She had barely managed the fare for the coaster. Hawking potions and philters, some of them authentic, she had had to remain in Mhevyr for more than a fortnight before she could scrimp the coin to pay her passage. The Eagle Cat had offered the cheapest price, but seemed hardly worth the pittance that her slovenly captain, Eylras, has asked. The coaster was a square-sailed galley that Telriy thought probably a smuggler under normal circumstances. For some undisclosed reason, Eylras had taken a commercial cargo of lead ingots bound for The Greatest City in All the World. Most of the crew were rough looking louts. She had been subject to leers and catcalls, but thus far nothing that she had not been able to fend off with a cold glare.
She turned the lamp down and then blew it out. Shifting about until she found the least lumpy spot in the thin mattress, she settled back into her cramped bunk and shut her eyes. Her mind, however, was not quite ready to be at ease.
Telriy had first told her grandmother that she would become a great wizard when she was eleven.
Gran had laughed in a hoarse, half-choking way, then spat between two fingers to ward evil.
“Magic isn’ for this world, girl. They won’ have it.” Gran had gestured at the slimed walls of the tiny cave that sheltered them. “My mother did magic. Her mother did magic. And hers and hers and hers for all of time. It’s weak magic, sure, half starved magic that couldn’ save ‘em from those that hate magic, but it was magic. All that they knew, I’ve got up here.” She had tapped the side of her head in the odd way that she had. “I can cure a sick child of a fever. I can hide things from prying eyes. I can make little things appear from nothin’. It hasn’ made me rich or kept me from sleepin’ in ditches. It didn’ save Celiy.”
As it had always done, the mention of Telriy’s mother had ended the conversation. After the night of the fire, they had never spoken of the deaths of her mother and father. Telriy had cried without comfort that first night but had not shed a single tear since.
Gran’s cynicism had not dissuaded her then nor at any of the other thousand times that she had announced her determination. Her certainty had never wavered. She would become a wizard. This was not a desperate hope or a strident demand or a heart-felt plea; it was a cold, inescapable fact. It did not matter what she had to do to accomplish her goal or how long it took to achieve. She knew that the hidden Thirteen Books would hold the spells she needed. The small magics she could accomplish now would seem mere charlatan’s tricks when she found the Mother of the Seas and learned the ancient, lost magics.
Telriy took a long breath and used it to push out the tightness that tensed the muscles of her face. A nagging poke from the straw stuffed mattress coaxed her over onto her side. She snared the wandering traces of her thoughts and slept.
Shuffling, clumsy footsteps woke her. The thin panel that technically gave her privacy kept nothing out -- not sound nor the captain’s drink-sodden smell. She heard the man’s hands scrabble drunkenly at the latch. The weak light of a lamp held in an unsteady hand leaked around the gaps between the ill-fitted door and its frame.
Silently, Telriy sat up. She took her pouch from the foot of her bunk and slipped the strap over her shoulder. Grimly, she gripped her staff.
The latch rattled. “Wakie, little girl,” Eylras slurred. “Come ha’drink w’me.”
Telriy bit her lips, crouching at one end of the bunk.
The door creaked as the man’s weight leaned against it, then popped open.
Though she had practiced with the staff from the day Gran had given it to her, the rolling ship and dim light still conspired to cause her to land only a glancing blow on Eylras’s skull as he fell into the compartment.
While he screamed, cursing and clutching his head, she bounded over him and into the abbreviated passageway. Leaping the three short paces to the end of it, she threw open the hatch and rushed onto the deck. She sidestepped to the left immediately and knelt. The clouded night sky showed nothing of the narrow galley. Moving about the deck in the dark would be an invitation to disaster. Eylras and his lazy crew did not keep a taught ship; hazards in the form of stray coils of rope, haphazard canvas, and loose equipment abounded. With anchors set fore and aft, there was no watch and the crew should all be below decks.
Rough hands seized her from behind. She kicked back with her right heel, struck a shin, heard a man yelp a curse, and shoved her boot down, scrapping. She twisted and broke free as the grip loosened, and then threw herself forward. Spinning, she saw the shadows of two large men lunging after her.
“Come here, girlie!” one barked.
She whipped the staff around, aiming low. She struck a knee with a breaking crack and a scream, but the other sailor tackled her to the deck and pinned her beneath him. He slammed a fist into her gut and she gasped as her breath was driven from her. He began immediately pawing ineffectually at her clothes, his stinking breath vomiting in her face.
Eylras staggered from the passageway, holding a lamp in one hand and his head with the other.
The other sailor, sprawled on the deck, wailed, “I think my leg’s broke! The slut broke my leg! Send her down to Phrusht’s Depths!”
“Skin ‘er, Mheesh!” Eylras ordered. “We’ll ha’ some fun w’ her before we toss ‘er over the side.”
Mheesh laughed as he began ripping at her coat with his free hand. “Don’t worry, Ehld, we’ll make her pay for that!”
Telriy struggled, throwing knees and elbows, but Mheesh kept his vulnerable bits out of her reach. She reached one hand for his eyes, but he hooked her wrist with the hinge of his elbow and crushed her fingers in his fist.
“I been in a good many bar fights, sweetie,” Mheesh breathed hoarsely in her ear as he twisted her arm in to a lock. “You’ll not get away from me.”
“Get that stick away from her, Mheesh!” the captain warned.
When Telriy felt the sailor grasp the staff, she released it and balled herself up as best she could beneath Mheesh’s shielding bulk. Turning her face to the deck, she uttered Gran’s simple key.
“Storm and ruin, death from above.”
The first blast of fire hurtled from the black heavens and incinerated Mheesh, blowing his smoldering corpse into bits that splattered Telriy, knocked Eylras from his feet, and ripped more screams from Ehld.
Singed, Telriy scrambled away from the staff as it began to vibrate, emitting a strobing green light. Unseen forces pivoted it vertical and made it hover half an armlength off the bloody planks of the deck. She sprinted toward the bow.
The next plunging streak, larger and brighter, tracked along the length of the staff and exploded through the deck. Fire roared up from below. As the ship lagged over hard, the deck canted sharply and oddments skittered toward the down side. She fell, but caught a flopping line to drag herself upright. Dodging bouncing debris, she struggled farther forward away from the staff. As the final fire bolt splashed day into the night, an upheaval broke the coaster’s keel and she danced to the rail and dove out into the dark water.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Mar reacted without thought, scattering the magic of the heavy ball before its spell could be released. As its flux dissipated, it became nothing more than an inert lump of clay.
“Run, my lord!” Phehlahm cried desperately, attempting to interpose his body as a shield.
The young magician whipped his head about to find his view blocked by the marine. Mar snapped the edge of his boot against the hinge side of his misguided protector’s knee and simultaneously pulled the man’s opposite shoulder back. As Phehlahm collapsed, howling, Mar saw Ulor reach his sword only seconds before the monks reached the tall marine. Ulor went down quickly beneath the flashing blades of the monks, hardly slowing them.
Mar, without being conscious of how he did it, hummed to slow time and used the seconds he gleaned to reach out with his magical senses toward the Phaelle’n. Swiftly, he enchanted the leather of the monks’ armor and the folded steel of their weapons, pressing determinedly against the metal’s resistan
ce. Already running toward Ulor, he carelessly cast the two Phaelle’n as far up into the sky as he could. The men, writhing and fighting against the magic that propelled them but making no outcry, sailed over the walls of the keep and out above the streets beyond. An instant later, the matrix of their swords collapsed and enveloped them in expanding balls of blue ethereal fire.
The descending concussion knocked Mar from his feet, but as soon as the force of the wind abated, he leapt up and threw himself toward the wounded Mhajhkaeirii. The hysterical screaming and crying of the women and children, interrupted by the blast, rose anew. The surviving legionaries began to yell and run.
Mar rolled the unmoving Ulor onto his back, his heart sinking as he saw that a half dozen wounds afflicted the marine, all weeping horrible amounts of blood. Mar pressed his hands into a deep tear in Ulor’s chest, trying unsuccessfully to staunch the dark outflow.
Mar hummed again, closing his eyes and ears to the calamitous panic about him, and seized the screeching flux of time, using its magic to steal seconds and forge them into minutes that held him beyond the normal scope of the world. His view of the courtyard dimmed and eventually faded completely.
If another normal second passed, Ulor would be dead.
And Mar refused to let the marine die. Ulor had sacrificed himself to protect Mar and the young magician was totally and completely -- outraged. Without forethought, beyond all sense, unasked, Ulor had thrown himself into a fight that he could not win. Mar could not – would not – be responsible for the man’s death.
Mar looked deep into the marine, listening to the flux currents that defined his life. His wounds were fountains of varicolored indescribable sound pulses. Mar searched for patterns, found them, and immediately began to knit the disrupted ones back together. He strengthened weaknesses, repaired damage, corrected malfunctions, and carefully rewove the mangled ethereal cloth of Ulor’s wounds, using his own undamaged flesh for a model. After uncountable unreal minutes, he was done. Releasing his grip on the temporal flux, he allowed himself to be swept along with the normal flow of time.
Ulor gasped, eyes snapping open, and began coughing blood and tissue from his throat.
Phehlahm dashed up and dropped to his knees, his hands shaking as he frantically pressed a cotton shirt ineffectually into the sea of blood on Ulor’s chest.
Ulor gagged, spat, and then spat again. He knocked the other marine’s hands away and tried to sit up. “Get back you dolt!” he snapped, coughing.
Mar stood and stepped back, marveling at what he had done.
Phehlahm sank back onto his hindquarters, his hands clenching the crimson soaked shirt as he stared at Ulor incredulously.
“But. . .but Ulor . . . you . . .were. . .dyin’ . . .”
Ulor, somewhat wild-eyed, searched his grime-encrusted chest for wounds that no longer existed. There was no sign, save for the rapidly drying blood, that the marine had ever been wounded.
Mhiskva’s voice broke across the courtyard, thundering in command. “DROP!”
All three men flattened themselves as the captain’s great axe flashed across the space, spinning end over end, and struck another monk who had dropped unnoticed from the parapet above the doors of the main tower. The axe drove the Phaelle’n into the doors and pinned him in place. The man shook once and then became still.
Two dozen marines and legionnaires, all fully armed, charged into the courtyard. Several snatched Mar up before he could protest and dragged him into the shelter of the gatehouse tunnel where Mhiskva stood. Once there the armsmen surrounded him, forming a barrier with their bodies. Others began trying to calm the women and children and move them toward the Central Tower. Still more Mhajhkaeirii streamed from outer bailey into the courtyard and, pulling Mhiskva’s axe and the dead Monk from the door, entered the Central Tower apparently in search of further enemies.
Mhiskva laid a hand on Mar’s shoulder.
“You are unharmed, my lord Magician?”
“Yes, I’m alright.”
Berhl, cursing as many as a third of the Forty-Nine in a profane flood, rushed through the gate and wedged himself through the ring of Mar’s protectors. Flushed from running, he held a shortsword in each hand. His eyes widened at the red stain on the young magician’s hands and tunic.
“Whose blood?”
“Ulor’s.” Mar told the fugleman simply, hesitant to reveal all that had transpired.
Berhl’s shoulders sank slightly, but his face closed down completely, betraying no emotion. After a moment, he said quietly, “He was a good marine.” Several of the other men chimed eulogistic agreement.
“I’m still a good marine you idiot,” Ulor disparaged as the mass of Mar’s defenders, some goggle-eyed, parted to let him through. Phehlahm followed, still with a dumbfounded expression on his face.
Berhl’s stared blankly at his fellow marine. “You look like a slaughterhouse.”
Ulor shrugged. “The monks cut me down before I knew what was happening.”
“So why ain’t you dead?” Relief and exasperation warred on Berhl’s face.
Ulor cocked his head significantly at Mar.
Berhl and all the marines stared openly at Mar. Their expressions were a variegated mix of awe and gratitude. Berhl, sheathing his swords, saluted and said with simple sincerity, “Thank you, sir.”
Mhiskva nodded, grinning appreciatively, but his eyes held a calculating look.
Mar frowned, realizing that the ties binding these Mhajhkaeirii to him had tightened. He did not want their gratitude and certainly not the loyalty he sensed growing in them. The Mar of the Moon Pool had been a man to whom such loyalty was given. That Mar had led men who would eagerly die at his word, bound for life in an allegiance that could not be broken. But the Mar of the here and now had no desire to lead men in battle, no desire to see brave men perish for his sake. He was determined to deny the future that the Pool had shown. He would not become that man of scars, burdens, and sorrows. He would not be a king.
“Berhl, send a man to fetch my axe,” Mhiskva ordered. “Then organize a scout group, a full file – four quad of swordsmen and the rest crossbowmen. I am going to the Palace.”
“I’ll come with you,” Mar told the captain. If the Brotherhood could insinuate assassins into the Old Keep, then no place inside the Citadel was truly secure. He would need to keep Telriy by his side. The girl was his responsibility, despite his better judgment and her capricious moods, and he could not protect her across the breadth of the Citadel.
Mhiskva looked grave. “We need to complete the new flying ship as soon as possible, my lord.”
“Berhl and Ulor can get that done. They don’t require me until it’s finished. The ship need only be enchanted when it’s ready to fly.”
“I can see to your wife, my lord,” the captain countered perceptively. “I feel that you will be safer here. I give you my word that no harm will come to her.”
“She’s not my wife!”
Mhiskva smiled with accommodating patience.
“Stop doing that.”
“Certainly, my lord.”
Mar locked eyes with the mountain. “You’re not immovable, Mhiskva.”
Before the large captain could reply, Mar flared an enchantment all about. Gently but swiftly, he raised all the Mhajhkaeirii and moved them away from him, pushing some against the walls of the tunnel and others back through the gate into the inner court. The captain remained rigid, but the other marines shouted and clutched at each other and the walls. Slowly, keeping the strain of enchanting so much cloth and leather at once from showing on his face, he advanced into the barbican court, bearing Mhiskva, Berhl, Ulor and the several nearby marines along before him.
“On second thought, my lord,” the large captain opined thoughtfully, his boots dangling, “perhaps it would be better if you did accompany me.”
TWENTY-NINE
Eu snatched his head behind the improvised barricade, an overturned table heaped with broken chairs. Arrows flashe
d through the space where his eyes had been and shattered on the curved wall of the stairwell. Shielding his face from ricocheting marble fragments, he turned to Veteran Brother Khorsk, who crouched at his side.
“Order another charge, brother. Send ten men this time. There are only four of them on the next landing.”
“The Second is down to less than half now, brother,” Khorsk pointed out.
Eu instantly perceived the other man’s meaning. Having suffered unexpectedly heavy casualties as it assaulted the barricaded landings of the tower stairwell; the second cloister perhaps had begun to loose its edge.
Eu scanned the haggard faces of the brethren waiting below him on the broad steps. He saw determination, but also doubt. Most bore wounds, some more than slight, and all looked to be on their last reserves of strength. Their discipline held – there were, after all, combatants of the Salient Order – and there was no question of their obedience. Nevertheless, with their commander, Brother Pzu’gh, already dead, it would be difficult to enliven their fervor.
Eu grimaced in remembrance. His friend had rendered his life to the Duty on the second landing. Only moments after Pzu’gh’s combat team had beaten down the last of the position’s defenders, two axemen had sprung from ambush. Both had died quickly, but not before the Junior Assault Brother and four other members of his team had taken fatal wounds.
Unlike the Mhajhkaeirii in the remainder of the Palace, those guarding the apartments of the Prince had not, for as yet unknown reasons, been taken by surprise. Two combat teams sent to scout the tower had discovered the pirates dug in and waiting. Five bloody assaults had thus far, though clearing the lower three floors of the tower, been unable to break through to capture the Prince.
His own First cloister waited at the bottom of the tower in reserve, but if he fed them too soon into this meat grinder he might not have enough men left to hold the Palace. However, with Aear and the Third cloister guarding the ground floor entrances and the prisoners, Eu had no option but to reinforce the remaining brethren of the Second with men from the First.
Key to Magic 02 Magician Page 15