Good gods, what?
Imagination, she explained. You aren’t jaded or hidebound, trapped by your own knowledge. They have had spell after spell ground into their heads until they can only think in . . . certain ways. You don’t have that handicap.
Inexperience and desperation are my advantage? he asked, incredulously.
I have every confidence in your ability to dodge a couple of Censors for a few days.
Tyndal couldn’t very well disagree with her without sounding like a coward, so he didn’t. He bade her farewell and ended the connection.
As he fell asleep that night, nervously checking the proximity of the bridle-borne charm every few minutes to assure himself that it was still, indeed, over fifteen miles away, he tried to think of every possible plan, every remote contingency that he could imagine and figure out what to do ahead of time. “Always have a plan,” his master was fond of saying. “It doesn’t have to be a good one.” Most of the possibilities he considered ran to conclusions that featured him dying heroically to save Alya, or captured by the Censorate and subjected to an increasingly gruesome number of tortures, but he tried to do the best he could to be realistic.
It didn’t help that he continued to be distracted by the thought of Ansily, who kept appearing in his plans in unusual – and often unlikely – ways. Ways which usually led to even more unlikely (but infinitely more pleasurable) conclusions than death or imprisonment. They often feature he and Ansily hiding out somewhere while the Censors stalked them, the fear they felt compelling them into passionate and imaginative acts of desperation.
Then he’d remember he had a duty to perform, and sternly forced himself to focus on the very real danger, and not how Ansily might look when she bathed. He fell asleep long past midnight.
The next day was uneventful, though the bakery was tense and nervous after the previous day’s interrogation. Alya was safely hidden for a day, which made him feel easier. And Alya’s absence made things a little easier for the family to bear, they had been shaken by the Censors, and even the children had become nervous after the dour men in the checkered cloaks had made their appearance.
Tyndal felt guilty about bringing such dread to such good people, but he tried to make up for it by vigilantly ensuring that the men were at a safe distance. What little he knew of the theory behind the spell suggested that his scrying would not be detectable, and not a quarter hour passed that he did not close his eyes whisper the command, and discover just how distant the Censors were. And with every receding mile, his heart grew a little lighter.
That night when he finally fell asleep they were over twenty miles distant, and remained there the next morning. Tyndal begged to see a map of the area – Master Rinden kept a passable one in his office to help with planning and deliveries – and decided that the Censors were likely in a village listed on the map as Lickhaven, east and south, just over the frontier with the next barony on the river. It was a crossroads village that led to two other riverports, where Tyndal could only hope the warmagi were headed.
It was a testament to how confident he felt that the next afternoon he felt complacent enough to daydream about Ansily more than worry about capture by the Censors. Again when he caught himself he vowed to focus on his duty, and busied himself with more productive things . . . but his thoughts inevitably returned to her, and the way she smelled and looked and tasted on his lips.
He was doing just that when he heard a familiar voice behind him, most unexpectedly.
“Boy!” the gruff demand came from the doorway, a rough, deep voice laden with derision and disgust. “What in the name of Ishi’s rotting twat are you trying to do?”
Tyndal froze, and a thousand thoughts went through his head as he dropped the pitchfork in surprise. He turned around to face a very irate Censorate warmage. Wantran, if he recalled correctly.
“My lord?” he asked, automatically. He tried to stay calm, and not let his face betray him. He was only partially successful.
“You, boy! You’re the one!” he snarled. He wasn’t reaching for his blade, so Tyndal didn’t try to escape. Perhaps if he played dumb again . . .
“I . . . my lord?” he asked in confusion. “I’m the one? The one . . . what, my lord?”
“Oh, I think you know,” he said, sneering as he entered the stable, his checkered mantle fluttering behind him. There was anger in his eyes. “Yes, I think you know very well.” He took a step forward menacingly.
“My Lord?” he squawked again, taking a step back.
“Hire us a horse ripe to throw a shoe?” he said, disgusted. “We didn’t get to Harline before we were walking. I demand our money back!”
All thoughts of escape vanished as Tyndal’s professional pride – as a stableboy – was hurt.
“My lord, I assure you the farrier was here just a week ago, and assured us—”
“I don’t care if Huin himself assured you that it could crap golden muffins, Boy, you hired us a lame horse! Do you have any idea how much time you cost us? Your information has already caused us to inconvenience one very irate Ducal tax collector. Had we decent horses, perhaps we could have caught up with our prey, but we had to trade those nags and lost half a day doing it!”
“My lord, I am sorry that you ran into misfortune, but Mast—”
“You have a hundred heartbeats to put coin in my hand, boy,” the warmage said, darkly, “or I shall have you taken into custody.”
Tyndal glared back defiantly, but went to the jar where Master Gorus kept the coin for the stable and slowly – very slowly – counted out half of the fee before handing it to the Censor. “That’s half. We’ll send the other half when we get the horses back. And the tack,” he added, warningly. He reasoned a real stableboy would have done the same, even at the risk of alienating a customer. Customers came and went, but you had to live with your master every day.
“Very well, then,” Watran said, reluctantly accepting the money. “When we have concluded our business at the bakery, then I shall speak to your master about them.”
“The bakery, my lord?” he blurted out automatically. He tried to cover himself quickly. “I eat lunch there every day. Everyone does! Is the baker—”
“It’s nothing to concern you, boy,” Wantran dismissed, pulling his cloak of office back over his shoulder. “An evil sorcerer broke the law, and he happens to be the son of the baker. We think he knows where he is, is all, and we need to get that information.”
“But the baker will be okay?” he asked, worriedly.
Wantran studied him carefully. “Perhaps you should consider someplace else to get your lunch tomorrow,” he said with a dark chuckle, and left the stable.
The moment he left, Tyndal sprang into action. He wasn’t absolutely sure of what he was doing, but he knew he needed to do something. The thought of Master Rinden being lead-away in chains – or worse – terrified him. The old baker was a strong man, but he could not resist the spells of compulsion the Censors would employ. Or less-mystical but more painful methods. In mere hours they would know about him . . . and where Alya was hiding.
Tyndal couldn’t abide that. He retrieved his witchstone from the shelf he’d hidden it upon, and then went all the way to the back of the tack and harness room, where he had hidden a bundle the second day he’d worked here. Carefully he unrolled the oiled leather he’d wrapped around his mageblade and the only wand he’d brought with him. It wasn’t worth much – it didn’t have more than two charges – and any decent mage could defend against it, at need. But Tyndal wasn’t planning on giving them a chance to do so.
He drew the blade six inches to examine the steel before he snapped it back. He barely knew how to use it. Master Minalan had tutored him, and he’d practiced with it faithfully in the village the Bovali refugees had been sent to, but any first-year guardsman was better with a blade. That didn’t deter him in the slightest.
He strapped the mageblade across his back, tucked the witchstone under his shirt, and slid the warwand in
to his belt, behind his back. Then he took a deep breath, turned around—and walked smack into Ansily, knocking them both to the floor.
“OhmygoddessTYNDAL!” she said, ashen-faced as she helped him to his feet. “Those men, those Censors! They were at the Four Stags this morning, and I overheard them, and I came as fast as—”
“It’s all right, Ansily,” he said, as gently as he could manage with his heart pounding in his chest. “I saw them. They haven’t discovered me, but they are going after Master Rinden. I can’t let that happen,” he said, defiantly.
“But they’re soldiers!” she said, her eyes as wide as wagon wheels. “They’ll kill you!”
“Probably,” he conceded, as casually as he could manage, “but I’m not going to make it easy on them, and I’m not going to let them take away my master’s father. Or his bride.” He started to walk past her, but she grabbed on to him instead. He hadn’t expected that, though he found he enjoyed it.
“Tyndal, no!” she pleaded. “I don’t know what kind of trouble you’re in, but—”
“I’m in all sorts of trouble, and I can’t wait any more,” he insisted, shaking off her grip. “They are over at the bakery right now!” he said, pleadingly.
“All right, but . . . can’t we summon the guard?”
“They’re Royal Censors, Ansily,” he tried to explain. “The Duke couldn’t even tell them what to do.”
“But if you go to fight them then won’t that be treason or something?”
“It’s probably just really stupid, and honestly I’m not that worried about that right now.” He stared at her curiously. Why would anyone worry about that sort of thing when someone’s life was on the line? Sometimes he wondered if women were all crazy. “Stay here. Stay hidden. They won’t bother you, I’ll wager, especially if you just look like a frightened girl hiding— ”
“I’m sure I’ll manage!” she said, sarcastically.
“If I pull this off, I’ll come back for you. If I don’t, you should be safe over here. And if you get the chance . . . run.”
She looked at him with tears in her eyes, and before he could say another word she was kissing him, passionately. “If you pull this off, Tyndal of Somewhere, then you had better come back here. You and I have some unfinished business,” she said, her eyes telling him just what kind of business she had in mind. Tyndal spent a few seconds locked in utter confusion before he shook it off and pulled himself away. “So what are you going to do?” she asked, a little more confidently.
“I have no idea,” he confessed. “But I’m down to desperation and imagination, so it’s not going to be subtle.”
The sounds of sobbing and screaming could be heard over the tall wooden fence that surrounded the bakery compound, which was already starting to attract attention. They weren’t cries of pain—yet, he noted as he sprinted across the road, they were cries of outrage. They hadn’t begun to hurt them yet. They were just bullying and threatening and scaring them, not actually harming them. That was something, at least. He crept up to the wall and scaled it effortlessly – he’d always been partial to climbing trees, and the wall was hardly a barrier. The compound was deserted; the shadows spawning in the twilight were darkening as the harsh noise was coming from inside the sprawling house.
Tyndal quietly crossed the courtyard past the giant red ovens and came to one of the windows that led to the residence. He didn’t need the hearing spell to hear what was happening inside. The voices were loud, angry, and severe.
“—tell us where your son is hiding!” Wantran’s voice demanded. “We know he was here, we detected the tracking spell he planted on us! Which of you knows?”
“We haven’t seen Minalan in over a year! Leave him alone!” Mistress Sarali insisted, pleading for her husband. It tore Tyndal’s soul to hear that riven tone in the good woman’s voice.
“She speaks the truth,” Lespin’s voice called out, casually. He must be using a spell.
“He sent someone, then,” Wantran insisted. “Do not lie to us!”
“The spell on our saddle was fresh,” Censor Lespin pointed out. “Are any of you magi? No, you stink of flour and sweat and ignorance. Then the mage your son sent to protect you . . . where is he?”
Tyndal suppressed the desire to jump through the window and announce himself. As dramatic as the gesture would have been, he realized it would have been just as final. He could not take the risk that the warmagi would not only capture or kill him, but kill everyone else in the house as well. He had to find another way.
His first task, as he saw it, was to get the Censors out of the bakery.
That part he hoped would be simple. He stole back over to the fence, and using it and a stick of firewood as a ladder he quickly lifted his stringy body up to the low roof of the building.
Imagination and desperation. There had to be something.
He scanned the street from his vantage point, details already beginning to fade in the gloom of twilight. He noted the mist forming along the riverfront at this hour, and the number of lights on in the village, and he heard the bell of a barge coming up the river. It seemed so peaceful and serene that it was hard to imagine the scene that was unfolding under his feet. He spared just a moment to consider hiding up here until the Censors had left, but he knew that wasn’t really something he could do. He might be common born but he knew what honor was.
What he could do, he decided, was give his master’s family the best chance at fleeing he could. He needed divine intervention, like the fog that the goddess Delanora had used to hide the lovers in Ansily’s tale. Where the hell is she? he wondered, bitterly. Then as he stared at the creeping mist, Despite his desperate situation, he thought he had the beginnings of a plan which might do the trick . . . and probably get him killed in the process.
It was the mist. He could use the mist. It was just water, in the air, and he knew a thing or two to do with it.
Tyndal took one last look around the roof, glanced longingly across the road to the stable where Ansily waited for him, and then around at the darkening village that had been, however temporarily, his home, and he sighed. Then he got to work.
The explosion that erupted in front of the bakery had been only mildly impressive, and had exhausted Tyndal’s knowledge of magical pyrotechnics, but it had done the job. It had produced (along with a loud bang and eight-foot tall pillar of fire) an unmistakable wave of magical energy that any mage would have felt. The Censors certainly did – in moments both men were rushing out to the street, swords and warwands in hand, looking around intently for the source of the spell.
Tyndal had wisely moved the moment after he’d cast the thing, so when the magi began tracing the spell’s origin he was in a different place entirely. Lespin savagely attacked a shrub that screened the steps of the shop across the street, and then signaled to his partner that the offending mage he suspected had been hiding there was gone.
“That’s not very sporting of you!” Wantran called out into the night. “Why don’t you come out and we can talk like gentlemen?”
Tyndal’s heart raced as he triggered the next part of his plan. A weak flare – no more than a cantrip – sputtered up the hill, away from the river.
“You’re going to have to do better than that,” Wantran called, shaking his head. “Master Mage, surely you can offer us something more tempting as a lure?”
Tyndal paused, mid-crouch, as he skimmed the rooftop of the little shop next door to the bakery. He debated with himself, and then shrugged. He wasn’t going to be lingering here long, anyway. He drew his warwand from his belt and carefully aimed. Lespin was instantly knocked off of his feet, which Tyndal found very gratifying. Unfortunately, the Censor got to his feet very quickly . . . and very angrily. He scanned the area, and cursed when his magesight revealed . . . nothing.
The mist had thickened, encouraged by a few small spells here and there, and then just before he had engaged his first distraction he’d energized the entire cloud. Not to do anything in p
articular . . . just hold the power. It wasn’t perfect, but it made magesight useless for tracking him now.
Tyndal was already moving, scaling the rear wall of the building and scooting around the corner, where he could peer out into the thickening mist and see his foes as they searched for him. He grinned despite himself as he released another cantrip, another tiny ‘pop’, near the Censors. Both men whirled and threatened the empty gloom.
Satisfied that they were preoccupied with the mysterious hidden mage, he slunk across the top of the fence to the rear of the compound and scaled the gate.
He unexpectedly saw Hirth, the junior apprentice, who was clutching a bloody rag to the side of his head with one hand and holding a bare dagger in the other. He startled when he heard Tyndal’s footsteps, then sighed as he recognized him in the deepening gloom. Hirth’s face was as white as if he’d been moving bags of flour. Except for the dark red parts.
“Thought you’d be over the horizon by now,” he whispered, harshly. He sounded pleased that Tyndal wasn’t.
“I’m not that smart,” Tyndal pointed out. “What happened?” he asked, indicating the bandage with a nod of his head.
The dark-haired apprentice shrugged. “This? Oh, just being my usual charming self. I didn’t like how they were treating Mistress Sarali, and said so. But Master Rinden didn’t say anything, Tyn, I promise—“
“I’m not worried about that – I’ve lured them away for a bit. Can you manage to get everyone out of the house and down to the back gate? I think I can keep them chasing shadows awhile yet.”
“That shouldn’t be difficult. They had everyone crammed into the kitchen. They started getting really nasty, Tyn,” he added, worriedly.
“I know,” he sighed. “That’s why I’m here. I’ll take care of this, I promise. You just get everyone out of the house and . . .”
“Down to the charcoal burners,” Hirth suggested. “They owe Master Rinden their livelihoods, and most of them are part-time thieves on the best of days. Good lads. They sure know their way around a dice cup,” he added, ruefully.
The River Mists Of Talry - A Spellmonger Story (The Spellmonger Series) Page 5