelings. He gave Terak a reassuring pat on the shoulder with his three-fingered hand.

  “Just remember everything the Chiefs Martial and Arcanum taught you,” he said in a soft voice. “Consider this as any other test. You’ve been taught by the very best, Acolyte. All you have to do is remember just what they said.”

  I remember them calling me worm, Terak thought ruefully, but he nodded all the same as the Chief External raised his three-fingered hand before turning and disappearing back up the path.

  Terak scanned the path that extended across the meadows and straight into the forests. A new feeling swept over him.

  Freedom.

  It was so all-encompassing that he hardly knew what to make of it. He could do anything now that the chief was gone. He could run off into the woods and not look back.

  And why would I ever want to go back there? Terak cast a glance back up the ridge to the high gray spikes of the Tartaruks. They didn’t want him there, did they? They thought him a freak even before he had been declared a null . . . Whatever that is.

  “So, I have no natural magic. Is that really so great a crime?” Terak murmured to himself as he walked forward. Every step felt different, now that he wasn’t on the cold and unforgiving paving stones or mountainsides of his past. He felt like he was learning to walk all over again.

  But then Terak’s steps faltered. He remembered the look on the Chief Arcanum’s face and his and Gourdain’s chill words.

  “Terak is a null!”

  “‘ . . .the others will never accept him . . .”

  Was it just the Enclave who rejected his apparent lack of magic so completely? Or would the entire world?

  “What little I know of it,” Terak said aloud, pausing to look at the forest. There, in his belly and rising quickly, grew a spark of indignation. A spark of outrage for all the years of slights and insults that had been thrown his way.

  The fathers and chiefs of the Enclave had stolen his opportunity to learn about the real world. All he had to go on were the scraps of information that he had learned in the last few hours.

  It would be different with the Chief External, Terak thought. The chief—Father Jacques, as he called himself— said they, of all the fathers of the Enclave, left the Black Keep and traveled far. That thought filled Terak with excitement.

  “Assess your options. Calculate. Choose the correct path . . .” He remembered the words of his various teachers over the years. They were the only words he had to guide him.

  Terak knew that he was quick. And he was a good fighter, to a point. He also knew that he could remember better than most of the other acolytes. He would do well in the Chief External’s lessons. It wouldn’t be long before he had the knowledge, skills, and resources he would need to flee the Enclave for good.

  Besides, a part of him was intrigued by what had been revealed to him this day. I will find out what it means to be a null, and why that makes me special . . .

  Terak stepped into the eaves of Everdell Forest, totally unaware that this was the very place that gave him birth.

  The trees at the top of the world were old-boned and ancient. Winter pine, Terak recalled from his various arcanum lessons. Some of them had trunks so large that were he to attempt to put his arms around them, he would barely feel the curve. Their bark was like dark granite, formed into scales.

  Within a few paces under the eaves of the ancient forest, the air grew cold and the sunlight was next to nothing. The winter pines formed a dense mat of gray-green a hundred or more feet above him.

  Miraculously, plants persevered under the gloom. Terak noticed dark shrubs with succulent-looking purple berries and cruel-looking thorns.

  Demontree, Terak correctly identified. One of those berries would bring shakes and sweats, two would bring sickness—and a third?

  Well, it would be the last foraging that you did.

  The elf sidestepped the bushes gracefully, hopping from one gigantic, gnarled root of the winter pines to another. Such creatures that liked these dark and hidden places—spiders, insects, millipedes—skittered and rattled as he passed.

  The path woun
d its way through the trees. On many occasions, Terak saw that the roots had been cut away to allow it to progress.

  “Oof!” Terak tripped but righted himself with a leap to the nearest root. His simple leather-and-strap boots had caught on a rock edging the path. Deep and lustrous black, it was the same kind of rock as the way-marker.

  How old is this path? he wondered. He knew that the way-markers, and some parts of the Black Keep, predated the Enclave. He had said as much to the Chief Arcanum. But who had lived in this inhospitable place before?

  With these questions mulling his mind, Terak didn’t hear the crack of branches until it was almost too late.

  Sweet Stars! Terak swore, throwing himself to one side. The large, dark shape swung across the path to land on one of the roots a few feet away. It roared at Terak.

  Beastial! Terak had never seen one in the flesh, but he had heard one described by Father Gourdain.

  The creature crouched. Standing, it would be taller than he was. It had brown-and-black wiry fur covering its body. A shaggy mane sprouted from the thing’s head. Beastials were humanoid, although their feet were wide and splayed, and they had short, hairless tails behind them.

  The strangest thing about them, however, was their boar-like, tusked face. The snout was narrower and a little lower than that of the roast pigs that Terak had seen on the rare Feast Days. The thing’s small black eyes were placed forward, unlike on a normal pig.

  Of the many things the Chief Martial had said about them, one was that beastials roamed through the deep, wild places searching for easy prey . . .

  And that they hunt in packs.

  Knife. Knife. Knife! Terak panicked as he stumbled back. One hand moved to his belt where the long handle sat. He was already pulling it out as the creature gave out a loud, snorting hoot and leaped at him, its hands stretched out, its talons blackened and cracked—