by Guy Antibes
“Such a thing exists?” Henrig looked excitedly at the other Vashtans.
“It does,” Valanna said. “Are you willing to let me use it on you? If you aren’t under compulsion, you will feel nothing. If you are, you might faint. Any spell will gradually fade.” She hesitated to warn them about not being able to come back from a compulsion like the Magician Guild practiced.
“They have used the spell on me,” Derit said. “It won’t kill you.”
Kulara shook her head. “We will give you the word before we use it.”
Derit nodded to Henrig who looked at the other two Vashtans. “Are you willing?”
One of the Vashtans peered at Valanna. “Only a word, no pose?”
“I will sit here and say it,” she said.
They all nodded their assent. “The word is a Pestlan word. You can repeat it after me. You say it with the intent of eliminating the effect of all spells. It is ‘worry.’”
“Worry?” They all said the word multiple times.
Kulara nodded. “That is it. Valanna?”
Valanna started with Henrig. “Worry.” She concentrated on each Vashtan. Canwog fainted dead away, but the rest looked at their companion with startled looks on their faces. “The spell fades away, so he will wake and be able to tell you who compelled him.”
Derit took Valanna’s hand. “Thank you. Teaching you to teleport in exchange for this is a very fair trade.”
Henrig brought out a skin of watered wine, which they passed around while waiting for Canwog to awaken.
~
Derit, Kulara, and Valanna went to retrieve the flyer. The Vashtan crouched down to pose, but Valanna stopped her. “The flyer isn’t far.”
“You knew?”
“Kulara grew up out here. She knew where the flyer was and where your countrymen had set up their camp. We are about five hundred paces away, and I can use a little exercise, can’t you?”
Derit put her hand to her forehead and sighed. “I can’t fool either of you.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Valanna said. “I thought you were the enemy when we first met. It looks like I was wrong.”
Derit led the way. She knew which direction to head.
“We can do better than to deceive, Derit,” Kulara said. “There are some of the Ferezan who delight in deceiving outsiders, but I am not one of them, and, even through my Prince is a spy, he doesn’t gain pleasure from lies and violence.”
They walked through the cold, dry, night air in silence until they reached the flyer. The three women packed their things, and Kulara lifted the flyer a few stories in the air, certainly high enough to clear any of the stunted trees between camps. Valanna supplied the wind and set the flyer back down at the Vashtan camp.
“Is Canwog up?” Derit said.
Henrig nodded. “The Yellow Foxes caught him two months ago. He has been sending messages to them whenever we stayed at an inn.”
“No other duties?”
The Vashtan shook his head. “You do know that we will have to pass on the secret spell?”
“Not so secret,” Valanna said. “There are many in Santasia and Colcan who know of it. It can even take down a flyer, although slowly. There are poses that the Toryans use that will do the same, Trak told me. The Yellow Foxes can take down a flyer, too.”
“We do, but a power word without having to strike a pose? Very useful as a defense.”
“As an offense, too,” Valanna said. “I walked through an army and reduced its strength because Riotro relied on compulsion. It saved many lives that day.” Her thoughts turned to the march through Santasia. The memory of the Blue Master’s look of terror, when discovered, still made her shudder.
They shared their supplies for breakfast. Valanna found that the Blue Swans were actually likable. She wished that she could share that insight with Trak. She knew that he regarded every Vashtan as an enemy, just as she had until they had met Derit.
~~~
Chapter Twenty-Five
~
TRAK NOTICED THESE VASHTANS’ COLORING MATCHED the ones he saw in Santasia, but their facial features were less pronounced. “What are you doing in a cell?”
“Being prisoners, of course,” the standing Vashtan said. Trak had to smile at the man’s sense of humor. The Vashtan looked to be about Lenis’s age, mid-twenties or a bit more, he estimated.
“Why don’t you teleport away from here?”
“The cell is shielded. The Benninese have found a way to make a shield persist. We are—“ The door clanged shut and Lenis’s eyes appeared through a tiny window in the door. “Prisoners, is the word. And so are you, Trak Bluntwithe. You didn’t know I have a shield in my room, did you? Your little sleeping spell worked, but not as well as you thought,” Lenis said, gloating. “Now Tembul and Sirul can fret and worry all they want when you don’t return. We will capture them when they find their way into the castle like you did, although no one can figure out how you made it all the way down here. We don’t care, since you are now just another captured magician.” Lenis laughed after he shut the window. Trak could hear him chortle away as he walked away.
“You don’t appear to be very worried.”
Trak smiled. “Let’s introduce ourselves and find out if we are friends or foes. I have seen another Vashtan in the presence of the Emperor.” Trak looked at the three men in front of him, and none of them resembled the Vashtan he saw with Nashi. “I am Trak Bluntwithe of Pestle, although I have some Toryan blood running through my veins, and am here to rescue a Toryan princess.”
“We think there is a Toryan woman at the end of the corridor. You were so close to your goal.”
Trak had to give them a grin. “And I’m not any longer?”
“We are in a prison, or do you not recognize the stone walls around you?”
This certainly wasn’t the island of luxury that Lenis enjoyed. There were five pallets with mattresses lining the walls. A single square table with stained cushions tossed around it were the only other items on the floor, except for chamber pots at the foot of each bed. The cell still looked remarkably clean.
“Your magic works within the room?”
“It does. I am Ferikan and this is Boriak, and Markik. We are all from the Third Blue Swan clan.”
“What does the Blue Swan clan mean? I only know you as Vashtans.”
Ferikan gave Trak a very abbreviated digest of the political situation on the continent of Vashtan and of the rivalry between the Yellow Foxes and the Blue Swans. “Of course we don’t have the resources that the Yellow Foxes have.”
“But they don’t have enough soldiers to invade our country, let alone take over the world on their own,” Markik said, interrupting. “Now we are stuck here.”
“What do you know?” Trak said.
“Very little. The Yellow Fox clan works with a high-ranking Benninese magician named Shinowa. He’s the one who shielded this cell.” Ferikan offered Trak a seat.
Trak sat at the table, a man on each side. “He’s probably the only one in Bennin who knows how to do that,” Trak said as he told them of his own adventures in Bennin, but he left out his progress with poseless magic.
The others yawned, and it was time for them to return to their sleep. Trak lay down on a pallet, and when he heard snores, he teleported out of the cell. Whatever shield Shinowa had created, it didn’t stop Trak’s poseless teleportation.
He stood in the middle of the corridor wondering what to do, when he heard a door open and teleported back into the Vashtan cell. He sat on his pallet when the little window opened again.
“Master Bluntwithe, let me see you,” Nashi said. Trak stepped up to the little window and let Nashi gloat at him. “Lenis tells me he caught you. Occasionally, the Toryan can be of minor value, but this time he has exceeded himself. Very good.” The man just looked inside the cell for a minute with a self-satisfied smile. “Enjoy your stay. In a few days you will become food for ravens, along with your new friends.” The little door clanged sh
ut. Trak could hear Lenis and Nashi congratulating themselves as they returned to Lenis’s cell.
“You know Nashi?” Ferikan said.
“I do. I once wondered how he could have so easily misled me and say that Vashtans were captured when I saw one with the Emperor. Now I know, since there was more than one group of Vashtans. I will leave you, but I will return to take you out of here.”
Ferikan scoffed. “How can you do that?”
“I have a few tricks of my own.” Trak said. He stripped some of the bedding from one unused pallet and scrunched it up to make it look like a person slept on the one he had used. “I am not bound by the shield, it seems. Do not let others catch on that I am gone, but I promise you that I will soon come back and take you all away. Farewell, and have faith. Tell Lenis that I am sick or something.”
Trak teleported out of the cell and looked up and down the corridor. He opened up the little grate on the door to the Vashtan cell. “See? I’ll be back,” he said quietly.
He examined the other cells and found only one more occupied. He knocked on the door.
“Who is it?” a woman said in poor Benninese.
“I am a friend,” he whispered in Toryan and opened the little door, looking through the grate. The woman had turned the wick up on a lamp. She adjusted her robe and walked to the door.
“You aren’t Lenis.”
“No. You are the Toryan princess.”
“That’s what I’ve learned to answer to,” she said.
Trak thought that an odd comment, but he had found the woman he sought.
“I have come to take you back to Torya.”
The woman put her hand to her chest. “Me?”
Trak looked more closely at the princess. He had expected a young woman, but Trak would gauge this woman to be of an age with Honor Fidelia, Trak’s aunt.
“Wait for a moment.” Trak concentrated on the lock and soon opened the door. “Gather your possessions. We are leaving.”
“You don’t have to ask me twice, young man.” The princess gathered a sheetful of her things while Trak wondered if he should lock the door back up. He decided that he would leave it open, so that might provide something more to confound his enemies.
“Close your eyes,” Trak said and he teleported the pair of them to the mansion.
~
“I present you with a princess,” Trak said after he called Tembul and Sirul into his study.
The rescued woman smiled at the two Toryans. “You speak Toryan, too? You look like my people.”
Sirul furrowed his brow. “Who is this woman?” he said to Trak.
“You know her, she is the Princess of Western Torya.”
Sirul shook his head. “She is not. I am related to the princess, and this isn’t her.”
Tembul and Trak looked at each other, and then at the woman. They both addressed the woman simultaneously, “Worry!”
The woman fainted.
Trak looked down at the comatose woman. Not the princess? He just blinked as he tried to gather his wits. “Not the princess?” Trak repeated what he had just thought.
“How could she be? The princess hasn’t seen twenty-one years yet. This woman could be her mother.”
Tembul laughed. “A young mother.”
Trak brewed some tea while the other two guarded the prone woman. They were sipping out of Mori’s porcelain cups when the woman blinked her eyes open.
“Where am I? Oh, yes. I was rescued.” She looked a bit different. “You’ve done something to me, young man.” The woman’s personality had changed.
“You aren’t the princess?”
The woman laughed. “You actually believed me?” She still spoke in authentic Toryan. “I was the princess’s companion while she traveled to Beniko. My name is Hana.”
“Was she to be a slave?” Tembul asked.
“Gods in the heavens, no! I imagine she is still on the top floor in the castle, pampered as always. She would never consent to being placed in a dungeon. I was well rid of her when they put me down there. Other than no window, the cell was as nice as most places I’ve ever lived in, with better food and plenty of peace and solitude, I’ll tell you!”
“Do you know why they placed you down in the dungeon?” Tembul said.
The woman waved her hand and smiled. “I suppose to lure the Vashtans, which they successfully did, and maybe even you. Magicians?”
Trak nodded.
“My room is shielded, like the Vashtan cell.” She laughed. “I imagine none of them expected anyone to just unlock the door with a key,” the woman said. She leaned over to look more closely at Sirul. “Haven’t I seen you before? Sir something.”
“Sirul, my name is Sirul. I visited my cousin a few times. She never did like me either.”
Hana cupped Sirul’s chin in her hand. “That’s right. They caught you trying to speak to her father, but he refused.”
“My uncle was under Riotro’s spell by then.”
“Not Riotro, the Vashtans. They are masters at compulsion. I can remember them prancing around like arrogant monkeys,” the woman said. “They are in the castle, you know. Lenis crowed to me about how they captured some of their own and trapped them just down the corridor from me.” She looked around and took a deep breath. “I’ve been shut in that cell for long enough, I guess.” The woman looked around and blinked. “Where am I, by the way?”
Trak wondered if the woman ever shut up. “This is an old mansion in Beniko. We have come to take the princess back with us.”
Hana snorted. “Good luck with that. She won’t leave. That little girl knows what’s good for her, especially after the rebels killed her family.”
Sirul hung his head. “I know,” he raised it back up, “but we are taking her to Eastern Torya.”
“I didn’t know that still existed. The last I knew the plans were to invade Santasia. That didn’t happen?”
Trak smiled. “It happened, but the invasion was turned back and Riotro and his Vashtans defeated.”
The woman narrowed her eyes and scoffed. “As if… No one can defeat Riotro.”
“He can,” Tembul said, looking at Trak. “I saw it all myself. Cut off his feet, this lad did, in front of a hundred witnesses.”
“Cut off his feet? So he couldn’t pose?” Hana laughed. “Good for you, if it is true.”
“It is,” Sirul said.
The woman finally took a sip of the tea that Trak had offered. “I don’t have to go back?”
“To Torya?”
She shook her head. “To the cell. To be more than honest, I’ve been a bit bored of late.”
“Then we can take you to Torya,” Sirul said.
Tembul put his hand to his face. “Just how many people will fit onto a flyer?”
“Flyer? You mean floater, don’t you?” the woman said.
“No flyer. We will tell you in the morning. You must be exhausted. Sirul will give up his room.” Tembul said and looked towards the younger Toryan. “You can sleep with me.”
Sirul sighed. “This way,” Sirul said after he picked up the pile of Hana’s possessions.
Tembul and Trak sat sipping cold tea in the study.
“Now what? The woman was a diversion,” Tembul said.
“We will take two flyers. The woman will accompany the princess. We will also have the three Vashtans to help us fly.”
“That’s a lot of people, Trak.”
“That is still only three or four per flyer. If we have multiple magicians, we travel longer. I don’t think I’ll be able to teleport that many people all the way to Homika.”
“Assuming there is a ship we can take.”
“Does it matter where we go - Pestle, Amorim, or Tachium? Anywhere to get off Bennin and onto another continent.”
“What about your father and Able?”
“We will eventually get to Kizru. First we have to capture, not rescue, the princess.” Trak said.
“So, when do you free the Vashtans?”
&n
bsp; “Right now,” Trak disappeared right after he said it.
~
“You keep waking me up, Pestlan,” Ferikan said, grinning as he rose from his pallet.
“Do you have any possessions that you need?”
“Nothing in this cell, if that’s what you mean. You are breaking us out?”
Trak laughed. “We won’t break anything. Let’s join hands and leave this place.” Trak stepped to the door and unlocked it with a spell, leaving it slightly ajar.
Ferikan roused his two fellow Vashtans, and in an instant they stood in the middle of Trak’s study. Tembul hugged the wall.
“What happened?” Tembul said. “How did you push me out of the way?”
“That’s the spell, I guess,” Trak said and went about introducing the Vashtans. “Do all of you know how to make wind?”
Boriak said, “Here?”
“Wind spell, knucklehead,” Ferikan said rapping his knuckles on Boriak’s skull.
“To some degree or another. Why?” one of the other Vashtan’s said.
Trak smiled. “In the morning I will introduce you to a new mode of transportation.”
~
“So these will fly with the birds, eh?” Ferikan said. The courtyard seemed smaller with two flyers and seven people standing around. “Why is this better than teleporting?”
“It can carry more people and more things. I imagine you have to travel lightly when you teleport.”
“Not to mention we are only good for a certain number of jumps,” Markik said, earning a glare from Ferikan.
Trak noticed the look and kept from smiling. It was always good to know the limitations of the other side, and he supposed that it applied to the Yellow Fox clan, as well as the Blue Swans. “But you can always go in two’s or three’s,” Trak said to mollify Ferikan.
“There is that,” the Vashtan said.
“Or you can stay here. Do you have the power to fight Shinowa and the Yellow Fox Vashtans?” Trak searched Ferikan’s eyes for any evidence of duplicity.
“Not on our own. We have done all we can, and admittedly, we have failed in Bennin. We had already discussed that we weren’t accomplishing anything in Beniko, since there were more Yellow Foxes here than we can handle. We were about to make preparations to leave the city.” Ferikan didn’t reveal any emotion, other than the general relief that he had been saved.