03- A Sip of Magic

by Guy Antibes

  “I can give a little boost to a catapult. I might faint or something from the effort, but every bit of time that keeps them at bay works in our favor.”

  That brought a grin to the Captain’s face. “Straight ahead. I can barely make out some large tents going up.”

  The fact that the South Salvans were making camp gave Pol a shred of hope that they would lay a patient siege. “Let’s try,” Pol said.

  Jamey escorted Shira and Pol to a catapult. The ones on the wall weren’t very large, but Pol had seen them in action while troops practiced using them.

  He looked out and built a pattern of the terrain in his mind that terminated at the tents. He nodded to Jamey. Pol heard the ropes strain and the men who worked the pulley grunt with effort.

  The catapult shook as the missile shot into the sky. Pol closed his eyes and located the ball and then tweaked it, putting the force of his power into the inertia of the rock. He guided it towards the tents, and just before it hit the ground, he shattered the bonds that held the rock together, hoping that it would rain fragments down on the soldiers, giving them a message of the power of Borstall’s defenses.

  Pol staggered after that last blast of power. A few seconds later, he heard the sound of an explosion. His vision blurred, and he felt Shira help support him. Pol opened his eyes and could see the camp, but the large tents seemed to be flattened. He didn’t know if his mind played tricks, but he knew he didn’t have many augmented catapult throws in him.

  “Amazing. I think you shattered the exact area you aimed for,” Jamey said. Pol could hear the excitement in his voice. He stood in front of Pol. “Are you all right?”

  “Not really,” Pol said. “Moving large objects saps a lot of power. That was no exception. I guided the missile towards the right place.”

  “You won’t be able to…” Jamey said.

  “No. Only one or two times, if that, and then I’ll be useless for some time thereafter.”

  Pol tried to think if there was anything else he could do. He looked at the catapult with disappointment. He pictured the rock flying through the air. Where had he seen something like that before? Recently.

  He watched the camp for a while, and then looked back at Shira. He suddenly remembered how Shira communicated with Shinkyans outside the monastery.

  “Do you still have your slingshot?” Pol said. He remembered the pea shooter that had helped Grostin cheat at the Emperor’s tournament two summers ago.

  “I always have it with me.” She pulled it out of the bag of strings that she kept with her bow and arrows.

  “Is there somewhere I can get metal balls made?” Pol said.

  Jamey thought. “Like a ball mill? That’s what a potter uses to grind minerals for clay.”

  Pol hadn’t heard of such a thing. “Can I get some?”

  Jamey called for a soldier and gave him instructions and pulled out some coins.

  “He’ll fetch what he can. I also sent him to a place that sells those.” Jamey said. He looked at the slingshot, and then gazed at the catapult. “Big rocks take a lot out of you, but smaller ones don’t?”

  “We need all the arrows we can use,” Pol said, “but I think I can shoot a ball farther with a slingshot than I can throw a knife. We’ll see how long I can hold out.”

  “I can help.” Shira said. “It will save some arrows. I always do a bit of course correction.” She winked at him. “What did you to do the rock?”

  “With teleportation, you picture where it is to go and then tweak the path, which is the pattern in this case, pushing it along,” Pol said.

  “What made the explosion?” Shira asked.

  “A final tweak at the end. I released the bonds holding the rock together. That’s how I visualized it.” He shrugged. “I’ve never done such a thing before.”

  “It worked.”

  “Right,” Pol said. “And I nearly fainted. Even now that I can handle a lot more magic, there are always limitations.”

  Shira put her hand on Pol’s shoulder. “Limitations are good, aren’t they? Isn’t that what you are seeking? Moral limitations?”

  Pol nodded. Limitations on magical power and limitations to keep morally strong. Pol would have to remember that.

  He noticed a shard that broke off from a rock and used a sip of magic to round the edges. “Could I use the slingshot?”

  Shira gave him the little weapon.

  Pol spied a signpost about one hundred yards from the wall. He could throw a knife with some accuracy about half that distance. He closed his eyes and located the post in his mind and pulled back the slingshot. He felt the rock between his fingers through the leather pad and let it fly. The rock began to wobble as it lost speed, but Pol picked it up within the pattern in his mind and used a sip of magic to guide it to the signpost.

  He opened his eyes to the sound of the smaller missile hitting the signpost. The wood signboard split in two. He stood looking at the damage and flexing his fingers. A sip of magic. Pol could probably stand on the wall and fling rocks at enemy soldiers until his arms tired out. He didn’t use any more magic than he did as a pattern master.

  “You try,” Pol said.

  Shira beamed at him. “I like slingshots. They are sneaky.”

  “There won’t be anything sneaky about this. The South Salvans used a pea-shooter with a metal ball, but those only stung. This will have more of a bite,” Pol said.

  He picked up another shard and shaped it with his magic. That took more of his power than the shot. He gave it to Shira.

  “Picture the flight?”

  Pol nodded. “The intended flight becomes the pattern. You tweak the trajectory of the rock and add momentum.”

  She sighted the same signpost and drew back the slingshot. She let fly and used her eyes to sight the post. They could hear the hit, and then part of the signpost split off and fell to the ground.

  “I did more damage than you did,” Shira said coyly.

  “Think of that all you want. I probably cracked the wood and your shot finished it off,” Pol said, smiling at her success.

  “I think I used more than a sip. I could feel the power diminish.”

  “We can do a little practice, so you can apply just the right amount.”

  Shira stared at the broken signpost. “I hope your father doesn’t charge us for the damage.” She broke into a giggle.

  “I have to try something,” Pol said. He ran into the city and found Paki and Kell. He had them experiment with the slingshot, but neither of them could do more than put a bit of direction on the shot.

  He walked back to the wall and found Shira with a basket at her feet.

  “Slingshot balls?”

  “No, food.” She lifted the cover to show a well-packed lunch. “I waited for you.”

  Pol noticed others were eating, so he sat down beside her, leaning against the crenellation. “No luck with Paki and Kell. They can change the path so that they would be able to correct the course of an arrow, but they can’t enhance the distance very much.”

  “Your dreams of an army of magicians with slingshots faded like the mist.”

  Pol nodded. “Crossbows have the power, but not the range.” He shrugged and began to eat.

  Jamey walked up to him. “Good. Feed that magical body of yours.” He put a box down at his feet. “Five slingshots and about three hundred balls. Not enough to defeat King Astor, but you’ll wear out before you’ve shot all of those. I’ve got some blacksmiths making more. They won’t be perfectly round, but then the rock you shot wasn’t either.”

  “No,” Pol said. “Have you had anything to eat?”

  Carter shook his head. “How can I eat?”

  Shira giggled. “You put this in your mouth and move your jaw up and down.”

  He laughed a little and took a bread roll from the basket. “Like this?” he said with his mouth full.

  She giggled again, and Pol ate, trying to savor that moment before the horrors of war descended upon them.

&n
bsp; ~~~

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  ~

  AT DUSK, THE SOUTH SALVANS ROLLED OUT A FEW SIEGE MACHINES. They weren’t much larger than the catapults on the Borstall walls. The enemy began to launch ranging shots, but nothing fell close.

  Jamey brought Banson Hisswood to the wall. “See? Their catapults don’t have any more range than ours. Once they get in range, we can take them out.”

  Hisswood noticed Pol. “I heard about your shot on the camp. Good work. Why don’t you keep pummeling them?”

  “Even I have my limits, sir,” Pol said.

  Hisswood grunted. “They’ll be on us soon enough. If they attack, make sure you get some oil burning down below to light up your work.”

  “I will, Banson,” Jamey said.

  “Will you really do that?” Pol asked.

  “No. I didn’t want to argue with the man. All I need is to create a smoke wall to hide the enemy from us.”

  “Good.” Pol remembered reading about sieges where the smoke generally benefitted the attacking army.

  “Can you see in the dark with your magic?”

  “Well enough,” Pol said. He actually thought Shira had better night vision than he did, but he didn’t mention it.

  “I want you to keep watch tonight as long as you can. I wouldn’t put it past Astor to sneak up on us. Everyone will be sleeping on the wall tonight. Watching and sleeping.” He walked away to talk to the other soldiers.

  “We can alternate watches?” Pol said to Shira.

  She nodded and yawned. “You start.” She settled in the blankets that were passed out to the soldiers along with an evening meal.

  Pol noticed the tension building on the wall. Men talked nervously to each other. Some sharpened their weapons over and over, while others were successful in enlisting the oblivion of sleep.

  He used his locator sense to monitor the battlefield in front of the city wall. From time to time he would try out another slingshot. None of them were as good as Shira’s, but with a sip or two of magic, Pol could make them all work.

  He tried to move a ball without using the slingshot in the night towards the shards of the signpost. He could hear the crack of it hitting, but he could also feel that he used too much magic. Using the slingshot to generate inertia on the ball kept his energy drain down.

  The idle time on watch prompted Pol to think of too many things. Honna’s death bothered him the most and Abbot Festor’s the least. His sister’s demise seemed to cut off another piece of his past. He sighed and mourned for her in his own way, and that train of thought led him to mourning for his mother.

  Astor had caused all this. Twice he had the opportunity to take care of the king, but he hadn’t. Perhaps it would be fitting for the Emperor to have the privilege of executing the horrid man, rather than for Pol to kill Astor out of revenge.

  Pol peered into the darkness. He saw other watchers looking outward. He gazed at the sky to see the dim shape of the moon lighting the overcast, and then something caught at his location vision.

  “Attack!” he yelled. His alarm broke the stillness of the night. “They are coming!” Pol found a dot a little farther than the signpost and shot a ball.

  He threw his senses out farther. “Catapults advancing!”

  Jamey ran to his side. “Where?”

  Pol pointed. “Two hundred yards.”

  Jamey yanked him back to the catapult. “We’re smearing oil on the rocks. Can you set them alight as they leave?”

  Pol smiled. That would solve the smoking problem. “I’ll give it a try.”

  The oil-soaked rock shot into the air. Pol used his locator sense to track it and spelled fire on the dot. Fire lit up the sky, and it fell near a catapult.

  “We have the range, now. Are there others?”

  Pol walked along the front of the city wall with Jamey, directing the flights of flaming rocks. Soon there were enough of the rocks burning in the dry fall grasses surrounding the city that the defenders could see the troops.

  Shira stood shooting arrows into oncoming soldiers. “I still like my arrows better,” she said.

  Pol ran around the battlements to Hisswood, but the troops weren’t attacking that side. He returned, huffing and puffing. A year ago, Pol would be wheezing and curled into a ball, fighting for more breath and trying to concentrate on calming down his heart. Now he just leaned against the battlement, watching the last of the arrows fall among the attackers.

  “That was as much a feint as anything,” Jamey said. “Probably no more than five hundred troops.”

  Pol nodded. “To think they have thirty times that many.”

  “We’ve bloodied them a little. They got one rock launched while you were notifying Hisswood.”

  ~

  Morning dawned. Pol rubbed his eyes, looking up at Shira. She had circles under hers.

  “You can get some more sleep,” she said as Pol joined her.

  He looked out at the bodies still on the field. Not all of them were dead. Pol could still hear the moans that had kept interrupting his sleep.

  Women flooded up the stairs, collecting some of the blankets and exchanging empty food baskets for full ones.

  “We won’t have to worry about running out of food,” Pol said. “The emperor will be here in less than a week, or we’ll all be dead.”

  “Don’t say that!” Shira said, slapping him on the arm. “We’ll be on the waves sailing on the ocean, heading towards Volia, most likely.”

  Pol put that thought behind him. “Most likely.” He put his arm around her. He didn’t know why he did that, but she didn’t pull away, and it felt more like they were in this together.

  “Will the wall fall today?”

  “We will see,” Pol said.

  “A strange place for lovebirds,” Kelso said as he walked up to them.

  “You’re going to stay?” Pol asked as he abruptly took a step away from Shira.

  Kelso nodded. “I have my family out and on the way north. If the Emperor fails us, they can move further west. I have a friend in Yastan who can take them in.”

  “Grostin will be king,” Pol said.

  “Right. I guess I should have said I have a friend in Yastan that can take us in.” He gave Pol a grim smile. “I wanted to see how you were doing before I headed back to my post. Jamey told me about the oil-soaked rocks. I have a magician that’s still in the city who thinks he can duplicate what you did. We’ll be giving it a trial. Fires are no joke on a city wall, so we won’t be lighting them before the rocks get thrown.”

  Pol nodded. “Good luck. I hope we don’t meet up again at the castle.”

  Kelso snorted and looked at the commotion in front of the tents. “They’ll be attacking soon enough.”

  “That they will,” Pol said.

  The old Captain of the Guard looked down at his boots. “I’ll be leaving Borstall as soon as the city walls are breached,” he said. “I don’t want to, but—”

  “You’ve done enough. You don’t need my permission, but you have it. There’s a secret route that you know?”

  Kelso nodded. “I didn’t want you to find out from someone else. I talked to Paki, the young scoundrel. He told me that you’ve got a ship ready to set sail for Volia.”

  “I think the sails are already set, Kelso.”

  “Make sure you are on it. If Astor doesn’t kill you, Grostin will.”

  Pol wasn’t so sure about Grostin, after all, but he wouldn’t last a moment if he were captured.

  Shira squeezed Pol’s arm. “I’ll get him aboard the ship if I have to incapacitate him to do it.”

  “Don’t fail us, lass,” Kelso said. “I’ve got to get back to my post. Don’t tell Jamey.”

  “I won’t,” Pol said. He watched Kelso hurry away. That must have been a hard decision for him to make. Pol looked at Shira, who looked back with squinted eyes.

  “I know what you’re thinking, and don’t think I won’t put you to sleep when the time comes.” Her face turned s
olemn. She meant it.

  Pol put thoughts of flight behind him as they stood and watched the enemy troops begin to assemble. Long ladders were now raised above heads. Other soldiers slapped boards on top of the ladders. Shields to protect them.

  “No catapults. I guess they learned a lesson,” Jamey said in Pol’s ear, making him jump. “Get ready. They won’t stop until they swarm over the city wall. I have horses waiting for you at the bottom of the stairs for when the time comes.”

  Pol nodded as Jamey clapped him on the same shoulder that Kelso had a moment or two ago.

  “They’re coming!”

  Pol heard a soldier shout. He turned to look upon a sea of men rushing towards the wall. Pol wondered if he saw the entire army or if Kelso and Banson Hisswood were seeing the same number of men.

  Catapults began to smash into the enemy forces, breaking ladders as they hit, but there were many more ladders than there were catapults. The forces reached the signpost, so Pol and Shira went into action, shooting soldiers while arrows flooded the air.

  Pol shot at faces and necks when he could find a target that wasn’t running. He had forgotten about men in motion when he came up with his bright idea. He met with less success than he had hoped for, but they both emptied out the bucket of balls before the first soldiers reached the city wall.

  Pol looked down at the boards and the ladders and had no choice but to tweak them into flames. Shira nodded, and they ran in different directions, putting the wood to flame as they stopped and tweaked and stopped and tweaked.

  He hoped that Kelso’s magician would be doing the same. Flame wasn’t very hard for a magician. Pol kept going towards Hisswood’s position, and soon all of the ladders were aflame. The soldiers pulled back.

  Bodies littered the field. Some were burning and some not. There must have been a thousand of them, Pol thought. “Respite,” Pol said to Shira as they met up again above the main gate to the city.

  “Kelso has a magician who began to burn the ladders when he saw me do it.”

  Pol nodded. “I hoped he would.” He sat down with his back to the crenellation. She did the same and put her head on his shoulder.