The Congruent Wizard (The Congruent Mage Series Book 2)
Page 1
Table of Contents
What Has Gone Before
Chapter 1: The Battle of the Quarry
Chapter 2: Nûd and Eynon
Chapter 3: Damon and Merry
Chapter 4: Fercha and Doethan
Chapter 5: Nûd and Eynon
Chapter 6: Damon and Merry
Chapter 7: Fercha and Doethan
Chapter 8: Nûd and Eynon
Chapter 9: Damon and Merry
Chapter 10: Fercha and Doethan
Chapter 11: Nûd and Eynon
Chapter 12: Damon and Merry
Chapter 13: Merry
Chapter 14: Damon
Chapter 15: Fercha and Doethan
Chapter 16: Nûd and Eynon
Chapter 17: Merry
Chapter 18: Damon
Chapter 19: Fercha and Doethan
Chapter 20: Nûd and Eynon
Chapter 21: Merry
Chapter 22: Damon
Chapter 23: Fercha
Chapter 24: Doethan
Chapter 25: Nûd and Eynon
Chapter 26: Merry
Chapter 27: Damon
Chapter 28: Fercha
Chapter 29: Nûd and Eynon
Chapter 30: Dârio
Chapter 31: Merry
Chapter 32: Fercha
Chapter 33: Nûd and Eynon
Chapter 34: Damon
Chapter 35: Túathal and Verro
Chapter 36: Nûd, Eynon, and Dârio
Chapter 37: Outside the Dormant Dragon
Chapter 38: Inside the Dormant Dragon
Chapter 39: Nûd and Fercha
Chapter 40: Eynon and Merry
Chapter 41: Laetícia and Quintillius
Chapter 42: Damon and Dârio
Chapter 43: Túathal and Gwýnnett
Chapter 44: Quintillius
Chapter 45: Eynon’s Idea
Chapter 46: Quintillius and Bjarni
Chapter 47: Doethan
Chapter 48: Túathal and Gwýnnett
Chapter 49: Back to Melyncárreg
Chapter 50: Fercha and Merry
Chapter 51: Nûd and Eynon
Chapter 52: Doethan
Chapter 53: Verro
Chapter 54: Nûd
Chapter 55: Eynon
Chapter 56: Doethan
Chapter 57: Túathal and Verro
Chapter 58: Melyncárreg
Chapter 59: Háiddon
Chapter 60: Eynon
Chapter 61: Túathal
Chapter 62: At the River’s Edge
Chapter 63: Eynon
Chapter 64: Fercha and Doethan
Chapter 65: Freezing the Brenavon
Chapter 66: Túathal and Gwýnnett
Chapter 67: Melyncárreg
Chapter 68: Eynon
Chapter 69: On Túathal’s Platform
Chapter 70: Fercha and Doethan
Chapter 71: With Dâron’s Army
Chapter 72: Doethan and Salder
Chapter 73: And the Emperor of the Roma
Chapter 74: The Reluctant King
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Additional Material: Maps, Family Trees, and Diagrams
Other Books by Dave Schroeder
Dedication: Copyright
About the Author
What Has Gone Before
The First Ships sailed to the west more than two thousand years ago. Men and women from the White and Green Isles fled across the Ocean to Orluin to escape the invading legions of the Eagle People. They found the new continent empty of people and rich in timber, fish, and furs. With hard work, the forests were cleared and transformed into productive farms and noble estates.
A large river, which the exiles named the Abbenoth, flowed north to south midway along the coast. It became the dividing line between the kingdom of Dâron, established by folk from the southern White Isle, and the kingdom of Tamloch, established by the Green Isle’s arrivals. Clans from the rugged north of the White Isle found familiar new homes in the high hills near the source of the Abbenoth and the mountains of southwestern Dâron.
Athican sages had been the first to unlock magestones’ potential. They mapped the capabilities of the congruencies found inside the stones and learned how to direct them. Congruencies opened instantaneous connections between different points in space and allowed wizards to command fireballs, lightning strikes, blasts of cold, and tendrils of tight light that transferred force as well as illumination. Manipulating the properties of congruent interfaces allowed talented wizards to produce fields of force known as solidified sound for privacy and protection.
Several generations earlier, most Athican wizards had been captured and co-opted by the Roma, as the Eagle People called themselves. A few wizards fled west, away from the empire. They settled among the people of the White and Green Isles, where they taught the art of wizardry to promising pupils. When the Roma invaded, native-born wizards from the Isles helped build the great armada of First Ships so their people could escape Roma’s legions and laws.
Wherever they traveled, Athican wizards introduced the royal game of shah-mat. Legend said they’d learned it from magi with tall hats from the east. Its ultimate source was reputed to be fabled Indja.
Conflicts between Dâron and Tamloch were frequent over the centuries, with armies carrying Tamloch’s green-quatrefoil-on-gold banner and Dâron’s dark-blue-dragon-passant-on-light-blue standard clashing frequently. Irregular troops from the northern and southern Clan Lands were often hired as mercenaries or simply swooped in to attack battle-weary soldiers from both kingdoms. Five hundred years later, that changed when the Roma pushed even farther west across the Ocean and claimed the fertile valley of the Abbenoth as their new Occidens Province.
The Roma provided both a buffer and a common enemy for Dâron and Tamloch. Over the next five hundred years, the three realms fought each other for territory and control of valuable resources, like iron ore deposits and sources of precious metals. Thanks to its superior military skill and discipline, the legions of Occidens Province held their own against the two kingdoms, even with a smaller population. Land might change ownership from one party to another each generation, but a balance, of sorts, was maintained.
Then a new group of settlers, led by King Bjarni the Great, arrived and settled in the far north of Orluin. They were Northmen from the boreal border of the empire and the Isle of Ice and Fire. Their fleet of dragonships and heavy cargo-carrying knarrs claimed largely-unoccupied territory north of Tamloch and named it Bifurland.
The Bifurlanders made their livings farming, fishing, trapping, and raiding—sometimes as far south as Dâron. They claimed vast lands to the north and west, but few of their people lived more than two days walk from the Ocean or the shores of the Hövlána, the Whale River, that runs east from the Inland Seas.
Centuries passed. Dâron expanded farther west, opening up the lands of the Coombe, a broad, protected valley ringed by modest mountains. Coombe-folk were simple farmers, glad to be far away from the intrigues of the kingdom’s capital at Brendinas.
A custom arose and spread across rural Dâron. It was strongest in places near the western border, like the Coombe and the Rhuthro valley. When a young man or woman reached the age of sixteen, they would travel the kingdom for a year and a day, having new experiences and meeting potential mates.
Over time, a new equilibrium emerged—one where wars or significant raids occurred every generation, while the four major powers and the two Clan Lands found opportunities to trade as well as fight during the long lulls between battles.
During one such lull, Seren, the crown princess of Dâron, mys
teriously disappeared. Ealdamon, the kingdom’s master mage, set off to find her and was never seen again—until he returned twenty years later to help the royal armies of Dâron and Tamloch by freezing the Abbenoth so both kingdoms could attack and defeat Occidens Province.
In the two-thousand-and-sixty-seventh year since the First Ships landed in Orluin, Eynon of Haywall, a tall, thin young man of good character and great curiosity from the Coombe, set off on his wander year. At high noon on the day he left home, he found a magical artifact—a blue magestone in a silver setting—in the middle of a crossroads. The artifact belonged to Fercha, a powerful Dâron wizard, who’d lost it while dueling in the sky with Verro, Tamloch’s Master Mage, the previous evening.
Eynon then meets Derry, a nearby landowner. He sends Eynon down the Rhuthro river toward Tyford, the second-largest city in Dâron, to find a wizard who can help him with what he’s found. Derry also sends his daughter Merry, an experienced river guide, along to show Eynon the way. Merry is almost sixteen and will soon be ready to embark on her own wander year.
While traveling on the river, Eynon and Merry meet Gruffyd, an old friend of Merry’s, and Nyssia, his fiancé. Both want to serve as members of the royal guard. They also meet Doethan, a wizard with a tower along the Rhuthro, who has been teaching Merry magic. Later, they meet and defeat four unscrupulous brothers from the Mastlands. Eynon nicknames them Oaf, Dolt, Fox and Fool. With luck and Merry’s magic, the brothers are defeated before they can injure the two travelers.
Later, when they stop in a forest clearing to eat, Eynon is adopted by Chee, a raconette. Chee is the size of a kitten, with the paw-hands and markings of a raccoon and a long fluffy tail. He’s fond of apples and dried cherries. Merry realizes that Chee is Eynon’s familiar. Eynon and the raconette share a special bond.
As they float with the current, Eynon and Merry discover the entire Rhuthro valley is mobilizing for war with Tamloch. King Dârio, the capricious young king of Dâron, has summoned his forces to defend the realm. The two young people, with help from Chee, fend off attacks by a recruitment raiders who want to kidnap them and forcibly enlist them in the army.
On their trip downriver, Eynon demonstrates his cooking skills for Merry and both discuss their shared joy in reading books. They decide to become lovers and spend two nights together. Charms from hedge wizards ensure control over conception.
Then Doethan warns them not to go to Tyford, but to head back upriver to the mysterious Blue Spiral Tower they’d passed earlier. Eynon falls through a gate in the base of the tower and materializes in Melyncárreg, a region far to the west marked by tall snow-capped mountains, geysers, mud pots, striking waterfalls, and air that smells like rotten eggs. He is met by Damon, an old man who says he’s a student at the master mage’s academy, part of a huge castle perched near one of the falls. Eynon also meets Nûd, a big man not much older than he is, who says he’s the master mage’s personal servant.
Eynon begins to study wizardry with Damon, but he doesn’t tell him about finding the artifact at the crossroads. Damon sends Eynon off to a distant basin filled with hot springs, geysers, mud pots and dangerous basilisks to find a magestone for crafting his own artifact. Eynon finds a large red magestone, not realizing wizards from Dâron traditionally use only blue magestones. In the process, he escapes a basilisk attack and is rescued by Rocky, a wyvern with an affinity for the taste of spheres of solidified sound.
Next, Eynon is sent to find gold to craft into a setting for his new red stone. It’s a task that usually takes several weeks, but Eynon uses his creativity to collect enough gold in hours. He cuts his magestone, designs his setting, and integrates them both into a unique artifact, since no one has ever heard of a wizard with a red magestone.
Damon teaches Eynon the basics of offensive and defensive magic. Eynon, with help from the subtle capabilities of Fercha’s blue magestone and the raw power of his own red stone, proves to be a magical prodigy.
Back at the Blue Spiral Tower along the Rhuthro valley, Fercha returns to find Merry distraught over Eynon’s disappearance. She agrees to mentor Merry and help teach her magic. Merry assembles an artifact of her own, with a traditional Dâron blue magestone, and becomes particularly adept at working with beams of tight light guided by her fingertips.
Damon, Nûd, Doethan, Fercha, Merry and Eynon learn that Verro had been scouting out a source for green magestones in a quarry west of the Coombe because the sources of such stones in Tamloch are played out. Rumor has it that he’s planning a raid to steal green magestones from the quarry.
Fercha, Merry and Doethan fly west from the Blue Spiral Tower to the Coombe before dawn. Damon and Nûd gate-in from Melyncárreg to the Blue Spiral Tower and follow them, leaving Eynon behind. Eynon triggers an alternate gate and reaches the Blue Spiral Tower as well, riding on Rocky. All six converge on the quarry just as Verro and a cohort of Tamloch wizards and soldiers swoop down to attack.
Chapter 1
The Battle of the Quarry
More than a dozen flying disks bearing green-cloaked wizards poured over the hundred-foot rim of the quarry. Most of the attacking wizards had one or two soldiers armed with swords and crossbows crowded around them on their yard-wide disks. Some soldiers carried buckets and shovels. The sun would be up soon, but for now, the only illumination came from a glowing sphere of light cast by Doethan.
Fercha shouted, “Verro!” and launched herself at the tall, dark-haired wizard leading the attack. He was standing alone on his disk and seemed to be directing the other green wizards.
Buckets and shovels? thought Eynon. Of course, he realized. To collect green magestones!
Merry, Ealdamon, and Doethan angled their flying disks to engage the rest of the attacking wizards directly, but Eynon remembered the strategy the gryffon had used on the old bull wisent and sent his flying disk above all the other combatants so he could evaluate the scene and attack from an unexpected direction. Below, he saw Fercha and a wizard in green robes who must be Verro exchanging lightning bolts that crackled, boomed and echoed off the quarry’s walls. Rocky, the black wyvern who had somehow adopted him, was darting in and out of clusters of Tamloch wizards, using his body to disrupt their flight. Eynon’s staff was still tucked into the scarf tied on the big beast’s back.
Rocky flicked his tail right and left, knocking four attackers off their flying disks when they were close to the ground. Eynon saw them fall ten or twelve feet to the hard floor of the quarry. Only two of them got up.
Chee wasn’t fond of the conflict and retreated from Eynon’s shoulder to hide inside his jacket, making nervous chee-chee-chee-chee sounds while the battle raged below.
Merry and Doethan were following five Tamloch wizards as they dove to the quarry’s floor, dropped off their soldiers, and swooped back up to a higher vantage point. The older wizard sent a congruency ahead of two of the five and used it to release torrents of water onto the retreating Tamloch wizards’ spherical shields. With a gesture, he sent a gust of chilled air at the water that was so cold the liquid froze around the shields, blinding the wizards and weighing them down. The pair of attackers descended rapidly and broke their ice shells when they made hard landings.
Eynon was impressed by Merry’s skill using thin beams of tight light. He hadn’t learned that sort of magic, though Damon had used it against him. Apparently, the beams could carry force, not just light and heat. Merry used dozens of beams the width of her little finger to set the other three Tamloch wizards’ spherical shields spinning, making the wizards who’d constructed them twist in dizzying circles.
Far below, Nûd was firing his crossbow. At first, he’d been aiming at wizards on flying disks, but now there were enough soldiers on the ground that he’d shifted his focus to them. Unfortunately, some of the soldiers were shooting back, so Nûd had retreated to crouch behind a quarryman’s wagon ten yards behind his previous position.
Drawing on the expertise of his borrowed blue magestone and his red magestone’s power
, Eynon created a curved translucent red wall of solidified sound between the wagon and the Tamloch crossbowmen. Nûd immediately shifted from direct shots to arcing fire, sending his bolts over the wall and down into clumps of soldiers. The blue magestone somehow maintained his construct without continued attention from Eynon.
He turned to look for Damon, expecting to find the old wizard using spectacular magic to stop more than half the attackers at once. Instead, he saw Dâron’s Master Mage casting a massive construct of solidified sound in the shape of a giant dome above the quarry, keeping out a third of the attacking wizards—including Verro—and preventing the ones below from escaping into the clouds.
Speaking of clouds, Eynon caught a glimpse of something purple inside a low cloud that was almost a fog bank. He didn’t have time to investigate it, because the wizards above Damon’s shield had seen him and were headed in his direction, ready to blast him with their own selected forms of wizardry.
Eynon deployed a defensive sphere of solidified sound around him, leaving a small hole in the back of the sphere to work offensive magic. He created a lens to accumulate magical energy, like the one he’d used against Damon during his testing yesterday, and prepared to take whatever the green-garbed wizards decided to throw at him. He pretended to cower in fear of his attackers. It wasn’t hard to do, but he hoped they’d be the ones truly worried in a few seconds.
While his opponents were positioning themselves for attacks from all directions, Eynon was subtly moving small bubbles of transparent solidified sound under the edges of the flying disks controlled by the six green-clad wizards arrayed around him. His hands were balled into tight fists, keeping the bubbles tiny. Then he flung his hands open in a fast, fluid motion and all the bubbles rapidly expanded to ten times their original size, catching the green wizards by surprise and tipping their flying disks almost to vertical. Two managed to hang on, but the other four fell like rocks toward the quarry floor.
They didn’t fall far, however. Damon’s shield was in the way. The attackers from Tamloch hit Damon’s construct and slowly slid along it, pulled down the shield’s slope by their own weight. Eynon watched them try to slow their descent with their boots and palms pressing against the curved surface. The two remaining attackers were trying to tilt their flying disks back to horizontal by shifting their weight, so he set them rotating with nudges from their enlarged bubbles.