Son of the Keeper: Book 1: Principles of Magic

by R. S. Merritt

  Chris nodded. Everything Wessel was saying made sense. He was wondering what the council had come up with. Hopefully they’d gotten together and decided to just say he had passed by proclamation. That would be the easiest thing to have happen. Had Wessel just casually mentioned fighting ogres?

  “They ruled out you passing by proclamation. They also ruled out the small tactical battle to prove your mettle. You’ve already proven your mettle beyond any possible doubt. They decided this should be a test of leadership. Most of us think you’re already growing into that one but I think they just want to give you something to do so they can have the ceremony without saying you skipped a trial. By the way, you’re not supposed to know any of this so try and keep a lid on it until you’re officially told.”

  Chris nodded. What was a test of leadership about?

  “For you to be tested on leadership you needed someone to lead. They sent out a request to the nobles and everyone who received the request volunteered. Normally it would have just gone out to your family and retainers but you don’t have those being the last in your blood line. With that many knights and mages behind you there isn’t a force on this planet that could stand up to you so that wasn’t going to work. Instead, they’re going to select a couple of people for you to lead on an assassination run to take out a powerful dark wizard. They haven’t decided which dark wizard yet. That’s all I know your majesty. Hopefully, we’ll find out more in a few days. I’ll come get you when they’re ready to do the formal meeting on this. Meanwhile. Celebrate! You’ve made it through two trials and you’re still standing. This third one should be a piece of cake for you.”

  Chris hoped so. Piece of cake or not he appreciated Wessel trying to make him feel better. He slept until noon the next day. He’d fallen asleep without setting his alarm. It was the latest he’d slept since he got here and he felt vaguely guilty about it. It being Sunday there were plenty of the boys from his hall out in the main room. They bowed and broke into applause as he came out of his room. He thanked them all and worked his way towards the door intent on going to see Brent and Nicole.

  “That last trial must’ve been a little harder than the first. He had to go through a portal and swim and everything. Barely woke up in time for dinner.” A sarcastic voice was raised a little too loudly. Most of the boys in the hall looked aghast but a few around the tall boy who had spoken laughed. Chris stopped and turned to address the tall boy. He looked to be old enough to be ready to graduate. More of a young man than a boy at this point. Someone who should have already passed the trials and been moved to a different hall by now.

  “The trials are pretty tough. Once you get old enough to try them you’ll find out yourself.” Chris had just openly challenged the boy by embarrassing him in front of the entire hall. The boy wore the robes of a pure mage student. His face hardened with anger when Chris spoke to him that way.

  “My apologies your majesty. The rest of us have to face real trials. Not trips to Hawaii and fake stories about impossibly large dragons.” The boy looked around to see if anyone was going to laugh along with him this time. The ones who had laughed at his jest earlier were now working very hard on distancing themselves from him.

  Chris walked slowly towards the boy who was now standing alone and looking very much like he wished he’d kept his mouth shut. Chris wasn’t sure what to do. He’d best anyone in this island on a fight just by virtue of genetics. His battle magic was on a different level than everyone else’s. Now that he was learning to control it he was a force to be reckoned with. He had zero fear of this boy. He was mostly curious how many others felt the same as this one did. The boy must have thought the king was going to attack him as he raised his hands to summon power.

  Bad idea. Chris didn’t do a thing but his knight guardian was past him in a flash and the boy was up against the wall with a naked blade at his throat. The boys whole body was wrapped and held snugly to the wall by the knights shield spell.

  “Let him go.” Chris said. The knight released his spell so quickly the boy almost fell over. “What’s your name?” Chris asked him.

  “Avery your majesty.” The boy replied in a sulky voice. Now Chris placed him. He was the son of one of the more powerful nobles. Evidently he had some delusions of grandeur.

  “Avery. Do you know the penalty for trying to attack a royal?” Chris asked him. Avery didn’t respond. “Well. Luckily for you I don’t know either. Here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to be put on the team that cleans up the impossibly large dragon that you don’t think I killed. Maybe some time spent in close proximity to it will convince you my trials were real. Report to Lacosta and tell her what happened and what I have just told you. Go now and there will be no further punishment or mention of this incident.”

  “Thank you your majesty.” Avery looked like he realized he’d made a huge mistake. He walked out of the hall quickly to do as the king had bid.

  “Anyone else want to question me? I noticed a few of you laughed along with our friend Avery. If you have something to say step forward and say it now and there’ll be no repercussions. Otherwise, keep it to yourself. We’re in the middle of a war and you’re all going to be soldiers in it. It’s a war we can’t afford to lose. To win it we have to fight together.”

  The boys in the hall dropped to their knees and extended their hands in fealty to their king. Chris bid them rise and left the hall. He started walking back down the hall looking forward to finding Nicole and Brent. He knew Brent was going to have a million questions for him about how the portal had worked.

  “Your majesty.” His guard had just addressed him. Chris stopped and looked back at him. “Your majesty. Avery is my cousin. He’s kind of an idiot and he needs to be taken down a few pegs but he’s not a bad kid. Thank you for being lenient with him.”

  “No problem sir. I just hope he learns to reign in that emotion. For his own sake.” Chris kept walking. Thinking idly about the fact that his guard had slammed his own cousin up against the wall and been ready to kill the boy at the kings command. It was a sobering thought and brought home the terrible power and responsibility he now had.

  They found Nicole in the library. She was busy putting together a syllabus for Chris to follow to learn more about portals. She smiled when she saw him coming and waved him over. She gave him a hug and told him congratulations again.

  “Just one more to go. Any idea what the third one is going to be about?” Nicole asked.

  Chris shrugged. “Wessel has given me some hints that I’m not supposed to repeat or say he gave me. It sounds like they may be struggling to come up with a trial because of what I’ve already done with the necromancer.”

  “Congratulations you most royal majesty!” Brent boomed from behind them. “I just grabbed some lunch and the rumor mill is flying. Did you really throw Avery out of a second floor window?”

  Chris sighed. “So much for telling everyone they shouldn’t repeat any part of what just happened.” Brent and Nicole were now staring at him. “Ok. Avery said some stuff under his breath about me and then I went to talk to him and he got scared and started to pull a line on me. The knight with me knocked him against the wall and I told him he had to help clean the dragon he said I didn’t kill as punishment.”

  “I’ll be glad when that dragon corpse gets dragged here and cleaned up.” Nicole said. “I’ve been hearing people whispering the same things. I think it’s been so long since a royal was here that they’ve forgotten how much raw potential and power you have. You’re probably not helping yourself any by being all aloof and secretive either.”

  “Other people think the dragons fake? Who says I’m aloof? I’m the least aloof person I know.” Chris’s mind was spinning. He knew he spent a lot of time alone but what of it? He needed to study.

  “Name five of the boys in your hall.” Nicole asked him.

  “Avery, the short one, I think one is called Bill or Biff or Bob or something…” Chris began to see her point. “Ok. You got m
e. I’ll work on it.”

  They talked of portals after that. Nicole was getting much more into the astronomy pieces and learning the science and the magic behind the alignment of the universal forces. She was the one who said that the portal on Eor must’ve been a miscalculation since it ended up in two different places on Earth. Or, it could have just been setup that way to allow for easy access from the island to Hawaii. Chris filled them in on his sudden understanding of why technology wasn’t widely adopted and they both stared at him like he’d just said grass was green. Brent seemed a little bummed out about it.

  “It’d be nice if we didn’t fry hard drives every time someone pulled a shield near a computer. Outsourcing everything to computer firms takes all the fun out of it. Replacing hard drives gets real old real fast though. I’ve got some high hopes for some optical drive technology they’re working on. I bet the colleges with the grants to pursue those patents would be freaked out if they knew who was really paying to develop it and why.”

  They talked through the afternoon and then began to settle in for the math assignments they gave themselves for learning to figure out the positions of the portals on Earth. It was excruciatingly tedious to calculate as it required large amounts of number crunching. They could only do it up to a point and then they had to outsource the math for some supercomputers to crunch for them. They spent more on supercomputer time for their homework assignment without even thinking about it than most fortune 500 companies could afford to spend in their yearly budget for supercomputer tasks.

  A message for Chris came towards the end of the night as they were wrapping up. He was to meet Wessel in the morning at the tower to learn about his third trial.

  Chapter 28: The Final Trial

  Chris woke up early to get dressed and head for the tower. As he walked through the main hall he made a point to go and greet each boy he saw and try to learn their names. It was a little awkward since he’d been seeing some of these people for a couple of years now and hadn’t bothered to ask their name. Of course everyone knew who he was. Avery was sitting on a couch and attempted to slink out when he saw Chris was talking to everyone. Chris just told him hi and asked him to let him know once the dragon carcass made it over.

  Wessel was waiting by the tower when Chris showed up. He saw Chris coming and walked over to greet him.

  “Before we go in I’ll just let you know that the powers that be around here got it in their heads that you needed a real challenge since you seem to be killing it at everything. Remember when I told you this was going to be a piece of cake?” Chris nodded. “I may have spoken a little too soon on that. This is not going to be a piece of cake. Nothing we can do about it now. You ready your majesty?”

  Chris was a little put out by how Wessel had changed his tune about this next challenge. If there was a trial that made Wessel nervous then it was a trial Chris wasn’t sure he wanted any part of. Not much of a choice at this point though. Chris walked towards the tower door while his knight escort scanned the surrounding area for any threats. Wessel and Chris took the stairs up to the room where the committee awaited them. Chris stayed by the entrance to the hall and Wessel went to join Omasa and Penny on the other side of the large wooden table.

  An aged wizard began explaining the final trial. Chris was relieved to think it was the last time he’d have to worry about the trials. Complete this last trial and it was time to move on to the much more difficult challenge of defeating the horde. Listening to the description of the trial he was fixing to undertake got him excited. This was a trial he felt he could really get into as it aligned directly with what he wanted to start doing anyway.

  “Your highness, for this trial you will be joined by your mentors to remove an evil from this world. As you know, the original dark ones who followed the Xandians on their exodus from Xandia came through the portal into the Mayan pyramids. Like the Xandians the horde got split up as they searched for and fought with the Xandians. Many of the horde ended up staying in the Mayan territories and used their magic and dark arts to help the Mayans become a learned and technically advanced culture. A few of their lines have survived there over the years and still live as they did when they first came through the portals. They use magic and wealth to keep people away and to keep them supplied with sacrifices. Your final trial will be to destroy a very strong and evil holding who live under the rule of a powerful Shaman.”

  The wizard looked around the room to see if anyone had any questions or wanted to make any further comment. No one did so he concluded by asking if Chris would accept the challenge.

  “I accept the challenge. When may I begin?” Chris asked.

  “You’ll be briefed on the plane your highness. For your security we propose you leave and attack as quickly as you are able to plan and deploy. Your mentors have been provided all the information we have. Good luck your majesty.”

  Everyone bowed their way out except for Omasa, Penny and Wessel. Penny finally broke the silence.

  “I like the way we get to risk our lives on your trial your majesty.” She saw Chris start to speak up and laughed. “We volunteered Chris. We’re in this together since all of us seem to have a death wish. I didn’t have any plans for the weekend anyway. Let’s go kill a Shaman.”

  “Everything is already on the plane your highness.” Omasa chimed in. “We have armor, weapons, the local money and some other random supplies from the armory I thought may be useful. If there’s nothing else you’d like us to get I suggest we get wheels up as soon as possible. There’s a lot of people on this island and it’s always possible some of them are feeding information to the horde.”

  Once they were on the plane Chris asked for more details on how he was to be judged on passing this trial. Wessel took this one since he was the one who’d inform the council of the pass or fail on this trial. Assuming Wessel survived.

  “Your highness. To pass the Shaman needs to be beheaded or otherwise rendered dead. Failure is any series of events that do not lead to the Shaman being dead at the end of our journey. You have us to fight with you but you’re in charge of the operation. Prepare to see some dark magic that is probably going to scar you a bit. The Shaman have been loose in that part of the world for a couple thousand years now and they’ve kept the whole place pretty medieval.”

  “I get that Shaman are dark wizards. What’s up with the sacrifice?” Chris asked. As far as he knew most of the magical accoutrements he’d heard of had turned out to mostly be window dressings. Wessel answered his question.

  “Kind of like the way a wizard may add charms to his staff or a knight may have a charmed sword and wear charmed armor the Shaman do similar. Except for the charms they want to perfect the result is normally inflicting torture or death on somebody. To build those kinds of charms and spells takes performing the action ahead of time repetitively. The same way the picnic baskets get charmed to go back to the kitchen or the links of armor in your chain mail are charmed is why the Shaman do things like breaking toes off people or killing them with a single gesture over and over again. You’ll still see it and defend it as a line of force but it will be fast. The shaman practice to be able to throw around those curses like a striking cobra.”

  Great. This trial was sounding more and more fun all the time. They were going to be landing in a small airport in Panama and from there they would be moving through the jungles using magic to get to the temples. The temples themselves were buried under the canopy of the rain forest in the deep jungle. Randall had sent an expedition to check out the rumors of the place and the first expedition had not come back. They’d thrown more money at the second expedition and gotten back some info although half that party didn’t make it back either.

  There were guerilla fighters to deal with on the outskirts of the jungle. These shouldn’t pose much of a problem. As you got further in and closer to the Shaman temples more and more of the guards were not originally from this world. The giant spiders, the Corvellans and others made the temple their home.
The temple itself was most likely full of all sorts of unpleasant creatures. None of the expedition who had been sent to try and get inside had made it back. The expedition members had sent up a drone and seen large creatures moving around the compound in infrared but couldn’t make out any details due to the dense canopy of the rain forest.

  They landed and unloaded all their gear into the van that met them at the airstrip. The driver left after they loaded their gear into the van. They’d then driven as far as they could into the jungle and hidden the van. They’d suited up in armor and robes and charms to help them move silently and blend into the dark green of the jungle. They began moving through the jungle towards the temples. Omasa had taken the lead to navigate them through the dense foliage. Chris had already announced to them that he thought the best trait of any leader was to be smart enough to listen to the guys who’ve been there and done that.