To Be Victorious: The Maestro Chronicles Book 6

by John Buttrick

  In the shocked pause that followed, he grabbed one of the bags, pulled out a few seeds, and dropped them to the ground, while summoning the potential for Rapid Growth. The spell, focused through the crescendo like Simon would have done, hit the two seeds. A pair of honeylocust trees, one on either side of him, sprouted up, maturing to seventy cubits high and each twig had three-branched thorns, giving him a formidable pair of weapons. He ceased the spell and cast, Animation. These were not Willow Guild Melodies, they were Symphonics of his own, but no one observing would know that. Each hand controlled a tree and his fingers, the limbs.

  Roots tripped up horses at the flipping of a wrist, his right pointer finger twitched and a huge thorny branch smashed to the ground, crushing three horses and their riders. Tenderized piles of gory meat were what remained on the ground and red smears on the tree limbs that had crushed them. The curling of his left pinky swept half a score of men from their saddles and he could hear the screams and the breaking of bones as they fell to the field.

  At a trumpet blast, the surrounding Suttons began circling him and the trees, but were keeping well clear of the branches. The Pentrosans were a quarrelsome bunch but not a stupid people. He was pleased Kall had stopped their forward motion, evidently to focus attention on the new threat. Riders with the new sabers launched solidified blades of air his way and Daniel threw up a dome-shield and the spelled-projectiles struck and were instantly absorbed an arm-span from reaching his body. Arrows rained in over the heads of the horse-and-riders who were circling him and kicking up dust clouds. The explosive arrowheads hit the branches of both trees. Limbs split and fell crashing to the ground, thorns flew like tiny darts, and he jumped forward, hit the ground in a roll, and sprang to his feet ten strides ahead, as a flaming branch came crashing down where he had been standing.

  The trees were in flames and falling, but for the moment they did him the favor of barring the Suttons on the other side from reaching him. He only had to face the thousands of elite Guardsmen, all on horses that were currently aiming their sabers at him. He ceased the potential for Animation. His dome-shield, invisible to their eyes, extended down close to the ground, but up about a hand-width so he could move forward. Solidified blades of air were being absorbed into his shield while exploding arrows pelted it from above as the archers sent volleys over the trees. The ground around him exploded into fountains of dirt and the dust that came in under the shield became more than an inconvenience. He sniffed rapidly and then sneezed as an arrow struck the ground right behind him, yet close enough that the concussive force flipped him into the air. He came down on his back and was looking up into the hazy sky at the multicolored glowing spheres.

  He cast the spell, Freshen Air, to clear the smoke and haze within the dome-shield and then stood up as the ground around him was effectively being tilled by the solidified blades and being blasted upwards by the exploding arrows. Stable footing was becoming hard to come by.

  He pointed the crescendo and cast a spell through it similar to one Simon used earlier. A cobalt blue beam of light fanned out from the tip and hit a line of twenty horsemen right in their faces. Their skin turned green, brown, and then rotted like over-ripe fruit. Sabers slipped from slackened wrists and hit the ground about an eye-blink before the bodies of those who had held them.

  He used the same spell to kill another group of Suttons and then another, slowly killing everyone between him and General Kall, who shook the reins of his warhorse and went racing off to the right along with his twenty personal guards. The Colonel and Majors went the other way. Daniel sent a fan of light at the three officers, they changed color and rotted a few moments later, then he pointed the crescendo at the fleeing General, actually at the back of the Suttons between him and Kall. Those men died while the commander took off on his galloping horse. The archers ran from the back side of the still burning trees and let fly at Daniel. He fanned the deadly light at them and most of the forty or so men sagged to the ground but several of them loosed their arrows before dying, one man dropped his shaft and the explosion blew off his legs. That probably would have hurt if he hadn’t been already dead.

  Daniel sprang to the right as the loosed arrows flew at him. Again, he hit the ground and rolled to his feet, yet managed to catch a glimpse of those arrows hitting the dirt-churned field where he had been standing. He preferred jumping aside to allowing the heads to explode near or under the dome-shield, getting flipped and sent flying any which way or onto his back was not an experience worth repeating. Men on foot wielding battleaxes charged at him, so many he could not take the time to count them all.

  He ceased the potential for Putrefy, and cast Die Now in its place. The spell radiated from him like a thin blue disk, out to a radius of one hundred paces, killing everything between him and that point, and then an ax blade hit his shield and bounced back as if the man had struck a wall of steel. The handle flew backward, out of the hand of the dead man, and hit the chainmail-chested fellow directly behind him. That fellow was just as dead as the other Pentrosans who had run into the radius of the spell. Daniel stood in the middle of a circle of corpses.

  The mounted Suttons on the perimeter of the kill zone launched solidified blades of air at the ground near his feet, no doubt hoping to at least slow him down. The tactic did slow him a little bit, churning up soil and sand as he was walking towards the west. They retreated at the pace he set, soon the back half of their circle was beyond the burning trees, and they had him completely surrounded, although not one rider dared to venture closer than a hundred paces of him. Why they thought they were at a safe distance, he did not know, and so decided to reveal to them their error. He sent Die Now out in a two hundred pace radius and in about three blinks of the eye, over three hundred men and horses fell dead, and they never felt a thing, then or ever after.

  He spun around, trying to locate Kall, and spotted him six hundred strides away, and surrounding himself with more of his men. A flash and crackling boom, followed by a major Ripple Effect drew Daniel’s attention. The spell had been so loud everyone on the field had glanced back to the east. “Give them a few more like that, Simon, and we might just win this battle a lot sooner,” he said under his breath.

  Through Find All, he sensed Leah and the other groups of Atlantans battling the Serpents spell for spell from within their shields, and the Sentinels, Benhannon Guardsmen, and Lobenian forces fighting to the west, at the forefront of the fight against the tri-army invaders. “Come on, come on,” Daniel said under his breath while pulling the other bag from his inner pocket. His people were being injured and some were dead or dying, the fact was making him anxious.

  He opened the bag, flung the seeds up into the air, then scooped them up with a spell and floated them over the better part of Kall’s defenders. The non-Aakacarns could not see the glow of the low power spell involved, but any Aakacarns that were looking that way certainly would.

  Daniel cut off the potential, letting the seeds fall all over the men, and then cast, Rapid Growth. Everyone upon whom the seeds fell suddenly sprouted nettles. They sprang from beards, on noses, and in their mouths. They sprang from helmets, chainmail, gauntlets, and boots. Nettles grew from their ears and nostrils. They grew on the horses and they grew on the ground. He had deliberately missed Kall, the seeds having fallen short of him by about eight paces, but he did not miss seeing the General’s defenders being turned into shrubbery.

  A loud boom, followed by a powerful Ripple Effect, came from the east, clearly proving to anyone in the theater of battle that the Maestro of the Atlantan Guild was back there unleashing his wrath upon his enemies, instead of farther to the west, threatening the life of the leading General of the campeign.

  “He comes!” The warning from Squirt was more a mental picture of whom he was supposed to hunt and a feeling of talons about to close on prey, rather than words, but Daniel understood and prepared himself accordingly.

  “Simon Trenca, we meet again,” a spell-amplified voice came from behind
Daniel, who spun around with his crescendo aimed and a symphony playing in his mind. The man must have approached invisibly and then ceased the spell, for there was no whip-crack of displaced air or a teleportation circle accompanying him. “You have a reputation for daring-do, but your lack of discipline has done you in,” Fenton Chen finished the address as they stood eyeing each other from a distance of twenty paces, crescendos at the ready.

  “Perhaps, but I wanted to help my Maestro achieve his goal all the sooner,” Daniel replied with the spell altering his voice to sound like that of Simon.

  Fenton Chen, one of Sherree’s mentors, a lean man with light brown skin and black silky hair cut short, had twin lightning bolts on the hood of his black silk cloak. A medallion with a coiled serpent in the center no doubt indicated his rank as the Tri-Con of the Serpent Guild, one step below Vice-Maestro. His two bolts of potential gave him four times the power of a One-bolt Accomplished, everybody knew that. His brown eyes were ovoid in shape and his mustache, neatly trimmed, sloped around his chin and into a thin beard along his jaw line. His voice was as dispassionate and emotionless as the face, bland and unmoving, from which the words had been uttered. “If the goal of Daniel Benhannon is to replace an undisciplined Chief Aid with one that is more methodical and self-controlled, then you have succeeded. Congratulations,” he replied and sent a sonic energy beam at Daniel’s feet. The spell passed under the dome-shield, enveloping both boots, and the leather instantly burst apart, ruining his socks as well, but was then absorbed by his personal shield, shaped to fit his body. The man clearly had been watching and learning the best place to strike, below the shield.

  At the same time Fenton was focusing his spell; Daniel reached into his shirt with his free hand and turned the amulet around so he would look like himself when he cast, Shatter Sphere, at the treacherous spy. He focused the Symphonic with fourteen bolts of potential, enveloping the traitor in a topaz blue sphere that glowed so brightly, Daniel barely caught the first signs of emotion to possibly ever appear on the face of Fenton Chen. The former Aloe’s mouth was wide open, eyes bulging, his brow furrowed, and he screamed as every bone in his body was in the process of being reduced to a fine powder, and then collapsed to the ground in a boneless pile of silk-covered flesh. His death happened within a ten count, far faster than the one Daniel imposed on Serin Gell, to whom Fenton had delivered Sherree. Daniel had only learned about that recently, but timing meant little when it came to punishing anyone involved with hurting his beloved.

  The fighting had not stopped during Daniel’s over-matched duel with Fenton Chen, but the time had come to finish it. “Leah, have the Sentinels, Benhannon Guardsmen, and our Lobenian allies quit the field. All commanders, all squad leaders of the Atlantan Guild, kill the foreign legions, and every single Serpent in sight,” Daniel ordered through both arrays.

  He lost track of the General in all the excitement and so concentrated on Beady. Through the eyes of the owl he found Kall in the center of three rings, horsemen, footmen, and the outer ring was a regimen of archers. Having reestablished exactly where the devious commander had gotten too, Daniel used his own eyes to focus the spell.

  Eight hundred paces, three rings, and thousands of men and horses between him and his target made no difference. He sheathed the diamond-bladed knife and raised his hands towards his foe. The spell, Die Now, shot from his fingertips in eight narrow beams, passing through man after man, creating a narrow corridor of death in the midst of the defenders, and clearing the way to his ultimate target. The focused beams shot through hundreds of shield-bearing soldiers and reached the General’s protective circle. The shafts of light went through eight archers, eight legionnaires, as many Sutton horsemen, and finally General Kall, along with the three men to his right, four to his left, and all of them died before hitting the ground.

  The spell-battle between the Accomplisheds of the Atlantan Guild and those of the Serpent intensified far beyond the level it had been before Daniel issued his last set of orders. The dome-shields were gone, his Aakacarns were on the move, conveying from in front of the enemies to right behind them, and then striking them down. Leah evidently chose to follow his example. She and her squad of twenty were casting Die Now at what was left of the tri-kingdom armies and within a tenth of a mark anyone who was not an ally of the Atlantan Guild or Lobenia was dead.

  Through Find All he sensed his Accomplisheds still standing, not as many as he started out with, and nearly a thousand enemy Aakacarns dead on the field. The rest were joining circles and teleporting from the area. With the Tri-Con dead as well as their non-Aakacarn allies, they seemed to have lost their will to fight, at least for the time being.

  The sun was an orange ball rising slowly in the east when a loud snap-crack announced the arrival of Simon, who still looked like the leader of his guild. Sero, Carlos, and a weak but somewhat healthier-looking Silvia also appeared. The spheres in the sky began to wink out of existence as whichever Accomplisheds involved in sustaining them took note of the dawning of the new day.

  “Leah, this chore is finished. I will leave you to handle the rest,” Daniel sent through his array.

  “It will be as you say, Maestro. I will take command of your twenty-five squads, keep my twenty-five here to mop up, and send Zera and Rishard with their squads to assist Conductor Lassiter in the defense of New Oben,” Leah replied, and then a sense of pride flowed through the link. “The price was high but you forced the Serpents to fully commit and drew out Fenton Chen. We cannot stop the teleportation raids from attacking Lobenia, yet I am pleased we were able to destroy one major threat.”

  “Agreed,” Daniel sent, and ended the communication.

  While pleased about the success, he felt the price had been too high, certainly higher than he had anticipated. The Serpents had taken far longer to commit fully, waiting until Kall’s forces had lost a critical amount of fighters. Once that happened, the trick played on Fenton Chen did not take so long, not the duel at any rate.

  Whatever the Chief Aid saw in the eyes of his Maestro, it made him reach into his shirt and take off the amulet. “I don’t know how you expect me to arrange your schedule in any kind of an orderly fashion if you are going keep filling sunset to sunrise with so many chores.” Whatever he saw clearly did not stop him from speaking.

  The evening had started with Manta One swimming under the Mighty Hirus and things had grown more complicated as the night went on. Simon knew no one could have anticipated what had transpired and so the statement had to be an attempt to light the mood of his Maestro. If so, the effort failed, and yet the attempt was appreciated.

  Daniel wiggled his bare toes and shook his head, sadly, not that it would be difficult to form a new pair of socks and boots; it was where he was standing in his bare feet that troubled him. He took a few moments to look over the field, at the fires, the bodies of men and horses, and no matter where he set his gaze, death was before his eyes. “Carlos, will you take us to the Benhannon Estate? Simon, if at all possible, I would like some sleep time before you schedule a meeting of the First Accomplished and Conductors with me. What has transpired this night needs to be discussed,” he paused, and even though he was tired and thirsty from all the spell-casting, he still could not keep himself from saying, “Simon, you can be at the meeting too, if the timing does not interfere with your itinerary.”

  The Chief Aid placed both hands on his hips and opened his mouth to respond, when Carlos chose that moment to cast his spell and the darkness between here and there swallowed all.

  Chapter Six: The Way Forward

  The last of a series of dreams, some violent and disturbing, and the final few actually pleasant, ended when a huge condor, having a twelve-pace wingspan and black plumage with a white neck ruff, swept in and began circling Daniel and Sherree at the very moment he was about to lean forward and kiss her on the lips. The dream vanished but the image of the condor remained in his mind, even though Daniel was awake and no longer dreaming. Rifeq squawked at hi
m, so he concentrated more fully on the avian to the point where Daniel could see through the scout’s eyes, scent what those keen olfactory nerves could smell, and hear what the great bird heard.

  He could feel the wind beneath his wings while as one he and the condor flew high above the tops of trees. His body was still lying on the bed beside Sherree, but his mental presence was with the king of the vultures. The blue sky was partly cloudy and the tantalizing aroma of a dead rabbit was wafting on the wind. Only through the senses of a carrion-eater could the smell of decaying flesh be appealing. Fortunately Rifeq had recently finished eating what was left of a moose that had been killed by a pack of wolves and was not tempted to bank into a circle in order to lock on and follow the scent to where the morsel lay.

  Cradled in his left talon was Slinky the mouse, also a scout. Few of Daniel’s mice, rats, or ferrets, could be comfortable while in the needle-sharp clutches of any bird of prey, but a tiny bit of concentration directed at the little fellow revealed Slinky was feeling no fear. The critter seemed to be enjoying the feel of the wind blowing through his gray fur and whiskers, which was one of the reasons Daniel had chosen him for the mission. This particular pair of scouts had always worked well together and both of them were bold, literally willing to stick their nose or beak in some truly unpleasant places.

  One of the odd effects among the animals that were a part of Daniel’s swirl was that none of them thought of each other as food, as if they were all one pack, pod, herd, and flock. The feeling of commonality worked well and prevented the need to keep the creatures usually considered prey apart from the ones that usually would eat them. That did not mean the rodents preferred the company of raptors, cats, foxes, or any number of animals in his private community that generally considered them to be on the menu, but neither did they run away or cringe in fear.