In a way, though, this was good.
Really, it was.
If there’s one thing a creature like that does for you, it kicks your ass into gear.
For the next few days, I redoubled my efforts in everything. I got up earlier, so early I was one of the first in camp to wake, with only Siddel beating me. Siddel seemed to pride himself on being the earliest riser and had gotten annoyed the first and only time I beat him.
I used those early hours to finish my camp chores early. That left me most of the afternoon to practice on my spells.
Or spell. Using the plural was a little arrogant, judging by my current skills.
I figured I was struggling so much with the hrr-levita spell because the stances were too complex, and my body wasn’t used to the movements yet. If a guy bought a paintbrush from a store, would he start by trying to copy the Mona Lisa?
I needed to break each stance down into smaller movements, master those separately, then put them back together to form the stance. I needed to do this for each one, and then string them together to form the full cycle.
It sounded easy when I put it like that. Too easy.
Step one, buy a hammer, cement, and some bricks.
Step two, build the Sistine chapel.
That was how I passed my days. For the whole of the next week, I worked early morning until midafternoon, and then I focused on my stances. Breaking each one down. Straining my muscles and then feeding them with goat stew so they came back stronger.
I began to feel more flexible. Stronger in my joints. Day after day brought new aches as I mastered new stances and awoke muscles that evidently hadn’t been used much. Old stances felt less difficult to form, and easier to maintain.
As an experiment to see my progress, I cycled through hrr-chare, going through the motions as quickly as I could without casting it.
Man, what a difference!
I could build a hrr-chare spell in less than three seconds now. Still not a great response time in a fight, but it was a giant leap from where I had been before.
I spent my evenings by the main campfire, where more and more of the clan were warming up to me now. They’d sit by me and try to talk as much as my limited vocabulary allowed, and every conversation helped me understand more.
Mainly, I spent my time with Siddel, Rosi, or the teenagers and kids who I helped split the logs and lead the camp bison to the stream. Pendras and Red never once joined me.
At night, I would lie in the tent I shared with Roddie and two bison, and I would close my eyes.
Sometimes I pictured the stances in my head as I tried to sleep. I imagined moving my arms and legs to match the drawings in the book. It usually wasn’t long until I drifted off.
Other times, I couldn’t help but picture the Runenmer. The way he walked with his exaggerated steps, stretching out his legs. The rune circles he’d drawn, the demons that came from them.
The screams and the cries of utter agony, and then the remains that were left behind.
I didn’t sleep on those nights.
That was how it went for one week. Two. Three.
Work, exercise, stances.
Stew, singing, fires.
One night, I showed Rosi the novice hrr-levita book.
“What it do?” I said.
“Na, Isaac,” she said, and spoke Kartum, correcting my pronunciation.
“What does it do?” I finally managed, earning a smile. It was weird how much I valued that. Was I turning into a dog?
“Levita? Good spell,” she said.
Rosi picked pointed at a stone beside her foot. “Hrr-levita,” she said, and then picked up the rock and made a surprised face.
She dropped the rock, then slowly lifted it again, and understanding came to me.
Right. It was a telekinesis spell, or something similar. Wait – I earned a kinesis elemental for investigating the portal!
“Rosi, can he ask question?”
“Na, wrong, Isaac,” she said, and she corrected my vocabulary.
Finally, I got it right. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Ya, Isaac.”
“Siddel and I saw some people on the night we saw the Runenmer.”
She nodded. “I know. Red told me da untimefa na bese… horrible, horrible death.”
“I didn’t catch that. Apart from the horrible death part.”
“Survivors, Isaac. Like Lonehill. But not trust.”
Survivors. Humans. They were people out there who lived in small groups, it seemed. People like me, maybe. People who didn’t know there was a crazy demon summoner wandering around.
“Has any else in clan see Runenmer?” I asked.
“Na. Gone. Siddel has searched.”
“Ya, thought so. I search with him. No sign. He think maybe others may have eyed.”
Rosi grinned. “Eyed? Wrong, Isaac. Listen to words.”
And then our conversation turned away from spells and demon summoners, and back to normal, safe things like vocabulary lessons.
It took me another week to master the first stance of the hrr-levita spell. Two more weeks to master stances two and three.
In that time, I became an expert at chopping wood. I could lead bison to the stream like an absolute genius, if genius existed for such a thing. More importantly, I earned the respect of the clan. Only a little more each day, but I found that I was rarely ever alone at mealtimes now. One kid even taught me a Lonehill song about a clan elder who couldn’t stop farting. You’ve gotta love kids.
I kept going. Kept working, practicing, improving. Man, using magic was hard. Hard, and restrictive as hell. I mean, I guess utilizing magic shouldn’t be easy, but still.
The thing was, the Lonehills seemed to have ways to cast their spells quicker. After the few times I had seen them use magic, I was certain there was a way to push through the restrictions.
The question was, how? And whenever I asked this question, I got the same answer no matter who said it.
The mage must walk his path to mastery alone.
It was one of the most basic and deeply-held of the Lonehills’ beliefs; that every man and women must earn their own powers. Even spell guidebooks had to be earned by serving the clan somehow.
Despite that, knowing there was a way around the restrictions gave me hope.
I carried on working to improve, and it was another two weeks before I got my reward.
That night was a night like any other. Roddie was back in camp, sleeping by the dying fire. I was beyond the tent line but still well within ear and eyeshot of the camp.
I had chosen my practice spot carefully. I liked privacy while I fell on my ass and made a fool of myself mastering stances, but I wasn’t so worried about embarrassment that I’d isolate myself while the Runenmer was around. Even if we hadn’t seen his royal runeness for a while.
As I worked myself into the first stance and held my form, I felt the energy build up in me.
Stance two, and the feeling grew stronger.
Stance three hurt my thighs, but I held it, and now I heard a voice in my head. Hrr-Levita…Hrr-Levita…
Stance four, and energy and voice mixed together, becoming what I now recognized as the feeling of magic swimming around inside me.
Stance five, and my body begged for mercy, while the voice commanded me to release the spell.
Stance six, seven, eight…come on…hold it through the pain…
Stance 9…that’s it!
I stopped. I collapsed on the ground, sweaty and exhausted even though it was one of the coldest nights we’d have in weeks.
I’d done it. I’d finally cycled all nine stances in the spell. I had felt the energy inside me, the magic ready to cast and held back only by a single barrier; the elemental, and my refusal to use it.
I had only one kinesis elemental, and as much as I wanted to cast the spell and see it work, I didn’t know where my next elemental would come from. Elementals were precious when death was the only thing that produced th
em.
So I called it a night, and I headed back to my tent. Hot, tired, and ready to drop, but satisfied.
CHAPTER 18 – Boulderdash
I heard a scream.
A shiver ran through me as the snow fell on me, clinging to my hair and melting, making ice water run down my face. The wind howled in my ears so loud that it hurt.
I hadn’t heard a scream, had I? It was just the wind.
Even so, I gripped my poker tighter. When we first came out to hunt that morning, I wasn’t happy that while the others knew arrow spells and similar magic, I could only use a poker. I hadn’t expected to be able to kill anything on the hunt today, but I would try.
Now, I was beyond glad I had a weapon. Something I could use to bash a beast’s brains in.
But no, it was just the wind and not a scream. I heard it again now, that ghostly whine that breathed ice-cold air into my ears.
It was a freezing morning, two days after I had finally completed a cycle of the hrr-levita stances. The day afterward my success I hadn’t practiced, letting my muscles recover and grow. The second day after, I had completed the cycle twice more, getting faster and more precise with each practice.
Today, I was hunting. It had begun snowing that morning, and within an hour the land around the camp was a sea of white. Tents sagged under the weight of fallen snow, and it was the clan kids’ jobs to go to tent to tent and clear them.
Everyone else, every adult with a strong heart, was sent out into the wastes to hunt. Red and Pendras believed this snowfall was the beginning of months of it that were to come, and it might be the last chance to hunt for meat in a while. Thus, we were all sent out to kill whatever we could, and Mardak the cook would salt the meat later on.
There it was again. A scream.
No use persuading myself now; I definitely heard it.
I looked around me. We had all headed into a forest to the north of the camp. Maybe thirty of us in total, all spread out so that we could cover more ground. It meant that although I wasn’t alone here, I still couldn’t see anyone.
I held my poker and started running to where I’d heard the screaming. The makeshift boots that Nino, the clan inventoryman, had given me crunched on the snow, and yet more of the white stuff fell from the sky.
“Hello?” I shouted.
There was no answer. The forest was so big and we had spread so far apart that I guessed I was a couple of kilometers away from anyone else. It wasn’t dangerous, though; Siddel said the wolves always left the forest in the winter.
Nothing to worry about.
Right?
And then came the scream again.
It sounded like it was from the northeast. Not far away now. Surely someone else must have heard it?
I sprinted faster, and it wasn’t long before my lungs ached. I might have improved my muscles and flexibility, but I could use some cardio training.
Soon, I saw a boulder ahead of me. I walked over to it and leaned against it, catching my breath.
And then I heard another scream, this one so close that I let out a yell of my own.
The sound came from underneath the boulder.
I got to my knees and carefully moved the snow, uncovering the face, and then body, of a Lonehill clan teenager trapped under the boulder. The giant rock was lying on his stomach, completely pinning him down.
My first thought was, how??
My second was you poor, poor bastard. The boulder was as tall as my knee but twice as wide. To trap him underneath, it must have somehow dropped on him. How that was possible, I had no damn idea. Maybe a tree that grew boulders on its leaves? I could rule anything out in this place.
That didn’t matter now. The fact was that this thing had probably crushed the poor kid’s organs. He wasn’t getting up from this.
Only a matter of time until…
“Help,” he said. “Tu ma gnomore. Hurts…”
He coughed, spitting out a glob of blood that hit his chin and then dripped off into the snow.
I used my robe to wipe his chin. “Just hold,” I said. No, that wasn’t the right word. I was panicking. What did I want to say? “Err…wait for one time. No, one second.”
So, I had a kid trapped under a boulder.
No surprise what I needed to do here.
I began cycling the stances for hrr-levita. I got the first one wrong, and I lost my balance and fell into the snow.
Damn it. Focus.
I got to my feet and tried again. The cold made me shiver, and the boy wouldn’t stop groaning. It was impossible to concentrate, impossible to hold the right form.
Come on. Clear your head.
I nailed the first stance. Then the second.
Energy trembled in me.
A voice joined the energy as I completed stances four, five and six. Even after a full cycle, it hadn’t built enough yet. I hadn’t held form for long enough, or with enough precision.
So I cycled again.
Again.
The boy coughed more blood but I forced myself not to break concentration.
And now the energy felt hot, and the voice was chanting over and other in my head.
“Hrr-levita!”
I shouted the words of the spell, and I felt the kinesis elemental disperse from my bag and join the energy inside me.
Tendrils of black light left my palm, becoming a spectral hand that wrapped around the boulder and gripped it.
It seemed the hand was mine to command now. How did I do this?
“Lift.”
Nothing.
So I imagined the boulder rising. There we go! The boulder began to lift from the boy, and I imagined moving it away from him completely.
The spectral hand completed my request, and then it suddenly dispersed, and the boulder crashed down onto the snow beside the boy.
Discipline Unlocked: Kinesis
Spell learned: Levita
[The most basic of kinesis spells, allows the user to manipulate items beyond reach, or that would normally be too heavy.]
[Kinesis] discipline improved by 2%!
Rank: Grey 2.00%
Spells:
Levita [Cost: 1 [kinesis]elemental]
I wanted to deep-dive into what the text told me and what it meant, but this wasn’t the time.
I kneeled beside the boy. Holy hell, what a sight. The boulder had crushed his hips and thighs. Completely smashed his bones. His green face was so, so pale, except for the flecks of blood around his lips and on his chin. There was nothing I could do for this boy.
I stood up. I started shouting.
“Fix! Fix!”
Damn it, that wasn’t the right word! What had Rosi said again…
Oh yeah.
“Heal!” I bellowed. “Heal!”
“Isaac?” shouted a voice from the east. I couldn’t tell how far away they were.
“Heal!”
More and more voices answered now, and I heard people running through the forest.
I took off my overcoat, leaving me in just my robe. I put the coat over the boy, and I wiped the blood from his face.
How the hell had this happened? Looking around, there was just no possible way. There were no ledges, no places for a boulder to sit up high. Had this goddamned rock just fallen from the sky?
The only creature I had seen who was capable of this was an ogre, but there were no tracks nearby. Nothing. Nobody else could just lift a giant rock.
Oh, shit.
Nobody but mages who could use a telekinesis spell. Had someone else done this? One of the clan?
I had no time to get deeper into what this meant, because I was joined by Siddel, Rosi, and then others. Soon, a crowd formed around the boy.
“Move. Now. Get from the away,” said a mage. Or he said something like that, anyway. I had found that some mages spoke so quickly it was harder to understand them than others, and I always got the words wrong.
The crowd parted for him, and I saw that it was Cleavon, the healer. Cleavon
was a weird mage; he never joined us at mealtimes by the fire, except to dip his bowl into the stew dish to fill it. He’d then cross camp and retreat to his tent where he slept alone, and he wouldn’t come out until daybreak. I didn’t know what his deal was.
Cleavon removed the overcoat from the boy. The poor lad was taking deep, wheezing breaths now. He’d stopped coughing blood, but I wouldn’t say his condition had improved. He sounded like someone was using his lungs as an accordion.
“Boy will die,” said Cleavon. “Die with pain. Lots of pain. Na.”
Without a single other word, he put one hand over the boy’s eyes, took a dagger from his pocket, and slit his throat.
I felt my stomach bubble. I could taste bile in my throat. I was going to be sick, and I had to turn away.
I kept my back to the mages, but I held my breath and fought against nausea. I wouldn’t vomit. That would be seen as weak.
A hand settled on my shoulder.
“Okai, Isaac?”
It was Rosi. She was wearing a fur coat five times too large for her, which looked so cumbersome it would have made any attempt at hunting or stealth completely impossible.
“Okai?” she said again.
I nodded. “I am one who sees the world as opportunity,” I said.
This sentence was a strange one, but everyone said it. And they accomplished it by speaking just one word in the Kartum language; Alreygofar.
It was a word that was said every morning, by every clansperson. Their motto.
Alreygofar. I am one who sees the world as opportunity.
Cleavon turned away from the boy. “Gai, Siddel. Bring Pendras to location.”
The healer had lost some of his cool. I guessed that wasn’t strange, given he’d just had to end a young clansman’s misery.
Rosi patted my back. “Go, Isaac. Look at boy’s face. In death, one sees answers. You must not hide. Insult to poor Perryn if hide from it.”
She wanted me to look at the corpse. Fine, I’d do that. I stepped forward so I could see him, and it was then that I saw why Cleavon had lost his calm.
Everything Is Worth Killing- Isaac's Tale Page 14