He smiled back and patted me on the head. “What a good apprentice you are. Alright, I received a note from Vonda that she is able to go with us after all and to meet her at the train station. So let’s go.”
If I had realized that Derek the Menace would be on this same train, I would not have been so nonchalant about getting on it.
There were quite a few mages and mage apprentices on this train. It was my understanding from Rena that we had fifteen senior apprentices going on this job. No one had thought it a good idea to take anyone younger than sixteen, as apparently they wouldn’t have enough defensive and offensive spells in their arsenal for a problem like this one. All fifteen apprentices were either ready to take the Tests or in the middle of doing so. Aside from them, we had four Masters. And me, of course.
Some part of me should have realized that Derek would be one of them, as of course he was still in training as well, but I hadn’t considered it. Until now, when our eyes met over the high back of the train benches. He glared at me, and I glared right back. I had no idea why this gleeking son of a whore was so set on messing with Rena, and I didn’t frankly care. He’d proven to me what kind of man he was and I was not giving him any more openings.
So help me, if he even looked at Rena cross-eyed, I would break his arms.
I kept an eye on him as we settled into a bench one down and on the opposite side. It was almost the perfect angle to see him at all times. Emily noticed this glaring contest and leaned across to ask in a whisper: “What?”
“Derek.”
“Ahhh,” she intoned with a wealth of understanding. “You’ve already run into him once, but he does leave an impression, doesn’t he?”
“Twice, actually,” Rena explained with a grimace. She leaned against my shoulder enough to glance around the bench. “He was hassling us in the market too. I didn’t realize he was going to be in on this. Isn’t he ready for the Tests by now?”
Tarkington swung himself in so that he sat opposite of me. “Apparently he’s been set back a notch. Even his connection with the Council isn’t enough to cover what he did at the dump and at the market.”
I threw up a hand. “Wait, what connection?”
“They’re trying to keep it hushed, but Derek is the grandson or grand-nephew to someone on the Council,” Tarkington conveyed in a low voice.
Well that explained why he thought he could get by with murder.
“Word has been trickling up through the senior mages that Derek is not known for working well with others,” Tarkington continued. “Too much praise has been heaped upon him and it’s all gone to his head. So he now has to complete three group work events, to show he can cooperate, before he’s allowed to take the Tests.”
Oh? Maybe it had been more than a slap on the wrist. And really, if that was how they were going to judge him as being ‘qualified’ enough to be a true mage, then likely the boy would never succeed. He was far too arrogant to manage three events before upsetting someone.
The train started moving with a slight lurch, steam puffing, the metal wheels grinding slightly as it gained purchase on the tracks. I admit I had never been on a train before so I stared about me with curiosity. It felt narrower than I imagined it would be, and the benches were such that two faced each other, every bench back-to-back with another. So that people could sit and converse with each other, make the time go by faster? There wasn’t much leg room in the benches, barely enough that I had three inches clearance with Emily’s knees. Thankfully she was a little short, otherwise this would have gotten uncomfortable and cramped in short order.
In our benches, we had Rena, Steph, Lori, Emily, and Tarkington. Travel teaches a lot about the people that you’re with, and I was curious how we’d fare after four hours together. I would either gain confidence in where I stood with them, and find it that much easier to work with them in the fighting to come, or the exact opposite. Trips do that.
Rena turned to me with an expectant look. What? What did that look mean?
“Toh’sellor,” she prompted me.
What? Oh! Right, I’d promised her we’d talk more about it on the train.
“What about Toh’sellor?” Tarkington asked in bemusement, eyes darting between the two of us.
“The description you gave me of the situation we’re walking into sounds like the effects Toh’sellor has on an environment,” I explained.
The other three girls all gave me the same blank look, as if I had seriously just suggested that the tale of the Gnome and Seven Brownies was a perfectly legitimate tale. Tarkington was only slightly better. “Yes,” I drawled, trying to stay patient, “Toh’sellor is real. Frighteningly real.”
“We’ve only heard about him—it?—in stories.” Steph frowned, head pulling back as she fought to accept what I was telling her. “Are you sure? I mean, it’s rather the stuff of legends.”
“I’ve seen it with my own eyes.” Ha, that got their full attention. “Granted, I was on the top of a mountain, with a valley in between us, but even from there you can see it and the effects Toh’sellor has on a region quite clearly. They have so many retaining barriers up to cage it in that it’s like a light show up there. It’s constantly slamming up against the barriers, too, making sparks fly. I understand they have to rotate mages in every three months to maintain the barrier, as it would burn them out if they tried to stay longer than that.”
“It would,” Tarkington allowed slowly. You could see the calculations flying across the man’s face. “Holding any kind of barrier in place for a lengthy amount of time is draining. Doing it while it’s constantly under barrage would be even more so. But truly, you’ve seen it?”
“I have. My father took all of us that direction once, when I was about seven, as he wanted us to understand just how dangerous it is. It’s tradition in my hometown for everyone to see it once in their lifetimes, although most see it twice, as they’ve taken their children to see it too.” Being seven, it had given me nightmares for weeks afterwards. “But you understand now when I say that your description sounds like something I’ve seen.”
Tarkington’s eyes never left my face. What he was searching for, I didn’t know. Maybe he was hoping that I was just pulling his leg. “Yes, perhaps I do. Bannen, perhaps you’d tell us the true story of Toh’sellor? Seeing as how we only know the fairytale version.”
We had four hours to kill, I didn’t see why not.
“Many generations past—no one knows precisely when—an abnormality grew in nature. At first it was just an aberration, but it was strange, as in most magic didn’t faze it. It had no form, no true substance—it was chaos. It was void. It was everything and nothing, in this odd concoction of energy and power. Several mages tried their hand at killing it, but it only absorbed their power, grew from it, and became that much larger of a threat. Two mages had the sense to not attack it and observed it instead, finding that it acted not out of evil or any malicious intent, but that it followed its own instincts. It was like a plant, or animal, only understanding the need to eat and propagate. The way it warped everything it touched, turning it into some semblance of itself, was proof enough. Of course, everything it changed became monstrous, and no matter what they tried, no one was able to take the tainted and turn it back to normal.
“For years, the Magic Council tried everything. They sent some of their best mages to attack the thing, to no avail. They tried alternative methods, scientific ones, such as gunpowder, and that had a very limited effect as well. Toh’sellor continued to grow during the course of all of this. It went from a small area to an entire mountain range, forcing the evacuation of several dozen villages and a small town. Finally, they came to the conclusion that the best they could do was to contain it. Even this method had its faults, as it meant they could never regain the territory they lost, but they didn’t know what else to do. They arranged a shift of several dozen mages to come up, twelve always working in harmony, to maintain a barrier around Toh’sellor at all times.
“For over two hundred years, that’s what they’ve done. Just maintain the barrier. A’ba told me that once in a while, someone will come up with some new method, and they’ll sneak them in to try it on Toh’sellor. So far, nothing has worked, though.”
The end of my story heralded brief silence. I didn’t think anyone knew what to say. I had just turned one of their preconceptions on its head, and that always takes a lot of mental adjustment.
Tarkington broke the silence by asking, “The story we know says that Toh’sellor deliberately changes animals, trees, and other plant life into its minions. That’s not so.”
I shook my head. “Not deliberately. Toh’sellor doesn’t have an agenda, it doesn’t think like a human. Its effects on the land are because of its very nature. The crazy animals, the fighting plant life, that’s a side-effect, not part of some elaborate design.”
“This is very strange,” Emily stated, perturbed. “I feel like the boogeyman that hides under the bed just became real.”
Steph jabbed a finger at her. “Exactly. That’s it exactly.”
Lori asked, unease written all over her face, “But Toh’sellor is safely contained behind the barrier, right? So why do you think that he’s all the way down south like this?”
“I really hope it isn’t. I hope it’s some crazy magical spell gone awry that’s mimicking some of Toh’sellor’s traits.” Because the alternative was frankly terrifying. “I’m going off a description, a second hand one at that, as Tarkington knows only what was reported. It could be something else entirely.”
“Surely it is,” Lori said to us all equally. “It must be. Toh’sellor is on another continent entirely. If it can reach this far, then it would have to break that containment barrier it’s in, and that would have been reported.”
All very true. It was something I’d realized before, but I knew for a fact that Toh’sellor by nature was pure chaos, hence the name. Just because we thought it purely contained, didn’t mean it was always going to stay that way. They didn’t put it behind a containment barrier because that had been the best way to deal with it, but because they hadn’t been able to come up with any alternative.
The topic shifted to other, lighter things. We ate our sandwiches, some of us took naps—actually most took naps—including Rena. At some point she ended up cuddled against my side, using my shoulder as a pillow. I looked down at her, smiling a little. Funny how quickly she’d grown attached to me. The familiar bond at play in her, I wonder?
“You’re truly her familiar.” It wasn’t a question.
My eyes moved up to meet Tarkington’s, the only other person in our vicinity still awake. “We knew that. What are you trying to say?”
The man blew out a breath, looking resigned and tired. “I had so many doubts when you first arrived. Familiars are always subservient to their mages, and they need to be that way, as a mage requires their constant attention. I didn’t think a human could do that, have that kind of loyalty and devotion, without being burned out by the demands. I kept waiting for your patience with her to break. But I haven’t seen that. Quite the opposite, the two of you are getting closer by the day.”
“It’s because of my charming and dynamic personality,” I informed him seriously.
Tarkington’s lips twitched. “Not to mention your humility.” The humor faded and Tarkington passed a weary hand over his face. “You’re now close enough, the bond strong enough, that it’s going to hurt when it comes time to break the bond. This is going to complicate matters so, so much. I can foresee it going badly.”
Rena had explained a little of this to me, but I wanted to hear his take on things as well. “Is there really no way around this?”
“No, there is no wiggle room or loop hole here. The problem lies in that you’ll be up against the laws of Corcoran as well as the Magical Code of Ethics. Binding a human as a familiar smacks of slavery and there’s going to be many that will want to break your bond with Rena on those grounds alone. There’s also the matter that they’ll be afraid this will set some sort of precedent, and if she gets by with it, then others will try to do the same thing.”
I thought I understood where all of these concerns were coming from. In fact, in a sense, I also agreed with it. At least, the intellectual part of me agreed with it. The rest of me was perfectly willing to tell any fopdoodle who wanted me to break my bond that they could sard off. I had to take a deep breath to rein in my volatile emotions and remind myself, firmly, that Tarkington was on my side. “Because if we can, then the next person that tries this might not have the best intentions or even have the other person’s permission to bind them as a familiar.”
“Exactly. Precedents always make things difficult because you never know how people are going to use it later as pretext or rationalization for their bad choices.” Tarkington stared at Rena’s sleeping face for a long moment. His expression was so much like a father’s that it made me realize the obvious: he’d basically raised her since she was eight years old. Rena was more than a magical apprentice to him, she was a daughter. “For her sake, I want you to stay. I feel much more reassured with you here, as you’ve proven you really can protect her long enough for those insanely long spells of hers. But I fear you won’t be able to.”
While I did understand the danger of the precedent that Rena and I would start, I wasn’t about to let that fear rule my decision. People made bad decisions all the time. They created chaos and evil and used any pretext as their excuse. I saw no need to sacrifice anything on a ‘maybe’ because of those bad eggs.
Tarkington was a very law-abiding man. He wasn’t one to buck the system or fight the lawmakers unless pushed to do so. It would be useless to argue with him about this now, so I didn’t say anything more, just let the matter sit. There would be the right time to stand my ground. Now was not it. It could well be that his anticipation of the fallout would be worse than reality.
I dozed myself at some point and woke when the train came to a grinding, slightly lurching, stop. We had apparently arrived. Glancing out the window, I didn’t see much difference from the city we had left. Granted, all I could see was the wooden building of the train station, and those seemed to be built off some universal blueprint.
Getting up, we gathered our bags and gear. Mages picked up their familiars from the back cargo area, where they had been riding, and we all shuffled through the narrow aisle toward the doors. As we moved, I gingerly rotated my right arm back and forth, trying to get the pins and needles sensation to go away.
Rena caught the movement and giggled. “Arm asleep?”
I shot her a look and drawled, “Strangely enough, yes.”
With no mercy whatsoever, she poked me with both fingers.
“Ow! Rena!” I whined in protest. I would have moved away from her if there had been any room to maneuver.
Giggling, she went to do it again.
“No you don’t,” I growled at her, catching her in a headlock and dragging her along under the crook of my elbow. Strangely, this made her laugh harder, squirming and trying to tickle me at the same time. I’d have to remember that naps made her frisky.
Derek used an elbow against my shoulder, trying to shove past me. He sneered as he moved, “Stupid lovebirds.”
In the next instant, he tripped and fell straight forward, slamming his head against the top of the bench with a sharp crack of sound.
Okay, I admit, I might have tripped him.
Rena bit down on a laugh, eyes dancing. She gave me an enthusiastic thumb’s up. I, of course, not knowing to what she referred, gave her an innocent, befuddled expression in return.
Derek knew good and well what had happened. He turned, a large red mark on his head, and glared at me with eyes that promised thumb screws and lye. I gave him a slight smile and made sure I was between him and Rena as we pushed past, exiting the train.
Proving that he didn’t miss a thing, Tarkington met us at the bottom of the stairs and gave me quite the look. “Was that necessary?
”
“I, of course, have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Of course you don’t,” Tarkington agreed dryly. He glanced up at Derek, who exited and stomped off toward the train station’s main gate. “The sad thing is, not one person was interested in whether he was hurt or not.”
After the way he’d been lording his talents over people and sneering at them? Couldn’t say I was surprised. “I actually was trying to do him a favor.”
I got twin looks of ‘Oh, do tell.’
“He needs an attitude adjustment, right?” I spread my hands, trying very hard to keep a straight face. “A cranial correction is the best method for that. Or at least, that’s what A’ba always says.”
Tarkington rolled his eyes to the heavens, but I think he secretly was laughing. Rena certainly was. “And, ah, how often did you get that cranial correction?” she asked, eyes sparkling.
“More often than I care to recount,” I admitted shamelessly. “I was a precocious child.”
“Do tell.” Rena grabbed my hand, towing me toward the gate. “Come on, as we’re heading for the hotel, you can tell me some stories.”
All of us grabbed different trolley cars, heading toward the hotel reserved for us. I related a few stories—only somewhat exaggerated—and got a good look at the place. It neared six in the evening, and the light was starting to fade. It was still early summer, so the days were getting longer, but we weren’t into the long summer days quite yet. This place had street lamps already lit, the roads were smooth and well maintained, and the buildings were all in good repair. It didn’t have that sense of grandeur or size that Corcoran did, but Brightwood seemed to be a nice place. The only complaint I had was that they lacked originality in their architecture. It was all straight lines, either red, white, or grey brick, simple doors and windows. No real variation except that some buildings were one story, others had two or even three.
The hotel was one of the three story buildings, very symmetrical with its red bricks and white trim. It seemed nice enough, just without any character to it. Passing through the door, the impression remained the same. The floorboards were polished to a gleam, a white counter with a granite stone top to it also polished to a shine, and a very clean-cut man in a red and white uniform stood behind it. As people went to him and gave their names, he consulted a large bound book open in front of him, then retrieved a brass key before handing it to the person with instructions.
The Human Familiar (Familiar and the Mage Book 1) Page 15
