Lingering Haze (The Elusive Strain Book 1)

by James Berardinelli

  “My magic isn’t working.” It was a clumsy way to phrase it but an accurate assessment of my predicament. “It hasn’t been since the battle with the soul-ripper.”

  “I can see that. It’s been blocked. To be more precise, you have blocked it.”

  “Me?”

  He nodded. “Perhaps not consciously but your present circumstances are your own doing. It’s most curious, a rare ability. Not something I could do no matter how hard I tried.”

  I stared at him dumbfounded. “How do I get it back?”

  “I may be able to help, although I don’t pretend to be an expert at this sort of thing. Summoners who live in isolation are rarely good at probing the minds of others. My guess is that your brain blocked the magic as a form of automatic defense. To keep you from burning yourself out, it shut the valve off, so to speak. To restore your abilities, you have to open the valve.”

  After completing his explanation, Bergeron looked into my eyes, catching and holding me with his gaze. At first it was comforting but, after a short while, I felt something like panic welling from within. The stare, which had initially seemed curious, had become piercing. I couldn’t break it, not even to blink, although I desperately wanted to. He held me powerless, those eyes boring into me. Then I felt it, almost like a physical sensation, and he released me. I gasped for air, only just realizing I had been holding my breath.

  “That should do it,” he said with a smile. A cold, hard smile that didn’t touch the eyes I had initially mistaken as being gentle.

  He was right, though. I knew it immediately. My magic was accessible. I was whole again: Janelle the Summoner. I wasn’t sure how to feel about Bergeron at this moment. He had restored me but, in doing so, he had displayed a ruthlessness that made me uncomfortable. I felt violated, as if his mind had gone places where it had no right to be.

  The others were looking at me expectantly so, for their benefit, I said, “It’s back.”

  “Want to try a trick? Light a candle or something?” offered the Summoner.

  “No need. Will it happen again?”

  Bergeron shrugged. “Hard to say. If you never push yourself again, probably not. But I’ve never heard of a Summoner who doesn’t push him or herself from time-to-time, and we may be entering a volatile period when that’s a daily requirement. So the likelihood is that this will happen again. You’ll need to learn how to remedy it yourself, which will be an interesting trick. In order to break the block, I needed magic. The block prevents you from accessing magic, so you can see the dilemma.”

  My heart sank. I didn’t want to face that stare again but, worse, it meant that if Bergeron wasn’t around, I could become trapped away from my magic.

  “Let me think about it later. I’m sure there’s a simple solution. For now, there are plenty of other things to talk about. I gather you’re here to learn and you’ve brought some friends as guides and protectors. I can tell by looking at you that you’re not from this world. Not surprising. I don’t think a Summoner has been born here in a dozen generations. We’re all from other worlds, myself included, although I’ve been here for so long that I think of myself as a native.”

  “Father Backus in Aeris said you might be able to teach me a few things about being a Summoner. He also believes you might have some insight into why I get debilitating headaches every time I access magic.”

  “Backus?” Bergeron barked a laugh. “Is that old fool still alive? I guess it shouldn’t surprise me.” His voice became momentarily wistful. “What a Summoner he would have made if he’d had the discipline to curb his excesses and study…”

  “He can’t use magic.”

  “Burned himself out, I guess. Can’t say I’m surprised. At any rate, I can tell you the location of every known Summoner across the land but wild wizards like Backus remain elusive - there may be quite a few and we’ll have to root them out and rally them to our cause. That won’t be easy. There’s a reason why they rejected becoming a Summoner in the first place. But magic, even untamed and uncontrolled, will be needed for what’s to come.”

  “Can you help Janelle?” asked Samell.

  “Perhaps. Headaches, you say?”

  I nodded.

  “Not a common symptom. In fact, most uncommon. I think I read about a Summoner many centuries ago who suffered something similar. It’s probably related to the blocks your mind creates. Another defense mechanism, perhaps? Given enough time, I have no doubt we’d be able to identify and correct the problem.” He paused, somewhat theatrically I thought, before adding: “But time may be one thing we don’t have much of. Before we delve more deeply into the specifics of your condition, which is better done when the two of us are alone, there’s one subject we need to address with everyone present.”

  “The reavers.” Willem’s voice was flat, without inflection, but I knew Bergeron would catch his accent.

  “Yes, the reavers,” acknowledged the Summoner. “You’re not from around here, are you? From your features, I’d guess you come from quite a distance away, perhaps from the southeast. Erenton?”

  Willem’s face quirked into a mirthless smile. “Somewhere close to there. I’ve spent a lot of my adult life on the road. Most recently, I settled in West Fork.”

  “Which explains your participation in Janelle’s expedition. But not yours, Princess.” He fixed his unblinking stare on Ramila.

  She was obviously startled by his knowledge. It showed in both her expression and her inability to form an immediately reply.

  Bergeron extended a slender finger toward the silver necklace she wore. I had seen it before but never given it much thought. For the first time, I noticed a distinctive charm dangling from the end. It looked like a “+” sign inside an ellipse. “Only true royalty or a daring imposter would wear that sigil. It’s more likely you’re the former than the latter. But it begs the question of why you’re here, probably as far from home as your warrior companion.”

  I wondered if Bergeron was flaunting his superior erudition, proving to us that he was a master of observation and deduction. There was no reason for him to mention Willem’s foreign birth and Ramila’s heritage beyond establishing his perspicacity. I had never liked show-offs.

  Ramila quickly recovered her composure. “My father and I had to leave our home some time ago. There were…issues...with a cousin on my mother’s side. We live in West Fork. When we learned that a new Summoner had arrived, we offered our help.”

  “Who is your father?”

  “Marluk. Marluk the Peacemaker.”

  “Ah. That explains much.” To him, perhaps, but not to me. Now I wondered even more about the hidden past neither Ramila nor her father had seen fit to entrust me with. “You are most welcome in my humble abode, Princess. As are all your companions. Now, to the matter at hand. How much do you know about the reavers?”

  “Several weeks ago, a force of about fifty earth reavers attacked Aeris. We were able to kill some and drive off the rest.”

  Bergeron’s left eyebrow lifted. “Really? I wasn’t aware of that. It must have happened outside of my range or before I was paying close attention. Go on.”

  “On our way south, we encountered a lone air reaver, possibly a scout. I couldn’t detect any others. Then we came to the ruins of NewTown. Although the attackers were gone by the time we got there, the evidence pointed to a sudden, violent attack by creatures of fire. On our way to locate you, I became aware of a large group of earth reavers, perhaps the beginnings of an army, massing in the mountains.”

  “So you sent two of your party back to West Fork to warn them. A shrewd decision.”

  I started, once again surprised by his awareness.

  “Don’t be so astonished. I told you I’ve been mindful of your party since you spectacularly dispatched The Rank Guardian.”

  I wondered if his senses were strong enough to have tracked Gabriel and Stepan on their return journey. “Did they make it?”

  “I can’t say for sure. My sight doesn’t extend
all the way to West Fork. But by the time I lost them, they were still hale. I suspect they’ll arrive intact. Whether anyone other than Marluk will pay attention to what they have to say is another matter. There are many disbelievers. Apocalyptic talk is rarely taken seriously regardless of the evidence.”

  “If they saw what happened at NewTown, they’d believe,” said Esme bitterly. Those were the first words she had spoken to the Summoner since introducing herself outside.

  “True, my dear. Disbelief will doom them if they don’t shake it off or have someone shake it off for them.” His eyes fixed on me. It was evident who he had in mind for that task.

  “So what now? What’s our next step?” asked Samell.

  “Prepare for war.”

  “War?”

  “War,” affirmed Bergeron. “The legion being amassed by the earth reavers can serve no purpose other than the eradication of sentient life in this part of the continent. The specifics of their plan are largely irrelevant. West Fork may be their first target but it won’t be their last. NewTown is already gone and Aeris isn’t likely to survive long after West Fork falls. Human habitations are relatively isolated in The Western Wilds and will be easy pickings. After that…they could go east or south but they won’t stop. There’s a single-mindedness to those creatures. I’m surprised they retreated at Aeris. That’s concerning because it indicates an awareness and intelligence. Reavers have always been beings of instinct and hunger, born of magic but with little in the way of brain capacity. I wouldn’t have expected them to organize much less have a genocidal strategy.”

  “Why now? Does it have something to do with me?” It wasn’t lost on me that the sudden aggressiveness of the reavers had coincided with my arrival. And, even if there wasn’t a direct cause, I wondered whether some people might make the connection and assign blame to me.

  “An important question. I suspect ‘I don’t know’ isn’t going to satisfy any of you, so let’s speculate. Without question, a daemon is involved. Reavers are inherently malignant but tend to reside in out-of-the-way places where they can congregate and feel safe. Earth reavers are typically buried well underground. Fire reavers love volcanoes. Air reavers prefer mountain tops and clouds. Water reavers call the depths of the oceans home. Only a daemon can roust them and, while there have been no confirmed signs of a living daemon for generations upon generations, there now may be multiples of them. Our immediate concern is an earth daemon but, judging by the activities of the other reavers, it’s reasonable to assume there are also active air and fire daemons as well. It’s too soon to say whether there’s coordination or simply opportunism at work.”

  “Why haven’t we seen any water reavers?” That had been nagging at me for a while now.

  “There are a couple of possibilities,” said Bergeron. “It could be that there’s no water daemon. Or, since we’re landlocked here, it might be that there aren’t any around. It may be different in the distant south or east, near the coast. In fact, the harbor towns and cities may have more to fear from water reavers than the other three varieties.”

  “How many earth reavers are there in the mountains?” asked Willem.

  “At the moment, hundreds. But there are more coming. Many more. I don’t know the number the daemon has access to but, assuming he can mass all the earth reavers in this part of the world, his army will be in the thousands. Possibly the ten thousands.”

  My heart plummeted at that. Considering how difficult it was to bring down one of those… Thousands? Was this world doomed?

  “How do we stop them?” breathed Esme, her eyes wide. I could almost see her thoughts: remembering Aeris, remembering NewTown.

  “The best we can hope for here, in the west, is to slow them down. It’s not realistic to believe we can save West Fork. It’s too small a settlement to be able to assemble a decent militia and too remote for help to come from any place with enough men. If we can delay the reavers, an evacuation might be possible. That presupposes the elders are sensible enough to heed the warnings.” Bergeron’s tone implied that he was skeptical.

  “The real battle will be in the east. There’s enough manpower out there to build an army large enough to counter whatever force the earth daemon assembles.”

  “But…thousands of those things…they’re so hard to kill.” Esme was struggling with the image of a wave of earth reavers flooding across the world. A flash of a memory impinged on my consciousness: a swarm of beetles fanning out over a decaying tree trunk, turning the ground into a metallic, moving carpet. It would be like that, only on a much larger scale.

  “Hard to kill? No doubt,” agreed the Summoner. “But not impossible. Enough stout soldiers with sharp weapons…it can be done. Earth reavers lack the innate skill to apply their nature to anything more than brute-force attacks. Of all the reavers, they’re the least dangerous and the easiest to defeat. The daemon, on the other hand, is a real danger.”

  “What if we killed it?” I asked.

  “That would be a quick and efficient way to end the threat. Without the daemon, they would retreat back to the safety of their underground burrows. But killing a daemon is no easy thing. Even a lone Summoner would be hard pressed in such a battle. They are magic incarnate so victory requires turning their nature against them.”

  The conversation continued for some time after that with Willem, the most tactically astute of our group, taking an active role. Much of the information he solicited related to things I had already learned from either Backus or Marluk. My mind drifted as Willem proposed various strategies, most of which were dismissed by Bergeron as inadequate or ill-advised. Even if the combined armies of all the cities of the east were able to drive back the earth reavers and their daemon, there were still three other elemental powers to be considered, and all of them were stronger.

  As he patiently answered Willem’s questions and debated options with him, Bergeron’s eyes frequently sought mine. He was assessing how well I was absorbing the information. Finally, noticing that we were beginning to droop from a combination of despair and weariness, he motioned for us to follow him. He led us to a spartan chamber, bare except for a series of straw mattresses laid out on the floor.

  “Sleep now,” he advised. “What lies ahead will require a clear mind and rested body. You may be taxed to the brink. Replenish yourselves while you have the chance.” Turning to me, he added, “All except you, Janelle. Come with me. It’s time you learn what it really means to be a Summoner.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five: The Mysteries of the Mind

  It was easy to forget that Bergeron’s home was buried under a mountain. Putting aside the lack of windows, it replicated in nearly every way a traditional, free-standing mansion. He had taken great pains to ensure that the floors, walls, and ceiling were smooth and flat. Most rooms had wooden doors - more a decorative than functional touch for someone living alone. Part of me marveled that magic could have accomplished the crafting of such a domicile.

  “Impressed?” asked Bergeron conversationally, noticing the interest I was showing in the architecture.

  “I didn’t think…I can’t imagine how you did all this.”

  “It took a while. Years, in fact. I started out with a small cave and gradually widened it into a series of rooms. Every so-often, I do a little more work when I grow bored with reading and study. There are always new tricks to practice. Mastering magic is a combination of book-work and application. Unfortunately, you will have little time for either. Summoners of my era were bred as scholars. Now we’ll have to learn to be warriors. Either that, or pass on the mantle to others like you, who arrive as blank slates and can be taught from the beginning how to use their powers for battle. I’m afraid that the epoch of The War Summoner is upon us.”

  “Do you know who brought me here?”

  “I do. In many ways, he was the most powerful of us all and possibly the oldest. I couldn’t say how long he had been around. From the old days, I suspect, when Summoners weren’t as rare as they are today.
They say that over the years, he had thirty wives and none at the same time. All of those were before I came here. We Summoners can use magic to prolong our lives to incredible spans but mortality eventually overtakes even the greatest of us. Sometimes our bodies give out and sometimes we lose the will to continue. Unending life seems like an amazing boon until you start to experience it. Longevity leads to boredom and monotony and, with no one to share the passage of days with, it can be very lonely. Not something you need to be concerned about, at least for now.”

  And if all the reavers attack, maybe not something I’ll ever have to worry about.

  Our stroll through the halls and rooms of Bergeron’s rambling home terminated in a small chamber that served as his office. Books and scrolls were everywhere and the comforting scent of old paper hung in the air. The hallmark neatness of the rest of the mansion wasn’t evident in this mess of jumbled clutter. Two lanterns hanging on poles illuminated the small space. I noticed they weren’t giving off smoke and the flames weren’t flickering. My companion motioned for me to sit across a small table from him. He cleared it by sweeping his arm across its surface and unceremoniously dumping sheaves of paper and a heavy leather-bound tome onto the floor.

  “Even though it was so very long ago, I still remember what it was like waking up in this world, a stranger pulled away from all that was comfortable and familiar. Where I came from, I had been pampered and bowed to, but there hadn’t been any meaning in all that genuflecting. Here, my life has purpose but it took decades for me to understand that. I had the luxury of time to come into my powers and hone them. Your circumstances are different.”

  “You’re not from Earth, are you?”