Wings on my Back

by Alex Sapegin

  A part of time and existence had fallen from his understanding.

  “Two blows to the heart, two blows. To each of you. And then only ash. Teg Hag knows languages well. That’s another way to translate my name,” the non-human announced in an icy tone. Hag snapped back into time and lifted his eyes to greet the bringer of death.

  For the first time in his life, the very first time, he became frightened! This non-human’s aura was tightly withheld under many shields, and the force he wielded was billowing about him. He was a mage! A strong mage! Tim and Sveiny were trying to put up an active defense, but to no avail! This strange force broke through their joint shield as if it were tin foil. It tore like paper. The sorcerers tumbled to the ground. Such a weight fell on their shoulders that Hag couldn’t take a step. He glanced at the warriors. Their faces were white and fatality lingered in their eyes, but that mix… Oh, gods! His blue eyes were glowing with a transparent light, his hands were lifted—another couple of seconds and he would strike. That’s it! The end. You’ve asked for it, Hag! Got carried away, dammit! What had he said about sheep?

  Something flashed off to the side. Myra! No!

  “Please! Don’t kill my uncle! Don’t do it! Kerr!” Myra threw herself at the mix’s feet. He lowered his hands and dropped to his knees in front of her. Tracks from tears streaked her cheeks. Her hands were clenched into fists at her chest. “You’re good! I know it. Forgive us.”

  The weight was lifted from his shoulders. Hag fell backwards onto the roadway, dropping his sword from his weak hands. He was alive! Everyone was alive, thank the gods that nothing fatal had happened. What was going on there? With Myra?

  “Thank you for helping me remain human!” Kerr said. Who had helped? Myra? Thank you Myra!

  Human? Well, that’s quite a declaration. He-he, he would have squashed us like bugs, that human!

  “I said you don’t look like an orc or an elf,” Hag snickered hoarsely, taking away the last of the fear and tension with his laugh. Glad for the gift of life, Myra and the warriors laughed too.

  Out of the corner of his eye Hag looked at Kerr, holding the girl’s hands in his, and caught his blue eye…, then choked. He had never seen such a wave of loneliness, sadness, grief and pain in anyone. What a wave!

  “What shall we tell the punishing mages?” he heard as if from afar. Sveiny the magician had snapped out of it. “Sorcery at that level, near the gates, if the reason for it is found, will be answered, and not by a slap on the wrist. For practicing magic without the mark of a mage or student—they can string up the non-human!”

  In horror at the idea, Myra grabbed hold of the clothes of the mix who had almost killed them. Then again, they had asked for it. They had crossed a line, not minding their business. And they had paid for it. A strange ripple ran over the boy’s face and hands, then disappeared. It was a boy, actually; now Hag could see he was no more than sixteen or seventeen, not twenty as he had previously thought. It seemed to Hag he saw scales and claws on his hands, just for an instant!

  “Tell me what I magicked here! I’m leaving, let them look for me if they like. They won’t find me. They’ll go crazy searching.” Kerr let go of the girl’s hands. “Well, so long, pretty girl.”

  There had to be a way out of the situation. Hag painstakingly went over all of the possibilities in his head. He had caused the problem. “Honor clouds one’s vision,” apparently, as the fidgety girl had said, and now the boy was saving their honor. Theirs! The dragons’! No, not on his watch. If that happened, they wouldn’t have any honor left and they might as well never return home. Better to fall on their own swords than to let it be this way!

  “Sveiny! Go get the Thunder Amulet!” Hag ordered the sorcerer. Guess he’d found a way out of the situation. “And you, Crystal, have a seat and don’t budge. ‘I’m leaving, let them look.’ Stay there and try not to shine, for the love of sea scum!”

  “What for? It’s empty. I didn’t charge it. It needs so much mana pumped into it, you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Exactly! Split the accumulator and stone in a frame. Let the sniffers prove that the mana didn’t splash out of the amulet.”

  “There’s an idea,” Sveiny Wave smiled, catching the sea-king’s drift as soon as he had begun speaking. So much mana was pumped into the “Thunder Amulet” to maintain the cupola of fixed protection that the boy’s magic could be chocked up to a glitch by the broken artifact. Everything would fit perfectly: the drawn-out discharge of mana, the warriors’ loss of strength, the ghostly luminescence.

  “Well, I’m still leaving. The gates to the School of magic are open till five for accepting potential students, I’d better hurry,” Hag heard Kerr’s words, addressed to Myra.

  “Will I see you again, uncle Kerr?” the girl said, holding on tight as a burr. She wouldn’t let him go so easily.

  “I’d be happy to see you at my house any day,” Hag said sincerely. “It’s the second house on the left after the ‘Blue Bookworm’ inn. And please accept my apologies. I speak for all my warriors and for myself most of all.”

  “Hey, you should thank Myra. And you know what….”

  “What?”

  “Find her a governor, ok? Better a Life mage. She’s got a gift. By the way, you can call me Gurd!”

  Bam—that was a slap in the face. How kind the gods are! There goes the whole thing from the Younger EDDA. Four words, a whole name. There’s blue eyes with no whites for you! And he even has a title too? But from where? Hag glanced around. Kerr-Gurd had already vanished into thin air.

  “I will, I definitely will. A Life mage. I’ll remember that. We’ll see each other again!” Hag mumbled under his mustache, stunned.

  Part 2.

  Bookworm.

  The white tower. School of Higher Magic…

  The tall double doors of dark oak wood parted, squeaking slightly.

  “May I?”

  “Come in, Valett,” the rector leaned back in her old wooden chair, a fixture of the office of the rectors at the Orten Mages’ School for over five hundred years now.

  A small man entered wearing a gray gown with the black and white edging of the bloodhound-punishing mages. His completely bald head reflected back the sunlight hitting it. The rector smiled. For twenty years now a popular legend had been circulating among the students: if you can catch a glimpse of master Valett’s head before an exam and see yourself in the reflection, you can relax and count on a good grade on the exam without too much stress. A fun game which they called hide-and-seek began every spring. Master Valett holed up in some out-of-the-way nook or office, and the students tried by all means necessary to find his hiding place in order to ambush him and admire his baldness. Various traps were included in the game, to the point of serious violations of order or the school rules. Everything possible was done to ensure the guilty parties were presented before the clear eyes of an officer of law and order. The “hide-and-seek” before exams always drove Valett boiling mad. They had plenty of their own work to do, and yet these youths were acting like dogs loosed from their chains! The whole school year gone to…, the fools wasting time frequenting taverns and one another, and it’s the master who’d suffer for it later!

  Valett tried everything to stop this nonsense. He put on masks, engaged guards, devised various magical traps, sent the students he caught to public service—someone had to clean the latrine—all to no avail! The students removed the masks, tricked the guards, and skillfully and splendidly avoided all the deadly traps! They were obeying their one common goal—to get something for nothing! Such energy in the young, if applied to a peaceful effort, could have disassembled the Rocky Ridge, stone by stone, long ago.

  The rector smiled again. For the first year, Valett wasn’t aware of the fact that the rumor had originated with and had been disseminated by the rector herself. If a young mage exhibited miraculous ingenuity and acumen in order to see his or her reflection in the punishing master’s shining noggin, meanwhile risking coming under the wra
th of the all-powerful head of the enforcers of order at the School of Magic and Orten as a whole, and he or she accomplished this goal. Well, not all was lost; the young man or woman might amount to something. She was prepared to look the other way about such shenanigans yet for another semester punishing the offenders with a slap on the wrist.

  When he found out, Valett was quite offended, and the rector had to offer many excellent wines so that she could smooth over her guilt, and Valett could finally forgive the joker. Then he started thinking of it all as a trial. He would set traps, obstacles, plenty of danger. The students, according to their strength and capabilities, would try to overcome them. Valett equipped himself with the students’ most original solutions for disarming the dangers, using new solutions in his hide-and-seek the following year. The students got around them, and he would change his strategy, perfecting his game in new ways. And so the students, without knowing it, participated in the important task of modernizing the magical defensive configurations and systems, and in doing so were acting as testers of the new creations by the mages of Valett’s department. It was an unofficial joint professional effort.

  Lyrics aside.

  “Valett, what are you going to say to make me happy today?” the rector asked instead of greeting him. “I see your eyes are shining. Are you going to tell me about something especially repulsive and flavored with the blood of innocents?”

  “Hello, Etran!” They could address one another informally when alone. “Right to the professional problems. Maybe I’m here to wish you well on entrance exam day! Or does that not suit you?”

  “Valett, would you say such a thing? This means a whole ‘nother batch of mediocre freeloaders abusing your poor head!” the rector teased her friend.

  “Don’t go there. Sometimes real natural born talents are in there, hidden among this great gray mass—it’s amazing. True diamonds in the rough! The night-time guild is nervously crying in a corner. And I’m glad these juvenile idiots are interested in my bald head, not the royal treasury. With their talent, they could rob it completely empty without batting an eye.”

  “It’s just that in your department they work so unscrupulously—ringers, all of them!”

  “What did you expect? I select the personnel in advance. I’m fishing with live bait.”

  The masters laughed. They had started calling those who had passed the “baldness trial” ringers. They made a note of the successful ones and if a mage lived up to the expectations, they offered him or her a job in the department of punishing mages or the Secret Royal Chancellery. To put it plainly, they made good on these people’s talent. The “ringers” hunted for “rats.”

  “Okay, that’s enough! Spill it, Valett.”

  “A couple of hours ago my configurations registered a powerful expulsion of forbidden magic near the western gates of the city.”

  “And?”

  “The three people we’ve got stationed there did an inspection at the temporary camp near the entrance to the city.”

  “And?”

  “They discovered a detachment of mercenary northerners. Hirdmen from the Dragon clan.”

  “The ones the magistrate hired to guard the middle city perimeter and the School walls? What do the northerners say?”

  “They lie, as always. They say they had organized a sword fighting training session to loosen up after their travels on horseback. While they were waiting for the crowd at the gates to thin out, they accidentally broke the ‘Thunder Amulet.’ They recited that story to me as if they’d memorized it beforehand.”

  “And no one died?”

  “No. The Amulet, they say, was already on its last legs. It burned the surrounding territory a bit, slightly beat people’s brains, but that’s it.”

  “What’s wrong then?”

  “That version of events doesn’t hold water. There’s an inconsistency in the background of the radiation of mana from the Amulet and the tilled layers of the astral plain. It’s a different background. The northerners’ sorcerers obviously erased the tracks and made a cover-up mess where they couldn’t clean up, but we can’t charge them with any criminal act. They never saw anything else, don’t know anyone.”

  “Ay-yay-yay, where were the gatekeepers? What were they looking at at the time?”

  “The gate guards were monitoring the purses of the crowd entering the city and couldn’t care less about watching the hird of northerners. Instead of money, those northerners might silence bribe-takers with a sting. It wouldn’t be the first time!”

  The rector thought for a moment. She occupied one of the leading positions in the city council. Still, the School and its students brought the dragons’ share of income and taxes to the city treasury, and allowing a newcomer who practices forbidden magic or an unregistered astral mage into the city would mean losing his influence in the council. Some frenemies would gladly screw him over, give him a shove out the door, and take full advantage of the School’s weakened influence. The vultures in the council would try to grab a piece of the pie.

  “What measures have you taken?” she asked Valett.

  “What can I do today? Take the names of all the mages who entered the city today? It’s entrance day!”

  “I understand, it doesn’t look good. We missed him. The barbarians won’t give him away, either, and it’s not worth confronting them now. Alright, Valett, have your people organize a subtle scan of the ‘lower’ levels of the astral. If he tries to cross the borders, we’ll catch him right away by the cast mold of his aura.”

  “It’s no use. The northerners erased the tracks of the residual background. You can’t collect a cast mold, no matter how much you try. You’re not the only one who thought of that! Pardon me, but I’ve got a lot of smart people and a lot of things to do!” Valett slapped his knees with his palms decisively and stood up from the comfortable leather chair.

  “Keep me in the loop,” the master rector leaned her elbow on the back of the chair. “This is just what we needed….”

  Orten. The school campus. Entrance exams.

  The city gates were behind him now, along with the hustle and bustle of the travelers trying to enter the city, only to be replaced by the hustle and bustle of the city streets. To Andy’s surprise, the streets of Orten were straight and even, extending radially from the town hall in all directions. The city was laid out like an academic center and the city planners moved away from the old stereotypes, at once planning and laying out all the avenues and alleys, parks and gardens.

  The city was located on three wide rocky ledges which ascended in steps to the Dekhan plateau. The river Gremuchka cascaded over all three steps in a waterfall. It began its rushing path in the Rocky Ridge penetrating through the entire plateau as a light blue vein and falling into the Ort River near the wide bend, where the spur of the Lower Mountains, with their mighty forests and impenetrable jungles, smoothly turned into the steppe-forest. The Ort, which had freed itself from the mountain gorges, poured its mighty body for two leagues, irrigating wide fields and gardens at its shores with its waters. The canals, which had been crafted and dug out by dwarf masters, carried the nourishing moisture of the mighty Ort another ten leagues inland.

  The exterior city walls, which Andy had just walked passed, used to fence in a plain at the foot of the mountains, now all overgrown for a half a league from the city walls. “The plain” was the worker’s neighborhood in the city, the area where the skilled workers lived, the location of all the production masters and guilds, which didn’t at all resemble the small industrial towns or skilled workers’ neighborhoods Andy had seen before. In orderly rows, quality two- and three-story stone and brick buildings, kept up nicely, lined the avenues. Their roofs were made of multicolored tile and their polished weather vanes shone brightly. The variegated colors of the roofs lent an indescribable festive flavor to the lower city, the Plain’s official name. The streets were paved with porous, tight-fitting cobblestones. Every fifty yards or so, drainage and stormwater manholes could b
e seen. Three aqueducts stretched from the Gremuchka to the lower city. The builders had thought of everything.

  In the place where the city walls went down towards the slightly sloping river bank, port structures began, with breakwaters and docks extending hundreds of yards into the deep river. The depth of Mother Ort allowed both river boats and ocean sailboats that had climbed five hundred leagues up the river from the mouth to easily take on cargo at the berths.

  Even at the western gates of the city, you could hear the noise of the traders directly beyond the port warehouses and structures.

  Merchants and traders came to Orten not only from around the entire continent of Alatar and the ocean islands. One would come across the occasional visitor from Rold or Radd, which were located far to the east and west, beyond the vast expanse of the seas. Trading went on all year round, bringing glory to the city and profit to the traders.

  Four bridges—the Lesser bridge, the White bridge, the Trade bridge, and the Central bridge—connected the lower and middle city.

  White walls surrounded the middle city, forming a completely impregnable thirty-yard rocky ledge. The streets of the middle city were even wider. Many parks with splendid fountains, cool ponds, and pavilions provided nice places to rest and relax and places for lovers and the public in general to take a leisurely stroll. You could have a bite to eat in one of the many dining houses entitled in the latest fashion: “cafe” and “restaurant.” The theater, gladiator arena, and hippodrome opened their doors invitingly to celebrate the end of each week, calling everyone to enjoy the art of the stage or the sight of blood pouring out all over the soon-to-be bright red sand. Fencing schools often held competitions and presented their students as contenders; mages, too, didn’t hesitate to take part in magical duels, especially the School’s third and fourth year students. A multitude of gardens hid the estates and manors of the wealthy merchants, townspeople and gentry in their bountiful shade. The golden cupolas of the temples to the One God rose above this greenery and the walls of the monastery of Sacred Solitude peeped through.