by Dante King
Ink Mage (Book 1)
Dante King
Copyright © 2020 by Dante King
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover illustration by Czepta Gold @ http://thecoverforge.com
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
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About the Author
Chapter One
The wooden wheels of the two open wagons creaked as they trundled along the wide and rugged forest road. On each side, the rough, broad highway was flanked by a dense wall of untamed forest. Tall pines loomed over low, gnarled acacias and nameless thorny shrubs, bent and twisted by the endless winds of the Kingdom’s north.
Pain thudded dully though my back and side as the awkward motion of the ox-drawn wagon bashed me against the wooden planking. Again. My hands were numb from the ropes that bound them, and the ropes at my ankles chafed when I tried to move. Thankfully, the bonds weren’t biting into the skin on my wrists, so my tattoo wouldn’t be damaged. It depicted a small flame. Knifing through the flame was a spear that reached halfway up my forearm. I had drawn the tattoo myself on a drunken night with my girlfriend, Katlyn, whom I feared I would never see again.
I shuffled to one side and tried to sit up straighter. My lower back ached abominably, and I grimaced as I straightened up and looked around. I must have dozed off. This wagon ride seemed to have lasted an eternity. Days had blended into each other until I could not have said how long it had been since that horrible day when I had been sold into slavery by those I had considered my friends and neighbors.
Had a week passed? Two? All I knew was that both landscape and weather had become wilder as we climbed relentlessly up, away from the fertile farmlands around Aranor and into the northern regions. Day by day, the bumpy wagons made their plodding way northward toward the mountains.
“Could you make it any bumpier?” snarled Boris, to the wagon driver. The driver growled wordlessly back at him and muttered curses as he whipped the twin oxen.
Boris was my guard, a thickset, dull-witted trollman dressed in stinking, badly cured wolf hides. He seemed uninterested in me for the moment, so I took my chance to take a look at the beautiful blonde woman who sat opposite me. She had been in the wagon for only two days. Like me, her wrists and her ankles were bound with coarse cords. For most of the journey, she had sat with her knees drawn close to her chest. Fear was in her eyes.
This woman wore high, well-made brown leather boots that had seen some serious wear. Her long, graceful legs were clad in tight leggings of green linen, and she wore a loose brown tunic that bared her forearms, her shoulders, and the top of the generous swell of her breasts. Her skin was very pale, as if she was not used to spending time outdoors. A tumble of blonde curls fell past her pale shoulders. She looked cold as well as frightened.
When these trollman slave traders had picked her up, I had already been in the back of their wagon for long enough that I had begun to lose track of time. She’d been walking up the road alone, wearing a rich cloak of white fur with a deep hood, and carrying a heavy, leather-bound book open in her hands. As we drew parallel with her, she closed her book and glanced up, pushing her hood back to reveal her pretty, lightly freckled face and a somewhat naive smile.
“Pardon me,” she had said, “but is this the right road to Brightwater town?”
Boris and the driver had conferred for a moment, and the driver had nodded his head. Without a word, Boris leaped from the wagon, grabbed the woman, and hauled her up into the wagon. Her book had fallen to the ground, and Boris, seeing that it looked valuable, had grabbed it and flung it unceremoniously into the wagon beside her. When he pulled her cloak off her back and used it to cushion his own backside, she glared angrily at him, but did not dare protest.
I was grateful for her company, even if we weren’t allowed to speak with each other. That was not for a lack of trying, either; I had attempted to ask her name, but Boris had delivered a swift back-hander across my cheek.
The sting of that strike had made me want to break free and kill Boris, but I was sorely outnumbered. There was only Boris and the driver in this wagon, but there was another wagon coming along behind ours, and it contained four more slavers. Six to one odds weren’t great, and I doubted the blonde would be able to contribute much in a fight.
For all that, I was curious about her. She was the most interesting thing that had happened since I’d been forced to start this journey, and she was certainly better to look at than the slavers. I checked her out as much as I could.
From the obvious quality of her garments, I figured she had to be a noble of some kind. I wondered if she was one of the Arcanists, the powerful magic-users who operated as judicial enforcers, tax collectors, and sometimes warlords and militia leaders in the towns and cities of the Kingdom. That didn’t hold up though; her book looked magical, but if she was an Arcanist, these slavers would never have dared to grab her like they had. And no way would she have allowed herself to be taken without a fight.
I did catch her staring at me a couple of times, from which I guessed that she might be curious about me as well. She flashed me a cute, gap-toothed smile when I met her eyes. I knew I was rather built after hard work on the farm, and not so bad looking, if the attention I got from the ladies back in Aranor was anything to go by.
“William,” my foster-father used to say to me, “what a young man like you needs to make him strong is good food and honest work. I’ll make sure you get plenty of both, and when the time comes the women won’t be able to resist you.” By the looks my fellow captive gave me, I guessed he was right.
“Going to fetch a high price for you two,” Boris said, interrupting my thoughts. “Ain’t delivered Elemental Sensitives to the mines for a good while now. And two at a time? The gods really have blessed us.”
“You are a lucky asshole, then, aren’t you?” I muttered.
“What was that?”
I looked away, and Boris grunted and went back to picking at his nails with my dagger. The bastard. That dagger was my most prized possession. When I’d been sold to these Trollmen, they had looted everything I’d been carrying. Not much, to be sure, but none of it was as precious to me as that dagger. That had been a gift from Gregory, my foster-father, the man who had raised me for as long as I could remember. It was a very unusual item, not an edged weapon like other knives, but a stiletto with a round, tapering blade, about eight inches long from its base to its needle-thin point and made from a single piece of some dark metal. The crossguard was elaborately curled, more decorative than practical. Strangest of all, the cruelly sharp tip was actually hollow.
“It’s a weapon for a brawler, not a gentleman,” I remembered Gregory saying to me as he handed it over on my 18th bir
thday, “so it’s just as well you are no gentleman!” I tried more than once to wheedle more information about it from Gregory, but he would just shake his head. “It belongs to you, William. Let that be enough for now.”
All this detail was lost on the squat figure of trollman Boris the slave trader, however. Having lost interest in cleaning his nails with it, he began to use the fine tip to try to dislodge something stuck between his teeth. The wagon jounced again, and he hastily pulled the dagger away from his mouth, glaring at me as if daring me to laugh.
“Two Elemental Sensitives,” he said again, shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe his luck. “You two will be the making of me this trip. I’ve heard that some of the Beasts have escaped from the mines recently and been seen roaming the forests around Brightwater. Hell, we should try to get you to locate some of them on the way. If you could find us a couple of Beasts, we could kill them and harvest the Cores. Make even more money!”
“Shaddup!” yelled the driver. “Stop talking to the slaves, you fool. There’ll be no bloody stopping until we reach the mountains. There’s no Beasts outside the mines, you idiot, that’s crazy talk. Everyone knows that Beasts can’t leave the mines. That’s the whole bloody point.”
“It’s just what I heard,” said Boris defensively, then lapsed into surly silence.
The woman had been following the conversation with interest, and had almost seemed about to say something, but thought the better of it. She glanced at me under her eyelashes, and I raised my eyebrows at her. So, she was an Elemental Sensitive as well! I didn’t know how the trollmen could be so certain, but I didn’t doubt that they had some way of being sure.
The folk who operated the slave caravans between the cities and the northern Beast Mines were not really men at all, but a lower breed of troll, smaller and more cunning than their monstrous cousins, and much more human-like in their looks and behavior. They were not given to subterfuge or trickery. If they said this woman was an Elemental Sensitive, like me, I had no doubt that she was. Stupid the trollmen may be, but they knew their business.
Boris and the driver of our wagon seemed to be the leaders of this group, and they were ecstatic with their haul. I was sure it was true that they would fetch a high price for myself and the woman when they transported us to the Beast Mines. We were Elemental Sensitives, which meant that we could detect the presence of certain Elemental Beasts. These creatures contained special orbs with magical ink that could be used to enchant weapons and armor with spells.
Beast Cores were the foundation of the magic that was used in the Kingdom. Cores were highly prized, as were the Sensitives who could be used to locate them. Those who could use the items enchanted from the Cores were known as Mages, the most powerful of which would join the cohort of Arcanists at Astros. Mages, almost unanimously, were selected from noble stock.
Which counted me out. Commoner I might be, but I was something beyond that. For better or worse, I was Sensitive—if there was a Beast Core in the vicinity, I could sense it—but nothing more. I’d never seen a Beast before, and I’d only ever touched a single Core.
It was Gregory, my foster-father, who had taught me that I was an Elemental Sensitive. My ability made me very valuable to the slave traders who roamed the Kingdom, so Gregory had always tried to keep me safe from being captured and sold. Technically, I was a slave and Gregory owned me, but he always treated me like a son. I thought of him as a father, and he thought of me as his son. Gregory died only weeks ago. A cough took him, and his end was swift and merciless.
We lived in Lowvale, a village on the edges of the vast, worked farmlands that surrounded the southern city of Aranor. Slave trader caravans regularly passed through our village on their way north from the great markets of Aranor. When Boris and his companions had driven their empty wagons through my village a week after Gregory’s sudden end, I realized just how much my foster-father’s presence had sheltered me. It turned out that some of my neighbors knew about my Elemental Sensitivity and only kept quiet about it for fear of Gregory’s wrath. I was worth a lot of money, and Boris’s gang had paid my neighbors well for me. My neighbors were apologetic, and I couldn’t really blame them; slavery was an accepted part of life, and they were all very poor.
“It’s a pity we can’t sell you damaged,” Boris said to the blonde woman. I looked up. The tone of his voice was ugly. These trollmen may not have been wholly human, but they certainly retained some of the baser instincts of men. I could see that my pretty companion was trying to look unconcerned, but there was fear in her eyes.
Boris gave a grunting laugh and moved a bit closer to the woman. He had put my knife down, leaving it on the wooden seat at the far end of the wagon. The trollman’s stubby tongue came out to lick his flat lips, and he looked at me to make sure I was watching.
In my mind, I almost heard my foster-father’s voice speaking words from long ago. “You may be just a simple farmer, William, but you’re a man, and it’s the duty of any man to treat women well, and to defend them if they are threatened.”
Those were words which I had taken to heart. Fury boiled in my stomach, and I was ready to pounce on the trollman and tear into him with my teeth if he looked like he was going to molest the woman. For the moment, however, he simply contented himself with leering.
As much as I hated to admit it, I couldn’t see any way out of this predicament. I’d always been able to get out of scrapes when I was running rough with the young thieves in Aranor, but this time it looked like there’d be no escape. During the earlier parts of my journey, I had been overcome with lethargy and hopelessness at my situation, but now, looking at the woman across from me, my desire to escape became stronger.
I wanted to escape, and I wanted to escape with her. She didn’t deserve to be mixed up in all of this.
I felt rage building up inside me. Here I was, helplessly forced to watch as the slavers abducted and sold this poor woman who simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I could feel the heat of my anger actually making my palms sweaty.
“Maybe I could just have a taste,” Boris muttered. He was salivating, and there was a bit of a bulge in his grubby leather pants.
Boris glanced slyly at the driver, as if to make sure he wasn’t looking, but we had hit a smoother bit of road which wound back and forth up a slope, and the driver seemed to be dozing over the oxen’s reins. Then Boris glanced behind us. The other wagon was some distance off, and a sharp bend in the road hid it from view.
Satisfied that none of his companions were watching him, Boris came to sit alongside the woman. She struggled to put some distance between herself and him, but there was nowhere for her to go. He laughed and extended one grubby hand toward her chest.
I could feel my body getting hotter and my hands getting sweatier. Out of nowhere, I smelled an acrid scent, almost like hair burning. My back was starting to get really hot where it was leaning against my tied-up hands. I turned my head and looked back as far as I could. In the cold, clear air, there was a trickle of smoke. It was coming from my hands. Huh? What the fuck was going on? I felt lightheaded. Was it just dehydration and lack of food? The slavers were not exactly generous with the rations.
I reached my fingers back to touch the ropes. The smell of burning was stronger, and I could hear a crackling sound. As the sensation of heat grew more intense, I spread my hands and felt the ropes give. My head was spinning; I felt almost drunk with it. What was this? Whatever it was, it felt right. I pushed again and felt the ropes fall away.
At the same moment, Boris reached his grubby hands out to grab a fistful of my fellow prisoner’s ample breasts. She let out a small cry of disgust and fear and tried unsuccessfully to pull away. My anger bubbled over.
My feet were tied together, but my hands were free. I glanced about. My pointed dagger was lying unattended on the wooden bench at the far end of the wagon where Boris had been sitting. The wagon driver dozed over the reins, and for the moment Boris was still intent upo
n forcing himself on the woman.
I lunged toward the dagger, swiped it up in my left hand, then launched myself at Boris. The feeling of lightheadedness was gone, leaving in its wake a sense of extreme clarity. I could see every detail of the scene, and my movements felt amazingly accurate. Boris turned his face to me, and I had a chance to see his startled eyes up close as I punched the brutal steel tip of the dagger twice into the side of his neck.
My first blow punctured his windpipe, and my second blow punctured his jugular and let rip a gout of foul-smelling dark blood into the crisp forest air. His stubby hands flailed at me, clawing at my face and trying to find a grip on my throat. Blood choked his mouth and nose.
He was dying, but I switched my dagger into my right hand and put it through his eye and deep into the brain to finish the job.
“Fuck you, Boris,” I growled as the wreck of the trollman slumped to the floor of the wagon.
In my haste to kill Boris, I’d nearly forgotten the woman. She was still seated, pushed as far back on her bench as it was possible to be. Her mouth was open as she stared at what had just happened. Horror and relief mingled in her beautiful face. Ice-blue eyes met my gaze, and she took a breath as if about to speak.
I raised a finger to my lips and glanced at the wagon driver. Her gaze followed mine, and she nodded. I had no way of knowing when the driver might wake up from his doze, or when the other wagon might come into view behind us.
Crouching down in the wagon, I took a deep breath and gripped the ropes at my feet with my left hand. My right hand still held the dagger, but its rounded edge and sharp point would not be much use for severing cords. I tried not to think too hard about what I was going to try, or about what would happen if it didn’t work.