The Mage War

by Ben S. Dobson

  “Jusht tell me what to do,” the big orc said.

  “Rip it off the wall.”

  Vladak reached down, grasped the box in both hands, and pulled. His muscles corded, strained, and then Tane heard something creak and snap, somewhere in the wall. Suddenly Vladak stumbled backward, and the box came with him, trailing several broken copper cables of varying length. Which meant the spell glyphs weren’t connected anymore.

  “Indree! Now!” Tane shouted. He was already on his feet, running into the hall. He heard a crash behind him as Vladak tossed the spell-box to the floor and followed.

  They made it just in time to see Indree, already standing inside the doorway, Astral force bursting from her outstretched fingers. The silver wave hurled the swarming crawlers off Kadka without moving her an inch. Near two dozen automatons crashed hard against the far wall. Some fell motionless to the ground, too broken to function; the rest tried to right themselves again, insectoid legs skittering and scraping against the brass floor. Indree didn’t give them a chance. She uttered another spell, and a wave of silver fire gouted across the room. It was as precisely targeted as the force spell had been—she was no amateur. Astral flames melted the spiders into pools of molten brass without leaving a single mark on the walls or floor.

  Tane rushed down the hall, and no ward stopped him at the end of it. Indree was already kneeling at Kadka’s side, checking her wounds. There was more blood than Tane liked.

  “Is she…?” He trailed off, not even wanting to voice the possibility.

  Indree looked up at him. “She’s breathing. Some deep cuts, but I should be able to close them if there’s no broken bones or internal damage.”

  Tane exhaled in relief. “Thank the Astra.”

  Just then, Kadka began to stir. Her eyes blinked open, and she looked up at them. Her voice came out hoarse, like she was just waking up from a rudely interrupted nap. “This is not best hurrying I ever see, Carver.”

  Tane had to laugh. “Well, we did our best. We’re not all as good as saving people from certain death as you are.” He looked over his shoulder at Vladak, who was standing just behind him now. “Although Vladak did more than his fair share of the heavy lifting.”

  Kadka gave the big orc a grateful smile. “Thank you, brother.”

  Vladak shook his head. “It wash nothing. I’m jusht glad you’re shtill with ush.”

  “We all are,” said Indree. “But that was a lot of noise and spellfire, and we’re fugitives. We need to get out of here before someone gets curious. Treating those wounds is going to have to wait until we’re hidden. Can you stand?”

  Kadka began to push herself up, and then she winced and one of her legs—the one Tane had seen a crawler gash badly—started to tremble. Vladak stooped and slung her arm over his neck, lifting her the rest of the way.

  “Are you good to walk?” Tane asked. “That leg looks…”

  “Is fine.” Kadka shot him a grin that didn’t quite mask her discomfort. “Still faster than you.”

  “Well, maybe don’t try to prove it just now,” said Tane. “Come on, let’s get somewhere safe. I think we have a lot to talk about.”

  Chapter Eight

  _____

  TANE STRODE INTO Bastian’s workshop ahead of the others, leading the way across the warehouse floor.

  “We’ve been at work all night.” He picked his way through row after row of worktables strewn with the tools and materials of artifice. Even at this hour, those tables were still manned by dozens of Bastian’s best, hard at work on the project they’d been assigned. “I think we’ve got something we can use to defend against Endo’s siphon spell, at least temporarily.”

  Bastian was already crossing the floor to meet them, his wings fluttering behind him in an agitated rhythm. “My dear Kadka! Are you well? Whatever did they do to you?” Tinga and Cestra were just behind him—Tane had asked everyone to meet there.

  “Fine, little man,” Kadka said. “Takes more than a few scrapes to stop me.” Her clothes were still torn and bloody, and she was favoring her right leg. Tane couldn’t blame Bastian for assuming the worst, but it wasn’t as bad as it looked. She’d had nasty gashes all over her body, but nothing complicated enough to require a mage surgeon—Indree had dealt with the crawlers before they’d had time to carry out the vivisection they’d clearly intended. And she’d been able to magically knit the wounds closed, too, in the safety of the Silver Dawn’s hidden tunnels. In a few hours’ time, even the deepest incisions would be nothing but a bad memory.

  “That’s what I tried to tell him,” said Tinga, although her face betrayed her relief. “If you admire her so much, Bastian, you should have known she wasn’t going down that easily.”

  Bastian’s little round cheeks flushed red. “Well, I didn’t mean… of course I have nothing but the utmost faith—”

  “I’m sure Kadka didn’t take it personally,” Tane interrupted, and shot her a meaningful glance.

  “Is nice you worry.” Kadka grinned at Bastian. “Don’t need to, but is nice.”

  “You see?” said Tane. “Now that that’s settled, I want to show everyone what we’ve learned, and we don’t have a lot of time. Is the machine ready?”

  “Of course!” Bastian nodded with great enthusiasm. “You must all see what Mister Carver has created. It is quite brilliant! Come, come!” He turned and fluttered toward his personal lab at the back of the warehouse, beckoning for them to follow.

  A replica of the machine first created by Felisa Thorpe sat in the center of the lab: a big brass orb atop a tripod of metal legs, connected with brass pipes to an instrument panel below. Hovering above the switches and dials, an illusory pane of dark blue shimmered in the air, displaying nothing. The machine was active, but not currently set to detect anything in particular.

  “You put this together fast,” Indree noted, moving to examine the machine from several angles. Tane had done the same when he’d first seen it, checking it against his memory. “I’m impressed.”

  “Given the circumstances, my friends and I set ourselves to the task with some urgency,” Bastian said. “After all, the fate of our nation is at stake!”

  “Which is why we need to get to it,” said Tane. “Indree, come here for a moment.” He strode toward the machine and stood before the instrument panel, setting the dials to focus on nearby Astral presences. Immediately, the illusory panel lit up with silver light, in the rough forms of the people in the room. As Indree neared, Tane picked out her signature and eliminated the rest, so that her shimmering silver outline was the only thing on the display. “So, no one has ever managed a divination to detect magical ability before, but Endo’s siphon spell can tell mages and the non-magical apart. The scrolls we took obviously contained the method he was using, but without practical testing, I couldn’t understand exactly what they were referring to. Now I do. Indree, if you would, just cast a simple spell. The kind of low magical field you might use for an ancryst test.”

  Indree nodded, and her eyes lost focus for a moment as she uttered a few words in the lingua. The silver image of her Astral signature showed no visible change.

  Tinga stepped closer to squint intently at the image. “It just looks the same as it did.”

  “Which is exactly why divination has never been able to detect this,” said Tane. “A person’s ambient Astral signature swallows up what we’re looking for. Indree, hold that spell. Now, watch this.” Tane adjusted the dials again, focused in further. “Thorpe’s machine essentially burrows into the Astra, so we can see what’s happening there in far more detail than was ever possible before. So, I can do this.” One final turn of a dial, and Indree’s signature vanished. “Do you see it?”

  “See what?” asked Cestra. “It’s blank, isn’t—”

  “Wait.” Tinga’s face was inches from the illusory display now. “There.” She reached out to touch a spot on the dark blue panel. “What is that?” Her fingertip passed slightly through, breaking a very faint line on the displa
y, at the heart of the space where Indree’s Astral presence had been a few moments before. It was scarcely visible, more of a dim grey than silver.

  “That’s what makes a mage, apparently,” Tane answered. “We tested on Bastian and several of his friends—it’s only visible when a spell is being cast. Best I can tell, it’s what allows them to communicate with the Astra in a way some of us can’t. An innate channel that carries magical requests in the form of Astral energy. And that’s what Endo uses to detect mages. That’s what his siphon does—it’s not detecting people without magic and targeting them, it’s detecting people with magic and targeting everyone else.”

  “That’s what I felt when it hit me,” Indree said. “That same rush I get when I’m casting a spell. The siphon is… what, moving power along this channel just to see if it’s there?”

  Tane nodded. “More or less. It taps into your Astral signature and then… effectively it begins to request a spell on your behalf, but one that never completes, without any purpose or effect. The power needed to fully cast a spell through every person it targets would make the siphon devour itself. Instead, it just takes the process far enough along to see if it detects that communication. If it does, you must be a mage. Only a spell scribed into the Astra itself by Thorpe’s machine could see it. From our end, the channel is effectively invisible, outshone by a mage’s basic Astral signature. It’s like lighting a match outside at noon on a sunny day—whatever light it’s casting, you don’t notice the difference.”

  “Is all good to know,” Kadka said, obviously trying not to sound too bored, “but Bastian says you create something. Some way to undo siphon?”

  Tane shook his head. “I wish it was that simple. Without getting whoever’s anchoring the spell in front of one of these machines, I don’t think it’s possible to craft a counterspell. There’s no good way to stop something etched into the Astra except actually punching through the divide and erasing it, or…” Tane hesitated. “Or destroying the anchor.” He didn’t elaborate—they all remembered what had happened to Wilnam Urnt. “But now that we know what it’s looking for, and we have the machine on our side, we were able to work out a way to fool the siphon. Bastian?”

  Bastian nodded enthusiastically. “Right here!” He flew to his worktable, where some half-dozen identical brooch-sized artifacts lay, and picked one up. It was round, with a small diamond embedded in the front and a sharp pin on the back. “The work is ongoing, of course, but we have produced several dozen already. Now that my friends are familiar with the process, the rate should increase.”

  Indree moved over to the table to examine the artifacts. “They don’t look very complicated,” she said. “How do they work?”

  “I’ll show you.” Tane picked the person he knew would least object to his next request. “Kadka, jab that into your arm, will you?”

  Kadka didn’t hesitate for a moment, just took the artifact Bastian offered and plunged the pin in. She didn’t even flinch. It wasn’t the first artifact she’d been asked to stab herself with. “Feels no different. Is something like mimic vial?”

  “Only in that they both need to pierce the skin to interact properly with your Astral signature,” said Tane. “Otherwise, this is very different. I don’t think anything like it existed before now.”

  “The idea is truly genius!” Bastian exclaimed. “Mister Carver came to the conclusion that if a spell could be etched on one’s Astral signature, other anchors might serve as well. The gem is charged with Astral energy, but the only magecraft on the artifact itself is a few glyphs to hold the pin in place once inserted. With the machine, we were able to inscribe the rest of the spellwork Astrally, using the signature of the charged gem as an anchor! The mind boggles at the potential of this technique! It will be the next great revolution in artifice!”

  Tane ducked his head, embarrassed by the little man’s enthusiasm. “It’s just a natural extension of what Endo did. More importantly, in this case, it let us create a… a decoy channel, I suppose. You haven’t noticed anything different because there’s nothing to notice yet. It isn’t doing anything just now. But watch this.” He moved a few dials to summon up Kadka’s signature in silver on the machine’s display, and then he adjusted the focus just as he had with Indree. Again, the panel went blank. “You’re going to have to look closely—it will be faint.” After adjusting the instruments once more, he pulled a switch at the side of the panel.

  A very faint line of grey-white appeared where Kadka’s Astral presence had just been.

  Kadka’s eyes went wide, and she looked at Tane hopefully. “This… makes me mage? Like Indree?”

  Tane shook his head. “Sorry to disappoint, but even with the machine we couldn’t make that kind of connection on this side of the Astra. There’s no way to actually channel your will through it. It’s a fake. But it looks like the real thing, and when the siphon does its little test, this decoy channel will send a pulse of energy back. Just enough of an Astral signal to make you look like a mage. That’s what’s happening now. I set the machine to target you with that same false spell request, and the artifact is responding.” He flipped the switch again, and the faint thread disappeared. “No siphon, no response.”

  “So we just get everyone one of these and Endo’s siphon doesn’t work, right?” asked Tinga. “How long is it going to take to make enough?”

  “Ah. Well, as to that…” Bastian frowned. “Even if we were to share the diagrams for these artifacts with every manufactory available, it would take months to supply every magicless citizen with one. The logistics of distribution alone would prove as much a problem as supply. And those problems aside, I’m afraid it would not be enough.”

  “They’re temporary.” Indree made it a statement, not a question—she’d already worked it out for herself. “It takes power to manifest the channel, and to send a signal when the siphon asks for it. Not much if it was just once, but the siphon doesn’t go away afterward. As long as you’re in range, you’re going to have to keep proving you’ve got magic, and that means a constant drain. There aren’t enough gems in Thaless to keep one person safe in the long term, let alone thousands—never mind that it would also cost a fortune.”

  “Precisely,” said Bastian. “For the purposes of large scale production, we have been using my supply of peridots to keep expenses down—a fine gemstone for everyday artifice, but in this context it will last perhaps an hour. Less, I expect, as one nears the source of the siphon, where the intensity is greater. I have personally crafted several with diamonds, to prolong the protection, but I do not have a limitless supply, and it will not add more than another quarter hour under constant drain.”

  “We considered other options,” Tane said. “But to extend the effect city-wide would require an artifact too large and expensive to be practical. This isn’t the solution, is what I’m saying. It’s a useful tool, hopefully, but it doesn’t beat Endo. We still need to find a way to stop him.”

  “Right.” Indree nodded sharply. “Everything we’ve learned says the peace talks are going to be the target, and they start in the early morning. Which is when Durren said the Knights of the Emperor would get their signal to take to the streets. It’s nearly sunrise now. We’ve got maybe an hour before diplomats and leaders start boarding the Aquilon.”

  “Hobbier will do something there,” Kadka said. “Endo says in message that her work is too important to let us stop. Has to be because she can board this boat.”

  “You think she’s going to carry the siphon?” Indree asked, looking to Tane. “You’re the expert.”

  “Anyone could, but…” Tane nodded. “It makes sense. She’s got access to all the most important targets. They’d have to Astrally anchor the spell to her in advance to be activated later, so she could get aboard first, but that’s possible.”

  “Then they’ve probably already scribed it,” Tinga said. “The warehouse was empty, but the machine there had been used. And she’s not going to have time to go back and get it
done before the talks if she hasn’t already.”

  “I agree,” said Tane. “We’re probably too late to stop her there. I think our best chance is to get on that ship. We can’t trust the constabulary, and we know Endo has used his machine to animate people already, which means that even if we had access to someone who could stop the talks within the next hour, we’d have to waste time figuring out if we can trust them. But if we can get aboard, Lady Abena might listen. And if Oola Hobbier is the focus for the siphon, I’ll be able to talk to her. From what Kadka says, she might not be too fanatical to reach.”

  “She says nothing bad about magicless,” Kadka agreed with a nod. “And is not disgusted to talk to half-orc, or doesn’t show it. Most of them, is hard to miss. Way she talks about Endo, she does this for him, not for belief.”

  “There’s no way Endo feels the same.” Tane didn’t have any doubt on that count. “He cares about his magical empire more than anything or anyone else. Maybe I can convince her of that. And if not… we’ll be close enough to try to stop her.”

  “But how are you going to get on board?” Cestra put voice to the question on everyone’s mind. “Security is going to be impenetrable. You’re all fugitives. They’ll be looking for you. You can’t get there without being arrested.”

  Tane had been hoping someone else would offer a better plan, but he couldn’t put it off any longer. They were out of time. “I’m counting on it,” he said, and his fingers found the watch case in his waistcoat pocket. “I’m going to let them catch me.”

  Chapter Nine

  _____

  TANE BRACED HIMSELF for the protests, but even so they came fast and furious enough that he couldn’t pick the words apart. Indree shook her head, Tinga glared at him furiously, Bastian wrung his little hands in dismay, and all of them shouted over one another to tell him how wrong he was.

  All save Kadka.

  “Enough!” she roared, and it cut through the rest. None of them could out-shout a half-orc with a mind to be loud.