Deceptions (Ascendant Book 3)

by Craig Alanson

  Holding her breath lest she launch into another uncontrollable series of hacking coughs that threatened to burst blood vessels in her eyes, Wing stood up straight and proud to face the enemy charge. Her body was weak, she knew that without any need to use her wizard senses. Her knees shook, her head throbbed with pain, and she could not remember ever feeling more hungry. Her use of power had drained her energy dangerously, even her wizard skills at fighting could not save her against a single enemy soldier right then.

  She could not fight the men charging toward her, and she did not have time to fight them all anyway, for more foul men were already coming as they answered the shouted summons of their leader. So she did the only thing she could; she reached deep down into the spirit world, and pulled power from that unseen realm. Interlocking her fingers, she held her hands palms-outward, as fire flared into life in front of her hands. With a curse of defiance she heard mostly through her bones, she flung a thin stream of fire sweeping left to right across the enemy, burning through their ranks. In one moment, the soldiers went from charging her to rolling on the ground in agony, horribly burned by magical fire. The two archers and the men running toward her with swords were dead or dying, their muffled screams of agony registering even in her recovering ears.

  Using every ounce of strength she had left to remain on her feet, she turned to face another group of soldiers who had come running to the aid of their fellows. Seeing the terrible fate of the soldiers Wing had incinerated, the enemy still alive halted, looking at each other fearfully. The enemy wizard who had just so easily killed a group of determined soldiers was now glaring at them, her face great and terrible in the moonlight.

  It was too much. Released from the magical compulsion they had suffered under for years, their courage failed. First one, then all the soldiers turned and ran, flinging aside weapons, helmets and any other burden which might slow their escape.

  Wing stood her ground until the last enemy soldier disappeared from view before allowing herself to fall to her knees, holding a hand to the scorched ground while she drew in breaths in between sharp coughs. The coughing, she knew, would not get better until she could get to a place where the air was not full of swirling soot particles. It was longer than she wanted, perhaps a quarter of an hour, before she could again stand. East. She needed to walk to the east, toward her fellow wizards who she knew were at that moment coming toward her as quickly as they could, riding heedlessly through the night. Trodding unsteadily across what used to be a farm field, she stopped to pick up a discarded sword. A blade of Acedor was not her weapon of choice, she felt tainted by even touching the hilt of such a crude and evil device.

  As a weapon of war, the sword she held was crude. But, she had to admit, it made a fair cane for her to lean on as she limped her way to safety and freedom.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “Ah!” When Madame Chu killed the wizards of Acedor, Koren felt a wave of dizziness and fell backward, his arms flailing wildly to grasp onto anything but the ridge they were climbing was so steep, he was on the way down before he knew it.

  “Got you!” Bjorn held onto a tough mountain shrub with one hand and the boy’s jacket with the other, yanking forward and making Koren spin around to slam into the slope on his back. “Grab something,” Bjorn grunted from the strain of holding the boy up with one hand. “You’re falling!” He warned as Koren’s own weight started him slipping out of the jacket.

  “Yes, yes, I’m all right now,” Koren said woozily while wrapping both arms around something.

  “Koren, that’s my boot you’re hugging,” Bjorn supressed a chuckle.

  “Oh, sorry,” he blinked, his vision returning to normal. First, he made sure his feet had firm purchase on a rock, then he let go of Bjorn’s boot and took hold of shrub to pull himself upward. “I’m all right now, really.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Koren said truthfully. “I got dizzy all of a sudden.”

  “Hungry?”

  “No, I think it was a wizard thing. I’ve felt something like it before, when Paedris and the other wizards were testing me on top of his tower.”

  “This wasn’t a test,” Bjorn stated the obvious.

  “No. I don’t know what happened.”

  “It better not happen again until we get to the top,” Bjorn fretted. They were climbing the last stretch up to the top of a ridge, where Raddick planned to stop for the night. It was too dangerous for the soldiers to be stumbling around in the dark, they were only climbing then because nightfall had caught them exposed halfway up the ridge. “Come on, then, you go ahead so if you get dizzy again, I can break your fall. Don’t get dizzy if you can help it.”

  Koren didn’t respond. How was he supposed to prevent himself from falling victim to something he didn’t understand?

  In the light of dawn the following morning, Raddick regretted his success in luring the orcs to chase him, for he feared becoming trapped. His plan had been to disappear behind the ridgeline, then go eastward and down before turning north again to resume climbing. That plan had been dashed when the party discovered a sheer cliff to the east, and they were forced to double back, losing precious ground and time as the orcs came upward with the skill of mountain goats. By the time the soldiers had laboriously climbed the steep second ridge, the orcs were far too close, and more orcs had come out of the treeline to join the pursuit. Raddick noted with dismay that the hunters had watched his team climb the steep ridge, learning what areas to avoid and the quickest route to the top. When the army troop reached the summit, only to see with a groan there was another ridge above them, Raddick called a halt for his people to rest shaking arms and legs. They waited longer than Raddick wished, but he had to wait, for his plan was for Koren to pick off one or two of the hunters as they climbed, forcing the others to retreat and wait for reinforcements.

  “That’s two,” Bjorn said unnecessarily, as the second hunter hit by Koren tumbled down the steep ridge. “Can you hit that one?” He pointed to where an orc was huddled fearfully under an overhanging rock, clinging by its claws.

  Koren frowned. All he could see of that orc was its hands, while all the other hunters had gone to ground, squeezing themselves into crevices or under rocks, not daring to move. Forcing the hunters to remain motionless gave the soldiers time to get away, but only until the orcs realized there was no one above to shoot deadly arrows. Every second the hunters delayed Koren, the much larger group of orcs below climbed ever closer. “I will try,” Koren responded, and handed the arrow back to Bjorn.

  “Something wrong with it?” The man asked, studying what looked to him like a perfectly good arrow.

  “It’s fine. It doesn’t,” Koren shrugged as an apology, “feel right.” He selected another arrow from the row on the ground in front of him.

  “You trust in those feelings of yours,” Bjorn advised sagely.

  “Right now,” Koren admitted, “I feel like throwing down my weapons and running away crying like a little boy.”

  “Trust your feelings except that one,” Bjorn wagged a finger.

  Koren did not reply, instead focusing on the target even his keen eyes could almost not see. He aimed at the orc’s exposed hands, but it did not feel right, and he had little hope of hitting something so small from such a distance, in the gusting winds blowing across the mountain slope. Closing his eyes, he muttered a silent plea to the spirits, receiving no answer. No answer, but there was a feeling, an almost imperceptible tingle at the back of his mind.

  “Er, young master wizard,” Bjorn whispered, “I don’t wish to argue with the spirits, but you’re aiming too high and too far to the left. Come right a-”

  Koren released the arrow. It flew upward, wavering side to side as its flight was buffeted by the winds swirling up the slope. The untrained wizard and the former King’s Guard watched the arrow drop below them and plunge downward, still flying too far to the left. The arrow seemed to stagger in the air, almost stopping before a gust of
wind caught it and pushed right, right, right and down. “Not enough,” Bjorn exhaled, disappointed as he saw it was going to miss the target.

  Miss the target it did, the arrow disappeared from view well clear of the lucky orc clinging to the overhanging rock. A wail reached Bjorn’s ears and, from where the arrow had gone out of view, the body of an orc rolled downward, tumbling over and over, picking up speed as it fell.

  “Remind me never to argue with the spirits,” Bjorn said, mouth agape in astonishment.

  Koren merely grinned, and winked.

  “Oh, shut up,” Bjorn grumbled.

  After Koren’s arrow hit the unseen orc, Raddick ordered the party to move out, on up the next ridge. The slope there was less steep, the ground not entirely cluttered with rocks and the path was broad enough for people to walk beside each other. Raddick set a punishing pace, knowing the orcs hunting them would move quickly once they reached the top of the previous ridge. Though three of the hunters lay dead, there were at least twenty more orcs coming up the mountain, and they would not delay long once they saw no more arrows were raining down on them.

  The pace of advance, the leg-burning climb and the thinner air on the mountain did not keep soldiers from whispering and looking suspiciously at Koren and grumbling, and a few hex signs were made with fingers to protect themselves.

  After a while, Raddick had enough of the whispers. “Cease this foolishness! You are soldiers of Tarador, what is the matter with you?”

  “Begging your pardon, Captain,” Thomas spoke first, “but the boy’s skill with a bow, it ain’t natural, is all.”

  “No, it’s not natural, because the boy is a wizatd. Now, move like we have blood-thirsty orcs on our tail,” he was interrupted by a guttural howl from behind them, “because we do.”

  “How do you do it?” Lem asked Koren, intensely curious as they approached the crest of the latest ridge. “Hit a target you can’t see? If you can’t see it, how do you aim?”

  “I don’t know how I do it,” Koren admitted. “The spirits knew that orc was there, even if I couldn’t see it.”

  “The spirits knew it was there, but they didn’t aim your bow,” Lem insisted.

  “They don’t,” Koren threw up his hands. “The spirits don’t tell me where to aim, they don’t speak to me at all,” he complained. “I move the bow around until it, it just feels right. I can’t explain it. And I release the bowstring when I feel that I should,” he looked at the ground sheepishly.

  “The wind blew that arrow all over the sky,” Lem was not satisfied with an ‘I don’t know’ answer from the young wizard. “You mean to tell me the spirits knew if you released the arrow at that precise moment, the winds would be blowing in just the right direction and force to bring it to the target? The spirits know the future?”

  “Paedris- Lord Salva told me there is no past or future in the spirit world,” Koren explained. To Lem’s mildly disgusted look, he replied “That’s what he told me, I’m not a master wizard!”

  “I can’t believe the spirits knew exactly how this wind,” he tugged hair out of his eyes as a gust of wind twirled around them, “would move an arrow-”

  “The boy bends the world to his will,” Bjorn interrupted, tired of the constant questions. “The spirits know what he wishes, and they reshape the world however he wants. If the winds would not have guided that arrow to the target, the spirits made the winds do his bidding.” Seeing Lem’s surprise, Bjorn added “That is how it was explained to me by a dwarf woman who was servant to a master wizard.”

  Lem stared at Koren with astonishment, and not a little fear. “You bend the world to your will, and you are only an untrained wizard?”

  “I haven’t been trained,” Koren protested, embarrassed. “I don’t know how magic works, I only know how to do, the things I can do.”

  “Hmm,” Lem unconsciously moved a step away from Koren. “If you can make the world do whatever you want and you haven’t even been trained,” he didn’t finish the thought.

  “Lord Salva needs us to prevent another invasion this autumn, so the enemy will be forced to wait through the winter,” Ariana explained as she unrolled a large map on the table in her royal tent. In the soaking cold rains of late autumn in northern Tarador, roads would become impassible streaks of mud, rendering any large-scale movements by an army impossible. As the year wore on into winter, the muddy roads would freeze but ice and heavy snow would block roads just as effectively, and regular thaws made roads a sloppy mess. Not until the middle of spring would it be practical for the enemy to move an invasion force into northern Tarador, and that would give the beleagured nation time to rebuild defenses. Southern Tarador suffered somewhat less from snow and ice, but what fell as snow in the north fell as chilly rain in the south and made the roads just as bad. The true barrier to an invasion of southern Tarador was the terrain in that region; rugged mountains ran east-west with deep river valleys flowing north to south. To cross the rivers there, the enemy would have to build a bridge, and the Royal Army could easily prevent such an extensive effort.

  “Where is Lord Salva?” Regin Falco inquired, and not for the first time. His question was not quite phrased as a demand, but it also lacked a bit of the deference owed to the young woman who was both crown princess and Regent.

  That young woman ignored the tone of the duke who was her future father-in-law and, recently, a war counsellor. She found the man irritating but had to admit his strategic thinking was sound, even Grand General Magrane sought Duke Falco’s advice occasionally. “That is not the subject of this discussion, Your Grace,” she deflected the question yet again, and had a brief moment of satisfaction when she saw a vein throbbing on Regin’s temple as he was frustrated once more. “Lord Salva is doing his part to secure allies in our fight-”

  “He is greater than any ally we might persuade to fight on our side,” Regin insisted. “Lord Salva should be here! We have too few wizards,” he shuddered, remembering the overwhelming power the enemy had on their side of the river, including ranks of dark wizards. “Too many of our wizards and skilled in nothing but,” he waved a hand dismissively, “reading fortunes and healing cuts.”

  “You would be thankful for our skill in the healing arts,” Madame Chu said with icy calm, “if you suffer injury in battle.”

  “I am more likely to be cut with a sword in battle because Lord Salva is not here to fight by my side,” Regin shot back.

  “Enough!” Ariana threw up her hands. “This is what the enemy wants; for us to fight amongst ourselves. We are here to discuss ways to forestall an invasion, not,” she glared at Duke Falco, “to debate the whereabouts of my court wizard. Paedris is on an errand with my blessing and full support, and there will be no more talk on that subject, is that clear?”

  Regin Falco did not blush, because Falcos did not blush, or back down. They did, however, know to choose their battles. “Of course, Your Highness.”

  Ignoring the sulking duke, Ariana tapped the map with a fingernail. “General Magrane, could we take a substantial force across the river, to raid deep into Acedor? If we take control of enemy territory and destroy villages, crops and grain stores, the enemy would surely have to shift position to push us back, and we could then conduct a fighting retreat back across the river,” she explained, proud of herself for developing the strategy. “By the time the enemy reorganized, it would be too late in the year for them to strike.”

  “Um, well, Your Highness,” Magrane began, seeking a tactful way to let down his leader.

  “It is a fine idea, Highness,” Regin interrupted, “against any other enemy. Against Acedor, it would only hasten our doom. The demon cares nothing for the people under its dominion,” Regin suppressed another shudder at having seen how cruelly the ruler of Acedor treated the unfortunate people under its control. “We could burn half the villages in Acedor, and the demon would not react except to take advantage of our having weakened our defenses east of the Fasse.”

  “Oh,” Ariana sta
red at the map, crestfallen.

  Magrane cleared his throat. “Duke Falco is correct, Highness. We cannot think of the demon the way we deal with other enemies.”

  “Very well,” Ariana mentally switched gears to her second plan. “Madame Chu informed us the enemy has a major supply,” she paused to recall the correct military term, “dump? Here, in this valley behind their lines north of us. Could we attack those supplies and destroy them? When Captain Raddick was tutoring me, I wished to know about tactics but he told me amateurs debate tactics, professionals discuss logistics. An army cannot move without supplies.”

  “I like it,” Regin murmured with admiration. “The enemy knows they cannot rely on foraging for supplies here after they cross the river.” At the direction of Magrane, almost all vital supplies of grain and other foodstuffs had been moved east away from the river valley. Ducal armies had orders and were prepared to burn anything useful to the enemy as they conducted a fighting retreat, depriving the invading forces of provisions to continue their advance. Any supplies the enemy needed during the invasion would have to be brought across the river and transported to the front lines. If an invasion happened anyway, Magrane planned to send fast-moving cavalry units to hit the enemy’s supply wagons behind the lines, delaying the advance. That was a prudent plan, but it would be far better to keep the enemy west of the River Fasse.

  “It is an excellent idea, Highness,” Magrane agreed, “except-”

  “It is an excellent idea,” Regin did not allow the Royal Army commander to finish his thought. The more he considered the idea of attacking the enemy’s supply dump, the more he liked it. Major units of the Royal Army would have to cross the River Fasse to make the raid successful, and the princess would almost certainly insist on leading the raid herself. That would make her vulnerable, especially if something, anything went wrong during the retreat.

  Regin felt confident he could arrange for something to go wrong.