Madness and Magic- The Seers' War Read online

  MADNESS AND MAGIC

  Greg Curtis

  Madness and Magic

  Greg Curtis

  Digital Edition

  May 2019

  Acknowledgements:

  As always this book could not have been written without the love and support of my family and I am ever grateful.

  Cover Art:

  The glorious cover art for this book was done by Yvonne Less, Art 4 Artists.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One 5

  Chapter Two 12

  Chapter Three 21

  Chapter Four 27

  Chapter Five 34

  Chapter Six 38

  Chapter Seven 45

  Chapter Eight 49

  Chapter Nine 56

  Chapter Ten 63

  Chapter Eleven 70

  Chapter Twelve 78

  Chapter Thirteen 85

  Chapter Fourteen 93

  Chapter Fifteen 96

  Chapter Sixteen 99

  Chapter Seventeen 103

  Chapter Eighteen 111

  Chapter Nineteen 121

  Chapter Twenty 125

  Chapter Twenty One 130

  Chapter Twenty Two 135

  Chapter Twenty Three 139

  Chapter Twenty Four 146

  Chapter Twenty Five 153

  Chapter Twenty Six 162

  Chapter Twenty Seven 166

  Chapter Twenty Eight 171

  Chapter Twenty Nine 175

  Chapter Thirty 178

  Chapter Thirty One 183

  Chapter Thirty Two 187

  Chapter Thirty Three 193

  Chapter Thirty Four 207

  Chapter Thirty Five 211

  Chapter Thirty Six 217

  Chapter Thirty Seven 224

  Chapter Thirty Eight 232

  Chapter Thirty Nine 239

  Chapter Forty 247

  Chapter Forty One 252

  Chapter Forty Two 258

  Chapter Forty Three 262

  Chapter Forty Four 269

  Chapter Forty Five 276

  Chapter Forty Six 289

  Chapter One

  It was late. Late enough that Baen was wondering whether he should close up shop for the day. Business had been good that day. There was plenty of coin in the register. It was now late afternoon and he was unlikely to see many more customers before five bells rang. Most of his trade came during the midday rush. Why not go upstairs and make himself comfortable in the easy chair beside the front window of his home, and watch the sun set with a cold ale in one hand and a good book in the other. Just as he did most nights. He could even think about preparing dinner though it was probably too early. Or he could head up to the roof and watch the sun go down from his private garden.

  Baen reluctantly pushed aside these thoughts. He had a business to run. What sort of storekeeper would he be if he just closed his shop whenever he felt like it? So instead he settled back in his seat behind the counter and did what he usually did when the shop was quiet. watching the people of Cedar Heights wander past his front window. The shop had a series of large, lead-light windows that gave him an excellent view of the street outside – though admittedly the diamond shaped panes of glass distorted things a little. If he wanted to Baen could have instead sat down in one of the button leather couches he had put in the bay window front, to allow people to sit down and read. But he didn’t. His own seat was comfortable enough.

  Most of those who wandered past were well dressed by the standards of a small provincial city. It might not be Greenfields, but Cedar Heights was still a well to do city of fifty thousand people. Peoples' clothes were generally made of good cloth and were neat and tidy. Few had rips or tears in them. Few had hair that was unkempt or faces covered in dirt. But then his store was in a better part of town.

  Baen was glad he had decided to open the store on this street. It had been one of the first decisions he'd made when he'd thought about opening it. Naturally it had cost a lot more to buy the premises here than in other parts of town, but those people who bought books were generally those who had both spare coin and spare time. And it was fortunate that he'd been given the coin. His father had provided it when he'd told him he wanted to open a store. Since then he'd become far richer. The fact that he had a private gold mine also helped. But while he could have bought a castle somewhere else and retired years ago, he never had. He wanted to sell books in the city that was his home.

  Of course, there were some aspects of the city he wasn't so fond of. Baen’s brow wrinkled slightly as he watched one of those aspects go barrelling by, rattling the lead-light windows in their frames as it did so.

  Steam chariots! He cursed the sight of the foul contraption. Whoever had invented the accursed things should have been shot! Actually, shooting would have been too good for him. There had to be something more painful they could have done! The bloody things were a canker on the city. And they were everywhere!

  Everything about them was an offence. From the sheer noise they made as their light weight steam engines roared like angry lions, to the way that they raced around the streets like out of control horses, sending people scrambling for cover. Unsurprisingly they crashed rather frequently. As for the drivers of the engines, if their language was anything to go by then they must have come from the foulest quarters of the city. For the only language they seemed to know were the curses they yelled at everyone as they demanded that they get out of the way. The passengers were no luckier. They stood in the attached gondolas, staring at the back side of their leather clad driver crouched over the raging steam engine in feet in front of them, and held on to the handlebars for dear life.

  What was wrong with a horse and carriage?! That was what he kept thinking whenever he saw or heard one of the contraptions. You could sit down in comfort inside the carriage, secure in the knowledge that you would reach your destination without crashing into something or being hurled out of an open gondola into the streets when it took a corner too fast. And at least they didn’t produce clouds of black smoke that left a residue on your skin and a certain smell to your clothes. Failing that they could have taken a steam wagon. Maybe they were slow and you had to share your ride with thirty other passengers, but at least they weren't quite so loud or so dangerous as they chugged along sedately.

  But no. Someone in his infinite idiocy had decided the best option was to take away half the wheels of a wagon, strip out most of the weight and the seats and body, and then change the engine design so it ran twice as fast. Clearly that person also thought that omitting some safety controls and having the chariots driven by lunatics would make it a more exciting ride.

  Exciting? Huh! The word really didn’t go far enough. Terrifying was more accurate when the damned things blew up every so often!

  Fortunately, his annoyance didn't last after the steam chariot disappeared from view, and he was once again left in the peace and quiet of his store. But then a face he recognised appeared in the window.

  It was his sister. Baen groaned quietly as he watched her walk past the shop front to his door, and for a second he hoped she would keep on walking and not open the door. But of course she did. Why else would she be in this street? Fielder's Line wasn't anywhere near the family home.

  It wasn't that he didn't like Aribeth. He loved her. But she was a year older than him and because of that year seemed to take it as her mission in life to order him about as if he were a child. She had always done so and didn’t seem to take into account that they had both since long passed the age of adulthood. It was just his luck that she had decided to turn up on a Friday afternoon, he thought. That could not bode well for his previously planned quiet weekend.

  W
hat would it be this time, he wondered as she pushed open the door and made the little bell ring? Afternoon tea with Aunt Marigold? A social engagement he simply had to attend? He'd already planned on having Sunday lunch with his family as he always did. But couldn't he have the rest of the weekend to himself?

  “Aribeth.” He greeted her as she stepped inside.

  “Baen,” she returned the greeting. And then she stopped and started running her fingers along the shelves. “At least it's clean for once,” she announced after she'd examined her fingers. Then she stared at his counter. “And I've told you before that should be marquetry. What self-respecting noble wants to be served from a man in a tatty tweed jacket standing behind a slab of barely varnished oak? It gives a terrible impression.”

  “I'm having Mrs. Perkins come in twice a week now to clean the whole house,” he defended himself. Of course she didn't clean the entire house. She cleaned the shop front and the back room, and of course the two floors above. Sometimes she even went up to the roof garden. But she never went down to the basement. He couldn't blame her for that though. She had no idea there was one. To her the stairs leading down to it didn't exist. There was nothing there but a blank wall.

  “Daily would be better,” Aribeth told him as she wove her way through the rows of shelves to reach him. “And you're looking thin. Are you eating well? A cook would be a good idea. Or better yet a full-time housekeeper. You have the room.”

  “But not the coin.” Actually that wasn't true. He had all the coin he needed and a lot more thanks to his somewhat innovative means of acquiring stock for sale and of course his gold mine. But he was happy living alone. A live-in maid would have driven him mad.

  He still hadn’t quite worked out how to tell his family about the mine. They would have laughed at him because the last of its gold had been spent, or at least it was to those trying to access it by non-magical means. And were he to explain how he was mining it they would have been scandalised to discover he was using magic; something no one in decent society would think of doing. Baen thought about the newly minted gold pieces that filled his desk drawer and sighed. How could he ever explain them to his family? The truth was that he couldn't. It was easier to keep that to himself.

  “Father would pay. You know that. Mother would insist.”

  “But I wouldn't want that,” Baen told her before changing the subject. “So, what brings you here? Shouldn't you be out bothering poor old Edders?”

  Not that poor old Edders really minded her bothering him as far as Baen could tell. He might claim to be a man's man and not interested in marriage, but every time he looked at Aribeth, Baen could see the look of a man in love in his eyes. Edderson Farnsworth the Third might not understand it, but he had already been hooked. Now he was just being reeled in. Baen expected to hear wedding bells by the end of the year.

  “Edderson's busy. Doing stock take all weekend.” She pouted a little. “And stop calling him Edders! You know he doesn't like it!”

  Actually, Edders was quite comfortable being called Edders. It was Aribeth who didn't like it. She thought it was demeaning in some way. He was nobility after all. Minor nobility perhaps, but she didn't care. As long as he had a title. After all, the Walkertons had all the wealth they needed to wander through the upper echelons of society. It was only the title that they lacked. Marrying Edders would finally propel his sister into the station in life she dreamed of. Edderson’s family for their part had the title, but they were dirt poor – hence the reason poor old Edders was doing the stock take instead of employing someone else to do it. The nobility working? It was practically a disgrace!

  “Anyway,” she continued, “it's the spring garden festival in a few weeks, and we thought it would be a good chance for you to show off your roof garden. Maybe hold a small gathering for a few select people.”

  “No! Absolutely not!” Baen didn't even have to think about it. “I'm not having strangers traipsing through my home!”

  And it wasn't just because he hated the thought of strangers in his home. He also had to worry about whether these people might see something they shouldn’t. His family knew he was “gifted” – they regarded it as a minor shame and refused to speak of it. But to the rest of the city he was just a bookseller and son of a wealthy trading family. He didn't want that to change. If someone accidentally leaned against a wall and discovered that it wasn't actually there and then found their way down to his basement, it would change fast.

  Most people viewed magic as a joke. Something taken up by charlatans and tricksters. Palm readers, crystal ball gazers and illusionists. Those who performed actual magic were considered pitiful wretches; perhaps even an oddity. He didn't mind that. But that didn't mean he wanted the world to discovered he was one of those oddities. The rest of the family wouldn't want it either. Because the Walkertons were already a family of oddities. He had an aunt and a grandfather with their own gifts. It was the secret family shame. If the truth about Baen’s oddness came to light then he had no doubt that the truth about his aunt and grandfather would also eventually be discovered.

  “But it'll only be a few and they will come from the cream of society,” she protested. “People of refinement!”

  “And I'm only a bookseller. Bring them to Aunt Martha's home as you do every year. She loves having people to show the garden to.”

  He wasn't sure that was true. In truth all he really knew was that his aunt loved wine. She was unfortunately something of a lush who had to be dressed by her servants every day and then spent most of her time propped up in a seat drinking fortified wines and slipping in and out of consciousness. But she loved to play the part of a proper woman, particularly when it involved the opportunity to consume her favourite beverage in the company of her peers. Besides, her garden was magnificent. A fact his father bemoaned regularly since he had to pay for the gardeners.

  “Unfortunately, she's had another of her turns and the physicians have said she has to stay in the convalescent home for several weeks.”

  “Ahh!” Light dawned as Baen realised why she was asking him for the use of his roof garden. And he wasn't fooled by her diplomatic niceties. “You mean she's drying out again and you can't really show off her garden without her.”

  It happened every so often. Usually when Aunt Martha became so drunk that she did something rather embarrassing in public. After that she would be taken in hand by their father and he would send her away to a convalescent home to sober up while they put out the word that she had taken ill once more. Although it was often deeply mortifying, Baen rather suspected that his father revelled in each of her transgressions, as it gave him yet another opportunity to complain about the shortcomings of the family.

  “Don't say that!” Aribeth admonished him a little too quickly. “By the Lady show some propriety! She's ill. Again.”

  “She's a drunkard!” He corrected her. “A sot! A lush! The whole city knows it! So, what did she do this time?”

  “Don't be crass! That's your aunt you're talking about! A well-respected member of society.” But it was difficult for Aribeth to hold a straight face as she said that. So difficult that her eyes quickly dropped and she seemed to find a detail in the construction of her shoes that consumed all her attention.

  “What did she do?” He persisted. He knew she'd done something. Especially when Aribeth had invoked the Lady's name. She only did that when she was desperate.

  “Alright then,” Aribeth relented. “But you can't say anything to anyone. Promise?”

  “I promise,” Baen agreed easily enough, even as he considered briefly crossing his fingers behind his back. Aunt Martha's drunken exploits were legendary and would earn him a lot of free drinks at the gentleman's clubs he sometimes frequented.

  “You remember that there was that ancient story about some woman riding naked through the streets of the King's city centuries ago?”

  “Oh shite!” Baen instantly knew what she was talking about. But he wasn't quite sure whether to laugh or
cry when he realised what Aribeth was telling him. “That was her a couple of weeks back?! Aunt Martha?!” He'd thought it was a joke when the criers had started telling everyone about an overweight, middle aged woman on a horse galloping stark naked through the city in the middle of the night, shooting in the air with a brace of pistols and leading the city guard on a merry chase in some sort of drunken recreation of the ancient tale.

  “Father must have been mortified!”

  Why, he wondered, did he feel a sudden need to cover his mouth with his hands? And then he realised – it was to keep Aribeth from killing him when he burst out laughing. But it wasn't easy to hide his amusement, and she wasn't fooled. The Walkertons were always concerned with appearance. They had aspirations. They went to the Temple regularly and donated generously. They were always well dressed. They made sure to show their wealth to the city on every possible occasion. And of course they hid their family black sheep away. Black sheep like the drunken aunt out riding naked in the middle of the night! Or the other oddities in their family. Oddities such as his grandfather and other aunt. Oddities such as him too he supposed.

  “Don't you dare laugh!” she scolded. “It's not at all funny! Father was pulled out of bed and called to the city gaol in the middle of the night with a basket of fresh clothes for her. And then he had to pay a small fortune for her to be released without charge. Pure extortion! But if it had gone to the Magistrate, the gods only know what he would have decided!”