by Ron Collins
Life force raged inside him.
He concentrated on his link, and a stream of flame poured from his palm to destroy three Koradictines.
Spell work raged through his mind. He drank from a never-ending stream of life force, eating souls and funneling energy back into his already bloated magic, redoubling his power as he cast more and more into the fray. He felt invincible. As he cast his magic, Garrick strode unerringly toward the weaponry, life force burning like fire inside him. With each step he threw his shoulders back farther and the set of his jaw became more firm. The battle raged around him, but Garrick became an island of calm that moved down the hallway at his own steady pace.
The conveyor belt was shredded, rollers crushed and splintered.
Smoke hung in the corridor.
A man groaned.
Two Lectodinians blocked his way. He wrapped magestuff around their necks and lifted them so they dangled with their hands clutching at their throats. He pushed them until they were over the shaft, then dropped them into their own free-fall.
Actions and consequences, he thought once again, and this time he knew those words were his own.
Dim magelight flickered in the hallway. An explosion roared ahead of him from where the stables were. The armory was nearby.
Panicked horses screamed, confirming he was drawing near
He turned a corner to the stable room and caught the sharp, lemony scent of Lectodinian magic.
Darien was trapped along a wall. His clothes were tattered and sweat-drenched. One leg was stained crimson. His dark hair glistened in the magelight, and his face was covered with grime. He held his father’s sword, though. The blade glimmered red and purple in the dim light.
Two Koradictine mages occupied stalls halfway down the stables. Garrick watched as they counted in unison, then stepped into the open to cast their spell.
Before they could finish, Garrick raised an arm and spoke a word of power. Flames poured from his hand, forking in midair, each tongue taking a mage in the back. The entire chamber shook with an explosion, and Garrick took a moment to breathe in their lives.
“Garrick!” Darien said when it was over. “I didn’t expect to see you again.”
“It appears you’re not going to be that lucky,” Garrick replied.
“We’ve got to get out of the city,” Darien said. “And we’ve got to get out now.”
As if on cue, another explosion shook the floor.
Darien limped forward.
“I’ll take care of that,” Garrick said.
“I think we should hold off on any more of your help until I understand what it’s going to cost.”
“It’s too late to get skittish on me now, Darien.”
“I’ll be fine.” Darien put weight on his bad leg and nearly fell over. Then he looked at Garrick. “All right,” he finally said. “Do it.”
Garrick bent to his task. The wound knit quickly.
“I’ve got no words for this,” Darien said.
“Proof that there’s a first time for everything,” Garrick replied.
He went to the stall to get Kalomar.
“What are you doing?” Darien called. “The animals will slow us down here, and they’re liable to get hurt in the corridors.”
“Perhaps,” Garrick said, loosening the reins that held Kalomar to the stall. “But I gave my word I would take care of this one, and I don’t relish the idea of walking across the entire desert on foot, either.”
An explosion rumbled in the hallway, and the ceiling gave a sharp crack.
The horse was shaking, terrified.
Garrick calmed the animal by speaking gentle words and running a hand over his back. He slipped a saddle over the animal’s back, and hitched up the girth. Then he slipped a bit into Kalomar’s mouth.
Behind him, Darien prepared his own horse.
“You, too, are unwise, eh?”
“Two horses are no worse than one.”
The floor shook again, this time from an explosion deep in the bowels of the city. The orders’ forces were many, and, despite Garrick’s terrible toll, they were advancing quickly through the city.
Garrick mounted Kalomar and waited for Darien.
Once his friend was ready, the pair ducked low to avoid the tunnel’s ceiling and rode into the battle-torn hallway.
Chapter 26
The exit loomed ahead, with two mercenary soldiers standing guard.
Darien took one.
Garrick cut his way through the other.
He drank their life forces, but his blood rush had quieted and he found these more difficult to absorb than previous ones had been.
A dagger flashed by to his left.
He set his links and poured a prismatic rainbow of destruction over soldiers who remained between them and the exit to the city. The knowledge that he was a full mage made him feel different, now. He was confident. He was capable.
“Go, Darien!” he yelled as the corridor sloped toward the surface.
Darien’s horse was fresher, and ran ahead. But Kalomar pinned his ears back and his muscles moved with fluid grace. The passage was tight and so low that Garrick had to press against Kalomar’s neck to avoid crashing into the ceiling. He leaned into a turn as the path corkscrewed upward.
The horses surged as they reached the ramp.
The air grew warmer here, and a single shaft of afternoon sun angled a dusty beam into the tunnel. Two soldiers and a Koradictine mage blocked the final way out.
Darien cut one soldier down before he could react.
The other fell back, waving his sword ineffectually.
Garrick flung raw power, and the mage died with his spell still on his lips.
They burst into the open desert with a blaze of speed. For a moment Garrick was blinded by the sun, and followed Darien by sense of sound only. Dry heat scorched his lungs. He trusted Darien—he realized that fully, and he realized also that the fact he could actually trust someone here amid the chaos of Arderveer’s fall was a remarkable thing in itself.
Darien turned, and Garrick spurred Kalomar to follow.
They raced through a line of soldiers before any could react.
Garrick’s vision returned well enough that he could make out the spires of two tents that rose from the horizon, one blood red, the other deep blue.
Four riders rode hard toward them, their swords glittering in the bright sun, more coming along behind.
“How do we get out of here?” Darien called.
Garrick licked his lips and found them raw and briny. He felt strong and bold, filled with power that twisted through his body, filled with a fresh sense of being that he couldn’t totally grasp. It was Sjesko all over again, only different. He body was sorting through the powers of slaves and mages and desert knights, and his mind was dealing with them, too, coming to parse them, coming to understand. He could destroy the riders. He knew he could. But he didn’t want to do that if he could help it.
He pointed to the mountains due east.
“If we can get to those foothills we’ll be able to lose them.”
Darien moved without hesitation.
Kalomar’s hoofs beat against the hardened desert.
Garrick gathered his sorcery and glanced over his shoulder. One of the riders called to them across the wind, but Garrick could not discern the words. He did not bother to touch his link. Instead he loosed pure energy that snaked across the sand.
A storm of wild magic rose up—the desert sand of a hundred dust-devils twisting gray and brown as they molded together into one massive gale. Men’s voices disappeared into the storm, the beating rhythm of pounding of hooves became its pulse. Wind screamed in Garrick’s ears, and he felt each grain of sand rotating through the air as if it were the only thing in existence.
He turned them all over in his mind, and the storm grew into an ugly cloud of yellow grit that burned skin and cut into eyes. Lightning flashed pink and blue inside that cloud, thunder rolled in massive claps.
> He urged Kalomar to follow Darien.
The horse complained, but Garrick dug his heels into Kalomar’s flank and the animal pinned back his ears and rode for all he was worth. Garrick’s long hair whipped around behind him. The wind scrubbed his cheeks.
Three riders from the south drew near—scouts, perhaps.
Darien turned away, but their horses’ fatigue was having its effect.
The riders closed.
Darien twisted in his saddle and flung a dagger at the nearest. The blade flew true, and the man clutched his chest before falling from his mount. The two remaining riders drew up on Darien. Darien parried the first man’s attack, but the second closed in on his exposed flank.
Garrick thundered close by and released a blast that threw the man off his horse. The other rider’s eyes grew wide, and he turned to flee. Garrick hesitated, unwilling to kill a retreating man now that his hunger was sated.
“Do it!” Darien yelled over the storm. “If he makes it back to camp they’ll be able to follow us.”
Garrick nodded.
Darien was right. This man knew where they were heading. If he made it back to the orders’ camp, they would know of their position.
Garrick formed a smoky trail of energy that took the rider from behind.
“It was for the best,” Darien said, nodding his approval.
Garrick looked at the body lying motionless on the desert sand.
“Yes,” he said. “It was for the best.”
A small weight shifted against his leg—the wooden box, he realized with a sense of irony that made him chuff. It had remained intact throughout the ordeal.
He looked over the desert, feeling the full truth of his life in that moment.
This wasn’t finished.
He felt it in the faint outlines of red and blue spires he could barely make out on the horizon, he felt it in the black smoke that curled into the sky from five, no, six places along the desert floor, and he felt it in the way his life force clashed within him as it shifted around inside him.
Arderveer had fallen.
Takril, perhaps the most powerful Torean mage across all of Adruin, was likely gone. The orders were on the move.
“We need to get out of here before the next wave comes,” Darien said, turning his horse for the mountains.
Garrick turned Kalomar to follow Darien.
They broke into a run, and Garrick grabbed Kalomar’s reins in both fists to lean in as they covered ground that was hard and smooth. He leaned forward and moved in perfect tandem with the animal’s graceful stride, and he bent over Kalomar’s neck and spoke into his ear.
“Run, boy,” he said to his horse. “Run.”
As they raced away, the brown sandstorm settled back to the desert floor, growing translucent before eventually fading away to nothing.
Epilogue
They camped in a rocky depression facing away from the desert. The horses stood quietly in the cool night, grazing on the harsh grasses that grew from the cracked landscape. Stars scored the nighttime sky, and the moon hung low on the horizon.
Darien fell into a deep sleep so quickly that a stick of dried beef still dangled from his hand. Garrick unrolled a blanket from his pack and laid it over his friend. Darien took it without waking. His lips were cracked from the wind, so Garrick drained life force into them, and soon they were again soft and smooth.
Energy from the battlefield rolled through him like waves now, his body growing accustomed to using it without second thought. It warmed him before he realized he was cold and it soothed his pains before he knew he had them. It was an unnatural feeling, like walking on air.
Garrick would not sleep tonight, so he returned to his sentry post to watch over Darien while nighttime creatures fulfilled their roles of predator and prey.
He sat in the darkness and tried to forget the happenings of the day. He sat there and tried to remember when life had been simple, when he had merely wanted to live alone on a hillside where he could practice his magic. That time seemed so far away. How little he had known then. How little he had understood.
The orders were coming. The Koradictines and Lectodinians. There was no hiding this fact. He shuddered, thinking about how easily they had dispatched Arderveer. This would not be his last experience with a battlefield.
He didn’t know what to do about it, though.
Garrick had never wanted anything more than to be a free man, to be beholden to no one. Perhaps this was his problem—perhaps he should want more. Or maybe the problem was that he had never expected anything more than that. He remembered Darien’s belief that the world held expectations of him. The idea made him uncomfortable, but the power rolling through him made that hard to argue with.
He was god-touched. He accepted that now.
What should he do?
He wanted to understand things. He wanted to know more.
Where did he start?
The throaty grunt of a predator drew him out of his haze. Garrick crouched and peered into the darkness, prepared to defend his friend. It was a mountain cat, slinking down the rocky hillside toward Darien with feline grace. He felt its hunger, pure and natural. He sensed the cat’s muscles tense as it got a whiff of prey, and felt its arousal as it saw Darien’s sleeping body.
Garrick moved to stand between them.
The animal sniffed the air, glanced in his direction, then slipped away with casual disdain.
Garrick sat back against the desert rock, pleased the cat had passed them by. Its demeanor left him feeling relieved and oddly content. Garrick felt a sudden kinship with the animal, alone here in the desert foothills, hungry and driven to hunt.
The cat belonged here, though.
Did that mean he belonged here, too?
He looked up to the sky and took in its pristine and brutal clarity. Its vastness made him feel small.
For perhaps the first time ever, Garrick decided he liked that.
* * * * *
This is the end of Trail of the Torean, but the story of Garrick, Braxidane, and the struggle between the orders continues in Target of the Orders, due to be published December of 2014!
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The Saga of the God-Touched Mage includes:
Glamour of the God-Touched
Trail of the Torean
Target of the Orders
Gathering of the God-Touched
Pawn of the Planewalker
Changing of the Guard
Lord of the Freeborn
Lords of Existence
APPENDIX
* * * * *
Map of the Plane of Adruin
image by Ron Collins
Acknowledgements
The universe of Adruin and All of Existence has many people to thank for its existence, not the least of which are Tim Brown, Mike Cox, Ken and Jackie Peters, and my wife, Lisa.
I need to single out a few others for their efforts beyond all the rest.
My friend, collaborator, and pre-reader John Bodin's help was—as always—superlative. I want to thank my daughter, Brigid, for stepping into the fray when I needed her. And I want to give thanks to my cover artist, Rachel Carpenter, who was great fun to work with and who did a fantastic job bringing Garrick to life.
Mostly, though, I have to thank Lisa for everything she's done for me. The Saga of the God-Touched Mage has gone through more twists and turns than I could ever have predicted when the idea first hit, and she's been with me through every step. (Don't worry, honey. It's really done. Really, I mean it. It's done. You don't have to read it for the 111th time!).
About Ron Collins
Ron Collins is an award-winning author who lives in Colum
bus, Indiana, with his wife, Lisa.
Trail of the Torean is the second volume in the eight-part Saga of the God-Touched Mage. Ron published Five Magics, a collection of his short fantasy, in 2012. Five Magics includes two tales from Dragon Magazine, a Marion Zimmer Bradley’s FANTASY MAGAZINE Cauldron Award winning story, and another tale that was awarded Honorable Mention in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling's “Years Best Fantasy.”
Ron is the author of two road trip, alternate-history, fantasy, science fiction baseball novels, the first being See the PEBA on $25 a Day (2010), and the sequel being Chasing the Setting Sun (2014).
He has contributed numerous short stories to professional science fiction publications including Analog, Asimov’s, and Nature. His writing has received a Writers of the Future prize, and a CompuServe HOMer Award. He holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering, and worked developing avionics systems, electronics, and information technology before spending a decade in Human Resource management.
Discover other work by Ron Collins at:
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Subscribe to Ron's Ramblings to be the first to hear about new publications!(*)
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The Saga of the God-Touched Mage includes:
Glamour of the God-Touched
Trail of the Torean
Target of the Orders
Gathering of the God-Touched
Pawn of the Planewalker
Changing of the Guard
Lord of the Freeborn
Lords of Existence
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