Wizard's Blood [Part One]

by Bob Blink

  “We have couriers that travel to many places. I’ll arrange to have word sent via the couriers to the places you’ve mentioned. It is very little, and I doubt it will have much chance of working, but it’s the least we can do. Now, unless there’s more, Jolan and I should hurry over to the castle. Tomorrow at noon I want the results of your thoughts on this.”

  As Jolan and Chancellor Vaen rode through the underground tunnel toward the castle, Jolan wondered if he should start carrying the Colt with him again despite having promised the mages he would leave it locked away. In the end he decided with his lack of expertise he’d have to be so close to one of the wizards he could almost touch him to use the pistol effectively, and by then it would be too late.

  Chapter 61

  Jolan went to see Ward the next afternoon after his session with an instructor-mage. He had a number of questions about his shield, and decided he’d been foolish to allow this important topic to linger as long as he had.

  “How’s the medical training going?” asked Ward when Jolan had settled into his chair.

  “Amazingly well. I can’t believe the progress I’m making.”

  “You’ve finally started to get the hang of healing then?”

  “Instructor-Mage-Hutla said today that with a bit more training and enough practice I might just be able to heal a hangnail by the end of the year.”

  “You know the spells, so why do you think you have so much trouble with implementing the knowledge?”

  Jolan shook his head. Here was a perfect example of being fully aware of the spells, and having incorporated them into his repertoire of executable talents, yet being unable to generate the finesse to make any significant use of the ability. It demonstrated to him very clearly that there was more to using the power than simply absorbing the spells that were offered. At his level such things as closing wounds, mending broken bones, and reducing pain should easily be within his reach, applied both to himself and others. After weeks of patient effort on the part of Hutla, Jolan could barely close a small cut.

  “Maybe it has something to do with my being a bit squeamish about bleeding and messing around inside the body. In school I used to get faint when they would show movies of spurting blood or sucking chest wounds. I knew then I’d never be able to be a doctor.”

  “Maybe we should consider dropping this area of study, at least for now. There are plenty of other areas where you can benefit.”

  “I’d hoped you might come to that conclusion.”

  “Actually, Hutla approached me with the suggestion last week,” Ward admitted with a grin. “But you aren’t here about medical. You said yesterday that you want to talk about your shield. That attack came a bit closer than you’d like to admit, didn’t it?”

  “I’m only here because of luck.”

  “Well, you made a couple of mistakes. The first, of course, was to get outside the effective range of your staff. You must be able to tell when you’re leaving its sphere of influence by now.”

  “I can,” admitted Jolan sheepishly. “But I didn’t think it could matter for just a minute.”

  Ward raised his eyebrows at him and grinned. “Bet you won’t make that one again soon. The second mistake was the same one everyone around here makes. We assume we don’t need to keep our shield up all the time. We’re not under attack, now are we?”

  “But you can’t breathe inside a full shield.”

  “There are ways to modulate it so you can, but you can also go with a partial shield.”

  “What is a partial shield?”

  “This is all something you would normally learn later, but the shield doesn’t have to be a complete total enclosing of the body which is the default when a mage doesn’t know what he might be exposed to. You could use a cylinder for instance, that protects you on all sides, but leaves you open to the air from on top. Against normal weapons this is often sufficient. It is also possible to erect a barrier shield that is held in front of you. This would have worked fine against the pulse-balls the other day, which came from a designated direction. It would have been stronger, since it is only required to provide protection in a single direction, but it would be no use against your favorite firewrap spell that surrounds the body.

  “The shield will always maintain a normal condition inside the protection zone, even if the shield is totally encompassed? I was surprised that Kalnd could continue to attack while resisting my initial attempts with the firewrap spell.”

  “As long as the shield is healthy, you would not be prevented from taking action. The shield allows full freedom of motion, and acts to keep the world a fixed distance away from the mage. You have some say on what is allowed through the barrier. One of the mages here claims he can adjust the barrier and allow through different frequencies of light. He claims he can ‘see’ objects at night by their heat. You might want to talk with him. In general, with a healthy shield, even though it looks like the world is ending from the outside, inside the mage can tell how he is being attacked, but have a pretty much unobstructed view of the world. Once the shield starts to fail, this may no longer be true, and the glow from the shield might obstruct one’s view to some degree, depending on how close to total failure the shield is. You must have noted that yourself the other day.”

  “When the actual impacts were taking place I was too busy scrambling for cover. Between impacts was when I was paying attention. I just don’t recall.”

  “Remember, the shield can be defeated by enough force. The force doesn’t have to be magical in nature. As a mage increases in level, the stregth of his shield increases also, so at some level it is virtually impossible for a non magical source to supply the necessary destruction potential to bring down the shield. There are also spells that can be used against a shield, but it takes a mage of sufficient level or a group of them working in concert to do so. A higher level mage can usually attack with spells that will over-power a lower level mage. Once again, a group working together can often over-come a higher level mage’s shield.”

  “Can the enemy’s shield be covered or darkened to impede his ability. One of the first things they taught us was if we can’t see it, it’s a whole lot harder to spell against it.”

  “There are some spells that naturally have some darkening effect on the target’s shield, but they are fleeting and not very effective. You would not be able to coat the shield, say with paint. The very nature of how the shield works would cause it to shed such materials almost as fast as they were applied.”

  “Multiple attackers just make things worse as you just explained?”

  “Absolutely. If you’d had two people sending magic against you the other day, your shield would have collapsed almost from the start. From your story, you were just holding on.”

  “What about setting up layers of shields, one on top of the other. That should give added protection, and if the outer layer fails, you’d still have protection.”

  Ward was already shaking his head. “You know the answer to that. You can’t execute the same spell multiple times simultaneously. The current instance of the spell must be complete and terminated before you can try again. Multiple layers of shields would be multiple instances of the same spell.”

  Jolan didn’t like much of what he was hearing.

  “Does the shield work when one is sleeping? If I set up a shield and then go to bed will the protection stay in place?”

  “Yes, but you must be careful. You have to plan to allow air in, so a full shield is not something you’d want in place when you plan to sleep.”

  “What about holding one in place? When some of the wall struck me, I was physically moved from where I’d been lying. Isn’t the shield supposed to protect against that?”

  “You can still be knocked around inside a shield. You won’t be hurt, but say an avalanche lands on you. You would be protected, but swept away. It is possible to prevent that from happening, but it requires a conscious anchoring spell that tells the shield not to allow your physical locatio
n to be changed. Sort of like you can do with your staff when you set it somewhere. That puts more strain on the shield, but works well.”

  “Can anything be done about the fact the shield can be monitored?” he asked.

  “That comes under the heading of “how things work”. The higher level a mage or wizard becomes, the more sensitive he is to drawing of the power. Sadly, shields require a significant draw, even when they are in idle and not fending off an attack. That makes them observable to almost any level. There’s nothing that can be done about that.”

  “There’s nothing more that can be done?”

  “Practice, as I’ve emphasized before. There’s an inherent upper limit to the protection a shield for a given level mage can provide, but without practice your effective level will be significantly less. Keep that staff, close, since it boosts your protection several levels, and maybe keep your eye out for one of the yellow stoned rings to go with the one you already have.”

  “Yellow? The yellow stones boost the shields?”

  “That’s what Chancellor Vaen says. You didn’t notice she has one of the yellows?”

  Jolan hadn’t, but then he’d always been extremely unobservant about such things. Maybe it was time to start paying a bit more attention to fine details since it seemed they might just keep him alive.

  “I’m going to set up a special session with Instructor Miton to replace the ones we are canceling with Hutla. He is as expert on the subject of shields as anyone we have on the staff. Maybe he can give you some advice I’ve over looked. You can start with him the day after tomorrow. In the meantime, when in doubt, duck!”

  * * * *

  Jolan ran into Mistress Denlere again on his way to attend the King. It seemed she was around a lot these days, but since she coordinated many of the King’s social activities he realized it made sense. With the coming of spring the number of parties, social functions, and visiting dignitaries the King had to meet with had grown considerably. Since the King had no wife, he needed someone to handle many of the details of the affairs from the woman’s perspective, and Denlere, the daughter of one of his nobles, was apparently expert at the task.

  Denlere was an attractive brunette, somewhat on the short side, with a trim and neat figure. She was a hell of a flirt, and he wondered how many of the men that passed through the area to meet with the King made passes at her, and what percentage actually succeeded in slipping into her bed. She didn’t particularly appeal to him, for reasons he couldn’t quite pin down. Maybe it was because his thoughts were directed elsewhere, and maybe because she was just a bit too nosy.

  “Another meeting with the King?” she asked when she encountered him. “You’re becoming a regular member of the court, aren’t you? What’s it about this time?”

  As far as Jolan knew, Denlere was not privy to the subject of his meetings with the King, and he had no intention of being the one to tell her. He wondered if he should bring the matter to the attention of the King, but hadn’t quite found the right opportunity.

  “Man talk,” he answered as usual, which earned him the standard wrinkled nose and displeased look. He’d been on reasonable terms with the woman earlier on, and had even, if a bit reluctantly, gone to a meeting she’d arranged with the court wives who wanted to know a bit about Earth. He suspected that the meeting had set back womanhood on Gaea significantly, as he’d started to see some of the fashions he’d described at meeting due to their prompting, including a few women wearing high heels. He was able to slip away today because Mojol was waiting for him outside the room they used for these discussions.

  “I wanted to talk with you privately to get your personal assessment of the progress being made,” explained the King. “Sometimes one is told what is prudent, rather than what is real. In light of the events of the last week, it seems you might be more correct about the prospects of hostilities than I’ve wanted to entertain.”

  The telegraph effort had been moving along far more quickly than he would have thought possible. Buris had teams stringing wire between Cobalo and Carta, and another set of teams working between Carta and Yermo, the capital of Kimlelm. Rather than work linearly, he had several teams on each leg, each with their own stretch to complete. With the wire going in very fast, Buris had been working on the operator stations and equipment, and even come up with a design for booster stations that greatly increased the range between stations. It seemed likely they would be able to run the lines all the way between the cities without having to place operators in out of the way locations between the cities. The manufacturing might of Angon had been tapped, and electro magnets, relays and an incredible supply of batteries were being turned out daily, being shipped to designated cities as fast as they came out the door. Buris was convinced the test line to Seret would be done before the first class of operators graduated at the end of the month. Jolan told the King as much.

  “How about the firearms?”

  “Shyar and Buris have made a number of important design changes. Buris’ team of chemists experimented with powder mixtures and found that small adjustments to the concentrations that I thought I remembered produced a powder that gives a good velocity without the sharp pressure peak. That means the barrels are strong enough.”

  “Even though the existing barrels now work, Shyar has developed a very strong new steel for the barrels. This is important because the weapons were becoming heavy. The woman is a genius. I’ll bet she has started a whole new industry for Angon with this project. When she wanted a variation in the steel that the metal-smiths couldn’t figure out how to make, she went to a whole new approach. She extracted the component materials using the power in a very fine powder form. Then she blended the materials in the desired portions. Again using the power, she exposed the resulting metallic powder to intense pressure and heat while holding it all in a magically formed mold of the desired shape. The result is a barrel blank of the desired material, made far faster than could have been done by conventional means. She’s had a number of your tradesmages turning out the blanks for a week or more now. They can be machined by standard means. The result of all her efforts is an extremely strong and relatively light weight firearm. The test targets I saw the other day showed groups of six inches at one hundred yards.”

  “When can they start manufacturing?”

  “Buris has already approved a test run of a hundred rifles. He wants to see how they turn out before he comes to you for approval to press on. Besides, he has another surprise in the works.”

  “The cartridge?” Mojol asked. He had been keeping very close to the effort since Buris started.

  “That’s right. Buris thinks he might have a design for a cartridge version. If so, that would be a significant improvement. It might be wise to delay production a bit to see if his tests validate his design. That way all of the output could be geared to the infinitely easier to use and more powerful cartridge rifle.”

  The King nodded. “This is good. You have no concerns that Buris is overstating his progress?”

  “If anything Buris is being resistant to admitting to progress. The man is as thorough as anyone I’ve ever known, and he hates to claim progress for anything that hasn’t been fully tested.”

  Chapter 62

  “Jolan, come in. I haven’t seen you in a whole week this time,” said Chancellor Vaen with a hint of a smile. “I’ll be fascinated to hear what brings you here today.”

  “I know that you are busy, but when I talked with Ward, he felt this was a matter we needed to bring to you. Besides, he says some of my questions are something only you can approve him answering.”

  “I’m not that busy, and frankly I find that when you are involved, the meetings are always fascinating. More has happened in the few months you’ve been here than in the last one hundred years combined. So tell, what is this about?”

  “He’s been experimenting with his shields,” Ward said.

  “Given the events of the previous week, I’d say that’s probably a good idea.
You haven’t had another encounter have you?” she asked looking at Jolan. “I was under the impression there hasn’t been any further indication that Cheurt has people in the area.”

  “That’s not exactly what I meant,” Ward said.”

  “I’ve made a few changes in the spell,” Jolan added.

  “Oh my,” responded Vaen as she sat down in her chair. “I’m almost afraid to ask.”

  She looked at Jolan and Ward and then said. “Okay, who’s going to tell me?”

  “He came to see me the day after the attack with a lot of questions about shields, how they worked and some of their limitations. It was a close thing, and if he’d been any weaker or slower, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  “I left that meeting bothered by a couple of things. I didn’t like the fact it was impossible to ‘double up’ on the shields. . .”

  “But that would require sending the same spell twice. That’s just simply not possible,” interrupted Chancellor Vaen.

  “That’s what Ward explained, but I still wasn’t happy about the restriction. I also didn’t like the fact that Kalnd had almost nailed me because he knew where I was whenever I used the shields. So I sneaked into the second years’ scrolls and had a long look at the written spells.”

  This was a violation of the schools rules, and Vaen gave him a bit of a frown, but said nothing else.

  “I found some similarities in all the spells, and one symbol which was always present. It made me think of something from home, and I thought I’d seen a reversed version of the symbol somewhere before.”

  This wasn’t true, but he’d been sure for some reason that he was right so had tried the spells with the altered symbol.

  “And?”

  “Maybe it’ll be better if Jolan demonstrates,” Ward suggested. “If you could fire a pulse ball at him and see how his shields respond. Something mild would do for now, say a level four equivalent.”