The Mage (The Hidden Realm)

by A. Giannetti

  Gallus pushed Elerian into a sitting position against a rough barked chestnut and then turned away. He walked over to the body of Casco and, with his back to Elerian, began stripping him of his pack and other valuables. Evidently, Gallus’s friendship with his dead companion was not strong enough to keep him from robbing his corpse. Beyond Gallus was the girl, manacled and sitting with her back to another tree. Her head was down, staring at the ground by her feet.

  Although his head still ached horribly, Elerian no longer felt quite so lightheaded. “Now is my chance to escape from these manacles,” he thought to himself. “After that I will settle my score with Gallus and Ruso,” he promised himself grimly. Confident that the soft iron links would not be able to resist the power of his arms, he quietly, he tightened the links of the chain binding his wrists, meaning to pull them apart before Gallus turned around. As the cold iron of the manacles pressed against his skin, however, intense pain lanced through his wrists and up into his arms, almost as if someone had taken a file to the nerve endings there. Elerian slackened the chain, and the pain stopped at once. Gritting his teeth, he tightened the chain again, but the pain returned with such intensity that it made him light headed. The harder he strained against the chain, the more intense the pain became, until it overwhelmed all thought, and he involuntarily relaxed his arms. With the chain slack, the pain faded away once more.

  “There must be magic involved here,” thought Elerian to himself. He opened his third eye and saw that a film of red light covered both sets of manacles that he wore. “My fetters are enchanted, just as I suspected,” thought Elerian to himself. “I will open them with magic, then,” he thought confidently to himself. He began to shape an opening spell and immediately felt pain so intense that it banished the barely started spell from his mind. When the pain faded and thought returned, he attempted a second spell with the same result. For the first time, some of Elerian’s confidence ebbed away as he realized that neither his great strength nor his magic would suffice to free him from his chains.

  Much later, he found out that the Ancharian raiders were always hopeful of capturing one of the Dwarf traders that were still occasionally seen in the province of Lascar. Dwarf slaves lived many lives of men and were skilled in working both stone and metal; therefore, they were greatly prized by the Goblins, who paid handsomely for them. Because Dwarves were powerful, the Ancharians carried special shackles to bind them. The enchantment laid upon them caused the hardiest Dwarf to faint from the pain inflicted by the spell long before he could burst the links of the chains that bound him. These same manacles were also useful when a mage was captured, for they blocked the wearer of the manacles from using magic. By chance, the raiders who captured Elerian had used their set of enchanted manacles to bind him instead of an ordinary pair, thereby insuring, purely by accident, that he could not escape.

  Elerian now decided that his only hope of freeing himself was to somehow get hold of the key that opened his manacles. “Let me get my hands around Gallus’s throat and he will become more than willing to free me,” thought Elerian to himself with grim humor. Before he could draw Gallus to his side, however, he heard the sound of footsteps behind him. Ruso had returned.

  “There’s no sign of the lupin,” Ruso said softly to Gallus, who had just finished emptying Casco’s pockets. “Hide Casco’s body and then keep a look out while I have a talk with our young friend.”

  As Gallus walked away into the forest, dragging Casco’s body behind him by the ankles, Ruso squatted down in front of Elerian, staring at him with eyes cold and hard as chips of black stone. Before Elerian could make a move, he drew out a long knife with a keenly whetted edge and held it close to Elerian’s throat.

  “Where did you get that pretty shirt and your silver ring?” he asked harshly, keeping his voice low so that it would not carry far. “Tell the truth now. I can carve you up plenty without spoiling your usefulness for the masters.”

  Elerian thought desperately for a moment and then said in a quavering voice, “I pinched it. I help out an old mage sometimes; he’s a little deaf and more than a bit blind. His cottage is full of odd things, and one day I saw the shirt and I took it. Then I saw the ring and I took that too. He still doesn’t know either one is gone.”

  Ruso continued to give Elerian a hard, penetrating stare, which Elerian returned, trying to put just the right amount of fear and desperation in his eyes.

  “It could be the truth,” said the Ancharian thoughtfully, as if he was speaking to himself, but he did not withdraw his knife. “You listen to me boy,” he said, drawing his lean, cruel face closer to Elerian’s. A savage light lit his dark eyes. “You’re bound for the life of a Goblin slave. Bad a fate as that is, it’s nothing compared to what will happen to you if you open your mouth about that pretty shirt and the ring you pinched. The masters may not believe your story, for they’re not as easy as I am. If they decide to question you, you’ll wish you were dead a thousand times over before they’re done with you,” he said fiercely.

  “I won’t say a word,” said Elerian, his voice quivering with pretended fear.

  Ruso stared at Elerian for a long moment, trying to decide whether he could believe him or not. His greed to possess the scaled shirt and the silver ring warred with his fear of being punished, for according to his orders, he was to bring any Hesperian who was the least bit out of the ordinary to the attention of his Goblin masters. Avarice finally won out, and Ruso decided to risk deceiving his masters, despite the awful penalty he would pay if he was found out.

  “I’ll take you at your word, boy, but don’t think I won’t be watching you,” he said in a low, threatening voice. “If I see you so much as look at a Goblin, I’ll stick you with this knife and take my chances. Understand!” he said, suddenly fierce again.

  Elerian nodded his head to show his assent. Even more than the Ancharian, he wanted to keep his shirt and ring a secret. If he came to the attention of the Goblins and they were to question him closely, one of them might see through his disguise and find out who he really was.

  Satisfied for the moment, Ruso put away his knife and rose to his feet. “Bring the girl, he shouted to his companion. Gallus emerged from the forest and brought the girl to stand by Elerian. She was still crying softly, and refused to look at him.

  “It’s all arranged,” said Ruso to Gallus. “Let’s be on our way.”

  He set out at once, and Elerian and the girl followed him as best they could, for the shackles on their ankles limited the length of their steps. Behind them came Gallus, who now carried a short, heavy whip of black leather in his right hand. He was quick to lash the two prisoners whenever he thought they walked too slowly, for he and Ruso were now only interested in bringing the pair to their final destination as quickly as possible. If their plan worked, Ruso intended to take his payment for the prisoners and travel to Marsala with Gallus. The ring would only bring the price of a few drinks, but the shirt was sure to fetch a tidy sum if he could find a buyer among the Dwarves who traded in the city. Each scale was like a blue green jewel, and they were as hard as steel.

  While the two Ancharians dreamed of the wealth they would gain from his scaled shirt, Elerian supported the girl as best he could, shielding her from the worst of the lash with his back.

  A red rage shot through him at each stripe of the lash, and he passed the time by imagining himself throttling Gallus slowly with his bare hands.

  Although the dense canopy of leaves overhead blocked out the sky, and there were no landmarks, only the endless trunks of the trees rising around them like gray pillars, Ruso easily kept to his path by following a line of small discs of steel pinned to the bark of various trees by means of a small, short spike in their back. Various horrible faces were stamped on the disks: trolls, mutare, and other, even stranger creatures. Each face had tiny red gems for eyes that gleamed with a sultry glow in the dim light that penetrated the roof of the forest. With his innate sense of direction, Elerian knew that their path wa
s taking them in a northeasterly direction, straight toward Esdras if they followed it long enough. Ruso frequently looked back over his shoulder, casting hard looks at the prisoners and warning Gallus, several times, to keep closer to the trail. When he turned his head and saw that Gallus had strayed off the path yet again, he lost his temper.

  “Keep to the trail!” he shouted angrily. “The trees of this wood are dangerous.”

  Gallus’s temper flared at his companion’s harsh warning. “The Abercius is to the west of us, Ruso. These trees are only dangerous if they fall on us,” he said scornfully. To prove he was not afraid and to irritate Ruso further, he pulled his knife from its scabbard and selecting, at random, a huge chestnut tree growing several feet to the right of the path, hacked at its trunk with his knife. “See,” he said disdainfully, as he carved away a large slab of bark and a layer of the green, live wood beneath it. “There is nothing to fear.”

  The words were barely out of his mouth before there was a sudden creaking of wood over his head, and a limb as thick as a man’s waist swept down, striking him across the chest and head, smashing him to the ground. The girl beside Elerian screamed, and Ruso stepped back in alarm. A tearing, sucking sound filled the air, and the chestnut’s great knotted roots quivered and began to squirm like thick brown snakes as they pulled free of the ground. The tree shook from root to crown, and an enraged bark covered face appeared high on the side of the trunk.

  “Death to the two legs,” it shouted in a great booming voice, as its enormous branches suddenly took on the shape of huge arms that began to grope toward Ruso and the two prisoners.

  “Run,” shouted Ruso in a panic. Following his own command, he ran off into the forest. Elerian and the girl followed him as quickly as their chains allowed. When the girl stumbled, Elerian supported her with his left arm, half dragging her along.

  From beneath the branch that had trapped him, Gallus suddenly called out in a voice filled with pain and fear. “Ruso, my back is broken! Don’t leave me here!”

  From a safe distance away, Ruso called out to his fallen companion. “You are on your own Gallus. You have no one to blame but yourself for your troubles.” He watched callously as Gallus tried uselessly to pull himself out from under the branch that held him prisoner, screaming in agony from his injury with each move that he made. Next to him, the Ondredon continued to pull its roots out of the ground.

  A cruel smile twisted Ruso’s lips as he urged Elerian and the girl on with hard blows of his fists. They returned to the path and, in a few moments, were out of sight of Gallus and the Ondredon. The doomed Ancharian’s screams and cries for help followed them, but Ruso coldheartedly ignored them.

  “Fool,” he thought to himself. “Only a madman would touch one of the trees in this wood, for the Ondredon sometimes wander a great distance from the Abercius. In any case, I am well rid of you. Now I shall have all the spoils to myself.” A sudden loud thump interrupted Ruso’s gloating, and Gallus’s screams were abruptly cut off. The ground trembled and muffled thuds reverberated in the air as if enormous feet were pounding the earth.

  “Gallus will soon be little more than bloody paste beneath the Ondredon’s feet,” said Ruso to his captives, a brutal smile on his face. “If you do not wish to share his fate, you had best move along.”

  Ruso took a position behind his captives and urged them along with curses and blows, all the while casting nervous looks over his shoulder. The Ondredon, however, had evidently spent its rage on the hapless Gallus, for it did not pursue them. They traveled until sunset, at which time they stopped in a small meadow ringed by low bushes, and saplings. A small, clear stream ran through the center of the clearing, not far from the charred remains of an old campfire.

  Ruso forced Elerian and the girl to sit in the center of the meadow, keeping them under constant watch while he gathered dead wood and lit a fire in the charred place in the grass. Elerian watched him closely. Ruso was much more alert than Gallus had been, but Elerian still hoped to seize the Ancharian, forcing him to release both him and the girl. As the orange flames of his fire leaped into the air and the night wrapped its dark cloak around them in earnest, Elerian was surprised to see Ruso suddenly lose some of his wary look.

  “Look there boy,” he said grimly to Elerian, pointing into the forest with his right arm. The light from the fire spoiled his night sight, but Elerian clearly saw the glitter of fiery eyes under the trees and a dark shadow behind them. The eyes crept closer until Elerian could make out a black, wolf like shape. The lupin had returned. There was no need for Ruso to be on his guard now, not while the shape changer lurked about the edge of their camp.

  “Even if you were to somehow escape, boy, believe me, you’d not get far,” said Ruso to Elerian. “These creatures dearly love man flesh. He’d bring you down in a heartbeat, saving me the trouble of bringing you to Esdras.”

  Remembering his flight from the lupin pack in Ancharia, Elerian was inclined to agree with Ruso. Somehow, he needed to get rid of the lupin if he and the girl were to have any chance of escaping from Ruso.

  After tossing the two prisoners some hard, dark bread to eat, Ruso returned to his fire to prepare his own supper. He seldom looked at Elerian and the girl as he ate. With the lupin guarding the clearing, there was nowhere for the prisoners to run to and no way for Elerian to threaten him without being attacked by the shape changer.

  Although he was seething with frustration, Elerian ate his bread and drank from the nearby stream, trying to come up with a new plan. As he sat, glaring in turn at Ruso and the lupin, a sudden, soft whisper in his ear caused him to start.

  “I am sorry I deceived you,” said the girl, the first words she had spoken to him. “They threatened to kill me in the most horrible ways if I did not help them,” she said apologetically.

  “I do not blame you for my capture,” said Elerian softly. “It was my own carelessness that led me to fall into their trap,” he said bitterly. “You are Alfidia are you not?”

  “Yes I am, but how did you know?” asked the girl.

  “I was following you. I promised your father I would rescue you,” said Elerian, still resolved to somehow keep his promise to Clodius.

  “You will still find a way to save us,” said Alfidia quietly. “I have been watching you, and I do not think you are as you seem.”

  Elerian gave her a startled look. Her face was pretty underneath the dirt and the bruises, but her soft, brown eyes had a penetrating look out of keeping with her age. Elerian was sure she was not more than fourteen years old at the most, and he wondered if she had mage powers of her own, which she was yet to discover.

  “I think you should sleep now,” he said evasively.

  Alfidia stifled a yawn and then curled up next to him, falling asleep almost instantly, but Elerian remained awake, all his thoughts bent on escape. It was almost dawn before a plan finally came to him.

  Ruso was fast asleep, trusting to the lupin to keep him safe. Just beyond the edge of the clearing, after staying awake all night, the shape changer had finally laid his head on his paws. The lupin’s eyes were closed, but Elerian knew he would awaken at the slightest suspicious sound.

  Gently, he shook Alfidia awake, holding a finger over his lips to indicate that she should be quiet. Carefully, he grasped the manacle around her left ankle in his left hand and pulled slowly and steadily on the first link with his right hand, taking care not to rattle the rest of the chain. The soft iron stretched, breaking apart at the weld. Moving quickly and silently, Elerian freed her other ankle and her wrists. When he was done, she was still wearing the manacles on her wrists and ankles, but her chains were gone. Her eyes were wide with fear, when he looked into her face.

  “What are you?” she whispered. “No man could break those chains.”

  “That does not matter now,” said Elerian softly. “Do you think you could find your way back if you escaped. The discs marking the trail are plain to see, even in the dark.”

  “I can do
it, I think,” said Alfidia, excitement replacing the fear in her eyes. “But what about you, are you not coming with me?”

  “I will catch up with you later,” lied Elerian. “I must create a diversion first. When I tell you to go, follow the path home.” As Alfidia began to object, Elerian whispered insistently, “You must go. I have already freed you, and Ruso will punish us, perhaps even kill us if we do not escape now.”

  “Very well then, I will go, but you must promise to follow me,” said Alfidia, as she searched his face with those eyes that seemed to see so much.

  “I promise,” replied Elerian, but he turned his face away and did not look into her eyes. The first rays of the sun were now beginning to gild the leaves high up on the trees on the western side of the clearing. “Go, before we are discovered,” Elerian said in an urgent voice.

  They both rose to their feet, and with many a backward look, Alfidia stole across the clearing, her sandals making no noise in the thick grass. She edged past the sleeping Ancharian and disappeared into the forest. Elerian waited as long as he dared before creeping stealthily toward the lupin, one careful step at a time. The slightest rattle of a link from his chains would wake the beast and spoil his plan.

  He was able to approach to within several feet of the sleeping lupin before the shape changer suddenly opened his eyes and lunged at him with a startled yelp. As it reared up before him with its mouth gaping wide, Elerian slid the chain that joined his manacles between its jaws and grasped its head between his two strong hands. With a powerful wrench of his arms, he broke the creature’s neck. As he threw its body away from him, he glanced over his shoulder. Ruso was awake and standing with his knife in his right hand. Despite the fact that he was armed and Elerian was shackled, he made no move to approach any closer.