The spellbook ofDivine Magic

The boy is fourteen and this is his first hunt on the cliffs of Curracurrang, and his hands are shaking on his spear. Kaelu, the Zephyr priestess of the eyrie, folds her great wings and lays two fingers on his brow, murmuring a prayer to the wind. Nothing visible happens. But for the next few minutes, as he clambers down toward the goat ledges, his footing is a little surer, his thrust a little truer, and his luck a little kinder than it has any right to be. It is enough.

The young envoy from Mohenjo-Daro has one audience with the queen of Sheba, and he is sweating through his silk. Before the doors open, a priestess of Ishtar catches his sleeve in the anteroom, touches his cheek and whispers a line of scripture. He walks in taller. For the next several minutes he is witty, warm and quick, and the queen laughs twice. He will spend the voyage home wondering where that charming man came from, and why that man vanished the moment the audience was over.

Far beneath the snows of Frislandia, the dwarven priest Thrain stops at the edge of a cavern his clan has never seen before. The lantern light dies a few yards out. He raises his hammer, speaks a word to Atlas, and flings the blessing forward like a thrown stone. Eighty feet away, a pool of steady white light blooms on the cavern floor, twenty feet across: a ring of pale stalagmites, the glint of silver ore in the walls, and a very surprised family of cave fish in a still black pool.

The savant Nebamun has catalogued scrolls in the Library at Acheron for thirty years, and he has learned to distrust anything wrapped in red linen. Before unrolling the newest arrival, he murmurs a short prayer to Heru and looks. For a single minute, everything within a few steps of his desk is laid open to his sight. The ink on the scroll glows faintly. So does the seal. So, alarmingly, does a small dead beetle tucked inside the wrapping. Nebamun sends for tongs.

The ghoul comes up out of the embalmers' cellar in Acheron with its jaws dripping and its eyes on the little acolyte. Priestess Tuya is faster. She thrusts out her hand, and a bolt of pure white astral light blazes from her palm across the courtyard and strikes the creature full in the chest. Unholy flesh burns twice as fiercely as living meat would. The ghoul shrieks, reels back smoking, and tumbles down the cellar steps. Tuya follows it into the dark, her hand still glowing.

The spear went deep into the Cimmerian trapper's side, and his companions have carried him three days to the little shrine in the hills. Brannagh, an old priest of Og, takes one look at the blackened wound, kneels, and lays both broad hands upon it. He prays, not loudly. The trapper gasps as warmth floods through him, and the torn flesh knits closed beneath the priest's fingers until only an angry pink scar remains. Brannagh sits back on his heels, pale and sweating, and asks for water.

Twelve warships of Atlantis lie at anchor in Maelstrom Bay, waiting to sail against the corsairs, and the admiral wants to know if the gods approve. The priest of Poseidon stands at the bow of the flagship, asks his single question aloud, and waits with the whole fleet watching. For a long moment the sea is still. Then a silver fish leaps clean out of the water beside the hull, once, twice, and falls back with a splash. The admiral lets out a long breath and orders the anchors raised.

The witch's summoned fiend crashes through the shutters of the magus's study in Findias, all horns and hunger and stinking breath. Nikon does not reach for a weapon. He speaks the name of his god and a circle of pale protection springs up around him, ten feet in every direction. The fiend lunges and hits the edge of it as if it were solid glass. It howls and claws at the air, circling, but it cannot come in. Nikon sits back down at his desk and begins to write a message for help.

The expedition into the Sarakan Jungle has lost half its supplies to rot and the water from the river smells of death. Sister Ilse, a savant of a scholarly order, lines up the waterskins and the moldy flatbread on a log and prays over them. The stink vanishes, the mold fades, the water runs clear. Then someone points out that the expedition's only healing potion was sitting among the waterskins. Everyone stares at it. There is no telling, until someone drinks it, whether its magic survived the prayer. Ilse decides to hope.

The spotted fever has swept through the poorest lanes of the City of Tang, and the priest Wu Tao has been walking them since dawn. In a cramped room above a noodle stall he finds a girl of seven burning up on a straw mat, her mother weeping beside her. He kneels, lays his hand on her forehead, and prays to Shang-Ti. The fever breaks under his palm like a wave on a rock. The girl opens her eyes and asks for food. Wu Tao rises stiffly and moves on to the next door.

The necromancer is long gone, but the sentry he touched still stands rigid at the gate of Mehedra, eyes wide, one foot raised mid-step like a man carved from wood. His comrades have been shouting at him for ten minutes, and nobody knows how long it will last. Paladin Theodoros pushes through the crowd, lays a gauntleted hand on the frozen man's shoulder, and speaks a short prayer to Atlas. The sentry's foot comes down with a thump. He staggers, gasps, and then, to everyone's delight, finishes the sentence he began ten minutes ago.

The elven paladin Faelan takes a room at the Inn at the River's End with a single request: the room beside the stair. When the house falls quiet she kneels, prays, and lets her senses spread outward through the walls, a hundred feet in every direction. The stable boys, the snoring merchants, the cook: nothing. Then, in the cellar under her feet, something cold and patient and utterly evil, waiting in the dark where no one can see it. Faelan rises and quietly buckles on her sword.

The rope bridge is gone, and the only way up to the besieged eyrie is a sheer cliff face in the Tara Mountains. The human climber roped to the Zephyr priestess is good, but not this good. Kiri touches his wrist and asks the wind for its blessing. His fingers find holds he would have missed, his feet settle like a cat's on ledges no wider than a thumb. For ten swift minutes he climbs like a spider. When the blessing fades he is lying on the ledge, laughing and exhausted.

The forger has been fooling the treasury of Avalon for a year, and the savant Rhodri has been asked to look at the latest batch of silver pieces. He prays briefly, and the world sharpens. The candlelight seems brighter, the room louder, every scratch on the table suddenly clear. He turns the coins one by one under the lens, and there it is on the fourth: a tiny flaw in the king's crown, a missing leaf. He marks it quickly with wax, before the prayer's keen edge dulls again.

Every horse in the stables of Skara screams when the young knight comes near, and has done for a month. Eira, a priestess of Hawwa, lays her hand on his brow and hesitates. The witch who laid this malediction was old and strong, far stronger than she is, and the odds are not good. She prays anyway, with everything she has. The knight feels something cold unknot beneath her fingers and slip away. That afternoon his gray mare, who has not let him near in weeks, nudges his shoulder for an apple.

The Vanir raiders are coming up from the fjord, and forty villagers of Ku are crammed into the long hall with their children and goats. There are no raiders inside yet. The old priestess Ingrid raises her hands and speaks the sanctuary. The doors are still open, but the first raider to reach them bounces back as if from a stone wall. The raiders howl and hammer at the windows for an hour. Inside, a young fisherman grips his harpoon, and his grandmother holds his wrist firmly until he lets go.

The mine roof in Frislandia has come down on the dwarf Borin, pinning his legs under a beam as thick as a man, and his cousins cannot shift it. The priest Grimnir presses a palm to the chest of the biggest of them, Hrodgar, and prays to the god of his fathers. Hrodgar's shoulders swell and his breath deepens. He sets himself under the beam, roars, and heaves it high enough for the others to drag Borin clear. Then he lets it fall, and stares at his own hands in wonder.

The vampire's eyes have already taken two of the savant's companions, and now they turn on Mirela herself in the ruined chapel of the Black Forest. She feels the pull of that gaze like a warm current dragging her under. She grips her holy symbol, prays for strength of spirit, and feels her own will thicken and harden like iron cooling in water. The vampire's smile falters. For ten long minutes she can meet its eyes without flinching. It is enough time to find the stake.

The rains have failed three years running in Okalo, and the children of the hill village are thin as reeds. The priest of Abar climbs up at dawn with nothing in his hands but a clay bowl. He sets it on a flat stone in the square, kneels, and prays. The bowl fills with warm millet porridge and then overflows onto platters that were not there a moment ago, beside jars of clean water. There is enough for eight mouths for one day, not for the whole village. He chooses the youngest first.

Ever since the kraken rose beside his ship in the Stygian Sea, the Tharshi sailor Obadiah has done nothing but rock and whisper. His family brings him to a priest of Poseidon in Tartessos. The priest lays both hands on the man's head and prays, and slowly the whispering stops. Obadiah's eyes clear, and he asks for his wife by name. The priest tries three times to lift the terror of deep water from him too, and fails each time. Obadiah will be a sound, sane man, and a landsman forever.

Prince Hemon of Acheron has been smiling vacantly at the beautiful foreign advisor for a month, signing whatever she sets before him. His old tutor, a priest of Heru named Djedi, finally gets the boy alone in the palace gardens, takes his face in both hands and prays. The prince flinches as if slapped. He blinks, looks around the garden, and then down at the ring on his finger, which she gave him. He pulls it off. Where is she, he asks quietly, and who let her in?

The shrine of Ishtar on the road outside Bersheba has no guards, and thieves have already stolen the offering bowls twice. The high priestess Bilqis burns a handful of incense on the altar at dusk and prays aloud, and she needs no chalk circles, no bargaining. The air above the courtyard shivers. A great winged lion settles onto the temple roof, folding eagle wings as wide as a ship's sail, and looks down at her with golden, patient eyes. She asks it to guard the shrine, and it bows its head.

The trial by combat will be fought on the sand of the Atlas Hippodrome, and the accused, a stonemason named Kleon, has never held a sword in anger. Before he walks out, a priest of Atlas grips his shoulder and prays over him in a low, steady voice. Kleon feels something settle into his bones like the weight of the mountain itself. For ten minutes his guard is steadier, his blows land harder, and when his opponent's blade should have taken him in the throat, it glances off his helm instead.

The priest Cosmas carries his own most precious possession, a small silver reliquary, through the crowds of the Sea Nymph Bazaar with a prayer laid upon it like a hand on a shoulder. The pickpocket who brushes past him never stands a chance. His fingers close on the reliquary and a crack of blue-white sparks throws him onto his backside among the melons. He tries again, being a stubborn boy, and gets the same result. Cosmas helps him up, dusts him off, and gives him a copper for his trouble.

The perfumer of Acheron lost her sense of smell to a fever last winter, and her shop has been failing ever since. Her customers do not know it, but for months she has been mixing by memory and by guesswork. The priestess from the Temple of Isa touches her face gently and prays. The woman gasps. Suddenly the room is overwhelming: jasmine, myrrh, crushed rose, cedar oil, sweat, spilled wine, the dog. She bursts into tears and laughter together, and begins at once to rearrange her shelves.

The Triton envoy rising from the waves off Antilla speaks in whistles, clicks and gurgles, and not one of the Atlantean delegation understands a word. The savant Philippa steps down onto the lowest step of the landing, touches the arm of the ambassador and then her own throat, and prays. The next clicking phrase opens up in both their minds like a flower: the Triton is asking, rather impatiently, why the humans keep dumping their rubbish in his garden. It is going to be a long afternoon.

The wraiths come down the barrow passage in a cold rush, and the priest Idwal has time for nothing but the name of his god. He speaks it aloud, and a circle of pale light seven feet across springs up around him and the wounded girl at his feet. The dark riders strike its edge and recoil. They circle, hissing, but they cannot cross. Idwal kneels in the center, eyes shut, his whole mind fixed on the prayer. If his thoughts waver even once, the circle will fall.

In the Halls of Justice in Acheron, the grain merchant stands before the magistrate and swears, hand on heart, that he has never watered his wine. The priestess of Heru who serves as the court's witness listens with her eyes half closed and her lips moving silently. She understands every word of his dialect. After a long breath she opens her eyes and gives a small, decisive shake of the head. The magistrate sighs, and reaches for the scroll with the fines on it.

The merchant's daughter was taken from the market in Tang three days ago and the magistrates have found nothing. Old Liang, a priest of Shang-Ti, lights incense in his small shrine and asks one question: where is the girl? The answer comes as it always does, clear in his heart but tangled in meaning. She sleeps where the red bird cannot see. Liang turns the words over for an hour. Then he sends the magistrate's runners to search every cellar within sight of the Gate of the Red Bird.

The great bronze brazier of Vaca's Temple of the Sun has taken nine years to cast, and today it is consecrated. The high priest Araci kneels before it, cups his hands, and prays until a globe of pure white fire, no bigger than a melon, blooms between his palms. He sets it in the empty brazier. It will never need fuel, and no hand but his, or the god's, can ever quench it. The worshippers crowding the steps feel their hearts steady in its light.

Since the drowning, a fisherman's daughter on Skye has spoken in her dead uncle's voice, demanding ale and cursing the nets. The priestess of Vana comes at moonrise, sets the girl on a stool by the hearth, and commands the spirit to leave. The girl's face twists, and the uncle's voice laughs at her. It holds on. The priestess does not raise her voice. She simply begins the prayer again, and this time the girl shudders, sighs, and slumps sideways into her mother's arms, speaking in her own voice at last.

Between the caravan and the only pass lies a strip of broken rock in the Land of the Basilisks, some two hundred feet across, and no one who has walked it has come back. The priestess Amina walks it anyway, laying down a faint, rose-tinted path a foot wide ahead of her. Behind her, the four merchants walk in single file at a slow and steady pace, eyes fixed on the faint glow. One of them glances up at a flicker of scales, loses the path, and cannot find it again. The others do not stop. They cannot.

The necromancer who has claimed the dead master's tower on the Isle of Dread watches the island through scrying pools, and his spells can smell a living soul a mile off. Brother Anselm, priest of Poseidon, kneels in the ash below the tower and wraps himself in a shield of spirit, feeling it settle about him like a cloak woven of prayer. For one hour he is a blank to every magical sight, and no charm or whisper can take hold of him. Eyes of flesh are another matter, so he keeps to the shadows.

The ford across the River Grut is flooded, and the Marhashi bandits are closing on the priest from behind. Ayo kneels, prays to Ishtar, and steps out onto the brown water as if it were a flagstone floor. The river heaves under his sandals but does not swallow him. He walks steadily across, never looking down. On the far bank he turns, a little out of breath, and watches the bandits stop at the water's edge, arguing about who will be the first to wade in after him.

The old Hesperian house in the Mediterranean Quarter of Atlantis has been empty for twenty years, and no family will stay there more than one night. The magus Leontios comes at midnight with holy water and a lantern and speaks the exorcism in the dusty hall. The whole house shudders. Doors slam upstairs, a mirror cracks, and then a long, low moan rises through the floorboards and fades away into the cellar and beyond. In the morning, for the first time in years, sparrows are nesting in the eaves.

The high priest of Atlas has served faithfully for forty years, and now he needs to know what really happened on the night his predecessor vanished from the inner sanctum. He kneels on the cold floor of the temple, burns incense and candles, and calls upon one of the Irin. Penemue answers, a watcher vast as a thunderhead and dim as twilight, filling the chamber with a presence too large to see all at once. The priest asks his question. The watcher, who has seen everything, agrees to tell him.

The rope snaps with a crack like a whip, and the priestess Zawadi drops away from the cliff face above the Lake of Dragons. Halfway through her scream, she gasps a prayer. The world lurches. She is hanging from the rope again, one hand on the rock, and the rope is whole, the frayed strands knitted back together, as if the break had never happened at all. The climbers above her never saw a thing. They only wonder why she has gone so pale, and why she is laughing.

The two Vanir clan chiefs have killed each other's sons for three generations, and now they stand in the priest's hall in Haloga with their hands clasped. Both have agreed to this, grudgingly. The priest binds their words with a prayer: no raids, no killings, not for as long as they both live. Each man knows exactly what that means. Break it, and he will fall senseless and be dead within a week. The chiefs release each other's hands very carefully, as if they were holding something that might shatter.

The troll has already smashed the wagon and killed two of the escort, and the young paladin Gerwyn is the only one left standing between it and the pilgrims. Old Branwen, the pilgrims' priestess, hobbles forward and grips his hand with all the strength she has left. She prays over him like a woman shouting into a storm. Gerwyn feels the god fill him to bursting. For ten minutes his sword is lightning, his shield a wall, and the troll's great club seems to miss him by a finger every time.

The minister's palace in Tang is beautiful, but the priest of P'an Ku standing in its hall suspects that not all of it is real. He prays, and for ten minutes his eyes see only the truth. The lovely fountain is an illusion masking a pit full of spikes. A plain wall panel hides a secret door. The old woman sweeping in the corner is a young man in a magical disguise, and an invisible guard stands behind the minister's chair with a drawn blade. The priest bows politely, and asks for his tea by the door.

The minister of rites in Tang has received three warnings that the dark monks will come for him at tonight's banquet, and he refuses to stay home. His chaplain, an old priest of Shang-Ti, touches his wrist in the carriage and prays a single ward: daggers. Halfway through the soup a servant lunges from behind a screen with a thin black blade. It strikes the minister's ribs and skids off his silk robe as if it had hit polished stone. The minister, who is not a brave man, faints anyway.

The Vanir hold the only pass, their campfires glitter in the valley below, and the Cimmerian village on the far side of the mountain has no idea they are coming. The priestess Freydis prays to Eloah and gasps as brilliant white wings unfold from her shoulders, wide as a sail. She takes to the air at twice the speed she could ever run, carrying only her staff and a waterskin. Arrows whistle up from the camp; she climbs out of their reach. Within the hour she drops into the village square, breathless, shouting her warning.

No one alive knows who built the Pyramid of the Atlantydes, or why, and the savant Hypatia has spent six years trying to find out. At last she kneels at its foot, lays her palm on the ancient stone, and asks her god. Knowledge pours into her like water into a cup: the name of the builder king, the purpose of the chambers, the legend of the sleeping guardian beneath, all true, though blurred at the edges like an old fresco. She sits back, trembling, and reaches for her notebook.

The fisherman of Rapa Nui has been possessed for a week, and the thing inside him has already killed two of his neighbors with his hands. They have tied him to a post on the beach. A traveling priest of Poseidon, the only one for a thousand miles, faces him at sunset and commands the demon out. The fisherman screams in a voice not his own. Something black and shrieking tears loose from his body in a gust of cold air and is gone, and the man sags, sobbing, against his ropes.

The necromancer's zombies have come shambling up the road to the village in their dozens, and Tomas, the village priest, has no army, only his voice. He stands in the middle of the road, raises his holy symbol, and speaks a single word of power. Every one of the dead within earshot stops, flinches, and begins to back away, slowly, until they are huddled thirty feet off, their empty eyes on him. For ten minutes they will not come closer. Tomas turns and shouts for the villagers to run.

The Vanir are coming up the Cimmerian coast, and the refugees have nowhere to go but the lagoon. Olaf, an old priest of Poseidon, wades into the shallows, lifts his arms, and the water draws apart before him like a curtain: a lane ten feet wide across the lagoon's sandy bottom, the waves standing on either side like green glass walls. The villagers stream across with their carts and cattle. Olaf stands at the water's edge, his eyes shut, not daring to let his mind stray until the last child reaches the far shore.

The tomb is collapsing around them in the Kaila Mountains, ceiling stones cracking and dust pouring down, and the high priestess Dolkar has gathered the most precious scrolls into her arms. There is no way out through the rubble. She speaks a single word. The tomb vanishes. She is standing on the familiar floor of her own chamber in the temple, dust still falling from her hair, the scrolls clutched against her chest. Her acolyte drops his broom and stares at her. She asks him, quite calmly, whether anyone has fed the cat.

Babilary slavers took the boy from the beach at dawn, and by evening their ship has vanished over the horizon. His mother goes to the old priestess of the fishing village with nothing but his wooden toy boat. The priestess prays, and far away, somewhere south-east, a small, bright soul flickers in her mind like a lantern across dark water. She rises, takes her staff, and goes down to the harbor to find a captain. For a whole day she will know exactly where the boy is.

Three days they have wandered the silver mists of the astral plane, the priest Ionnes and his four companions, and their business there is done. Now Ionnes gathers them close, hands clasped in a circle, and speaks the prayer backwards, the way his teachers taught him. The mists tear. Grass, wind and the smell of the sea rush in at once, and the five of them are standing on the cliffs above Klymeus in the gray dawn, blinking at a world that suddenly feels very heavy and very real.

The captured spy sits before the high priest of the Sun God in Quechua, lips pressed tightly together, eyes defiant. The priest, an old man of formidable power, lays his hand on the table between them and asks one question in the spy's own tongue: who in the temple is paying for his treachery? The spy fights. His jaw clenches, sweat breaks out on his brow, his hands grip the edge of the table until his knuckles whiten. Then, in a strangled whisper, he speaks a name. The priest closes his eyes in pain. It is his own nephew.

The Scythian horde has ridden right up to the temple steps in Saturnia, a hundred mounted warriors with bows drawn, and the old high priestess walks out alone to meet them. As she reaches the top of the steps, a radiance breaks out of her, soft and immense, as if the sun had quietly stepped inside her skin. The front ranks lower their bows without knowing why. Their horses back away. A few hardened veterans grit their teeth and hold their ground, but even they do not move for a long minute. No one fires.

The necromancer's summoned demon towers over the Atlantean paladin in the ruined courtyard in Pictland, wings spread and fangs dripping, and Cassian is bleeding from a dozen cuts. He does not raise his sword again. He raises his free hand instead and speaks one word of absolute authority. The demon, older than he is and stronger, fights the word with everything it has, snarling, its outline trembling like a heat haze. Then it loses. It is simply gone, sent home in an instant, and the courtyard is silent.

Above the door of a sealed tomb among the pyramids of Heru-Seti, the high priest Amenhotep raises his staff and traces a glowing sign in the empty air. It hangs there a moment, burning gold, and then dims to a faint golden tracery above the lintel, easy to miss in torchlight. It needs no wall to hold it and it will never tire. What it does to the next grave robber who comes within its reach and sets eyes on it, only the priest and his god know. The priest seems quite content with that.

The Hantu came into the old governor's mansion on Taenerus through some rift in its cellars, and dozens of them now howl through its halls, fighting each other over the scraps of the dead. The high priest of Poseidon walks in through the front door alone and speaks the final exorcism. The whole building shakes. Most of the lesser horrors are ripped away at once, like leaves in a gale. A few of the strongest cling on, screaming, but in the end they too are torn loose, and the silence afterwards is enormous.

The mountain above the villages of Okalo has begun to rumble, smoke pouring from its crown, and ash is already falling like gray snow. The high priest of the valley, a very old man with long years of service behind him, climbs to the shrine on the lower slopes and prays with everything he has. The rumbling stops. The smoke hangs still in the sky. The mountain seems to hold its breath. His prayer will hold the mountain for some hours, and no longer, and the villagers are already running.

The ruined First Age temple on Taproban Island is full of strange objects, and the savant Theokles has no time to study them all before the jungle swallows the expedition. He stands in the middle of the great hall and prays, and the god opens his mind to everything within a hundred feet. He is allowed three questions. Which of these objects is magical? What is the jade box and who made it? Is anything alive in this room with evil intent? The third answer makes him turn very slowly toward the ceiling.

The slaver who murdered the pilgrim on the road to Madaan thinks himself safe behind his hired swords. He is wrong. The pilgrim's priest, who has served his god faithfully for fifty years, walks into the slaver's tent at nightfall and speaks a single word of judgment. The slaver fights it, straining, sweating, his hand on his knife. It does no good. The ground beneath him opens onto a red, roaring dark, and he is gone, banished to the lower planes. His hired swords decide, as one, to seek other employment.

The city of Goldar is under siege, the walls are breached, and the high priestess of Poseidon has done all a mortal can do. She burns the temple's last incense, lights every candle, and invokes her god's guardian. The air splits open with light. The being that steps into the sanctuary is tall and serene, crowned with brilliance, and its first words are a question: has she been faithful? She answers yes, and she has. It turns toward the breach, and the priestess, for the first time in a week, sits down.

The Picts have broken into a farmstead courtyard in Uallach with torches and axes, and the only defender left is a frail old priest, a guest of the house, who has nothing but his voice. He climbs onto the well's edge and speaks one word, flee, with all the power his god can give him. Almost every raider who hears it drops what he is doing, turns and runs, scrambling back over the wall and down the hill. Three stubborn warriors stay behind, blinking, suddenly very alone. The old priest looks at them, and they reconsider.