“It’s not me who will never give you a break, Eril. It’s them,” he said, gesturing towards the outside. “They’re only a handful of people who know of your existence who don’t want you dead! Don’t you understand? You can never, ever, let down your guard. While I trust most of the men stationed in this castle. I’m fairly certain several of them are spies for one foreign power or another. You never know when one of them might get a message saying that they need to kill you or me or any of their fellow guards.
“I have known more wizards killed in the celebrations after a battle than those who were killed in the actual battle. We’re human. Weak. Easily killed, if we’re off our guard. Why do you think I’ve lived so many years alone, isolated from most everyone? I know what it’s like to be betrayed. I know the pain of having to defend myself from a man I thought was my friend.” Eril could see the anguish of those memories written clearly in the wizard’s face.
Eril wanted to apologize, but the words couldn’t come out of his suddenly thick throat.
“I don’t . . . trust . . . anyone,” Dorull said, then looked away. “Truthfully, Silurian is the only possible exception to that. I know he would never betray me, but I still don’t reveal everything to him, nor to anyone else.”
Eril felt sick. The pounding in his head made things worse, but his insides were twisted in knots at the depth of this revelation and what it meant for his future. He didn’t want to find himself with the horrible memories Dorull obviously possessed, but he could see that, like it or not, he might have no choice. “I’m sorry,” was all he could manage.
Dorull got up and began to pace the room. “Eril, I need you to live. I’m not saying this out of the goodness of my heart. You’ve already seen there isn’t too much of that to be had. No, I need you to live because you are our only hope against the demons. We are only months to three years at most away from Grimor launching a new war. If they win, all the people like Silurian and myself won’t be allowed to live. They’ll kill us in the war, or afterward. That’s a certainty.”
He stopped pacing and stared intently at Eril. “That is why I need you to live, and I can’t have you dying because you think those around you are as honorable as you are.”
Dorull went over to the cabinet where Eril kept his toiletries and began taking out his rings and amulets. He laid them on the bed by Eril.
“Put these back on. Never be without that shield amulet. I don’t care if you’re bathing by yourself and there isn’t another person within a hundred miles, don’t take it off unless you have one of your rings on. I’d tell you to wear those more, but Silurian is right about the habit-forming nature of these power rings. You need to not get dependent on it, but you need to have them ready at hand. You understand?”
Eril nodded solemnly as he put the amulets back on and then cupped the rings.
“Good. Don’t forget,” Dorull said as he walked out and closed the door.
Dorull had been good as his word. In the next two weeks, he’d engineered other situations where Eril would previously have let his guard down and then had him attacked. Once it was his best friend among the guards who tried to stick a knife into him while they were both eating lunch together. The other time was when he and Zeldar were relaxing after a long session healing soldiers. Zeldar had tried to hit him at point-blank range with a magic missile. Eril only just managed to duck to avoid it and was about to counter-attack when Dorull came in and told Eril it had been a test.
After that, Eril really did learn to be prepared at all times. He’d gotten in the habit of sleeping with his shield amulet active and leaving objects strewn just so to make approaching him difficult while he slept.
Now, as Eril was being celebrated by what seemed like everyone, he suddenly remembered Turek’s comment about there almost certainly being spies in the city. He increased his zdrell sight and purposely neutralized the alcohol in the ale in the tankard before it even passed his lips. He also surreptitiously shifted his gaze to watch for people’s reactions.
Maybe he was just paranoid, but Dorull’s warning and training made him desire to be better safe than sorry. As he mixed with the crowd and accepted congratulations and drink after drink, it happened. He was about to neutralize the alcohol in yet another tankard when he realized that there was something in there besides alcohol.
Rather than make a scene. Eril took what appeared to be a partially drunken step and managed to catch the bottom of the tankard on the corner of a table, causing the entire contents to spill onto the floor. Several people laughed drunkenly at his supposed gaff, but he saw at least two who were nowhere near the spill, yet seemed very angry about it.
As he turned to head towards a different part of the square, he felt a pinch in his side, and realized, again from the extensive practice at Dorull’s castle, that he’d just been stabbed by someone in the close press of bodies.
He looked up to see the eyes of the woman who had done it averting, even as her hand was just leaving the hilt of the slim dagger now buried in one of his kidneys.
Reacting with long training, he killed the pain, quickly stopped the immediate blood loss, while leaving the knife in place. He focused on the woman and launched the spell that would knock her unconscious. He called for guards and pointed to the fallen woman. “Take her away. She’s an assassin, so bind her and search her thoroughly.”
Shaking his head, Eril could tell the blade was poisoned. He had stopped the blood flow around the knife, but since it pierced a kidney, he was going to have a hard time stopping the progress of the poison. He took a moment to put on his master ring and sit down at a table, asking the guards to keep watch.
With the ring on he could turn his attention inward. To his surprise and pleasure, this poison was one he’d already practiced with in his training with Dorull. Compared to the charzen’s poison the previous day, this was simple to deal with.
Keeping half his attention on the surrounding area for additional threats, he extracted the knife, healed the wound, and neutralized the poison. It felt almost exactly like the drills he’d done previously, something he was all the more thankful for now.
In moments, his part of the plaza became much less party-like as news of the attack passed by word of mouth. Turek, who he’d hardly seen all evening appeared as if he were a summoned demon.
“What happened?” He asked. “Are you alright?”
“A woman stuck a poisoned dagger into me. I never saw it coming until it was already in.”
“Poison? Did you get the woman?”
“Yeah, I knocked her unconscious with a spell before she could get away. The guards already took her. Also, it was a common poison, so I had no problem neutralizing it.”
Turek had been craning his neck, looking around, which was extra difficult due to his short stature. “I’m going to track down the guards with your assassin. I don’t want her to disappear. If someone could make one attack, that doesn’t mean there weren’t others waiting to help.” He ran off, without Eril getting a chance to tell him about the poisoned ale.
Eril suddenly felt vulnerable in this location, even with a ring of guards around him. He turned to the closest guard, “Tell Master Turek, or The Marshall if he asks, that I’ve gone back to my rooms.”
The guard nodded and said, “How many men do you want to guard you to your rooms, master wizard?”
“None,” Eril said as he invoked his invisibility amulet and then leaped into the air. In moments he was hovering a hundred feet above the celebration and felt much safer. He decided that he would go back to the workroom in the tower rather than the bedroom he’d been assigned.
He knew Turek could find him there, but others wouldn’t know where he was. He also felt a burning need to see what he could do to repair his damaged shield amulet.
Chapter 70
With the fire stoked in the workroom, Eril used his master ring to help as he turned his sight deep into his damaged shield amulet. He almost laughed at himself when he saw how simple the p
roblem was to fix. The amulet still had the undamaged spell within it. In fact, it was an enhanced version of the shield spell he’d been taught, but all the power for the spell had been drained.
The amulet was in the same state as so many of the magical artifacts Dorull had collected at castle Kord. To restore it, he only needed to feed power back into the reservoir contained in the amulet. In moments, using his power ring, he once again had a functioning shield amulet.
This repair though sparked an insight that all the time he’d spent working with Dorull had never previously occurred to him. All magical artifacts, no matter who created them, were simply manifestations of a spell that then had power stored in the object to make them active.
He had made his first amulet, the invisibility amulet, by casting the spell hundreds of times into it, and then when the spell “took,” he’d cast a binding spell. He now saw that the binding spell was what took the energy put in from the multiple casts and bound it into the amulet, as well as giving the control to activate and deactivate the spell.
This revolutionized the way he saw creating amulets or similar artifacts. He now thought he’d be able to create amulets much quicker. With his zdrell sight he’d be able to tell when a spell had engaged with the structure of the item, and not have to wait for it to overflow, which is what he now realized had happened when an item “took” the spell.
He was pretty sure he could make an amulet, put the spell in place with a handful of castings, cast the binding spell and then just feed in power directly to activate the amulet. He was so excited by the idea he knew he had to try it.
He also had the perfect spell to try it with. Excitedly, he looked around the workshop for a piece of metal he could use to form an amulet. Eventually, he found a copper disk. Copper was not ideal, but he didn’t care too much. This would be an experiment.
Taking a metal scribe, he quickly sketched the runes needed to make the metal hold a spell. He also punched a hole to thread a thong through when the amulet was ready. He wouldn’t be able to do that later without damaging the spell.
Once he was satisfied that the disk was prepared, he cast his spell into it. This was a spell that Dorull had taught him. It was related to a shield spell, but different.
The spell made things rebound from the user when it was active. If an arrow were shot at a person with the spell active, the arrow would bounce back in the same direction it came from. With arrows, that tended to make them break or blow apart, but for more substantial objects like stones or swords, the effect was intense. The stronger the strike, the stronger the rebound.
It wouldn’t have stopped an attack like his stabbing this evening, as the assassin had slid the dagger in slowly and smoothly, but in a sword fight or any kind of missile attack, it was a very powerful shield.
Using his sight, Eril could see that after only five casts of the spell into the disk, the spell had altered the structure of the metal to capture it. Frowning, he cast the binding spell on the disk. Nothing seemed to happen.
He examined the disk minutely with his sight. The spell was indeed there, but there was no discernable power to it. Using his power ring, he began to feed magical energy into the disk. He was amazed at how much energy the small disk absorbed.
Suddenly, the disk glowed brightly and felt like what he expected an amulet to feel. He contemplated casting the binding spell again, but rejected it.
He threaded a string through the hole and put the disk on. He invoked the amulet spell and felt the spell activate. Grabbing a stone paperweight, he tossed it up into the air so that it would fall down and hit him in the shoulder. Just as it was about to impact, the stone flew back up with the same force, as though it had bounced off a taught sheet.
Eril whooped with joy. He had just made an amulet from scratch and done the entire process in less than two hours. He didn’t know if anyone else knew or understood this truth, and he was suddenly wary about revealing it. This could allow him to create amulets, and likely other artifacts, in much shorter times than he’d ever heard of.
Copper had a tendency to tarnish, which was why most important items were made of gold or silver alloys. Pewter could also work, and it had the added advantage of being considered a common metal, not of intrinsic value to most mundanes, unlike silver and gold. When he got back to Salaways, he would have to see if he could make amulets from pewter, and make them in quantity.
Just then, Turek walked in, grim-faced. “Your assassin is dead.”
“What?” Eril said, getting to his feet.
“As I feared, someone, either in the guard, or trusted by them, didn’t want her to have the chance to talk. Her throat was cut, along with the throats of the two guards who were supposed to be watching her.”
Eril growled in frustration.
“Honestly, Eril,” Turek said. “It doesn’t really matter who sent her. It could have been Espilona, or Nitholia, or she could have just been an agent of the demon wizards themselves. She might not have even known who she was really working for.”
“I guess you’re right. Oh, and that was the second assassination attempt. Someone tried to poison my ale not long before she stuck me.”
“Yes, you were popular tonight. And you seem to have drawn all the attacks, since no one made any attempts on me, or Carge, as far as I know. What were you working on?”
“I decided I needed to see if I could fix my shield amulet.”
“Yes, I can see where almost getting killed would remind you of that detail. Do you know what went wrong with it? Were you able to fix it?”
“Actually, yes,” Eril said, pulling the amulet out from under his shirt. “There was really nothing wrong with it, other than it had been completely discharged. Somehow those swords were able to entirely drain the magical energy from the amulet. So, once I figured that out, I charged it back up, same as I did with those communicators, and it seems to be working fine again.”
“And that other thing you had out when I came in?”
“Just an experiment in amulet making.”
“Huh. Copper. That’s usually a poor choice for magical items, corrodes too easily.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s just an experiment,” Eril said, fingering the copper disk. He noted that Turek didn’t press him on what it would do. That made things easier. He didn’t want to lie to the man if he didn’t have to, but he wouldn’t tell him of his insight in creating amulets.
“Well, don’t stay up too late. I think there’s a good chance we’ll be dealing with the naval engagement tomorrow.”
With that, Turek turned and left.
Eril stood thinking for a few minutes, put the amulets back under his shirt and headed off to bed.
Chapter 71
The next morning Turek’s prophecy proved correct. The united navies of Nitholia and Espilona both came into the large harbor to make another attack. Eril decided this would be a fine time to determine how well his new amulet could work.
After meeting with the Marshall and Turek, he opted to take to the air and fly with his invisibility in place but not using his normal shield spell. This time he would use his new amulet to see if the rebound worked as well as he thought it would. He deliberately flew close enough to one of the ships and dropped his invisibility. When archers began to loose arrows in his direction, he figured this would be a good test of his amulet because he knew that at the last moment, if needed, he could deflect the arrows if the amulet failed to work.
This didn’t turn out to be a problem. The first volley of arrows that flew at him rebounded easily. Once he had verified the efficacy of the shield, he returned to invisibility for his actual attacks.
The plan was for Eril to dismast as many of the ships as possible. Without their sails, the vessels would be drifting largely out of control. The Marshall’s forces could demand their surrender or destroy them easily.
While invisible, Eril would fly to a ship and use his sword to slice through the forestays and backstays, the massive lines that held the mas
ts and sails aloft. On many ships, the lack of the support lines, plus only moderate wind was enough for the masts and sails to come crashing down. In the rare cases where the masts and other rigging were still standing, Eril would launch an energy ball or two to finish them off.
There only appeared to be one wizard in the entire fleet. Eril ignored the man until he sensed a portal opening. This time Eril didn’t hold back and launched multiple massive energy balls that first set the ship ablaze, then in moments had it sinking. One of his early shots must have gotten the wizard because the portal had closed before Eril completed his initial salvo.
In less than an hour, Eril had dismasted the entire armada of twenty-eight ships. It took just over three hours for all fighting to conclude, with all the crews either dead or surrendered. Both Carge and Turek took their turns at firing on crews who refused to surrender, Carge from standing by a huge bonfire at the edge of the breakwater, while Turek rode in a longboat with one of the generals demanding surrender or destruction.
Eril flew high cover over the entire battle scene after having dismasted the ships. Two ships attempted to flee, being towed by their own long boats. Eril told them to turn back or face destruction. One listened and gave up after a warning shot. The other refused, so Eril set the ship on fire. The officers went down with the ship, but several sailors chose capture over death.
By early evening, the city was once again celebrating. This victory was even more impressive than the previous two for the city inhabitants because they had watched and cheered from the shore as ship after ship was first dismasted, and then captured or destroyed.
The feasting of the night before had been somewhat reserved, since many feared the battle of the next day. Now the war was over. Both their two larger neighbors’ forces were destroyed or turned back with almost no loss of life on their part. The celebration that night was of epic proportions.
Eril was the great guest of honor. Where the day before they had called him the ‘Savior of Jull,’ now they treated him as such. Everyone thronged around him anywhere he appeared, wanting to touch him, toast him, hug him.
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