The Spirit Mage (The Blackwood Saga Book 2)

by Layton Green

  “The Devlans count a small number of wizard converts among their numbers. I would not wish to run afoul of one.”

  “Ah,” Will said. “Me neither.”

  After a lunch of cold rabbit stew, courtesy of the gypsies, the party entered the foothills of a mountain range. They passed through the smoking ruins of a village, bodies stacked in neat rows by a stream, similar to what Will and the others had seen on their way to the mines. The sunny blue sky was a jarring contrast to the massacre, and Will had to choke back his bile. Tamás stared at the pile of corpses for a long time before walking away with a clenched jaw.

  Not an hour later, after they topped a small knoll, Yasmina put a hand up. “Tuskers,” she said, staring with undisguised hatred at the copse of fir trees at the base of the hill, “with a group of prisoners. They’re heading right towards us.”

  The party slipped behind a group of boulders. Dalen looked stricken. “Slavers? We have to run!”

  “How many?” Tamás asked grimly.

  Yasmina strained to see into the woods. Will thought he saw a rustling through the trees in the distance. “Ten. With four prisoners.”

  “A small party,” Tamás said. “It’s possible they’re responsible for the village.”

  He looked at Marek, and they exchanged a nod. Will noticed and said, “Count me in.”

  Caleb put his hands to his head. “Jesus, Will.”

  “Those poor people are headed to the mines,” Will said, “or worse. We can do something about it.”

  Caleb lowered his voice. “It’s not our fight.”

  “Today it is,” Will said, as a line of chained humans, heads bowed in submission, came into view.

  Tamás squeezed Will’s shoulder. “With the element of surprise, I believe we can manage ten tuskers without casualty. If we’re shrewd in our tactics.”

  Lisha was staring at the tuskers with a tense, vicious light in her eyes. Yes.

  Will knew Caleb had a point, but he didn’t care. He couldn’t sit there and watch the tuskers herd another group of people to the mines. Not if he could do something about it.

  As they devised a quick plan of attack, the tusker party started up the knoll, pulling the slaves behind them. Will grew jittery with anticipation, dopamine pouring into his nerve endings. His knuckles turned white from squeezing the hilt of his sword.

  When the wart-covered creatures reached the halfway point, Caleb stepped into view, whistling to himself. The tuskers eyed him like a Happy Meal. Caleb froze as if he had just seen them, then took off up the hill. The tuskers shouted and followed.

  As the first two tuskers came into range, passing right by where the party was hidden, it happened all at once, fast and hard like most battles. Dalen threw a flash of light into the lead tusker’s eyes, disorienting him, while Lisha dropped down from a tree and set the second on fire with a thrust of heated palms.

  The burning tusker screamed. Tamás, Will, and Marek rushed into the fray, storming down the hill with battle roars to increase the perception of a larger enemy. All three of them cut down a tusker on the first wave. Dalen cast a replication spell on Yasmina, causing three tall Brazilian women wielding quarterstaffs to enter the fray, further panicking the slavers. Will and Caleb had argued vehemently to dissuade her from fighting, but she insisted, and Will had to admit she could hold her own with the staff, albeit with the help of Dalen’s illusion.

  What else had Elegon taught her?

  Lisha leapt onto the back of another tusker and ignited him, Will pressed forward with his fellow warriors, and the fight was over before it began. Nine tuskers dead and one pinned on the ground by the tip of Tamas’s sword. The success of the attack shocked Will, and he realized with a surge of pride that in a fair fight, he was now a match for a tusker. Not a match—better.

  The human captives looked stunned, then started cheering as Yasmina found a set of keys and freed them. It was one of the best feelings of Will’s life.

  Tamás used the tip of his sword to raise the tusker to his feet. “You must be touched by the gods,” the revolutionary said, his blond hair menacing his face, “because today you get to live. But go: go back from whence you came and tell whoever sent you that this despicable practice is finished.” He smacked the foul creature on the back, then sent him scurrying with a kick to the rear. “Spread the word, tusker,” Tamás roared. “Tell them our people will not be enslaved!”

  Will and his companions guarded the freed prisoners during the night, then accompanied them to the next village. The townspeople welcomed them with open arms and vowed to help them return home.

  The villagers did not, however, welcome Lisha. Despite the goodwill the party incurred for killing the slavers, they were hustled out of town for consorting with the darvish woman. And in the next village, a dilapidated collection of brick and straw huts, an old woman stumbled into the muddy street and hurled epithets at Lisha. A crowd gathered and started throwing stones, forcing the party to flee town yet again.

  “I guess there’re bigots on every world,” Caleb muttered as they ran. “Superstition, religion, rich, poor, wizard born and common born—I can’t stand any of it, man. All it does is divide us.”

  Will felt a rush of warmth for his brother, because he knew what he said was true. No matter the circumstance, Caleb would welcome a stranger of any color or race with open arms. He might have his faults, but he was a kind and gentle soul, one of the few people Will had ever known with no prejudices.

  They stopped for lunch and Lisha caught trout from a river. After a quick training session—Yasmina and Marek had started to join in, the big man slowly learning to fight with one arm—they returned to the forest. It broke to reveal a shattered landscape of rock fragments, stunted cinder cones, geysers and fumaroles with smoke pouring out, sagebrush, and crater-like impressions. In the distance, Will saw a red glow emanating from one of the cinder cones.

  Caleb swiveled to take in the Jurassic landscape. “Are there lava fields in the Rockies?” he asked Will.

  “Maybe we’re in Yellowstone,” Will said, “though I think that’s on the other side. Or maybe this world’s just different.”

  They started along the edge of the forest, skirting the blasted region, until Will turned and saw that Lisha hadn’t moved. He went back to her.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  I know this place. I can return home from here.

  Will didn’t respond. He sensed she had more to say.

  I can accept the differences of the surface world, but it appears they cannot accept me. Can you please tell the others? I wish to say farewell.

  It was so abrupt. Will’s first instinct was to persuade her to change her mind, but then he saw the pain and finality of her decision reflected in her eyes. If villagers were stoning him for being different, he wouldn’t stay, either.

  He hugged her tight. “Thank you for saving us. If you ever need anything, come find me, and I’ll do everything in my power to help you.”

  Thank you, friend. You gave me life again.

  Will told the others of her decision. One by one, everyone except Yasmina embraced the darvish girl who had led them to the surface. Yasmina said a curt goodbye and stood off to the side.

  Lisha’s eyes watered as Caleb whispered into her ear and held her close. Their embrace lasted long moments, causing everyone to move on and leave them in peace. Will watched over his shoulder, a hollow feeling inside him, as Caleb wiped an eye and walked slowly back to the party, leaving Lisha to cross the lava field alone. She climbed into a cinder cone and disappeared.

  The rest of the afternoon walk felt somber, muted by the loss of Lisha. As daylight waned, the party rounded a cluster of rocky hills, crested a ridge, and gazed upon an awesome sight below: a slender emerald valley slicing between two mountain ranges so steep they looked sheared by scissors. A trail led down the other side of the ridge, right to the start of the pass.

  “The Valley of the Cursed,” Tamás said. “We’ll camp here tonight
, and enter at first light.”

  -49-

  Mala materialized in a sloping wooded glade. The unmistakable details of her home world, the lush greens and browns of the forest, the trill of birdsong and a heady aroma of fresh air and loamy soil, almost brought her to her knees. Like most gypsies, her clan had traveled throughout her youth, and she did not think of any one place as her own.

  But she did have a place to long for, she realized. Urfe itself, in all its terrible beauty and wonder, was her home.

  Relieved not to see Zedock’s citadel but expecting to land somewhere near New Victoria, she knew with a glance that this forest was taller, less dense and humid, than the woodlands of the Fifth Protectorate.

  The Barrier Coast, she guessed.

  Needing to gain her bearings, she shimmied up a large spruce to better understand her surroundings. Near the top, after watching a red-crested eagle—another sign of the Barrier Coast—leave its perch as she climbed, she found a sturdy branch and gazed upon the land.

  Half a kilometer to the north, she spied a fast-flowing stream that made her salivate. She had never desired a bath in cool waters, followed by a flagon of honey grog and a platter of fire-crisped meat, quite so much. Turning eastward, she gasped in delight when she saw the muscular sprawl of the ocean in the distance, just a few kilometers away. On the shoreline of the curving bay, downhill from her position, rose a familiar sight. A large encampment of beautiful domes and spires that brought another swell of relief, as well as a surge of pride.

  This was a stroke of luck, she realized. Against all odds, her interdimensional journey had brought her closer to her ultimate destination. That brought thoughts of the map she had discovered in Leonidus’s Keep, and a stab of worry that her sojourn in the Place Between Worlds might have affected her belongings. After she climbed back down, she made sure all her weapons and jewelry were intact, then checked the contents of her Pouch of Possession, a magical canvas bag whose holding capacity far exceeded its size.

  When she withdrew the scroll, she unrolled it and checked to make sure it was intact, handling the thin parchment as carefully as a robin’s egg.

  It was just as she recalled. The map, the runes, the legendary tomb of the sorcerer king.

  She knew why Leonidus must have sought it out—to aid the Revolution—but she desired the map for a very different reason. A frisson of excitement coursed through her. If the map was real, and her adventurer’s intuition screamed that it was, then that which she had longed for her entire adult life might be within her grasp.

  A vivid flashback rocked her on her heels. The attack on her clan while the morning dew was still fresh, the giant red-bearded man with cruel eyes and a black robe belted in silver, her father hiding her under their wagon with tear-filled eyes and a whispered goodbye. The screams of her clansmen that haunted her dreams to this day.

  Killing Zedock’s arrogant majitsu had felt good. Empowering. Yet she had caught him unawares and harnessed the magic of a strange world. The warrior-mage whose head she craved was far more powerful, perhaps the most terrifying majitsu who had ever lived. A man named Kjeld Anarsson who had risen to great power in the Realm, and who most would consider untouchable.

  And so he might be.

  She started walking towards the stream. Yes, she knew the nature of her next adventure. For once, she was seeking something for herself. She could assemble a team, but why not let the gullible Council engage one for her, on the promise of the other relic the existence of the map implied?

  The Coffer of Devla. Fools they were. Chasing after a myth, resting their hopes on a god whom had either never existed or had long since abandoned them.

  The desire to set forth on the quest tingled through her, a song to her gypsy soul, giving her a sense of purpose she had not felt in a very long time. She almost felt young again, both empowered and burdened by the youth she had lost.

  First things first, she thought as she stumbled to the stream and stripped off her clothes.

  Bathe.

  Find grog and food.

  Crawl into warm bed and collapse.

  -50-

  Val raced downstairs, shoved his bed aside, and found the loose floorboard. He caught his breath as he reached inside and extracted a black vellum notebook.

  Dad.

  Trembling with emotions he had kept suppressed for a very long time, he opened the first page and saw his father’s name, written in his tight, elongated scrawl.

  Journal of Wizard Studies

  Dane Blackwood

  Val flipped through the worn notebook, which contained observations and tips on the spells his father had studied during his three-year tenure at the Abbey. His father’s first year had consisted of a coterie class, a spiritmancy class, and History and Governance. He had even chosen Relics as his elective.

  Just like Val.

  Hoping against hope, he was disappointed to find that the journal ended with his father’s graduation. There was no mention of the Planewalk.

  Val stayed awake the entire night and devoured the spell book cover to cover. He paid attention to the tips and absorbed the wide range of spells from the other disciplines, as well as the far fewer spirit mage spells, such as Spirit Radiance, Mind Whip, Spirit Door, and Moon Ray. There were descriptions of higher level spells introduced at the school, but which his father had not yet mastered: Create Portal, Stasis, Astral Cord, Gravity’s Kin, Spirit Skin, Stargaze, and Spirit Storm.

  With dawn came gummy eyes and fuzzy thinking. Val allowed himself a few hours of sleep, then rose and prepared a pot of coffee, drumming his fingers as he thought.

  Salomon had made an appearance for a reason. Val’s guess was because of the Planewalk. The good news was that Salomon must think Val was on the brink of finding the entrance.

  The bad news was that he thought Val was going to die in the attempt.

  His father’s spell book was a nifty addition to Val’s repertoire, but it wouldn’t help with the Planewalk. Not this soon. He would need weeks or months—maybe years—to learn those spells.

  He paced the house, pausing in front of the tapestry in the common room portraying two wizards facing each other on a rock bridge spanning a bottomless chasm. Two fortresses, one silver-blue and one gold-and-crimson, stood on either side of the bridge. One wizard held an azantite staff, the other an orb of roiling darkness. Swirls of color ignited an inky sky, and bizarre creatures dotted the landscape.

  Was the tapestry a vision of the past? The future? Another world or dimension?

  Or just a piece of art?

  Whatever it was, Val had the feeling the imagery was important—perhaps even a depiction of Salomon himself.

  Back to the Planewalk.

  You’re not ready, Salomon had said.

  Val rolled his eyes. Thanks for pointing out the obvious, old man.

  Yet Salomon being Salomon, Val figured he probably knew he was going to attempt the Planewalk regardless of what anyone said.

  You’re not ready. Not as you are.

  Not as you are, Val repeated to himself.

  The phrase had meaning, he could feel it.

  What was he supposed to become?

  The spell book might help transform him, but not in a day. No, he needed something else. Something that would render him more powerful. Make him something more than who he was at this stage of his development.

  Rubbing his chin as he thought, he looked across the room and noticed the cabinet on the other side, the one that contained the enormous chest of gold and gems he had been using to fund himself.

  A slow smile crept onto his face.

  Holding a canvas bag stuffed with coins and gems in each hand, having to use a bit of magic to carry the load, Val entered the New Victoria Magick Shoppe.

  Not as you are.

  Expecting a creaky wooden shop filled with overflowing shelves of potions and arcane magical trinkets, he instead saw Saks Fifth Avenue for the wizard set. A marble foyer heralded an atrium with a glass ceiling, fi
lled with flowerbeds and statues and artwork displayed on easels. Groups of wizards conversed at a sunny café in the middle of the indoor courtyard, screened by potted banana trees.

  Gemstone archways lined the perimeter of the circular room, leading to alcoves arranged by wizard discipline. To his left was a ruby archway for pyromancers, displaying a Rod of Fire in a glass case near the entrance. Val checked the price and whistled. Five hundred gold pieces.

  He passed a sapphire entrance for aquamancers, amber for geomancers, diamond for aeromancers. How much are those archways worth?

  He didn’t see an alcove for spiritmancy, but opposite the foyer, a black-and-white marble archway opened up into the largest room of all, which seemed to contain a potpourri of items not endemic to any one discipline.

  Lugging his sacks inside, Val approached the counter clerk: a stern, red-headed woman wearing a high-necked gray blouse. He said, “Do you carry any items useful to a spirit mage?”

  The woman replied in a slow, controlled voice, as if speaking to a child. “Spirit mages are not allowed to craft magical items for public sale. It violates their code.”

  Oh. “In that case, where are your most expensive items?”

  The woman looked down her nose at him. “Each Discipline Vault maintains a collection of rare pieces. There is also this vault’s Thaumaturge Case.”

  Val affected his best look of disdain. He was already tired of this lady’s attitude. “Which is where?”

  She smirked and looked him over, as if to say, you’re not dressed for this place. “We require proof of funds before viewing the Thaumaturge Case. The least expensive item is one thousand gold pieces.”

  Val lifted the two sacks and plopped them on the counter, spilling a few gold coins in the process. “I trust you can hold these for me while I browse? It might help if you start counting.”

  Eyes wide, the woman bit back her remark and waved over a man in a tuxedo. He bowed and led Val through another archway in the rear, this one warded by sigils and isolated by a silver curtain.