The Games of Ganthrea

by Andy Adams

  Gemry herself hovered about seven feet off the ground, facing the flightless students. “If they’re brazen, they’re going to come from the high peak on the right,” Gemry said, motioning to the towering hill in the distance. “So, you three, station yourselves within view of that pass.” She pointed to Sorian and two other spellcasters, and they headed out. “If they’re smart, they’ll try to sneak through the lower pass by the trees, so there’s more obstacles to cover them. You two,” she said, pointing to the remaining two, a boy and a girl, “flank the left side of the lake and find a good vantage point in a tree to keep that pass in your sights. Signal me if you see them trying to sneak through.”

  “Can do,” one of them said as they hustled away.

  As the only flightless player left, Brenner waited for instructions. He felt awkward as Gemry floated above him, probably deciding some leftover spot to assign him. Suddenly she flew down to the ground, standing as tall as he did, her hands on her hips.

  “I saw you during the practice shoot,” Gemry said, her green eyes meeting his.

  Oh great, Brenner thought, bracing himself, she saw my misses, and how I have to say the spell out loud to make it work. Sorian’s bad enough, now she’s going to grill me, too?

  “There’s not many lower level conjurers that can hit the red warrior a full league away.”

  Huh? His cheeks warmed; he hadn’t expected a compliment. “Oh… thanks…” he said, and awkwardly realized he’d forgotten her name. “Was it Gimery?”

  “No, Jem-ree, like a gemstone. And what’s your name?”

  “Me? Brenner.”

  “Just Brenner?”

  “Brenner Wahlridge.”

  “Well, Brenner Wahlridge, I saved you for last because along with the high and low passes, I need you to guard the sky.”

  Unconsciously, Brenner’s shoulders straightened back. “Thanks,” he said in what he hoped was a dignified voice. “I’ll do my best.”

  “Make some good stuns, and prove me right,” Gemry said, as two loud peals of brass bells sounded.

  Sage Vicksman flew above the middle ridges, sent a pulsing light from his mircon that touched every part of the stadium, and shouted, “Zabrani matches—begin!”

  “If you can keep up with me,” Gemry said, “press forward to take more land and, eventually, the glowbes. Now, play hard and win,” Gemry added, flying towards a high elm tree on the right side of the lake.

  She hadn’t assigned him a fixed spot, just an objective. He liked that.

  Brenner took off around the left side of the lake, so that he could watch both of the likely entry points that Gemry predicted.

  Flashes of light flickered over the ridge and through trees ahead: the battle was upon them.

  Coming to the last stand of trees before the hills, Brenner hid behind one and peeked out to see three flyers with violet shields sending a continuous volley of stunning spells at a trio of his orange teammates behind large boulders, pinning them in place. His teammates, two flightless groundlings and one knight, shot back, and succeeded in hitting the leg of one of the flyers. He let out a sharp cry, and his leg went rigid, yet he still hovered in the sky.

  Brenner pointed his mircon around the tree and was about to shoot, but saw he’d only hit their shields, and worse, give up his position. I can do more damage if I get around them…get a clear shot at their backs.

  One of his teammates let out a yell, and the orange knight fell from the air to the ground with a sickening thud, immobilized.

  “Gotcha!” a violet flyer yelled.

  They were now down, two groundlings against three flyers, when the odds got worse: two new violet knights flew from over the left hill.

  It was now or never.

  Brenner made a run to the far right of the melee, sprinting across the open hillside and diving for cover behind a grey boulder. He held his breath. The shots of spells continued…but they weren’t directed at him. He stuck his head around the side of the boulder. The five flyers had picked off another of his teammates, and they started to fan around the rock to finish the remaining orange groundling.

  Brenner leaned to his right around the boulder, and as hard as he could, thought, “Arcyndo!”

  His spell streamed out from his mircon, struck a knight in the back, and as he fell, Brenner pointed to a red-haired girl flyer and shot again.

  “Aaaaagh!” shouted the first boy as he dropped to the ground, catching the attention of the two closest fliers to him. As they turned, Brenner’s second spell hit the next knight, and she plummeted to the rocky hillside. Yes!

  “There’s one over there!” a violet knight called to her two teammates, who had swooped around and stunned the last orange spellcaster.

  Brenner’s adrenaline kicked in: they’d be coming for him now. He looked up the hillside—briefly saw a sage in shimmering silver flying far above, watching the field—then saw two boulders wedged together, forming a narrow cave entrance. Knowing the three knights would surround him, he sprinted for the cave, holding his shield back to defend his shoulder and blindly shooting spells at the flyers.

  Hot bursts of light cracked into the rocks around him, and two blasted hard into his shield as he ran the last twenty feet to the cave, diving in headfirst. Chunks of stone showered his feet; then he whipped around and placed his orange shield in the entryway, which barricaded most of the cave-mouth. This gave him a narrow opening between his shield and the upper rock, much like an arrow loop in the walls of a castle, through which he could see two flyers coming towards him—where was the third?—then it felt like his shield was slammed with sledgehammers.

  If he could only hold his shield still during their shots, he could figure out the flying pattern of his opponents…

  …the girl seemed to loop in place with aerial cartwheels…the boy darted side to side, but his legs drifted lower than his shield could cover…Yep, there’s his weak spot. Brenner waited for his twist to the left which would leave him open, and shot a spell through the mouth of his cave—it stunned the knight’s legs, which surprised him enough to throw his shield arm up in the air—and by then Brenner had already loosed a second spell at him—WHAM!

  Got him! Just one more left.

  But when he looked for the violet flyer, she was gone. An eerie quiet filled his cave; he could only hear faint spells firing in the distance.

  “Parsplodo!” a voice rang out.

  The walls around him started shaking, and rocks from the ceiling smacked onto his shoulders. She wasn’t shooting at him: she was shooting at the boulders above him.

  He had to escape, even though he’d be an exposed, easy target. Another explosion rocked the cave, and a jagged rock hit him in the calf. If he didn’t jump now, the crumbling walls would crush him. Whether he could be healed from that or not, he didn’t want to find out.

  Turning his shield sideways, he lunged out of the cave, falling backwards in midair, and shot up at the hovering violet figure.

  That same instant, her spells rocketed into his chest, and his body froze. His back landed hard on the rocky hill, and his chest ached with a fiery pain.

  A moment later, a dull thud sounded from the hillside.

  Yesterday, Finnegan had said anyone in danger of dying would be removed by an official. While he wasn’t worried about dying, his mind was fixed on the immediate pain of two things: his calf was bleeding from the rocks, and his chest felt like he’d been shot at close range with a paintball—and it didn’t help that the stunning spell left his whole body feeling constricted. He wondered if he could muster enough energy to send a surrender spell into the air, which, if an official found him, would eliminate him from play. But hopefully take away the pain.

  While he was still deciding if he should wait around or send up a spell, a white mist enveloped his body…then his pain…melted away. The stunning spell dissolved. He could move.

  “Pretty impressive for a conjurer,” a feminine voice called over to him.

  Brenner looked up the
hillside to see Gemry floating above him, her long brown hair rippling behind her like a ribbon.

  “Careful!” he shouted, “There’s one more left, behind the boulder!”

  “You mean that stunned flyer over there?”

  Gemry pointed uphill, and when he jumped up to look, he saw that the violet flyer had been immobilized from his final spell.

  “Oh…” Brenner said. “It worked.”

  “I’ll say. Where’s your teammates?”

  “They got picked off behind that rock,” he said, pointing, “over by the wood’s edge.”

  Gemry flew over to the pacified players. A moment later, the three of them joined Brenner at the crest of the hill.

  “You got all five of those knights?” asked the boy in dark green robes, looking around at the frozen violet players.

  “Well, the first two were busy shooting at you,” Brenner said, “so I had a couple of easy targets.”

  “Very good,” Gemry said, “but we haven’t won yet. While you were skirmishing on your side, the right side was overrun; our king, Maverick, was stunned—”

  “There goes twenty points,” said a knight at Brenner’s side.

  “It’s worse,” said Gemry, leading them to the top of the ridge. “They also grabbed our first glowbe. Now, nearly all the violets are surging toward the center glowbe. There are about six teammates left to guard our last two glowbes, so we need to move fast. Their right glowbe may be unguarded. You two,” she pointed to the flyer and the groundling, “go take it as quickly as you can. We—” she gestured to Brenner and another boy, “will go for their center glowbe, and then converge on the remaining one.”

  They split up: the two teammates ran to the right side of the ridge, toward a purple light shooting behind the rocks from a thick stand of trees. Brenner and the other boy bolted up the center ridge, while Gemry flew ahead to the grove of trees.

  When will I learn to fly? Gemry covered the same ground in a fraction of the time. As they ran downhill, jumping over bushes and crags, the other boy called to him.

  “So! You’re that new kid—the one who aced the Agilis test!”

  “Yeah,” Brenner said, vaulting over a rock, “I s’pose that’s me.” Suddenly a streak of white light shot into the hill behind him. They picked up their pace.

  “Nice job back there! I’m Girard, and I—” Loud spellfire sizzled past. Two violet knights were shooting at them from the far left.

  “Over here!” Gemry yelled to them.

  They burst through some bushes, and the shots on the ridge behind them ceased. Gemry nodded ahead, then glided silently above them. Brenner followed her, with Girard behind, breathing hard from the sprint, which triggered an old memory for Brenner of burning lungs. But so far, he gratefully felt fine.

  As he and Girard crept through the woods into enemy territory, the middle glowbe came into view; then a loud snap filled the air. Brenner looked back twenty feet to see Girard grimacing as he lifted his foot off a broken twig.

  A flurry of spells shot toward Girard; Brenner dove behind the closest tree.

  Girard froze in place, then fell with a loud thud. Brenner artfully jumped up to a high bough, careful to avoid sticking his limbs out, then peeked through a clump of leaves at the scene below. Five players soon pressed around Girard, mircons at the ready.

  “Where’s the other one?”

  They were within a dozen feet of Brenner’s tree. Another moment and he would be forced into a firefight. Then he saw Gemry.

  Hovering across the clearing and behind a few maple trees, she was directly behind the violet knights. As they strode away from her, mircons pointed toward Girard, she rained stunning spells down on them. Two players were knocked out. The rest of the team scattered, regrouped, and then fired back, pinging her shield, and forcing her lower into the trees for thicker cover.

  In their haste to attack her, their backs were now exposed to Brenner: a golden opportunity.

  Arcyndo! he thought, shooting jets of light at two of the knights, hitting them squarely in the shoulders.

  When the last knight realized he was pinned between Brenner and Gemry, he made a mad dash from the clearing. But crisscrossing spells from both of them finished him off.

  “Good timing,” Gemry said to Brenner, hovering in for a graceful landing next to him.

  “You too.”

  “Would you like the honors?” she said, gesturing towards the purple glowbe floating nearby.

  “Sure,” Brenner said. He leapt up and grabbed it. The orb changed from a misty violet to a vibrant orange in his hand, then levitated high in the sky with its new color-beam. Scanning the woods, they saw another light in violet’s territory flicker and turn orange. Two glowbes gained, one to go.

  “Can you go back and thaw Girard?” Brenner asked.

  “Uh-oh,” Gemry said with alarm. “No time.”

  “What?”

  “Look back at our territory.”

  Brenner raised his eyes over the hills, and noticed two of the three distant lights from their home glowbes now shimmered purple.

  “We need to move,” Gemry said, and with a sweep of her hair, was flying again.

  Brenner bolted through the woods after her.

  The two came to the edge of the forest, about thirty yards from the last violet, shimmering glowbe, which inconveniently floated behind a ring of opposing spellcasters. His heart sunk: four flying knights and six groundlings. He and Gemry were severely outnumbered.

  “I have an idea,” said Brenner, catching his breath. “How far can your healing spell shoot?”

  “If I can see you, I can heal you.”

  “Good,” Brenner said. He told her his idea, and then the two moved to opposite sides of the woods.

  As the ten violet knights circled their glowbe, watching for movement from the hillside back near Orange’s territory, Brenner climbed, listening to their conversation.

  “—should clinch the game any moment now,” one of the older boys was saying, “I came back to check our defense as Kuehl was on his way to grabbing the second glowbe.”

  “How many are guarding the third?”

  “No more than a handful. Dozens of stunned Orange spellcasters were on—”

  Suddenly Brenner burst from the treetops in a flying leap toward the glowbe, falling fast toward the prize behind the circle of spellcasters.

  He was shot five times midair.

  His body froze in place, but gravity continued to do its work, and this time there was no sage to stop his long fall to the ground: time seemed to drift lazily as he fell like a ragdoll, and then fast-forwarded as he built up speed to the hard earth—WHAM! Briefly, he landed on his feet before crumpling hard on his side, between the ring of knights and the shimmering glowbe, about fifteen feet away.

  So, this is what a bruised rib feels like.

  “Well, that was obvious,” one of the violets called.

  “See any more?” a groundling called back, casting glances to toward the forest where Brenner had emerged.

  “No…was it just him then?”

  “I dunno—"

  “Ah!”

  Pulses of spellfire burst into the violet players, knocking one to the ground.

  “There!”

  Counter-spells rang out: the violet band of knights concentrated their fire at Gemry on the other side of the clearing. From his sideways view on the ground, Brenner could tell their firepower was too much for her to make forward progress. The whole gang swarmed towards her, forcing her to fly behind a large elm.

  Now, they flanked her, rounding on all sides, giving her one last shot. She popped out behind the tree trunk, cried her final white spell—“Mobilus!”—which cut through the ranks of the knights, unfortunately missing them completely—and then she was hit.

  The pandemonium ceased, and the violet knights smirked at their handiwork.

  What they didn’t realize was that her last spell wasn’t aimed at them: it had surged the last hundred yards over the cl
earing and into Brenner, freeing him from his frozen bind.

  One knight happened to turn back, saw Brenner rising to his feet, shouted, “Oh…no!” and fired wildly at him. Brenner blocked this with his shield, and ran forward as mircons aimed and shot at him.

  Brenner made one good leap—straining for the glowbe with his hand, spells converging upon him. He touched it and was stunned.

  The glowbe shimmered and turned orange.

  A loud voice echoed across the arena: “North field! Your Zabrani is finished! Orange team has claimed victory!”