EverMage: The Bundle
By
Trip Ellington
Copyright © 2015 by Trip Ellington
Cover by Trip Ellington
*****
PUBLISHED BY:
Ellington Marketing, LLC
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author except where permitted by law.
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EverMage: The Bundle
Chapter 1
Atop a rocky promontory overlooking a wave-crashed shore on one side and a deep forest of yew and oak on the other stood a slender spire of seamless white stone. The wizard’s tower was taller than the tallest trees in the forest and more majestic in its simplistic lines than the most opulent of palaces in distant cities.
In a round-walled chamber at the very pinnacle of the spire, a young boy and a very old man stood arguing passionately over the subject of passive magical wards.
“I don’t see why I have to keep practicing the same spells over and over,” insisted Mithris, the lad. He’d seen sixteen winters, and of the twelve which he could remember clearly nine had been spent in this tower learning Master Deinre’s spells.
He was a spindly youth, already taller than most grown men but slender and lanky. His face was as long and narrow as his body, with big hazel eyes and a mop of sandy brown hair which could not be tamed even by magic.
Nine years he’d been studying as the ancient wizard’s apprentice. It seemed he ought to have progressed beyond passive wards by now, but Master Deinre insisted he keep at them.
“One day you’ll have a tower of your own,” Deinre said, a thin—very thin—layer of long-suffering patience draped over the words. “If you live that long, anyway. You’ll want to protect your tower. There are those who’ll try to take it from you by force.”
“Then I will lay very protective wards indeed,” said Mithris, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and spreading his arms to the sides as if to say I’m reasonable. He knew Deinre was right. Wizards were famous mostly for their squabbles with one another. Seizing a rival sorcerer’s tower was a common strategy in the never-ending struggle for supremacy.
“I will lay the most powerful wards I can find in the spellbooks. It will be the first thing I do when I move into my tower. But I’ll use the books, Master Deinre. I’ll use wards too complicated to memorize.”
Master Deinre shook his head angrily, causing his great tangled white beard to ripple and flutter over his wiry torso. He jabbed a bony finger at the apprentice and snorted. “And when you’re traveling unfamiliar roads through foreign lands, lands where unknown wizards are feared and oft-times hated, what spells will protect you in your nightly slumber?”
“I will carry with me a special spellbook, compiled especially for traveling. I will read my warding spells nightly before I go to rest.” A flash of inspiration struck Mithris, and he thought he saw a way to score points against his master. Deinre always said Mithris didn’t think enough of the future, and was always unprepared. Well then!
“I will also include spells of translation in my traveling grimoire,” he told Deinre, tilting his chin up smugly.
“Bah!” Deinre waved a dismissive hand. “Translation spells are notoriously unreliable, boy. They never get the syntax right. I would tell you to ask Master Gugel if you don’t believe me, but last I heard he was up to his clairvoyant eyeballs in a battle with Mazon the Shipmaster.”
“Well,” said Mithris, who had never heard of those particular wizards before. “The wards, anyway.”
Deinre’s rheumy blue eyes narrowed as the old man realized he had been sidetracked. He harrumphed and crossed his be-robed arms over his chest, trapping most of his scraggly beard beneath them.
“What if you’re caught without a spellbook, then?” the master demanded. “What if you’re set upon suddenly by bandits, or worse? Suppose a summoner sends a swarm of omnitors your way without warning? You’ll have only seconds to react. A hastily erected ward will grant you a few extra precious moments in which to devise a counter-strategy.”
Mithris bit his bottom lip and narrowed his eyes. Master Deinre was being unfair.
“I won’t have a counter-strategy,” he said petulantly, crossing his own arms in imitation of the old man, “if you never teach me anything but the same warding spells over and over again!”
The problem came down to memorization. Mithris hated it. He hated mouthing the same words over and over, careful to repeat them silently until Master Deinre was satisfied he had them down correctly, again and again until he began hearing the magical words in his utterly boring dreams. He hated the way a spell, once used, instantly began fading from his memory so that he would have to practice it again to retain it no matter how well he’d known it before casting.
But Master Deinre always countered his arguments. The ancient wizard said that so long as Mithris couldn’t be bothered to memorize the simplest wards and cantrips, how could he ever be trusted with a truly powerful spell? The really impressive incantations were always very long, taking up multiple pages in the spellbooks and composed from as many as a thousand of the whispery, serpentine words of magic.
It had taken Mithris his first three years as Master Deinre’s apprentice to master even two or three dozen of the difficult, alien words. Hardest was the trick of imagination. You could not simply utter the words. You had to feel them in your mind. Some words, you had to picture an image. Others, it was a smell you had to meditate on while speaking the word. This was the mental, or spiritual side of the language. That’s what Deinre said, anyway.
“The kinds of spells you’d need against an omnitor,” said Deinre, unsurprisingly, “are complex and difficult. You won’t have time to simply read them off a page, even with the strongest ward buying you some breathing room. And if you can’t memorize a simple passive ward, how in all the Foundations can you expect to handle a spell of true power?”
The old man uncrossed his arms and put his hands on his hips, leaning forward from the waist. His beard swung free and loose, its tangles wobbling. He wore an expression of victory. Mithris knew what was coming next.
“Honestly,” said the wizard, as if he hadn’t said these exact words a hundred times before. “If you can’t see the sense in listening to someone with over five hundred years of experience and wisdom to offer, I don’t know why I bother. Now practice those wards!”
With a sigh, Mithris looked down at the floor and tried to remember the exact shade of blue that went with the first word of the spell Deinre wanted him to practice.
Chapter 2
“Honestly,” said Mithris, alone in his tiny bedchamber on one of the tower’s middle levels. He spoke in a nasally, mocking impression of Master Deinre’s self-important tones. “If you can’t see the sense in living for hundreds of years just so you can do the exact same things over and over each day, I don’t see why I bother!”
He sat on the edge of his bed—more of a cot, really—in one
corner of the room. It was like a cell. Not a cell for prisoners, as the ramshackle wooden door could not even be locked. More like a monk’s cell.
Mithris did not remember much from his life before Master Deinre came to claim him from the orphanage. That was likely because there was precious little to remember. Even so, he remembered being so very excited that day when Deinre came for him. He was going to become a wizard! Mithris did not remember what—if anything—he had wanted to be when he grew up back then, but it certainly hadn’t been some claustrophobic monk.
The bare stone walls held no ornamentation. No tapestries softened the lines of the room, as they did in practically every other section of the tower. No rug lay on the floor to soften the flagstone chill. Mithris had only his cot, a flimsy blanket, and a small table on which to rest his spellbooks.
And the food! Moments earlier, one of Deinre’s ethereal servants—conjured from the misty realm of some older Foundation to sweep the endless corridors and serve the meals—had delivered Mithris’ evening meal. The sturdy, earthenware plate—chipped all the same—bore a familiar repast. It was not enough for Deinre to set Mithris to practicing the same mind-numbing spells again and again. Steak and kidney pie again!
Mithris stared down at the pie on the plate with something close to revulsion. It was not that he detested steak and kidney pie, or at least he hadn’t used to. He’d been quite happy, tucking in with great relish, the first time Master Deinre had served it up. That was more than eight years ago. It was the same meal each night.
He made to rise, thinking to set the plate on his table and leave it untouched. But if he didn’t eat, he’d have nothing else to do but practice his wards. Mithris thought he might go mad soon, from monotony and repetition. How did any wizard live so long, if this was their lot from the very beginning?
Mithris bit into the pie, and hot juice squirted over his lips and ran down his chin. He reached up a hand to stop it dripping onto his robes. He was too late. A fat glob of juice splashed on his chest, dribbling down the front of his plain, tan robe. Mithris swallowed his bite of steak and kidney pie and looked down at the stain irritably.
“Great,” he muttered. “Now Deinre will chide me for being a messy eater.” Adopting the nasally tone once more, he added, “Great wizards are seldom messy eaters, Mithris. Great wizards don’t stain their robes, Mithris. Great wizards know that cleanliness is akin to the glory of the First Foundation, Mithris. Hmph!”
Taking a second bite of the pie, mostly out of habit, Mithris pondered his predicament. He would just have to clean the robe before Master Deinre took note of the stain. That should be simple enough, he thought. He was, after all, apprentice to one of the most powerful wizards in all the realm.
Surely there was a way to magic the stain out.
Surprised to find he had finished the pie, Mithris dusted the crumbs from his fingers and set the plate aside. One of the ghostly servants would come for it later. In the meantime, Mithris had a spell to find. He got up and left his tiny cell, heading down the hall to the winding, spiral stair that would take him to the scriptorium.
The massive depository of spellbooks, ancient scrolls, and other arcane texts took up six levels of Deinre’s tower. The uppermost was five levels beneath Mithris’ cell. It took the lad several minutes to reach the scriptorium, and he reflected that it must be getting late. The tower had no windows, save from the uppermost chambers, so he had no way of gauging the light of the sun. It could be the middle of the night for all he could tell.
Stifling a yawn, Mithris pushed open the heavy wooden doors, banded with iron, that let into the scriptorium. He was assaulted by the musty smell of old parchment and paper. The air in the scriptorium seemed more dust than atmosphere, and he wrinkled his nose and tried not to sneeze.
If I were apprentice to a normal wizard, Mithris thought to himself as he went to the nearest shelf and ran a finger along the leather spines of the spellbooks, there would be an army of apprentices instead of dust and silence. I could just ask one of them to help me find the right spell.
He wandered along the aisles of shelves, hunting for a suitable-looking tome. Occasionally, he carefully pulled down one of the grimoires and paged through it for a moment before returning it to its place. Perhaps an hour passed, during which the only sounds were the occasional rasp of paper or leather and the increasingly demoralized grunts Mithris made as he replaced manuscript after manuscript on the dusty shelves.
At last, he retrieved an ancient volume bound in cracked leather which bore a promisingly domestic title on the first page. Mithris flipped through the spellbook, searching for anything that might be a laundry spell.
The first dozen spells described in the text were all for passive wards. Mithris groaned.
The tower shook. It was subtle at first, an almost imperceptible tremble. Then it was a rumble and Mithris felt the floor rattling beneath his feet. The bookshelves creaked and moaned and cascades of fresh dust leaped into the air to join the thick clouds already aloft.
Mithris looked up from a spell he thought was meant to banish mildew, brows drawn down in puzzlement over his hazel eyes. What in all the Foundations…?
Deinre’s voice boomed in his head. Mithris! To the pinnacle chamber, this instant! Attend me!
Mithris staggered from the force of the sending. The ancient wizard might as well have shouted directly into his ears. He clamped one hand to the side of his head, wincing in pain and nearly dropping the spellbook.
What did the crazy old man want at this hour? But then the tower shook again, and this time Mithris thought he heard a distant sound that might have been an explosion. Deinre’s voice broke through his thoughts again.
Now, Mithris. There is little time. Hurry to me!
The suddenly very frightened young apprentice spun in place and ran for the scriptorium doors.
Chapter 3
The tower shook again as Mithris burst out of the stairs, panting with exhaustion, in the open chamber at the pinnacle of the spire. He felt a vertiginous swaying sensation, and wondered for the first time if the tower were entirely stable.
Across the expansive, circular room stood Master Deinre. The ancient wizard had his feet planted far apart, and his arms wove about his body in silent conjurations. His scraggly beard swung to and fro. Sweat matted down the long, white locks hanging from his head. Facing the long bay window that looked out over the forest, Deinre’s eyes were closed against the view. He wore an expression of fierce concentration.
Even as Mithris started across the room, Deinre’s hands blurred forward one after the other, and massive balls of flame spewed from his fingers to hurl themselves out and down. The master defended his tower. The tower was under attack!
Stumbling as the tower shook yet again, Mithris supposed he really should have guessed that much already.
“Master,” he cried, rushing to the old man’s side. “What is happening?”
Deinre broke off his mutterings and stilled his flailing arms, whirling on Mithris and opening his ancient blue eyes wide. Reaching out, he seized the apprentice by the arms with both hands. White-knuckled, bony fingers dug into Mithris’ flesh painfully.
“Mithris!” the wizard shouted. “There’s not much time!”
Releasing the lad, Deinre ran to a table to one side of the curving window. There, he took up a thick spellbook Mithris had never seen before. Turning, he thrust it into the confused apprentice’s arms.
“Master?”
“You must take this grimoire,” said Deinre in a rush, waving one hand at Mithris to shut up. “Guard it with your very life, boy, do you understand me? That book doesn’t leave your possession until your last breath has preceded it. Your oath on it!”
“What? Master Deinre, I --”
“Your oath, boy!” roared the wizard, face turning purple with impatient fury.
“I swear it, Master,” stammered Mithris. “But Master, what is happening?”
Deinre glared at him, then suddenly spu
n away again. His hands raced over the cluttered surface of the table, knocking aside scrolls on minor objects of power as he hunted for something in particular. He twisted his head around to fix his eyes sharply on the gangly apprentice.
“It’s inevitable, I suppose,” the old man mused, his fury of a moment ago vanished entirely. “He lost his tower to that earthquake and besides, we have long been at odds. Yes, it’s only natural. Yes, I think I’d do the very same.”
“What are you talking about?” Mithris shook his head. “I don’t understand. Of whom do you speak?”
“Eaganar, boy!” Deinre shook his head, brow wrinkling in consternation. “Stop dawdling and fetch a wand from the rack!”
Deinre turned his eyes back to his hands as he continued his search, cutting off any reply Mithris could have made. The apprentice shook his head again, but did as he’d been told. Along the curving wall of the chamber stood a wand-rack with some two dozen lengths of supple, magically-shaped wood. Mithris hurried over and took down his favorite of the bunch, a length of willow whose bark formed whorls and curlicues that formed words of power.
When he returned to Deinre, the wizard had resumed hurling fireballs out the window. The chamber was rocked by another explosion and this time Mithris was certain the entire tower had leaned and swayed from the force of it. He staggered, nearly pitching over until Master Deinre grabbed the front of his robe with one hand.
Panting, Mithris stared through the window at the extremely long fall he had narrowly avoided.
“What’s this!” hissed Deinre in an angry voice. Pulling Mithris closer, the ancient wizard bent his head down to glare balefully at the greasy stain on the tan fabric. “By the pillars of creation, Mithris! How do you expect to be a great wizard with such slovenly hygiene?”
A roiling ball of blue-green, magical flame struck the near corner of the bay window and exploded into the room. The flames caught wherever they struck, sizzling like hot oil. Deinre and Mithris leaped back in fright, and the old wizard let go of Mithris’ robe to mutter a lengthy incantation. Lightning flashed beyond the window, striking down again and again at the forest below.
EverMage - The Complete Series: A Fantasy Novel Page 1
