“Char, stay quiet. Not safe. I will keep the funny monk alive.” Paxala nudged my mind with hers, and I tumbled back into my body with a feeling like waking, startled, from a deep sleep. It was something like the hypnotism, I realized, some entrancing connection between minds, and I wondered if that was where the Abbot himself learned the technique…
“Char? On your feet!” Ansall barked, looking at me skeptically. I had the terrible sensation that he might be able to see through my eyes and into my mind, and observe the dragon hidden there.
“Yes, sire.” I nodded, “Where do you want the candles, sire?” I distracted the peering old Abbot, who waved disgruntledly that I should stand them into a circle around us.
Soon enough, all of the Mage students had joined us, as well as a very few of the returning monks. I noticed that the Abbot didn’t refer to any of them as Draconis like Jodreth was, and I suspected that even these older monks might have a touch of magic, but were not full Mages either. Apart from Ansall, we had no idea what was happening or what the Abbot intended. Whatever this was about to be, I didn’t like it and I didn’t want any part of it – but the monks were all around me, and behind me. I tried to remember Paxala in my mind’s eye, and to remember the clear and fresh mountain air... Anything to keep the Abbot out of my head.
The Abbot arranged us into a circle in two ranks, the smaller students on the inside, the taller and older monks on the outside. Next, he had the monks stretched out their right hand to lay upon the right shoulder of those in front, like we were the petals of a giant flower, or spokes on a wheel. We radiated out around the standing candles and the fire bracket, with the Abbot on the very inside.
“Now, students? Please attempt to keep your minds pure, and you minds still,” the Abbot said. “This will be your very first introduction to channeling the energy of battle magic, and you will have to follow my every command, you understand me?”
“Yes, your grace,” we all murmured or nodded, and the chanting began.
I didn’t speak the words at first, only mouthing them so as not to add my will to theirs. I didn’t want magic if it meant warfare and blood, but I felt myself growing heavy, and my eyes feeling sleepy once more.
No! I tried to fight it, but the hypnotic drone was too strong. The effect of the Abbot’s voice was amplified by all of the monks here. I could feel my mind starting to slip…
Pax!
The monks started muttering, and then murmuring words that my awake mind did not recognize. Words of a charm that us student shads not been taught yet.
“Evoka Bellos! Evoka Stil! Evoka Bellos, Evoka Stil!” The chanting in my ear was a low drone, and one that set the hairs on the back of my neck rising. As it continued, the Abbot waved his hands to the monks and students, as if conducting them to greater and greater efforts. Soon the chanting started to take on a constant, moaning rhythm all of its own, blocking out the sound of the alarmed dragons outside or the march and rush of the besieged knights and students.
The chanting swelled and grew around us, and I found myself swaying, my mind curiously blank and dreamlike, as the chanting swirled and rose, surrounding us all, rising, and enfolding us.
I don’t know how long we were there chanting, but the entire lower half of my body went numb as the four words repeated again and again, again and again. Was it my eyes, or was the sky starting to grow darker. I wondered, as the Abbot lifted a hand with clawed-like fingers into the air. In my strange, sleepy state I couldn’t tell if the Abbot was making the light change, or if it was just my imagination.
“Now, students…” he called as the chanting bombarded us. “I want you to think of the most terrible storm that you have ever been in, do you understand? A mighty, terrible storm like no other.” The Abbot excitedly flung incense into the fire, only adding to my lightheadedness. I couldn’t concentrate– and neither did I want to– on any storm, so instead I reached out for my dragon.
Paxala? I thought to her, as the circle groaned and shouted.
“…” I felt a buzzing between my eyes, like I could almost hear the dragon, but that she couldn’t reach me through this strange storm-ritual.
PAXALA! I thought in alarm, remembering the storm of her wings as she flew…
“Char.” The voice of the Crimson Red sounded faint. “The funny monk is safe…” I could just make out her words, as suddenly from high above Mount Hammal there was a peal of thunder.
“Yes!” the Abbot shouted, cawing with laughter as around us great drops of rain started to fall. When I looked up, dark clouds were boiling down from the north and across from the west. My mother’s people had a name for those types of clouds. Dread-drear, they called them, because whenever you saw those chalk grey and fierce black lowering clouds coming for you, then you knew that you had to seek cover quickly because they would unleash mayhem and destruction.
The Abbot was still laughing, as the sky above him flickered with lightning, and it raced towards the east, and rising sun.
“The parley has returned!” Someone at the gate shouted, and the storm began in earnest.
Chapter 26
The Secrets of the Tower
The first hands to seize me after the gate monks let me in were those of the Quartermaster Greer, shaking me so much that I dropped the white flag.
“You have failed, haven’t you?” he said. “Your brothers are still there. Did you even try to negotiate?”
“Yes, of course,” I was saying, as the Quartermaster shook me once more. “But they won’t go, not unless…”
“Maybe if we show them just exactly what will happen to a Torvald that tries to defy us,” the Quartermaster raised his leather crop, before a meaty hand closed around it, squeezing the man’s wrist in whit-scarred fingers.
“I’ll not have my boys beaten, Quartermaster.” It was Monk Feodor, glowering at the Quartermaster before releasing him. “Go back to provisioning the monastery, and leave the defenses to me, if you please.”
The thin man rubbed his wrist with a sneer, but turned away all the same, hurrying towards a circle of black-clad, chanting monks in the center of the practice ground. I caught a glimpse of Char’s snow-white hair gleaming from the middle of the gaggle.
“What are they doing?” I said in alarm.
“Never mind that. Tell me what happened, and get some hot food into you.” The monk shoved a clay bowl of something warm and nourishing; a type of stew with oats and grains in a thick liquor. I told him everything that had happened – including the fact that my brothers thought that the monastery had poisoned my father, which is why they were here in the first place.
“Revenge?” Feodor groaned. “If it were as simple as bargaining for the prince’s life then we might have a chance, but if its revenge they are after then they won’t be happy until we’re really hurting,” he said gloomily. “Look, child – there is no way to get out of this cleanly. I was hoping that there was, but from what you say there won’t be. There is a way out, through the Kitchen Gardens. When the time comes, I want you to gather as many of the students as you can and lead them out across the mountain, can you do that?”
I nodded, thinking of Char, and Dorf, and my other friends here. What has it come to, having to flee my own brothers?
“But thank you as well, Torvald, for coming back to warn us,” Feodor said. “I am sure that with your brothers down there you didn’t have to.”
I know, I thought. But there was Paxala here, and Char, and Dorf and Sigrid and Maxal. I had taken an oath to keep Paxala safe, and I couldn’t just abandon them all so easily.
Oh, Rik would kill me as soon as look at me anyway, and Rubin might just let him. “What’s right is right,” I said with a shrug. “How can I leave my friends here to die?” At the hands of my own brothers as well, I thought.
There was a flash and a peal of thunder, as the dark sky boiled heavier with rain and thunder clouds. An ugly black cloud had been spreading low and fast from the north, and it brought with it a storm the like of
which I had only rarely seen.
“Great,” Feodor muttered. “That’s all that we need.” Another flash of lightning illuminated his face on the side of the white scars, making him appear half dragon himself. “Go on.” He pointed me towards the nearest storerooms. “Get out of sight before the Abbot sees you.”
I wanted to ask Feodor why he didn’t flee now, through the gate at the back of the Kitchen Gardens – but he was already turning to bark orders at the nearest monks.
“Get that door braced! I want stands of arrows and spears up here, behind the wall!” he shouted, his mind already focused on the coming battle. “Two on guard, two off! Rotate as soon as you get too tired to fire your bow.”
The rain fell in a fat, heavy cascade all around, turning the usually dry practice ground into a muddy hole in practically minutes. Students ran back and forth, some looking panicked, others looking fierce. It was only the prince’s knights, sheltering by the walls and readying their weapons who didn’t look worried. There must be a couple hundred knights and I had told Feodor that we were facing how many – a thousand? Two thousand? I wished I had paid more attention now to my father’s lectures about troop numbers and trained fighters. Did they include the large number of villagers who acted as militia as well?
Ten to one odds, I thought, remembering my father’s training. That was ridiculous. Who could beat that? But we are in a fortified castle-like building, on top of a mountain. I remembered my father saying something about how you had to have at least double the number of defenders if you wanted to lay siege to a place – or had it been triple? Or ten times the number?
I huddled under the eaves of the nearest storehouse, peering into the rainstorm to see if I could get to Char and the other chanters. It was hopeless. Either way, good people were going to die. Either my friends up here in the monastery, or people like the chief scout Rudie whom I had known my entire life.
The drummers of the Sons of Torvald began their steady beat, and the wall guards shouted in response. “They’re coming! They’re climbing the mountain!”
I have to find Char, I thought from my place in the dark of the storeroom, looking out. The war drums were deafening now, matched almost by the panicked blasting of the dragon pipes, and the shrieks of the alarmed dragons near the crater. It was getting hard to even stand in the storm that whipped across the mountaintop, but the storm benefited the monastery by the fact that my brothers’ army could not hold a strong line. The Draconis Order wall guards shouted their news to those below. “The front ranks are falling!” or “They cannot move forward!” or “They are being washed downhill!”
“Archers, ready!” Feodor shouted, and I felt a moment of indecision. No! How could he shoot them? Those fighters outside were just like him, men and women raised to do their job, and doing it for their masters. But of course, should Feodor do nothing, it might be his own life that was lost, or those of people he cared for.
Lightning crackled above, bracketing across the low skies, illuminating the walls –
In that flash, I saw a group of figures standing atop the wall. The Abbot, with arms raised into the air, and surrounding him were dark-clad monks and students, apart from one with flashing white hair. Char! She was there with the other Mage-students and trainees. That meant Maxal Ganna must be up there too. But what were they doing? The monks and students swayed like ferns in a forest around the tall, crooked tree that was the Abbot, as he brought his hands down in front of him…
The ground rumbled, and the sky flashed once more, and the darkness from the clouds seemed to swirl down in front of the Abbot, as if he were summoning it. Could he do that? Was he so powerful as to control storms?
The dark vortex of cloud grew faster and faster, spinning in a tight funnel as I watched. The students swayed and chanted faster, matching the speed of the tornado, and the Abbot’s shoulders shook as he sought to control it. The funnel cloud writhed in the air in front of him, twisting and jerking one way and then the other, as he pulled his hands further, and it descended past the line of the walls and where I could no longer see.
Shouts and screams rose from outside the walls and I imagined the twister wreaking havoc amongst my brothers’ forces, throwing their fragile bodies this way and that like straw dollies.
Pheet. Pheeet-Pheeet! The sound of arrows being released filled my ears, so many arrows and so close I could hear them above the storm– only they weren’t the arrows of Feodor’s guarding monks, but those of the hundreds of Torvald archers, creeping up behind the front ranks, firing wildly into the storm. Like crows on the way of turbulent air the arrows were tossed and snapped this way and that. I saw that the hurricane was only centralized at the front gate, and surely my brothers’ armies were attempting to surround the monastery. They had hundreds of archers, and as arrows began flying from behind me, I realized some had managed to find their way in.
Thock! I saw the first arrow strike at the wall of the Great Hall, sparking as its steel head hit stone. It was high and wild, but still deadly. Arrows fell like a deadly hail into the courtyard, smashing windows, piercing beams. Some were arrows loosed on purpose and well-aimed, and some were the storm-tossed arrows being flung behind the hurricane and down amongst us.
The air filled with the shrieks of the first casualty of the war, a monk who staggered across the courtyard with one of Torvald’s own arrows sticking from his neck.
The dragon magic. It was the only hope, I thought desperately, seeing the Abbot’s Tower lit up by the sudden flash of lightning. I could not wield it, but my father had sent me here to uncover its secrets. I could not offer Rik or Rubin the Dark Prince, or a kingdom, but perhaps if I offered them the secrets of the dragon magic they would relent. With that power, they could train their own monks and Mages, I could reason. Why all this death and destruction?
The dragon pipes hammered their unceasing call, and I knew that the time was now or never. I had to get to the Abbot’s Tower and find a way to stop this.
The door to the Abbot’s study was open, knocking against its hinges and the floor dripping with rain. Someone had left one of the shutters open, or perhaps the storm had torn it from its moorings, and now rain had sleeted into the wide space, and the tornado-gales had flung the Abbot’s desk to its side, and papers and scrolls scattered the floor, and candles rolled this way and that.
But where was the staff? I thought, looking around the room. Had the Abbot had it with him earlier? No, I didn’t remember seeing it down in the courtyard – so maybe it was here. I pushed aside the papers with my feet, looking for anything that might appease my brothers. To stop this madness.
Thunk. In the gales of the storm that was blowing into this room, something had dislodged from behind the door, and hit the floor with a thump. I turned to see, there, rolling across the room was the Abbot’s cane, the one with the silver dragon ornament atop it.
At last! I thought in a split second, before I saw the condition that it was in. Splintered and cracked. Had it been in the fight with Jodreth? Or was it some other sort of magical experiment gone awry.
No matter, I thought, seizing it up to examine it. There might still be some magic in it… but no sooner had I thought that, then the lower half of the cane gave way to its injuries and sheered, falling with a clang on the floor below. I was holding a glorified doorknob; a silver dragon on a stud of wood.
“Are you the source of all this evil?” I asked the little ornament warily, but all that I got in return was a metallic stare. It felt just like any other walking cane. An expensive walking cane perhaps, but nothing special whatsoever.
No. I couldn’t be wrong. I just couldn’t be, I thought desperately, shaking it. With a sinking feeling, I realized that it didn’t even matter if this simple ornament was magical or not, as I didn’t know how to use it.
It’s not magic, my heart was telling me, but I refused to listen to it. It had to be. Otherwise, what had all of this been for? Where did the source of the Draconis Order’s magical powers –
the Abbot’s magical powers – really come from? No, once again my heart told me. I did not feel any of the strange sleepy feelings around it that I had in the meditations, and neither did I feel any of the buzzing pressure in my head that I felt around Paxala and Zaxx. And either way, my brothers will never look at that little statuette and conclude that their work is done. They would laugh at me. I needed more. I shoved the dragon ornament into my tunic and turned back to the rest of the room. Maybe there was something else in here that I could take.
“Where do I even start?” I muttered, grabbing the first few pages of notes, seeing black spidery writing starting to smudge. There were circles and lines and odd sigils drawn on them, and languages and words that I did not understand. They’ll have to do, I thought. I stuffed them under my leather cuirass Feodor had made me wear, turning to gather other pages, and even a few crumpled scrolls.
“Torvald, I knew your treachery would be revealed soon enough,” hissed a voice behind me. Ice shivered down my neck. It was the Quartermaster, striding into the Abbot’s study – or attempting to anyway – with that little leather crop in his hand. I thought about once again declaring that I was on an errand for the Abbot and then, as lightning flashed and I heard more screams from outside shrugged. Why deny it now?
“Stand out of my way, Greer,” I said to him, crouching to keep my balance amidst the gale.
“Treachery is in your blood, you see,” Greer said, rocking from one foot to the other, the leather crop in one outstretched hand. “Your bastard Gypsy blood…”
I snarled, anger flashing hot through me as I moved to shove him to one side.
Crack! A line of fire hit me across the temple, and it felt like I had been stung by a gigantic wasp.
I hissed, jumping back and putting a hand to my temple, where I came back fresh with blood. The Quartermaster was using the whip. I lunged again, but the Quartermaster was much quicker than I had thought, and with his years of experience he made another flick with his wrist.
Dragon God (The First Dragon Rider Book 1) Page 24