Magician In Captivity: Power of Poses - Book Three

by Guy Antibes

  Mori gave Jojo a withering look. “How often do I have to prove that I support you? If you don’t let Trak help, I will leave Bennin with him. Do you understand?”

  “Ha! You’ll never do it, you mercenary bitch!” Jojo said.

  Trak’s eyes turned to Mori, whose jaw dropped in disbelief. “Do you mean what you say?” she said.

  Jojo folded his arms and nodded his head. “I do, and you will act as I direct.”

  “Fat chance,” Mori said, her face pulsed red. Trak had never seen her truly angry until now. She turned to Trak. “Do you have room on one of your flyers for me?”

  “You know I do,” Trak said. “You, too, Jojo.” It wouldn’t do to take sides, Trak thought.

  Jojo fumed and stalked out of the room. His companions stood, rooted to the floor.

  “Eat until my cousin cools off,” Mori said. She walked to a few of them and pushed on their shoulders until they sat.

  She put the food on the table and parceled out generous helpings, and then left the room. Trak thought she would seek out Jojo and try to calm him down, but Mori’s face hadn’t relaxed all that much.

  Tembul and Ferikan had moved to the edge of the room.

  “Have they all been tested?”

  Ferikan nodded. “Even Jojo didn’t feel any effects,” he said.

  Trak put his hand to his head. His head began to throb from all of the tension. “I will talk to these men. It’s time for you to go to sleep.”

  Tembul and Ferikan quickly exited the room. The men’s overt pledge of loyalty to him as their leader had stunned Trak. He still looked to Tembul as their real leader, but evidently they felt differently. He suddenly felt responsible for them, and that made Trak uneasy. He cast those thoughts aside and sat down next to Kanoki.

  “You know Jojo. Will he cool off?”

  The man’s expression didn’t look encouraging. “If anyone can, Mori is the one to do it, but I don’t know. Perhaps this time both of them might have gone too far.”

  Trak pressed his lips together. “Have you made any specific plans? Are you going to assassinate the Emperor and Shinowa? What about the Vashtans, excluding the ones in this house, of course?”

  The men looked a bit too morose with Jojo gone from the room. “We fear a bloody revolution. The bureaucracy rules Bennin, and they will fight to maintain their privilege,” one of the men said.

  “Our privilege,” said another. Trak took that to mean that these men were former members of the bureaucracy and of the ruling class of Bennin.

  “But what if the Emperor and Shinowa are removed from power? The citizens won’t accept Vashtan rule, will they?” Trak said.

  One man shook his head quite emphatically. “I agree, but I’m not sure Jomio does. He wants to be the new Emperor, and the people will expect the heads of the bureaucracy to select a new Emperor, not have one shoved down their throats.”

  Trak now understood Jojo’s truculence. He certainly could see Jojo wanting to run things. His giant-sized ego was pretty evident the first time he met him in the mine. The problem was that Jojo didn’t even have the full confidence of the men who comprised his ‘headquarters’. The reaction to the leadership question also made more sense. Knowing his erstwhile friend, Jojo wouldn’t accept being a co-leader with anyone, if he became the Emperor of Bennin.

  “Thank you for your honesty. What are your plans?”

  The men sat up a little straighter. That was an encouraging sign.

  “We have men in place all over the castle ready to cause disruption, along with a large number of the people ready to demonstrate their dissatisfaction with the current bureaucracy. Regardless of how we seem to you, we have a lot of support. In the past, it has been enough for the bureaucracy to mollify revolting citizens with some reforms.”

  “That doesn’t take away the bureaucracy’s power?”

  The men smiled and nodded.

  “So an assassination can work if the bureaucracy continues to function smoothly?”

  The men darkened a bit. “All attempts at assassination have been unsuccessful. None of our guards are assigned to the upper levels of the castle.”

  “I can solve that,” Trak said. “I can get men into the Emperor’s chambers.”

  Six sets of eyebrows went up. “You can?”

  Trak nodded. “Without anyone knowing.” He didn’t want to boast, but he would rather the two groups work together, and that might mean a confrontation with Jojo. “I think I need to talk to Lord Jomio to refine your strategy.”

  ~~~

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  ~

  “ANOTHER ONE ON THE LIST HAS ESCAPED before we could get to him,” Kulara said. She crumpled the paper and looked out towards the open landscape, broken only by a pen of goats bleating.

  “That means half of our targets have escaped us, plus the warriors they have taken with them.” Valanna looked down at the list. The traitors had left the Arid Lands and seemed to be heading towards Balbaam. “The strategy has changed since we started to root out our betrayers. The Yellow Fox clan acted more quickly than Henrig thought. I think Asem needs us, more now than ever.”

  “We agree,” Henrig said. He took another sip of wine. The Vashtans had just arrived to meet them at this oasis, deep into the Arid Lands and almost to the Southern Sea. They didn’t look any more encouraging than Kulara or she felt.

  They sat beneath a canopy. Capricious breezes ruffled the cloth above them. In other circumstances, the setting would be rather pleasant. Their discussion intensified their sense of failure. Both groups had split up, and their actions had ended up forcing those they sought to head for Balbaam.

  Valanna had noticed the increasing tension eating away at Kulara the last few days. She looked at Derit and then at Henrig. “I think we need to follow those who have fled. We will have to scour Balbaam for them.”

  “My team can leave as soon as we have eaten,” Henrig said.

  “Come with us on the flyer. You can teleport into the city when you are closer. There is no reason for you to use up your strength jumping all the way to Balbaam.”

  He laughed. “Would that I had your ability, Valanna. We might have caught more if we were faster.”

  Valanna waved his comment away.

  “Balbaam has more rules than the Arid Lands,” Kulara said, “not to mention, it’s more dangerous for vigilantes like us.”

  “We have Asem and King Marom there.”

  Kulara looked at Valanna, frowning. “Asem is under house arrest. Do you really think that is King Marom’s wish? He has to placate his Ferezan advisors. Who among them are traitors?”

  “We can find that out,” Derit said. “I don’t see a need to sit around and talk any further. Let us eat and leave immediately.”

  All six of them boarded Kulara’s fancy flyer and rose thirty stories into the air. Derit would be the first ‘driver’, as they now called the magician who pushed the flyer with the wind spell.

  They all took turns driving until nightfall when they landed and Kulara called up water from the ground. Valanna slept beside the flyer on a soft patch of dirt. She was filthy at this point, only taking the time to wash her face and hands in the morning when they took off and at night. Flying through the dusty air of the Arid Lands made them all filthy, given the speed of the flyer.

  After three days, Valanna saw the River Pusuun. Balbaam wasn’t far to the northeast of where they landed for the night.

  “Tomorrow we can split up in the city,” Henrig said. “Derit has said she wants to stay with you, Kulara, so we will meet you in the city at some point.”

  “The Yellow Foxes will need to be taken care of at the same time as the traitors,” Valanna said. “We’ve gone over all this before, but please don’t be talked into moving sooner than we planned.”

  Henrig smiled. “We won’t; in fact, let’s meet the night after tomorrow, an hour after sunset at the inn where you left my message.”

  Valanna nodded. She hadn’t enjoyed her role
as a hunter and had let Kulara take care of the two traitors they had caught. She didn’t want to let the others know how much she wanted to return to Balbaam, but now that they were ready to leave, Valanna could only feel relief at the decision that the others had made. She didn’t know what they would face tomorrow when they landed on the palace grounds, but Valanna looked forward to returning to the capital from the Arid Lands. She had to admit that she would never make a proper Ferezan woman like Kulara.

  ~

  Valanna looked around the courtyard where they had set down. A gaggle of curiosity-seekers stood around the flyer, daring to touch the thing. She had to smile, since the flyer was an inert device, and only served as a stable platform. Magic powered the flyer, so she didn’t have to worry about someone moving it.

  She wore only a robe after her long bath. Valanna didn’t know if the dirt from the Arid Lands would ever come off, but she had scrubbed and soaped and scrubbed again. Kulara had given her a potion to release the black from her hair, and that had required more scrubbing, more of the potion, and then even more scrubbing. Her blond roots had begun to show anyway, and she felt relief when her mirror image showed a blonde woman looking back.

  Asem had seemed to be in better spirits than when she had left him, but he wanted time alone with Kulara to talk about Rumanna’s death and its aftermath. Valanna had been politely told to leave them alone until dusk, when dinner would be served.

  She hadn’t had any idle moments out of the palace, so she put on a comfortable silk dress and decided to spend some time with Trak’s portfolio. She pulled it from its hiding place in her room beneath a bottom drawer, and then flipped through the pages.

  Memories of her time with Trak and of her time in Pestle with and without him flooded into her mind. She felt her face burn when she finally thought of their last meeting in Amorim. That made Valanna take a deep breath, and then she went back to the portfolio with renewed focus.

  Trak had taken the time to enter a comment on the worry spell and a diagram of the lift spell that they used to elevate the flyers. He had notations for eight levels, from one to thirty stories. He had even made a notation about each story being four paces high. Valanna hadn’t really thought that precisely, although Nullia had taught her a few more power words that that weren’t included in Trak’s collection.

  She pulled out pen and ink and entered the additional power words. She felt closer to Trak somehow when she added to his portfolio. Valanna had learned two more poses since Amorim. As she sketched the poses, she realized again how well Trak had drawn images of himself. After entering the teleport spell and the water spell that Kulara had taught her, she attempted to use the same kind of encryption that Trak did and entered the words on the loose master sheet.

  Valanna blew on the last entry and closed the book. Her hand stayed on the cover. When would she see Trak again, if ever? Had their paths finally diverged enough, so that they had truly gone their separate ways? She shuddered as that last meeting preyed on her mind. They both had acted so poorly. Why had she chosen that time to break down with worry about what would happen in Balbaam? How she wished that Trak would have ridden south out of Amorim and caught them on the road to make amends.

  She shook her head. Valanna chided herself for thinking like an insecure teenage girl, yet, living with Nullia in eastern Santasia, she saw a prim, secure woman turn into a girl in love. She hoped that Nullia and Sandy were doing well together. Valanna let out another sigh, realizing that she ached to see Trak again.

  ~

  Asem and Kulara seemed more distant at dinner. Kulara didn’t want to talk, and Asem had returned to the aloof manner he had when she had visited him briefly after teleporting all the way from the Arid Lands, but this time no spell caused his dark mood. Valanna looked forward to visiting with the Blue Swans, but her excitement had been dampened by Kulara’s declining to join her.

  Valanna walked to the inn during a pleasant evening. There were enough clouds in the sky to make the sunset interesting, but not too many to threaten any kind of precipitation. She smiled at the smells of wood fires and simmering pots, along with grilling meat, as she walked through the cobbled Balbaam streets. Valanna ignored the other smells of habitation as she made her way to the inn.

  She appeared to be the first to arrive and found a table with benches on either side in a darker corner of the establishment. A barmaid sauntered over to take her order. Valanna ordered a light ale, something that was common in Pestle, but rare in the Arid Lands.

  When it arrived, her friends had not yet come, so she sat and savored the taste and let a little haze from the alcohol wipe away the tension that she felt.

  “You’ve started without us,” Henrig said, showing an amiable frown, and the four Vashtans sat down around Valanna. “I admire your judgement in picking the table we usually occupy.” He seemed to be in good spirits, as did the other three.

  Derit had put a welcoming hand on Valanna’s arm once she sat down and leaned over to whisper in her ear. “We have news. Good or bad depends on how you interpret it. Don’t drink too much, you will need a clear head.”

  Valanna sat up a bit straighter and leaned against the wall. Did she appear a bit tipsy? She put her hands to her cheeks, but she didn’t feel particularly warm the way she would if she drank too much, which she had only done on a few occasions. “What have you uncovered?”

  “The positive news is that the citizens of Balbaam are not involved in an uprising. The bad news is all of the traitors to the King are either staying in the palace or near to it. The Yellow Fox clan has been very busy stirring up a palace coup. It will be a small affair, and the perpetrators are all in close physical proximity to the King.”

  ~~~

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  ~

  JOJO STOOD WITH HIS ARMS FOLDED, leaning against one of the flyers. The man seemed to be brooding. Somehow, Trak never thought that Jojo would mope around like a teenager, so he had to smile when Trak remembered that he was in his last year as a teen. Perhaps Trak could act that way, but Jojo’s behavior seemed unseemly. He shook his head after he remembered his grand performance of adolescent behavior in front of Valanna.

  “Why don’t we set the future aside and concentrate on what we all have to do immediately to save Bennin from Shinowa and the Vashtans?” Trak said.

  Jojo looked up as if he hadn’t heard and nudged a rock with his foot. His arms remained folded.

  “Let’s not work against each other. There is no need.”

  “What if I don’t want to?” Jojo said. Trak sought out Jojo’s eyes in the darkness to see what he really meant by his statement, but he didn’t really see the truculence that took Jojo out of the room.

  “Then I will rescue the princess, and you can do what you want with whomever you enlist in your cause. If we work together, I really can help.”

  “I know you can,” Jojo said. Trak had to concentrate to listen; Jojo’s words were so quiet. “I’d rather you stick around and help me keep things peaceful once we win.”

  Trak let the night sounds come between them for a bit. “You know I can’t do that. I have to save my two fathers in Torya.”

  Jojo nodded his head. His mood had changed while Trak was by his side. Jojo took a deep breath of resignation. “How can you help me…us,” he amended.

  “I can get a small force into a secret passage that leads from the Emperor’s sitting room to his private pantry. From there we can go anywhere in the two upper floors.”

  “No, you can’t,” Jojo said. “I heard there is a passage that they bricked up. That is undoubtedly the one.”

  Trak grit his teeth. Of course, he would have done the same. “I can teleport into the room itself,” he said.

  “Too dangerous. We could all be cut down at once.”

  Jojo’s objections were getting tiresome.

  “In a few hours, I’ll teleport up to the second to the top floor, outside in the corridor, and find another place to arrive.”

 
“Then what if you are captured?”

  Trak made a dismissive expression, but realized that Jojo probably didn’t see it. “I teleport out. Wink in and wink out. What do we have to lose?”

  “You?”

  “I am nothing without the princess to return to Torya.” Actually, Trak finally felt some desperation caused by Neel and Able’s captivity. He could walk away from the Toryans and not feel guilty, but he couldn’t desert his fathers.

  “Then do it. None of us are ready to go tonight. We’ve been wandering around Beniko too long today.” He wiped his face with a hand. “I’m going to sleep.”

  “And I am going to work,” Trak said. They weren’t working together, but Trak sensed that some of the anger Jojo displayed had drained away in the cooler night air.

  ~

  “Every trip you take magnifies your risk,” Tembul said, as he held Trak’s wrapped sword.

  “I won’t be gone for long. We have to have a landing place for our people, and that means I have to scout the upper floors. The Vashtans’ teleportation spell isn’t as accurate as mine, and that might mean the difference between success or failure.”

  “I know, I know,” Tembul said. “But you need to be careful. Are you sure you won’t need me?”

  Trak nodded. “If we go together, and I lose touch with you, the risk that you talked about becomes much greater. It’s easier to take care of myself.”

  Hana stepped into the room. Trak had forgotten all about the princess’s companion. “If you want to see the princess, she’s on the northeast side of the upper floor, at least she was when I last waited on her.” Hana grimaced and left Trak wondering what she had done to the princess to earn her a special room in the dungeons. Hana made the princess sound like an awful harridan. Trak shrugged his shoulders. Tonight’s foray would be quick, especially if he could find a suitable alcove in the hallway in the Emperor’s quarters.

  Without a magician to create a shield, Trak drew his sword. He wouldn’t arrive without baring his teeth.

  “Good luck,” Tembul said. “I’ll be right here when you return.”