“I am telling you that our oral history says the scamps are a symbol. I believe they are more of a tool. Either way, my duty was to tell you what the voice of time says, and let you resolve things in your own mind. You are a clever boy.”
Both of them said nothing now. Kody’s scamp had curled up into a ball, into the same position as baby scamps slept in. Josag’s scamp stared absently into the distance.
“I hope you understand, boy, that you need to change the way you think. Times are dangerous. The humans aren’t our enemy, now. We have other things to worry about, and I have things to do. I cannot concentrate on keeping us safe while worrying about you. I cannot have my son meet the same fate as my brother.”
“Yes, Father.”
“Tell me, then. Tell me why it is so important that I never have to bring you here again? Why is it vital that I never have to worry about you?”
“Because there are other enemies out there.”
“Yes. And who are they?”
“The circle children.”
“Yes,” said Josag. “Those of magic. Those who must kill to fuel their spells. Come; let’s get back to the tribe. You mother is cooking roach stew tonight.”
Father and son stood up together, and now the young ogre gripped his chains firmly and wrapped them once around his hand, and he gave them a tug. His scamp jerked upright, surprised. One more yank of the chain, and he scampered along after Kody.
“Come on, scamp,” Kody said.
Josag looked at his son and smiled, his worries easing just a little. His son would grow strong in the ogre way.
CHAPTER 16 – Headbutt
So this was the Lonehill clan’s home. A scattering of tents made from animal skin that still bore the strange blemishes and colors of the creatures they must have skinned to make them. Wooden spikes driven into the ground surrounding the camp, with boar and wolf heads impaled on them. The Lonehills could have used a few decorating tips.
I realized now that Pendras and his people were just a small group of a great population of mages. Sixty in number, maybe more. They all had their own families, and they slept in tents that fit eight or ten each.
When we first approached the camp, mages streamed out to greet Pendras and Rosi and the others, but it wasn’t long before every set of eyes fell on me. Me, the outsider. It made me a little uncomfortable. I mean, I couldn’t remember much of my life before coming here, but I was sure I had never walked into a camp of green-skinned mages before now. Still, first time for everything.
Pendras, Rosi, and a few of the older mages I’d traveled with headed off into the largest tent, disappearing from view. A bunch of other mages gaped at me for a while, but it wasn’t long before they got bored.
Then I found myself alone. Nobody to speak to, nobody to tell me what to do. And I felt like I should be doing something.
I made myself useful by joining a bunch of other clansmen. These were kids, I guessed, younger than Kaleb. They looked at me warily as I approached them, so I conjured up the little Kartum that I knew, to try and put them at ease.
“Ma agname Isaac,” I said.
None of them even looked at me, except a lone mage girl. She had an athletic figure, and part of one of her pointy ears had been torn off.
“Ma agname Nixie,” she said.
She looked at me then, as if waiting for me to say something else. The Lonehill people did that kinda a lot, I was discovering.
Well, I guessed that was the end of that conversation unless she wanted me to point at the sky or some trees and say the Kartum word for them. I didn’t want to get a reputation as the guy who hanged around camp pointing at the sky and the ground and saying random words.
The kids were collecting piles of wood that someone else had chopped, so I made myself busy by helping them. I spent a few hours taking piles of wood from one side of the camp to another, where they were building fires.
When that was done it was still mid-afternoon, and I hadn’t seen any sign of Pendras, Rosi, or the others.
I guessed there was only one more thing I could do.
“Come on, Roddie,” I said.
My pooch and I crossed to the east side of camp, and we walked beyond the tents and a little away from everyone else. I had a plan to make use of the fading daylight, but I didn’t want to do it while everyone was staring at me.
So, out of earshot and mostly out of sight of the Lonehills, I settled by a boulder sticking out of the ground. It was covered in a sheet of frost, and strange little insects scurried over it. Ants, but the size of cockroaches, walking behind each other in a line and then disappearing into a crack in the boulder.
There, I opened my bag and took out the two books that Pendras had given me.
So, this was my reward for helping them stop the wolves crossing the lake. Even thinking about it made me a little sad. I pictured Kaleb running across the ice, and the ice melting and stranding him away from shore, and then I remembered him slipping into the lake, too far for us to rescue him.
Damn, this was an unforgiving place.
Best not to think about that. I needed to focus on something else.
I picked up the first book and studied the title. Hrr-Levita: Un gata fur Novicien. The title of the second book read, Hrr-Barrer: Un gata fur Novicien.
Okay, at least I was right about something. I’d suspected that Pendras had given me a couple of spellbooks. After studying the first that Kaleb had given me and subsequently learning how to shoot fire from my hands, I was unbelievably excited to see what I could learn from these.
So, which to choose?
That’s the problem when you can’t read a language; it doesn’t give you a lot to work with.
Luckily, it seemed that novice spell books came with pictures. And if you can’t read the words, at least you can look at the pretty drawings.
Just like with the hrr-chare book, the levita spellbook came with a bunch of stances. Nine in total, but way, way harder than the stances needed to cast the chare spell. I tried to copy them, but man, I needed to be a master contortionist to pull some of them off.
The first movement was the backward c, just like in the chare book. So far so good. But the next one required me to place one palm on the ground, lift my left leg and bend it back so that the front of my foot was resting against the back of my knee, and to arch my back and look up at the sky.
After thirty minutes of trying to pull it off, all I got for my efforts was a sore back, aching calves, and a busted nose from where I lost my balance and hit the ground face first. Frozen mud stings like a bitch.
I understood now why the mages looked so toned. None of them were particularly muscly, but they were all pretty athletic, and that must have come from years of training their bodies to become some kind of yoga masters. All this so they could use their magic.
Damn it, I wasn’t going to get anywhere with this yet. If I was going to be able to master the hrr-levita spell, whatever it did, I needed strength training.
Rather than finish for the day, I used the last of the fading daylight by practicing some of the other stances in the book, but these were even harder than the second, and I was an aching mess by the time the sky turned dark.
Disgruntled and frustrated, I set off back to the tents, to where half a dozen fires glowed against the darkness. At least there would be food. Maybe helping move all the wood had earned me something to eat. Then I could sleep and get up the next morning, refreshed and ready to work at it again. For now, though, food and sleep were the only things on my mind.
When I got back to camp, I found Pendras waiting for me.
He curled his finger to me.
“Ya, ya, Isaac caim hier,” I said. A few watching mages laughed.
I followed him to the largest tent in the camp. Inside, the tent smelled of acorns and shit. I was coming to realize that the aroma must have played an important part in the Lonehill clan’s life. Otherwise, why did everything smell of it?
Still, I hardly smelled
much better.
Just two mages waited for me; Pendras and another mage. He was green-skinned like the rest of his people, but this guy looked older than time itself. He was beyond wrinkled, so much that he looked like a raisin that had been left to shrivel even more, stretched out, then sat on for fifty years by a herd of elephants. I’m sure he had a great personality, though.
The effect of old father time wasn’t the strangest thing about his face, though. Two words should suffice to show how strange he was.
Dual circles!
He had two circles on his forehead. One golden, and the other silver. I had thought that Pendras, with his golden circle, must have reached some kind of peak in magery, but I was wrong. What happened when you gained a gold circle and then advanced even more? You got another circle!
I felt very insignificant right about then, with my colorless, pathetic excuse for a circle.
The older mage was sitting on a pile of folded furs. His bony fingers were adorned with rings, and the medallion necklace around his neck seemed so heavy it might tip him over.
“Isaac,” he said, his voice so croaky it was almost a whisper. “Wanderor. Isaac na tage, delui ra ma fatanika.”
Okay, even after my vocabulary lessons with Rosi, I hadn’t understood a word of that.
The old mage lifted his hand.
I thought I knew what was coming next.
Don’t do it…
Yup, sure enough, he beckoned me over to him by curling his finger. What was with the Lonehill elders doing that? But being in the presence of a two-circled mage older than the sky, I wasn’t going to say much about it.
I walked over to him. He pointed at the ground by his feet, so I took a step forward.
“Na, Isaac. Knie,” he croaked, pointing at the ground again. Pendras shot me a look now, arching his eyebrow and nodding at the ground.
Hoping I’d guessed right, I kneeled. The old mage leaned forward. He stretched out and he held my head in his bony hands.
This was starting to get weird.
He then leaned forward, closer and closer until I thought I might have to tell him that we only just met and he could at least take me to dinner, when he pressed his forehead lightly against mine.
The circle on my head began to glow. It felt like when I had held the stone from the fire; warm, but not painful. Pleasant, in the whole old mage guy pressing his head against mine kinda way.
He held his head against mine so long that it began to feel very, very awkward, but I decided that there must have been a reason for this. Otherwise, I was high-tailing it outta there the first chance I got.
And then, I saw something in my mind. A thought, but not mine. It seems strange to say, but I knew it wasn’t mine, but the old man’s. It had a…uh…a smell to it. Or, the thought version of a smell.
There was just something about it.
The thought was an image; it was me, tumbling through a long passageway of light while the cosmos flickered for millions of light years around me.
Woah!
I was about to speak, when I felt the old man press a finger against my lips.
Okay, this is getting ridiculously strange.
The images changed then, one after another firing into my mind.
An eye inside a small sphere, balanced on a mage child’s lap. Then, an eye in the clouds, watching the world.
It shifted, and the scene turned dark. It showed passageways of light just like the one I had seen myself tumble through. But not just one passageway; dozens. Hundreds. Forms plunged through them, some gliding, other somersaulting in the vacuum of light. Each of them journeyed through the blackness of time as the stars watched them impassively.
I saw Vikings. Businessmen in suits. Strange lizard creatures with two heads and six legs. Spiders who carried swords, one in each hand.
They all fell from their portals and then tumbled down to the ground, landing on it without harm or injury.
The image zoomed out now, showing me the vast surface of the world. It was breathtaking in scope, and so vast that I could barely see end to end. Things were scurrying across it.
Ants?
No, not ants. These were people, and I was just looking at them from a god’s height. I saw ogres. Mages. Lizards. All hurrying through their lives, banding together, making camps, building towns.
Tress grew. Trees were felled. Volcanoes erupted. On and on these ants scurried, back and forth across the planet, tucked away in their little groups.
And way, way above them was the eye. Giant, watery, blinking as it watched.
One last, final image beamed into my skull.
Me, but with green skin and with light shining from the circle on my forehead, and the eye watching from way, way above.
The mage separated from me then, coughing and spluttering. I felt as if something had been ripped out of me; as though the old mage had planted a root inside me as we talked, and…
Let me rephrase that.
As though the mage and I had formed a connection, and now it had been severed, tearing something indefinable from me.
Pendras rushed to him and rubbed his back while he coughed, and gradually the sounds died down, and the old man slumped back and took deep, wheezing breaths. His face was pale green now, his eyes sunken.
I hardly knew what to think. There was just so much to understand, or to not understand, as the case may be.
Where did I even start?
I realized that I was clenching my fists so hard that my knuckles hurt, so I took a few steadying breaths, and I got to my feet, feeling shaky at the overload of information.
The old mage coughed again, and I was worried he might die right there and then.
“Are you okay?” I said.
Pendras nodded. “Gae, Isaac,” he said, and pointed at the tent door.
It was a lot to process. I didn’t know what the old mage had tried to show me, and he was too tired to answer at any rate.
All his images had shown me was that I was not the first, and I doubted I would be the last. I was nothing special. Maybe that was what he had tried to tell me.
Or, that I needed to adapt to this place. Perhaps that was what the image of me with green skin was about.
If that was true, then I was expected to merge with the Lonehill clan, to become one of them. If I didn’t, then what? Something to do with the eye watching us?
I decided that for now, my best chance of safety was in numbers, and that meant getting the clan to let me stick around. If all that meant was I had to learn their language, maybe even wear a robe, then fine. I could live with that. The robes were pretty cool, actually.
I’d do that, and all the while I would find out more and more about this place, and I’d get stronger and learn as many spells as I could. Then as soon as I got the chance to do anything – I don’t know what, but anything – I’d take it.
Good. Settled. With a vague plan to work towards, I felt a little calmer.
Over the next couple of weeks, my life took on a little structure. During the days I’d help out with whatever needed doing around camp. I’d chop logs, I’d take the bison to the stream, I’d fill huge clay pots with water and bring them back.
I went out on a few hunts with Siddel, the Lonehill’s chief hunter who could shoot arrows of light from his palms. I noticed that Siddel cycled through his spell stances so quickly it was almost a blink. It opened my eyes to his power when he spotted a hare, cycled to build energy, and zapped it dead before I’d had time to breathe.
This meant that the right spell done the proper way could be useful in a fight. You just had to be quick enough, and that meant I could learn it, too. Then again, Siddel’s forehead circle was red, and I guessed I had a lot of work to do to match him.
In the afternoons, Rosi would spend a little time with me and teach me more of their language. We started with the point-and-name game, then moved on to context, sentences, questions.
As my skills improved, I took the opportunity to ask her w
hether everyone saw words when they used magic and collected elementals, or if it was just me.
Rosi tapped her forehead circle. “All clan see own words.”
Through shooting the breeze with her and observing the rest of the clan during the day, I started to learn how these guys worked. What interested me most was the thing that seemed most appropriate to worry about – how they stayed alive.
One thing that stuck out was that I was sure some of the older mages, those with golden, crimson, or silver forehead circles, didn’t use one elemental per spell cast.
They just couldn’t, because it didn’t add up. I watched them cast spells to fell particularly large trees, to light fires on nights when the snow and rain were so bad that traditional methods failed. Knowing that you only get elementals from killing stuff, I didn’t think they’d be so wasteful.
So, they either didn’t use a whole elemental per spell, or they had a great stock of elementals that I didn’t know about.
I guessed the former made sense. The better you are at casting spells, the more economical each spell is. Seemed to make sense in my head. That was something Rosi was tight-lipped about, as was everyone else. The Lonehills most infuriating belief was that ever mage walks his own path to mastery.
Something that supported my idea that the better the mage, the less wasteful his spells were, was the fact that a few of the younger mages used weapons. Nothing special; just some standard iron swords or maybe a hand axe.
Maybe it was because that for a younger mage, casting spells was a resource drain. While they were still learning their craft, they had to have weapons handy to use if it ever came to a fight.
There were also some Lonehills who lived out in the wilds. Guys and girls who lived as scouts, always searching for resources for the clan. You know, stuff like a field full of wild bison ready for slaughter. That sort of thing. These Lonehills were better trained in fighting, and could be recalled to the clan territory in times of need, as long as they hadn’t scouted too far field.
Finally, there was how they got the elementals. Rosi told me they used to breed sheep and cows, and they could get a lesser elemental from animals like this. Then a disaster meant their livestock died, and since then, they relied on hunting.
Everything Is Worth Killing- Isaac's Tale Page 12