Battle Mage

by Tim Niederriter

  Edmath turned to move towards the path where he’d been walking. Seeing Chelka approaching at a distance, he remembered her proposal and the way the light splashed her by the pool. He’d hardly expected the event, and now he was going to be married. Now he would have to tell Sampheli and Zuria. Even Brosk did not know yet.

  His breath felt very loud coming out of his nostrils. A blessing he’d wanted for years drew nearer than ever. What did he care if the strange Roshi woman had been summoned to the inner palace?

  Chelka raised a hand to greet him, eyes bright in the shadows that partially veiled her face.

  “Ed, there you are. What have you been doing?”

  “Walking, and inspecting plants. The gardens here are well-tended.”

  “Is that all?” Chelka walked down the path to Edmath and put her thumb to her lip. “Were you tired of sitting all day?”

  “You know me, Chelka. I sometimes become anxious and need to recover. The day has been pleasant, wonderful, even, but now the future looks unplanned for me, at least after what we discussed today takes place.”

  “I understand. Have you told anyone about our plans yet?”

  “Not yet, though I suppose I will have to tell someone soon.” Edmath paced across the path to the far side, where a row of bushes flowered in violet. “If anything I think the plan will make my mother happy, my sister too.”

  Chelka smiled broadly, following Edmath to the edge of the path. Confidence, red and burning, flashed in her eyes. She must have known as well as Edmath that their relationship could only become simpler for him once they wed.

  “I’m glad. Sometimes I think Zuria doesn’t like me.”

  “It’s not that, of course. She simply wanted to protect me.” Edmath laughed as he turned to Chelka. “Protect me from you. I feel silly just saying it.”

  Chelka’s smile turned mischievous.

  “I can be dangerous, you know.”

  “I know.” Edmath put his arm around her shoulders and the two of them started walking down the path together. The roar of the mirache from behind them made Chelka turn first, though Edmath wasn’t much slower. The creature shot upward, clearing the inner walls. Tamina Roshi clung tightly to its back, bent low, near where its necks reached its body, red hair streaming out behind her. Chelka and Edmath broke from each other and looked up at the Roshi.

  Tamina cried out in the fox language.

  “Down. We must land now.”

  Glancing at Chelka, then at the creature, Edmath realized where the mirache would come down.

  “Better get off the path,” he said, trying to gauge the enormous animal’s rapid descent.

  “Indeed.” Chelka touched his arm.

  The two of them raced off the path toward the inner walls. The mirache flew lower above them. A claw scraped a treetop as it fell slowly toward the ground. Tamina cursed in the fox language, something that translated embarrassingly in Edmath’s mind. He drew a striker from his pocket and spun with Chelka to watch the mirache come down.

  The great creature landed gracefully on the path, folding its wings as it did. Tamina slid sideways out of her saddle, dark cloak streaming, and hit the grass with a crunch of plants giving way. Chelka glanced at the mirache.

  “This is incredible. What is this creature?”

  “A fox-tribe steed from the Nation of Roshi,” Edmath said. “Be careful and do not approach it. I will attempt to find out what we should do.”

  “Can you talk to that thing?”

  “Of course, but I am also worried it might be aggressive if we should try to approach.” Edmath turned toward Tamina’s mirache and spoke in the fox-tongue. “Friend?”

  “Prey!” the mirache shrieked and brought up all but one of its six heads to stare at Edmath, yellow eyes wild, and tail thrashing. Its sixth head remained facing the spot Tamina had fallen.

  “Not prey, good creature. I want to help your rider.”

  She was a being in need, despite her nation. Edmath frowned. His monastic studies went deeper than he’d thought.

  Edmath raised his arms and opened his hands. He slipped the striker over his thumb as he did. Its bone ridges barely gripped his skin, but Edmath couldn’t afford to make a move to steady it so close to the mirache.

  “Prey wants to help us?” one head said.

  “Prey should flee before we lose patience,” said another giant fox mouth.

  “I will not flee. I don’t know what happened, but your rider appears injured. You would be wise to let at least one of us see to her.”

  “Trickster.”

  “Prey!”

  “Enemy!”

  Edmath took a step backward, letting his hands fall and pushing the striker up his thumb with a nudge from his fingers. He stared at the mirache and spoke to Chelka from the corner of his mouth.

  “I’m going to try to get past them. Be ready to strike.”

  “Don’t be too heroic, Ed.”

  “I won’t get hurt, Chelka.” A twinge of pain ran through his broken hand.

  He hadn’t asked for the Roshi to hound him and hadn’t done anything to deserve it, but perhaps if he did them a good turn they would forget about his father’s crimes. Moving slowly, he advanced on the mirache. One of its heads darted towards him but stopped just short, with teeth bared.

  “No closer, prey.”

  “Do you want your master to die?”

  “Obviously not. He was protecting me.” Tamina stalked shakily out from behind the mirache’s wing, hand on the creature’s side and hair falling around her shoulders. She scowled at Edmath. “He knows not to let one of you approach, no matter what.”

  Chelka grabbed Edmath’s arm and tugged him back from the mirache’s toothy face. He moved with her, seeing the striker appear in her hand before catching a glimpse of the hand with which Tamina had touched the mirache. It was stained red with drying blood. Chelka must have seen it too because when she spoke it was with disgust in her voice.

  “What were you doing in the inner palace?”

  “I am a guest here. Do not question me.”

  “I am an Imperial Saale. You will answer.” Chelka released Edmath’s hand and took a subtle stance from the survival art, one foot forward, one arm extended to the side. “I do not mean to threaten you, but you must do as I say.”

  “Do you think two little Saales can defeat my steed and me? No, this mirache and I will return to the High Castle now, and you will stand aside.”

  Chelka’s dark brows came together, eyes narrowing. She relaxed her stance.

  “Fly on, but do not go anywhere else tonight. I will inform her Excellency the War Empress of your actions if you do.” She fixed Tamina with her razor-sharp glare.

  “What actions?” Tamina climbed onto one of the mirache’s head and let it lift her onto its back. She took her seat and drew her red cloak about herself. “You know nothing.”

  Despite the pulse of fear he felt from being near the mirache, Edmath knew he needed to act as calmly as possible. He scratched his neck.

  “Not quite, my good Roshi. After all, I saw you enter the inner gardens. Even if your master has cause to speak with his Grace there, you certainly do not.”

  Tamina stopped with her mouth half-open before giving a sigh.

  “You are right. I had a meeting at the inner palace. But you shall not speak of it with either of you.”

  “What have you to threaten us with?” Edmath turned his back on the mirache and walked past Chelka. “If you fight here you will only add that to the crimes you might have already committed. Fly on, and know that this is not over.”

  Tamina scowled a fierce expression that scarcely seemed less menacing on her pretty face.

  “I suppose I will.” She leaned forward to speak to the mirache. “Fly, Hurol.”

  The mirache growled a reply. “Yes, mistress.”

  The beast took off. Wings fluttered in unison clus
ters as they headed toward the High Castle.

  Chelka turned to Edmath as he watched the great creature fly away.

  “That was Ursar Kiet’s second. She might be unpleasant enough as a Roshi, but I don’t think her manner tonight was entirely normal.”

  “I doubt it as well.”

  Edmath glanced in Chelka’s direction. Her look told him all he needed to know. She did not trust the Roshi. Of course, Edmath did not either. Trust, he thought, had very little to do with anything involving the Roshi Nation. They had already tried to kill him. Trusting them never came into it. Chelka wouldn’t forgive them easily. He put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Chelka?”

  “Yes, Ed, what is it?” Her quirked lips and the tensed nerves made her face taut in the white starlight that shown through the cloudless sky. Above them, the constellation Gorui gleamed an abstract worm’s shape.

  That constellation marked the worm tribe, his father’s tribe. But not my tribe, he thought, my father was a royal and I am not. He shook his head.

  “While I think we must be careful around the Roshi, let us focus not on them, but on the wedding.” He walked over to Chelka and glanced at the sky. The stars stretched out and gave silver light, along with the luminous moths gleamed in soft yellows within the garden.

  “You’re right. I will tell my father tomorrow.”

  “And I’ll tell my mother and Zuria as well. Then we should consult Brosk about what happened tonight. He could give us a better perspective. Everything shall be well.” I hope, he added mentally.

  Chelka ran a hand up her rega and laid her head against Edmath’s shoulder. He touched her side and she let out a slow breath.

  “You are right again,” she said.

  “Of course, I wish I was as confident in myself as you are in me.”

  “Don’t worry about them, Ed. Let us go back to your quarters.”

  “My dear, I would like nothing better.”

  The next morning Edmath woke up late, having slept heavily once Chelka departed the late night before. He went into the courtyard. He had only a few hours before Haddishal Rumenha would require his presence. Edmath paid one of the serpent royals outside the gate to send a message by snake to Sampheli Mierzon. In the note, he told her there was something of great importance he wanted to talk about.

  It might be awkward explaining that he and Chelka had been together for so long, but now that they were to be married it was unavoidable. Finishing the note, he handed it to the serpent royal who attached it to a snake’s tail and ordered the small animal to deliver it in their shared language. Edmath thanked the royal, and then went back into the palace to prepare for the day’s court duty.

  He waited in his room, hungry but uncaring, and read in a bestiary until the sun began to rise high in the sky. Then, he walked down the stairs and made his way to his lab, where the new Orpus was growing. The tree was already quite tall from his careful enhancement of its growth rate and occasional speech to it.

  Clearly, the tree was going to be successful, and the ghosted roots already allowed it to move from where he had planted it, slipping over and under the dirt just like a smaller, younger Orpus Strodusial. The thought of the old tree left Edmath tasting nostalgia. He wondered what the tree would be doing now. Perhaps another student had befriended it. Perhaps not.

  Putting those thoughts out of his mind, Edmath walked over to the desk by the door. He drew a seal on a dried leaf he’d taken from an ordinary tree in the garden earlier that day and went into the courtyard with the Orpus. Placing the seal on the bark of the twelve-foot-tall tree, he pressed it tight to the trunk.

  He drew a striker. He opened a tear and used the magic from it to transfer the seal. It was an experimental seal. If this new idea worked, he may have revolutionized the Orpus.

  “Keep straight, good Orpus,” he whispered and walked back into the lab to retrieve a pitcher. Returning to the Orpus, he poured the water over its shifting roots. The seal would take time to mature and the tree still had to grow.

  He could gain a name for himself if this worked. It had been at Lexine Park that he realized that Orpus Strodusial could understand human speech. The next logical step was to make a tree that could itself speak. Of course, it might not be possible, with the physiology of trees being so different from that of humans, but Edmath remembered the stones and how life could hide even within them.

  Life from a stone would be a break of the curtain, beyond the limits of all the world’s wizards thus far, the purview of only Serem the creator. Every part of magic was alive, and thus the stone, which could never have lived, was far beyond being affected by magic, farther than even a desiccated piece of bone.

  Magic and life flowed together, the Hesiats said. Decaying flesh within strikers and wielded by living Saales could open the tears that led to the ghostly world of magic, releasing the life into the mortal world. Edmath thought of the transfer simply as borrowing from the dead when he considered the nature of the action. It was all part of the life cycle, according to Hesiats. Of course, according to the Roshi’s prophet from centuries ago and their current national faith, it was abhorrent, a violation of the dead.

  Edmath took up his striker and opened a tear in the curtain near the door of the inner garden. He had been out of practice with the arts since the duel. His plants grew no slower now thanks to his tweaking of hand signs to work with only one set of usable fingers.

  He grew a vine from the magical stream flowing through the garden’s center. In rare places, tears opened naturally, and thus the Roshi conception could be proved wrong. The tears at the center of Serem’s temple in Vishelen had been open for generations, the center of the Hesiatic Orders’ tradition.

  No one could prove it wasn’t simply the product of an abnormally powerful striker, so the Roshi went on with their own ways. If they cared one way or the other, their ministers did not say officially.

  Shaping and expanding the shifting lengths of vine into a ladder, Edmath rode the growing plant to the next floor, above his lab.

  The empty balcony overlooking the garden fell away beneath him and he rode the vine higher, while it supported itself against the building. He opened a new tear as he ran out of magic and poured the flow from of magic from it into the vine until he could see over the building to the palace domes beyond. His stomach lurched and air whistled in his ears. The inner garden’s walls soared over the outer courtyards and buildings.

  The morning shadows seemed vaguely ominous to Edmath. The Roshi were up to something, something that went beyond the diplomacy they officially showed and back to the uncompromising views that divided them and the Zel for so long. Surely Tamina had been up to something the previous night, or she would not have been bloody, whether from a wound she dealt or one she received.

  Climbing down his vine, Edmath stepped onto the balcony of the second story. He followed the hallway outside it and through the Saale research building to a grand staircase with Brosk waiting below him on the steps. Brosk looked up from the ground.

  “I presume you have been up to something since the council yesterday?”

  “I have, Brosk. I really should tell you this amazing news.”

  “Come out with it, then.” Brosk grinned ferociously. “I can’t wait here all day.”

  “Chelka and I are to be married. She proposed yesterday.”

  Brosk’s grin only broadened.

  “I had a feeling it was something of that nature, as in I overheard a snatch of words between her and the Hearth Emperor today. Her father seems happy as well.”

  “I hoped he would be, but I am glad to hear it nonetheless.”

  Brosk laughed loudly as he started down the stairs. Edmath followed him, thinking of how Zemoy Benisar might have reacted to the news. Chelka probably had to be tactful to keep him from raging if he hadn’t liked it. Edmath hoped it hadn’t been necessary.

  Chelka

  Spinning tentacles unfolded fr
om the giant squid’s body and grasped for Zemoy. Chelka’s father, fully within his tosh and sporting four royal limbs of his own, grabbed onto one of them with one of his heavy tentacles. The squid lifted him from the water with a flick of its long limb and dropped him gently onto the port house balcony beside Chelka.

  She looked at him and he returned the gaze he as he shifted back into a fully human shape. Behind Chelka, her younger brother, Jeref laughed and pointed over the water. Father’s squid had fastened its tentacles around the supports of the pier and rose out of the water near the family.

  “He’s happy,” Jeref said. “I think dad gave him a good struggle this time.”

  Chelka usually would have smiled at the squid wrestling as well. Her nerves did allow that at the moment. Father was trying to decide whether or not to allow her engagement to Edmath.

  Bassa, the oldest of Chelka’s sisters, walked past Chelka and their father and spoke in a loud stage whisper of the squid language. “Aberan, you be careful with father. He is getting older, you know.”

  The giant squid’s rumbling reply came back with the rise of a tentacle.

  “He is more experienced but no slower.”

  Chelka glanced at Jeref who surprised her again, for now being almost as tall as she was. He had shot up over the last three years, for sure, and he would likely be of similar stature to father. Zemoy touched Bassa’s arm and she turned back from the railing.

  “Aberan is right.” He took a towel from their mother and dried the outside of his sodden-wet shift cloak. “I’m in no danger with him.”

  “Not many men, even young ones, can wrestle a squid of his greatness.” Mother handed father his sandals and he put bent down to put them on.

  Then mother nodded to Bassa, who looked back from the railing all delicate features and long black hair. Chelka had always admired her for a natural gracefulness Chelka herself was only now gaining. Bassa paced around the puddles of water father had left on the stone tiles and made her way over to Chelka and Jeref.