Everything Is Worth Killing- Isaac's Tale

by Alex Oakchest

  “Kid on my parent’s farm. Clever kid. My pa farmed elementals. No offence there, slick. Took a shine to one of the livestock, a kid with bright blonde hair. Turned out to be a polyglot. Pa bought him a tome from a library, and the kid learned English from it, and taught it to me.”

  People farmed humans out here? For their elementals?

  Sick bastards.

  Then again, back home Dud would be on his way to the slaughterhouse now.

  He stood up then. “Listen. I better hit the track; I want to be in Dostenon by tomorrow sun fall. Stay slick, slick. And if you see my brother…a guy with a big ol’ red horn branded on his skin…run.”

  With that, Dud the Unsheathed tipped his pipe tobacco onto the ground, stood on it, and then walked away, whistling to himself.

  Roddie and I watched him go, and I only had one thought; in a world where people shot arrows from their palms and ogres kept humans as pets, this shouldn't have been so strange. And yet, I was sure I’d just witnessed the god damn weirdest thing in all my life.

  I headed back to camp, where I found Mardak standing by the main fire. I hoped he could give me some answers.

  Mardak, as well as being the camp chef, had also taken it upon himself to boost morale. I had noticed this about him, because I always made a point of observing the people in the clan and wondering what made them tick.

  Most nights, people would approach Mardak’s giant cauldron to get their serving of supper. Mardak would spend a minute or two talking with every single person. Learning what they had done that day. Learning where the hunters had been and what they had seen. Learning what spells younger mages were trying to master.

  If someone looked down, Mardak would tell or a joke or play the fool to cheer them up. If someone was rude, by cutting in line or coming for a second serving before it was time, Mardak would rebuke them.

  It was as though the collective mood of the camp was Mardak’s responsibility to maintain; that his job wasn’t only to fill their bellies, but to keep their spirits high. That was the job he’d given himself, anyway. I hadn’t spoken to him much except for our brief cauldron-side chats, but I liked him.

  “Listen, Mardak. Do you know a guy called Dud the Unsheared?”

  “Was, Isaac?”

  “Dud. He’s a sheep.”

  “Sheep?”

  “Uh, what’s the word? Damn it. Can’t think. You know, sheep. Baa, baa.”

  A few of the nearby mages were staring at me now, which hadn’t been my intention. Truth is, I was too tired to care.

  “Sorry, Isaac. Understanding eludes.”

  “No problem.”

  After walking back to camp, I had told Mardak the cook about the deer I’d killed, and he said he’d send a few mages to go collect it in the morning. I wanted to offer to help, but I’d killed the damn thing, and I had other stuff I needed to do now.

  So, after getting the kind of deep sleep only an utterly exhausted man can have, I woke the next morning to daylight and the songs of unseen birds, and I immediately headed east out of camp and to the place where I practiced my spells.

  After spending all of yesterday in a forest and killing a bunch of ice frogs or whatever the hell they were, I had new elementals.

  The problem? I didn’t know the spells I could use them in.

  But.

  I already knew that there were guides for learning new spells. Someone had to have written those guides, and they had to learn the spells somewhere. And whoever taught them was taught by someone else, and so on and so on…

  Now, I had already found out that nobody in the camp would teach me a spell. This was one of the tenements of Lonehill life; a clan member had to learn his spells. If they were from guidebooks, he’d had to get the books by his own means, such as helping in a battle. I realized now what a great favor poor Kaleb had done for me.

  Guides weren’t the only way, though. They couldn’t be. There seemed to be so many elementals and so many different spells out there, that there had to be a way to create new ones.

  Or, to uncover spells that already existed.

  I wasn’t sure about that yet. It was chicken and egg, I think. When a mage discovered a spell, was he creating something new? Or was he bringing to the light a spell that had always existed, but he couldn’t see?

  I hoped it was the latter.

  My experiment was pretty simple. I already knew the moves for hrr-chare. I’d practiced them so much that my limbs still remembered the aches the stances had given me. I could close my eyes and picture them, one after another until they became a cycle.

  So, using that, I started work on something else.

  The first stance in hrr-chare was making a backward C shape with my arm. Instead of doing that, I did the opposite; a front-facing C.

  Or, just a regular C, as the shape is better known.

  I did this for each stance; I remembered the relevant stance for hrr-chare, and I figured out what it would look like if I reversed it. It involved thinking completely differently; holding the stance in my head, and then moving my arms and legs so I did its opposite.

  At first, I felt nothing. Well, nothing except the breeze teasing down my collar and tickling my spine. A breeze that carried with it the smell of breakfast; of oats cooking in milk. My stomach tightened.

  You’ll eat when I master this, and not before, I told my stomach. It gurgled in reply.

  I reversed stance after stance, and I cycled through this new routine a few times, but I didn’t get the familiar build-up of energy that usually accompanied a spell.

  So, I started again. I figured I was reversing the moves wrongly, and maybe that was because I was trying to think of them in my head. I needed a guide.

  Using a twig, I drew out the six stances for hrr-chare in the snow.

  Below them, I drew what the opposite of the stance looked like. Leg placement, where to put my arms, everything. Drawing it like this, I could see where I had been going wrong.

  And now, I began to get excited. Too excited, actually, but who could blame me? I was sure I was onto something; another level of secrets, a new platform of mage knowledge.

  But excitement was the enemy of focus, so I took a few calming breaths and let my pulse settle, and I studied my drawings again, even as fresh snow fell and began to cover it.

  Here goes.

  I performed stance after stance again. New ones, the opposite of hrr-chare. I completed a cycle.

  Again, I told myself.

  That was the key; repetition. I already knew that learning a new spell took many, many cycles of stances.

  Again.

  Northing changed. No energy, no voices, nothing except my stomach getting hungrier.

  Focus. Again.

  And so I went, over and over as the morning grew old and began its transformation to afternoon. As clouds grew overhead. Great, billowing clouds with a blizzard hidden within their folds.

  Still, there was no change. Had I gotten this wrong?

  No. Don’t doubt it.

  Again!

  My shoulders ached. My calves sang with agony. Even my lips felt like they were aching, and I didn’t even know lips could do that. I sure as hell hadn’t involved my lips in the stances.

  I pushed through it all. Through hunger, pain, doubt, and then back around to hunger again. I imagined these discomforts as little mice, and every breath I took was a mental hrr-chare that burned them into cinders.

  And then I felt something.

  Sensation in my right thumb. A tingling, and not because of the cold.

  I made another stance.

  The feeling spread to my index finger and my palm.

  Another stance.

  Now my whole hand thrummed with energy.

  I was right! I had worked this out, and I was right! It was hard to control my excitement then, but I did my best and I worked my stances one after the other, until finally the energy was bursting to get out of me and a voice in my head was repeating something over and over again.
>
  Something I had never heard before.

  Hrr-Eisre, Hrr-Eisre.

  I stopped then, because I knew if I carried on the spell would burst out of me, and I would have used an ice elemental. Casting it there and then would have been a waste.

  I sat on the ground, my ass on the snow, and even that wasn’t enough. I lay back, utterly, completely exhausted. My body ached with pain, and my stomach was on strike, tightened itself into a thread to show how much I’d displeased it.

  Even through all of that discomfort, I had a smile on my lips.

  Hrr-Eisre.

  A spell made from the components of hrr-chare, but reversed. A spell that could only mean one thing; ice, instead of fire.

  Maybe I wouldn’t need novice spell books anymore. If I could learn what each stance meant, maybe I could construct my own spells. Maybe the stances were like notes in a song.

  “Isaac, ged,” said a voice. “Ver, ver ged.”

  Conscious that lying in the snow wasn’t usually a good impression to give people, I got to my feet.

  Standing there was a mage who I had seen around camp, but had never spoken to. In fact, he mostly kept to himself, and Rosi told me it was because he was utterly obsessed with his work.

  He was small, even for a Lonehill mage. Because almost every person in camp was bald. the only way they could make themselves look even more individual was by styling their beards or mustaches or by painting marks on their faces. This one was different.

  He had two streams of hair growing from the sides of his head. And I thought of them as streams because that was what they looked like; they were blue and seemed to flow from just behind his ears and down over his shoulders.

  I admired his persistence in growing them, but at the same time, they were ridiculous. I mean, come on. Five long, blue hairs growing from each side of his head? There came a time in almost every guy’s life when he needed to just give up. Embrace baldness.

  “Hai, Isaac.”

  “Our lips have never touched,” I said. And then I realized I’d murdered my vocabulary in possibly the stupidest way. “I mean, our words have never met.”

  “I am Giocomo, tanner and weapon melder.”

  “Rosi said me your name. I am Isaac. Hatchling to this world and profession-less.”

  “You were learning hrr-Eisre, no?” asked Giocomo.

  I nodded.

  “Ged, Isaac. I view no books of guide. No mentor whisper words to ears. You learn from thoughts?”

  “Yap. It took many turns of the clock, but yap.”

  “Hmm. Pendras will look with ged impression. Come, Isaac. I have something that your eyes might see. Something you will eat.”

  Something I would eat?

  No, like. I’d heard him wrong.

  Well, I had to admit, I was curious. Rosi said that Giocomo worked on all kinds of stuff in his tent, and he never let anyone else enter. Time to find out what it was that I would like.

  Forgetting for a second that entering an old mage’s tent so he could show me something I would like sounded very, very suspicious, I got up and followed him back to his abode.

  Giocomo’s tent smelled of leather, and I supposed that the strips of leather laying all around the place probably had something to do with that. Looking around, I couldn’t see any sign of a bed nor anything else that would make this homely, but I knew Giocomo lived in here as well as worked in it.

  “Rest bottom, Isaac, please,” he said, and he gestured as though there was a chair.

  I sat on a stack of garments of various sizes and materials.

  “Big surprise,” said Giocomo. “Geld deer? Big shock. Many ah’s.”

  Yep. I’d heard that a lot since the teenagers had brought the deer back to camp. Half a dozen mages had thanked me, while a few of the hunters had shot me dagger looks. I didn’t blame them; they had years of hunting experience and they had spells perfect for their craft. I had gotten lucky and pokered a deer to death.

  “Hier, Isaac,” he said.

  He handed me a robe. But not just any robe, because any old robe wouldn’t have made my eyes widen. I already had two, after all.

  No, this robe was made from a completely different kind of material to what the Lonehill tanners and robe makers usually used. The fur was soft but firm in a strange kind of way, and my fingers glided over it as I stroked it.

  The strangest part was its color; a light brown in certain parts, but as Giocomo lifted it up and down, it seemed to shimmer with golden light.

  “The deer?” I said.

  “Yap. Geld deer.”

  “Wow. Your work was a sprint. I mean, you made this quickly.”

  “I master of crafts such as this. Ta fleg ma na mitakia…”

  Giocomo’s speech turned into a torrent of Kartum that he spat out so quickly I couldn’t catch a single word. I’d found this was common among the clan. They each had their own jobs and passions, and when you asked them about the things they loved the most, they spoke so excitedly that it was impossible for me to understand.

  As I nodded and pretended to follow what he was saying, I put the robes on.

  When I did, there was no question of even trying to listen, because I was more interested in the text forming in front of me.

  Robes of the Geld Deer equipped!

  [Through freezing winters and boiling summers, through rain and wind and sun and drought, always has there been a Geld Deer in the forest of the Circle. This was the last, and its pelt rests on your shoulders.]

  Woah.

  I had killed the last deer of its species?

  That was heavy. Literally; the robe weighed a ton. But I read and re-read the description, and I thought about the geld deer and the end it had met; that of a poker in the throat, and then getting buried on top of a rune.

  When I had seen it, I thought nothing of its golden shine. After all, there were tons of weird creatures in this world. Why should a golden deer be special when there were green-skinned dudes who could fire magic arrows?

  Now I saw how wrong I was.

  If I could go back to that moment, knowing what I did now, would I do anything different? The deer would help keep the clan alive. Mardak would butcher it and salt the meat, and it could be the edge between surviving the winter and dying.

  Was the mages’ collective survival worth more than the deer’s?

  Then again, there was something I hadn’t thought about. If this deer was the last of its species, then the species was doomed to die no matter what happened. It was already walking its path toward destiny, and I had just helped it along.

  Maybe that’s all survival was, when you looked at it. Just extending an inevitable journey.

  I looked at the benefits the robe bestowed on me.

  - The geld deer’s’ legacy may visit when alone

  Huh? Was that it?

  That wasn’t much of a benefit, and certainly not enough to justify how proud Giocomo had seemed when giving me the robes. They looked great, no doubting that, and his workmanship was masterly. But what did it mean?

  “Geld deer’s legacy?” I said.

  Giocomo shrugged his shoulders.

  “Have you tried this on to see what it does?”

  “Yap.”

  So Giocomo had worn the robes, and he was utterly unaffected by the fact that this pelt used to belong to the last geld deer. It didn’t surprise me; the Lonehills weren’t a sentimental people.

  “Thankie, Giocomo,” I said.

  The old tanner patted me on the back, and I left his tent. Outside, some of the mages stared at me. I got a few envious looks, which I guessed was because of my flashy new robes.

  With no sign of Pendras or the rest of them, I spent all that morning and afternoon practicing my spells. I didn’t cast anything, but I completed cycles of each spell, holding my form and learning how to go from one stance to a next with the minimum of movement.

  That was something else that I had realized. It had come to me a few nights earlier, when everyone
was gathered around the campfire. Harrien and his friends were sitting on an upturned log, and the teenage mage was playing a lute.

  Harrien could strum a tune, but he was clumsy when going from chord to chord, and the transition was sometimes jarring. I guessed that summed up what I had learned about him.

  He liked to make a good appearance. To be seen with a lute, or casting a spell. But the appearance, the cool effect, was all he cared about. He didn’t delve into the nuts and bolts of things, because all he wanted to do was impress people.

  And, to be even more specific about it, he wanted to impress girls.

  In any case, his best friend Malin took over playing the lute, and the change was insane. Malin knew shortcuts and techniques to change chords that made Harrien look like he’d been playing with broken fingers. Where Harrien would move all of his fingers from one chord to the next, Malin knew that some fingers didn’t have to move at all. That was the key to a smooth flow of chords; conserving movement.

  And so it proved with stances. Now that I was intimately familiar with hrr-chare, I began to see how I could move from one stance to the next with the least possible movements.

  The difference was astounding. This one, simple change meant I had shaved a whole second from my hrr-chare casting time.

  Excited, I next applied it to hrr-levita.

  Of course, excitement is the enemy of focus, and my first few attempts failed until I calmed myself down.

  On and on I went, maximizing the efficiency of my cycles, so that I flowed from one stance to the next much better, quicker, and easier. I was beginning to see how Pendras could be so fast now. I’d never reach his standards through practice alone, I suspected, but I saw how a mage could improve.

  And so it was with my limbs exhausted beyond belief that I stumbled to the camp.

  Night had spread its wings overhead, and snowflakes began to drift from the sky. They landed in my hair and on the shoulders of my golden-hued robes, melting and then trickling over the fur.

  That night was the merriest we had for days. The whole Runenmer thing had cast a billowing thunderstorm on our moods, but the deer meat changed things. It filled our bellies with something rich, and our brains rewarded us with endorphins.