In the center of the Inner Bailey was the donjon, a huge five-story block of stone that was the castle’s ultimate defense. Should all else fail, the donjon could hold five hundred or more for quite a while, even against superior forces. The two major towers, East and West, were likewise heavily fortified, though their purpose was less active defense than it was storage. The lower level of each tower was crammed with boxes and bales of supplies, from cowhides to arrows to bolts of cloth to sack after sack of wheat and barrel upon barrel of salted meat. And cheese. Lots of cheese.
Attached to the donjon in the south were two more blocky towers that rose above the rest of the castle and provided an excellent vantage point for directing forces in a siege. That was where Sire Koucey would be, when the time came.
It was secure, for the moment, or the closest thing to security that we could hope for under the circumstances. I felt safe here, and it was hard to imagine anyone able to break through that much stone. But the tall stone towers and thick walls were only as strong as the men who defended them, and in that we were sorely lacking.
I liked the vantage point up here. It would do, I decided – I could peg a goblin from here with bow or warstaff. It was just a pity that there would be so little of either weapon available. A real magical corps could have held this castle from nearly any force, indefinitely. Even with my shiny new stone as a reservoir, just Garkesku, and me and our half-trained apprentices against a hundred thousand savage goblins, well, it was starting to sound like the beginning of a bad joke
That problem, at least, I might be able to do something about. I knew people who owed me favors, or wouldn’t mind me owing them favors. And I now had a currency beyond mere gold to offer.
I made myself comfortable in the center of the roof, seated on a cask of arrows, and began a spell I had not had the strength to try before.
* * *
My fourth and fifth years flew by, and every year my techniques and understanding improved. By the time I was ready to produce my journeyman work, I felt as cocky and adept as any old Archmage. I submitted to the Board a spell that I had worked on for months, and after rigorous review it was accepted. They allowed me to partake in the Journeyman Trials.
In a way they prepare you for the Trials from the day you arrive at the Academy. Every scrap of magical lore you have ever learned comes to the fore, as you face one master after another and they direct you to answer questions or perform spells. The Trials last a week, and are held in a specially built building at the very edge of the Academy’s grounds. It was grueling. Only six out of eighteen of us made it through the first time. When my name was called as one of the successful candidates, I was amazed. I’d thought I’d screwed it up royally.
We new journeymen were given two weeks off to celebrate while our less adept peers gave it a second go. I spent my two weeks either stalking through the booksellers in town looking for obscure texts or whoring. I also thought a lot about the big decision I had to make.
In the sixth year at the Academy we were asked to choose a particular field of study in which to specialize for the last two years before Grand Practicum and final Master examinations. I chose Magical Theory and Thaumaturgy because I was interested in it and good at it – certainly not because there was a high commercial demand for such specialties. It was pure academics.
Master Theronial was an astute instructor with an eye for a good scholar. He took me as one of his assistants and guided my independent studies into the wheels and gears of how magic works. It was through him, then, that I met Lady Pentandra anna Benurviel, an Imperial girl from Remere.
Now, I had been anything but celibate at the Academy. The town was full of young girls anxious to become the wives of prosperous court magi, and even the ugliest students in the tower could enjoy the favors of young ladies without too much difficulty, as long as the lighting was dim. As for myself, my liaisons in Inarion began when the tower’s baker sent me with a wagon to the local mill, where I met Misha the miller’s daughter (what is it with bakers’ sons and millers’ daughters, anyway?). Over the years I accumulated quite a following among the town girls, never pledging my heart but frequently hinting that I might.
I might have pledged it to Penny.
Pentandra anna Benurviel was the third daughter of an Imperial family that traced its lineage to several noteworthy Archmagi, and (allegedly) even back to Lost Perwyn, before the Inundation. While they were now a shadow of their former glory, House Benurviel still ran a highly prestigious and profitable magical practice in the East. Penny had started at Alar Academy, but had come to Inarion to pursue studies with Master Theronial. While she appeared to be the very picture of the austere and reserved Imperial noblewoman, she was in fact a demented magical prodigy. Penny studied Sex Magic.
And she was looking for a partner.
Sex Magic was discussed mostly in theoretical terms at the Academy. The faculty wisely broached the subject just often enough to pique the interests of the students, but rarely went into detail until the last few years of study. Sex magic has fallen out of favor in the last few hundred years, owing in large part to the prurient attitudes of my barbarian Narasi ancestors.
Imperial families, I’ve noticed, don’t bat an eyelash at things that would make the average Narasi peasant (myself excluded) die of embarrassment. During the height of the Empire the study of the magical aspects of sex (or the sexual aspects of magic, depending upon which school of thought you adhered to) was a highly respected field of study.
When King Kamalaven the Great smashed the Magocracy into pieces, sex magic, as it once was practiced, was dealt a profound blow. Under the repressive regimes of the early Dukes magic was suppressed as an Imperial tool of oppression and decadence. Many of the advanced techniques were lost altogether, and the practice went largely underground.
Penny was doing her level best to single-handedly revive this lost art. Quite early in our acquaintance she decided that I had the intelligence, the talent, and the stamina to aid her in her quest. And she didn’t often take no for an answer. Our relationship began when I was assigned to her the first day she was there, fetching books from the library and giving her a tour of our facility.
She seemed unimpressed with Inarion’s rough hewn stone, coming as she did from the baked brick splendor of Alar back east, but she was interested in everything around her. I thought she was just curious – which she was – but she was already looking for partners with whom to conduct her research. Before I knew what was happening, we were studying and sleeping together, though little actual sleep occurred.
I consider myself lusty, but Penny’s capacities were endless. Luckily Master Theronial was eager to see the results of Penny’s research and was liberal with both resources and time for experimentation.
I never quite knew what to make of Penny. Now, I’m not the handsomest man in the world (or even the barony, if you want to be particular) but neither am I particularly ugly. Puberty had been kind to me, giving me a healthy body which had grown stronger lugging around flour sacks and firewood, a full shock of light blond hair, and two gleaming blue eyes.
Still, I was a commoner, I was (relatively) poor, and I possessed only the rudiments of court manners. There were noblemen at the Academy that would have lined up for a chance to dance with Penny , but she chose me. Why? Trygg alone knows. I asked her often enough – she usually just said that she really, really liked baked goods and left it at that.
We studied together regularly, and I appreciated her vast knowledge of magical minutia. She had literally cut her teeth on stuff it had taken me years to learn – in her family, the intricacies of spellcraft were bandied about the dinner table the way my family would talk flour and sugar We could talk for hours about topics of mutual interest, or about nothing at all, and count the day well spent.
She was certainly attractive enough – classical Imperial features, down to the gray eyes and the long straight black hair. She seemed awfully fond of me, I knew, and I of her, but for two y
ears I wrestled with my feelings for her. In love, in lust, out of love, out of lust, I was never quite certain. Penny reveled in my confusion, claiming the added emotional tension created a more powerful magical upsurge, but she would never commit herself. Despite our intense level of physical intimacy, we never really became more than just friends.
At this point I’m sure you’re figuring that I fell madly in love with her and followed her to the ends of the earth, with assorted run-ins with her evil relatives and equally desperate suitors dogging my heel. You would be mistaken. She came from one of the great magical families of Remere, and they do not sully their lines with the mongrel barbarians who had conquered them, no matter how talented we might be. I didn’t take it personally; it is hard to argue with their generations of success at producing strong magi. Besides, Mama and Dad would probably not approve of me marrying a girl “from foreign parts.”
I met her “evil” relatives on a two-month trip to her family’s estates, and they were all really quite decent. Her father, Orisorio, indicated his respect for any hard-working mage, even to the point of letting me know a friend of Pentandra’s could always get a job in the East . . . but also making it quite clear that any more formal relationship between his youngest daughter and a barbarian commoner was out of the question.
He even knew what we were doing upstairs. He didn’t mind. I found out later that Penny had been experimenting on the servants since she was fifteen. He respected her work and didn’t judge. It took me a week to get over the idea that he wouldn’t be bursting into the room with a wand in his hand every time Penny and I tried out a new theory. I had spent the majority of my active sex life consciously avoiding parental scrutiny, after all; the freedom, once realized, was heady.
It wasn’t all sweaty sex and magical lights, though. Penny was a researcher, and so was I. Our pillow talk was highly technical in nature, and often we ended our bouts with detailed journal entries or a quick jog to the library to look something up. Her passionate brilliance on the subject coupled (no pun intended) with my flair for thaumaturgy produced no less than five papers in two years, two of them proposing some groundbreaking theories. If it wasn’t for the sheer prudish conservatism of magical academics we might have been invited to lecture somewhere.
Eventually Penny completed her studies at Inarion and returned East, where she continued studying on her own. She had proven her place as an Authority, and that’s what she had been after. Her father was terribly proud of her, granted her a small estate, and kept her on retainer with his firm. I feel a great debt to her, as our work together helped establish my academic reputation in thaumaturgy. Our goodbye was tearful, but inevitable, and we parted friends.
Truth was, I was relieved. As much as I liked – loved – her, and as good as she was at what she did, I was getting a little bored. I was anxious to return to chasing peasant girls and millers’ daughters again.
They may not have her skill or dedication, but then they never got up in the middle of it to take notes.
* * *
The Otherworld is largely unknown to mundane folk, though they travel there nightly in their dreams. It is the realm of imagination, only anchored to our own reality by our thoughts. Some argue that it is a byproduct of consciousness; some argue that it is independent of our thoughts; and neither side had been able to prove their case – such is the nature of a subjective reality.
It is peopled only by our subconscious minds and a few natural denizens unknown to all but the most learned. The spirits of the Tree Folk and the Sea Folk and even the gurvani travel here, though it is rare to encounter such by chance. We are not on the same phase, or something, which tends to support the by-product school of thought.
It is not the realm of death, nor the realm of life-before-life, but one can become lost and surely die if the utmost caution is not practiced. The landscape is similar to that of our world, but essentially different. While natural features can often be seen there are other structures, “towers” erected by magi, palaces of court magicians and long-dead Archmagi, floating castles whose builders have retired to the inner confines of their minds. (I would erect one myself, eventually, as I settled in a single spot long enough to do so.) It is a realm not ruled by any god or demon (though they, too, come here upon occasion), a kingless kingdom of shadows, a world turned inside out and upside down.
I mean that last part literally. When a mage is in the Otherworld, there are no stars above him, only an eternal gray. Instead, the sparks of light that can be seen are the slivers of sleepers’ minds that intrude unknowingly here. They collect in the spaces that correspond to towns and villages in the mundane world.
Only magi traverse this place of their own will, and few are brave or powerful enough to do so with any regularity. We had been introduced to this place in the Academy, taught its ways and the methods of survival, and cautioned against ever coming here lightly. Those who forsook the advice ended up dead or mad.
But I had purpose, and I now had access to oceans of power, thanks to the little green marble around my neck. Flying through the Otherworld was liberating, I discovered, when you do not have to struggle with every step.
I followed the trail of tiny lights across the outer ring of mountains that bordered the valley, and down across the fertile hills of Alshar. Cities stood out like swarms of lightning bugs, with the sparks from fellow magi producing brilliant fountains in their midst.
I flew across Alshar and then Castal, used the bright lights from the Academies to orient myself, then skimmed along the coast (narrowly missing a pod of Sea People who were collaborating on some errand of their own) and slowed only when I neared the correspondent point of Remere. I was searching for a particular spark, a soul-light, if you will, and after only a little fooling around I found it.
She had, of course, erected her own tower, a theoretical construct that resembled a classical Imperial structure, all graceful arches and dainty points. She was working, I saw, as the point of the tower was lit with the magnificence of her power. I took just a moment to firm up my own mental self-image before I intruded.
I should have known. Floating in midair was a small, lithe woman, naked and beautiful in outline, with a wild cascade of hair made of sparks that sputtered and crackled with energy. She had her thighs spread, and I could tell from the vaguest of outlines that she was mounted upon someone. Around the imaginary bed was a complex magical construction, specialized items akin to kaba and apis but infinitely more delicate, all hooked together in conjunction. Her eyes were closed, but I knew that as soon as her climax hit . . .
I didn’t have long to wait as she silently threw back her head, arched her back, and thrust her breasts forward. Her eyes snapped open in ecstasy, and I saw the brighter-than-starlight illumination shoot forth. The spell she had carefully constructed sucked in the energy and started moving like a watermill’s gears.
Then she noticed me, and it startled her enough so that her creation oscillated out of control and shattered, sending harmless shards everywhere.
Son of a bitch! she screamed at me. Minalan, do you have any idea how hard it was to build that?
I can guess, by the complexity. It was pretty. What were you supposed to be doing?
Penny closed her eyes and groaned in exasperation, though her hips never stopped moving. It wasn’t really important; just a spell I was experimenting with. I was trying to boost the amount of power I can raise so I can try some of the really, really big spells that no one thinks about anymore. It took me a month of research and a week of preparation, but you always did have poor timing.
Penny, that’s not fair, I argued. You should have put up some signal, a “do not disturb” sign at the very least.
Hmmph. Everyone around here knows not to disturb me when I’m working. I hadn’t anticipated a bumbling country spellmonger crashing in.
Ouch. Sorry. I really am. And you know I wouldn’t have done it without great need.
She “looked” at me through the Otherwor
ld for a moment. Yes, I do. It must be pretty damned important, actually, for you to make the journey.
It is, I admitted. The little Valley I’m working in is about to be over-run with little black-furred goblins, and we’re going to be wiped out if I don’t raise some help.
Interesting. But why can’t you just zap them? I heard you were pretty good with that sword.
I sighed. She made it sound so easy. It would be no problem if there were only a few hundred. Hell, I helped mop up that many just the other night. No, there will be thousands, perhaps tens of thousands. They plan on making Boval Valley a staging point for invasion into the Duchies.
Boval? Isn’t that where the cheese comes from?
Yes, that’s where the cheese comes from.
I thought so. It’s really good. Goblins, huh? What do you expect a peace loving young maiden like me to do about that?”
Well, it isn’t just gurvani, I said, shaking my head. And you haven’t been a maiden in a decade. It’s gurvani infantry backed by powerful shamans. And I need for you to hire me a real nasty bunch of mercenaries to get here double quick, before we get cut off, and send these buggers back to their holes. Warmagi. I need you to gather together a powerful magical corps. We need more weapons, too – anything. Arrows, spears, swords, bows, the lot.
Again, Hmmph. Mercenaries are no problem, as long as you pay for them. Daddy cut my allowance after an . . . incident. Finding qualified warmagi who would be interested in signing on for a defensive, back-woods campaign is going to be hard no matter what kind of money you’re offering. They’re making too much money stinging each other in these silly baronial wars.
Time to play my trump. Tell them that the coin I will pay them in coin they won’t find elsewhere. Tell them that participants will have a good chance to get their hands on irionite.
Irionite? Are you serious? Sparks shattered off of her hair as she jerked her head up suddenly.
Very. Here’s the proof. I held up my spectral hand and opened it, displaying the ball of raw magic I was holding within. Most un-enchanted objects are not reflected in the Otherworld, but Irionite has power even here. The marble glowed brightly, obscuring even the light from her eyes. In the glow the faint outline of her supine partner disappeared altogether.
The Spellmonger Series: Book 01 - Spellmonger Page 16