God of Magic 5

by Logan Jacobs

  “I don’t think Emeline was feeling very confident,” Lena added.

  “I told her just to think of this as good practice,” Lavinia said with a shrug.

  “I just hope she doesn’t damage the balloons,” Lena pointed out. “That could make the trip back a bit more difficult.”

  “I don’t think Dehn would complain,” I laughed as I sat down with a plateful of eggs, bacon, and warm mini muffins.

  “Apparently, Welch has already managed to make arrangements for tonight’s dinner,” Lavinia continued.

  “That was fast,” I commented.

  “I’m not sure he sleeps,” Lavinia noted.

  “My grandfather was like that,” I mused. “He would wake up really early in the morning, but you know, he took naps during the day. Maybe that’s what Welch does.”

  “In any case,” Lavinia replied, “He sent out invitations to several nearby estates. He’s expecting the responses before noon.”

  “I hope he’s right,” I sighed. “Otherwise, we could be here for a while, trying to find clues.”

  The rest of the Shadow Foxes straggled in over the next hour, and the breakfast buffet was replenished each time. As a rule, we tended to put away a lot of food, and Aerin complained that it was one of our biggest bills each month. Even Lena could devour a pile of eggs for breakfast, so I was surprised that Lavinia sat and watched the rest of us eat. She pulled apart a few slices of toast, but more ended up crumbled on her plate than in her stomach.

  “Feeling okay?” I whispered in her ear.

  “Just fine,” she replied, but when I stared at her plate, she huffed and added, “I was up early. I had something to eat with Welch.”

  “Okay,” I said, “But if you do feel a little woozy, be careful of Lena’s cure. I’m not sure I want to see you with green hair and purple skin.”

  “Who says that’s what would happen to me?” Lavinia replied with a smirk. “Maybe I’ll turn orange and blue.”

  “Well, I could always take you to a Broncos game if that happens,” I laughed, but no one else got the joke of course.

  With little to do until Welch’s dinner guests arrived, we scattered to our own diversions. One of the footmen was able to guide me to a large library. Like the house, the books were a wide ranging assortment of styles and genres, but I managed to find a small history section wedged between a book on accounting methodology and a stack of pulp fiction novellas.

  One of the history books was focused almost entirely on local events, and I flipped through it, hoping to find something that sounded like the Shodra. There was a tale of a mage arriving, not long after the end of the civil war, carrying a powerful item of magic. He built a small hut in the woods, where he lived alone. He rarely visited the nearby town, and most people stayed away from the woods.

  This continued for several years until one day, a group of heavily armed men rode into the town. The men said they were hunting a manipulator who had escaped just before the last battle. At first, the townsfolk did not reveal the mage’s location. After all, he had done nothing that made them believe he was a manipulator, and the townsfolk weren’t really all that fond of either side in the war.

  But someone let slip that there was a mage living in the woods, and the armed men rode forth. A valiant youngster ran out of town, taking a shortcut through the fields, to warn the mage. The mage thanked the boy and quickly gathered his few possessions. He handed the boy a small orb. He told him to plant it near the town, and all the fields would be forever fertile. The mage disappeared deeper into the forest, heading for the mountains, and the boy slipped quietly back into town.

  The soldiers remained a few more days, but were unable to find the mage. The captain threatened to burn the town to the ground, but a fierce rainstorm came up. Wet, disheveled, and without their prey, the soldiers finally left. A few days later, the townspeople gathered around as the boy planted the orb. To this day, the town has never had a bad crop.

  The mage was never seen again. Even hunters sent by the Mage Academy itself were unable to locate the mysterious figure.

  I set the book down and stared out the window. It certainly could have been someone carrying the Shodra. Or it could just as easily be the last of a dying race, searching for a place to live out whatever days he had left in peace. There wasn’t even any description of what the powerful magical item was supposed to be. Still, I’d felt a tingle in my mana as I’d read the story, and I knew I was on the right track.

  Dinner was early, as Welch had warned, but he had a good turnout. I counted at least thirty carriages as I watched the arrivals. I’d managed to hold a quick conference with my teammates before we’d had to dress for dinner and explained the story I’d read.

  “See if you can learn anything else about it,” I’d encouraged. There had been nods all around, and as we stood now with Welch, greeting his guests, I could see Yvaine and Maruk were already in shmooze mode.

  Welch wasn’t exaggerating when he’d said most of the guests were old fogeys. The average age was somewhere around seventy, and I wondered if the people around here had stopped having children. But then one couple arrived, with a young man in tow, who was introduced as their grandchild, so someone was still having kids.

  I floated around the salon, moving between various groups of people. I quickly realized that about half of the guests were here because they knew Welch would serve a good dinner, and the other half were here hoping to hear a good story or two about the bounties we’d recovered. I did my best to turn our adventures into a crowd pleaser, but I finally had to give up and watch the pros at work.

  Aerin had a handful of older gentlemen enthralled with her tale of our adventures in the Diru Wilds, while Dehn was reenacting pretty much every battle he’d ever fought for the younger sixty-ish crowd. I made my way over to Maruk and Yvaine, who were holding court near the center of the room. They easily had the largest crowd to deal with and were handling the attention with aplomb.

  “So you say the man had mixed his plaids and his argyles?” one of the ladies asked Maruk. She sounded appalled at the very suggestion.

  “It was quite distressing,” Maruk replied with a sage nod. “He clearly failed to grasp the concept of complementary patterns.”

  “Dreadful,” the woman said sadly. “But you showed amazing restraint. I doubt I would have spoken to the man in such an even tone.”

  “Maruk does have the most divine taste,” Yvaine noted as she held her glass up to the orc.

  “One can tell just by the cut of his clothing,” a balding fellow chimed in. “Is that Cambrian cotton?”

  “It is,” Maruk replied with an adorable amount of pride as he held up one arm so that everyone could take in the fine weave.

  “Quite lovely,” another lady said while she touched the fabric.

  “But here, we’re being rude,” Yvaine said as she spotted me at the back of the group, “We’ve spent all this time talking about us. Surely you must have some interesting tales of your own?”

  “I’m afraid this is a rather boring part of the world,” one of the men sighed. “Why, we haven’t had a good troll attack, in what? Sixteen years?”

  “Seventeen,” someone corrected.

  “That’s extraordinary,” Yvaine replied. “Don’t you think so, Gabriel?”

  The crowd turned as one to look at me, and I felt the wine I’d just sipped go down the wrong way. I started to cough, and someone thumped me on the back.

  “What was that story you said you read today?” Maruk mused as I struggled to control my hacking. “Something about a mage?”

  “Yes,” Yvaine said. “And a magic ball, wasn’t it?”

  “Well, a round object of some sort,” Maruk agreed. “It made the plants grow. Or was that the story about the magic beans?”

  “Oh, I think I know which story you’re talking about,” one of the ladies proclaimed. She looked around at her neighbors, who were still staring blankly at the three of us. “You know, what was his name? That
man who came here after the Civil War. Those beastly soldiers threatened to burn down Hightown, but the rains came and swept them all away.”

  “Ah, yes,” a rotund man with mutton chops agreed. “But I don’t think the rains washed the soldiers away. I think it just made everything too wet to burn. And it was Hallandale, not Hightown.”

  “It was an orb,” I finally managed to choke out. “It was a gift from the mage to the boy that warned him the soldiers were coming. It was supposed to provide fertile land for the crops.”

  “Hightown,” the woman asserted with a nod.

  “The soldiers never caught the mage?” Maruk asked.

  “I should say not,” the man with the mutton chops sniffed. “We don’t take kindly to foreign armies hereabouts.”

  “Foreign armies?” Yvaine asked. “They weren’t local?”

  “Oh, goodness no,” another woman supplied. “They were sent by someone in Morelia, I believe.”

  That drew several nods of agreement from the crowd.

  “No doubt that’s why this lovely place has remained so peaceful,” Maruk said sagely. “A true haven of gentility.”

  Another round of nods, with a few “here, heres” thrown in.

  “Perhaps the mage is still looking out for the town,” Yvaine teased.

  An uncomfortable silence greeted that comment, and a few humphs floated through the air.

  “Oh, surely not,” Yvaine said as she glanced at her audience. “Why, he would have to be thousands of years old.”

  “No, no, of course,” a dowager in a deep purple gown trimmed with black lace assured her. “But you know what they say about inviting bad luck by discussing your good luck.”

  “Ah,” Maruk agreed. “A very common belief in many cultures. In fact, Heraclitus wrote an excellent tract comparing the concepts associated with the idea of luck.”

  I drifted away as Maruk and several of the guests began a discussion on the various theories of chance and luck. The crowd’s reaction to Yvaine’s comment was curious. Perhaps they really did believe that someone was still guarding the town, but where was that person hiding?

  The dinner bell rang, and we were ushered into the formal dining hall, a much larger room than the one we had eaten in before. It could easily hold two hundred people, and the well-worn flagstones on the floor were a testament to a few centuries of parties and other such crowded events.

  I found myself seated between the Trenche sisters, a pair of octogenarians in matching candy pink gowns whose sole interest was clearly the food. I tried to ask about the town, and the story, but either the Trenche sisters were deaf, or too determined to eat to bother with conversation. The oak table was so wide, and the flower display in the middle so large, that I couldn’t successfully carry on a conversation with the person sitting across from me either.

  I ate my five course meal in silence while the room filled with the usual sounds of dinner. I will say that the food was delicious, and I could understand why the Trenche sisters were so single-minded. My favorite was probably the roast, which was succulent and buttery, and had me scoping the table for seconds, and then thirds. The fish was a close second, with its hint of orange and a crispy skin that crackled in my mouth.

  Dessert was a show unto itself, involving an army of servers who flambeed cherries at strategically placed stations about every third seat. The young man who cooked the dessert for myself and the Trenche sisters was nearly mauled as the two ladies snatched the bowls from his hand and dove in. I tried to smile politely at him as he carefully set my bowl in front of me. He pulled his arm quickly out of the way and retreated with his trolley.

  As we stood to leave, one of the sisters placed a hand on my arm and leaned in to whisper, “The mage might be dead, but he had brethren, you know. They serve a higher purpose.”

  I blinked at the old woman, but then she and her sister were scuttling away. I was about to follow when Lavinia appeared at my side.

  “That young guy over there,” she said with a slight inclination of her head, “I think he knows something but he’s a smug bastard and he won’t tell me anything.”

  “What do you want to do?” I asked. I recognized the grandson I had been introduced to earlier.

  “I think I can scare it out of him,” she said.

  “Um, is that wise, in the middle of the party?”

  Lavinia looked around the room, and I did as well. The dining hall was virtually empty now, and I could hear the sound of carriages being readied in the distance.

  “Wow, this party broke up quickly,” I commented.

  “I think I can corner him before he leaves,” she said. “But I thought it might be nice if you could give him a little show.”

  “I don’t really do anything showy,” I admitted. “Maybe Emeline….”

  “Emeline is not scary looking,” Lavinia interrupted. “No matter how many fireballs she throws.”

  “True,” I sighed. “All right, let’s find him.”

  The kid in question was slouched against a statue, watching the carriages as they lined up. He was probably about sixteen, and looked as bored as you would expect, given who he’d just been forced to have dinner with. He perked up when he saw Lavinia striding towards him, but then his eyes flicked to me, and he took on a more sullen look.

  “Leaving so soon?” Lavinia asked as she ran a finger along the edge of his collar.

  “I don’t have to,” he replied as he glanced at the carriages. “I can stay as long as I want.”

  “Hmmm,” Lavinia mused. She tapped one finger against his cheek, and I saw him turn bright red. “Let’s go somewhere else.”

  “There’s a gazebo,” he said as he looked at me.

  “Perfect,” Lavinia replied. She grabbed his arm and started to drag him away from the door.

  “Ow!” the boy protested. “Hey, you don’t have to hurt me!”

  “Where’s the gazebo?” Lavinia growled. The boy gawked at her and began to back away.

  I was directly behind him, and he stepped on my toes as he did so. I hissed, and the boy swung around to face me.

  “Where’s the gazebo?” Lavinia repeated.

  “Over there,” the boy said as he pointed towards a stand of pine trees. “Knock yourselves out.”

  He tried to go around me, but Lavinia had him by the shirt collar now and was dragging him towards the trees. We found the promised gazebo, and Lavinia dropped the kid to the floor while I took up a position blocking the exit. The kid squinted up at both of us, and I could see that he was trying to muster his courage.

  “I can kill you both,” he sneered. “I took first in my class at school.”

  “In what?” Lavinia asked as she stared at the boy, her eyes blazing. “Q-ball?”

  “Par-Mat,” the boy shot back as he pulled himself to his feet. Lavinia rolled her eyes, and I gave her a quizzical look.

  “It’s fake martial arts for people who don’t want to get too sweaty,” she explained.

  “Attack!” the boy suddenly cried out as he dropped into a squat. Lavinia heaved a sigh, and as the boy lunged forward, she drove an elbow hard into his spine and a knee into his solar plexus. The kid hit the floor with a loud whoosh.

  “You really shouldn’t warn people when you’re getting ready to attack,” I pointed out.

  The kid had rolled over onto his back, and I could see tears pouring out of his eyes. Lavinia squatted down next to him and patted his head.

  “Now you can say you battled the Shadow Foxes,” she said. “And I won’t even hunt you down when you lie about how that went if you tell me what I want to know.”

  The kid wiped a few tears away and looked at Lavinia for several seconds. I could see his lower lip was trembling, but he was putting up a pretty good front, all things considered.

  “What do you want to know?” the boy asked sullenly.

  “At dinner, you said you knew where the mage went,” she replied.

  “It’s just a story,” the boy said.

&nb
sp; “So tell it to us,” Lavinia insisted.

  “Well, when we were kids, we were always told that the mage went up into the mountains,” the kid began, “and when he found a safe place to hide, he sent for some of the other mages that were being hunted. The other mages always stopped in the town, and the townspeople always helped them on their way, so that’s why they take care of the town. Sometimes, we’d see someone in dark robes hanging around the town, and we’d say that it was one of the mages. But usually it was just someone who got stuck in town because the bridge got washed out again.”

  “Where was the safe place?” I asked.

  “I dunno,” the kid sniffed, but I didn’t need Aerin’s gift to know the boy was lying.

  “Where is it?” Lavinia demanded. Her red eyes flared up again, and the boy cringed back.

  “Mount Awana,” the kid huffed. “There’s supposed to be an old castle there or something, but we never found it. You have to go to the top of the mountain, but there’s no way up.”

  “There, that wasn’t so hard,” Lavinia remarked as she stood. The kid pulled himself up and glared at both of us. I stepped aside, and he slouched past me.

  “We need to have a team meeting,” I said. “I think we have enough to make our next step.”

  “Another hike up the mountain,” Lavinia remarked. “This is becoming a regular thing.”

  “We may have to start investing in some climbing gear,” I replied with a smile. I wrapped an arm around her hips as we walked back to the house. She had gone silent, and there was still enough light that I could see that she was lost in thought.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” I said.

  “What?” she asked a moment later.

  “Just wondering what you were thinking about,” I explained. “You looked pretty far from here, and I know you haven’t been feeling good for the last few days.”

  Lavinia studied me for a moment, then twisted out of my arm. “Team meeting,” she called back as she strode towards the house.

  I was stunned, and if Maruk hadn’t wandered up at that moment, I might have stayed there all night.

  Chapter 17