Jack Whyte - The Sorcer part 1 - The Fort at River's Bend

I reached out and picked up one handspan-long tube made from the bark of some exotic tree and tied with a leather thong. It held a single twist of long, dried, yellow grass, folded upon itself time and again and bound, in turn, with a loop of its own stuff.

"This," I said. "I have no idea what it might be, and it looks innocuous enough, but I suspect, from the care with which it has been wrapped, that it has more than casually lethal properties."

He nodded "What would you do with it?"

I shrugged. "Who knows? Cut it up into tiny flakes and sprinkle it in someone's food? Boil it in water to extract its juices? Set it alight to give off lethal smoke? I've no idea. But judging from the materials with which it is surrounded, all of which are highly toxic—and I know that, before you ask, because I fed small amounts of each of them to animals and they all died—I would hesitate to think that this particular grass might have some therapeutic quality. There's little fear that I would bind a wound with it, for example.

"There is my dilemma, in miniature. If I wished to destroy this grass, this single substance, how would I go about it, safely? Can't burn it, because I might inhale the smoke and die convulsed. Nor can I bury it without wondering if something might dig it up and eat it. Can't scatter it upon the wind, in conscience. And yet it is no more than a twist of grass, only one element of what these chests contain." I paused, remembering. "But here's something else that will interest you, and it is the single, most convincing reason I have found for not destroying everything that's here, because it's the one and only thing I've found in here that is not poisonous, and I've tested it quite thoroughly. It is, nevertheless, lethal."

I dug into the lowest layer of the open chest, removing the remaining trays one by one, and finally brought out the most fascinating substance I had found in the entire collection. It was contained in a rather large; flat wooden box, the largest of all the boxes in the chests, that was tightly bound with twine. I undid the twine and removed the lid to reveal a blackish, granular powder, knowing it would fail, utterly, to impress Arthur visually. The powder was odourless and practically tasteless save for a saline, brackish tang. I knew it to be non-poisonous, since I had tested it by feeding it to three rabbits, none of which had suffered any ill effects. This powder, I had long since discovered, would not dissolve in water, but when I had thrown it on the fire, thinking it useless, it had frightened me near to death by flaring up with an appalling, flashing hiss and throwing off great clouds of dense, black, bitter smoke which had made me splutter and cough but had done me no other harm. Recovering from my first terror, I had made other tests and found this mixture to be the most volatile and dangerous material I had ever experienced, igniting even with the heat of a stray spark. What purpose it might serve lay far beyond my ken, but I suspected it must be dire. I had attempted to visualize the conflagration should an errant spark once fall into the box, and my spirit had quailed at the horror. In consequence, I treated the substance, which I thought of as "fire powder," with great care and circumspection.

Now I took a generous pinch of it between two fingers and my thumb and wrapped it tightly in a twist of cloth. I made sure to close the box carefully, then handed the twist to Arthur.

"Here, there's nothing more to see of it than you have seen. It has no taste, no odour, no particular colour apart from black and brown, and no use that I could find for it. It does not dissolve in water, nor in wine, and it's not poisonous. Throw it in the fire, there, behind you."

He turned and did as I had bidden, watching to see what would happen. The twist landed on some unburned coals and lay there, beginning to smoulder at the ends. He turned to look at me and I waved him back to the fire, and his eyes returned to the smouldering cloth just as the powder inside it ignited. There came a sudden, concussive whuff of sound, a blinding glare of blazing light, and then thick clouds of black, evil-smelling smoke, shot through with whirling sparks, boiled up and belched outward from the brazier. I had been expecting it, but even I was taken aback by the ferocity of the reaction.

Arthur leaped to his feet in terror, the colour fleeing from his face as he fought against the panic that urged him to run and hide. He teetered there for a long moment, poised between flight and acceptance, and then he suddenly dropped to his knees, grasping a piece of kindling from beside the brazier and using it to brush a number of fierce-burning embers towards the hearth before they could set the entire room alight. I rushed to help him, horrified by the sight of so many burning patches on the rug Tressa herself had woven for me. Between the two of us, we somehow cleared everything before any noticeable damage had been inflicted, and then we both sat back on our haunches, puffing and laughing nervously.

"Well," said Arthur, "that's two things you can't burn without risk: the yellow grass and the black powder. What is it, Cay? Do you have any idea?"

I shook my head. "None. It looks like crushed charcoal, doesn't it? But it's not like any charcoal I've ever seen before."

"It burns so quickly, that's the frightening thing about it. No warning of any kind, just whoosh! and it's gone. Have you ever heard of anything like it?"

"Absolutely not, but the warlocks who brought it here were from the distant reaches of the Empire. Their names were Egyptian, but I suspect they came from even farther afield than that, perhaps from beyond the eastern borders, where the people are said to be yellow of skin. I'd wager that even if they were not from those parts; they'd been to them. Anyway, now that you have seen how this powder works, what do you think I ought to do with it?"

He shook his head and then smiled. "Use it to frighten people? It works very well for that."

I laughed with him and then rose to my feet and placed the box of powder back into its space at the bottom of the chest, after which I allowed him to help me in repacking everything else I had unearthed. As I was locking the padlocks, he stood off to one side, watching me.

"These things are very dangerous. Cay."

"Aye, they are that, but they're safe enough in there, for now, so long as I have the only keys to the boxes. There's only one of each. I haven't looked inside these things in years, but now I know I have to go through everything they contain, meticulously, and try to discover what each item is, and what might be done with it. I could never bring myself simply to destroy them without trying to discover what they are. D'you understand that?"

"Of course I do. They represent knowledge. Though you might not, there are people somewhere who know all the uses of them, and knowledge is power."

Knowledge is power. I smiled, hearing him quote the words I had said to him so many times.

'There were people, once, who knew the uses of them, Arthur, but they are dead. Perhaps they took their knowledge with them into their graves. We may never discover what these things are."

"You will. If you apply yourself, the way you're always telling me to apply myself, you'll answer all your own questions. All you need do is work at it."

I grinned, dropping my keys into my scrip. "You are impertinent, but I hope you are also right. Come, let's find Tress before she finds us and sees what we almost did to her handsome rug."

Tress, I knew, was visiting Shelagh, and as we walked towards Shelagh and Donuil's quarters I placed my hand casually on Arthur's shoulder, gauging his height as I always did. In the past few years he had shot up so that, where once I walked with my elbow only slightly bent to hold him, I now had to raise my hand almost to the level of my own shoulder.