Disciple of War (Art of the Adept Book 4)

by Michael G. Manning

  ‘Him’ was her father, the sociopathic king of Terabinia. Will felt bad for his honesty then, for there was no one Selene loathed more than the man who had raised her. “You were a little scary, but you weren’t him. You caught me off-guard for a second, but there is a clear difference between you and your father.”

  “Don’t fool yourself,” she argued. “After you left, I deliberately played on her fears to get what we needed.”

  “Did you pretend you’d hurt her daughter?”

  “Not explicitly. I did it just as I was raised. I let her create her own fears and then talked around those fears in a way that made them ten times worse. She’ll be having nightmares for years.”

  Will had been on the receiving end of that technique several times with King Lognion, but never once had he doubted the man’s willingness to carry out his threats, whether they were unspoken or explicitly stated. Lognion didn’t bluff. It might not even be fair to call the man’s words threats. Lognion communicated in a brutal and efficient manner that let you know exactly what would happen to you if you displeased him. Even worse, the man seemed to have very little emotional involvement in his threats. When Selene’s father made a threat, it was a statement of fact, as plain and unemotional as the fact that the sun would rise.

  “You acted as you saw him act,” said Will. “But behind it all, you still have human feelings, guilt, regret—you have a conscience. That’s the difference.”

  Selene chewed her lip in a manner that was entirely unsuitable for a princess. Will found the expression of self-doubt rather appealing considering his wife’s otherwise unshakeable confidence at most times. After a moment, she shook her head in silent agreement.

  He could tell she still had reservations, but they had finally reached the address listed in the late-Lewis Arberry’s notebook. For a home in the dockside district, it was surprisingly well kept, although small. A smattering of people moved back and forth along the road, most of them watching the small group of watchmen more than Will or Selene. Something was about to happen, and everyone in the vicinity could feel it.

  Since Selene was still reflecting on herself, Will glanced at the watchmen, then ordered, “Same as before. Two in back, two to enter ahead of us, and one to stay at the door.” He knocked and waited until someone opened the door.

  A woman in her middling years opened the door. Her face was slightly chubby, and her cheeks were ruddy, offsetting the pale grey that had stolen the color from her hair. As her eyes locked onto Will, the blood slowly drained from her face, leaving her looking lifeless and drained. It was several seconds before she noticed the guards beside him. Without thinking, she started to close the door, but Will blocked it with one hand. “I wouldn’t,” he warned. “Step back and clear the way. Is anyone else in the house?”

  “No! There’s no one home!” she yelled, her voice rising to an exceptional volume. Rather than move, she continued to block the door.

  “She’s warning someone else,” said one of the watchmen as he pushed her aside and the two of them entered.

  At the same time, a man’s voice spoke from the next room. “Why are you yelling? Of course I’m home.” His statement was followed by a yelp as the watchmen found and restrained him. Will and Selene entered then, and the man grew still when he saw Will. “Shit.”

  “You know why I’m here,” said Will.

  “Don’t say anything, Ben!” cried the woman.

  “Benjamin Doster, I presume,” stated Will. “I met a man named Lewis Arberry a couple of days ago. You paid him an exceptional sum of money.”

  Ben lowered his head. “Aye. I did.”

  “No!” yelled his wife.

  “Shut up, Sandy!” the man bellowed back, then he looked at Will. “It was all me. She didn’t know nothin’ about it.” More noise came from the back of the house, and after a moment one of the backdoor watchmen dragged a teenager into the room.

  “Dad?” The young man looked to be in the midst of puberty, and his features were a picture of confusion. “What’s going on?”

  Will and Selene looked at each other and then Will spoke to the watchman. “Take him outside.”

  “Don’t hurt him!” cried the woman, who Will assumed was probably the boy’s mother. “He’s all we have left.” Something about the way she said the words seemed to stab at Will, as though she thought they would mean something to him.

  “What does that mean?” Will demanded.

  Before Sandy could reply, her husband roared, “Shut up, Sandra!”

  “I don’t care!” she yelled back. “You shouldn’t have taken that money! They’re going to kill us all now. The bastard should at least know who it is that wants him dead!” Her eyes fixed on Will with venomous hatred. The glare was so spiteful that Will took an involuntary step back, and Selene stepped forward protectively, as though she would shield him from the woman’s stare.

  Sandy blanched when she realized it was the princess standing before her, but she didn’t wilt. She looked up at Selene and boldly told her, “You shouldn’t have married that one, Your Highness. I’m a loyal subject of your father’s, but that man doesn’t deserve to live. You may have me hanged for sayin’ it, but I’ll speak my mind anyway.”

  Will’s mind was working furiously to understand her vitriol. He had initially thought the family’s last name sounded familiar for some reason, but he hadn’t been able to place it. Now, at last, a faint idea percolated through is mind. “Did you have an older son, or daughter?” he asked.

  “He doesn’t even know which it is!” spat Sandy.

  “A son,” said Ben quietly.

  “Simon,” said Will. “You’re Simon’s parents.” Selene looked at him in confusion, wondering what he was referring to, so Will spelled it out for her. “I accidentally killed him and a girl, Lyndsey, during the vampire catastrophe.” His heart felt numb, empty. During the ritual that had wiped out most of the vampires plaguing the city, Will had lost his head during the euphoria that accompanied the ritual. Vampires had rushed them, and he had killed several of them while continuing the ritual, but he had also missed and hit two students who were in danger. He hadn’t discovered it until after the dust settled and the ritual was over.

  “They would have been getting married next year,” said Sandy sourly. “And you laughed as you did it! They told us everything!”

  “That isn’t true,” said Selene.

  “Beggin’ your pardon, Your Majesty, but you weren’t there,” said the dead student’s mother.

  “She’s right,” said Will, his face blank. He had suffered a considerable amount of guilt over his mistake that night, but he had also managed to forgive himself. His eyes met the woman’s. “But I wasn’t laughing because of that. I didn’t even know I had killed them until after everything was over. I was trying to protect them. My laughter was a result of the magic I performed.”

  “You were drunk with power,” accused Sandy.

  Will nodded. “That’s a good description, but I never meant to kill your son. If I had done nothing, he would have died. I tried to save him and killed him by mistake.”

  The woman lowered her gaze and began to cry. Then her husband chided her, “You should have kept your mouth shut, Sandy. Now we’re both dead.” He looked at Selene and asked, “What will happen to our son?”

  Selene glanced at Will, then responded, “Where did you get the money?”

  Chapter 15

  That evening, Selene was sitting up in bed as Will crawled under the covers. They hadn’t fully discussed what had happened at the Doster home, but he could tell she wasn’t going to sleep until they had. He lay down and closed his eyes to see how she would react.

  She said nothing for a while, opting merely to sigh loudly. He waited another full minute, and after her third sigh he spoke, though he kept his eyes closed. “Go ahead and say it.”

  “Do you think we did the right thing?”

  “You’re the princess. Didn’t they teach you how to make these kinds of cho
ices?”

  Selene grabbed an extra pillow and pounded his face with it. “You know better than that! Besides, my father wouldn’t have chosen that. If he had heard of it, he would have eradicated the entire family. Then he would have located the grandparents and any other close family members and executed them as well. He’s very big on setting examples.”

  “So when you ask if we did the right thing, you’re really asking me whether we should have had them executed?” clarified Will.

  “Yes and no,” said Selene. “They did commit a crime, but at the same time I couldn’t help but feel like I understood their motivation.”

  Will could still remember the chill that had gripped his heart when he had emerged from the ground and had found Selene collapsed before him with crossbow bolts standing out from her torso. If you had died, I might have made the same choice as your father, whether I felt responsible for their son’s death or not.

  She continued, “I didn’t feel like it was right to punish them, but I also wonder if failing to make an example of them might bring us more trouble in the future.”

  He shrugged. “Your father is a madman. He can make the choices he does because he doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘regret.’ If you need a model, my mom is better for this situation.”

  “What would she say?”

  “You can’t make your decisions based on what someone else might do. We let them live because it was the right thing to do. If they do something terrible in the future, that’s on them, not us. In other words, base your regrets on your own actions, not what someone else might do. You acted according to your conscience. Everything else is a problem for the future.”

  “I still can’t believe you gave them the money, though.”

  It was his turn to sigh. After they had finished interrogating Benjamin and Sandra Doster, he had chosen to return the assassin’s fee to them, on the condition that they split it with the family of Lyndsey Travoy. “I didn’t mean to kill those two students, but I still felt bad for them.”

  “That was over five and a half thousand gold crowns. We could have used it to help a lot of people.” As usual, her charity came first in her own mind.

  “Call it my selfishness,” said Will. “No amount of money is worth their children, but it made me feel better.”

  “I still think he was lying,” stated Selene.

  “About which part?”

  “The sum. He said he received exactly five thousand six hundred and thirty-five gold crowns and that he paid that amount to Arberry to kill you. No one pays such a strange number for an assassination. It was probably an even number, and he kept some of it before paying the remainder to Arberry.”

  Will frowned. “Does it matter? I chose to give it back to them.”

  “I don’t like liars.”

  “But you were fine with me letting them go after they paid to have me killed?”

  She exhaled loudly. “I didn’t say it made sense. It’s just how I feel. You let them live and even gave them the money back. If he lied about the exact amount, it annoys me.”

  “The real question is who gave them a sack of gold and told them who they should hire. Common folk like the Dosters wouldn’t even know where to go to hire an assassin, much less have such a fortune to spend on it,” said Will.

  “That was the only part that made sense to me,” she returned. “Your true enemy saw an opportunity, and he used them to cover his trail. Even though we were able to trace it back to them, they couldn’t tell us who he was.”

  “Or she,” added Will.

  “I stand corrected; it could have been a he or a she. But whoever it was must have deep pockets if they’re willing to risk five or six thousand gold crowns by leaving them in a package with a note. What if the Dosters had chosen to simply keep the money? Then your enemy would have spent a fortune for nothing.”

  “Well, that’s sort of what happened in the end anyway,” said Will with a smirk.

  “You know what I mean. They did follow through and pay Arberry to kill you, even if he failed.”

  Their conversation trailed off after that, and Will spent an unknown period circling the facts over and over in his mind while he tried to go to sleep. No new ideas came to him. Blake hadn’t turned up any leads regarding the serving girl who had quit either. It appeared possible that they would never know who had masterminded the scheme, and that bothered Will quite a bit. He had gotten used to having lots of enemies, but not knowing the one actually trying to have him killed made the spot between his shoulders itch.

  If he didn’t know who the enemy was, he wouldn’t be able to guess where the next attack would come from, and if there was one thing he had learned from his endless practice with the point-defense shield, it was that if you didn’t see something coming, you couldn’t stop it. He drifted into a restless slumber in which shadowy men hunted him through the alleyways of his dreams.

  The next week progressed in a rather ordinary fashion. Selene insisted on attempting the third compression, and while she was once again uncomfortable and unable to sleep for long, she seemed to be managing. As expected, she was plagued with a constant, mind-numbing exhaustion from being continually turyn deprived, but she bore it with a minimum of grumpiness. Will watched her worriedly as the days passed, ever fearful that she might fall over dead, or go to sleep and fail to wake up. As Arrogan had warned him, other than gauging how quickly she had adapted to the previous compressions, there was no way to be absolutely certain things wouldn’t go wrong with this one.

  The odds were in her favor though. Will told himself that repeatedly.

  He continued going to classes and keeping up his own spell practice. His private reading of military history continued to threaten his wakefulness, but he forced himself to keep going. Once in a while, he encountered fascinatingly clever stratagems that had been used, though none of them seemed like they would be likely to apply during the upcoming war. When the reading became too boring, he would take breaks to work on a new spell.

  Will had only designed a few spells, one simple one with Arrogan’s help and a few engineering transmutations that had been part of a class project. This time, the spell he wanted to create was something entirely new. Selene had told him that the Driven required the help of both an earth and an air elemental to hide underground. Will wanted to do the same, but as he had no plans to become a sorcerer, it would take a custom spell.

  He began with the water-breathing spell, which was actually an elemental spell that compressed and stored a supply of air into a tiny space within the user’s body—enough to last half an hour. With that, he wouldn’t have to worry about breathing, so all he needed was to add an elemental earth manipulation. He looked at the grave-digging spell first, but he couldn’t see any way to apply the technique it used to enable him to sink into the ground without disturbing it.

  Eventually he did the smart thing and asked his wife for advice.

  “Well, I never did what the Driven do because I didn’t have an air elemental and I would have suffocated, but with my earth elemental I was able to briefly pass through dirt and stone without affecting it,” she told him.

  “But how?”

  “It’s hard to describe. You just sort of flow through it. It’s almost like becoming a spirit, except you still have a physical body and you can still touch some things, like solid metal. The weird part is that you can’t take a breath, at all. The air just passes through you, just like dirt and stone.”

  “So, you don’t actually move the soil around yourself?” he asked, utterly confused.

  “No. It’s as though you attune yourself, or become a different substance, one that still has weight and mass, but can’t directly interact with most physical objects.”

  “So, you’re out of phase?” An idea struck him then. “Are you actually entering the ethereal realm?”

  She shook her head. “No. As far as I know, there’s no way for an elemental to assist someone in shifting into the ethereal plane. Plus, if you w
ere ethereal, you could probably move through other people, solid metals, or liquids.”

  “You can’t pass through water?”

  “The moisture in soil isn’t a problem, but any amount of pure liquid, whether it’s oil, water, or whatever, could kill you. It’s like touching a cold flame. If it’s moving water, like a river, it would rip apart any portion of you that was put in it,” she warned.

  Will frowned and shook his head as though that would make his brain function better. “That makes absolutely no sense to me.”

  Selene shrugged. “I don’t have any better words to describe it.”

  His next obvious course of action was talking to Arrogan, but again, the answers he got only led to more questions.

  “I’ve never seen or heard of a spell that allows someone to move through earth the way she described,” said his grandfather. “Elementals were still fairly new in my day, so I’m not sure anyone had even tried doing that with an earth elemental yet either. However, I do know that some of the fae can do something similar using wild magic.”

  That was promising and daunting at the same time. “I’ve got some capability with wild magic already.” He was referring mainly to his ability to alter the sensitivity of his eyesight, as well as to change the types of light he could perceive, though he had also learned to alter his other senses and even his speed and strength to a smaller degree.

  Arrogan laughed. “Most third-order wizards do. You aren’t the first. We all pick up some tricks here and there, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to replicate what they do. That’s why we create spells, so we can do the things we don’t have a natural talent for.”

  That shook him. “Wait, what? I thought spells were the heart of wizardry.”

  “Knowledge is the heart of it, but even that doesn’t cover it fully. Maybe I should say skill, or more specifically, skill with magic,” explained Arrogan.

  “Exactly, spells,” said Will.