He has taken pity on me, and his advice was gratefully received. It seems I reminded him of his younger brother, who had been lucky enough to also inherit the ability to summon (I am told that only the firstborn children of summoners will be guaranteed to inherit the ability—the siblings have a far smaller chance). Connor’s brother, Rufus, was still a few years off from attending Vocans, but I was small for my age and we shared the same mousy hair and upturned nose, or so Lord Cavendish said.
Yesterday, I had heard Valentine and the others gossiping about Lord Cavendish. His father was a commoner, and his mother had married his father in disgrace. Later, his mother had disappeared when her flying mount went down somewhere deep in the orc jungles. Valentine said it was fate’s way of punishing her for marrying so far below her station. As a commoner himself, I could not understand why he thought this could be true.
In any case, I thanked Lord Cavendish for his direction and went to the library, a great room filled with long benches, armchairs and of course, shelves upon shelves of books. The librarian is called Dame Fairhaven. I like her. She has given me a long list of books to study and help me prepare for the tournament. But she also warned me that book learning will only get me so far.
“If you wanted to become a horse racer, you could study horses and riding until the cows come home,” she said, “but you’d never become any good unless you practiced riding the damned things.”
Duly noted, Dame Fairhaven. I thank you.
Day 8
I met the first-year nobles today. Well, I say “met.” More like I saw them. They do not speak to us; many would not even deign to look at us. They sat at a separate table, so there was not much more to discover. What I do know is there are four of them, two girls and two boys.
I also saw some second-year students, but they kept even farther apart from us than the first-year nobles did. There were commoners among them too, but I rarely saw them, even in the commoners’ quarters. When I did, I never received anything more than a polite nod.
Summoning was the first lesson together with the nobles, and I am pleased to see that it is being taught by the closest person I have to a friend (forgetting Sable of course), Lord Cavendish. Even so, it was a terrifying affair. We learned to “infuse” our demons and then summon them back into existence. Infusion required placing our demons in the center of a pentacle—a five-pointed star surrounded by a circle. This pentacle had to be made out of organic material too, so we were given “summoning leathers,” an essential part of a summoner’s tool kit. Mine was little larger than a handkerchief, since Sable is so small. Some of the nobles had quiver-like cylinders on their backs with their larger leathers in them.
Apparently, a giant demon could be infused even using a summoner leather as small as mine, but it was harder to do. The larger the demon and the smaller the pentacle, the harder it was to infuse them.
I still remember that moment when I first infused Sable. The nobles just watched, their demons either absent or hidden within them. I think they were sizing up the competition. After all, in two years, we would face one another.
I placed Sable on the mat and concentrated, doing as instructed by Lord Cavendish. Kneeling, I placed my hand on the mat’s edge and pushed mana into the pentacle, until I felt an obstacle between Sable’s consciousness and my own. Then, as the pentacle fizzled, giving off the acrid stench of burning leather, I drew Sable’s essence through and she dissolved into threads of white light. Then she was inside me, and my body was suffused with an unnatural euphoria. It was so intense that I fell on my side and twitched until it passed.
To my surprise, and perhaps selfish disappointment, Valentine, Tobias and Juno all succeeded in doing the same. I heard a muttered comment from one of the nobles—that it was easier to infuse pathetic demons such as Sable. That his demon would crush our Mites to a paste in the tournament.
Later, I caught his name and marked him as one to watch out for. Jamie Fitzroy.
Day 9
I have a new tutor—the weapons master of Vocans. They call him Sir Caulder. A grizzled man, missing one arm and one leg, but as wily and agile as a man half his age. He was curious to learn where we had come from, asking us each in turn our age and upbringing.
The nobles did not attend his lessons, which took place in the evenings, when they would rather be carousing in Corcillum. Not to mention that most of them had private weapons tutors.
Our lessons took place in the arena, a place I was told would someday be where I faced my peers in the tournament. It was a sandy circle, with seat-stepping in concentric rings around it. The corridor into the arena had been lined with barred cells—built a few years back for deserters, or captured orcs. They had almost never been used. Even the few gremlins that had been captured were too small for the cages. I recently learned that gremlins are a servile species long since enslaved to the orcs, if the books I have been reading are accurate.
In any case, Sir Caulder has started me on training to fight with a straight sword. Each of us has been given a cutting weapon—Valentine a saber, Tobias an axe and Juno a cutlass.
We will train with him each week—though I have already asked for extra lessons. While the others joke and chatter each evening, becoming fast friends, I shall be down here, perfecting my swordcraft. I am shorter than them, and chubbier too—my mother always said customers liked a rosy-cheeked baker’s boy to deliver their bread.
But that will soon change. If I am to become a leader of men, then they will need a lean wolf in their midst—not a plump lamb ready for slaughter.
Day 10
Demonology. I love demonology, even if I dislike our teacher, Lord Etherington, with a venom that would almost feel irrational if he wasn’t such a git. This time, the nobles joined us. They even paid attention. I think it was out of respect for our teacher more than a desire to learn though.
He is a fearsome man, tall and bearlike with a black beard that comes down to his waist. But behind the fierce exterior is a shrewd, even cunning man, whose sharp tongue cut each commoner to the core as he asked us questions that of course none of us knew the answers to.
Lord Etherington seemed to take pleasure in making us feel like fools. Even when I answered the first question correctly (thanks to my studying in the library last night), he followed up with another. What happens to a demon when its summoner dies? I did not know, and the tongue lashing I received at my unpreparedness near brought me to tears.
He explained in withering tones that an “untethered” demon will fade back into the ether—whence it came from.
Luckily, the sniggering from Valentine, the nobles and the others turned Lord Etherington’s attention to them. Five minutes later and they were as cowed as I was.
Yet, when the nobles did not know the answers to his questions, he did not treat them in the same way. Of course, my father warned me to expect such bigotry here, but it did not make the foul taste it left in my mouth any more palatable.
I remained with my head down for the rest of the lesson, but I ate up every word from that vile man’s mouth and was amazed by his sketches and charts. I will be sure to hunt down some demonology treatises from the library later. I shall not allow myself to be caught out again.
Day 12
I am finding it harder and harder to keep up with you, dear journal. With my additional studies, it is difficult to find the time to write down what I already know, and I confess, it can be painful to relive each day of loneliness and disappointment. Yesterday, when the others were resting, I studied in the library. But the texts are ancient and hard to understand, written for noble, expert summoners, not common novices such as I. Still, I shall persevere where I can.
Today we studied spellcraft once more. It seems that there are as many as thousands of spells to master, but given our war with the orcs, we focus on a few key battle spells to learn. There are even rumors of the first-year graduates being sent to the front lines early.
More depressing still, I am no longer the bes
t at spellcraft. Valentine performed a fire spell before I was able to, and he did not let me forget it. Of course, the nobles were well ahead of us, scoffing at the small ball of flame that we all eventually managed to bring into existence.
I shall have to practice more.
Day 15
It was our second summoning lesson today. Lord Cavendish did not return my smile when I entered the room. Does he still care for me? Or is he taking care not to show favoritism?
I should not let it get to me. How pathetic am I, to seek the pity of my teachers?
In any case, this time, the nobles did not bother to show up for class. Lord Cavendish explained that the first lessons would be going over things that many of the nobles already knew. He sounded quite defensive, in my opinion, and disappointed in his small class of four.
First, we were shown how to “scry.” We commoners were told to pay particular attention, for our Mites are the species that summoners scry with the most. It was simple enough. We were each given a shard of flat crystal, which we tapped against our demons’ carapaces.
When we did so, an image formed on the crystal, showing everything that our Mites could see from then on. Stranger still, there was an odd echo in my mind. It turns out that you can hear everything your demon does when it has been connected to a scrying crystal and said crystal is held in your hand. Giving the crystal to another summoner does not allow them to also hear though.
The rest was quite simple—cajoling our demons with our minds to move around the room. Lord Cavendish told us it was important to exercise demonic control, especially from long distances. It was easy really, not unlike moving a wyrdlight.
But all that changed when we were told to send our demons out of the summoning room and into the atrium, where Lord Cavendish had hung several hoops from the balconies. Without sight of Sable, it was far harder to control her direction.
Eventually, we learned that the best way to control our demons when out of sight was to see their movements with the crystal and impress on them our desires, indicating our intentions down the mental cord that held our consciousnesses together.
I was not good at demonic control. Tonight, I shall improve upon it.
Day 16
Each morning, I have gone down to the baths for my morning ablutions and checked my plump body in the mirror. I am still that baker’s boy, cherubic-faced and looking much younger than my true age. The only difference so far is the dark circles under my eyes, which are bloodshot from squinting at illegible scrawls in centuries-old books.
I am eating less, though whether it is a lack of appetite from the sadness I feel or my desire to gain a warrior’s physique I cannot say. Only Sable keeps me company, but she can only do so much.
Weapons training is exhausting work, but I gloried in the sweat that dripped from me at the end of the session, even if Juno pinched her nose and muttered that I stank of stale bacon. I can tell Sir Caulder is impressed with my enthusiasm, even if I did flail my wooden sword with an exuberance that made him chuckle on occasion.
Day 22
I have neglected you, dear journal, but there has not been much to say this past week. I studied, I practiced and I improved in all things summoning. I devoured my demonology lessons and even earned a grunt of approval from Lord Etherington.
There is much to say today though.
My life changed. Of course, by now I had heard of the “ether,” the other dimension where our demons come from. I had learned of their food chains, their habits, their mana levels and other things.
But seeing is believing.
Lord Cavendish wheeled out a table at the start of our lesson today, one made of the purest white marble with a dark, oval crystal in its center. Then he told us it was the “Oculus,” the largest scrying crystal ever found. The crystal type, known as corundum, was incredibly rare. That was why our scrying crystals were small shards, while those of the nobles were far larger, some even embedded in what might have been hand mirrors.
He placed his Damsel upon there, a demon that looked not unlike a giant dragonfly, and then chose one of the pentacles arrayed across the leather floor of the room. The pentacle he selected was larger than the others, but strangest of all, it had a series of symbols around its edge.
These, we were told, were “keys.” Coordinates to an approximate location in the ether, where Hominum’s summoners hunted for new demons to add to their rosters.
He embedded a leather rope into the pentacle’s edge and powered it by pulsing mana into the pattern. Soon, the pentacle and its keys glowed and the same glowing orb that had formed when I first summoned Sable appeared above it … only larger.
Then, without warning, his Damsel disappeared into the orb with a buzz of its wings.
Within the Oculus, the world turned red. It was a desert of dust and pillars of stone, with whirlwinds drifting across the plain. I wondered, how could it be that Sable lived in this wasteland?
It was then that Lord Cavendish told us that we were on the outer edge of the ether. The ether is disk shaped, you see. I included a diagram based on his descriptions below.
Lord Cavendish was scared—the “keys” are inaccurate things, and his demon had appeared far closer to the ether’s rim than he would have liked. Still, he told us to keep watching and sent his demon toward the ground, but not before we saw the edge itself—a broad cliff that stretched seemingly endlessly to the left and right, with the barest discernible curve to it indicating just how enormous the ether must be. Beyond the drop-off was an abyss so black that it almost hurt to look at.
He next sent his demon crawling to the edge, so slowly that my legs even began to ache from standing still. But finally, his demon reached the precipice and gazed out into the darkness.
What I saw there made my stomach twist with horror. Deep in the void, somewhere far below, monsters lurked. No two looked alike, though it was hard to tell in that writhing mass of tentacles, eyes and teeth.
The Damsel looked for no more than a few seconds before beginning its long crawl back. It was a while before he allowed the demon to take flight once more, heading away from the monsters, or Ceteans, as I later learned they were called.
He was sweating by the time the scenery changed, the terror of the Ceteans and the constant expenditure of mana taking their toll. But soon I forgot all about him, because I was staring into green jungle. Above, flocks and swarms of demons swirled across the horizon, while beyond, pillars of smoke from volcanoes broke up the sky.
The Damsel was quick to enter the foliage though, where beneath, the mulch of rotten leaves and rich black soil made up the jungle floor. There, I could see more demons flying to and fro, mostly lesser Mites and other Damsels. But there were other demons there, too many to name now, but each one more fascinating than the last.
Lord Cavendish only remained for five minutes in that viridescent jungle, but each minute felt like a lifetime. I wanted to go there and said as much. It was only later that I would learn that the air in the ether is poisonous to humans, and that only those wearing a special airtight suit with an air pipe going back into the portal can enter, and even then, only for a brief time.
Still, I left the lesson feeling invigorated. I could not wait to send Sable into her old world and bring back a new Mite friend, or perhaps even a Damsel.
Day 25
I went exploring today. Valentine and the others have made it their mission to ignore me, it seems. They do not like that I study so much, or that I stay after training to receive private tutoring from Sir Caulder. They themselves are too lazy, and since they won’t speak to me, my only other alternative is to stare at the wall of my room all day. They only have themselves to blame.
But I cannot stand another day in that stuffy library, and my mana is so low from practice that I fear I will not recover enough for spellcraft lessons tomorrow. So, I decided to wander the corridors of Vocans.
I have found myself particularly drawn to the strange jars of pickled demons that appear at in
tervals along the walls here. That, and the orcish weapons and occasional painted sections of orcish runes, scrawled on hunks of peeled bark or primitive papyrus.
Once, this was a place of learning and curiosity. Now, there is only war.
I befriended a servant in my wanderings. He is young, perhaps twelve years old, but we struck up a lively enough conversation discussing an enormous pickled demon, one that had been labeled “Cockatrice.” Of course, the brine that surrounded it within the jar had stripped it of its coloring, but one could still see the smattering of feathers and scales that had once adorned its body, with its strange lizard tail and cockerel’s beak and talons that made it a sight to behold.
It was then that this boy, Jeffrey, imparted a secret to me. Most of these specimens had come from a room in the northwest tower. He often delivered food there, and the most impressive specimens could be found inside. Giving me no more information than that, he led me there, pausing only to admire a painting.
In the background, dwarven women had their veils ripped away by human onlookers, while in the foreground, dwarven warriors kneeled in rows, their beards being cut by men in armor. Corpses of the fallen dwarves surrounded them, and above, summoners flew on their demons with bloodied lances.
“Just as it should be,” was all the boy said, then carried on toward the tower.
I knew very little of the dwarves. Of course I have seen them before, but they live apart from us—their lives are a mystery. Still, the hatred in the boy’s voice sent a shudder down my spine, and I resolved that perhaps he would not be my friend for long.
When we reached the tower, Jeffrey unlocked an unusual room that took up what must have been the entirety of the turret and showed me in.
The Summoner's Handbook Page 2