God of Magic 2

by Logan Jacobs

  Gaer and the other afflicted lunged forward to attack us as if on cue just as Aurelius raised his hand toward me. I saw the spark of his mana flare up as a deep, terrible suction sound started up.

  Aerin, Maruk, Lavinia, Lena, and Merlin turned to face the cursed people, and there was a ring of metal on metal as Gaer’s spear met Maruk’s shield.

  "Don’t hurt them!" I heard Aerin cry out as Lavinia brought her elbow up into the face of one of her attackers. "They don’t know what they’re doing!"

  "Now’s not really the time for a pacifist approach," the ranger grunted in response as she shoved back another of the afflicted.

  I couldn’t weigh in on that at the moment, however, because Aurelius’ mana had nearly reached his hand. The suction sound was almost deafening.

  I threw my own hand up toward the rogue mage and felt the surge of my own mana as it burst forth and enveloped Aurelius. The sucking sound cut off abruptly as I forced his mana back. Then the old man gasped and fell to his knees as he clutched at his chest. His eyes were wide when they met mine again.

  "How--" he started to say, but the answer as to how I’d been able to stop his spell dawned on him less than a moment later. "No, it can’t be. All the manipulators were wiped out centuries ago."

  "Not all of them," I replied as I stepped forward with my mana blade in my hand.

  Aurelius held up his hand again but not to cast a spell. It was a signal for me to stop.

  "We’re on the same side, you know that, don’t you?" the old man rasped. "People like us, mages like us, we should be the gods of this world. It is our right."

  "Having magic doesn’t give you the right to control innocent people," I said in a low voice. "You had your chance to cooperate."

  Aurelius’ eyes narrowed suddenly, and then he ducked back and scrambled beneath the desk behind him. In a heartbeat, I understood what he was about to do and began to back up as the mage shoved the desk forward sharply. All the jars and other instruments that had been so precariously balanced on top of it came crashing down between us.

  As I jumped out of the way of the shattered glass and potions, Aurelius used the distraction to put some distance between us. Behind me, the rest of my guild had their hands full trying to subdue the ill people without hurting them. It was up to me and me alone to deal with Aurelius.

  The old mage circled around another desk, and there was a cruel light in his eyes as he regarded me.

  "How could you betray yourself like this?" he asked. "You must know the very people you serve would kill you the moment they found out what you are."

  "I don’t work for the Mage Academy," I told him, but his words had left a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach regardless.

  "Was it not the Mage Academy who sent you here?" Aurelius held my gaze steadily as I edged closer to him.

  "It’s a bounty," I replied. "That’s all. I’m doing this for my guild, and for all the people you’ve hurt."

  "Bah!" Aurelius spat. "Don’t be naive, boy. As long as the Mage Academy is in power, people like you and me will either serve under them or be against them. You ought to be looking out for yourself."

  We were on the same side of the desk now with only a few feet of empty space between us. I was half waiting for Aurelius to try another spell, but the old mage’s hands remained at his sides as he watched me closely.

  "You know I’m right," he continued. "You speak of justice, but don’t the arch-mages have far more blood on their hands than I do? Shouldn’t they have to answer for their crimes as well?"

  "They will," I answered, "but not because you made puppets out of all of them. This ends now, Aurelius."

  The old man let out a furious cry and raised his hands. The flare of his mana was nearly blinding, but I had been expecting the attack.

  I didn’t try to suppress his mana again. I was done trying to reason with him, and he’d made his choice. I drove my dagger forward and plunged the blade deep into his breastbone, and as our combined magic exploded between us, I was thrown back across the room.

  I hit the stone wall hard but managed to keep my footing as the discharge of mana trickled through my veins.

  On the other side of the room, Aurelius’ robes were burnt where I’d stabbed him, and I could smell the stench of roasted flesh from his wound. The mage’s face was frozen in death in an expression of shock, pain, and fury, and his pale blue eyes seemed to stare into my soul as I bent over his corpse to pull the medallion from around his neck. It was heavier than I would have expected, and the bloodred stone at its center was warm to the touch. For a second, I almost thought I felt it move and pulse outward like a beating heart, but when I closed my fist around it, it was still.

  Before I’d even turned around, Aerin rushed forward and wrapped me in an embrace.

  "I saw you hit the wall," she said into my shoulder. "I thought Aurelius had attacked you."

  "I’m fine," I assured her as I returned the hug. "Are you all okay?"

  Aerin nodded, and Lavinia, Maruk, and Lena echoed the sentiment.

  "Uh, is there something we can do about these guys?" Lavinia asked as she looked nervously at one of the afflicted. "They’re creeping me out."

  The afflicted had ceased their attack, probably as soon as I’d killed Aurelius, but now they just stood like posed wax figures, each of them frozen in the midst of battle. Merlin was perched on the shoulder of one of the men with the man’s collar clasped between his pointy teeth. Another man had his sword raised to strike, and a woman still held her hands up as though she was trying to block a hit. They were no longer being controlled by Aurelius’ dark magic, but the curse hadn’t been completely lifted yet.

  "I think so," I said as I held up the medallion. "I guess we’ll see if this thing really can cure all ailments."

  I wasn’t sure how the medallion’s powers were meant to be activated, but in the end, it was a necklace, so maybe the answer was pretty straightforward. I walked up to Gaer and looped the chain around his neck. The stone at the center of the medallion pulsed with light as soon as it touched his chest, and a moment later he gasped as though he’d had the wind knocked out of him and staggered back.

  The boy’s eyes were wide as he looked around at us, then at the other cursed people and the tower, and finally over at Aurelius’ corpse.

  "What--" he stammered out. "Where--"

  I held up my hands in a calming gesture and spoke gently. "You got sick like some of the other people of your clan. That man over there was the mage responsible for the curse. He made you come to this tower, but everything’s going to be alright now."

  Gaer blinked at me as he panted and took in the scene again, and then he winced and rubbed at his temples.

  "I don’t remember any of that," he said.

  "It might come back to you once you’ve recovered more," Aerin told him.

  "Even if it doesn’t, I wouldn’t worry too much," Lavinia put in. "Mostly all any of you did was stumble around the forest."

  "We need the medallion back," I said when Gaer didn’t move. "We can use it to cure everyone else."

  Gaer touched the medallion absently as if he hadn’t realized he was wearing it, but then he nodded and took it off to give to me. To his credit, he seemed to recover fairly quickly from what must have been a harrowing ordeal, and as I went about the room and put the medallion around each person’s neck, he followed along and helped explain what had happened. I was grateful for his help, especially since a few of his clanmates looked ready to attack us of their own volition when they woke up in a strange place surrounded by people they didn’t know.

  Gaer approached me again after we finished curing all of the cursed people and filled them in on what had happened to them. The rest of the clanspeople had gone back outside, whether because being in the same room as Aurelius’ corpse made them uneasy or simply because they were eager to return home, I wasn’t sure.

  "Thank you again for your help," Gaer said earnestly. "I hate to think what might have happen
ed to us if you hadn’t stopped that mage."

  "Of course," I replied with a smile. "I’m just glad we got here when we did."

  "Are you coming back with us?" the boy asked. "I know Saelin and Corulin will want to thank you as well."

  "We’ll catch up," I told him. "We’re going to take a look around here first and see if there’s anything that we should bring back."

  Gaer nodded and then disappeared down the stairs again. Aerin, Lavinia, and Maruk had already begun to search through Aurelius’ belongings when I turned back.

  "Look at all this stuff," Aerin breathed as she flipped through one of the books. Her voice was tinged with horror and awe. "I’ve never even heard of most of these spells."

  "Anything useful?" I asked as I went to look over her shoulder at the book. Since being a manipulator was illegal, I still had to do my textbook shopping from the possessions of the rogue mages we apprehended.

  "It’s a lot of really dark magic," the healer replied. "Necromancy, curses, blood magic … I’m not sure there’s anything for you in here."

  "We should take it anyway," I said. "At least if there’s nothing there for a manipulator, we can make sure it doesn’t get into the wrong hands."

  Aerin nodded and gathered up the books to add to the stack of loot she’d already begun to assemble. Besides the books, there were a few magical items that had belonged to Aurelius that were worth taking. An enchanted quill pen, a variety of healing elixirs and potions, and a few old garments the mage had enchanted to help him stay disguised while he’d been on the run. They weren’t as advanced as my own invisibility cloak, but they would make the wearer seem less conspicuous, at least. There were some books on herbology and alchemy Lena took an interest in, and Lavinia and Maruk found a whole chest of poisons.

  "These’ll come in handy," the ladona woman declared as she brought the chest over to Aerin’s pile of loot. "I could coat my arrowheads before a fight."

  "Take them if you must," Maruk said, "but don’t expect me to carry that chest for you when you realize just how heavy it is. I’m not your pack mule."

  "You could use them, too, you know," Lavinia replied, and Maruk snorted in response.

  "You know I don’t like weapons. What do you expect me to do, dust my shields with toxic powder and hope our enemies breathe it in when I hit them?"

  Lavinia grinned. "You’ve had worse ideas."

  "I wasn’t being sincere," Maruk grunted.

  "I think we’ve got everything worth lugging down the mountain," Aerin reported. "We should probably go back to the human camp for the night. After that, we’ll need to go through the eastern pass to meet up with another caravan in one of the towns. Of course, if we wanted, we could always go a little further and stop in Vorunel for a few days. It’s a major merchant hub, we could get good prices for whatever we don’t want to keep, shop around some, and it would be easier to connect with one of the desert caravans there."

  "You’re the expert, Aerin," I said.

  The elf woman grinned. "It’s settled, then."

  Chapter 19

  That night, we sat around the fire in Corulin’s camp and feasted with the clan. The medallion had completely restored all the sick people to full health, and there was laughter and singing all around as the clan celebrated their friends return.

  "I don’t know how we could ever thank you enough for what you’ve done for us," Corulin said as he sat by me before the fire.

  "We’re just glad we were able to help, really," I replied.

  Corulin’s expression was difficult to read. He looked relieved, of course, but there was something else to the way his brow was furrowed that made me wonder what the healer was thinking as he gazed thoughtfully into the flames. After a few moments, he spoke again, though he didn’t look at me.

  "I suppose you spoke to the mage responsible." Corulin twisted a ring around his left index finger as he spoke. It appeared old but well-cared for, and the metal showed no signs of tarnish.

  I expected he would say more to follow up and waited, but he didn’t.

  "We met," I answered. I guessed Corulin wanted to know why his people had been targeted, but he was afraid to ask. After all, who wouldn’t wonder? I kept my voice low as I continued, however, both so as not to sour the celebratory mood of those around us who might overhear, and because I didn’t know how much Corulin would want to keep private.

  "It was Aurelius, the rogue mage we came to hunt down," I told him. "He had always been interested in … alternative forms of magical healing, but I guess lately he’s been looking into poisons and curses more. He wanted to use his curse to enslave your people and attack the Mage Academy. He was obsessed with the idea of getting revenge on them for having condemned his use of forbidden magic."

  "Perhaps it wasn’t just your Mage Academy that he sought to have revenge on," Corulin replied, his eyes downcast.

  "What do you mean?" I asked with a frown. I had assumed Aurelius targeted the clan at random or chosen them simply because they made their summer camp so close to his tower, but by the sound of it, Corulin knew him better than he’d originally let on.

  "Some years ago, a man, a mage, came to us in the winter," Corulin explained. "Our healer, my old mentor, had died suddenly that summer, and it seemed disaster had struck wherever it could after her death. The animals grew sick and died by the dozens, the berries spoiled and rotted on the bushes, even the mountain streams became polluted somehow. I did everything I could, but I wasn’t ready for all that would befall us. Our clan was dying, and we didn’t think many of us would be able to survive the winter."

  The clan elder let out a long sigh. "That was when the mage came. He was an older man, and by the time he found us, he was on the brink of death. His fingers, toes, the tips of his ears, and nose were all terribly frostbitten, and I don’t think he’d eaten anything in weeks. It was a miracle he even made it to our camp, really. We were camped farther down in the foothills for the season, but it was a bitterly cold year, and we wouldn’t have sent even our own hunters out alone or without supplies. Somehow, though, this man found us, and we offered him shelter and shared what little food we still had with him."

  Corulin sighed again, and I got the sense he regretted having helped the man.

  "He told me his name was Kovac, and that he was a mage. He was very interested to speak with me, especially. He wanted to learn everything he could about my clan’s healing magic. I was young, and I would have remained an apprentice myself had my mentor not died. The man told me the first night we met that he would repay us for our kindness, and I figured that was the motivation behind his interest in our magic. To be honest, I needed the help, and at the time, I thought he must have been sent to us by the ancestors."

  "Why was that?" I asked.

  "I didn’t really expect much of his promise at first," Corulin explained. "I thought he could help gather herbs and things, but as he recovered and grew stronger, he began to venture out into the forest on his own. Sometimes he wouldn’t return for days at a time, but it was as though he carried the cure for every ill that plagued the forest. Wherever he went, the animals were no longer sickly, the berries no longer rotted. We managed to scrape through that winter, and Kovac stayed with us and worked alongside me as our healer. He learned everything I had to teach him within a few weeks, but whenever I tried to ask him about what he’d done, how he healed the forest, he would refuse to answer, though he didn’t deny his involvement."

  I remembered the documents from the Mage Academy in Touleux we recovered in the ruins where we fought the trolls. It seemed Aurelius had tried to settle down in a few different places before he’d resigned himself to isolation.

  Corulin seemed hesitant to continue. He turned his ring a few more times around his finger as he stared into the flames, and he looked warily over his shoulder before he went on in a low voice.

  "I was curious, nothing more. He’d helped us, and I had no reason to distrust him, but he showed that he was capable of powerful
magic. I wanted to learn from him. So, one day when he left on one of his secret errands, I followed."

  Corulin’s face was pale and taut in the firelight, his eyes haunted.

  "Kovac had set himself up in a wooden cabin. I think he must have found it even before he came to us because there were books and papers and all sorts of things there I’d seen in his possession before. When I found him he was … experimenting on a rabbit. It was unlike any magic I’d seen before, and I knew instantly it was something evil. I confronted him immediately, and he became angry. I told him not to return to our clan, and I never saw him again. I always thought … hoped … that he’d moved on. Even when our people began to fall ill, I didn’t want to think it could be true."

  The healer smiled wanly. "I suppose I was trying to protect my own ego. I didn’t want to accept the possibility that this may have been my fault."

  "It wasn’t your fault," I told him.

  "I trusted him, I welcomed him into our clan, and then even after I realized the evil he was practicing, I only drove him away," Corulin said firmly as he shook his head. "Our ancient laws prohibit killing another person under most circumstances, but sometimes I think I should have done more to stop him, that I brought this terrible fate upon my people."

  "You didn’t know he had stayed in the area," I replied. "You were just trying to do what you thought was right. You can’t blame yourself for what he did."

  Corulin was silent for a moment, but then he nodded. "Thank you, Gabriel. I know it’s not much, but know that you and your guild will always be welcome among our people."

  The healer held up his cup in a toast, and I brought my cup to his.

  There was no shortage of food or drink all night, and Maruk, in particular, was quite fond of the clan’s spiced wine. We celebrated through most of the night and slept late into the following morning, but even as we prepared to leave, the clan had a few more gifts for us.

  Corulin and Saelin met us on the trail and handed out a few small bundles wrapped in fabric to each of us.

  "There’s some food for the road for each of you," Saelin said. The woman’s voice had a touch of regret to it I hadn’t expected, and her sharp eyes were kind as she looked us over.