“We should keep going,” the armadillo said.
“I know,” said Oliver thickly. “I’m sorry. I’ll get up in just a minute.”
“Mmm.” The armadillo came and sat on his feet.
It was being safe, even in the dubious safety of the drainage ditch. It didn’t make sense, but now that he wasn’t in so much danger, all the fear came plunging out of the back of his brain and ran away with him. His breath caught in his throat.
Oliver couldn’t burst into tears—not with the ghuls so close, even if they couldn’t hear him—but he felt a few tears slide, thin and hot, down his face. He felt very much like a child, not at all like someone who had braved a pair of bloodthirsty ghuls.
He’d been so sure, back in the village, that he could do this. He’d been worried about bringing extra socks, as if that mattered at all in a world with man-eating monsters in it.
He’d been so annoyed at the villagers, not for making him go, but for not being properly grateful about the fact that he was planning to do it anyway.
I can’t do this, he thought bleakly. That’s why Mom wouldn’t have let me go. She’d have known what it would be like.
He was barely two days down the road. How could he possibly get to the Rainblades? He was too minor a mage. The armadillo had saved him, and the pigs, but next time there might not be pigs, or the enemy might not be so foolish.
He wrapped his arms around his head and wished for his mother, which only made him feel younger and more hopeless. A real wizard wouldn’t be huddled in a ditch wishing for his mother.
(In this, at least, Oliver was dead wrong—many wizards over the ages, some of them very major mages indeed, have found themselves curled in ditches and wishing desperately for their mothers. But they tend not to mention these things in their memoirs.)
The armadillo leaned against him. Oliver reached out blindly and rubbed his familiar behind the ears. The gesture was so normal, so much like what they did every day, that it helped steady him. His next breath didn’t catch quite so hard in his throat, and he scrubbed at his face with his sleeve and wiped tears and blood away.
Maybe he couldn’t go all the way to the Rainblades. Maybe it was a fool’s journey after all.
But now, at this moment, he could get up.
“Okay,” he said, crawling to his feet. “Okay, let’s go.”
The next few hours were very strange.
The drainage ditch was about five feet deep and the weeds that grew up the sides rose another ten inches in the air, so Oliver could walk along the bottom without ducking down to stay out of sight. The moon was sinking but the air had the strange brightness of a midsummer night, and the bottom of the ditch was thick but not overgrown, full of horsetails and yarrow rather than brambles. So, his footing was not difficult to find—he only had to keep putting one foot in front of the other and keep his eyes on the small form of the armadillo trotting ahead of him. Sometimes his familiar was lost in the shadows, but the grass stems moved around him, a white froth of flowers churning in his wake, and Oliver was able to keep pace.
This was good, because the young mage was nearly asleep on his feet.
It had been a long day, and a much longer, more frightening night. His head had stopped pounding, but there was a dull pressure on it, as if his brain was swollen and pressing against the insides of his skull.
After the first hour or so, he wasn’t really awake. It was more like being in some long dream of walking, a dream woven together of the hiss of leaves against his pant legs, the soft footsteps of the armadillo, the distant calls of night birds and the hypnotic thrumming of crickets. It did not seem like a thing that could really be happening. It was a dream, surely. There was no ditch, no plants, no distant ghuls. There was no armadillo, no person called Oliver. Surely, he was somewhere else, someone else, and this was only a dream, a brief fantasy of a very minor mage.
Later on, he thought it was most like the time when he was eight and had a raging fever. Too tired to stay awake, too miserable to really sleep, he had sunk into a long waking dream that wavered across the line of hallucination. The cottage and the bed and everything he thought of as Oliver had gone away. What was left of him hung suspended in a strange, indistinct world where he froze and burned and froze and burned.
It had been a long time before the fever had broken.
This was a little like that. He walked and dreamed, neither asleep nor awake. He thought for a while that the ghuls were walking next to him—it seemed that they must be, somehow—but when he roused a little and looked to either side, there were only the sides of the ditch. A little while later, he looked for his mother the same way, but the dream of her shredded into leaf and stem and dried grasses.
He didn’t know how long he had been walking. Perhaps he had always been walking. Perhaps everyone else in the world had died of old age, and he was still walking.
The bottom of the drainage ditch developed a distinct slope. Oliver listed sideways and caught himself. The heavy jar of his foot on rocks roused him a little from his dream.
“Whuh—? Hnnn?”
“Here,” said the armadillo. “Up here.”
The ditch had run into a stream. A low bridge crossed the road. Oliver stumbled toward it.
“Ghuls…?” he said. He wasn’t sure what the word meant anymore, only that it was important.
“Lie here,” said the armadillo, herding him with his tail and one paw. “Under the bridge, just past these plants.”
The plants were silvery-gray and had small, ridged leaves on long stems. Blue flowers rose in long spires, washed pale by moonlight. When Oliver struggled through the stand, a heavy, dusty smell washed around him.
“Catmint,” said Oliver, to himself or the plants or the armadillo.
“It’ll hide your scent. Come on.”
Oliver went to his knees. The shock of his palms hitting the dirt seemed to take a long time to travel up his arms and down his spine. “I’m tired,” he said to the armadillo.
“You should go to sleep.”
Oliver needed no more urging than that. He slept.
A few hours before dawn, the armadillo lay in the catmint stand, watching the road. Moonlight lay over the fields and turned the road into a ribbon of bone.
A figure came running down it. It was shaped like a man, but it did not run like one. Its arms were held straight down by its sides, the knuckles large and red, fingers scissoring at it ran.
The armadillo did not move, did not blink. He might have been a collection of slick stones. Only his eyes moved, imperceptibly, following the ghul’s path as it ran.
The ghul did not even pause at the bridge. The heavy smell of catmint hung in the night air, eclipsing the smell of a small boy, or the faint, leathery scent of armadillo. It crossed the bridge, footsteps thumping, and continued on.
Oliver, dead to the world, did not even wake as the ghul passed. Nor did he wake, just before dawn, when the ghul thumped back the other way, hurrying now, afraid to be caught out on the road by daylight.
The armadillo had always been glad that Oliver didn’t snore. His life had just never depended on it before.
He waited until the dust had settled from the ghul’s passing, and then carefully extended a paw and nibbled thoughtfully at his claws.
The countryside needed rain. The drought had gotten bad, if ghuls were coming out and devouring farmers and going unnoticed.
He had considered leading Oliver around in a wide circle, back to Wishinghall and his mother. The Rainblades were no place for a child, even a mage.
But the drought needed to be broken. Things were worse than he had realized. It seemed unlikely that Oliver would be the one to do it, but perhaps all mages were unlikely. Somebody needed to try.
The sun came up, hot and pitiless. Dust shimmered in the light. The armadillo sighed and got to his feet.
“Come on,” he said, nudging Oliver with his nose. “Time to go.”
4
It was another long
hot day. The sky was mercilessly blue. Grasshoppers sang in the ditch. There should have been frogs calling, too, but Oliver had only heard one, creaking out a “hnagh-hnagh-hnaaaagh,” like a broken door hinge. It sounded lonely.
“Well,” said Oliver, trudging along, “at least we got away from the ghuls.”
He said it out loud, partly to hear his own voice over the grasshoppers, partly in hopes that the armadillo would agree with him. Hearing about the ghul crossing the bridge in the night had made him queasy, more ill than terrified.
The armadillo didn’t say anything.
“Surely they won’t follow us,” Oliver tried. “They’ve got their spot on the farm, they won’t risk leaving it…”
The armadillo still didn’t say anything. His tail left a long snaking line in the dust.
“Armadillo?”
The familiar stopped and turned his head, meeting Oliver’s eyes.
“Oh god,” said Oliver, feeling his stomach clench, “they’re following us, aren’t they?”
“I don’t know,” said the armadillo. “But I think they will. With the pigs gone, there’s nothing left to eat on the farm, and you know about them and might raise the alarm. There are lots of reasons to come after you, and very few not to.”
“Should we get off the road? Try to hide?”
“Not yet.” The armadillo faced forward again and began stumping along on his short legs. “We’re more likely to run into people on the road. They probably won’t attack a group. And they won’t start moving until evening. They don’t pass well in daylight.”
Oliver bit his lip.
“Besides,” said the armadillo, picking up the pace, “this is the only road to the Rainblades that I know about. If we leave it, we risk getting lost.”
“What if we don’t find people before tonight?” asked Oliver.
“We’ll sleep off the road a little way. No fire tonight.”
“There’s hardly any food to cook anyway,” said Oliver glumly, and followed the armadillo down the road.
By noon, Oliver had made a discovery. If he held his copy of Encyclopedia of Common Magic in front of himself, and looked up every few seconds, the road was flat enough and straight enough that he could read and walk at the same time.
He read the entry on ghuls five or six times, as if hoping that more information was lurking in it somewhere, and if he read the article often enough, it would spring into existence on the page.
It failed to materialize. Stupid book.
What good was such a short article? Why didn’t it tell you what you really needed to know, like how far a ghul would follow you, or if they were attached to their home territories? The entry for unicorns was twice as long, and what good was that to anybody? Unicorns were cowards and only dangerous in packs. Every now and then you’d get one hanging around the village trash heap, but it’d run off if you yelled at it. But there it was, six whole paragraphs, and meanwhile he knew no more about ghuls than he had an hour ago.
Oliver sighed. They had come to another bridge. The armadillo scrambled down the embankment to the water and Oliver tucked the book under his arm and followed him.
The water was warm and dusty, but better than nothing. Oliver filled his waterskin again.
This time, rather than going over the useless entry for ghuls, Oliver looked for spells. What he’d really needed last night was to be invisible, even if just for a short time. There was a spell for that. It was complicated, but he had nothing else to do right now.
“Hexus,” he read, under his breath. “Hexus el-ashin invisio…”
“What’s that?” asked the armadillo sharply, turning his head. “What are you up to?”
“I’m trying to turn invisible,” said Oliver. “If I could get the invisibility spell to work, I wouldn’t have had to run from the ghuls.”
The armadillo snorted. “You can’t cast that one.”
“How do you know?” asked Oliver. “I bet I could. It’s fern spores and magic words, which is pretty straightforward. I can get the spores in the forest. Then I’ll have them, and if the ghuls show up—”
The armadillo shook his head. “The old mage couldn’t cast that one at the height of his powers. You’re wasting your time.”
Oliver gritted his teeth. “I can learn the words.”
“You can learn the words,” agreed the armadillo, “but you don’t have the power. Not yet. Maybe when you’re older.”
Maybe when you’re older. Oliver fumed silently. He wished people would make up their minds. He was too young to learn powerful spells, but apparently, he was old enough to send off on his own to bring rain back from the other side of a cursed forest.
“It’s not fair,” he growled.
“What is?” asked the armadillo. “Look, there are other spells. They’re smaller, but they might be useful. You could find one to cover your smell. Or to make yourself look like a tree, say.”
“Oh, that’s useful,” muttered Oliver. “I’m running away from the ghuls, and hey, presto, a sudden tree in the road! They’d have to be pretty dense not to see through that.”
The armadillo snorted.
“I’m tired of being a minor mage,” said Oliver.
“Minor isn’t useless,” said the armadillo. “Remember the Jenson kid?”
Oliver bit his lip. The Jenson kid had been seven years old and had been trying to climb trees. He’d picked one covered in poison ivy and hadn’t realized it. He’d rubbed his eyes and wiped his nose and when the rash came on, both eyes swelled shut and his nose closed and all he could do was lie in bed and sob miserably, while his mother held his hands down to keep him tearing his own skin off.
Fixing poison ivy wasn’t hard. Oliver had come right away and done the cantrip with the herbs. He’d done it twice, just in case, and sure enough, in under an hour, the swelling went down and the kid could open his eyes and breathe again. His mother had thrown her arms around Oliver and nearly cried. Mrs. Jenson was a tall, raw-boned woman, and she’d put her face down on top of Oliver’s head and kissed his hair. Oliver had been both touched by her gratitude and desperately uncomfortable. That much emotion made him feel like he was seeing inside people’s guts, and he didn’t want to know so much about them.
Obviously, he was glad that he’d been able to help with such a small thing. He fixed poison ivy all the time, and he didn’t ever charge for it because he wouldn’t have wished that kind of itching on his worst enemy. But he’d much rather have been able to turn invisible or throw lightning around. Something impressive that didn’t leave people hugging you and crying.
They kept walking. Oliver tried to fix the invisibility spell words into his memory anyway. The armadillo was younger than he was, and he wasn’t right about everything.
5
It did not take as long to reach Harkhound Forest as the armadillo had thought. Perhaps his mother had remembered the journey incorrectly, or perhaps the forest had crept toward them. They were only four days out from the village when a band of darker blue appeared on the horizon.
The armadillo lifted a paw and pointed. “Harkhound,” he said.
“It looks big,” said Oliver, eyeing the sweep of dark blue. It went as far as he could see to the south, and most of the way to the north. The white peaks of the Rainblades, which were visible from the village on a clear day, seemed to float over the backs of the trees.
“It is big.” The armadillo started walking again. “I’ll be glad to get there,” he said over his shoulder.
“Will there be food, do you think?” They were down to extremely scant rations. Oliver had been scavenging what he could from the ditches, but the drought had left food scarce. He’d been chewing on sorrel awhile, which had a pleasantly sour taste, but you’d get sick if you ate too much.
He’d been hoping that there would be farmhouses, but there weren’t—or more accurately, there were, but they were empty.
It was unsettling. The ground was dry and cracked, but that was only from this summer,
wasn’t it? It shouldn’t have been enough for people to leave. He knew farmers, he’d grown up with them, and they felt about the land the way wizards felt about their familiars. It was the land that told them what they were.
The fields lay fallow. There was a short stubble of weeds in places, and in others the ground was bare. The farmhouses looked like hollowed out jack-o-lanterns, with the windows and doors gaping open.
“Did something happen here?” asked Oliver. “We’d have heard about a plague, wouldn’t we?”
“Would we?” asked the armadillo. He paused and sat back on his haunches. “Nobody goes to the Rainblades and Harkhound, do they?”
Oliver thought about it. Everyone said that the Rainblades were strange and dangerous, which was why sending a mage was such a big deal. And now that he thought about it, everyone from Loosestrife went north and east and south, but not very far west. There was the little belt of orchard and woods and then some farm fields, but he couldn’t think of many farmers that lived more than a day’s travel to the west.
“I guess not,” he admitted. He felt annoyed with himself for never noticing before, and never asking what lay to the west. He’d just assumed that it would be farmland of the sort he understood.
That’s such a little kid thing to think. I should have done better. I’m a mage, even if I’m only twelve.
They kept walking and passed more buildings. There was something that might have been a barn, but it had collapsed. Some of the houses looked as if they had been abandoned for a long, long time.
“Should we go in one?” he asked. “I mean… there might be food.”
“Might be ghuls, too,” said the armadillo, trotting along. “Or worse things than ghuls.”
“Are there worse things than ghuls?”
The armadillo threw a brief, ironic look over his shoulder at Oliver. “You’ve read that book of yours. Aren’t there?”
“Yeah…” admitted Oliver. “I just didn’t think they’d be… you know… here.”
Minor Mage Page 5