Free Defiant Peaks (The Hadrumal Crisis) by Juliet E. McKenna

you bring one of Ostrin’s priesthood here?’ He glanced up at the ceiling. ‘I dare not leave him alone.’
    ‘Tonight?’ Jilseth hadn’t thought that Kerrit looked mortally ill.
    Resnada looked at her, beseeching. ‘If his brain is swelling, the longer that goes unchecked, the more his wits will suffer. I can try a trepanning but that brings its own risks. Ostrin’s priests will be able to learn what Kerrit cannot tell me, so we can decide the best course of action.’
    Jilseth wondered if the apothecary realised that the local priests’ healing lore was in truth aetheric magic, the last tattered remnants of the Artifice which had once underpinned the Old Tormalin Empire. Those arcane enchantments were now reduced to meaningless syllables learned by rote and mouthed over the sick and dying to inconsistent and often indifferent effect.
    This was what Kerrit had studied for these past ten years, filling his house with gleanings from temple and shrine archives, ancient letters sent between Relshaz’s merchant houses, even copies of the Magistracy’s proclamations from generations ago.
    Jilseth had no argument with seeking knowledge for its own sake. That ideal underpinned Hadrumal’s existence. But she was at a loss to see the value of studying an obsolete magic which Kerrit couldn’t even use, precluded by his own magebirth from working even the most insignificant aetheric enchantment.
    But if the apothecary was confident that Relshaz’s priests could help show him how best to succour Kerrit, Jilseth would ask for their help without delay.
    ‘Is there anyone particular I should ask for?’
    ‘Brother Tinoan,’ Resnada said promptly. ‘One of Ostrin’s senior deacons.’
    The title meant nothing to Jilseth. Hadrumal had no shrines and she was Hadrumal-born, her family settled on the wizard isle for five generations. She looked around the immaculate kitchen. ‘Please open the window.’
    Ordinarily she wouldn’t risk a translocation from within a building but at present she judged it would be more hazardous to be seen working magic outside this house.
    Resnada shoved at the metal window frame. It squealed open to allow muted music and sounds of celebration into the silent kitchen.
    Jilseth wove her spell. This time she sought the hidden niche which Velindre had first shown her, tucked between two buttresses on the seaward side of Relshaz’s great marble temple. She took care to ward her magic against the elemental power of the waters, bolstered by the tidal surge summoned by the Greater Moon’s full. Jilseth could only be thankful that the Lesser had barely reached its first quarter.
    As soon as her affinity was safely balanced, Master Resnada’s inarticulate astonishment faded from her hearing. All sensation was overwhelmed by the spell and then she felt solid ground beneath her boot soles once again.
    She stood on the temple’s wide foundation. Jilseth could sense that this ground had once been the highest hillock in the delta, even before the river had been tamed by the Relshazri network of canals linking the inland wharves facing Caladhria and Lescar with the deep-water docks for sea-going vessels.
    She smelled the salt wind from the sea. For a timeless instant, the elemental power of those boundless waters surged into her spell. She didn’t merely feel the sullen brine confined within Relshaz’s harbour walls, nor even the greater expanse of the Gulf of Lescar, bounded to the east by Tormalin’s long thrust southwards and to the west by the bulwark of Caladhria overlooking the northernmost Archipelagan islands.
    Jilseth’s mage senses brushed against the immensity of the oceans, beyond the Cape of Winds to the east and past Cape Attar to the west. She could even feel, infinitely faint and some impossible distance away, the ties between those two oceans, divided by the Archipelago. Every sea and ocean was ultimately linked through the endless circulation of water through river and tide, cloud and