Scholar of Magic

by Michael G. Manning

  “Not in this form. Hurry up and cast your spell.”

  Will had never actually used the tracking spell, but he had practiced it, creating it once daily when he ran through his routine. The spell was only third-order, so it wasn’t hard to remember. The construct came together quickly above his palm, and then he placed his hand on top of the goddamn cat’s back. At the same time, he gave the feline an experimental scratch, but all he got for the effort was a hiss.

  “Follow the path quickly. It will only take me a minute. After that you’re on your own,” said the Cath Bawlg, then he did something Will had never seen before. He dissolved into what appeared to be an insubstantial smoky shadow. He raced away and then disappeared down a sewer grate next to the palace gate.

  Will returned to the others. “We’re set. I can get us there.”

  “Where do we meet your guide?” asked the baron.

  “That’s already done,” he answered, tapping his temple. “I have a path to follow.”

  “And we’re supposed to trust you?” asked his father anxiously. “You walk away and pretend to have a secret conversation, then you come back and tell us your imaginary friend taught you how to get there?”

  Janice started to open her mouth, but Laina was even quicker to respond. “If he says he can do it, he can!” she snapped. Then she looked at the others, a challenge in her eyes. “If any of you don’t believe him, then you shouldn’t have come.”

  Without further argument, they formed up near the sewer and Laina used her earth elemental to quickly remove the grate and widen the opening so they could easily get down. From there, they formed a long line. Tiny offered to take the lead, but Will was the only one able to see the line marking their path, or at all for that matter, lacking a light source of some kind. Tiny and Laina would follow him, while Mark Nerrow, Elizabeth Sundy, and Darla would bring up the end of the line, with the two hundred students in between. Janice would be in the middle of the line, where she could help organize the students according to their elementals, sending those forward who would be needed to block side tunnels.

  Being in the front, Will adjusted his vision accordingly. The others used light spells behind him, but Tiny’s bulk blocked most of the light that filtered forward, so Will preferred to stay a little ahead as he could actually see better without the extraneous light ruining his vision.

  Each time he came across a crossing point or a t-intersection, he stopped to warn the others and wait for an elemental to block the path that wouldn’t be used, then he would resume moving forward. All in all, it was significantly slower than it would have been to walk the streets aboveground, but there didn’t seem to be any vampires present. He had prepared three Ethelgren’s Ilumination spells, and he hoped that those plus his force-lances and shields would be enough to get them through.

  The worst of it was the feeling of the murky sewer water seeping into their shoes and soaking the lower portions of their clothing. Well, that and the smell. Although an air elemental kept bringing fresh air in from the street grates they passed under and pushing it forward ahead of them, the smell was still unbelievably foul.

  He was starting to think they might make it the entire way without encountering anything when something gray flickered through the tunnel in front of him, moving almost too fast to see. The vampire rebounded from his point-defense shield less than five feet from where he stood, but he began hammering it with force-lances before it could make another charge. Leg, leg, chest, arm, head, the creature’s body came apart under his rapid-fire spells.

  Will wished he had gotten a chance to learn the spell that Ethelgren had used, since it seemed to kill the creatures with a single shot, but then again, it would have taken months to get to the point where he could reflex cast it.

  Tiny had seen some of what happened, though the combination of darkness and flickering illumination from the light spells behind him made it difficult to sort out exactly what happened. “We have one in pieces up here,” called the big man.

  Janice had someone send an earth elemental forward, and the pieces of the vampire were quickly separated and encased in stone. That gave him pause as he wondered how thorough the ritual would be. It was meant to illuminate even underground spaces, but would it be fine enough to handle body parts encased in stone? Before he could ask, he saw smoke rising from one of the stone balls as it began to crumble away.

  Oh, acid, he realized. If it worked for trolls it probably worked for vampire flesh as well, though it wasn’t as fast as fire.

  Will moved forward even more cautiously after that, but after a hundred yards more he saw that the line went straight up to a grate roughly seven feet above his head. There were no rungs or other means of climbing, since the drain wasn’t meant for human access, but Will thought it might be the same sewer grate he had planned to use to escape from Selene’s wedding.

  If so, that means we’re near the east-side door to the cathedral. He wasn’t sure though. They could just as easily be on the west side, which was probably just as good. North and south would be less ideal, since the layout of the cathedral meant that the nearest gutters were much farther from the front and back entrances.

  “We’re here,” Will said to Tiny, who turned and passed the word back.

  He felt more nervous about emerging from the safety of the sewers than he had about entering them when they had seemed dark and unknown. Now it was the land above that seemed most dangerous. Is this how rabbits feel before they leave the safety of the warren? he wondered.

  They had come too far to back out now and waiting wouldn’t help. Will prepared to cast a climb spell on himself. He still had some rope inside the limnthal, so he figured he could tie it off at the top and the others could use it to get up. He was about to start climbing when Laina squeezed around Tiny and nudged him with an elbow. “Move, idiot.”

  He moved forward, to the other side of the space beneath the grate, and Laina’s earth elemental flowed upward, creating wide, easy hand- and footholds in the stone as it went. At the top, it shifted the paving stones and moved the iron grate aside with a minimum of noise. “Oh,” said Will, feeling slightly silly. “I keep forgetting about the elementals.”

  “I wish I could,” said Laina darkly, and before he could stop her, she ascended to the street.

  Surprised, Will reacted slowly, and Tiny beat him into position to be second. Fortunately, the street was quiet once he got aboveground. The city was covered in darkness, since the lamplighters hadn’t been able to do their duties. The windows in the buildings across the street were dark, and the only light came from the stars above.

  That was enough for Will, as he adjusted his sight to make use of the starlight, but for the others it was barely enough to keep from stumbling. Laina made as if to cast a fresh light spell, but Will touched her arm. “If we’re lucky there’s none near, but they’ll see the glow from that light from blocks away.” A scream in the distance echoed down the lane, underscoring his point. It seemed a few people hadn’t obeyed the king’s order to gather at Wurthaven.

  On one side of them, the cathedral loomed less than twenty feet away, with steps rising to broad double doors. Will had been right; it was indeed the east-side entrance. Laina leaned in, trying to see his face, and almost slammed her forehead into his nose. “No one can see. How are they going to find the door?” she hissed.

  “Wait here a second,” he replied, and before she could object, Will moved up the steps to the cathedral entrance. Testing the handle, he found the door locked. Figures. Quickly, he cast the unlocking spell and then eased one door open, wincing as the hinges whined loudly. Then he summoned his rope and tied it to the door handle. He stepped back to the grate and handed the rope to Tiny. “Put their hand on it as they come up. It’s tied off at the entrance.”

  The others began to ascend while Will and Laina moved just inside the cathedral doors. “It’s even worse in here,” she complained. “We have to have light to work by.”

  Will guided her to
the right, then put her hand on the closest of several tall candelabras. “One for now. We can light more once everyone is inside.” She nodded, and there was a tiny flicker as her fire elemental lit the closest candle.

  The candle made quite a difference, even to those just coming up from the sewer, for it enabled them to see their target, and the rope was hardly needed after that, though it helped keep them from stumbling on the stairs. Twenty people were inside when a voice rang out from the galleries above, echoing in a manner that made it impossible to pinpoint. “I warned you, Will, but you wouldn’t listen.”

  Everyone froze as a bolt of terror shot through their collective hearts. Unlike the others, Will could see clearly within the cathedral, and his eyes soon spotted a gray form moving on the balcony across from them. “Rob?” he called out.

  The vampire laughed. “The one and only. I see you brought friends. This reminds me of the day you first came to Wurthaven. Do you remember? When we looked out the dorm window?”

  Will remembered. “It wasn’t that long ago,” he answered, feeling sad. Rob’s fascination with the female student body had caused him to wax poetic. What had he said? “They lie before us like a banquet waiting to be supped upon.”

  “That’s what you all look like to me now, Will. Delicious and bursting with vitality.”

  Will avoided looking directly at his friend. Given the relative darkness, Rob would be seeing him primarily by his heart-light, and while the candle behind him would create a little glare, he knew his old friend would clearly be able to see where his gaze was directed. By looking off to one side, he hoped not to give away the fact that he could see Rob clearly. “Why don’t you come down here where I can see you, Rob? We can talk. Maybe there’s a way to fix this.”

  Rob laughed again. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? I’m not stupid. I know the things you can do. You’d end me the second you could see me. If our positions were reversed, I doubt you would care enough to try as much as I have.”

  “That’s not true,” said Will.

  “Then why didn’t you listen? Wasn’t I clear enough? Are you trying to force me to kill you?”

  Will’s mind was racing. We are merely decoys. He still didn’t understand. The vampires couldn’t have known about his plan for a ritual when Rob had written the message, so it couldn’t have been part of their plans. He had hoped that his action would circumvent their plan, thinking they only knew about the king’s final contingency.

  Yet Rob was there waiting for them, in the cathedral. How had he known they would appear there? “Decoys for what?” asked Will.

  “That’s the beauty of Androv’s plan,” said Rob. “It doesn’t matter what you do. All roads lead to an ending with two results, a dead city, and a dead king. Both will happen, and even if you managed to prevent one through some miracle, the other would be all but inevitable.”

  “Help me then,” Will pleaded. “Despite what they’ve done to you, you know what’s right. Help us.”

  “You don’t know what it’s like. The pleasure, the hunger, the taste of someone’s life flowing through your lips. Even if I could return to my old self, I wouldn’t want to now. I only warned you out of some strange feeling of sentiment, a feeling that has almost faded away.”

  “But you came here to warn me again?” asked Will. “Or is this an ambush?”

  “This is farewell, my friend. Whatever you do here doesn’t concern me. Androv will protect me.” Rob began backing up, moving closer to the stained-glass windows that lined the galleries.

  “Androv is dead!” declared Will.

  “Believing that was your biggest mistake.” Rob’s body blurred into motion, and glass shattered as he flung himself through the window. Will’s force-lance passed through the space a half-second later. I wasn’t quick enough, he chided himself, but he knew it wasn’t true. He had hesitated because he couldn’t bear to hurt his friend.

  Chapter 52

  Janice and almost two-thirds of the rest were in the cathedral by then. She moved closer to Will and asked, “That was him, wasn’t it?”

  He nodded, unsure what to say.

  Her features carried a multitude of emotions, but she stuck to the issue at hand. “Is it going to be safe to continue? Do they know we’re here?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “But we don’t have a choice. We have to try.”

  Laina glanced between the two of them, then went back to the doors to encourage the last of the line to hurry up. Soon Elizabeth Sundy and the baron were in, and they were at last able to shut the doors, though Laina found herself staring upward at the dark windows.

  Elizabeth didn’t waste time. Moving to the altar in the center, she began pointing at people and barking orders. “You, we need the doors sealed with stone! You, over here, we’re going to chalk out the circle. Move everything; we have to clear a space. Someone light the candles so we can see.”

  Laina was already covering the windows with stone, and soon it seemed they would be sealed inside the cathedral, like a caterpillar within a stone cocoon. Darla moved closer to make a suggestion. “You should leave one door open. Let me watch outside.”

  Will heard the conversation and joined them. “Why?”

  “How many defenders do we have?” asked Darla.

  “Twenty-seven students, plus the baron, Laina, Tiny, and yourself,” he answered.

  The Arkeshi pointed at the windows Laina had already sealed. “Can the Drak’shar break through these?”

  Laina shrugged. “It’s an inch thick. It should slow them down. If we have enough time, I can double that.”

  Darla nodded, then pointed at the east door, which they had entered through. “If there is a way in, they will take the path of least resistance. If there is not, they will climb over everything and begin creating their own entrances.”

  “They may not even notice the open door,” Will pointed out.

  The Arkeshi pointed at herself. “That is why I will wait out there. As soon as I spot them, I will light a candle and move inside. The candle will announce the position of the open door and draw them to it, like moths to a flame. Our small number of defenders can concentrate their efforts just inside the door, destroying them as they come.”

  “Unless they have someone with them smart enough to figure out our plan and redirect them,” Will stated glumly, thinking of Androv.

  “With how few we have, this is the best we can do,” said Darla. “If they do have a brilliant commander, we are already dead.”

  Tiny spoke up, as he had been listening from a few feet away. “Let’s do it. I agree with her reasoning.”

  For some reason everyone seemed to be waiting on Will to make the final call, so he did. “We’ll do that.” They began moving. When did I turn into the leader here? he wondered. Elizabeth Sundy was still barking orders at the students, so he felt some relief. At least I’m not the only one.

  The lectern and other furniture had been cleared away, along with the altar table, and now the dais where the high priest normally stood was completely clear of obstructions. “Will, come here,” called Elizabeth. “You’ll stand on this mark, at the center.” She handed him a sheet of parchment. “Can you do this?”

  It all started with a spell construct, Ethelgren’s Illumination, with a few alterations. His biggest worry was that he might create the original spell and omit the changes before moving on to the second stage. He nodded. “I can.” He had barely gotten the words out before the scholar had moved on, calling to the new sorcerers who would be participating. “You, over here. You, here.” It went on and on.

  She arranged thirteen in a circle around him, those she judged to be the most experienced students, for their jobs required more finesse as they would be providing auxiliary control, guiding the flows of turyn from the rest of the students into channels that would flow around Will in the center.

  While she organized the last of them, Will nervously activated the limnthal. “I’m about to start the ritual,” he told Ar
rogan quietly. “Wish me luck.”

  “Fuck luck. Luck will get you killed,” said the ring, speaking softly. “Remember what happened when the dam nearly collapsed on you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is like that. You have to make your own luck.”

  “I’m not going to be doing the double draw like I did then, though,” said Will, somewhat confused.

  “No, but you’re going to have to step up and do something similar. Controlling the turyn in a ritual like this requires a more advanced technique.”

  His heart sped up. “You should have said that before! I don’t know what I’m doing,” he hissed under his breath, hoping no one heard him.

  “If you did that, you can do this. The trick here is to keep the turyn away from yourself. Visualize a sort of shell around your core, your body. You want to control the turyn they’re sending in your direction, but you can’t let it slip through and into your inner boundary, otherwise it will undermine your control.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?” demanded Will, beginning to panic. “I think you should do this. Take my body.”

  “I wasn’t lying when I said I might not be able to give it up. I’m not doing this for you. It’s you or nothing.”

  Will said nothing.

  Arrogan went on, “You have to think of it this way. You’re keeping the turyn at arm’s length, away from you. There’s so much of it that it will literally tear you apart if it gets too close. So you have to control it at a distance. It sounds harder, but it really—all right, that’s a lie—it is harder, but not as hard as dying.”

  “How am I going to control that much energy if I’m keeping it that far away?”

  “Ever seen a tornado?”

  “What’s that?”

  “How about a dust devil?”

  Will nodded. “Yes.”

  “You’re going to whip the first turyn that comes in around yourself, like a wind-wall spell. Keep it moving, and its momentum will draw the turyn that follows along with it. As long as you don’t falter, the turyn will stick to the pattern.”