The spellbook ofMysticism

The villagers of Ys swear the herb-woman by the harbor is a witch, and the witch hunter Maelle has come a long way to find out. She stands across the square, pretending to haggle for eels, and lets her inner eye open. The fishwife beside her glows a steady blue. The priest on the temple steps shines white. The herb-woman, stooped and smiling as she hands a child a sprig of mint, is wrapped from head to foot in a shadow as black as tar. Maelle pays for her eels and does not look that way again.

Dario the charlatan spent two miserable years as a clerk at the Ebony Dolphin Trade Co., so he knows the counting room in Atlantis down to the ink stains. Now, from a rented bed across the city, he shuts his eyes and there it is: the clerks bent over their ledgers, the manager picking his teeth, the tall iron-plated strongbox in the corner. He tries to peer inside it. Nothing. The iron walls throw back his sight like a slammed door. Dario opens his eyes, swears, and begins to plan something less magical.

The Nethermen chieftain speaks no language the monk Ping Jun has ever heard, and he is shouting, with a dozen of his clan behind him and axes out. Ping Jun keeps his hands folded and quietly reaches for the man's feelings. Beneath the roaring he finds no hunger for blood at all, only fear, raw and gnawing, and under that, grief. Someone in the camp is dying. Ping Jun bows, opens his satchel of herbs and gestures toward the tents. After a long moment, the chieftain lowers his axe and leads the way.

The catacombs under the Park of Monuments in Acheron are supposed to be empty, but the mystic Sethi does not trust supposed. He stops in the dark, breathes, and lets his awareness spread outward through the stone. Three humans, his companions, close behind him. Something small and animal scuttling in a niche, probably a rat. And behind the wall to his left, two presences that are neither living nor animal: undead, patient and unmoving. He cannot tell what kind, or how strong. He raises a hand and his companions stop breathing.

The warehouse on the Tartessos waterfront is full of smoke so thick that the torches are just orange smears, and somewhere inside it children are coughing. The monk Brother Oren wraps a wet cloth around his face and walks in. His eyes are streaming and useless, but he sees the room anyway, clear as noon: the stacked bales, the fallen beam, the three small figures huddled behind a barrel. He picks his way to them without a single misstep and leads them out by the hand, one after another, through the black smoke to the quay.

The bandits in the Kaila Mountain pass expected easy pickings from a party of pilgrims led by an old woman with a walking staff. The mystic Pema sets down her pack, gathers herself into stillness, and flings out her open hand. A pulse of white force leaps from her palm across the rocks and strikes the leader squarely, lifting him off his feet. She flings a second bolt at the next man, who throws himself sideways and is only clipped, spinning to the ground with a yelp. Neither of them gets up in a hurry. Pema picks up her pack again.

The bronze dagger was found in the ruins of the Ghost City of Attla, and the Atlantis Historical Society wants to know everything about it. The savant Thais holds it in both hands and closes her eyes. In the first minute the inscription opens to her: a curse on thieves. In the second, its age, older than the Second Age. In the third, its use, a sacrificial blade. In the fourth, a flickering face, bearded and angry. Then her fingers begin to burn with cold, and the curse she has just read wakes up.

The Tartessian guard at the warehouse gate speaks no language Tobin the charlatan knows, but that hardly matters. Tobin leans against a post a few strides away, picks at his fingernails, and pushes one small, sensible idea into the man's head: the back gate. Did anybody lock the back gate? The guard frowns, scratches his neck, glances toward the rear of the compound. It would only take a moment to check. He shoulders his spear and walks off, and Tobin slips through the front gate the instant his back is turned.

The witch hunter Gerlach knows the charcoal-burner's hut in the Black Forest well; he slept there two winters ago. Tonight, from his camp a day's walk away, he fixes it in his mind and listens. At first there is only the fire crackling. Then voices, three of them, women, arguing in low tones about a sick cow, a blood debt and the full moon. One of them laughs, and he recognizes the laugh. Gerlach opens his eyes, pulls his boots back on and starts walking through the dark.

Somewhere in the reading room of the Tang University Complex, the old librarian swore, the founder hid a scroll. The savant Hu Lian sits on the floor in the corner by the window, calms her breath, and waits for the insight to come. It shows her the bookshelf in front of her, the floor under her, the wall behind: nothing. She moves to the next section and sits down again. And again. The afternoon passes. On the seventh try, beneath a loose floor tile by the ink cabinet, she finally finds it, and the student helpers cheer.

The spice market of Madaan is loud, and the mystic Hind has chosen a spot on a merchant's bench where she can hear more than voices. For a few minutes the minds around her open like shutters. A porter is thinking about his lunch. A boy is plotting to steal a fig. The merchant beside her is counting coins in a dialect she only half understands. The richly dressed buyer across the stall stiffens suddenly and looks around, as if someone had touched his shoulder. He cannot stop her, but now he knows.

The witch of Broceliande smiles at the witch hunter, soft and warm, and speaks to him in a voice like honey dripping from a spoon. She tells him he is tired, that he is among friends, that he should set down his sword and sit by her fire. Henri feels the sweetness of it slide over his mind like rain over oiled leather, and not a drop gets in. He had cloaked his thoughts before he knocked on her door. He does not set down his sword. The witch's smile falters, and then it disappears.

The thief who snatched the abbot's purse in the tanners' quarter of Acheron is quick, and he knows the ground. He leads the monk Nakht straight into the soaking pits, where the mud is waist deep and stinks of lime. The thief laughs, wading across. Nakht simply keeps running. His feet barely sink into the muck, and he moves over it as if it were dry pavement. The thief stops laughing when he looks back. He stops running when a monk lands beside him, not even out of breath, and holds out a hand for the purse.

The trail through the Iron Mountains forks at a dead tree, and the guide admits he has never been this far. The mystic Ingrith sits down in the snow and meditates for a long while as the others stamp their feet and complain. At last she stands and points left: this way is the safer of the two. Two days later they are fighting off a pair of hungry trolls on that very path, and the guide is complaining again. Ingrith, calmly, asks him to imagine what the other trail held.

The young prince of Ophir has been wasting away in his sleep for a month, and the court healers are baffled. The mystic Tefera sits by the bed through the night, still as a statue, his senses opened to what cannot normally be seen. Near midnight he sees it: a thin gray figure, ethereal and nearly transparent, crouched on the prince's chest with its mouth pressed to the boy's lips. It lifts its head and looks straight back at him. Tefera does not flinch. He knows, now, exactly what he is dealing with.

The bandit bursting into the caravan tent in Turan has a knife and a grin, and the mystic Farrukh is sitting on a cushion across the tent with a copper cooking pot beside the fire. He does not stand up. The pot lifts off the ground, swings back behind him to gather speed, and flies the length of the tent to crack into the bandit's forehead with a sound like a temple gong. The man sits down hard. Farrukh sighs, lets the pot settle back by the fire, and reaches for his tea.

The water skins burst on the second day in the Tu-Holo Desert, and the caravan turned back. The savant Yesui did not. She walks on alone across the cracked salt plain, her lips dry but her mind steady, and neither thirst nor hunger touches her. For nine days she walks, sleeping in the lee of dunes, speaking to no one. On the tenth she reaches the lost oasis she has been looking for all her life, kneels at the edge of the spring, and drinks, not because she needs to, but because it is beautiful.

The mystic Kleitos lies on his narrow bed in a boarding house in the Hesperian Quarter of Atlantis while his astral self drifts through the walls of a rich merchant's house across the canal, invisible and unheard, reading the letters on the man's desk. It is going beautifully until his landlady's cat jumps onto his chest. At once he is back in his body, and the room is spinning. For a few minutes he cannot remember which way the door is, or what day it is, or why his chest smells like fish.

The old mystic Tahmina has not left her desert shrine in Turan for thirty years, but she has not forgotten the courtyard of her family home in Ispahan, the pomegranate tree, the blue tiles. Today her favorite pupil is being married there. She sits cross-legged on her mat and closes her eyes, and the courtyard opens in front of her: the lanterns, the drums, the laughter. She hears the vows spoken, sees the bride blush. When it fades, she stays where she is, smiling, for a long time after.

The border guards of Khitai have been rude, suspicious and increasingly interested in the contents of the mystic's traveling chest. The mystic Chen Yu sighs, clasps his hands, and lets a slow, heavy dullness roll out of him. Four of the five guards crowding around him lose interest almost at once. They yawn. They glance at the sky. The chest, the travelers, the whole matter suddenly seems unbearably tedious, and they wave the party through without a second look. The fifth, a sharp-eyed sergeant, frowns after them all afternoon.

The ox cart has slid into a rut on the Meluhha road, and the axle has jammed against a stone. The monk Ashvin, slender and quiet, asks the drover to step aside. He kneels, slides his hands under the axle, and closes his eyes. When he opens them his whole body has changed somehow, the muscles standing out like ropes, and he heaves the axle clean out of the rut as if it were a basket of washing. The drover stares at him. Ashvin brushes the mud from his hands and bows.

The bandit who ambushed the monk Anand on the Dravidian road lies in the ditch, clutching a gash in his side where his own companion's spear went astray. His companions have fled. Anand kneels beside him. The bandit flinches, expecting a knife, and instead feels a cool, steady hand pressing down over the wound. The bleeding slows. The flesh draws together. It is not fully healed, but he will live. Anand stands, dusts off his robe and walks on toward the next village, leaving the man staring after him.

For eleven years the witch hunter Kari has chased the same witch across Hyperborea, and she knows the woman's face, her voice, even the smell of her cooking fires. After the trail goes cold in the forests of Cimmeria, Kari sits under a pine tree with her sword across her knees and meditates. For a long time nothing comes. Then the certainty arrives, heavy and cold: north, and a little east, toward the coast. Kari stands, shoulders her pack and turns her face toward the sea.

The monk Dorje is sweeping the courtyard of the monastery in the Himvati mountains when the vision slides over him, soft and blurred as a dream. He sees the great bronze bell cracked across its face, and snow falling on a red banner that does not belong there, and a stranger's boot on the temple steps. It will happen before tomorrow's dusk; that much is certain. What it means, he cannot say. Dorje sets down his broom and goes to find the abbot, trying to decide how to describe it.

The magistrate of Poseidonea keeps a truth-seer at his elbow, a thin priest who reads the hearts of all who come before the bench. The mystic Aristides has something to hide, so before entering the hall he wraps his mind in a quiet, invisible shell. When he speaks, the priest leans forward and narrows his eyes, reaching for a lie, and finds nothing there at all, not truth, not falsehood, only silence. He frowns and whispers to the magistrate. Aristides smiles politely and continues his testimony.

The priests of Poseidon at the temple in Mestea test every stranger who asks to sleep under their roof. The old priest lays his hand on the traveler's brow and reads his aura, and it shines back at him white and clean as sea foam. He smiles and waves the man inside. The traveler, a Black Mystic who has not done a kind deed in twenty years, bows humbly and takes his place at the long table. His true colors will return before the night is much older, and he intends to be gone well before then.

The monk Deshi has been thrown into the dungeons of the Citadel of Tok for preaching to its slaves. On the third night the guards find him cold and stiff on the straw, no breath, no heartbeat. They curse, drag the body out through the gate, and toss it into a shallow pit beyond the walls with a few spadefuls of earth over it. The next evening the earth stirs. Deshi sits up, spits out dirt, stretches his cramped back, and sets off south along the road, humming.

The wadi in Baluchistan has been dry since spring, and the herders' goats are dying. The savant Shirin walks the riverbed slowly, holding a forked hazel twig in both hands, its tip pointed ahead of her like a hound's nose. For a long while it only trembles. Then, near a pile of gray rocks, it wrenches downward so hard she nearly drops it. The herders dig. Two feet down the sand darkens. At four feet water seeps in, cold and brown, and the children shout for the goats.

The robbers on the Mongala road cannot understand it. The old mystic they have surrounded does not fight back or even raise his staff. He just stands there, eyes closed, with a faint shimmer in the air around him, while their clubs and knives stop a hand's breadth from his skin as though they had struck stone. They hit him from behind, from the side, from above. Nothing gets through. After a while they are panting and he is still standing, silent and untouched. Finally they give up, gather their weapons and slink away into the grass.

The witch who cursed the village of Iber with the spotted wasting sickness is long gone, and the child on the mat is very close to following her mother into the ground. The monk Sancho kneels and lays both hands on the girl's burning forehead. He breathes slowly, pouring his ki into her, and the red spots begin to fade like ink washing from a page. By evening the fever has broken. By the next morning she is sitting up and asking for bread, and the whole village comes to see the miracle.

The sorcerer in the Sorcerers' Market of Acheron is reading the minds of passing buyers, looking for easy marks, and he never notices the plain-dressed witch hunter drifting close through the crowd. Ramla has hunted this man for three months. While his mind is wide open, she strikes into it with all the force of her will. The sorcerer staggers, clutching his head. His eyes lose their focus. He stares at the scrolls on his table as if he has never learned to read them, and Ramla calmly signals for the guards.

The tunnel behind them has collapsed, and the air in the Ironhold mine is growing stale. The dwarves are digging, but the monk Aksel knows they need help from outside. He sits in the dark, calms his breathing, and pictures the face of his old master in the monastery three days' ride away. Then he chooses his words with great care: mine collapsed, six alive, north shaft, air for two days. Far away, the old man looks up from his tea. He cannot answer, but he is already on his feet.

The mystic aboard the trading ship feels it first, a cold tightening under her breastbone as they skirt the edge of Maelstrom Bay. Danger, close, and coming soon. She cannot tell what it is, only that it is near and growing nearer. She runs to the captain, who has learned to trust her, and he bellows the crew to the oars and pulls hard away from the dark water. A few minutes later a kraken's arm rises from the waves where they would have been, gropes blindly at the empty air, and sinks back.

The imperial envoy in the Palace of Harmony is charming, courteous, and lying through his perfect teeth, and the mystic Jiang knows it. She chats with him politely about the weather over the Chu Tang hills and the price of silk, laughing in all the right places. Meanwhile another part of her mind, quite calm and quite separate, is sifting through his thoughts as he speaks them. When he mentions friendship, he is thinking of poison. Jiang pours him more tea and smiles very sweetly indeed.

Eleven angry dock workers in Gadirea have surrounded the paymaster's office, and one of them has found a crowbar. The mystic Nerea steps between them and the door and lets a simple, sensible thought flow out into as many heads as she can reach: it is late, the sun is going down, and supper is waiting at home. Several of them blink and lower their fists. One by one they drift away, muttering about their wives. Three stay where they are, glaring at her, perfectly aware that something has been pushing at their minds.

The Serpent Cult priest captured in Tharshesh will not say where the hostages are held, no matter how often the guards shout. The mystic Maren sits down across from him, pale and quiet, and slips into his mind. For a moment his thoughts are all rage and fear and prayers. Then she reaches past them for the one thing she needs, and the priest does not even notice. A cellar under a potter's shop, near the harbor. Maren stands, nods to the captain of the guard and walks out without a word.

The necromancer's summoned demon has chased them into the ruined shrine in the Vale of Avernus, and there is nowhere else to run. The mystic Livia pulls the shepherd boy to the center of the floor, traces a circle around the two of them with her staff, and holds him tight. The demon comes through the doorway and stops dead at the edge of the line, snarling, clawing at nothing. It paces around and around them. Ten minutes, Livia knows. That is all she has. She is already thinking hard about what comes next.

The merchant's daughter on the Isles of Zora has been walking at night, pale and blank-eyed, down to the black rocks where a tall stranger waits for her. Her father has locked the doors; she simply unlocks them. The monk Nabil lays his hands on either side of her head while she sleeps and breathes his ki into her. Her eyes open, clear and frightened, and for the first time in a week she knows her own name. She begins to cry. Nabil goes to sharpen a stake.

In her hermitage on the slopes of Mount Tama, the mystic Nomvula wakes before dawn with a heavy feeling about the sea. Her brother is a sailor in Atlantis, due to leave today on a merchantman bound for Tartessos. She sits up and sends him a single quiet thought across the leagues between them: the sky looks wrong this morning. Perhaps it would be wiser to wait a day. In a harbor tavern, her brother frowns at the gray clouds, shrugs and orders another cup of wine. The ship sails without him.

The mystic Aurelio's body lies motionless in the camp while his astral self drifts through the walls of the Citadel of Namtu, unseen by the sentries. The halls are empty and dusty, and he is ready to call the place abandoned. But he is looking with more than astral eyes, and in the great hall he sees something the living could never see: a hulking invisible guardian stands beside the throne, perfectly still, waiting. He returns at once to his body and wakes the others.

The Khitan minister keeps a small jade horse on his desk, and the mystic Yun knows that desk well, having dusted it for a year as a servant. Now, crouched in a garden across the city, she closes her eyes and pours herself into the carving. Suddenly she is sitting on polished wood, looking up at the minister's face as he reads his dispatches aloud to his secretary. She listens carefully to every word. When her time runs out she comes back to herself in the garden, stiff and cold, with the whole plot memorized.

The mystic on the mountain above Shamballa has been asked to find the soul of a murdered child, and so she opens her eyes the way a Deva opens theirs. The world splits open like a fruit. Behind the snowy peaks she sees the gray astral sea stretching away, dotted with drifting travelers, and beneath it the lower planes, crimson and smoking. She sweeps her gaze across them, searching, for as long as the vision holds. Just before it closes, she catches a small bright light moving in the dark, and fixes the place in her memory.

The snows are coming early to the Kaila Mountains, and the abbot's pupils are scattered across half of Jambu, begging, teaching and wandering. The old monk sits on his mat and reaches out to each of them in turn, one face after another, eight faces in all. To every one he sends the same gentle, reasonable idea: the passes will close soon, and it would be good to be home. Within a month six of them have come trudging back up the mountain road. The other two, it turns out, had their own ideas.

The raft has drifted into the Sargasso Sea, and the last paddle broke yesterday against a floating log. The survivors are arguing about swimming. The mystic Nemo sits cross-legged on the planks, closes his eyes and holds out his empty hand. His fingers close around something smooth and heavy: a long wooden paddle, plain and solid, still smelling faintly of fresh-cut ash. He hands it to the strongest sailor without a word, and for the first time in two days, nobody on the raft is arguing.

The Turanian fortress has three walls, two portcullises and forty archers, and the monk Karim walks through all of them. He steps into the stone of the first wall like a man stepping into a pool, and out the other side into the courtyard. Arrows hiss at him and pass through his body as if through smoke. He rises into the air, flying twice as fast as he could run, clears the last wall, and drifts down onto the road outside. He has only a little time left, so he walks briskly.

The ruined villa outside Chersonopolis was burned forty years ago, and no one knows why. The mystic Eudora stands in the middle of the blackened courtyard and asks the stones to tell her. The vision comes like a half-remembered dream: a feast, laughing guests, a red cloak, a scream from somewhere upstairs, and then smoke rolling across the painted ceiling. She sees a face, but it is blurred. She sees a hand holding a torch. When it fades she stands still for a long time, more puzzled than before.

The mystic Rukmini's former pupil ran away to join the Serpent Cult six months ago, and she knows he is somewhere in their temple, deep in the jungles of Lemuria. She knows his face, his voice, the way he laughs. She sits in her shrine a thousand miles away and reaches out to him with one silent command: walk out of that temple now. In the dark of the sanctuary the young man stands up abruptly from his prayers, turns and walks out, straight past the startled priests, and keeps walking.

The monk Bao has spent three weeks in the libraries of Atlantis, copying texts about ancient medicine, and his satchel is now so heavy with scrolls that he can barely lift it. The journey home to his monastery would take four months by ship and caravan. Bao shoulders the satchel, closes his eyes, and pictures the monastery gate in every detail: the peeling red paint, the worn step, the cracked bell. When he opens them, he is standing in front of it, and the gatekeeper drops his broom in astonishment.

The gate of the Tartessian slave compound can only be opened from inside, and the archers on the wall have already killed two men who tried. The monk Kenji tells his companions exactly what he will do: walk to the gate, lift the bar, open it. Then he empties his mind and walks. Arrows hammer into him, and not one draws a drop of blood. His robe is shredded to rags and his sandals are torn away, but he walks on, lifts the heavy bar and throws the gate wide. Only then does he let go.

The party has camped at the edge of the Utgard Forest, and no one wants to take the first watch. The mystic Liv takes it herself, sitting upright by the fire with her staff across her knees, alert to every snapping twig. At the same time her astral self is gliding between the dark trees half a mile away, counting the troll fires in the clearing beyond the ridge. When one of the sleepers stirs and mumbles, her body turns its head and tells him, quite calmly, to go back to sleep.

The idol of the Serpent Cult sits in a ruined shrine in the Sarakan Jungle, and it has been whispering evil into the dreams of the villagers for a hundred years. The mystic Raksha stands before it and gathers all her ki into her outstretched hands. For a moment the old magic in the stone fights back, and the air grows thick and cold. Then it yields. There is a flash so bright that the villagers watching from the trees are dazzled, and when they can see again, the pedestal is empty.

The sorcerer in the plaza of Atlantis raises his hand and hurls a crackling bolt of power straight at the mystic's chest. The mystic Hesiod does not move. He watches it come, feels it, and with a single thought pushes it aside at the very last instant. The bolt veers to the right, misses him by a hand's width, and blasts the sorcerer's own bodyguard, who has been standing unwisely close to the mystic, flat into a fountain. The sorcerer stares at his hand. The bodyguard sits up in the water, dripping.

The mystic Ming Zhao is waiting in an antechamber of the Great Palace of Light in Tang, and she has decided to be careful. She lets her awareness spread outward through the painted walls. She feels the guards outside, bored and hungry. She feels a secret door behind the tapestry, and an iron box hidden under the floor. She feels the faint glow of an enchanted vase. And then, at the edge of it all, she feels something else: someone, somewhere, is watching her. She smiles at the wall and waves.

In the ruins of an ancient temple on the edge of the Wilderness of Zin, the mystic Yohannes has chalked his circles and lit his lamps exactly as the summoning rituals prescribe. For nine nights he has prepared. Now he speaks the name, the true name, one syllable at a time, and every flame in the room bends toward the empty center of the circle. The air thickens. The smell of hot sand and brass fills the room. Something vast is taking shape there, and it is not pleased to have been called.

The Black Mystic has served as chaplain to the palace guard of Punt for three years, and he knows every man in it by name and face. On the night of the coup, he sits alone in his cell and reaches out to twelve of them at once: lay down your spears, open the gates. At the palace doors, spears clatter to the tiles. Gates swing open. Only one guard, a stubborn old sergeant, shakes his head as if to clear it and grips his spear tighter, bellowing for help that does not come.

Five Nethermen have trapped the monk Aiyana in an alley behind the harbor of Taranta, and they are grinning as they close in. She waits until they are very close, then lets loose everything she has in one silent, crushing wave of force. Four of them drop like sacks of grain and lie there snoring. The fifth staggers, shakes his head, and stares at his companions in horror, then at her. She raises an eyebrow. He turns and runs, and she steps over the sleeping bodies and goes on her way.

Tomorrow the young caravan guard Selim must ride alone into the Wilderness of Zin to pay a nomad chief his toll, and he is terrified of an ambush in the rocks. The old mystic who travels with the caravan takes his hands, presses her forehead against his, and gives him something to hold onto: the power to feel every living presence within a hundred feet, once, as clearly as she can. Use it tomorrow, she tells him, or it will be gone. At dawn Selim rides out, clutching the gift like a coin in a closed fist.

Something has been stealing children from the villages along the Akela coast, and the elders are sure it is a demon. The mystic Tulok goes up into a cave above the sea and sits in silence for a whole day and a whole night, without food or water, turning his mind toward the darkness. The cold creeps in. Doubt creeps in. But at dawn on the second day he opens his eyes, and a name is in his mouth, a harsh, ugly, many-syllabled name. He does not say it aloud. Not yet.