The Fragile Tower - Book 1 of the No.1 magical fantasy series

The Fragile Tower Chapter 22 - The Rising Cold

Grace read for an hour before she raised her head, looked around the room and realised that she knew what to do. It was all there, in the book, as she had hoped it might be, and all she had needed was the imagination to join the various parts together.

Powerful riezehn would put their apprentices under a trance, she had read, and link with them in order to add to their power... But only in the Queen's time has it become a constant, involving boys so young that they are barely aware of their powers...

It had made her angry again, reading that, in spite of the twist of sympathy she still felt when she thought of the Queen and that child she had lost in the snow. She had read on, about the mages who had created vast and complex works of magic through linking. Without it, the wall would never have been built, and the kingdom would not have been enclosed from the cold.

Yes, Grace thought, and it would never have become the arrogant, heartless nation it is now.

She had learned more: that experiments with linking had been kept brief, because those who were subjected to it began to show signs of madness. She didn't want to think about how long it might take to drive someone mad. She didn't want to remember that Benjamin had been in the trance for four or five days now, and less still did she want to remember Afi's brother, who had been taken four years before.

Linking also came to be distrusted by those not involved, she read, trying to forget about madness for now. The power wielded by the riezehn controlling the link could become vast, and once created, the link is difficult and dangerous to break. It takes a power greater than that of the riezehn who controls it.

What did it mean by dangerous? Dangerous to the mage? To the one breaking it? Or to the boys linked?

Tell me! Grace thought, urgently, as she scanned on, but the book went on to tell her something else instead.

The mage who controls the link may be male or female, but those in the trance must be male. Experiments in linking women or girls in this way have always failed.

Which Grace had already known, but now she wanted to know why.

There are differences in the way men and women use magic, the book told her. For men, the extraordinary impulses which allow them to manipulate possibility are used reflexively, meaning that they need to thought process to be triggered. This is what makes male mages swifter and capable of more brutality as a rule.

Grace had remembered the Cold Mage, reading that, and wondered whether men turned to the Cold more often than women.

For women, the mind must be involved, the book had continued. This makes their works of possibility slower, but more detailed, and capable of far greater complexity. Though of course there are men and women who have stood in defiance of those rules...

Grace didn't need to know about the exceptions. Right there was the reason Ruidic had sent her here. But as she gazed around the room, at the girls and young women who either slept or read or involved themselves with games or drawing, she realised that it wasn't enough. They were trapped by those stones, and even though Grace had a fake circlet on her forehead, she was as powerless here as a child.

And so she had returned to the book, flicking through until she found a picture of a black stone, and the title Fane Stones.

She had traced the drawing with her fingers, almost expecting to feel the same surge of dread that she felt ever time she touched one of the stones themselves, but she didn't need that confirmation that the picture and the stones were the same; not after she had read on a little.

Also known as banishing stones, fane stones absorb possibility from the air, or from whatever they are put into contact with. The effects are profound: even the most powerful of riezehn find themselves unable to work magics within their area of effect, because there is no possibility to work with. Close by them, the world becomes a dull and restrictive place, with no chance of spells or miracles.