Scholar of Magic

by Michael G. Manning

  Pushing those thoughts aside, he opened the cage and organized the chains, separating them and moving them out of the center. Then he summoned the vampire jar from the limnthal and carefully tipped it over. The monster inside was just as feeble and helpless as before. A trickle of sunlight was falling on the cellar steps, and enough of it reached the desiccated form that smoke began to rise from one of the bloodsucker’s arms.

  Will moved to shelter the vampire with his shadow. He would have shouted for Blake to shut the cellar door above, but by the sound of things the man was bringing the pig down. Will waited.

  Eventually the pig was there, and Blake lit an oil lamp that sat on a shelf across the room. Then he went upstairs to shut the outer door. Once he had, Will began shackling his corpselike vampire subject. The monster was little more than a skeleton clad in skin, which made its limbs too skinny for the shackles.

  Will was forced to wrap the chains tightly around the respective limbs, the neck, the torso, and then affix the shackle to the chain itself. He imagined the vampire swelling up with blood, its flesh growing around the metal links like a tree grows around a metal fence. Hopefully it’s painful.

  Once he was sure he had the vampire secure, he dumped it back into the jar and stood it up again. The thing was too weak to feed, so he figured he could use to jar to marinate the monster in pig blood. He shuddered. I shouldn’t have thought of marinating, now I’ll remember this when I’m cooking.

  “How long will this take?” asked Blake.

  “For the vampire, I’m not sure,” said Will. “The potions I want to make are fairly simple. I can produce a few in a couple of hours; it’s just a single-stage process.”

  Even in the warm lamplight, the old Special Services veteran looked pale. “Do you want me to stay down here with you?”

  Will decided to take it easy on him. “Go up the stairs and wait at the cellar door. If things go badly for some reason and I yell for help, open the doors. The sunlight should solve whatever problem I’m having.” He began arranging jars on one side of the room, then put a large metal pan in the center of the floor to catch the blood.

  Blake evacuated.

  Chapter 40

  Will tried a sleep spell, which worked, but as soon as he began cutting, the pig woke again. He was forced to use a source-link to paralyze the poor animal, and he watched its eyes rolling wildly as he bled it from the main carotid arteries. It was pretty much the same thing that would have happened at the slaughterhouse, but Will still felt a strong sense of guilt.

  He did his best to catch as much of the vital red fluid as possible, though some splashed out from the force of its panicked heartbeat. The animal’s consciousness faded away, and Will released the source-link. He almost lost his blood as well, when the pig fell sideways and almost knocked his catch pan into the dirt. He was forced to hug the three-hundred-pound gilt against himself as he dragged her back in the other direction.

  Once again, he was liberally smeared with blood and dirt. Why do I even bother cleaning myself off? he wondered. Clearly, this is meant to be my natural state.

  Another thought came to him then, and Will carefully moved the blood pan off to one side so he wouldn’t knock it over. Then he went up the stairs to where Blake waited. “Can you get Tiny for me?”

  “You need his help?”

  “We can’t waste the meat, but I’m going to be too busy with the rest of this to butcher it.”

  “This is what you get for rushing. You should have planned for this,” Blake remonstrated.

  Will frowned. “Too bad. It isn’t as though I’ve had a lot of time to plan things.”

  Blake left and returned a few minutes later. Together the two men dragged the heavy pig’s body out of the cellar and up aboveground where they could cut her up. Will went back down below. He made sure he had Ethelgren’s Illumination prepared before he poured the pig’s blood into the jar.

  Nothing happened at first, so he moved back and locked the cage door. He’d been afraid the vampire might instantly spring to life and rush at him, but that wasn’t the case. Several minutes passed, and then a wet, slurping sound found his ears, and he could see the jar moving slightly as the thing inside shifted from side to side.

  I’ll never get used to this, thought Will. Then again, he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to get used to it. Was it better to be inured to such horror, or to remain unspoiled, happy, and innocent? He had a feeling it was the latter, but life hadn’t given him much choice in the matter.

  The jar exploded as the vampire finally emerged with an unholy howl of pain and outrage. It glared at him hatefully as the chains arrested its movement close to the center of the cage. “You will die for this, human!” it hissed. As he had suspected, the chains were inside the creature’s body, where the flesh had grown over them.

  Will stared at it coldly, trying to give no sign of the extreme unease he felt. “I sincerely doubt that, spawn of the grave.” With a thought he sent a force-lance through the bars, removing the vampire’s head. Its body fell sideways, and he rushed forward with a shallow bowl, trying to catch as much as he could of the black blood leaking from the stump of its neck. The head lay off to one side, staring at him and gnashing its teeth. Without lungs, it couldn’t make its curses audible.

  Unlike the pig, the vampire’s blood emerged sluggishly, without a living heart to pump it. His first bowl filled, and he grabbed a second. When that was full, the neck had stopped bleeding and had begun to heal over, while the arms still scrabbled aimlessly about, searching for the head. He removed his two bowls, poured them in to a jar that he could tightly stopper against light, then stored it in the limnthal.

  With his prize stored away, Will used several force-lances to further dismember the creature. Then he opened the cage and used his sword to do a more precise job. It was bloody and awful. The smell alone was enough to turn his stomach.

  His goal was to return the vampire to a pile of parts, devoid of vital fluid. It was a harder job than he imagined, and he wound up wishing he was only covered in pig’s blood by the time he was done. Then he removed the chains and stored the vampire’s body in a new jar, covered it, and stored it away in the limnthal.

  Throughout the horrid ordeal, Will made mental notes. The next time he needed to harvest vampire blood, he would have a better process in place. Going up the stairs, he opened the door. The fading rays of the sun burned away the black blood coating his tunic and sticking to his hair. He used Selene’s spell to further purify himself.

  Blake and Tiny were fully engaged in cutting up the pig, but it was obvious they wouldn’t finish soon enough. The sun was dropping quickly, and Blake needed to leave with the others. Will shooed them to the side and stored the rest of the pig in the limnthal. “You can finish this tomorrow. Blake you need to go.”

  “All right,” said the manservant. “Are you going to come see them off?”

  “It would just give them another opportunity to argue. Tiny and I will head to the Alchemy building. Make sure they know I won’t be back, otherwise they might try to wait,” ordered Will.

  Blake nodded and Will and Tiny set off.

  “Janice is going to be unhappy about us sneaking off without giving her a chance to join us,” said the big warrior.

  “But you didn’t argue against the idea, did you?” said Will.

  “Guilty as charged.”

  Lawrence was once again manning the desk at the Alchemy building. He glanced up as Will signed in. “Hi, Will. Who’s your friend?”

  “This is T—”

  “I’m his bodyguard,” interrupted Tiny, affecting a menacing expression.

  “Tiny, stop it,” said Will, embarrassed. Then he turned back to Lawrence. “He’s a good friend of mine.”

  Tiny nodded. “That’s true, but I’m also his bodyguard.” He held out his hand. “The name is Skullcrusher.”

  Lawrence wasn’t quite sure whether they were joking or not, but he offered his own paw and watched Tiny’s han
d engulf his. “Nice to meet you.”

  Once they were on the stairs, Will turned to his friend. “What’s gotten into you?”

  “Janice said I seem very nice.”

  “You are nice.”

  The big man frowned. “It’s well known that women prefer dangerous men. Besides, I am your bodyguard; it won’t hurt for me to project a more intimidating image.”

  “This is hilarious. So you’re doing this because you think it will make you more appealing to Janice?”

  In response, Tiny shoulder-butted Will, knocking him into the wall. He caught Will’s shoulder before he could fall down the stairs. “Sorry. No, of course not Janice! I meant women in general.”

  Will was pretty sure that his eyes had rolled around several times inside his head, but things straightened up a moment later. “You never worried about women in the past. Why now? It seems suspicious.”

  “No reason. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about lately.”

  “Since when?”

  “A while.”

  “Since you met Janice?” Will braced himself in case Tiny reacted badly, but his friend kept his involuntary reflexes under control this time.

  “The l-last f-f-few months,” stammered Tiny as he utterly failed to lie convincingly.

  Will nodded. “All right.”

  “Honestly.”

  “Sure.”

  Tiny’s face was shading toward a bright pink. “You won’t say anything to her, will you?”

  Will looked up at him with innocent eyes. “About the fact that you’re looking for someone to court? Or the fact that you’re infatuated with her?” Before the sentence was half out, he dropped down against the landing to avoid the blow that he anticipated, but Tiny didn’t move.

  He was stricken by a pang of guilt when he saw the desperate look on Tiny’s face. “Please?” The giant warrior was practically begging.

  Will stood back up and patted Tiny’s shoulder. “Of course not. I won’t say a word.” Damn, this is serious. He hoped Tiny wouldn’t wind up with a broken heart, and he resolved to try and stop teasing the man.

  With that taken care of, he led Tiny up to the small laboratory he was renting and got busy setting up his latest project: Dragon Heart potions. He couldn’t help but think that the name sounded very impressive, despite the fact that the primary ingredient was singularly disgusting. Then again, I guess the same is true of regeneration potions, he realized.

  It took half an hour to get everything set up, and once it was going, they had about an hour before Will would need to decant the product into its final vials and activate the potions. As they stood around, Tiny asked, “Are you sure this is the right thing to be spending your time on?”

  Will shrugged. “I don’t know what the best course of action is, but although their leader is dead, there’s still an unknown number of vampires hiding in the city, and most of them are young, so they’re likely to continue spreading their corruption. If any of them are still organized, though, then they’ll be attacking en masse tomorrow night.”

  “But all this potion does is make someone stronger. That doesn’t seem very important.”

  “If you’re going to act as a bodyguard, you’ll need to be able to handle them up close. I can’t use these potions, so if I’m going to have some muscle protecting me, it has to be you.”

  “Why can’t you use them?” asked Tiny.

  “The potion temporarily alters the internal turyn flow of whoever imbibes it. All the training I went through to become a wizard means that my body will automatically resist something like that. At best it would make me sick, but most likely it would just fail.” Will took that moment to bring out the case he had gotten Blake to acquire.

  “What’s that?”

  “A present,” said Will, laying the leather case on the worktable. It was roughly two inches thick, seven inches long, and six inches in width. There were rings mounted at every corner along with a collection of straps. Depending on how the straps were used, it could either be put on a belt at the waist or strapped to the leg. The top flap was secured with a unique mechanism that Will had never seen before, a spring-loaded buckle that could be released with a small amount of pressure applied to the right place. It kept the case securely shut but made it quick and easy to open when needed. Will was grateful that he had asked Blake, since obviously the military had seen the need for such an item long ago, and they had put a lot of time and effort into designing it.

  Once the top flap was opened, the interior was simple. It was divided into six velvet-lined compartments that had a small amount of woolen batting stuffed loosely into them. The extra bit of wool allowed the compartments to hold a small vial snugly in place. Tiny picked it up, feeling the leather with his hands. “It’s stronger than it looks.”

  “The leather is hardened, but there’s also a thin layer of metal sandwiched in between the outer layer and the velvet to help it hold its form if it’s put under stress, say if you fell on it or something.”

  “It’s for potions?”

  Will nodded. “More specifically, it’s for you. Since you can’t store things in a secret magical space, you’ll need somewhere safe to carry potions so you can use them in a pinch when the time is right.”

  Tiny looked hesitant. “Those things are valuable. You should keep them. If I lost them or broke them by accident…”

  “You’re more valuable to me, Tiny. More valuable than any amount of gold or magic.”

  The big warrior raised his brows and rubbed his chin. “Really? How about Selene, more than her?”

  Will pursed his lips.

  “See! My love means nothing to you!” They both fell to laughing at that. Then Tiny pointed at the interior of the case again. “So, there’s six spots. Do you plan on putting these Dragon Heart potions in all those spots?”

  “You can only take one or two before they become worthless. The first one lasts about half an hour, but if you take a second one the effect is lessened, and you only get another fifteen minutes. Taking more than that is pretty much a waste of time, and probably dangerous to your health. I thought it would be better to put other potions in those slots.” He pointed to the two on the left. “Two Dragon’s Heart potions, then beside those, two blood-cleanse potions, then one regeneration potion, and for the sixth spot a universal antidote.”

  “You think someone might poison me?”

  Will shrugged, then gave Tiny a meaningful glance, eyeing him up and down. “I think most people would rather poison you than fight you face-to-face, at least if they’re smart.”

  Tiny rolled his eyes, but then he became thoughtful. “You should give this to Janice. She needs it more. The other day, if she had had…”

  Will felt another stab of guilt. “I didn’t have any regeneration potions then, but I agree with you. Once this is over, I’ll have some time to make more.”

  “Things are dangerous now, Will. Let me just give her these.”

  “No.” Tiny narrowed his eyes, beginning to show signs of stubbornness. Will held up a hand to forestay the man before he set his heels. “I only have two regeneration potions right now. Do you want me to give her mine?”

  “Of course not. She’ll be safe tonight. You should… oh, I see what you mean.”

  An hour later and the potions were done. Will had made five, though he could have made even more given the amount of blood he had. From what he could tell the black fluid was spoiling rapidly and he doubted he would be able to use the remainder. He’d likely have to bleed another pig and feed his prisoner again. Next time he vowed to have more time so he could maximize his gain from the procedure.

  They loaded two of the potions into Tiny’s case, filled the rest of the slots with the other potions they’d talked about, and then Will stored the extras in the limnthal.

  “What now?” asked Tiny.

  “Well, we could spend the night making another batch of regeneration potions, or I could see if I can attune myself to the relic. Since thei
r big plans were for tomorrow, I think I should probably use the time to see if I can use the relic.”

  “So, no fighting?” Tiny’s relief was faintly visible.

  “My house isn’t safe. They know to look for me there. But the Alchemy building stays open all night. We can stay here. It will be boring for you, probably, but you could always perfect your ‘skullcrusher’ persona with Lawrence while I study the relic.”

  “So you do think I should try to seem more dangerous!”

  He laughed. “No. I think she’ll either like you or she won’t. Trying to change yourself isn’t going to fool her.”

  “Hmm, I’m not sure you’re qualified to give advice on this subject.”

  Will lifted one hand and pointed at himself with his thumb. “I’m married, remember?”

  “You murdered your bride-to-be’s groom on her wedding day, then got yourself stabbed to death, only to be resurrected and married at sword point. Are you sure you’re in a position to give advice?”

  “She killed the groom, not me,” corrected Will irritably. “Why does everyone keep saying it was me?”

  “Because he’d still be alive if you hadn’t shown up uninvited in the first place?”

  He gave Tiny a narrow stare. “Whose side are you on anyway?”

  “I’m on any side that doesn’t send Janice running in the other direction.” He paused briefly, then put a hand on his stomach. “Is there any food here? This will be a long night if there isn’t.”

  “There’s usually stale bread from the dining hall. They leave it out for the students that come at night. It’s in a little room behind where Lawrence sits downstairs. I’ll show you where it is.” Together, they went downstairs, but they were surprised to see that Lawrence had company at the front desk when they got there.

  Laina looked up from her conversation and smiled maliciously. “There you are. I was just telling Lawrence here that they shouldn’t let too many unsavory types in the building. Your presence is liable to spoil the potions the same way you curdle milk at home.”