“And that means he needs wise counsel – and in this situation, you are surely the wisest counsel he can hope to hear from. So we go forth boldly and demand an audience, tell it like it is, and then use your accumulated influence to convince him to form policy to our liking.”
“And that would be . . . ?”
“Raising the Duchies! Goddess, you’re dim! Every single one of them will have to send troops, weapons, supplies, magi – you name it, we’ll need it. This is going to be a long war. That’s the best-case. Worst case, Alshar is Shereul’s new summer home, and the Eastern Duchies get to fight against him at half-strength – and lose.”
“Pen, even at full strength we’ll probably lose.”
She sagged. “I know. But we have to try. And you’re the only man who can do it.”
“What about Terleman?” I protested. “Or you, for that matter?”
“We’ve all pledged to follow you.”
“Who did? Follow who? When?”
“Sorry you didn’t hear the announcement,” she said, dryly. “We had a meeting while you were sleeping the night before last. Every one of us knows what is going to happen – apparently we’re smarter than you. And after all the discussion it was decided that our best hope – the Five Duchies’ best hope – lay in getting behind a single leader and pushing him into a position of power.”
“How the hells did you manage that?” I asked. “They can’t agree which shade of blue the sky is!”
“Let’s just say it’s because I’m so damn cute and persuasive, and leave it at that.”
“Penny . . . !” I said, warningly.
“Calm yourself. I didn’t need to do much persuading. We all have a good handle on the situation. It was unanimous. In fact, they swore an oath.”
“Great, now we have oaths. What kind of oath?”
“Oh, one I stole from Imperial times. It’s based on the oath that subordinate mage-lords swore to the Archmage.”
“So . . . Spellmonger to Archmage. And here I was, trying not to be ambitious.”
“Well, yes . . . but they are just as concerned with the situation as I am. And despite all of the wonders of witchstones, they are scared. Scared of the power that they hold in their hands . . . and scared of the potential temporal power it suddenly implies.”
“I’m sure they’ll work through it.”
“Why are you being so difficult, Min? I’m serious. They don’t want to go back and get shuffled off to a bunch of meaningless skirmishes. They have power, they realize, but it becomes greatest when they act as a united force. And they have no idea what to do with that power once it is realized. They need someone to make policy.”
“They’re bright. They’ll think of something,” I assured.
“It’s not going to work that way, Min,” she warned. Then she bit her lip. That’s a well-known danger sign with Penny. “I’ve been talking to the others . . . they want to follow you.”
I stopped eating. “What did you say?”
“They want you to lead them. In battle. Against the Dead God.”
“So this is what irionite poisoning is like,” I observed airily. “The bad craziness sets in. Pen, what happened during the siege, it was fun, but it’s over. We’re rescued . . . or something. No one’s trying to kill us at the moment. I don’t need to lead – can’t lead. I don’t have any official standing – anywhere. I mean, I have my license, but . . .”
“. . . but you ‘prefer the life of a simple Spellmonger’, I know. That’s what I’m getting at, Min: you won’t be able to be a simple spellmonger any more. The next year will see one major loss after another, and before you know it the Coronet Council will be screaming for yet another mass call for troops to fight. They’re going to need warmagi, especially, and specifically us.
“But what happens if we just linger, waiting for someone to do something smart while the bodies pile up? What happens when the Duchy decides to take possession of the irionite, place it under the protection of the Court Mage? They get drafted or shafted, and they don’t like either choice.
“So they want you to keep doing what you did in Bovali. Those were special rules, true, but they worked: they want you to keep the conscience of the stones. It’s the only way they can trust each other with them. If you have claim, a claim that they all would enforce, then no one person can try to stir up trouble without bringing the wrath of the whole group down on them. That was the way the Magocracy was supposed to work.
“They won’t listen to me,” I protested, alarmed at what she said.
“They all agreed to the oath, that the stones are yours and they are forfeit on your word. When we go before the Ducal Council, and the Coronet Council, they want you to speak on their behalf, work in their interest. They want you to be their leader, their lord, their captain. Now, you can stand around and wait to get drafted again, or we can be pro-active and work to set this up the way we want it to go.”
“ ‘We?’”
“Us warmagi,” she explained. “Oh, not me, not really – I’m a theorist and thaumaturge, not a warmage. But I have a vested interest in this, as well, and I have my jobs to do. Everyone does, they just don’t know it yet. It’s our job to convince them. And we’ll back you. We pledged to put ourselves under your command, offer you counsel, obey your orders, and give our lives in your service. Over oaths sworn to any other lord.”
“ ‘Lord’, now. That’s great. Any thoughts to robes and silly hats?”
“That’s still in committee. Serious, Min, we have to do this.”
“Penny, we don’t have to do a damn thing!” I insisted. “Much less fight this war. I know I don’t want to—”
“And when did the gods start paying attention to what you wanted, Master Spellmonger?”
“Point taken. Okay, I appreciate the vote of confidence, but find another lackey. I’ve got better things to do.”
“Better than saving the Five Duchies?”
“In point of fact, yes.”
“Like what?”
“Like raising my kid in peace. And not leaving he or she an orphan.”
“You don’t have any—” she stopped, and her eyes got wide. “Oh, Min!” she gasped. “You? And . . . um . . .”
“Alya?” I offered. “Yes. Just as I was explaining to her why it was necessary to have long, passionate sex with my ex-girlfriend when she told me. I checked. She’s pregnant.”
“And you’re sure it’s . . . yours?” she asked, suspiciously.
Anyone else and I would have blasted them where they stood. But this was Penny. I took a deep breath. “Alya has been a widow for over a year. I’m the first man she’s had relations with since her husband died. So . . . yeah, I’m sure.”
It took a few moments for her emotions to settle – and there were a lot of them flying around behind those pretty eyes. “I don’t know what . . . are you happy about this?” she asked, hesitantly.
“Actually,” I admitted, “I am. I’m ecstatic. Busting out with pride. Looking forward to daddy duty, as it were. And scared spitless, but I hear that will pass.”
“Min, I . . . I’m sorry! Congratulations!” She had tears in her eyes.
“Thank you,” I said, sincerely.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I just did!”
“Sooner!”
“We were going to be dead, remember? And before that I didn’t want anything to distract you from your work. So I thought I’d wait for an opportune time.”
“I guess you did. Okay, you’re having a kid. Great! That should give you even more reason to want to defeat the Dead God.”
“Sure, I don’t want him – or her – to grow up in thrall to the short and fuzzy set, but that doesn’t mean daddy has to go to the front lines.”
“You won’t be on the front lines,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re too valuable. You’ll be in charge of the operation – which means I’ll be running the hard parts. We’re going to need a full lab, and a supply of—�
��
“And where is all of this going to come from?”
“The Duchy. Or Duchies. It doesn’t matter, actually. Let me handle that end of it. You just figure out how to win the war.”
“While raising kids?” I asked sarcastically.
“What you do in your spare time is no business of mine,” she assured. “Look, Min, we need a strong leader, an adept, and a warmage. You’re all three.”
“I’m a rutting Spellmonger, Penny!” I exploded. “I’m nothing special!”
“You hung on at an undermanned castle against twenty times the odds with nothing but a piece of irionite, guile, and some talented apprentices. Any one of us,” she said, indicating all of the warmagi in the party, “would have packed it in early and buggered out. You persevered. You even won – kind of,” she admitted.
“Not getting killed is a victory?” I asked, discouraged.
“Against the Dead God? Hells, yes!”
“Okay, okay, I concede the point. But if I agree to do this, it has to be real. I’m leader. No one else. The moment you guys don’t like what I’m doing, throw me out and let me go home. Those are my conditions.”
“Done. Min, I don’t think you have a clear idea what kind of hold you have over these people.”
“Nonsense. Sure, the peasants thought I was great, but these are my professional peers –”
“Who all insist that you are the greatest among them. Deal with it.”
“That is such a load of—”
“Deal with it!” she repeated. “Look, plenty of room for Alya and your kids in whatever gloomy old tower they give us. And wherever it will be will likely be safer than anywhere else. So just shut up and be our fearless leader for a change, will you?” she asked, annoyed.
“Oh, all right,” I muttered. “Do I get to wear a silly hat?”
“As silly as you need it to be,” she agreed. “You’re the leader.”
Crap. I really was.
The End
Make sure you check out Book II of the Spellmonger Series:
WARMAGE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Terry Mancour lives in Durham, North Carolina with his beautiful wife and three precocious children. He attended from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill pursuing a degree in Religious Studies, had a succession of crappy jobs, spent three years in exile in Greenville, North Carolina, and had more crappy jobs before he became VP of Broad Street Coffee Roasters, which was closed four years later due to no fault of his own.
He has written twenty books, many under pseudonyms, including the 1992 New York Times Best Selling Star Trek: Next Genration novel Spartacus, and two sequels to H. Beam Piper’s 1967 classic sci-fi novel, Space Viking, Prince of Tanith (2011), and Princess Valerie’s War (2011). The.sequel to Spellmonger, Warmage, was also published in 2012, and the third book in the series, Magelord, was published in 2013.
He is a frequent contributer to a variety of websites on a number of topics, and has written all sorts of stuff that he doesn’t want to mention here because they are largely too boring. A lifelong sci-fi fan and uber-geek, he has indulged in every nerdy stereotype possible over the years, yet remains remarkably cool except to his children. And what do they know, anyway?
Write the author at [email protected]
Visit the author’s blog: http://terrymancour.blogspot.com/
WARMAGE – PREVIEW
Chapter One:
The Slaughter at Grimly Wood
Grimly Wood, Late Summer
I surveyed the battlefield at Grimly Wood from horseback, looking out over the heads of the formations of infantry and the clusters of light cavalry, hearing the sounds of a thousand suits of armor rattle and hundreds of horses complaining about their burdens. I looked toward the distant line of the foe, barely visible in the mists and shadows that haunted this dour little land, and I had but one thought:
I really had to pee.
I should have gone earlier, I knew, but I was too worried about the battle to take the time. That was understandable: it was the first battle in which I was in command of the Ducal forces, and I was as nervous as a virgin on her wedding night. I had gotten little sleep the night before, and when I was awakened by my trusty servant an hour before dawn to hear scouting reports, I was still too busy to tend to my personal needs as messengers came and went and decisions had to be made. I’d managed to eat couple of camp biscuits with a rasher of bacon washed down with a big mug of weak beer but that was as much food as I’d managed – and now that beer was haunting me in an increasingly uncomfortable fashion.
I should have gone before I donned my armor, because once you put it on there’s no easy way to pee without removing a good portion of it. I had even stopped when that last chain skirt was being strapped around my waist and almost went, but then Captain Rogo had come with important news about the scouts, and I postponed it again.
By the time I mounted Traveler, I realized I was in dire straits.
I should know better. I’m not just some petty lordling elevated to command through favoritism or accident of birth. I was a trained warrior, a master wizard, and a veteran warmage of the bloody Farisan Campaign – not to mention a survivor of the hopeless Siege of Boval Vale.
I knew I was risking certain distraction and possible illness, a condition the healers call “belly rot” – what happens when a man’s intestines or bladder is full when he sustains a wound to the lower abdomen. One of the first things they teach you in Basic Infantry Training (which, despite my magical profession I had been obliged to endure) is to “lighten your load” before you step onto the battlefield.
This was a particularly important battlefield, too, and a particularly important battle. It wasn’t a decisive engagement, really, but a sustained skirmish which we were almost certain to win. But what happened on this battlefield and how would set the course for the many, many battles to come, I knew. This was the first time that the encroaching gurvani were being faced with a foe who not only expected them, but who knew what they were dealing with.
This lightning-fast campaign was but the opening salvo between two titanic powers: on our side was the massed professional military aristocracy of the Five Duchies, stout warriors with bright swords and snorting steeds and the favor of the gods (or so we told ourselves).
On the other was the gurvani horde of thousands – hundreds of thousands, actually. Gurvani were known as the Mountain Folk in some places, scrugs in others, but they were usually known as goblins – ‘gurvani’ was the name they called themselves. The average specimen stood four to five feet tall, covered in black hair, with a face like a terrier crossed with a pig.
They’re as smart as most human beings. They use iron and practice warfare. They have a tribal culture that sticks to the mountains or remote valleys. Ordinarily gurvani were peaceful, or at least not warlike. Their warrior societies spar with each other to solve inter-tribal disputes. A few tribes raid human settlements to steal chickens or a pig or a bushel of potatoes, but for close to two hundred years even that was rare.
Until now. Now they were led by a kind of super-shaman. The ancient undead head of a defiant shaman who led the last major war between my folk and theirs, to be more precise.
His name had been Shereul, when he was alive. Two centuries before he had led the last major organized resistance to human settlement of the northwest of the rustic Duchy of Alshar, where it abutted the Minden Range. He had lost several battles against the Alshari knights and their shining lances, and sued for peace.
At a truce meeting between him and the knights, he had been betrayed and slain in the sacred valley of his people, so that we could settle their lands. To add insult to injury, they chopped off his head and put it on a pike while they systematically cleared out the sacred valley of the goblins by slaughtering everyone in sight. Since then, the gurvani had been dispossessed from their sacred valley and their sacred caves and Shereul wasn’t very happy about that
Now he was just called the O
ld God by the goblins (we called him, more accurately, the Dead God) and he wasn’t just undead – which would have been interesting enough, thaumaturgically speaking. He was also encased in a perfect sphere of a peculiar kind of green amber, known to scholars as irionite. It’s absolutely rare, a translucent stone that shimmers like an emerald in the sunlight and is lighter in your hand than you’d expect. It’s magically potent – actually, that’s an understatement. It’s magically profound. A tiny shard a centimeter wide can give most magi almost unlimited power. I’ve got a perfect sphere of it three centimeters wide, which makes me an extremely formidable warmage.
But irionite not only animated Shereul’s thoughts, the huge mass of the stuff encapsulated his entire brain, giving the Dead God truly divine levels of magical power. How powerful? Just his existence is enough to threaten the nature of Reality itself in his proximity. Using that power he had secretly raised an army of almost a million gurvani back in the depths of the Minden Range and then launched a genocidal war on us.
I guess I shouldn’t leave that part out. It’s pretty important. It’s why I was here, about to slaughter a bunch of hairy goblins at a misty, rocky little fief in northern Alshar called Grimly Wood. It was late summer, now, almost autumn, and as I sat on my horse and tried to distract myself from my over-full bladder with reflections of my life and its purpose, I couldn’t help but realize that it had been an eventful summer. Hells, it had been an eventful year.
The Spellmonger Series: Book 01 - Spellmonger Page 41