The Choice of Magic

by Michael G. Manning

  Selene stared at him in surprise. “That would make me sick for hours, but there’s a better way.”

  “Hey!” someone called from their left. Four more men were emerging from a small, wooden building that must serve as a guard station.

  “Show me,” muttered Will. “Or things are about to get ugly.” He waved to the guards. “Give us a hand; something is wrong with these two!”

  The newly arrived soldiers weren’t buying his act, and they lowered short spears in his direction as they approached. The sword at Will’s side felt woefully inadequate. He readied himself to cast his linking spell again, but he knew he could only get two. Shit.

  From the corner of his eye, he saw a spell come together in Selene’s hands. The runes had a light green color to them, and when she released it, the spell shot toward the men before expanding and slowly fading from his sight. All four collapsed to the ground.

  “Damn!” said Will. “Are they dead?”

  “Asleep. Let’s get them off the street.”

  Make that two spells I want to learn from her, thought Will. The silence spell and the sleeping spell. Together they dragged the six unconscious soldiers back into the guard building, lining them up on the floor.

  “How long will they sleep?” he asked.

  “Hours, until the next watch shift comes and wakes them up.”

  “Or someone passes by and wonders why there’s no one asking for passes,” said Will. Stepping outside, he looked down each lane that led away from the intersection. The one to their left seemed much the same as the one they had walked down—more barracks—but the other two showed larger tents and buildings in the distance.

  The sheer size of the base was daunting. From what they had seen, even if they found the stores and supplies, there would probably be far too many. Setting fire to one would raise the alarm, making it difficult to destroy the rest. “Even if we find the supply tents or warehouses, how are we going to destroy them all?” said Will.

  Selene gave him a harsh look. “This was your plan.”

  A man emerged from a tent on the opposite side of the lane and walked toward him. The stranger wasn’t dressed as a soldier though; he wore a black robe, and Will could see something like a black flame hovering above his shoulder. A sorcerer. “Stay inside,” warned Will, hissing over his shoulder through the doorway behind him.

  Will stepped out boldly. “Show your pass.”

  The man stopped, a look of surprise crossing his face, and Will worried that he’d made a mistake. A second later the stranger relaxed. “Certainly. Let me find it for you.” The man lifted his hand, and the black flame pulsed. A spell formed above his palm.

  Will snatched his sword from his sheath and ran forward, but he was too late. The sorcerer finished his spell, and a tangled web of black lines shot toward Will. It expanded when it reached him, and he felt a burning pain across his skin before the spell faded and fizzled out. The sorcerer looked at him in surprise, but before he could do anything else, something flashed across the lane and tore through him. Will saw a hole three inches across that went entirely through the man’s body before he collapsed.

  He turned back toward Selene. “What was that?”

  “Will!” she yelled, trying to warn him.

  Will looked back and saw the dead sorcerer’s strange elemental just before it crashed into him. It seemed to be made of black, smoky flesh, and within it he saw claws and teeth. His sword found nothing when he tried to fend it off, and he found himself wrapped in powerful arms. Streamers of black turyn whipped around him, burning whenever they touched his skin, but they couldn’t seem to do serious harm since they faded soon after touching him. It was the claws and teeth that scared him most. He felt powerful jaws latching onto him in several places, and though they didn’t penetrate his mail he felt them begin to clamp down with bone-crushing force.

  He was helpless.

  Then something slammed into him from behind, knocking him free from the strange creature that had been trying to devour him. When he looked up from the ground, he saw a bizarre spectacle: Selene was battling the beast, her body covered in stone plates, while each of her hands held an incandescent blue blade.

  Unlike his sword, hers worked to devastating effect, destroying whatever they touched. They ripped through the monster, and when they came in contact with other things, such as the ground, they tore through it, leaving deep grooves. Her first two attacks caused gouts of black blood to spray from the shadowy thing she fought.

  Will watched in shock. What kind of elemental has blood?

  For a moment it seemed as though she would win easily, but the monster wasn’t done yet. Slipping past her next swing, it fell upon her, wrapping itself around her body in the same way it had done with Will. With claws and teeth, it pried at the stone protecting her, and black mist began to seep into the cracks. He heard Selene shriek with pain and rage as the black substance touched her skin.

  Her stone fists released the blue blades and they transformed, becoming broad, spinning circles that buzzed as they spun around her body, cutting and destroying anything they touched. Within seconds, they had shredded the beast clinging to her, sending bits of blood and gore all over the intersection. The black smoke slowly dissipated, leaving an odd assortment of arms, teeth, claws, and talons on the ground. Will didn’t think it would have resembled any living creature he had ever seen, either before or after Selene had disassembled it.

  She sank to her knees, and the stone plates crumbled to the ground, becoming dust, while the blue circles stopped moving and rediscovered gravity. They fell to the ground like ordinary water, soaking into the dry earth.

  Will ran to her side. She seemed unhurt, but her face was red and sweat was dripping down her forehead. “What the hell kind of elemental was that?” he asked.

  “Not an elemental,” she panted, her breathing heavy and irregular. “A demon. He was a priest of Madrok.” Then her eyes rolled back into her head and her body began to shake violently.

  He spotted something dark on her shoulder, just beneath the collar of her shirt, and he pulled it open to reveal an ugly darkness that seemed to boil beneath the surface of her skin. The black mist, he realized. He clamped his hand over her shoulder and tried to draw it out, but had no success—it wasn’t a spell. He decided to try something else, and a second later he cast the source-link spell, connecting himself with Selene.

  As always, a sense of duality washed over him, and while he was able to separate his sense of self from his sense of Selene, he could feel the searing evil that was trying to destroy her from the inside out. Without any other options, he began drawing out her turyn, pulling it from her body faster than he had ever done with anyone before her.

  The evil came with it, and because of his haste, his body couldn’t change it quickly enough to protect him from the inevitable turyn sickness that came with foreign turyn. Yet this was far worse than the nausea that had he had experienced after drinking his grandfather’s elixir of turyn. The same burning pain he had felt in Selene afflicted him for several minutes, until his body finished absorbing and converting it.

  With his ordeal over, Will realized his eyes were closed, and he opened them. A sense of vertigo washed over him and he promptly vomited onto the lane. Off to one side, he saw Selene lying prone, her eyes open as she watched him. “Are you all right?” she asked, exhaustion plain in her voice.

  Spitting to clear his mouth, he nodded. Selene sat up and began gingerly getting to her feet.

  That surprised him. Normally after being drained of their turyn, people were helpless for hours. “How are you recovering so quickly?” he asked.

  “The elementals,” she said simply. “I can draw from them.”

  “It doesn’t make you sick?”

  She shook her head. “The heart-stone enchantment converts it for me.” She gave him a worried look. “How about you? That was pure demonic turyn. It should have killed you.”

  Will got to his feet, doing his best no
t to stagger. “I guess my whole body is like the heart-stone enchantment. It converts anything I take in, just not as quickly.” He walked over to the man they had killed. The black-robed stranger looked ordinary enough, but as he searched the body, he noticed a strange symbol tattooed on the man’s chest. “What’s this?”

  “The symbol of Madrok,” said Selene. “We need to move.”

  He had briefly considered moving the man’s body into the guardhouse with the others, but there were shouts coming from several directions. It was too late. Selene grabbed his arm and slid it over her shoulder as a mist rose seemingly from nothing to surround them. Both of them had been through an ordeal, but she seemed to have recovered from it first.

  She led him down a different lane, the one that headed to the right. Gradually, Will’s balance returned, and he used his turyn to adjust his eyesight so he could see through the dense fog. He started to remove his arm, but Selene seized his torso, pressing her face into his chest. “I thought I was dying,” she said into his shirt.

  “We both would have died if you hadn’t destroyed that thing,” he replied, unsure what to do. Slowly, he relaxed, putting his arms around her. As the stress in his body began to drain away, he felt his arms begin to shake with a faint tremor. That thing scared the shit out of me, he realized. Things had happened so quickly before then that he hadn’t had a chance to register how much it had shaken him.

  Selene pushed him away, and her posture straightened as they began moving again. There were shouts in every direction now, and Will saw people running past them through the mist, heading toward the scene of their battle with the demon. He was forced to steer them toward the center of the lane as most of the responders ran along the sides.

  “What did you do to that sorcerer?” he asked.

  “Not a sorcerer,” she corrected. “He was a priest of Madrok, a warlock.”

  “Oh.”

  “It was a water drill, a spinning vortex of water,” she told him.

  “And that thing with him was a demon?”

  Selene nodded.

  “Why didn’t it vanish or go dormant after he died, the way elementals do?”

  “A sorcerer controls an elemental through their heart-stone enchantment. When they die, the elemental becomes incapable of doing anything until someone new takes control. Demons are different—they’re intelligent. The priests of Madrok sell their souls to him and he grants them a demon to assist them. The tattoo is a mark of that, but they aren’t controlled like an elemental is. Once the warlock dies, they can do whatever they want,” she explained. “What bothers me more is that there shouldn’t be any priests of Madrok here. They come from the kingdom of Shimera. They’re supposedly enemies of Darrow.”

  Will didn’t like the sound of that, then he saw something that caught his attention. “What is that?”

  “How should I know?” demanded Selene. “I can’t see a damn thing.”

  On their right was a large, wooden building and Will could see several women standing along a railing that stretched the entire length of its front porch. They were staring out into the mist curiously, though he was sure they were just as blind as Selene. “There’s several women standing in front of a building to our right.”

  “Just keep walking,” urged Selene. “That’s not our objective.”

  The women were only twenty feet from them as they passed the building, and Will stared intently at them. His mist-vision rendered everything in shades of gray, so he couldn’t have said anything about their hair or eye color. If Selene had been standing among them, he might have had trouble identifying her, but one of the women seemed familiar somehow. He tugged on Selene’s arm to stop her. “I think I know one of them,” he said softly.

  “You know what they are, right?” asked Selene.

  He wasn’t stupid. “Comfort women.”

  “Technically, the Darrowans call them ‘merchant wives,’” whispered Selene.

  “Wives? What the hell does that mean?”

  “The Prophet’s laws are weird,” she explained. “Prostitution is illegal, but an unmarried man can sleep with another man’s wife, so long as the husband gives permission.”

  “So they’re selling their wives to other men?”

  “Well, these are probably Terabinian girls. Women who are raised in Darrow are followers of the Prophet, so they have certain rights that foreign women don’t. So when they took your village, some of the more enterprising soldiers married the women they captured so they could make a profit prostituting them to the others.”

  Will felt his eyes go wide. Then these are my neighbors. “We have to save them.”

  Selene shook him, hard. “How? Have you lost your mind?”

  He was staring hard at the women, and he was pretty sure the one he recognized was Tracy Tanner. “I know that woman. I saved her son, Joey. She’s a friend,” he insisted.

  “She’s been here for months,” said Selene calmly. “She’s been remarried, beaten, raped repeatedly. They torture them, Will. She won’t be in her right mind anymore. She’s as likely to turn us over to her new ‘husband’ as she is to help us. And all that aside, how are we supposed to accomplish our mission if we stop and try to help a half-dozen women escape from the camp?”

  Will looked down, meeting her gaze. “If it were you, would you want me to walk away and leave you?”

  Her eyes were filled with uncertainty, but after moment she responded, “Yes. If it were me, I’d rather die than have someone I care about see what had become of me.”

  He stared at her for a moment. His heart was a confusing mess of emotions. “Well, too fucking bad. I’d drag your miserable ass out of hell if that’s where you were and screw the consequences.” Grabbing her hand, he pulled her toward the porch. “Keep your head down. You’re a boy and I’m bringing you here to gain experience.”

  “What?” she exclaimed in a panicked whisper. “No!” But it was too late.

  Chapter 61

  Selene kept her head down as though in embarrassment as Will pulled her up to the front porch. He said the first thing that popped into his head, “My friend and I are here for some fun.”

  The women gathered around them like hens, clucking their encouragement. “Your friend seems shy,” said the oldest, a middle-aged woman he didn’t recognize.

  Selene had her head bowed, her body facing Will, and she jumped as one of the younger ones ran a hand across her rump and gave it a firm squeeze. “Are you a virgin? I love how shy you are,” said the woman.

  It was Will’s turn to be shocked. He had returned his vision to normal, and both the voice and his eyes confirmed the identity of the one who had grabbed Selene. It was Annabelle Withy. Their eyes met, and she stared at him in horror. His eyes darted sideways, and he saw Tracy Tanner staring at him as well. He gave her a smile full of false confidence. “You look ripe. How about you and your friend show us the ropes?” He nodded at Annabelle.

  After a moment, Tracy broke out of her trance and smiled. “Of course! Anna, let’s take care of these gentlemen.” She was studying Selene’s face, and Will thought she saw understanding there.

  Tracy and Anna led them inside and positioned themselves to hide Selene from direct observation of the man who was seated there. He held out a hand to Will. “Six silver, three for each. You get one hour. If you want more, pay in advance.”

  He dug around in his coin purse, but it was empty. He’d never taken the time to recover his money from the floor at home. Unsure what to do, he continued to fumble until Selene shoved a gold crown into his hand. Will passed it to the man.

  The man looked at it carefully. “A Terabinian crown?”

  “Spoils of war,” said Will with a nervous grin.

  “Let me get your change,” said the pimp. After a few seconds, he handed Will four unfamiliar silver coins of Darrowan currency. “You’re lucky it’s me,” said the man with a wink. “You’re supposed to turn in any Terabinian coin you find.”

  Tracy pulled on his ar
m. “Let’s go upstairs,” she said in a sultry voice he would never have imagined coming from her. He followed, and she led them up to a short hallway. There were four doors leading off from it. “Anna’s room is over there,” she said, pointing at the door across from hers, “but it will be more fun if we share mine.” Opening the door, she let them in.

  After the door closed, they were alone, and Annabelle latched on to Will’s arm. “What are you doing here? Did you come for us?”

  “Not exactly,” answered Will, but Annabelle seized him a hug that nearly crushed the wind from his lungs.

  “I never thought I’d see you again,” she mumbled.

  Selene was watching them with a face carefully composed to show no emotion. “We found you by accident,” she said.

  “It’s dangerous for you to be here,” said Tracy, her expression fearful. “They’ll beat us if they find out we helped you.”

  “We’re getting you out of here,” declared Will. “How many of you are there?”

  “It’s just me and Tracy,” said Annabelle, still holding him. “There’s two other women here, but they’re both from Darrow.”

  “And Stan,” offered Tracy. “He’s the one you met in the front room.”

  “That’s it?” asked Will.

  Tracy seemed angry. “That’s all they need. Do you think we can just walk out of here?”

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” said Will. It was then that he realized that Tracy Tanner was pregnant and just beginning to show.

  “Do you know where the supplies are stored?” asked Selene, her voice cool and business-like.

  Tracy gave Selene a suspicious look. “Who’s she?”

  Will stared at Selene a moment, unsure what to say. I wish I knew. Finally, he answered, “Her name is Isabel. She’s a sorceress with the Terabinian army. We’re here to burn the supply stores if possible.”

  “You’re a fool, then,” said Tracy. “They’ll kill you and us too just for talking to you.”