Transcendent (Ascendant Book 2)

by Craig Alanson

  “Why?” Lord Mwazo asked quietly.

  “Are you daft, man?” Shomas asked in disbelief. “Haven’t you seen the destruction caused by our deceiving the boy? Our entire society is on the brink of destruction, and you ask-”

  “I only ask what has changed,” Cecil explained, simply. “I agree that we should tell Koren the truth. I want to be sure that all of us understand and agree why that is the right course now, when we all agreed before to hide the truth. Koren Bladewell is still inexperienced, and still young. So, I ask again, if Koren has not changed, what changes our decision?”

  Shomas knew he should not be annoyed; one of Cecil’s roles on the Wizard’s Council was to remind them all to be conscious of the reasons behind their decisions. “What has changed? It’s simple for me. We tried deception, and it didn’t work.”

  “Yes,” Paedris agreed. “More than that, Koren has changed. He is not the frightened farm boy he was when I first met him. He risked his life and his good name to rescue me, by himself. If we find him, when we find him, I am going to trust him. I was wrong to deceive him; Koren is stronger in character than I anticipated.”

  “Koren has changed,” Cecil said with a smile, happy that his fellows recognized their true motivations. “I believe we all can agree that he is still too young to control such power.”

  “I could not control that much power,” Paedris admitted. “The three of us together could not control such power, not yet.”

  Mwazo rapped the table with his knuckles. “Exactly. Shomas, when you meet Koren, and reveal the truth to him, you must stress the danger his power poses to himself. Explain to him that we, not even all three of us, can control the power within him at this point.”

  “I will explain that to him,” Lord Feany said with a frown. “Whether the young man will listen to me is a question I cannot answer.”

  “Koren trusts you, Shomas,” Paedris assured his fellow wizard. “More than that, he likes you, I believe.”

  “He liked me enough when I was here before the winter,” Shomas observed. “To him back then, I was a jolly fat wizard of no particular power. I didn’t threaten him. When we meet again, I will be telling Koren that we lied to him. I will tell him that he is a wizard, and that we should have discovered his power when he was a mere boy. His parents should not have abandoned him; they should have been living in luxury while Koren trained properly as one of us. Instead, our lies and incompetence destroyed his life. He is going to be angry, Paedris. All the kind words I can offer will not change the harsh truth for him. If anyone has a suggestion for how I should handle an angry young wizard with unimaginable power, I would appreciate you speaking now.”

  Unsurprisingly, no one had a useful suggestion.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Grand General Magrane sat quietly, waiting patiently as the wizard from Ching-Do lay on a cot, her body twitching in motions that Magrane found uncomfortable to watch. Madam Chu’s eyelids fluttered, and her fingers curled as if she were swimming, for in a way, she was swimming. Swimming through the air, in a world unseen. Her body was prone on a cot, in a tent surrounded by the Royal Army of Tarador, three miles east of the River Fasse in Anschulz province.

  Her consciousness was in the spirit world, flying gently on the breeze on the other side of the river, above the vast enemy camp. With Magrane frantically rushing troops from other parts of Tarador to bolster the defensive line along the River Fasse in Anschulz, he needed information on the enemy’s strength, intentions and timing. Magrane had sent spies across the river at night, but none of them had returned, Chu volunteered to investigate the enemy’s preparation for an invasion, despite the risk that enemy wizards would intercept her in the spirit world, and sever her connection to her physical body. The other wizards had been divided about whether Chu should attempt the reconnaissance under such dangerous conditions. The risk to Chu Wing was substantial; so was the risk of remaining ignorant of when and how the enemy would attack. The only thing everyone could agree on was the enemy would be coming across the River Fasse, and soon.

  Her eyelids opened, and she blinked as her consciousness slowly returned to the real world.

  “Madame Chu-” Magrane began to say.

  “Shhh,” the wizard from Indus cautioned. “Do not startle her, please.”

  “No, I am all right, Desai,” Wing smiled, and stretched her arms above her head, then swung her legs over the side of the cot. “How long was I away?” One problem with being in the spirit world was the spirits had no sense of time; past, present and future were all the same to the spirits. It would be easy for an inexperienced or careless wizard to lose track of time in the spirit world, and be lost forever.

  Magrane glanced at the hourglass on a table behind the cot. “Less than half a glass. Madame Chu, were you successful? What can you tell me?”

  “Successful in spying on the enemy, without being detected? Yes, General, I was. The news I have for you, I am afraid, is not good. The enemy will cross the river, tomorrow or the next day, and their numbers are far greater than we can resist. Their commanders will send boats across the river in waves, until your defenses are overwhelmed, and they gain a foothold on the eastern shore. The numbers of orcs and men they lose in securing a position on this side of the river is of no consequence to their commanders. I also can confirm that they have almost twice our number of wizards.”

  Her last remark did not surprise Magrane; it had long been known the enemy had more wizards than in the free world. The Wizards Council thought the demon at the heart of Acedor took people who showed even a hint of magical power, people who would never develop into true wizards elsewhere. The demon took people, and orcs, and fed his own essence into them, forcing them to contain magical power they were not capable of withstanding. The unnatural power twisted such unfortunates, burning them out from inside, but the demon cared nothing about what happened to his slaves. “We need Lord Salva here, with us,” Magrane insisted.

  “No,” Chu disagreed. “Paedris must for now, remain in Linden, at the center of power. If the enemy were to strike there, we could lose everything. The enemy knows this. No, although his power could greatly help us here, he must remain in Linden at this time. You need to trust us about this, General.”

  “If, when, the enemy crosses the river here, we could also lose everything,” Magrane declared. “Tomorrow or the next day, the enemy will cross the river? We are not ready. There are seven battalions still on their way to us. I must play for time. We will raid tonight.” Magrane had been preparing a desperate plan for a surprise attack to disrupt the enemy’s ability to cross the river. He was going to send a thousand soldiers across the river at night, to burn and otherwise destroy the boats the enemy had stacked close to the western shore of the river. Magrane had catapults and other siege devices throwing bombs filled with burning oil across the river, but the enemy’s boats were stored just beyond the range of his most powerful weapons. The women and men of the raiding force were all volunteers, knowing most of them would not be returning safely to the eastern shore of the river. To the credit of the Royal Army, so many captains, lieutenants and sergeants had volunteered for the raid that Magrane had been forced to deny most of them the opportunity, pleading that he would need experienced leaders when the enemy inevitably did cross the river.

  The raid would cost many lives, and would only delay, not stop, the enemy attack, but Magrane absolutely needed time to build up his defense force. If the Regent had not earlier denied his request to move troops down from LeVanne and to pull from army reserves deeper inside Tarador, he would be ready. He was not.

  “No,” Chu was emphatic in her response, cutting the air with a hand in a chopping gesture. “General, do not do that. The raid will fail.”

  “The enemy will not be expecting us to cross the river in force,” Magrane argued. “We can achieve strategic surprise, if we move tonight.”

  “You can get your people across the river, if we wizards are able to conceal them from the enemy lo
ng enough to get our boats in the river,” Chu retorted. “Most of them will land on the opposite shore. They will die there, without accomplishing much to justify their sacrifice.”

  Magrane bit the inside of his lip to keep himself from harsh words he might later regret. Wizards sometimes could not appreciate how people living in what the general considered the real world had to deal with situations. Situations that did not have a magical solution. Madame Chu was a foreigner, and Magrane knew little of Ching-Do. One thing he was sure of was that his counterpart in the army of Ching-Do could be just as frustrated in dealing with wizards as he was. “Madame Chu, we will lose people tonight. Good people, brave people. Their sacrifice will buy time for us to prepare for the invasion.”

  “General, I understand you need more time to build your strength here. I do not think sending a thousand soldiers on a raid is the best tactic.”

  “What do you have in mind?” Magrane asked skeptically.

  “I will go, by myself, as soon as it is dark tonight. There will be heavy cloud cover tonight. If by midnight, I have not been successful, you may send your people across.”

  “What can one person do, alone?”

  “One wizard, General. One wizard.”

  Madame Chu crossed the river by swimming, mostly letting the current carry her along. She wore leather outer garments to protect her from being chilled by the river water, which even in late summer was uncomfortably cool after a long exposure. She had ridden north along the east side of the river, going far enough to be above the enemy’s camp, and went into the water after sunset. Two other wizards had enveloped her in a spell of concealment, although such spells did not work well, or long, in water. The spell worked well enough so that her gently swimming out into the current was not noticed by the enemy sentries on the far side of the river, and she had chosen a bend in the river where the strongest part of the current came close to the eastern shore. Her plan was to swim across the river, being careful not to splash the surface as she moved, and allow the current to carry her to another bend downriver, where the current came close to the western shore. In that regard, her plan had worked, although as she approached the bend in the river, she saw the land there was strongly garrisoned by orcs. The enemy knew that bend in the river, where the Fasse bent around a tall, rocky bluff, was a likely place for spies to come ashore. Chu was not overly alarmed, she swam close enough to the shore to be in the slack waters out of the center of the current, and floated slowly along, around the bend, coming ashore a quarter mile farther downriver from her original plan. It made no difference where she came ashore, and long as it was in the orc’s sector of the enemy camp, and she was not seen.

  Hiding behind a rock under an overhanging area of the bluff, where the river’s spring floods had undercut the cliff above her, she stripped off the leather outer garments that had kept her warm in the water, and dressed in black clothes which she kept in a waterproof pouch. Before wrapping herself in a concealment spell, she warily sent out her senses, feeling for enemy wizards. While enemy wizards often had considerable destructive power, their skills were often crude and their use of power easy to detect. Chu quickly found an enemy wizard, an orc, less than a mile from her. The orc was sending its senses across the river, attempting to see what General Magrane’s army was doing. She smiled when she sensed the orc wizard’s great frustration, for wizards on the other side of the river were pushing back, blocking the orc wizard from seeing the raiding force that was gathered, awaiting orders to carry their flimsy assault boats forward.

  Confident her use of magic would not be detected, Chu Wing drew a concealment around her, and headed off into the night, climbing the bluff. She only had two hours, she judged, before she needed to signal either success or failure. Failure would require Magrane to send nearly a thousand people to their deaths.

  Madame Chu took a deep breath, and reached out to the spirit world to light the torches along the path. One after the other, the torches that had long burned out flared to life again, flickering with magical fire. When all the torches along the chosen route were alight, she reached out again, to snuff out the torches that lead the other way from the crossroads. As if one giant gust of wind had swept across the road, every one of those torches were snuffed out in the same instant.

  Slowly, carefully, Wing removed her senses from the spirit world, standing still and calm to feel whether enemy wizards had noticed her use of magical power in their midst. No, none of the enemy reached out in alarm; their focus was across the river, trying to break the powerful concealment spell which enveloped the Royal Army camp.

  Wing smiled to herself in the darkness. The concealment created by her fellow wizards on the east side of the river actually did not cloak anything important; its purpose was to draw the curiosity of the enemy wizards. To the north of the camp, where the raiding force awaited a signal to launch their boats into the river, there was only a weak concealment, but a concealment that not yet been detected by the enemy. With enemy wizards concentrating their power on penetrating the concealment that truly did not conceal anything, the raiding force had gone unnoticed.

  Satisfied her presence on the west side of the river also had not bene noticed, she turned her attention back to the crossroads. The road from the northwest split there, with one road going north into the heart of the camp set aside for orcs. The other road lead south, crossing an area that had been designated as a buffer between the orcs and the men. The road to the south used have a barrier across it, blocking passage in that direction. That barrier, consisting of tangled tree roots, thorns and sharpened spikes, had been rolled aside by Wing, and she had the cuts and scratches to prove it. Calling on the power of the spirits to help her move the heavy barrier had been her greatest risk that night; use of that power was the most likely to attract the attention of the enemy.

  With the barrier out of the way, Wing used branches to sweep away remaining debris from the road. Her last preparation was to weave an illusion to block view of the road to the north. With the illusion securely in place, the crossroads was no longer a crossroads, it was merely an ordinary spot along the road which had been designated for use by orcs.

  When Wing had overflown the enemy camp, in the spirit world, one thing she had seen was a battalion of orcs marching down the road from the northwest. To prevent fighting between orcs and men, the enemy commanders had kept some of the orcs away from the river until they were needed. Seeing that battalion of orcs on the march toward the riverbank had been one piece of evidence telling Wing the enemy would soon cross the river.

  The orcs were now close, the front ranks of the battalion less than a mile from her. She hid behind a gnarled and stunted tree as the torches of the orcs drew near. The enemy commanders had placed four orcs at the crossroads, to guide the incoming battalion and make certain they did not mistakenly wander off course to the south. Those four orcs were now sleeping, having been ensorcelled by Wing, and dragged into a ditch away from the road.

  As the orcs reached the crossroads, Madame Chu had to concentrate to maintain the illusion that blocked sight of the road to the north. This was the critical moment; once the orcs in the lead were past, the rest of the column would follow without question. The marchers were weary, she knew; they had been on the march almost the entire day, with little rest. Most of the orcs trudged along, heads down, following the rank in front of them.

  Wing unconsciously held her breath as the battalion leaders reached her; orcs mounted on dirty and rough-looking. Not one of them even hesitated, nor looked around them. There was no reason to question where they were. The leaders had been told to follow torches on the road, until they reached a crossroads, where guides would direct them to the battalion’s designated part of the orc camp. They saw no crossroads, what they did see was a line of torches glowing brightly in front of them, a chain of torchlight leading toward the fires and tents of a camp.

  The column of orcs continued past her, tramping in bad humor through the night. All the orcs want
ed was to reach their destination, set up camp, and sleep. They cared nothing about larger issues of strategy; all they knew was that they would soon be crossing the river, and many of them would die in the attempt. Many more would die fighting inside Tarador, pushing into the heart of that country, until the surrounded the capital and laid siege to it. Victory was inevitable.

  Wing was careful to maintain her concentration, yet she risked peeking around the tree, looking toward the south. There were signs of movement in the camp of men the orcs were unwittingly marching toward. No doubt the men were alarmed by the large force bearing down on them from the north, from the direction of orc camp.

  An alarm rang in the men’s camp. Orcs! Orcs were approaching, orcs were attacking! Men scrambled to gather weapons.

  What should have happened was scouts riding out, to determine why the orcs were approaching, along a road that was supposed to be blocked. The scouts should have contacted the orc commanders, and warned them away from the camp of men.

  What happened instead, because the men of Acedor hated and feared orcs far more than they hated and feared Tarador, was a volley of arrows flying through the air.

  The leaders of the orc battalion had slowed their march, beginning to nervously talk among themselves, wondering whether they had somehow gotten off course. Some of them had noticed they were marching south, not north, and the camp ahead of them smelled distinctly of men, not the sour yet familiar stink of their fellow orcs. The leaders were considering calling a halt to their march, when arrows began raining down on the leaders and the front rank of the column.

  Madame Chu did only one more thing against the enemy that night. She reached out to send a wave of fear through the men in the camp, making them terrified that the orcs were attacking. To the orcs, she washed over them a mixture of anger and betrayal. Without any orders, for their leaders now had no control of the soldiers on either side, a battle soon raged in the enemy camp. Orcs at the rear of the column rushed forward when they heard their fellows up front were being slaughtered by men. Horns sounded, attracting the attention of orcs in their camp to the north, and soon several disorganized companies of orcs were crossing the zone toward the camp of men. All the orcs involved were seeking to protect their own kind and get revenge on men for their cowardly betrayal. In truth, that was merely an excuse, for orcs hated all of mankind. They did not need an excuse to kill men, only opportunity.