by Guy Antibes
“Stand back!” she said.
“Hey, you magicians are on our side. But we can overlook that right now.”
Valanna could see the lust in the men’s eyes. She spoke the power word and blew the men into the building on the other side of the street. Her act didn’t go unnoticed. Those wishing to escape ran to her for protection and another roving gang had spotted the bodies flying through the air. A magician in a dirty yellow robe had joined this group.
A weak rope of fire headed her way, but she could tell it wouldn’t reach them. She thought to fight fire with fire and countered the magician’s attack with one of her own. Her own attack reached the group, but only the magician stood in the path of her flame and took the brunt of her spell. He jumped into a nearby watering trough, extinguishing the flames.
People in the street began to panic and sought protection anywhere they could. The magician rose again. Fear increased the power in Valanna’s pose. She cast the spell again and it hit the magician with full force this time, covering him with fire. He screamed and fell to the ground.
“We must go!” Garono said, urging Valanna across the street. She could barely move with her energy so depleted. Now she knew how Trak must have felt after he saved them from the magicians on the way to Bitrium.
She staggered and looked back. The gang stood looking at her and at the burning body of the magician. What had she done? After another street, she flung herself on the ground and her stomach emptied on the grassy verge.
“Eat something. They say that gives you strength.” Garono offered her some hastily cooked meat. She took it and forced it down. Valanna reminded herself that she needed to be strong. The rebels filled the city with men who would take her as easily as Prince Nez would. This time, no Asem was close to save her.
They continued until they came to the dirt road leading out of the city.
“This is the only way to the hidden boat,” Garono said.
Valanna merely nodded. The meat had done little to build up her strength. She heard shouting and another larger group of marauders approached them. She heard the angry shouts and saw fists raised and a few of those fists held knives and a sword or two. She tried to get her legs to move faster.
“Save yourself, Garono. That spell took too much out of me.” Valanna shook him off and stood, facing the oncoming men. She would fight them with the very last of her strength. Hopelessness filled her. The despair of being taken from Trak returned. Her time with Dalistro had only delayed the inevitable.
A stranger walked to her side. His gray cloak looked more Colcanan than Santasian. She looked up at his face in shock. “Trak! What are you doing here?”
He held out a knife. What good would that do to help them? He wore a sword at his waist. “Use your sword.”
“No need,” he looked down at Valanna. Her heart jumped as he squeezed her hand and then assumed the lightning pose.
“No. You’ll lose your strength,” she said, sliding to the dirt surface of the road. How could he be here? Did a magician throw a hallucination spell on her? She shook her head and looked towards Garono who had stopped in the middle of the road fifty feet or more past where she had fallen.
Trak looked at her and then pointed his knife at the approaching crowd of fifteen or twenty men. She didn’t see any magicians.
He grunted a power word. A pulse of lightning left the knife. It shot ahead as if on a taut rope and struck a rebel. He did it again and again. Men fell to the road. Holes in their bodies smoked. She had never seen such a thing before. She had expected him to throw lightning back and forth, but he had learned this new way of fighting since they last met. Did he learn it in Colcan?
The mob broke and ran back towards the city. Trak launched a few more strikes. Each one dropped a rebel. Trak lifted her up and carried her to Garono. “Where are you going?”
“Trak Bluntwithe. You are the last person I expected on this road! A ship waits for us, ahead.”
“By a little village? I passed it on the way here. We must hurry.”
“I can walk, now,” Valanna said. She gave some of the cooked meat to Trak before they started out.
“Thank you,” he said. He put his arm protectively around her. “I worried that I would be too late.”
“You were,” Garono said. “She had to put down two groups already. The third would have overrun us.”
Trak nodded. “I came this way since it looked like the only way you would escape to the east, although I expected Dalistro to be accompanying Val.”
“You know him well,” Garono said.
“Well enough, I lived with him for six months while he tutored me.”
“You learned enough to save us.” Garono slapped Trak on the back.
“My tutoring is still woefully insufficient, but I have developed a few usable talents.”
Garono snorted. “Usable?”
Valanna clutched at him. “I dreamed of you saving me. I really did and it came true,” she said. “I’m glad you came.” She stopped him in the middle of the road and kissed him on the mouth.
That was no sisterly kiss. Trak grinned for a second. “I missed you, Valanna.” He said hugging her to him.
Garono cleared his throat. “There will be more rebels once the others gather enough men to come after us. There might be a magician or two as well.”
“The magicians did rebel. I didn’t believe it when I was told they might in Mozira,” Trak said as they picked up the pace. Valanna clutched his hand as they walked.
“Mozira?” Valanna said.
“I’ve been exiled from Colcan. It seems they didn’t like the amount of talent that I had.”
“Jealousy?” Garono said.
“No, fear. I have the ability to topple their cursed towers. They tried to kill me, but a friend of mine saved me.”
“Asem? Honor?”
Trak took a deep breath and shook his head. “Asem didn’t know about my execution. Honor had no power to stop them. A former Dean saved me.”
“Strength?” Garono said. “He’s the only Colcanan that I know of that isn’t half-crazy.”
“You know him?”
Garono nodded. “I know most of the names of the Deans and have met with Strength in less stressful times. That is not a well known fact, so please keep it to yourself.”
“I will, if we survive.”
Trak turned as he heard shouts and the pounding of hooves. “We go into the woods here.” He let the pair go past him. “Go south to a clearing about one hundred paces in.” Then he turned and used the wind pose to obliterate their tracks with a focused wave of fast moving air.
He found them sitting on a rock close to his disk. He quickly uncovered it and placed it in front of them.
“Get on and put one foot in a loop on the surface.”
“This is like a lift platform, isn’t it?” Valanna said.
Trak could only nod, but her quick recognition of the device heartened him. The shouts now came through the trees. He struck the lift pose and up they went, the equivalent of nineteen stories into the air, above the trees just as riders exploded into the clearing. He saw colored robes on the horses. Masters had come. A bolt of fire shot past them as he adjusted to his wind pose and pushed them east. He took them east to the large stream.
“There is a boat down there.” Garono pointed, but then he must have spotted riders at the river’s edge. “So are the rebels.”
“It doesn’t matter. We head east until they can’t see us then we go to the ship.” The extra weight and the speed that they traveled began to wear him down. He lost sight of the tiny river and headed southwest towards the ship. From his altitude he could barely see the mast above the trees. “There it is!”
Trak lowered the disk to a height just above the trees and approached the ship slowly. He couldn’t push them much faster. The ship had already weighed anchor and was putting up its sails to head downriver towards the sea. He lowered the disk to just above the water and approached the ship.
/> Bolts of flame began to head towards the ship. “Wind, Valanna. Blow those streams off course with short bursts.”
She raised her wand and did as Trak said. “That doesn’t take as much power as I thought.”
“To preserve power use pulses, not a continuous stream.”
“Of course,” she said.
Trak finally reached the ship. He saw Dalistro staring at him on the deck. He set the disk down just a few paces from him. Garono ran and hugged his son. Such an overt display of affection surprised Trak. Valanna’s arms reached around him.
“Thank you, for saving me,” she said. Her eyes were filled with admiration and Trak hoped a bit of love. They were on ship. He smiled. Trak would have lots of time with her on their voyage wherever Dalistro had them going.
A bolt of fire hit one of the sails.
Captain Glasanda ran to them and pulled Valanna aside. “Save us, please.” His eyes went to Trak. “Master Bluntwithe, I didn’t expect you to save us.”
“And he flew in. Now show us how you can punch a hole,” his sailor friend, Ferano said, pointing to a ship from Espozia already making fast headway towards Glasanda’s vessel.
Trak ran to the stern and he first made a pose for water and drew a stream of water from the river onto the burning sail. He had to clutch the rail with both hands. His power had just about burned out. One more spell. He pulled out his knife and pointed it at the bow of the approaching ship and let fly as large a pulse of lighting as he could.
The bow exploded into chips of wood, opening up a huge hole in the front of the ship. It stopped dead in the water and began to tilt forward as water rushed in. Trak turned to see Glasanda’s sails finally catching the wind.
Trak smiled as he looked on through blurry eyes. His strength suddenly left him and he felt the entire ship jerk forward and that pitched him backward over the stern and into the water. His body went far underneath the surface. By the time he sputtered and struggled to the surface, Dalistro’s ship was a hundred paces or more ahead of him under full sail.
He saw Valanna frantically waving to him from the stern, but all Trak could do was paddle towards the shore. He dragged himself up on the muddy bank and saw the ship disappear around a bend in the river.
So close. He pounded the sandy turf and turned over on his back, totally exhausted. He closed his eyes. A nudge seemed to have revived him. He didn’t know how long he had been out, but he groaned when he recognized a familiar face looking down at him.
“So the errant magician has returned.” Master Borega grinned as he administered the Spell of Absorption to Trak.
~~~~
If you enjoyed reading about Trak, Honor and Valanna, please leave a review where you purchased your copy of the novel.
BONUS!
FIRST CHAPTER OF THE SECOND BOOK
IN THE POSES OF POWER SERIES
MAGICIAN IN EXILE
Chapter One
THE WIND DIDN’T CATCH IN THE SHIP’S SAILS as their pursuer began to bear down on them. Trak Bluntwithe, the young magician, threw a massive lightning bolt into the prow of the approaching ship. Valanna turned away from the struggling ship and assumed the pose to generate wind and spoke the power word. The wind suddenly filled the sails and the ship lurched forward.
She looked back at the broken ship behind them only to see Trak fall over the stern from the jerk forward.
“No!” she ran back and looked over the railing. Trak was nowhere to be seen. Tears filled her eyes while she scanned the empty waters. The ship continued to speed forward, leaving the spot where the young man had hurtled into the Pusuun River.
Captain Glasanda joined her at the stern. “We can’t turn back, look at the shore.”
Magicians and the Ozitzian rebels began to poke through the woods lining the river. “There!” The captain now pointed in the middle of the river, where Trak emerged gasping and began his struggle towards the shore.
Valanna raised her arms and waved at him. “We must save him!” She wanted to jump into the river and help him, but she never did master the art of swimming and could only stand in shock, as the ship followed the curving channel, leaving Trak behind.
Misson Dalistro, her tutor and a spy for the Santasian Council, came up to her and put his arm around her shoulder. The concern that he felt only made her feel worse. Her magic had pushed Trak into the river at a time when he must have lost all of his strength disabling the oncoming ship. She put her hands to her face and wept. “It’s all my fault!”
Her mind frazzled with grief. With all of the magicians at the shore, Trak would be re-captured by the Espozian Magicians Guild. How would he cope? She didn’t know, but the guilt that she had caused the lurch that had driven him overboard seared her.
“My dear, he came to save you, which the boy did. Without him we would be at the mercy of the rebels,” Garono Dalistro, Misson’s father and head of the now-exiled Santasian Council, said. “We can’t go back for him, but the boy has more resources than any of us. Have faith in him.”
“But he would be here at my side,” Valanna put her hand to her mouth. She didn’t want them to know how much she regarded Trak and now they would know.
“So you are more than friends,” Misson said with a grin. “It is probably what drove him to come to Espozia, alone, to save you.”
“I don’t really care about his motivations, I am glad you are both on this ship heading out of Espozia,” Garono said. “We will put in at Nikia and head to Mozira and begin our campaign to recapture our capital city. Espozia will be back under our control soon enough,” He patted Valanna’s shoulder. “We will have magicians enough to save young Bluntwithe.”
“Perhaps we can get aid from the Colcanans. At least Prince Asem and Kulara can help,” Valanna said.
The two Dalistros paused. The father looked at the son and Valanna could see they didn’t think much of that idea. She sighed. Valanna would have to wait to get back to shore before she could do anything to help Trak. She looked back towards Espozia, seeing tendrils of smoke rising in the sky far behind them.
~
Prince Asem of the Warishian ruling tribe, the Ferezan, paced in the house that the Board of Deans of the Bitrium College of Magicians had given them to live in while Trak learned more magic under the tutelage of Honor Fidelia and Strength Nomia. “We need to leave Bitrium,” he said to his second, and most loved wife, Kulara.
“And where will we go? Warish? Now that the late Prince Nez attempted to assassinate his father, will King Marom hold you responsible? Has our planned excursion to Espozia turned into exile?”
Kulara asked the right question at the end. Asem didn’t know his status in King Marom’s court. He would have to send a letter to the king asking for further instructions after Trak’s banishment from Colcan, given that his execution had been aborted with the assistance of Strength. Both of them had disappeared from Bitrium and for good reason.
“We also have Valanna to worry about,” Asem said. “Now that the Bluntwithe boy is out of the picture, perhaps we should find out what is happening in Santasia.”
Someone knocked in the door. Asem opened it to Honor Fidelia. She looked as distraught as when she came to tell him about Trak’s death sentence a few days ago.
“There is civil war in Santasia. The rebels have taken over Espozia with most of the magicians in the Magicians Guild. Valanna is in danger and who knows where Trak is in all of this.”
Asem helped the upset woman to a chair in their sitting room. Kulara quickly joined them.
“We were just talking about that,” Kulara said. “Perhaps we should see if there is some way we can help Valanna? She would be in danger.”
Honor shook her head. “She barely escaped. Don’t ask me how I know, but Trak saved Dalistro and his father while saving Valanna. She is heading on a ship to Nikia, Santasia’s most southern port.” Not asking meant the Colcanans had a linked pair in a position to know what was going on in Santasia’s capital city or even on the ship to N
ikia.
“I know where Nikia is.” That made sense and Asem relaxed. “Then Trak and Valanna are heading out of trouble.”
The look in Honor’s eyes disputed his statement. “Trak has been re-taken by the Magicians Guild. He’s in as much danger in Santasia as he is in Colcan.”
“Or Pestle, or Warish,” Kulara said.
Asem gave his wife a warning look. He didn’t know how much danger Trak would be in Warish now that Nez had lost his life.
“A magician without a country, in exile. It’s all my fault,” Honor said.
Asem hadn’t expected to see tears ever coming from that woman’s eyes. “What’s done is done,” he said. Kulara glared at him. They had argued about the importance of the past before. Evidently, women seemed to hold on to previous events a little more tightly than men did. Asem didn’t mention matters of the heart. He had enough scars in the love life of his young manhood that still bothered him from time to time. “We will go to Nikia or Mozira. I am on my own, now that Trak is captured again. We can return to Warish at any time,” he wouldn’t tell Honor about the attempted assassination attempt or his possible peril in his home country, “or we can work with the Santasians, loyal to the council, to retrieve Trak, if he’s still alive.”
“If his mind is still intact,” Kulara said.
Honor looked away from them. “Leaving might not be possible. The Board has voted to put you under house arrest.”
Asem jumped to his feet. “Is that why you are here?”
Honor pursed her lips. The new tension seemed to wipe away her emotions. “Yes! I am here to get you out of Bitrium. I’m leaving to atone for my mistake. I should have told Trak that his demonstration of power in the quarry should have been done in secret.”
After sitting back down, Asem thought for a moment. “I don’t want to lose my connection with Berin, but as a member of the Board of Deans, if he voted to restrain us, he must know me well enough that I won’t accept it.”