Scholar of Magic

by Michael G. Manning

  The memory of what he had choked down the day before made his stomach begin to spasm. “No thanks,” he replied, leaning over to fight back a fresh wave of dry heaving. That made his head hurt even worse of course, and he discovered he also had a sharp pain in his right thigh. Looking down, he saw that his trousers were ripped, and a scab had formed on his skin. The flesh was swollen, red, and very tender. “That must have been a monster mosquito,” he muttered to himself.

  His body felt incredibly weak, and he quickly realized that though he was absorbing turyn as quickly as possible, he was almost entirely drained. If he had slept longer, he might not have woken up at all. Summoning an elixir of turyn from the limnthal, he downed the entire bottle. He waited a few minutes, then followed it with a blood-cleanse potion.

  Clegg helped him get to his feet, and Will did his best to ambulate out of the chieftain’s rotting home and back into the dappled sunlight of the village center. Once there, he stored the emptied and newly refilled butt cask in the limnthal and replaced it with the second butt of ale. “Thank you for your hospitality,” he told Clegg slowly, attempting to sound sincere.

  The chief barked out a series of orders, and two trolls came over to stand on either side of him. “They walk with you. Keep safe.”

  An escort? Considering the thing they had hauled in to eat before he had passed out, he wouldn’t turn his nose up at the idea. After a few minutes of walking, the trolls grew tired of waiting on him, since he was too debilitated to jog. One of the trolls reached down and picked him up, and he found himself riding on the troll’s shoulders.

  Things went much quicker after that, though the swaying motion made it difficult for him to control his nausea. He was glad beyond belief when they finally reached the lake and he was once again placed on his own two feet. Will activated the limnthal. “I’m about to leave, and I want to thank the troll who carried me to the congruence point,” he told the ring.

  “Tell him, ‘brak gall,’” said Arrogan. “That’s troll for thank you. It’s about time you start learning troll anyway. You won’t be a very good ambassador if you don’t speak the tongue.”

  “Ambassador?”

  “I’m dead, so you’ll have to take the job.”

  “There’s no longer a council of wizards,” Will pointed out.

  “How does it feel to be head of the council too? My, what lofty positions you hold for one so young,” said the ring dryly.

  Will faced the two trolls and loudly repeated what he’d been told, “Brak gall.” Then he bowed and moved to the congruence point. Seconds later, he was home. With a sigh of relief, he slid down the wall of the laboratory and sat on the cool stone floor. He wasn’t quite ready to go up the ladder and face his mother again.

  He needed to clean up first.

  Casting Selene’s Solution turned out to be much harder than he expected. His mind was fuzzy, and combined with the pain of his throbbing headache, it was extremely difficult to focus. It took him ten minutes and three tries to finally assemble the spell. He drew in more turyn than was necessary and set the spell boundaries to take in the entire room. Might as well do some spring cleaning while I’m at it, he told himself.

  The feeling of being clean once more was indescribable, and he silently thanked his absent wife for the genius of her magnum opus. It wasn’t enough to make him forget the misery of his hangover, but it was a step in the right direction. Will started to rise to his feet—and promptly dropped to the floor, a half-choked scream emerging from his throat.

  The muscle in his leg felt as though it was on fire. Looking at it again, he saw that the swelling had increased. I took a blood-cleanse potion, he reminded himself. Surely the wound can’t be turning sour.

  He activated the limnthal and described his swollen leg to Arrogan, ending with, “It’s like some giant mosquito bit me, but the lump is almost the size of a small turnip now.”

  A long laugh came from the ring, rising into a maniacal cackle at the end. “You must have really enjoyed the party. Did you pass completely out?”

  “It was awful,” lamented Will. “Passing out was the best part of the whole experience.”

  “Did you make any close friends before you blacked out?” asked Arrogan, his voice tinged with hidden mirth.

  Will frowned. “What are you hinting at?”

  “Just that you need to learn moderation. Obviously, you can’t handle your drink, and just as obviously, one of the trolls took advantage of you.”

  “Took advantage? What does that mean?”

  “You’re pregnant.”

  “What?” Will shrieked.

  “Don’t be such a baby! Most women experience pregnancy at least once and you don’t hear them screaming about it. Well, some do, but usually at the end.”

  “I’m not a woman!” yelled Will. “This is not something I ever expected.”

  “That’s why I never liked the term, ‘expecting,’” mused Arrogan. “Because so many don’t expect it at all. Anyway, I warned you. Remember?”

  “No. I’m pretty sure I would have remembered that,” said Will sourly.

  “Hmm, I thought I did. Oh, well.” There was a brief silence, then the ring added, “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “I bet Lrmeg is the father of your love-child. He was still nursing a grudge. It would be poetic justice, wouldn’t it? You stabbed him in the dick last time, and this time he stabbed you with his dick.”

  Will groaned. “I’m really starting to rethink my refusal to melt you down.”

  “That’s what I’m going for,” said Arrogan gleefully. “Sweet, sweet, release.” Will thought he was finished, but then Arrogan piped up again. “Just like Lrmeg and his sweet release!”

  “Ugh, stop! I’m going to throw up again. How do I fix this?”

  “There’s only one way. You’ll need an abortion.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A highly dangerous medical procedure that no one really tries for anymore, since there’s no decent wizard-healers these days. In your case, though, it should be much simpler since this is more like a parasitic infection than a normal pregnancy. You’ll need to cut it out. After that, a fire should keep the little troll-let from continuing to grow.”

  “There’s really a baby troll in my leg?”

  “A teeny one,” said Arrogan, failing to hide a snicker. “The sooner you cut it out, the better. Otherwise you might lose the whole leg.”

  Will examined the wound and summoned one of his knives. He’d rather take care of matters before seeing his mother, but when he pressed the point to the swollen flesh, the pain took his breath away. There was no way he could do it on his own. In the end, he never really had a choice. Climbing the ladder with his wounded thigh would be close to impossible. Drawing a deep lungful of air, he yelled, “Mom!”

  He repeated the cry several times before he heard the stomp of feet on the floorboards above. The trap door opened, and a woman’s head surrounded by frizzy red hair looked over the rim. It was Sammy. “Will! Is that you?”

  “Yes,” he said, trying to sound calm.

  “Auntie is napping up front. You shouldn’t wake her,” said Sammy cheerfully. “Come up and we can talk in the bedroom.”

  “I don’t think I can climb the ladder, Sammy,” said Will carefully. “I hurt my leg. You’re going to have to wake Mom.”

  His cousin’s eyes went round at the news he was injured, and she vanished in a flash. “Aunt Eri, Aunt Eri! Will’s hurt! He can’t get up the ladder. Quick, come quick!” The words spilled out in one long, continuous stream that somehow maintained an incredibly loud volume throughout. Will covered his face with one hand. Sammy couldn’t ever do anything quietly. His poor mother was probably about to die of shock.

  Within a minute his mother had stormed down the ladder and was examining him carefully. She gave Sammy a baleful glare. “You scared me half to death, girl!” she chided.

  Sammy pointed at Will. “He’s the one who said he coul
dn’t climb the ladder.”

  Will pointed back. “I never told you to yell bloody murder, though! I said I was hurt, not dying.”

  Erisa shook her head, probing the swollen region carefully with her fingers. “It looks like a massive boil. How did it get so large in just a few hours?”

  “What time is it?” asked Will.

  “Midafternoon,” answered Erisa, then she wrinkled her nose. “You reek of ale. Have you been drinking?”

  “I had to,” said Will. “I couldn’t offend them.” Midafternoon meant it still hadn’t been a full twenty-four hours since his friends had been injured. He wasn’t sure how long would be too long, but he was determined to get the regeneration potions to them before forty-eight hours had passed. “It isn’t a boil,” he told his mother. “It’s sort of a parasitic sting.”

  “There’s something in there?”

  He nodded, and as if to emphasize his point, the lump on his leg moved slightly. “Oh, that’s disgusting,” announced Sammy. “I think I’m going to be sick!”

  Erisa looked at her niece sharply. “No, you’re not. Go upstairs and put the kettle on the stove. I’ll need hot water, fresh towels, and linen bandages. Once you get the water heating, find my kit and bring it to me.” Sammy scampered up the ladder with alacrity, and Will’s mother looked back at him, radiating calm confidence. “It appears to be in the muscle. Depending on how deep I have to cut, you’re probably going to have trouble walking for a while. It’s going to hurt a lot too, but I have some tincture of poppy saved for just this sort of thing—”

  Will put a hand on his mother’s arm. “I can’t take the tincture, Mom. I have to be clearheaded after this.”

  “Why?” she asked, her voice clear and untroubled.

  “I have to make potions when I get back.”

  “Tiny’s kidney problem won’t kill him for a week or two at the worst. You have time.”

  Will shook his head. “No. The regeneration potion won’t work if the kidney has already died. The same for Janice’s face. If it heals partially, she could be disfigured for life. She lost an eye, Mom.”

  “There’s no way you can travel like that,” Erisa said stubbornly.

  “She lost her eye for me, Mom. She and Tiny didn’t have to be there. They came even though they didn’t have a hope in hell of saving me. Rob too.”

  “Who is Rob?”

  “The one that didn’t make it back,” said Will somberly.

  She sighed. “Can you make them here? Maybe the cat can take me back with the potions in your stead.”

  “I don’t have all the ingredients here. It’s all waiting for me back at Wurthaven. Plus, I’m not sure you would survive the trip through Hell.”

  “Hell?”

  “That’s where the goddamn cat was wounded.”

  Her calm demeanor, carefully cultivated over the years for when she was dealing with patients, cracked and her cheeks paled. “And you think you can survive the trip? With a hurt leg?”

  “I don’t need my leg to use spells, and the cat does the running.”

  Chapter 31

  Will had experienced a wide variety of painful things since he had been born, but enduring minor surgery without anything to dull the pain was a novel form of torture. Unlike being whipped half to death, the pain came steadily, at the hand of someone who he thought loved him, but who he now suspected was in league with the forces of evil.

  Erisa was merciless, and her face showed no doubt, no reserve, no hesitation as she carved into the meat of his thigh to remove the ‘parasite.’ Will’s grunt’s turned into screams almost from the beginning, and when Sammy began to cry, his mother finally lost her temper.

  “Are you listening?” she snapped when Sammy failed to respond to the latest command. When Sammy responded with an incoherent sob, Erisa paused and put her knife down for a moment. “Sammy, you’re going to make this take longer than it should, which will hurt your cousin more. He was helping me with things like this at eleven. I think you can pull yourself together long enough to do what needs to be done.”

  To be fair, Will had nearly passed out the first time his mother asked him to help with delivering a baby, so he felt a great deal of sympathy for his cousin, or he would have, if the pain in his leg wasn’t blotting out every other possible sensation.

  Sammy clenched her teeth together, then managed to answer, “Yes, Aunty.”

  “Take that towel and mop up the blood around the incision. I can’t see what I’m doing,” said Erisa calmly. Will hissed when Sammy touched him, and Sammy flinched, but she kept at it. Soon the knife was back, and Will was choking back screams again.

  As family reunions went, it wasn’t the best, but it was something none of them would forget. When Erisa finally got the parasite, out a strange look of shock passed over her face, and predictably, Sammy was the first to say something. “It’s like a little baby chick.” The creature didn’t have feathers or down, but it did have large eyes and a bulbous head.

  Erisa gathered it into a towel, then handed it to her niece. “Throw it in the fire.”

  Will was full of mixed emotions, but he spoke before sorting them out. “Wait. I’ll take it back.”

  His mother stared at him suspiciously. “You said it was a parasite.”

  “It’s a troll,” he admitted.

  “How did you get a troll in your leg?”

  “Someone was playing a joke.”

  Erisa’s voice ascended the scales to a much higher pitch. “This was someone’s idea of a joke?”

  Will tried to give a brief review of what Arrogan had taught him about troll reproduction, which failed to impress his mother, and elicited a nervous giggle from his cousin. His mother spent the time carefully bandaging his bloody thigh. When she was done, Sammy fetched the crutches that Erisa kept for patients, and they helped Will up and onto his feet. “How far do you have to go to return this troll?” asked his mother.

  “It’s a bit of a walk,” he admitted.

  “I’ll come with you,” she told him.

  “But…”

  “I’m coming or you don’t go. Would you rather toss it in the fire? I’m still in favor of that plan,” she responded, cutting him off.

  He gave in, realizing he had no hope of winning, and his mother helped him hobble over to the corner of the room where the congruence point was. Will had the troll-let wrapped in the towel, but somewhere along the way it managed to slip its head free. He felt a sharp pain as it bit down on one of his fingers.

  Gritting his teeth, he pried it loose and pushed it back into the towel, wrapping it more tightly. Then he transported them across to Muskeglun. He was surprised when he arrived, for several trolls were sitting around the area of the congruence, using a fallen tree as a bench. One of them smiled at him, and he thought it might be Clegg. Trolls were still hard for him to identify.

  Erisa reacted to the smile by nearly falling over, which almost took Will down with her. After a few seconds of fumbling, they regained their collective balance. “It’s all right, Mom. They’re friendly,” he reassured her.

  The troll that had smiled stood and moved closer, while Will held out the towel and opened it so they could see what lay inside. Then he pointed at his wounded leg.

  “Hello,” said Clegg, confirming his identity with the greeting.

  That was a relief. “I found this in my leg,” said Will.

  The troll chief cocked his head to one side. “And you brought it back?”

  “I couldn’t leave it in my world,” said Will. “You know how dangerous that would be.”

  Clegg examined Erisa. “Who is this?”

  “My mother, Erisa,” said Will.

  “Mother, an interesting thing,” said the chief. “We do not have them. All trolls are fathers, until now. You are the first to bring one back.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Many times have troll played trick on humans. Never do your kind return with troll.”

  Will gaped at Clegg. “We
re they supposed to?”

  The chief troll shrugged. “Not care. Was joke.” Then he focused on Will for a long minute. “But you are strange. You have earned a name.” The chief turned to the other trolls, and they talked for several minutes, ending the conversation with a long series of cough-laughs.

  Clegg turned back. “You are Grak-Murra, Troll-Mother.”

  Will was stunned. “I thought trolls didn’t have mothers. How do you have a word for them?”

  “Just made it,” said Clegg. “Mother sounds bad to us, so ‘murra’ is close enough.”

  Feeling vengeful, Will made a request. “Can I name the child?”

  Clegg smiled. “What would you call it?”

  “Gan,” said Will. “After my grandfather.” He could still hear the troll’s cough-laughter in his ears when they reappeared in the laboratory.

  His mother was giving him a strange look.

  “What?” asked Will.

  She shook her head. “You’ve changed so much in the last few years. Those things were terrifying, but you talked to them as though it didn’t bother you at all.”

  “I was swarmed by vampires yesterday, Mom. I guess it’s all relative.” He had no intention of mentioning the joke regarding him having to sacrifice an arm.

  “Why did you tell him to name it Gan? Why not Arrogan?”

  “That’s what they called Arrogan,” said Will.

  Sammy could hardly contain herself. “That was quick! What happened?”

  Will explained while struggling up the ladder. With only one leg, he was forced to hold himself up with both arms while he took each step. It turned out to be easier than he expected, though his leg complained every time he bumped his right foot against anything. After he had finally pulled himself over the edge, he sat and rested a moment while the others came up.

  He noticed something interesting in the middle of the giant, four-poster bed that took up one wall of Arrogan’s old bedroom. A small pedestal of cushions had been built up, and in the middle of them, resting like royalty, lay the goddamn cat.

  Trying not to scream when the muscle was pulled as he stood up, Will hobbled over to examine the demigod, who appeared to be sleeping. In his housecat form, the Cath Bawlg always appeared as a gray tabby with short hair, but there was something different about him now. Sammy stepped up beside him, then put a finger over her lips as she whispered, “Don’t disturb him. Mister Mittens is sleeping.”