“Before Everec was attacked, I overheard Sari and the magician talking.” Donovan paused before he continued knowing that if he misjudged the warrior and he was loyal to the magician over his own order, then the ranger’s life could be over, but he had to tell someone other than Chance what he knew. “He said that Byrn over there was a prince and Sane wanted to find him so that he could kill the real prince and replace him with a magician.”
Kellen sat dumbfounded. “If this is true-“ he stopped himself. How could this be true? Sane may have decided to turn his back on the kingdom, but he would never betray his king in this way, but how else could this stranger know Byrn was a prince? “I need you to keep quiet about this. Sane is grief stricken over the loss of his sister. He may not be thinking clearly. If he truly intends to follow through on what you claim, then I will stop him. You have my word on that.”
Donovan let out a heavy sigh and visibly relaxed at the knight’s words. “Thank you, sir.”
“Now, I must ask you to keep a secret,” Kellen told him. His voice was barely audible over the light crackle of the fire. Donovan nodded and Kellen crawled the short distance to where Byrn slept. His glove began to glow as he absorbed Byrn’s magical essence again. Seeing Donovan’s questioning expression, Kellen told him, “This one is a danger. I drained his magic energy. It will keep him powerless for a time and prevent him from waking. If I can get him back to Silvering, then I can arrange for transport and take him back to Baj.”
“Why not kill him?” whispered Donovan.
“Maybe I should,” Kellen agreed stoically, “but he saved my life in Everec. Besides I cannot bring myself to kill a man in his sleep.”
“I could do it,” offered Donovan looking about the camp to make sure no one stirred. “It would be quick, even merciful.” He pulled his dagger from his belt.
“No,” Kellen told him flatly.
“You said yourself he is dangerous,” Donovan was almost within arm’s reach of Byrn, “The wizard will not let you take him. He wants Byrn to be king.”
For a moment the knight hesitated torn between honor and duty, then as Donovan prepared to strike he shouted, “No!” causing his voice to echo throughout the cave.
Marian’s eyes flew open. She was lying close to Byrn keeping him between her and the fire. Donovan crouched above her son with his dagger raised about to strike. She only had an instant for the scene to register, but that was all the time she needed. Marian threw her body over Byrn’s so that the knife bit deeply in her back. She cried out in pain as Donovan pulled the blade free.
“I’m sorry!” he shouted over and over as Kellen pulled him off of Marian. “I didn’t mean to!” Kellen tossed him to the other side of the cave like a doll.
The entire camp was up and in a commotion. Sari was putting pressure on Marian’s wound and calling for strips of cloth to use as makeshift bandages and gauze.
Aldyd was quick to comply ripping strips from his cloak and pressing on the wound as Sari prepared the bandages. It only took a minute for the elf to stop the blood loss.
Sane took off the ring he was wearing and slipped it on Marian’s finger. “It is a healing ring,” he said in explanation, “It is not very strong, but it might help.” Kellen came forward and pushed some of the magic he stole from Byrn into the ring hoping to strengthen its charge. The act was not lost on Sane and Kellen shook his head. They would discuss it later.
“That is the best I can do for now,” Sari told them. “This region is not known for its healing herbs. We need to get to Silvering soon.”
Looking to where he had tossed Donovan, Kellen saw that the man was gone and so was his friend, Chance. “Donovan and Chance ran off.”
Chapter 22
Tomlin’s hand-cannon rang out with a loud explosion as he fired it at one of the Kenzai guardsmen who had gotten too close. It was a marvelous contraption and now that he finally had the opportunity to use it, he was glad that he “liberated” it along with the control collar all those months ago. The hand-cannon consisted of a steel barrel attached to a wooden handle that he held in his hand as the name implied. All he had to do was load it with a small amount of igniting powder, commonly used for mining, by pouring some down the barrel. Then he could put in a tiny lead ball no larger than the end of a man’s finger. Once the ball was in place, it required a little more powder in the pan on the side of the miniature cannon. Lastly, it was a simple matter of pointing at what he wanted to kill, pulling the trigger that would ignite the powder in the pan with a spark, wait a few seconds, and then BOOM! The cannon would erupt. It was not as impressive as an elementalist’s powers and occasionally failed to fire, but for the young enchanter whose only other weapons were a dagger and a finely tuned lute the hand-cannon was an amazing weapon to add to his arsenal.
Seeing his wild grin as Tomlin hurriedly tried to reload the weapon that only fired about once every thirty seconds made Alia smile despite the danger and growing chaos around them. She was the one that managed to figure out that the secret to making it work was the dwarven powder and it pleased her to find the solution for her apprentice. It also pleased her, because she learned that the weapon had several weaknesses that could be exploited by a magician such as dousing the weapon with water or sending a strong gust of wind to blow the powder out of the pan.
“Don’t grow too reliant on that thing,” she warned.
Tomlin gave her that wolfish grin of his that the young girls found so charming. “Don’t you have an army to be leading?” He was right, of course. They were in the middle of an assault on Ilipse, one of the kingdom’s domains for magicians. Domains- that was a laugh! They could call it whatever they wanted, but a prison was still just that and it was all the worse, because these people did nothing wrong except to be born with the talent for magic. To hear Byrn tell it many of these people had never even cast a spell.
The Collective attacked Ilipse from all sides at once. Their numbers were few compared to the Kenzai that guarded the domain, but they could cover a larger ground per person than the Kenzai were capable of so that they could determine the kind of battle that the Kenzai would be forced to fight. The trick would be to break down the walls and then move in from multiple entry points. Unlike many cities that had walls erected to protect its citizens Ilipse’s walls were built to keep its populace in rather than to keep attackers out. On the inside of the walls and on the streets were carved massive anti-magic runes. The Collective’s first goal was to knock out the runes on the walls. Alia hoped that once the walls came down Ilipse’s citizens would flee on their own into the Collective’s open arms, but she also had a plan for taking out the Kenzai guardsmen if it came to that.
There were only a few elementalists among the Collective magicians and none were masters, but they worked in pairs on the wall. One would attempt to shift the dirt away from the walls at the base while the other would hurl fire, water, wind, or whatever they could manage to try and knock the walls down. Those who could create magical barriers against arrows and summon spirits to keep the Kenzai engaged protected each pair of elementalists as they did their work.
At the front gate Alia, Tomlin, Riona, and a handful of other magicians faced off against two-dozen Kenzai who foolishly decided to ride out to face them. Alia hoped that more would make the same mistake. It would make taking Ilipse far easier if they could whittle down the defenders outside of the domain.
Not to be outdone by Tomlin’s new toy, Riona and Alia summoned a trio of mounted war wraiths each to meet the Kenzai warriors. The Kenzai weapons glowed as they fought the wraiths on two fronts; one was a battle on the physical plane and the other was of a magical nature as the warrior’s weapons drained the energies that kept the wraiths anchored to this world. Left to their own devices the wraiths would not be able to best the Kenzai, but it did not matter. The wraiths were meant to be a distraction so that the magicians could cast their spells uninterrupted and keep the guardsmen from getting too close with their magic nullifying weapons.
Alia shot a short volley of fireballs and was backed up by other magicians causing flames to rain down on their enemies. The rain of fire spooked half of the Kenzai horses, bucking their riders and forcing them to fight on foot, making cutting the distance prove to be a nearly impossible task as the guardsmen were forced to dodge a seemingly endless barrage of magic to have any effect on the Collective’s magicians.
A flurry of arrows came from Ilipse’s wall, but none reached the magicians through their magic shields.
The secret behind the Kenzai’s dominance in Aurelia was that they could attack small groups of magicians using vastly superior numbers, but against a large group of organized magicians trained in how to fight against them, the Kenzai warriors found that advantage was taken away. The magicians on the other hand could react to any situation on the fly using whatever spells would benefit them most at the moment.
When half of the advanced guard was defeated, the doors to the domain opened up a crack and the remaining Kenzai tried to retreat, but the magicians’ fire was unrelenting in the guardsmen’s destruction.
Tomlin laughed, “They are opening the gates! Now is our chance!” he kicked his horse into a run in all the excitement.
Alia chased after him, “Tomlin, stick to the plan!” She drove her mount at a break neck speed until she was able to cut him off. “Follow my lead,” she said sternly. The look in her eyes let him know that no tomfoolery or brash heroics would be tolerated.
“Yes, my lady,” he said sufficiently cowed, “I lost my head.”
Seeing an easy target, several archers took aim at the master and her apprentice releasing a string of arrows at them, but a wave of Alia’s hand created a shield large enough to protect both magicians and their mounts. The pair fell back to their front lines out of bow range at a leisurely pace.
Riona was almost finished with her next spell when they returned to the front line. She had been drawing a complicated summoning sigil on the dirt road used to summon an elemental creature. While magicians surrounding the city from all sides were forcing the city’s jailers to spread their forces thin. Alia’s frontal assault was about to make a big push through their front door and the Kenzai would have to choose to either keep defending from all sides and allow Alia’s main force to enter Ilipse or rally against her group and allow the domain’s walls to be destroyed.
The necromancer looked to Alia, who nodded. Riona’s staff hit the sigil and she filled it with her magic. The ground rumbled and from the earth sprang stony hands like those of a man. Those hands reached out to the edges of the sigil and pulled the rest of the creature out; first revealing a stone head, then its equally rocky torso. The earth elemental was as tall as a man even without legs.
“Break the doors down,” Riona told the earth elemental indicating the large double doors that only minutes before the last of the Kenzai advance party had retreated behind, “and kill any guards inside that you find.” The elemental rumbled off to fulfill its appointed task. Almost as an afterthought, Riona shouted, “but spare any citizens that you come across!” She noted a surprised look from Alia. “It heard me,” she offered in a tone that was somewhere between apologetic and defensive.
“Will it obey?” Elementals were known to have some difficulty telling a friend from a foe in the heat of battle.
“As best it can,” Riona conceded and that was the end of the discussion.
The elemental did as it was commanded and supplied a flurry of well-placed punches and haymakers. Each swing of its rock arms hit with the force of a battering ram in quick succession that caused the double doors to groan under the strain.
Boiling oil was poured on the creature and then it was lit on fire, but the earth elemental barely noticed as each blow caused the door to splinter until finally shattering inward. The destruction of the main doors revealed a reception area large enough to fit multiple wagons in followed by a second pair of double doors.
Inside the waiting area were nearly a dozen Kenzai fighters whose weapons glowed brightly in the earth elemental’s presence. It swung about as it tried to squash the warriors. Massive hands killed and injured Kenzai as they did battle, but watching the fight unfold worried Riona.
“We need to help out the elemental,” she told Alia.
Alia agreed, but failed to get Riona’s meaning, “Yes, it has stopped focusing on the doors.”
“More than that,” added the necromancer, “Their swords are no threat, but the Kenzai are draining its magic energy and once it’s energy is used up it will be dispelled.”
Alia called for a charge to defend the elemental. It was earlier than she wanted, but there was little that could be done about that. Her frontal force would be somewhat exposed, but getting through that door was critical and it was unclear whether Riona had the energy to summon another elemental so soon after the first one.
They had to keep the pressure on the Kenzai. Alia threw fireballs with one hand as she steered her horse into the reception area. She was followed closely behind by Tomlin, Riona, and a dozen other magicians all wielding whatever magic they could muster. Tomlin placed one guard under a blinding enchantment. Riona used black tendrils to siphon energy from another Kenzai who was trying to do the same to her creating an uneasy back and forth of great energies passing between them.
The magicians would have been trapped in a killing ground had they been normal humans, but Alia’s squads spent months training together for a conflict such as this one. They fought as if they were each a smaller part of a larger body, each magician performing his or her own task in compliment to one another. Some kept shields in place protecting themselves and their allies from the archers that were hidden above them as others dealt with the more immediate threats. Two of the magicians battered the blinds that hid archers with fire and wind until they were decimated and those inside were dead.
“Keep hitting the door!” Riona ordered the elemental and it complied leaving the guardsmen to the magicians.
The final gate heaved with each mighty strike and soon began to buckle, lacking the reinforcements of the outer gate it soon broke into fragments so that much of it lied in ruin and the rest swung uselessly on its hinges. Seeing the way ahead of them was open, the magicians finished off the guards in the waiting area in short order.
Before them stood a city that looked like any other except the citizens that lived inside it were magic users. This place would have been considered an ideal by many within the Collective if not for the guards preventing anyone from leaving and the lack of magic being caused by the unseemly rune carvings that dotted the streets and buildings. The streets were bare as those that lived in Ilipse hid in their homes against the sounds of fighting that they must have been hearing on all fronts. They did not know they were being rescued. How could they without contact to the outside world?
“Secure this area! Have the elemental destroy the runes around us as we go and we will begin evacuating the city,” ordered Alia, “and hurry! I can already feel the effects of this place beginning to drain my magic already.” The feeling was faint, but it was there. From this point on those of the Collective in the city would need to be careful about how much magic they used.
A loud crash came from somewhere off in the distance and it was followed by another crash and another as Ilipse’s walls began to collapse like a line of dominoes. In the distance dust flew up on all sides.
Alia smiled, knowing that victory would soon be at hand. Soon the entirety of the Collective would be within the domain, rescuing citizens and routing the Kenzai that had played prison guard for far too long.
“Citizens of Ilipse, hear me!” Alia shouted loudly. Her voice was amplified by magic so that it echoed throughout the domain. “My name is Alia Necros and I am your friend. I am a magician just like you. Those with me are called the Collective and they, too, are magicians that hope for a better way of living, for freedom from unjust imprisonment as all of you have suffered. We have come to free you. You need not fear the Ken
zai any longer fore we will protect you. We will teach you the ways of magic if you wish to learn them. We are your brothers and sisters. Exit the city however you may and we will lead you to safety.”
A half-minute passed and there was no response from the magicians that lived in the domain. In those brief seconds Alia feared the worst. She feared that her words had fallen on deaf ears; that the people of Ilipse had no desire to be free. She would not take these people against their will if they truly wished to stay, but what would that mean for the Collective?
Then an old man’s shiny head poked out of a window. A woman came out of her home followed by another swaddling a baby. A family with two older children further down the street did the same. Soon there were many eyes on the enchantress. For a moment, she felt happiness amidst the pandemonium. Something deep inside told her that she was doing what she was meant to do.
The boom of Tomlin’s hand-cannon broke Alia from her revelry reminding her of the danger that still surrounded them. More Kenzai were coming from their left and Alia began to prepare a sleep spell.
Riona’s earth elemental was the key to their victory and it did not disappoint. In order to get a foothold within Ilipse the magicians needed to destroy enough runes so that they could continue to cast spells. Elementalists could also mar the runes, but it was far more difficult and the earth elemental could simply pass through the runes and destroy them. That also meant that the summoned creature’s own magic that kept it tethered to this world would dissipate more quickly, but there was no helping that.
Alia’s sleep spell affected six of the guards that had been charging her, causing them to fall in mid-run and tripping up others that were behind them. In their confusion, the Kenzai were easy pickings for a trio of elementalists that threw balls of fire at the guardsmen. Alia noted with a mixture of pride and depression that these were some of Byrn’s best students. They did their master proud.
Fallen Magician (The Magician Rebellion) Page 17