The Spellmonger Series: Book 01 - Spellmonger

by Terry Mancour

  * * *

  When one of the village men shook me awake the next morning, I had been dreaming about Talry and my parents. The sun was well on its way toward noon. Tyndal was snoring beside me, almost as tired as I was from an evening’s work that had not ended until dawn. It was a mark of how exhausted I was that I had not responded to the wards that should have alerted me to his presence the moment he crossed my threshold.

  “Begging your pardon, Master Minalan, but Sire Koucey and Sir Cei would like to see you. They’re in Micit’s barn,” he said when I finally came downstairs. With that the villager, whom I didn’t recognize (a thick man wearing a brown woolen cap and tunic that was the unofficial uniform of the Bovali peasants) turned and left. He also wore a thick leather coat over his tunic and carried a five-foot spear like it was a hoe, so I assumed everyone was still on alert from the attack.

  I glanced at my snoring apprentice and decided to let him keep sleeping. There was no reason we should both be falling off our feet. I quietly picked up my weapons belt and tip-toed down the stairs, where I took a moment to put myself in order. I put on my ‘business’ cloak, a dark blue woolen mantle that I had paid a local lady to embroider with stars and moons and all sorts of meaningless arcane symbols.

  I also grabbed my hat, the standard four-pointed affair that had been a fashion rage three hundred years ago. It was now the unofficial headgear for professional spellmongers and other magi. Three of the points were smaller than the last, and were sewn to the conical center. I felt a little silly wearing it, but the more important the man, the sillier the hat, my father always told me.

  I grabbed my staff from where I had dropped it last night and decided I was ready to meet the lord of the land. I tiredly tripped over the threshold as I left the shop, so I stopped and hung a cantrip that would make me appear alert, awake, and refreshed, in utter contradiction to the way I felt. It used nearly every scrap of energy that a few hours of sleep had restored, but I couldn’t appear before His Excellency, Sire Koucey, Lord of Boval Vale and Liege of Brandmont looking like a wastrel.

  I was greeted along the way with solemn nods and grateful smiles, and even a bow or two. There was a new respect in the eyes of my neighbors, thanks to my efforts in the attack. Several made a point of thanking me.

  Yay, I’m a hero, I thought dully, trying to ignore the wailing cries of those who had lost family in the night, or the moans of the wounded where they suffered from their beds. I saw several men who had fought the previous night, and made a point to nod back to them – they were the ones who deserved the praise.

  It’s easy to take a man who has been trained to fight and put him in danger. It is much harder to rise to the occasion when the toughest fight you had ever been in had ended with a mug of cider and nothing more serious than bruises. The thirty-odd victims of the gurvani had been a severe blow in a hamlet so small, but they carried on as if it was the day after Market Day. The stoic mettle of the Bovali impressed me. Many of these sturdy mountain people were going about their business as if nothing had happened at all.

  A knot of men-at-arms in the livery of the Lord of Boval Vale – a white cow on a green mountain – were loitering around outside, and I nodded sagely to them as I passed. I was surprised when they snapped into a loose approximation of attention. I just didn’t warrant that kind of thing.

  I saluted automatically, and then grinned self-consciously at myself when they returned the courtesy. It had been a while since I had done that.

  Lord Koucey and his dour Castellan, Sir Cei were inside, puffing away on their pipes while they looked over the stacked bodies of the raiders. There was a nasty, cloying odor of death, blood, and burnt hair that was truly nauseating. Live gurvani smell fairly pungent, and death does little to help matters. I understood immediately why they were smoking so early in the day. I bowed to the gentlemen before quickly moving to light my own pipe.

  “Master Minalan,” the Lord of Boval said around his pipestem in his high, reedy voice. “My thanks for your expert work last night. Had you not rallied the people and plyed your magics as you did, I would have found Minden’s Hall a smoking ruin and been shy several tenants here this morning.” He bowed his silvered head in a gentle salute, revealing the beginnings of a thin patch in the center of his pate.

  The Lord of the Vale was a short man, but well-muscled, and he had seen at least fifty summers in this valley. He had sharp, penetrating eyes that held equal measures of intelligence, wisdom and wit. He was also an adept warrior, good with a lance or sword, and an excellent combat leader.

  When I had first met him during the Farisian Campaign, he also proved an excellent drinking companion in addition to being a competent officer and a fierce fighter. His men, mostly doughty archers and tough country knights, likewise impressed me both in battle and in camp. He had brought two hundred, mostly peasants retrained as infantry or archers. He had brought more than half of them back from that hellish province, which is more than many commanders from that bloody campaign can say.

  When I took him up on his invitation to settle in his remote little valley I became even more taken with the man as a liege. He proved to be a good overlord in peacetime as well as being a good war leader. His people didn’t quite love him, but they did accord him far more respect when he was out of earshot than most nobles warranted from their subjects. In the six months that I had lived here as village Spellmonger, I had witnessed him dispensing judgment and making shrewd decisions that convinced me that he had the best interests of his people and his lands in mind, not his own aggrandizement– a rarity among the nobility anywhere.

  Sir Cei, on the other hand, was a tall, hulking, sulking, bitter-faced man of thirty summers or so, a distant cousin of Koucey’s from Gans. Sir Cei was typical of many of the “country gentlemen knights” of the Alshari Wilderlands in most ways, but he had a flair for organization. He was an excellent manager of his lord’s estates despite his famously sour disposition.

  He hadn’t accompanied Sire Koucey to Farise (someone had to stay home and tell the peasants what to do, I guess) and I could see now why Koucey had been so jovial on campaign. He may have been an excellent Castellan, but having Sir Cei around was much like being a teenager under the eye of a matronly and disapproving aunt.

  “It was my duty and pleasure to serve, my lord,” I said, lighting my pipe by flashy cantrip, and then bowing. That sort of thing impresses the layman, you know. “I am only sorry I could not have saved more of your people.” Almost two score of his subjects were dead, and twice that many were egregiously wounded.

  “I blame them, not you,” he grumbled, kicking a black furry corpse with his pointed horseman’s boot, causing his spurs to jingle. I winced when I noted that there was still a large splotchy vomit stain on it. “Particularly that witchdoctor. He was quite potent, it seems, to do so much harm so quickly – though not as tough as our Spellmonger!” Koucey laughed, slapping me appreciatively on the back. I didn’t think it was that funny.

  “He was the most powerful mage I have encountered since Farise, my lord,” I said, seriously. “You recall we we encountered the gurvani in the jungles of Faries,” I said. He nodded. He never tired of mentioning the war and the grueling campaign, although he saw it a damn sight more loftily than I recalled. “Their shamans were good, but not nearly that good. That shaman was handling far more power than any single mage in the Duchies. I cannot tell you where he came by it – perhaps he was just abrim with Talent – but that kind of power would have almost classed him as a Master Mage. . .” I trailed off as a horrifying thought suddenly occurred to me.

  Farise.

  “Quickly, where is his body?”

  “Over there,” Sir Cei grunted. “The men wanted to start lopping off heads for warning spikes, but I insisted that all bodies be thoroughly examined first.” Probably for loot, though he was too darn noble to say it. Cei likes being thorough, but he’s also utterly incorruptible. When anyone is watching.

  “Excellent,” I m
uttered absently, and began the unsavory process of hunting through body parts and disemboweled, furry little corpses.

  I was looking for one particularly gruesome limb. Thankfully it didn’t take me long to find it. I pulled a leathery black fist, severed midway between elbow and wrist, from under a pile of other discarded body parts. The cut was clean and sharp, which meant it was most likely the one I was looking for. The axes of the villagers and the lances of the horsemen made wounds far less neatly than Slasher.

  Carefully I pried the stiff, cold fingers apart. At the center, as I expected and feared, was a centimeter-wide stone of bright milky green, like an emerald only far deeper. It was smooth around most of its diameter but had a rough backside.

  I exhaled slowly, and backed away a step. Sire Koucey and Sir Cei had crowded around me, and when I stepped back they jumped as if bitten by the thing. Then they relaxed when it didn’t do anything in particular. Of course, if they knew what it was, they would have headed for the horizon as fast as their feet could carry them.

  * * *

  I never wanted to be a wizard – indeed, the thought had never occurred to me.

  My plans around adolescence centered on finding some way to get Hedi the Miller’s Daughter alone and up her skirts and eventually inheriting the shop some day and baking bread for the rest of my life. Noble goals, these.

  But Fate, or Luck, or the Gods had other plans, and about the time I started growing hair in unlikely places and cracking my voice, things just started happening.

  I began learning the basics of professional-class baking as soon as I could knead dough. I had a perfectly common boyhood for the first twelve years of my life as my father’s apprentice. Nothing more extraordinary than fights and stolen kisses ever happened, and if I blackened more eyes than I received it was probably because I ate too many cookies and was strong from toting too many bags of flour. And cutting too much firewood.

  You might not appreciate just how much firewood a good-sized bakery requires on a daily basis. Dad’s ovens were huge. Between the needs of the castle and the village and the regular contracts for journeybread Dad had with barge captains, he had two large ovens that rose above the roof of our house, and one small one that was still pretty damn big. They were rooms unto themselves, large enough for a man to crawl into to clean (and guess who got that job?).

  They dominated the rear of our house, great pregnant-looking domes constructed of wicker and river clay. Dad had painted them the traditional red, of course, and you could see them for almost a mile downriver.

  Every morning he (or one of his apprentices) would get up long before dawn and start the laborious process of feeding the fires, banked the previous day. Every third day someone (always one of his apprentices – rank hath its privileges) would climb in with a broom and spade and excavate the mounds of ash before they relit the fire and began stacking wood upon it. It took half a chord of wood to re-heat the large ones back to baking temperature and another half to keep it going all day. We used a lot of wood – Dad employed three families of woodcutters to supply him.

  I started toting wood from the shed to the ovens as soon as I was old enough to walk. At first it was fun. Then it was work. Then it was torture. By the time I was twelve I had lugged whole forests of trees into the gaping maws of the ovens.

  While I didn’t know it at the time, my magical Talent (or rijara, as the old Imperials call it) was starting to come out.

  It was little things, at first, things I didn’t even notice back then. During hide-and-seek I could always find everyone, no matter how cleverly hid, or hide myself so well that I’d never be found. While playing ball games I always knew when and where the ball would be before it got there. Perfectly normal “childhood” magic, the kind that every kid everywhere thinks that they can do.

  But in late winter of my thirteenth year things came to a head. I’ll never forget that day as long as I live.

  I had spent most of the night fuming about a fight with my youngest sister. Urah and I had always been at odds, largely because we were closest in age. In truth she was no better or worse than my other sisters when it came to alternately teasing and spoiling me. But Urah had a temper, and she often took it out on me when she was fed up at being the youngest girl but not the youngest child.

  We fought often, over stupid things, and sometimes it escalated beyond reasonable sibling rivalry and came to blows and nasty tricks. I don’t remember what the particular offense was, but I do recall that she got away with something big and blamed me for it.

  As a result, Dad had given me punishment detail for three weeks. In our house there was only one punishment: feed the ovens. That particular day I had gotten up way too early, gulped a cup of hot milk, and stomped out into the late fall chill to begin my torture. I fumed at Urah the entire time.

  I stomped my way back and forth between the shed and the ovens, a journey that I had long ago calculated to be twenty-three steps both ways, and on each trip back I held almost as much wood as I could carry. Every step of the way I cursed Urah under my breath. Not a good idea in front of the oven, which is also a shrine to Briga, the Fire Goddess (in Boval they call her Breena, other places Breega, but in Talry she was Briga), but I was pissed off at my sister and figured the goddess would understand.

  By trip six (it took nine trips for enough wood to get the fires started) the exercise had warmed me up. By trip eight I had loosened my jacket, and my boyish curses had become audible. At the end of trip nine I stacked wood as if every piece was aimed at my sister’s head. I had worked myself into such a frenzy that I didn’t even realize that I had started a fire.

  With magic.

  I stood and gaped in horror as the dry poplar and oak sputtered into flame. In moments a roaring fire was making my face uncomfortably hot. Smoke poured out of the oven’s mouth, as it normally did. The fire was spreading evenly from place to place. It was a perfectly laid fire. But I knew for a fact that I hadn’t started it. The spill I would have used was inside the house on the hearth altar yet.

  Had Briga heard me? I wondered, horrified that I might have just doomed my sister to a premature and fiery death. I dropped the rest of my wood and started to run away, when I ran smack into my father’s rotund belly. I looked up at him with tears in my eyes, and he looked down at me, concerned.

  “I saw the whole thing,” he said, softly. “Get your cloak on and go out to the shed, to my workroom. There are some things you and I need to discuss.”

  I nodded, and then remembered my chores. “What about the oven?”

  “I’ll get Urah to do it. She should be up by now, anyway. She’ll never catch a man if she stays lazy like that.” I grinned at him, relieved that he wasn’t angry at me.

  I grabbed my heavy wool cloak and trudged outside to the woodshed. When you think woodshed, you probably think of a tiny shack just big enough to store a half a chord or so. Perhaps if we were a simple farmstead; my Dad burned so much wood that he required a huge shelter for it.

  The entire right side of it was full of firewood, while the left side held my Dad’s workbench and tools, as well as a few extra bags of flour and salt and such. Behind that was Dad’s workroom. Mama may have run the house and shop like a Duchess, but the shed was my Dad’s domain, a place of refuge from his wife and family when he craved solitude.

  I was almost as shocked by the invitation as I had been by the magical fire. Dad’s workroom was Forbidden Territory, inviolate, his inner sanctum. It was where Dad kept his records and did his accounts – my father was proud of his literacy and secretive about his money. I found out later that he kept his secret recipe book there, too, the one he claimed didn’t exist, in a brick lined safe under the floor. Mama never even went in there.

  To be caught anywhere near it was grounds for a switching. An invitation within had never been extended to any of my kin that I knew of. I waited outside until Dad showed up, not able to bring myself to enter alone. He didn’t speak, just laid a fire in the tiny stove, and p
oured water into a small tin kettle on top. Two mugs were set out, and I could smell the crushed kafa leaf in their bottoms.

  “Well, son,” he finally began in his deep baritone, “it looks like you broke the egg basket on this one.”

  “Dad, I don’t know what--”

  “What happened? I think I do. But I’ll need a little help to explain it,” and with that he reached up on the top shelf and took down a small, pint-sized earthenware jar.

  I knew about that jar. Just about every kid’s dad in the village had one of those jars stashed somewhere where their wives wouldn’t find it. It contained a very powerful distilled liquor that Opa the Woodcutter made to supplement his meager income (regular spirits were available to the folk of Talry, but they were taxed heavily. While Opa’s brew was untaxed and, therefore, illicit, I don’t think the baron or anyone else minded his discreet trade).

  Opa brought a new pint every week when he made his regular delivery. Sometimes when Dad had friends over, he’d take them out back to “show them something in the shop,” and they almost always seemed friendlier when they returned.

  He pulled the cork and took a deep sip, then handed it to me. I was in shock. This meant I was a man, by the unsophisticated standards of village artisans, and I swallowed repeatedly before I could bring myself to take a drink of the liquid fire. I coughed and sputtered, but Dad expected this and was ready with a cup of water. When I had calmed down (and warmed up significantly) he had me tell him everything I could about the event.

  When I was done he took the jar back and stood up, sighing. I sat there silently and watched him putter around, looking behind books and under papers for his pipe and herb pouch. I found watching him comforting. He seemed so calm, and the shock of the earlier event was starting to fade into a dreamlike unreality.

  Armed with pipe and pouch, he sat back in his chair and began the ritual of packing it. He also began telling me about my family, on my mother’s side.