By Ways Unseen

by Daniel Dydek

“What is it?” Pladt asked, noting their reactions.

  “I hope they don’t have a wind-user,” Sarah said quietly. She glanced worriedly at Geoffrey. “I’m not as young as you might think I am, and I have more skill in magic than anyone I’ve ever met.” She paused, and her eyes hardened. “But remember I also haven’t had the training of everyone else I’ve met.” She stood, and gazed out over the wall. She drew a deep breath. “There’s something to be said for high vantage points,” she said, glancing at Geoffrey and Pladt, who remained seated. “And for clear eyes.”

  “Why—?” Pladt began.

  Suddenly, a horn winded long and it wailed over the drifting breeze. Then another horn sounded, and a third. As Geoffrey and Pladt leapt to their feet, the thundering of hooves echoed against the wall as Corith and his guards retreated to the castle. In the distance, a long column of darkly moving shapes were cutting a line through the plains.

  Corith and his men entered the streets below as the gates boomed shut behind them. Corith soon mounted the stairs to the wall and stood beside Geoffrey. “They came right where you thought they would,” he said. “I could have left half the men here to rest for tonight.”

  Geoffrey glanced between the evening sun and the advancing army. “I doubt the battle will be joined until the morning. Haydren should have his army by now; pray that they may move quickly back here.” He glanced quickly at Pladt. “We’re going to need them.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  EXECUTIONS

  “How is your young soldier?”

  “Delayed. And yours?”

  “On their way; they were not so difficult as Haydren.”

  “Hopefully.”

  36 Haschina 1320 – Summer

  As night fell, and the army advanced on Jyunta, torches were lit along the column – carried, Geoffrey assumed, by kobolds. In the hierarchies of beasts, it seemed the humanoid dogs occupied the lowest rank. As the column neared, Geoffrey could see wolves, kobolds, hellhounds, Moorish goblins, and even the occasional Plains goblin with short, tan fur and not the poisonous secretions of their watery cousins.

  On into the night the column advanced, and the army began to array itself against the city. Those on the battlements could do little else but watch.

  As more beasts poured into the broad plain before them, Geoffrey caught sight of a thing near the middle of the column that chilled his heart.

  “Pladt,” he said. “Your eyes are better; is that—?”

  “It’s a golem,” Pladt affirmed quietly. “So much for the gates.”

  “Keep your eyes open for the manipulator,” Geoffrey said. “He should stand out in a field of beasts.”

  “I have never seen one of these,” Sarah said.

  “Golems can rarely be found living wild,” Geoffrey replied. “They may be only a little larger than a human, but there is great strength hiding in their compressed bulk. Manipulators can control a golem to do their bidding. The manipulators are able to forge some sort of link between their minds and see through the golem’s eyes to control it. But if the manipulator can be killed—”

  “He won’t let himself get close enough to be shot at,” Pladt interjected firmly. “Why would he?”

  “Because if he doesn’t, we’re going to die tomorrow,” Geoffrey replied matter-of-factly. He glanced at Pladt and grinned. “Besides, he doesn’t know we have a world-famous archer with us, does he?”

  “Your optimism is inspiring, Geoffrey, it really is,” Pladt said with a smirk. “However misplaced it may be.”

  “Don’t forget you have a sorceress with you as well,” Sarah said quietly.

  Geoffrey said nothing, though he glanced at her quickly; Sarah, too, glanced at him, but returned her eyes to the field below with the barest shake of her head.

  Finally, on the horizon, the end of the column could be seen; thousands of beasts were massed before the castle under hundreds of glittering torches. The golem had seated himself in the middle of the congregation; the manipulator was nowhere to be seen.

  “You don’t suppose they brought a golem without a manipulator do you?” Geoffrey asked.

  Pladt gazed at him for several long moments, then shook his head and looked away. “So, so misplaced,” he muttered.

  Geoffrey shrugged. “Perhaps. This army will take until morning to get organized; we may as well sleep while we can. Pladt, would you take the first watch? Corith can go second, and I’ll take the last.”

  “I can watch too,” Sarah said with a sharp glance.

  “Indeed you can,” Geoffrey replied mildly. “I thought you might want to reserve your strength for the battle.”

  Sarah’s nostril’s flared. “I’m sure you did,” she said quietly; nonetheless, she lowered herself to a sitting position and leaned against the wall.

  “What’s gotten into you all of the sudden?” Pladt whispered. “Be nice; she is capable of saving lives.”

  “But at what cost?” Geoffrey whispered in reply. “Magic is not something to trifle with.”

  Pladt sighed. “I’ve got the watch, Geoffrey; sleep well.”

  After several hours, Sarah stirred and rose, moving to the stairs and descending from the wall. Geoffrey watched her go, but said nothing and settled a little deeper into his slouch. Corith glanced at Pladt and shrugged; Pladt set his jaw.

  “Would you mind taking over for a spell?” Pladt asked, glancing quickly as Sarah retreated further into the town.

  “Go ahead,” Corith said. “I’m awake anyway.”

  Pladt hurriedly descended, trotting after Sarah as he tried to recall her last turn in his mind; he didn’t want to get lost again.

  He caught up just as she reached a door. She turned quickly, startled, as he approached, and had begun muttering something.

  “Wait! I just want to talk,” Pladt said hurriedly, ducking a little aside in case the spell was already on its way.

  Sarah smirked. “Ducking wouldn’t necessarily help,” she said.

  “That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

  She gave her shoulders a slight shake. “Well come inside,” she said. “It’s a little too chill out here.”

  He followed her inside, into what was evidently her study; books were scattered across a long table, with corresponding gaps on a shelf on the far wall where even more and dusty volumes sat on bowed wooden boards. He seated himself on a thickly padded chair while she took up a place on a worn yellow chair behind the table.

  “You want to learn magic?” she asked.

  Pladt paused halfway in the motion of sitting back. “Can I?”

  Sarah cocked her head. “You tell me.”

  Pladt’s eyes slid sideways as he frowned. “How would I know? Is there some sort of test?”

  Sarah smiled. “What did you want to talk about?” she asked.

  “Oh, right; well, Geoffrey really doesn’t like you using magic.” He shrugged. “I just wanted to learn more about it, to see if he might be right.”

  “Did he send you?”

  Pladt shook his head vigorously. “N-no, I’m really, honestly curious.”

  Sarah drew a deep breath, and let it out. “Do you know anything about it?”

  “You can apparently kill a bunch of gremlins at once with it,” Pladt said. “And aggravate a goblin.” He gave a tentative smile.

  “And knock down a dragon,” Sarah added with a raised forefinger. “Let’s not forget that one.”

  “Oh no, of course not,” he said, smiling broader. After a moment, it faded slightly. “But you can’t destroy this army?”

  Sarah grimaced, and shook her head. “Magic, most basically, is using the language that the God of All used to create the universe, and commanding the elements – essentially what he did, but on a far smaller scale. We don’t create; we can only manipulate. I can’t create air; but I can tell the existing air to do certain things.”

  “I would think a strong enough gale could blow the whole army away,” Pladt offered.

  “It could
; but I can’t.” Pladt’s brow furrowed. Sarah glanced away in thought, then back. “Okay, it has to do with energy – a person’s energy. The element will take energy from the caster in order to perform the command.”

  “Do you mean, you can tell the wind to pick up a rock, but only as big a rock as you can lift on your own?”

  “Hmm, not quite. Because then why don’t I just pick up the rock on my own? See, how big a rock I can lift deals with my strength. But if I pick up a small rock and move it from one pile to a different pile ten feet away, then go back to the first pile and pick up a second rock, I can do that for a good portion of the day and end up moving a pile of rocks much larger than the pile I could pick up all at once.”

  “Oh; yeah, that makes sense.”

  “The danger is, we don’t always know what a spell will do, or how much energy it will take, because sometimes no one has used that spell in centuries.”

  “What happens if you cast a spell that you don’t have the energy for?”

  “You die,” Sarah replied flatly. “It takes so much energy from you that your heart can’t beat.”

  “That sounds like fun.”

  Sarah barked a short laugh. “To drive that point home, there are spells in Cariste that have been left going, because its size was just enough to cast, but also killed the caster. Sort of a fool magician’s memorial: always know what your spell will do before you cast it.”

  “They left it going?” Pladt asked. “So they’re able to cease it, if they wanted?”

  “Oh, yes; ceasing a spell is easy,” Sarah said, nodding. “Anyone with an affinity to the element can cease any spell – we’re not sure why, whether the God put it in as a safety measure. Some have speculated, and Geoffrey would probably be one, that the elements don’t want to do our bidding so they’ll take any excuse to stop. That’s helped more than one caster, because sometimes the energy is enough that you only become unconscious, and whenever a spell is ceased a small portion of energy returns to the caster - so casters rendered unconscious came back when someone ceased the spell.”

  “What’s the command to cease the spell?”

  “Kiet fiol thoi. And make sure you’re focusing on the spell that you want to cease.”

  “Can you cast a small spell, to see if I can cease it?”

  Sarah laughed. “No, there’s no need; if you have an affinity for an element, you know. It effects your mood, usually, or it will tell you things when it’s present.”

  “Oh.” Pladt paused. “Is controlling an element hard? Does it ever not listen? I mean, if you thought you had an affinity, but your spells never worked…”

  “Pladt, when you have an affinity, you know it,” Sarah reiterated, a little wearily. “It would be like telling me…” she trailed off with a gesture, searching for an appropriate simile. “I don’t know, the sky wasn’t blue, or Rinc Na was a southern continent – there we go. I can’t tell you why it’s in the direction it is, but I know it’s north of Cariste, and there’s no continents further north of it.” She paused as Pladt nodded understanding. “But no, it’s not always easy to command the elements; if you pronounce the word wrong, or – especially early on – if your affinity isn’t that close, sometimes it will ignore you.”

  “You can get closer?”

  “Sure, it’s like a friend,” she said. “If someone knows you very well, cares about you, and you ask them to do something they don’t already want to do, they’re more likely to do it than someone who doesn’t know you, maybe doesn’t even like you. That has gotten some casters into trouble, too, trying to command the wrong element.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, imagine asking someone who hates you to do something to help you; aren’t they likely to do the exact opposite, just to harm you?”

  “You make the elements sound, I don’t know…like people.”

  “In a lot of ways, they act like people – sentient, is the word you’re looking for. No, I can’t explain that; it’s just the way things are.”

  “Is there one element thats harder to get along with than any others?”

  “Do you mean is there one that’s harder to control?” She asked. Pladt nodded. “Fire,” she answered promptly.

  “You didn’t have to think about that, very much,” Pladt noted with a grin.

  “Remember I said we can’t create anything, only manipulate what’s there; fire needs fuel, it needs something to burn. Have you ever rubbed your hands together to create heat? And how much energy that took? And you certainly couldn’t start a fire with it, much less keep one going. But if you blow air on an existing fire, that doesn’t take nearly as much energy, and you can get a blaze going by doing that. Very much the same – but that’s the difficult part, from what I’ve heard: you don’t always know exactly what’s going to be needed to get the fire that you want; it might be blowing on an existing flame, it might be trying to rub your hands together with enough force and speed to start a flame.”

  “And you’d burn your hands in the process anyway.”

  Sarah chuckled. “Right.”

  Pladt was silent for several moments, then took a breath. “It does sound really dangerous,” he said. “Aside from using the words of the God, which I think is Geoffrey’s biggest problem, it sounds like it could be dangerous to you and the people around you – if elements are sentient, able to oppose you or do more than what you imagine or want…” He trailed off with a shrug.

  Sarah considered him for a long moment. “I’ve been doing this a while,” she said finally. “And I’m very careful.” Her eyes glittered. “It will only be dangerous for the army attacking us; which I assume you don’t have a problem with?”

  “I might, if it ends up killing you,” Pladt said. “I think Geoffrey would, too.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “You shouldn’t,” Pladt said, standing up. “I know him better than you. I think his primary concern most of the time is people not dying.” He shrugged. “But that’s up to you, I guess.”

  “Thanks,” Sarah said, her gaze drifting.

  “Get some rest,” Pladt suggested, turning to leave. Sarah said nothing, and he closed the door behind him.

  *

  The next morning, as dawn broke under Geoffrey’s watch, kobolds were running to and fro within the enemy camp. The torches had died out in the night with no one to relight them, and for a brief span Geoffrey could almost forget that the army was there. But as dawn crept on, their ghostly huddled masses rose from the plains under dim light.

  As the eastern sky grew steadily brighter, Geoffrey nudged Pladt with his foot. “Better wake up,” he said. “It will begin soon.”

  “I dreamed they got tired and went home,” Pladt said, his eyes still closed. They opened groggily. “Maybe that was me, actually.” He rose slowly and peered over the battlements, and yawned. “No, it wasn’t them or me. Rotten dreams.”

  Geoffrey shook his head with a grin. “Pladt, I swear,” he said.

  Corith rose, then, as did Sarah. Soon the entire wall was awake and gazing out over the sleeping horde before them. The sun spilled into the sky, chasing the shadows from the plains. A lone, thin trumpet sounded, and as one body the beasts rolled onto their haunches or their knees and stood, all in perfect formation. It was enough to snatch the breath from every soldier atop Jyunta’s wall.

  “Nicely executed,” Geoffrey muttered. “Could you tell where the horn came from? It wasn’t blown by the lips of a beast.”

  Pladt’s eyes swept the field, but he shrugged helplessly.

  As they watched, a lone kobold carrying a white flag broke from the lines and walked shakily forward, with many a backward glance. One of the hellhounds snarled at him, and he jumped forward, approaching the walls at a faster walk.

  Geoffrey set his jaw. “Pladt,” he said. “Give them our answer.”

  Pladt cocked his head for a moment, and in one fluid motion drew an arrow, nocked it, and loosed it in a smooth arc that terminated in the kob
old’s chest. With a strangled cry, it pitched to the ground, the flag crumpling over top of it.

  A snarling bark rose from the bestial army; muscles strained, and an occasional hellhound would sprint out, stop, and slide back into formation. Kobolds beat spear against shield, and the goblins squealed and barked in slimy voices that mirrored the muck and mud of their native terrain.

  “This is not it,” Geoffrey said, his voice low and meant for his companions only. “This is not the end,” he said again, louder, for the ears of all nearby. His voice rose as he spoke until it rang from the battlements. “This is not the day for the end of Jyunta! When songs are sung of this day, they will be triumphs sung around the fires of men, not of beasts. Let no dirge be sung by men. This is our city, and our land. They came expecting a broken city of shattered walls and spirits; but we will give them the might of men! Let us give them a shout that will be heard from Estwind to Fūnik. Let them hear our cry all the way to Galessern. This is our day: for Jyunta!” Geoffrey cried; and with bows raised, the soldiers atop the wall took up the cry, chanting it until it reverberated across the plains. If their thunder did not make it to Fūnik, Pladt thought, it made it to the Northern Forest at least.

  With a roar in return, the bestial army advanced. The hellhounds were in the lead, with kobolds behind them. The golem, for the moment, remained where he was. The chant of the humans continued.

  Then Geoffrey saw Sarah narrow her eyes, and her lips moved as if talking to herself. Slowly, a mist began to form before the front line of beasts. It thickened until it was opaque, and the beasts disappeared within it.

  “Pladt, the distance,” Geoffrey said in an excited whisper. “To the front edge of the mist.”

  Pladt gauged it, then shouted a command to the archers upon the battlements. Arrows were drawn, and nocked. Geoffrey glanced at Sarah, who gazed at him without smiling. Several tense moments later, beasts began to form out of the mist.

  “Pull!” Pladt cried. One hundred bowstrings creaked as they were drawn. Below, the beasts were coming out of the mist in ragged formation, and were rushing to draw together once more. “Loose!” Pladt shouted, releasing his own bowstring with a sharp twang. “Volley of four!” he shouted, quickly drawing another arrow and loosing it. As the beasts attempted to regain formation, four hundred arrows fell among their midst, and scores of beasts yelped and fell.