I’d learned some of the news on the hurried river barge trip north to Wilderhall from the Riverlands. Ganz had been overrun while Boval Castle still held, and the other fiefs in proximity had fallen almost as quickly. that the western barons of Stut, Horane, and Glanden had banded together almost 10,000 infantry and cavalry – mostly terrified armed peasantry – and met the main thrust of the Dead God’s legions at the ford of Bonser. Alshari nobles are suited toward killing bandits and each other, but they aren’t much use in real organized warfare. Now there were ten thousand headless bodies floating down the river. Rumors were spreading of long streams of captured peasants who were being taken behind the goblin lines, their fate unknown.
I hoped that they were just being enslaved, but I knew – personally – that the bloodthirsty Dead God had an appetite for human sacrifice.
The Duke of Alshar was calling his bannermen and assembling an army at Vorone (his own summer palace in the picturesque Wilderlands), but it was only fifteen-thousand strong and unlikely to get much bigger. Everyone west of the Piedee River was already fighting for their lives or fleeing for their lives. Huge mobs of their people were fleeing east in front of the gurvani onslaught. Goblins seemed to be attacking everywhere, with no warning, and the scattered local Alshari military was being overwhelmed. Bad news, no matter how you heard it. Everyone on the river had been sure Northern Alshar would fall without aid.
That’s why I had made the five-hundred mile journey upriver to Wilderhall, where the Duke of Castal had finally convened an emergency War Council. I felt compelled to convince them to do something about it, and let them know the real enemy we faced. I’d breathlessly told my story to the Ducal Court Mage’s secretary after the Lord Marshal’s staff wouldn’t listen to me, and the man (a mage himself), agreed that he would pass this on to Master Dunselen and through him to the Duke, himself. I expected to be hauled before the throne to tell my tale within the hour.
Only they added me to a list and kept me waiting for two days in a crowded part of the castle called the Tower of Honor. I supposed bedbugs are an honor. I was stuck in a common room with some landless knights, some poor barons visiting court, and some high-born sergeants who were looking to pick up some mercenary work. I’d have much rather quartered in one of the comfortable inns in Wilderhall Town. But I endured castle life because I couldn’t leave without completing my mission.
Despite the reports of carnage, this Council – nearly a month after the first reports of trouble came in – was the first tangible sign that the lords of Castal were taking notice of the invasion of Alshar. When half of the neighboring Duchy gets swallowed up virtually overnight, you’d think it would attract more attention.
I wasn’t the only one who thought that, either. In the brief time I’d been loitering around Wilderhall I’d heard rumors of a few adamant voices demanding that the crisis be dealt with. Count Angrial, the Ducal Envoy from Alshar had spent most of that time literally screaming for assistance from Castal, from what I was able to pick up from the castellans at the Tower of Honor.
Apparently his Grace, Duke Lenguin of Alshar had not been pleased when he woke up one day and found the northern half of his realm in the hands of genocidal nonhumans, and he wanted help from his fellow duke and brother-in-law – only not too much help, lest the northern fiefs follow Gilmora under Castal’s banner. So I knew that the Duke of Castal knew about the goblin invasion. But until I showed up to bring word of the magical, maniacal mind behind the hordes, he didn’t know about the Dead God who was behind the invasion.
I fumed as I made King Kamalaven’s sword grow bright and fluffy and pink, like a rabbit’s ear, warping the color of the fibers in the tapestry with my spell. My ancestors weren’t particularly adept at anything but swordplay and horses. You’d think that Kamalaven’s direct descendent would be ecstatic about the chance to slay a bunch of goblins. Plenty of other dukes had been. That was where our present dilemma began.
Goblins had been a problem in the past. Most of Alshar had been sparsely occupied by the nocturnal hunters politely known as “mountain folk” before the Duchies expanded. Over a century ago the last major gurvani tribes had been pushed back into the Minden range, and the ancient gurvani power centers had been destroyed by the same short-sighted barbarians who toppled the Magocracy. For a hundred years it had looked like the goblins had simply retreated, accepting defeat. Most people in the Duchies thought of them as a harmless mountain race that preferred to hunt the stony highlands, leaving the more fertile lowlands for us to settle and rule. Of course there was more to it than that, but that’s what everyone had believed.
Everyone except the goblins. They had found a secret refuge in deep mines and ancient caverns deep in the Mindens, where they husbanded their resentment and plotted their revenge in exile. They secretly built up their numbers, armed them well, prepared for their revenge over the course of a century, and, of course, they had raised the Dead God from the dead.
He was hateful. He was powerful. And he was smart. Sharuel had re-structured the gurvani society so that large groups of warriors could work together without intra-society rivalries getting in the way, and that paved the way for empire-building. I had interrogated one of the goblin prisoners, and he had told me the tale. Sharuel’s will was enforced among his people by a fanatically-devoted elite warrior’s society and the scary-looking special shamans who led the new warbands. And Shereul knew what each of them was thinking all the time . . . because each shaman had a witchstone. Irionite.
Irionite was the third big problem we faced. Not only had the Dead God returned from where we had left him (dead, decapitated, head on a spike) he had brought presents. A by-product of his rebirth was hundreds of thumbnail-sized shards of irionite. I have no idea how they did it, but the gurvani shamans “pickled” his head in heavily-enchanted kirsieth sap, or however it was you “made” irionite, until it was fully encased in the amber. When the severed head “awakened” under their spells, it became a kind of super-shaman, a powerful entity whose very thoughts became spells. A near-divine being with a genocidal thirst for vengeance against humanity. A ready-made evil dark lord. And the shards from his sphere were pebbles of amazing power.
Each shard was, by itself, incredibly powerful. The shamans’ magical system was crude, unsophisticated, and not geared toward cooperative spells, but there were a lot of them and they were terribly enthusiastic. That counts for a lot in magic. With even the smallest amount of irionite, enthusiasm counts for orders of magnitude more than technique. Our best warmagi couldn’t stand against the crudest country bumpkin of a shaman, if the goblin had a witchstone in his claw and the warmagi didn’t.
Okay, I did. But I got lucky.
I had taken my witchstone from the severed hand of the first shaman into Boval Vale, and I had collected plenty more in action during the long weeks of the siege. I had cleansed them of Shereul’s taint, given them into the hands of a small group of mercenary warmagi who had come to our rescue, and now those magical hellions were strutting around Alshar like newly-minted demigods.
Illegal demigods. Technically, no one was supposed to have irionite. It had been so rare for so long that it was strictly controlled by the Royal Censorate of Magic, and by “controlled” I mean “banned.” The Censorate was the pan-Ducal agency responsible for the regulation of magic and magi, to keep us from rising up against the warrior class, as in the tapestry. As of now the Censorate was obsolete, but didn’t realize it yet. Sharuel was far too much for them to deal with. This wasn’t an isolated case of a sliver of witchstone in the hands of a power-crazed wizard. This problem was far beyond the scope the institution was designed to accommodate.
But somehow I didn’t think they’d see it that way. The Censorate is made up of the wizards who watch other wizards. They oversee the training and certification of magi, the regulation of the use of magic, and the enforcement of the Bans. The Censor General has a habit of recruiting young, idealistic and not terribly bright magi fresh out
of school or apprenticeship. And these recruits are terribly incorruptible. They were empowered to order the death penalty, at their discretion, to protect the realm. Their black-and-white checkered cloaks struck fear into the hearts of all magi, certified and uncertified alike. They are, by definition, institutionally conservative. And they were not likely to give me a free pass for my stone (and, by extension, me), which was completely indispensable to the war effort, whether anyone realized that or not.
I continued to brood impatiently on that while I magically defaced the tapestry. I was satisfied with Kamalaven’s bunny-ear sword. So I decided to give Duke Bimin a really comical set of breasts. The “old me” wouldn’t have dared take such liberties, but facing death, destruction, and fatherhood will change a man. I’d started to develop a cocky attitude, as I took stock of my value and gave Bimin hairy nipples.
Yes, Irionite was the third problem. Irionite and the Censorate. And that would have to change.
Completely indispensable. I had the sphere, the only one who could sever the attachment between the stone and Sharuel. You wanted a powerful magical artifact without a sinister dark lord looking over your shoulder? You come to me. And you would want that artifact, regardless of silly custom, because without it you’re another sacrifice waiting to happen, and an archaic custom that damaging would have to be overcome, if we were to survive.
Censorate be damned, this was war, genocidal war, and the Bans were a hindrance. It might have been rebellious, but my faith in the established order was pretty much shaken after Boval Vale, and I saw myself on a mission of a higher cause than merely evading the Ducal Censorate. Of course, that was an easy attitude to take when you were a multiple offender.
I’d already severed the link in nearly thirty stones before I’d handed them over to responsible warmagi. That was, conservatively, thirty death-sentences the Censorate could levy on my head for the charge of empowering the magi – without the Censorate, it was thought, magi would run drunk with power and enslave everyone they could. But every mage I gave a stone to had sworn a personal oath to follow my lead in such things. And most of them had been my friends to begin with. The Censorate would not see it that way.
So I had powerful enemies, both inside the Duchies and out, but I also had some powerful allies. I had done a credible job defending Boval Vale and leading the warmagi on guerrilla raids against the goblins, and they had developed some measure of loyalty to me, personally. A lot of them had been comrades in the Farisan Campaign with me, which helped, I guess. They did what I told them to, more or less. Each one was as powerful as an army of ten-thousand, theoretically, and they all looked to me. Such power had not been put in one place since the ancient days.
Not bad for a common-born baker’s son. I had friends. Powerful friends. If that made me cocky, well, today I needed to be a little cocky. I had to march into that chamber – eventually – and convince the most powerful man in the realm to do what I told him to do, and that was our only hope.
So fuck the tapestry. They could get another one. They were making me wait, after already waiting weeks, and that was making me cranky.
I stopped short of giving Bimin a vagina. That might be going too far, and I realized that the power of the stone was making me less mindful of such things. When you have incredible power, it’s hard to be intimidated by a man on a throne, much less one in a tapestry. But if I came off as belligerent, that wouldn’t help my case, either. I’m no diplomat, but I consciously made myself stop vandalizing and try to see things from the Duke’s perspective. Maybe it would give me some insight, I reasoned.
Duke Rard was in a difficult position. He could raise a mighty army (Castal is twice and a half again as big as Alshar, population-wise, and far more martial) and invade Castal to meet the gurvani head-on, but that would leave his lands largely undefended and honestly the outcome of such a counter-invasion, without the benefit of advanced magics, was severely in doubt.
Plus there was the time, effort and money needed to recruit, feed, and house that army. The last time such a mustering had been done was five years ago, against the Mad Mage of Farise. That had taken two years to organize, had been costly enough to raise taxes, and had left a long trail of empty estates and dynastic disputes behind that Rard was still trying to sort through. I could see how planning a war on such short notice might be a headache.
The call to his vassals had gone out before I’d arrived, but it takes time to raise even a small army in a feudal society. I’d seen the yellow war flag flying over every castle I crossed up the river, and they should be over every castle in Castal by now. The banner flew from Wilderhall, too, just under the Antlers-and-Roses device of the Duchy. Theoretically that should call the Duke’s bannermen to arms and suspend individual wars between estates until after the crisis. Not everyone was paying attention, yet (the harvest seemed to preoccupy most of the lords and their petty vassals) but it was starting to dawn on at least a few nobles that the trouble “somewhere in the West” was heading this way.
Even if Rard could raise a small army relatively quickly and rush it to his frontier that was about the only thing he could do. There wasn’t much in the way of natural defenses between the two duchies to slow them down, either. If Duke Rard didn’t raise an army to oppose them, the gurvani hordes could cross devastated Alshar at will and attack Castal’s heartland.
So I guessed I could see why he wasn’t being more decisive. Perhaps Duke Rard had the manpower to stop the gurvani cold at the frontier, but that would be only half the battle and he didn’t know it yet. With the shamans throwing around hot magical death and other distractions, it would take an elite magical corps just to contain their fury and counter their advantages in the field.
The Duchy had a magical corps, of course – I’d been a part of it for two long years in Farise – but none of them had witchstones, and that put them at a serious disadvantage. And the thirty or so warmagi who did have witchstones were no longer officially under his control. They had all been released after the Farisian Campaign and were now working as free agents, magical mercenaries.
That is, they worked for me. Sir Indispensable.
I was just starting to add a few subtle gin-blossoms to the face of Kamalaven’s High Priest of Huin the War God (I forget the historical figure’s name) when I was finally – finally! – summoned before the Council of Castal.
* * *
“The Council is ready for you now, Master Minalan,” the small, effeminate-looking secretarial page said, approaching almost silently on his silken slippers.
I didn’t mention the long wait, although I’m certain he would have been sympathetic – I believe that was the entirety of his job, to be sympathetic. He’d sympathetically told me for two days that the Council was anxiously awaiting my report, and that it would be “just a few more hours, milord.” I wanted to shout and scream in frustration and grunt and blow a hole in the side of the castle when he brought the summons. Instead, I just got up and followed him, clutching my pretty pebble in one hand and casting one last glance over my shoulder at the defaced tapestry, wondering when someone would notice.
I was escorted past armored guards with crossed halberds through an elaborately carved doorway, into the inner hall – a large room filled with people, with a huge, ornate wooden table in the middle of it. There were at least a score of seats around the table, and at least three seats behind each of those seats, and it was more than half-covered with parchments and maps.
Young pages skittered around bringing papers and parchments from the far sides of the table. The fading afternoon sunlight that peered through the western windows joined a chandelier of beeswax candles to illuminate the scene, and I was able to pick out some of the attendees by sight.
The foremost, of course, was Duke Rard, a man well into his fifties, stately, graceful, with a short golden beard streaked with silver. A large deerskin map of Castal and Alshar was before him, and his eyes looked tired and worn as he studied it. I could take one look at
his face and knew the severity of the crisis was not lost on him. He wore a little green cap-of-maintenance under a golden coronet, and a dark green and yellow velvet jacket cut in a military style. There were two burly guardsmen with swords and halberds standing behind him, and behind them was his personal bodyguard of gentlemen, four or five noble men-at-arms just hanging around waiting for orders. He cast his eyes around this way and that toward his advisors as they spoke.
I recognized Count Sago, the new Lord Marshal, who sat to the left of the Duke from seeing him in command back in Farise. Sago was a short, dark man with a severe expression, but he was a coldblooded and valiant warrior by all accounts. It was widely speculated that he got the position after his predecessor became the Regent of Farise by threatening a duel to the death for any other man who vied for it. He was a bit ruthless for my tastes, but an intelligent and capable soldier. He had led the first beach assault on Farise, in which his brutality played a role that won him the post. A bodyguard in full plate stood behind him holding the ornate Sword Of Office.
I knew Count Kindine, the Prime Minister who was seated to the Duke’s right, because he never went anywhere without a half-dozen pages and clerks buzzing around him and he made quite an impression at Wilderhall. Kindine was an older man, in his seventies, a long gray beard resting on his rich red satin jacket. He had a huge stack of parchments and three busy scribes arrayed at a desk behind his chair, all scribbling away furiously.
The Spellmonger Series: Book 02 - Warmage Page 4