by Damien Lake
He spent most of that evening listening to her plans. An astonishing degree of complexity existed in what, to him, had seemed a simple matter. Her talk of the different grades in financial prosperity among various merchant houses in the larger towns nearby opened his eyes to fresh insights. Intricate webs of social structure he had never given thought to ran beneath even the simplest village. Everything interacted with everything else in ways too convoluted for him to follow beyond the first three or four turns.
Marik nearly gave up trying to understand her deeper strategies after ten minutes of struggling for comprehension while she explained. She started with a well-to-do merchant house in Driftbanks, the largest town within five day’s journey, which also sat on the Spine River’s shore. Ilona pointed at dozens of papers, showing him how these merchants collaborated with certain portage businesses, which were also the primary haulers used between other profitable merchants. If she spoke in the right manner in the right places, word would filter along this invisible spider’s web to wealthy men, through their hirelings, over to different gossip routes and trickle up to the local lords. After many tangled bends, he thought the newest path she followed took her news back through the merchant house she had started at, but maybe he was mistaken.
Though he always tried to dampen her enthusiasm for discussing his magecraft by proclaiming personal ineptitude, he refused to be stunned by her complex barrage. Or, failing that, he refused to show it. His inability to unweave her tangled social blueprints made him feel a drooling fool. That she appeared to follow these hidden lines between people with ease stung his pride, and he meant to at least look like he understood her as she continued.
Late in the night she suddenly abandoned her focused work in favor of playful attempts to unwind after a long journey. He had entertained such hopes during the long walk, but the tent hardly provided the level of privacy he preferred. His bashful concerns regarding the hired hands wandering outside the canvas walls only amused her, fueling her desires rather than banking them.
Before becoming lost in a world of crystalline brown through which pulsed an enshrouding cloak of primeval heat, he spared a moment to wonder why his embarrassment should always entertain her so greatly.
He left at dawn to return to Kingshome. While he walked, he realized she had apparently noticed no difference at all in him as a result of his strength training. Or had not noticed it to the extent of thinking it worth commenting upon.
So today he stood in the rain with his sword. Yesterday he had worked his body to the collapsing point under his drills. Twice the thick branches had flown down the blade and off the end when the knots worked loose from the constant motion.
Marik had started today with the expectation of working until mid-afternoon, whereupon he would return to a certain roadside point roughly two candlemarks walking distance away. He allowed his mind to wander while he worked. It was mostly content with remembrances of Ilona, but his mind surprised him by also wandering to other areas and discovering unfamiliar territory in what he had thought to be well-plotted land.
Perhaps Ilona’s elaborate mapping of social structures had inspired his brain to reconsider matters that seemed relatively simple. Whatever brought these thoughts about, Marik stood pondering his new idea as the rain pelted his body.
Tollaf’s constant haranguing annoyed Marik to no end. In spite of that, the teachings the old man graced him with had proven useful, if in a different manner than the chief mage intended. Magesight and channeling. These were the two most basic skills of the beginning apprentice. They were the meat of mage workings, so Marik had assumed once mastered there remained little for him to learn henceforth beyond specific workings.
Apparently not. Dual channeling was as integral to the intermediate apprentice as plain channeling to the beginner.
Not so different from channeling at all, it still felt as though he were restarting his apprenticeship. The closest comparison he could draw in his mind was the instance during the first winter while he trained to advance to a C Class warrior. He had practiced his swings and slashes, mastered precise blows and smashes. Marik had believed his skill first-rate until his first challenge by a lieutenant. That man’s casual comment to work on combining his attacks into continuous series had opened an entire volume of advanced technique that must be mastered before Marik could be considered average.
So did Tollaf intend to work him on the mage version of combination attacks. This came in the form of dual channeling, which, as the old man had explained at great length, was an essential necessity for any mage spending time on battlefields, and also unavoidable if one hoped to pull off certain advanced workings.
Marik rebelled at first, explaining for the eighty-seventh time that he held no interest at all in becoming a battle mage. Scrying would be the only area in which he would devote effort to learn the various workings. Tollaf, predictably, cared little for that.
His tirade concerning apprentices who thought they knew more of the world than their masters lasted nearly three marks, only ending when he happened to touch on his conversation with Celerity during Marik’s return home. This brought the one-sided dialog around to an issue Marik had actually been meaning to bring up.
“She is the head of the royal enclave!” Tollaf flung at him, his words exasperated. “Her concerns are beyond the petty troubles of a blockhead like you!”
“She told me she’d pass on any news they uncovered to you. And you promised me you’d attempt to scrye out father long ago! I’d say this falls under that deal.”
“I’d say that since you have failed utterly to work at your apprenticeship, any agreement we had is voided!”
In the end, he finally admitted that Celerity had passed on no developments in the search for Rail. If the best scryers in kingdom were unable to locate him through their workings, what could he, a struggling apprentice, possibly accomplish? It forced him to reevaluate his entire reason for using his mage talent.
Tollaf did not care one whit about his doubts. Marik could rot in the decomposing sludge of his own worries all he wanted as long as he started working on his apprenticeship’s next phase.
Dual channeling. As the name implied, it simply meant opening and operating separate channels simultaneously. But magic, much like life as Marik continuously learned, was never that simple. At least not magecraft.
He could have wielded his first sword with either one hand or two, depending on his need. His current, larger sword always required both hands unless he had his strength working in place. Dual channeling could be compared to taking one hand off his hilt so he could use it for other purposes while the first still fought. The dual channels simply allowed a mage to perform multiple workings at once.
Marik had thought this nothing new until Tollaf drew the distinctions clear. Layering shields did not fall under this category. His shields were created one-by-one, no matter how fast he might be able to do so, and then sandwiched together. Doing this combined the channel for each into one single feed of etheric energy from him that maintained them all. Shields required very little energy once created, needing only enough to prevent them from collapsing or to repair damage minimal enough that the shield had survived.
Nor did the separate channels he created from the etheric to his reserves, then from his reserves to whichever working he attempted, qualify as dual channeling. The dual nature of this new technique meant separating the mental hands he used to work in the etheric and using each for different tasks at the same time. He felt as an apprenticed juggler rather than a mage.
A high-effort working such as his single scrying technique could never be done while dual channeling. It required far too much concentration. Tollaf wanted him to practice with his etheric sphere. Though absurdly simple when compared to scrying, he had only succeeded in simultaneously creating two at once a very few times. The spheres were small, flickering vaguely under their magesight, the energies on the verge of spooling away back into the glowing purple vapors of the diffusi
on.
Tollaf ordered him to keep at it, that his skill would grow in this as it had with the magesight and ordinary channeling. Marik felt like wrapping the fossil’s tall stool around his neck.
The difficulty lay in separating his mental hands. He needed each of them to open different channels from his reserves, and keep them separate. Once the channels were open, then his hands needed to use the energy flowing through. Easy, right?
Except nine times out of ten his two channels merged together after only brief seconds. Like raindrops rolling down glass panes, the side-by-side channels held natural attractions for each other. If his concentration slipped the slightest bit, they would leap together and blend into a single track. And the level of concentration required to prevent this quickly exhausted Marik beyond any other working he could perform. After only a half-mark, he felt as though he had been maintaining a scrye for an entire day.
If he kept the channels separate, his next impossible task lay in creating an etheric sphere one-handed, as it were. Could a sculptor create fancy designs in clay using only one hand? Not that Marik knew of.
But Tollaf want him to do exactly that. With one channel each delivering tamed etheric energies into a mental palm, he struggled to find ways for each to manipulate the insubstantial clay into the forms he desired. If nothing else, Marik would come away from this winter with a healthy respect for the festival illusionists and the thousands of candlemarks that must have been required for them to master their dexterous sleight-of-hand.
A long path still stretched before him to achieve mediocrity, let alone mastery of dual channeling. He had little use for the new technique except that it kept Tollaf off his back. Or so he had thought until his mind wandered the various byways of his memories while his body labored in the rain.
On the fringes of the Green Reaches over a year ago he had discovered a new application of his basic mage skills. This resulted in the creation of his own unique working that vastly increased his physical strength. The only dark cloud shadowing his accomplishment remained his inability to open a channel to the etheric while the working coursed through his body. In fact, except for his magesight, he could not utilize his mage talent at all while the strength working ran.
Marik had accepted that as being beyond his ability to change, but that might only be true for the beginning apprentice. With this new technique, could that be overcome?
Channels into him from the etheric were of a slightly different nature than outgoing channels. The etheric energies were wild before his talent incorporated them into his personal reservoirs. Even the relatively passive energy forming the etheric mists held a wildness beyond his tamed reserves. All of Tollaf’s instruction to date had concerned separating the outgoing channels. Marik did not intend to experiment too far outside the range of what he knew, especially considering his past experiences with altering the channels he used to draw energy.
But he might be able to perform other workings to supplement the strength working. His inability to use his mage talent might only be a reflection of single channel usage. Until that moment he had not thought he used any channels at all while using his creation. He might have been mistaken in that.
All mage workings used channels. He had come to believe that. In flooding the network of life energy channels within his body, he had been using himself as the channel. His own body served the function of carrying the energy from his reserves to the places it needed to be. Usually energy flowed through a channel to be used at the far end in a mage working. In this instance, the flow of energy through the channels was also the working itself.
It seemed absurdly simple as he considered these thoughts in the cold downpour. Perhaps that’s why the likes of Tollaf and his fellow mages have overlooked it for so long! It’s not complicated enough for them.
His thoughts followed that course of reasoning into yet more unfamiliar territory. Tollaf had once told him that using his shields in an unexpected manner on the battlefield gave him an element of surprise. Perhaps he could do so again.
When Celerity had set the physical shields in place through Marik, he’d paid close attention to what she did in case she wanted him to recreate them. If they needed to be reset, he had wanted to be the one doing it, not her! Tollaf poking around inside his body disturbed him enough. Celerity doing it made his spine crawl.
Later he had practiced recreating it on his own in case she called him back to the palace. It was harder than any other shield he knew because he needed to alter the nature and texture of the raw energy to a much greater degree. He managed to recreate it after trial and error.
With his primary concerns being sword fighting rather than magecraft, could he combine these two workings with dual channeling? He needed a blade that could withstand the increased stress of his strength working. The blades that could do so naturally were also too ungainly for his liking. Yet what if he could protect his blade by wrapping it inside the physical shield? True, the shields that were adequate for deflecting shards of flying glass could never completely block the full force of a heavy blow, but they did not need to. If they could absorb the blow’s majority, his steel sword could easily withstand the rest.
There in the rain, Marik slowly recreated the shields that had the ability to protect against a physical force. He made no attempt to set his strength working in place as well. This time he only wanted to see what would happen.
Rather than surround his body with the shield, he slowly spun it around his sword, wrapping the blade with etheric energies that matched its shape precisely. He had already reached the conclusion that forming a sphere-like shield around the sword would be useless. The shield would strike the target before the blade, which would be like hoping to punch a man inside a room by beating on the walls outside.
Once he held his sword with the shield encasing it, he looked for a target. There were no strawmen in the backside of the Third Training Area, only supply wagons pushed up near the wall to keep them out of the way. He stepped to one after glancing around.
Marik knew he should not be doing this, but his curiosity prevailed. He raised his sword high. After opening his magesight to closely watch what happened to his shield, he chopped the blade down hard against a wagon bed’s plank edge.
Splinters chipped away when his sword struck. A ripple wavered though his shield. The energies at the spot where the blade struck were slightly thinner.
That could cause trouble if he needed to repair his shield after every blow. He suspected that might be the result of his inexperienced creation rather than from the actual blow. Further practice should enable him to construct the shield much stronger and with greater durability. Tollaf would likely fall off his tall stool when Marik walked in today and asked for personal instruction in physical shields.
Because his question seemed to have been answered. He sensed the blow’s entire force had been directed through the shield, none of it penetrating to touch his blade’s steel surface. Under the strength working a portion of the impact would undoubtedly penetrate, but probably only equal to the force of an ordinary strike.
He examined the gouge in the wagon plank before leaving for the Tower. Not a clean cut in the wood from a sharp blade. Instead it looked slightly rounded, as a wound from a dropped crate or other blunter objects.
Marik reflected he should have expected that. His shield, though adaptable in shape, was unable to hold an edge. Its sides would round slightly in the way falling water formed into spherical drops. That meant his strengthened sword would deal damage in the form of blunt trauma rather than sharp excision. Yet with so much power behind the blows, he could stave in ribcages and shatter bodies with the same ease as swinging the blade. He did not need to cut men in half to defeat them.
Good enough, he thought. While he walked to Tollaf’s domain through the gray veils, he considered the irony of how the old mage’s teachings always ended up being useful after all, in one form or another.
Chapter 28
Dietrik walk
ed to the armory, thinking Marik might still be there. He had mentioned needing to discuss a matter with Sennet that morning. Marik was in neither of the training areas they usually haunted, so perhaps he still haggled.
Whatever his friend might be about, Dietrik hoped his infatuation with Ilona had not clouded his mind. Marik could spout all the noble reasons he wanted. His genuine motivation shone through his stated reasons the way firelight glowed through his palm when he held his hand up to the hearth. If Marik’s so called ‘advanced’ training aided his skills, then so much the better, except Dietrik knew that if his mind were mired in her womanly charms, then it might be more dangerous in a fight to have Marik close at hand than absent from his side.
But he kept from mooning over her or from babbling endlessly for candlemarks about her superiority to all other lasses, which perhaps meant he kept his mind on the important matters of his profession.
Dietrik pushed open the armory door. He found Marik leaning over the counter to bring his face closer to Sennet. His finger jabbed at a paper between them, fingernail tapping against the wooden counter underneath.
Sennet stood with his arms folded, lips pursed, studying Marik as though judging whether the other man did in fact possess a functional brain. He looked neither disapproving nor accepting, only cautious.
Both glanced over at the opening door. Sennet dismissed Dietrik out of hand. Marik looked intrigued before re-devoting his attention to the weapons master.
“Either way,” Marik stated, resuming whatever conversation he’d interrupted, “that makes no difference. It doesn’t change the fact that you could do it for me! I’ve got the coin to cover all costs.”
Sennet grimaced; Dietrik wandered nearer. “You should be talking to a real swordsmith. I’m only a self-trained smith. I worked hard, learned all I could, studied every sword and text I could find. That,” he stated firmly, pointing to the sword strapped to Marik’s back, “is my best. I could never create a master sword, and none of my smiths could either.”