Maverick

by Curtis, Greg

  In return Felesily started relating a tale of how their own two daughters had been a handful as children, sneaking into the neighbour’s gardens and stealing oranges, and Marjan eventually allowed a small smile to reach his mouth as well, even as both daughters reddened. People it seemed were the same the world over.

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  Chapter Eight.

  Marjan kept blasting the beasts as they appeared, surprised at how his stamina had improved over the previous months. Not so long ago half a dozen bursts of chained lightning would have left him drained for at least ten minutes or so. Now, he was already an hour in, surely a thousand beasts of all descriptions lay dead at his feet, and he wasn’t even tired. All this practice, the heat of the battle and the fear, they were making him stronger than he ever had been before.

  Frustration might also play a role, and he was very frustrated, mostly with Essaline. In the full four tendays since he had had dinner with her and her family, she had avoided him as though he was plague ridden, and he didn’t know why. He assumed, rightly or wrongly, that it was something to do with her having said she considered him as more than a friend, as even perhaps a possible suitor, or perhaps because he had said the same of her. But she wasn’t around to ask.

  Since then Essaline had spent all of her time either in the Goddess’ Grove with the other priests and priestesses, a place where he didn’t feel comfortable to wander, or at her home, and he had not been invited to return there either. Naturally he didn’t raise the matter with her parents when he saw them in the council chambers most evenings. He wouldn’t dare, and least of all in a public place. Mostly when he saw them he simply nodded politely and tried not to run.

  The children were no use. It seemed that they were excellent at spreading gossip and no good at all at being spies, no matter how carefully he prompted them. Though of course he wouldn’t push them hard, and it was good to see them doing so well. Sassa especially was happy of late, the little girl was expecting a visit from her uncle in the near future, and she was hoping he would then escort her back to her family in Deepgrove, though that was uncertain, especially now that the enemy had finally shown up in force.

  All of that had left him with nothing to do except carry out his duties as a village spellcaster, enchant endless arrows and other weapons, help the council to communicate with the Guild, finish off his home and practice his magic, and scry for the enemy which he did each evening. So he was busy, and he was slowly getting to know the elves as they were getting to know him, even starting to learn a little of their language, and that was something, but it still didn’t help him with Essaline.

  On the other hand in the heat of battle, it was more than useful, as he knew he had allies he could trust, and they in turn knew the same of him.

  It helped that he had significant support in this fight. As he sat perched in his tree, looking down upon all the beasts heading for Evensong as fast as they knew how, he could see thousands more dead bodies, most of them with arrows sticking out of their hearts. The rangers, two full squads of them, two hundred men and women at arms, had accounted for at least four or five thousand more of the enemy, taking a lot of the burden off him, while still more of their number acted as bait, riding out and then drawing the enemy after them as they galloped past the set ambushes one after the other. The enemy might be powerful, his forces vast, but his soldiers weren’t bright.

  It was also the guards and rangers who had saved the town. Unlike Gunder and so many other human style towns, Evensong had no walls or fortifications to defend their people, but that had worked to their advantage. That and the fact that their homes were mostly perched up trees. Instead of a system of walls and barricades they had a well-prepared town watch, with rangers constantly on patrol around the town, and guards alert inside it. When the first of the enemy had arrived inside the town, the guards had quickly raised the alarm and then from the treetops taken care of the initial assault. It was relatively easy when all they had to do was raise the main staircases and then simply rain down arrows on the enemy from above. There had been a few injuries but as far as he knew, none had been killed.

  Then, once the town was safe and the people out of harm’s way, they had wandered out to meet the rest of the enemy in the forest, joined by two full troops of rangers. After that it was simply a matter of tactics and scouting.

  That was good, but it wasn’t enough. Marjan knew that they would win this battle, the enemy couldn’t have many more soldiers left, but he also knew they would be back, and that was the central impossibility of this entire nightmare. Where did the enemy get his endless soldiers? How did he transport them across league after league of the continent without anyone noticing? How did they arrive always unexpected, and often inside the city or town? And why were they here, now?

  As he sat there and kept frying the beasts, those questions kept running back and forwards through his thoughts. The whole thing was impossible. It made no sense. And it kept happening. Even as they fought he knew that a similar battle was being fought in Ellington, in the city of Compton to be precise. Just before this battle had been called he had been with the elders listening to the Guild Wizards speaking of how they were under attack once more while the gnomish people were panicking. Then the rangers had sounded their horns and everything had changed.

  So now not only was the enemy still battling with seemingly unlimited resources at his disposal, he was waging war on two fronts at the same time, and seemingly unbothered by it. He was also apparently unaffected by the wards he’d cast, and that wasn’t good. On the other hand it had been nearly three full months since the last attack, and that upon the south road as they had made their way towards the elven province. Maybe he didn’t have so many soldiers as they thought.

  Then of course there was the central question, who was the enemy?

  He had no idea, and if the Guild wizards truly did then they weren’t sharing it with anyone, not even the village elders, and no one else seemed to know either. They just fought them. But some of the Guild’s assumptions were proving wide of the mark at best. If they were right in the way in which the soldiers and the beasts had been transformed, then his wards should have been working. They weren’t. They helped, annoyed the beasts, even sent some of them running away, but that wasn’t enough. They should be leaving them lifeless corpses.

  The fact that they annoyed them, seemed to confuse them that meant something at least, something about the Guild’s analysis was correct, but that there was no true shattering of their evil masters’ control over them, that they were not killed, that was not good. It meant at the very least that the guild wizards would have to rethink their assumptions. But more than that, it meant they would still have to keep shoring up their magical defences lest they be overrun.

  It was as he was thinking such dark and unworthy thoughts that the star fell from the skies, and everything changed.

  At first he didn’t know what was happening, not even that anything at all was occurring, not until he heard the shouts from a few of the other rangers perched up in the surrounding trees, and then when he looked over to them and saw their arms pointed skywards, he still didn’t understand. It was just a star. Except that as he watched it, he realised the sky was bright blue and the star was out in the middle of the day. But more than that, it was moving. Actually he realised, it was falling.

  He had little more chance to wonder about the unusual nature of a falling star, when he suddenly realised it was falling far faster than he’d guessed, getting larger staggeringly quickly. A heartbeat later it hit the ground not half a league in front of him and the rangers, and exploded. Yet that went nowhere near to describing what it actually did. It exploded in the same way that a mountain erupted, except that no eruption he’d ever witnessed could be so violent.

  He had just time to put his hands up and cry out a warning as he saw the wall of incandescent white fury heading towards him as fast as a lightning bolt before it hit, and then he knew nothing but terror. The
whiteness was all around him, raging like the lightning of a thousand thunder storms, the wind was howling as though the demons of the underworld had all been released at once, and the ground was shaking as it was apparently being torn out of the ground. The tree was being torn loose with him in it.

  For ages it seemed he hung on to the trunk of the elm for dear life, terrified of being flung off into the white void all around him, not wanting to die, until finally a little whisper in the back of his mind started telling him he should already be dead. Under the unimaginable assault occurring all around him, it was impossible that he could have survived, and yet as he continued grasping the tree trunk with both hands and praying to every god he’d ever heard of, he realised he wasn’t even injured. The ground and the tree was shaking him all but senseless, he was blinded by the brilliance of the continuing lightning, deafened by thunder, every hair on his head and his body was standing on end, and his skin felt like it was burning in the sun, but he wasn’t even injured. Somehow all the deadly fury was passing him by unharmed. That understanding as it eventually seeped into his consciousness, allowed him eventually to start thinking again.

  It was magic he realised slowly, some sort of spell, but not one he’d ever seen before. It wasn’t an illusion, he might not be the most able in the magics of the mind, but he was sure he would have seen through such a deception, and besides every so often as he kept staring blindly out into the void something dark and howling just a little louder than the storm would scream past him, and he knew it was a beast, dying. Illusions couldn’t kill directly, but this was lethal.

  Yet who could cast such magic? He wondered about that as he hung on. Up until then he’d only met a few druids and a priest, and while some had considerable talents, they all seemed to be in the natural world. This magic, much as it was somehow guided to harm only enemies, was surely a form of elemental magic, the sort of thing human wizards were better at. But there weren’t any nearby, unless the Guild had arrived, and they had said nothing to the elders, at least not in his presence.

  In time, and it was a long time, or it felt like it, the howling, raging magic storm all around him began to lessen, and he knew that the worst was over. For that he was grateful. Even if the spell wasn’t harming him there was only so much a man could take. It was then that he began to breathe again, never have realising he’d stopped in the madness, and the air felt good in his lungs.

  When the whiteness finally vanished, to be replaced by his normal vision overlaid with brilliant greens and reds, much as a fool experienced after looking directly at the sun, he began to look around, and discovered he wasn’t the only one still in a tree, hanging on for dear life. All around the other rangers were like him still wrapped desperately around the trunks of their trees. Those that like him were beginning to look around, had eyes as large and round as dinner plates and the most shocked expressions on their faces. Many of them were staring at him as if he’d had something to do with it. He had no doubt that they’d just been through the same nightmare as him.

  Others hadn’t been quite so lucky, and a few rangers were lying on the forest floor, apparently having fallen out of their trees in the confusion. Most were moving however, writhing a little and moaning, and so he guessed their injuries if they had any, mainly related to the falls.

  Of the rest, the mounted rangers who had so bravely drawn the enemy in through the forest and right into the arms of the archers and himself, he could see no sign. Had they escaped? Or were they somewhere else in the forest, writhing on the floor along with their horses, or worse?

  The one thing he was sure of was that the enemy was gone. Of the soldiers and their beast armies he could see nothing, but more than that, he couldn’t feel them, and that was a good thing. If he couldn’t feel them attuned as he was to their evil, then they were either an awful long way away, or they were dead, and he suspected the latter. The magic had been brutal to them. Clearly the spell had been directed at them, which strongly suggested that the caster was an ally.

  Eventually he managed to unwrap his arms from the elm’s trunk, surprised at how they ached from the tightness with which he’d hung on, at how all his fingers were covered in blood as he’d physically tried to dig them into the bark by brute force alone, and at how they were still in one piece. It was a mistake letting go he discovered, as a heartbeat later he fell backwards on to the branch he’d been sitting on, and then managed to slide off it and into several more as he painfully and awkwardly made his way to the muddy ground. It was a surprisingly soft landing, the mud and bushes breaking his fall, but the damage to his ego was not nearly so minor, as he thought of his stupidity in letting go before he was ready.

  Then, as he heard the sounds of hooves beating in the distance, his thoughts turned to the mage or wizard who had cast the magic, and he forgot most other things.

  Thirty heartbeats or so later he watched as a unicorn and rider burst through the undergrowth and then came hurtling at him far faster than any horse could. He had never seen a unicorn before, except for their depictions in various books, there were none in Gunderland or any of the other human realms, he still wasn’t sure about Calibra, and for a moment he let the glorious sight fill him. But only for a moment. He idly noticed the beast was every bit as beautiful as the various authors had written, and the magic of its horn and white coat was intimidating, but that wasn’t important right then. It should have shocked him, the sight of the magnificent steed, caught him off guard and even filled him with wonder, but considering the magic he had witnessed, all it did was make everything perfectly obvious.

  Only two races rode unicorns, the fairy and the sylph, and this ones rider he knew at a glance, was a sylph. Not only was the rider dressed in white from head to foot, but his magic, and he now knew not only what sort of magic had been cast but the actual spell itself, was unmistakable. More than that however, he also knew where the rider had come from, Stirren.

  Stirren! The very thought of it stirred strange childhood fantasies in his mind, and though he had never expected to see it or meet sylph for that matter, suddenly that fantasy was almost reality.

  The marble city, not a realm or even a province, just a city all on its own, was based high in the southern Tonfordian mountains, but it was no more a part of the human realm of Tonfordia any more than it was a part of the gnomish realm of Bryer’s Plains further south again. Then again, even if they wanted to, neither realm would ever have dared to lay claim to it. They wouldn’t have been so foolish. With the magic of its residents on hand and the treacherous paths through the ranges to reach it, no army would ever be able to take it. Stirren was just a city, almost a legend, perched high in the mountain range that separated the two realms, and which few ever saw let alone visited.

  From the books he had read, he knew, or he believed, one could never be too certain where the sylph were concerned, that Stirren was a citadel, more an overgrown castle than a city, sprawled across a mountain top, and its proudest features where the spiral marble towers that it was said reached to the very clouds, and the walls of silver and gold that surrounded it. In fact according to some it was said that the entire city was made out of marble, precious metals and gems filled with fire. Of course that just had to make him wonder where they grew their food.

  As a child he had perhaps paid the stories too much mind, and certainly he remembered being told off for having let his thoughts wander during class as he dreamed of the legendary city, but suddenly heading towards him was a sylph, someone from that very place, and a part of him could barely suppress his excitement at the thought of asking him about his home and so much more. But the wizard in him needed to know why he or she had cast the star storm in Calibra, especially when they were winning comfortably. Things had not been that desperate as far as he knew. But on the other hand it had finished the battle rather quickly.

  He stood his ground waiting patiently as the rider sprinted towards him, unsurprised when Captain Saul joined him. He too surely knew who or what the
rider was and what he’d done, and though the captain wasn’t his favourite elf, least of all when his jaw still ached from time to time, and especially when he saw his spear in his hand, he was glad of the company. If nothing else he knew that the captain would be the one to make the introductions, after all he was an elf of rank, and since Marjan had no idea of what to say, that suited him well.

  In time, and it could have been seconds or hours, Marjan had no idea which with the confusion still raging in his thoughts, the rider pulled up to them and dismounted in the same fluid move, landing lightly on the ground in front of them. Surely he’d practiced that dismount, a lot.