The Black River Chronicles: Level One (Black River Academy Book 1)

by David Tallerman

  Durren suspected she would still have tried to go after it, but he hadn't let go his hold on her sleeve, and he pulled hard. Behind them, the rat-kind were skidding to a halt. They could have caught up easily, but instead they were scampering to the edge and gazing downward. As Durren watched, one or two even began to attempt the descent, while the others squeaked and chirruped encouragement.

  Tia tore free. For a moment Durren thought that she was going to try and fight the rat-kind—there must have been well over a dozen, for the second group had now caught up too. Instead, she hurried to the edge of the forest. There she struck out in a direction she seemed to have chosen solely because it led away from the rat-kind and their increasingly vocal efforts to recover their prize.

  Dizzy with relief, but more so with fatigue, Durren stumbled after. Thanks to him, they'd escaped with their lives. Thanks to him, too, they'd be returning to the academy empty-handed. He couldn't help suspecting that it was the second of those things the others were more likely to remember.

  Tia finally came to a halt a minute later, in a small clearing not unlike the one where they'd first materialised. They'd left the cliff edge, the casket and the rat-kind some way behind, but still she hadn't said a word to Durren, and he hadn't tried to speak to her in return. He wasn't even certain he could have for the ache in his chest.

  Seconds later, Hule caught them up, with Arein loping along behind him. The moment she stopped, she collapsed into the dirt, legs splayed in undignified fashion, leaning back on her arms and gasping great lungfuls of air. Hule, meanwhile, was glancing around the clearing, as though hunting for something that had been deliberately hidden from him.

  “I see no treasure,” he declared.

  Durren had no desire to answer, but he suspected that failing to do so would only provoke more tactless questions from the thick-headed fighter. “We had to throw it away,” he said, and tried to ignore the scoffing sound Tia made at the word we. “That was the only way to divert the rats long enough for us to escape.”

  Hule scowled. “We should have fought them to a standstill,” he insisted. “I'll go back and take their treasure from them. Which of you cowards will stand with me?”

  “You're staying here,” Tia told him. “The three of you have done enough damage.”

  Hule began to square up to her and then, catching the look in her eye, huffed dismissively instead.

  “All any of you had to do,” Tia said, each word colder than the last, “was to not get in my way. Those rats would never have known I was there if you hadn't alerted the whole damned place.”

  “What are you talking about?” Durren snapped, abruptly almost choking with anger. “We're supposed to be a party! You can't just sneak off on your own and do the entire quest without us, while we stand around being useless.”

  He realised only then what he'd said, and how the other two were looking at him. Arein, in particular, appeared mortified. That expression, not to mention the way her chin was beginning to wobble, made Durren want to take the words back—but he couldn't, because they were the truth.

  Durren turned back to Tia. Striving for a more reasonable tone, he said, “You went off without a word, so of course we came looking for you. What else were we going to do? If you'd just let us in on what you were planning, maybe we could have come up with a proper diversion. As it was, you put all our lives in danger.”

  “Everyone knows rat-kind don't kill people,” Tia said dismissively, as though that should be enough to settle the matter. “At worst they'd have imprisoned you until the academy ransomed you back.”

  “Oh, well. I mean, if that's the worst. I'm sure they'd promote us all to level two after that. I mean, the three of us having to be ransomed from a bunch of talking rats? They'd probably have given us honorary tutorships.”

  “So perhaps,” Tia said icily, “you'd have done better to just let the only competent member of the party get on with things. Now, I'm going back to scout around and see if there's anything to be salvaged from this mess. I can't stop any of you from following me, but I'd advise against it.”

  Then she had turned away and was already stalking back into the forest. Despite the implied threat, Durren would still have gone after her, perhaps have tried to dissuade her—had he not been too stunned to move. Surely she wouldn't really do this again? Surely his words couldn't have fallen so entirely on deaf ears? By the time he'd comprehended that she was serious, that she wasn't coming back, Tia had already vanished.

  “At least one among you has some spine,” Hule observed approvingly. He seemed quite unconcerned that Tia had abandoned them once more.

  “Oh, shut up, Hule,” Durren said. “She had a point, you know; what were you thinking, rushing in like that? It's a miracle you didn't get us all killed.”

  “It wasn't all Hule's fault,” a small voice piped up.

  Durren rounded on Arein. “No, that's true. Why couldn't you have just done that spell of yours straight away and saved us all a lot of trouble?”

  “Hule is no coward,” Hule affirmed, as though that somehow concluded the discussion. Arein, though, only snuffled and looked away.

  Durren had fully expected Hule to throw a punch his way. In fact, he'd almost been hoping for it. For one of the rare times in his life, he genuinely felt like settling an argument with his fists. However, Hule seemed already to have lost all interest in the matter. He merely snorted through his nostrils, sat with his back against the nearest tree and closed his eyes. It appeared that if he had no choice except to wait, his preferred option was to spend the time not fighting but napping.

  Durren realised guiltily that Hule's didn't seem like the worst of ideas. His every muscle throbbed, his lungs felt as though they'd been scraped raw with a sharpening stone, and even thinking straight required more effort than he was willing to devote.

  However, as he was glancing around for a suitable spot to make himself comfortable, one well away from the dormant fighter, Durren noticed a sound he should have registered before: Arein was snuffling, very softly. Abruptly, all of Durren's remaining anger evaporated. Of the three of them, he'd already decided that she was the least unbearable, and he felt bad for having lost his temper with her.

  Durren walked over to the dwarf girl, knelt beside her. “At least you managed a spell in the end,” he tried, realising only as he spoke that it was the exact opposite of the comforting remark he'd intended.

  Arein turned a tear-streaked face his way. Beneath those absurdly thick glasses of hers, her eyes were rimmed with red. She had to gulp deeply before she could steady her trembling lower lip enough to say, “And look what I did! Those poor people. For all we know, I burned their whole village down.”

  Though Durren wasn't convinced he'd mind if a few rat-kind homes had been razed to the ground, he understood that that wasn't the answer she needed to hear. “I doubt it,” he said. “They'll have put those little fires out in no time. And, look.” He licked a finger, held the digit up before him. “Barely a breeze. Fires only carry on windy days.”

  Arein looked reassured, but only slightly. “Still,” she said, “I shouldn't have done it.”

  “Honestly, it's not that big a deal. A couple of rat-kind houses will need new roofs, and maybe they'll think a little harder the next time they consider stealing some poor merchant's treasure.”

  Arein took off her glasses, rubbed at them with the edge of one sleeve. “It's not just that. Don't you know how magic works?” There was surprising dread in her voice, as though she were discussing some virulent disease.

  “I think so. I mean, there's all this magic floating around, and if you know how then you can control it, and some things are magical and some aren't. Nobody much uses magic in—” Durren had nearly said Luntharbour, remembering only at the last instant that he'd already claimed not to have lived there. “In the town where I'm from,” he managed. “My father always said that there's nothing useful magic can accomplish that coin won't do twice as well.”

  Arei
n slipped her glasses back on, and suddenly she looked very serious. “You don't know how magic works at all,” she said. She didn't sound critical, Durren thought, more envious, as though he was lucky not to have such knowledge scrabbling about inside his mind.

  “Fine,” he said, “then explain it to me. We're stuck with each other, so I suppose it's time I learned.”

  Arein considered him steadily. “We are, aren't we? Stuck with each other, I mean. The four of us. We have to make this work, somehow. Except that only you and Tia are any good.”

  That surprised him. “I don't know about Tia, but I doubt I'm much better at this sort of thing than you are.”

  “I saw how you shot that arrow. It was incredible.”

  “That? That was just luck,” Durren said quickly. “I was trying to frighten him, I never thought I'd hit anything. I'm just glad I didn't slice his ear off, or they'd have probably never stopped chasing us.”

  Arein smiled. She had a hesitant smile, but one that lit her pale, round face, turning it moon-like. “Well then, at least you're lucky. I'm not even that.”

  Sensing that she might start crying again if he couldn't divert the conversation onto safer ground, Durren said, “So what's so terrible about magic? I mean, making things happen just by waving your hands and saying a few words, that seems pretty amazing to me.”

  At that, Arein actually shuddered. “You must have heard of the unbalance?”

  “Of course. My grandmother used to swear by it sometimes. If she stubbed her toe she'd say 'Curse the unbalance!' Or if something good happened then it would be 'Thank the unbalance' instead. She was superstitious like that.”

  “It's not superstition,” Arein said. Her voice was dreamy now, as though she were reciting some ancient lesson she'd long ago learned by heart. “It's not superstition at all. The unbalance is very real. I know; I've seen it.”

  For the first time, Durren found himself really attentive to what the dwarf girl was saying. He was struggling to keep up with her switching moods, and her seriousness kept taking him off guard; it was easy to forget that she had access to power the likes of which he could only dream. “You've seen it?” he repeated.

  “The unbalance is the source of all magic in the world. Every wizard can see it. If they choose to, anyway; if they want to be good.”

  Durren was surprised to hear her say something so vain sounding. Then he realised she didn't mean good in that sense, she meant as opposed to bad. “Why would only good wizards see it?” he asked.

  Arein scrunched her brow, as though she'd realised she'd already lost the thread of her explanation. “The unbalance is just a…a phenomenon. It's real, but it's also an idea.” She chewed distractedly at her lip. “It's hard to explain. But you can imagine it as like a chasm in the ground, except that it runs through absolutely everything. And it's always in motion. Think of the earth constantly shifting, the two sides of that chasm scratching and grating against each other, and then imagine the stones and dirt raining down. Except that with the unbalance it's not any of that, but the raw stuff of reality being scraped loose, falling into our world. That's what magic is: tiny fragments of broken reality.”

  Durren found that he could just about stretch his mind around that notion, even if it didn't altogether make sense to him. “So magic is bad then?”

  “It's not that it's bad or good. It just is. The unbalance is there, and probably existed even before there were people; no one made it. Only, a long time ago, wizards began to realise that the more they used magic, the more magic there was. Using it actually made the unbalance worse—made reality a tiny bit less real. But when you have a hundred wizards in the world, or a thousand, or ten thousand, then suddenly all of those little bits start to add up.”

  “That's awful,” Durren said. He was genuinely horrified. He'd always felt a little distrustful of wizards, but that had more to do with coming from stolid, materialistic city folk than any suspicion that they might be doing something dangerous. “But then, why would anybody think of using magic? And how is it allowed? Surely someone would have rounded up all the wizards centuries ago and…” As his mind ran through the possibilities of what that hypothetical someone might have done, he finished weakly, “asked them to stop.”

  “It's just the opposite,” Arein insisted. “If it wasn't for wizards, things might be much worse than they are by now.”

  Durren nearly pointed out how that contradicted everything she'd just told him. But he was beginning to learn that she'd get to her point eventually, if he only left her to it.

  Sure enough, Arein continued, “The thing is, because wizards are aware of magic, because we can sense the unbalance, we're also capable of healing it. Doing so takes a lot of concentration, but over time the greatest wizards developed rituals that made the process easier, found items to help them focus, that sort of thing.

  “So the rule is, whatever magic you use, you have to repair the unbalance by at least a corresponding amount. Any good wizard will try to do more than that, though, to compensate for those who refuse to be accountable for their magic—and those who can't.”

  “What do you mean, can't?”

  “I mean, there are objects and beings that are just basically magical. They don't have any say in the matter, but it would never occur to them to take responsibility either. To them it doesn't matter if the unbalance gets worse and the world grows more magical. Maybe even some of the smarter ones might think that was a good idea. Dragons, for example—dragons are absolutely full of magic. And shape-shifters…have you heard of shape-shifters? They're horrible things, and once upon a time there were lots of them around, but maybe they're all gone now.

  “Anyway, the point is, there are all sorts of creatures that are magical just because their ancient ancestors happened to live in a certain place at a certain time. Sometimes all it means is that they look a little strange, like the rat-kind, but some of them have magic in their blood, they can draw on it and…”

  Arein stopped mid-sentence, distracted by the tramp of heavy footfalls. When Durren looked over his shoulder, he saw Hule marching towards them—and behind him, Tia waiting near the edge of the clearing. That she was back and wasn't carrying the casket, together with her baleful expression, answered any questions Durren might have had as to the success of her reconnaissance.

  If there'd been any doubt, however, it was settled when Hule announced, “The rogue wench has come back empty-handed. Now Hule wants to go home.”

  Durren assumed that Tia hadn't heard herself being described as 'the rogue wench', since Hule was still breathing. Rather than give the fighter any more opportunities to aggravate her, Durren clambered to his feet. “Thank you for explaining magic to me,” he whispered to Arein, and she offered him a timid smile in return. Then to Tia he called, “Are you ready to leave?”

  Durren took her silence for a yes. Hule had apparently come to the same conclusion, for he stomped over, to stand beside her impatiently.

  As Durren hurried to join them, with Arein just behind, he noticed that their observer was descending from the treetops. Perhaps the creature was somehow responding to what had been said, or perhaps it had only recognised that the four of them were finally all together. At any rate, once they'd formed a circle, Pootle dropped neatly into their midst.

  “So how does this work?” Durren asked. “Are we all supposed to say the words at the same time? Do you think we should hold hands?” Seeing the look Tia was giving him, he decided he'd do better to stop asking questions.

  “Homily, paradigm, lucent,” she hissed, pouring all of her aggravation into those three words.

  For an instant it seemed nothing was going to happen. Then suddenly Pootle was glowing bright as a star, the white of its eye somehow expanding, until that was all Durren could see—and the forest clearing was nothing but a vanishing memory.

  4

  I

  dislike hyperbole,” Colwyn Dremm pronounced. “I tell you this so you'll know that I'm not speaking lightl
y when I refer to your quest as an unmitigated disaster.”

  Dremm had arrived mere moments after their materialisation in the transport chamber, having presumably been alerted by Pootle. No one had said anything in the meantime, not even old Hieronymus, who seemed indifferent to their presence and uninterested in the details of their quest. The observer had flitted back to him, had nestled in his lap and closed its one disproportionately large eye. However, on Dremm's entrance it had looked up again, as though it was another member of the party, whose performance was about to be judged.

  Dremm's face had been thunderous as he'd entered. But, watching him, Durren sensed a degree of theatrically to his ill temper. Certainly he seemed to be enjoying himself now, as he settled down to what was evidently not going to be a brief critique of their failings.

  “It's hard to imagine,” Dremm said, “how you could have done much more badly than you did, unless perhaps you'd brought a few stray rat-kind back with you and let them loose in the academy.”

  He glanced about, inspecting the shadowed corners of the room as if he really expected to find beady rodent eyes glaring back at him. “Should you be given credit for recovering the object of your quest, at least briefly? I think not. In fact, that temporary success has only made matters worse. Even if the treasure isn't scattered far and wide at the bottom of a cliff, it's safe to say that the rat-kind will not be so lackadaisical in guarding it from now on. Thanks to your efforts, the prize this academy was hired to recover is most likely lost for good.”

  Dremm rubbed at his chin. “Since in all my experience I've never heard of such a miserable performance, I confess I'm at a loss to know what to do. Unfortunately, the academy turned its back upon flogging some decades ago, and any other punishment seems trivial. Though it will embarrass me nearly as much as it will you, I see no recourse but to ask for Head Tutor Borgnin's judgement.”