Fire Angels

Chapter 5 Part 2 Simon the Raven

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The following days travel was uneventful. The weather cleared. Rain was replaced by soft spring sunshine. The country became wilder. There were fewer farms and more woodland and the houses we passed were not as pristinely white washed. We saw fewer and fewer Burning Light followers and more and more ordinary Morians.

The low rolling hills continued. Except for the mountainous region around Mangalore, which formed a strong barrier against the Papal States and the Tyronic Duchies, most of Moria was low rolling hills. Then the Red Mountains formed a kind of spine down the middle of the country and beyond that was the great coastal plain that had once been the richest and most populous area of Gallia and was now the Great Waste.

It was such a clear night that we did not stay in an inn, but stopped under a low spreading pine tree by the roadside. We built a large fire and ate the food that Juba had given us that morning. I for one was glad of the privacy. Though there were fewer Burning Light people about, plenty of ordinary Morians disliked mages. Here we could talk about things. For the first time I showed Parrus my amazing iron necklace. He handled it gingerly, but with fascination.

"Do you think it could have some magic?" I asked him.

"I don't sense anything," he said. "Have your immensely superior senses felt anything?"

I stuck my tongue out at him.

"It's Wanderer make," said Tomas. "Look at these runes on it."

I had not really looked at the runes before. Most of them were completely new to me.

I asked Tomas if he knew the meaning of them, but he shook his head and said "I never learnt anything of runes."

"Marnie used to say that Wanderer magic works completely differently from ours," said Hamel. "She said they used more runes and that it was more powerful for that."

"Rune magic?" said Parrus looking skeptical, but nonetheless interested. "What do you mean? The Wanderers are just fairground fakes or hedge mages at best. They wouldn't have the skill to use runes. And magic is magic. What on earth do you mean by different magic?"

"More runes I suppose," said Hamel looking uncomfortable. "Look I don't know much about it. All I know was that Marnie told me Wanderer magic was much more powerful than we gave it credit for."

"Oh come on, that's just a legend, isn't it?" said Parrus. "Like that story about Wanderers being a great race of Mages who sat at the right hand side of the old Kings of Moria. Where has that magic gone then? You never see Wanderers at the White Colleges."

I'd heard those legends too and was still unsure whether to believe them or not, but Tomas seemed to have no such doubts.

"That's no legend," he said. "Anyone who has studied history will tell you it's a fact. When our people came to the Peninsula from Aramaya, the Wanderers were here. They were a tribe called the Klementari, a tribe of very powerful Mages and the New People as they call us, could not defeat them so the kings of Moria were forced to deal with them. The Madragas sometimes formed marriage alliances with them. There's a lot of Klementari blood in the Madragas. You can see it in their features. The Klementari in their turn helped the Madragas to forge a kingdom where all the other rulers on the peninsula could only control small dukedoms and principalities. 400 years of continuous rule is quite an achievement for one family. As a symbol of this alliance, it became the custom for the Klementari to place the crown on head the ruler, using iron regalia that they had made for the Madragas. This custom has survived Smazor's Run. Up until the Revolution of Souls, the fact that the greatest mage of the realm always crowned the Duke always caused trouble with the Patriarch."