Magience: second edition

by Cari Silverwood

  “Keep back. They have blades attached all over and they’re fast. Can cut you in half before you know it.”

  She gave him a somewhat sickly grin. A vision of herself popped into her head. Cut neatly down the middle. Only neat didn’t happen in real life. It would hurt and be very messy in a red blood-and-guts sort of way.

  No time remained to wonder why he was so concerned about her welfare.

  The Immolators were here.

  Like the surge of an avalanche or a house devoured by flame they drew the eye – stunning, dangerous and fast. Two sped, limbs blurring, for the group of fifteen or so warriors with Dost but one came straight toward her. Or so it seemed. She almost cowered back against the wall.

  This was worse than the Bloodmen. At least they had some respect for life.

  The funny thing was she couldn’t stop watching as he charged closer. Unblinking she took in every movement of his body.

  Golden pins sparkled in the backdrop of dying light and cast a golden halo around him. Sweat splattered into the air. He wore short breeches and no armor, with thin blades flourishing on his arms and legs like some exotic porcupine. She could see the flex of his muscles, the blood that leaked from the corners of his eyes, where two pins had been inserted, and the strange calmness on his face. In both hands he clutched short punch swords.

  He arrived like an explosion.

  One man flew sideways, another, the one with the spear, was flattened and sent skidding to the right. Dayna and Krueger, like mirror twins in perfect tune, parried each of the Immolator’s strikes in turn. With every blow they were beaten back a little, the force sending shudders up their arms. A swirl of particles glinted in the wake of Krueger’s blade as though some strange force gathered there. With an ugly crack his blade snapped in two. He threw himself backward as the Immolator’s sword cut the air where he’d been – straight into the flailing backswing of a Grakk soldier’s axe. Krueger dropped to the ground unconscious.

  The Immolator staggered.

  As if by magience an axe-spike thrust out from his chest to be drawn back through. At once he twirled. Weaving his swords in an intricate pattern of metal, he slew that axe man, sent the warrior beside him staggering away bleeding and pummeled Dayna to her knees.

  With his blades still chiming out a high and beautiful note, he somersaulted, landing with a smack of his feet before Ellinca, glaring at her, swords raised.

  “Haa-a-ah!” someone screamed. This time a spear thumped into his back and a full half yard of it protruded from his stomach. To her horror he grasped the haft below the spear point and hauled the rest of the timber shaft through.

  “Ugh!” She grimaced. Strands of tissue emerged stuck fast to the spear shaft. He spun with the gory weapon in hand, poised to hurl it then stumbled back toward her like a drunk, slowed to mortal levels. A mere wound should not do that, should it?

  She blinked. The creature from her haversack was plastered thin across his back. Absorbing the pins, it was slowing him down, but not enough. His back muscles bunched as he drew back the spear. She could see the warrior beyond, see the knowledge of his death in his eyes. She took a step, reached out, and placed her hand flat on the Immolator’s skin.

  Lightning flashed across her mind, searing away reality.

  Each time it became easier to slip into that space where she could feel the other’s body and sense what should be done. Time crawled. Healing a human must be no different than healing an animal. It must. Humans were animals, sometimes more animal in violence than any other creature she could imagine.

  There was so little that needed doing here, these wounds recent and minute. With the lightest brush of power, it was done.

  Hundreds of the tiny holes closed over, one by one. Golden pins tinkled as they hit the floor one after the other. She stepped away. The man crumpled to the floor – a sad puppet that had lost its strings. Ellinca wiped moisture away with the back of a finger beneath both her eyes. It had been hard to not see the rest of him, not to try to heal all the other wounds, for he was no longer a stranger. Somehow she knew his name.

  She looked down at him as he took his last breath and dullness flooded his eyes. He was Ismalli, a young man who had a father, a mother and a sister. She knew his name...This war must end. Swirls of men fought on. War cries echoed, as well as screams of pain and the harsh clangs of metal meeting metal.

  She backed away. Her boot snagged on something soft and she gasped. The guard at the door lay slain in a small pool of blood. Someone cracked the door open and peered out through the gap.

  “Psst! Come here!” The man widened the gap. Thinking only of escape, she slipped through into a large room smelling strongly of droppings and mold. Bubbling, squeaking and sloshing came from a complex assortment of tanks, metal tubes and benches and cages. The man leaned on the door, closed it and swung a heavy bar into place.

  “Uh...” She stared at him. Something made her decide not to mention the bar. There had been one on the outside too. For whatever reason, they both wished to protect him and to stop him – or something else in this room – from leaving.

  Dangling over his eyes was an untidy nest of black greasy hair that appeared to have been left uncombed for days. His face was spotted with pimples and he wore a tatty laced-up shirt and ochre trousers. Oddest of all, his forearms were covered in weeping sores and scars.

  “I saw that!” he spouted cheerily, his words spoken quickly and with an odd rhythm.

  “Oh?”

  “Yes! You’re like me.”

  Ellinca looked him over again. That idea was alarming...disturbing. Should she leave? The sounds of fighting carried through the door.

  “I’m sorry? What do you mean?”

  “You did something...with your hand. To that Immolator.” He spun away, trotted over to his tanks and patted the nearest one as if it were a child. “Like to see my work? I call myself an Organeer. Like that title? I can do things with my hands too.”

  Cautiously she approached and looked into the tank. A murky brown fluid poured into it from a tube at the edge. Animals swam swiftly about just below the surface.

  He reached in with both hands and trapped one. A fountain of water spurted up as it thrashed. In his hands was a pink tube a half yard long, narrow at one end and flaring at the other end into a corkscrew of spinning fins. “This is a baby. See how I’ve made the fins and muscles intergrow?” He gently lowered it back in. “...with these and this...” He wiggled his fingers and tapped his temple.

  He must have registered her horror. “Oh. I don’t kill. I don’t kill anything. All I use are the eggs and the embryos, things that haven’t been born. I encourage them to mix and make grand new creatures. Don’t you see? Look! Here’s another creation. This one I have released into the forest. They didn’t want me to, no, no. Said too early. Ha! They locked me in after that.”

  In this other tank a red sponge crawled across sand. He tipped in a scoopful of scrap metal. “This one can’t live long away from pure metal. It does its job, eats away our enemy’s weapons...and then it dies.”

  The sponge swarmed onto a hunk of copper and settled.

  This was her haversack creature, but somehow it had changed, mutated and survived.

  He widened his stance and began to quote in a deepened voice, “‘And your enemy shall be our enemy and we shall eat up their swords and their spears and they will fall at our feet! And we will exult at their weeping!’ From the Bloodtribe Bible. I’ve made it come true! Does that make me a god?”

  Unsettled, unsure of what to say, Ellinca looked up and clenched her hands, fingernails digging into her palms. Hanging from the ceiling by a chain was a cage. Inside it a pair of wings flapped – just wings with yet another tube in the middle. This tube was white and the surface seemed armored by scales except for at what could be the mouth end, where a pink orifice sucked greedily on a piece of dried meat.

  “Ah! That one may yet lead to powered flight. I can scale it up to a much, much larger wing. Im
agine a man riding one of those?” He smiled widely at her, not blinking at all. “Then those Bheulakks won’t be the only ones who fly!”

  “I...I have to get back.”

  Trying not to seem in too great a hurry, Ellinca headed for the door despite his repeated invitations to stay for dinner. She swallowed down nausea. The bar refused to budge. She pushed again and again.

  “Wait! Please! Can’t you stay?” He shuffled closer.

  She thumped the door and shoved again. It moved. She lifted it free. Ellinca did not turn around. Once through the door she closed it, barred it and rested her back against it, feeling her heart slow down to a less frantic rhythm. She slid to the floor. Yet another example of how this war fouled everything, everyone it touched. The Grakks had a pet mage, one who truly was mad, one who could somehow play with the very essence of life.

  The battle was over. A wide, wet red stripe showed where a body had been dragged away across the floor.

  Somehow the other two Immolators had been defeated...killed. How, she did not know, or want to know, but everyone was keeping their distance from Dost. She watched through her eyelashes as he pressed a chunk of dangling flesh into place and bound it to his arm with a strip of cloth. He saw her observing him and nodded.

  She closed her eyes.

  Footsteps drew close. She opened her eyes. Dost stood before her. She drew up her legs. A long gold pin twirled slowly between his finger and thumb. If only he would disappear.

  “There are many dead and wounded,” he said. “If you have any healing skills perhaps you could help the healers?”

  “Oh!” He was right, though her skin crawled at his closeness. She could hear the cries of the wounded.

  Her thoughts switched from being achingly slow, weighed down by a murky quagmire of despair and fatigue, to now racing and sunlight fast.

  Did he suspect? How much could he know about her? From what she’d just seen it might not matter to the Grakks, but in Burgla’le wild magience was still an executable offense.

  The gold needle glinted. Had he seen the body and marked how the wounds had closed? Heard someone say that she had touched the Immolator? But that would lead to thoughts of death, not healing... Ultimately she had killed him by withdrawing the needles.

  Enough dithering. There would be something she could do, surely. “Yes. I will help.”

  She pushed her aching body upright and walked over to where two healers attempted the impossible – plain doctors, not any of the magience professions, not bio-energeers or herbologists. Two doctors for fully fifteen wounded, one of them bleeding out in an ugly spreading lake of blood.

  “Madam?” Dost spoke to a squat woman in workmanlike blue trousers and shirt.

  “Yus?” The woman whipped her head ’round while still applying pressure to a leg wound. She spoke a few words of Grakk before switching to La’le. “If you can help, do so. Otherwise go away.” She glared at them.

  Startled, Ellinca faced a pair of eyebrows as sharp as any sword.

  With a tinge of alarm at her daring, she nodded and turned to the unconscious woman next in the line of wounded. This was the one lying in the pool of blood. No minor thing was this, but...leave her to die from blood loss, or chance whatever might happen if her power ran wild? Pascolli might have been right to refuse her touch. She found herself rocking on the balls of her feet, undecided, scared.

  She was dithering again. She bent to the task, drawing on all her knowledge.

  The woman’s arm was mostly severed below the shoulder. So, remove the woman’s leather belt. With the knife punch a hole for the buckle. Tighten the belt a few inches above the slashed flesh. Tighter! Good. No longer a small geyser but still bleeding. Ellinca wedged a wad of cloth in the armpit and lashed the arm in closer to her leather-armored torso. The bleeding slowed instantly. It would do. The woman’s eyes flickered open. Dost was nearby.

  “Here!” She snatched up a water bottle and threw it to him. “Get her to drink if you can. Small swallows at first.”

  Next in line. The healer was already there. Next. A man with a fist-deep depression in his skull. At one edge a smear of blood and a bulging lip of raw bone and brain. Wailing gibberish. Eyes rolled back. Nothing she could do except place him on his side so he could breathe easily. Next.

  A flood of men and women came in the double doors – magientists and more doctors or nurses. At last.

  Snapping out instructions in Grakk, the first of them pointed each of the others to various wounded and they scurried over.

  “You!” A lady bio-energeer glanced at Ellinca. “Good work. Thank you.”

  Ellinca looked at her hands. Blood. She had not killed anyone. She could control this thing, this power, let it loose only when she wanted to.

  No one had come near the gibbering man. Clearly he was taking the wrenching, terminal gasps of the dying. Choosing her steps carefully, as though afraid the earth might collapse beneath them, she approached him. Blue lips, eyes closed, mouth gasping like a fish out of water.

  How to comfort the dying? When she placed her hand on his shoulder he did not react. Animals and people, the same, yet different. Ellinca knew she would try to help an animal, if she could. Would bone and brain respond to her touch? Would it matter if she failed?

  A small sore on his neck oozed pus, the edges of the wound puffed up with infection and red raw, a tiny wound. She glanced around. No one watched. If this worked she would try the wound on his skull.

  Ellinca pressed her fingers flat over the sore, felt the pus stick to her skin, and grimaced. With eyes squeezed shut she searched. Exhaustion made it harder than before. Something threw up shrouding, bitter veils against her, like walking in a fierce storm. She faltered as she reached back to find the time when this man was brimming with health. One, two, three, four – she gathered slender threads to her. This and this and this if woven together made wholeness... Her power, having been held barely in check, rushed past.

  Wetness seeped between her fingers. Redness. Blood.

  “Oh.” She lifted away her hand. Where there had been a sore there was now a gaping fresh gouge in the flesh that wept blood. “Oh!”

  “I wouldn’t bother there,” someone said kindly. “Nothing to be done for him.”

  Ellinca rose. Trying not to show distress, she walked away, tripping here and there on her feet, not looking back. He was dying and that was that. She wiped her fingers across her breeches, over and over and over. Gods!

  Dost’s voice came to her, wet and gurgling. “Now do you see? This is what we need to stop.” His cold fingers clutched her shoulder. “We must stop this killing.”

  The gurgling – it was the wetness of old, cold blood leaking from the tissues of his throat. She heard again, the scratching and scratching of fingers under the log.

  “At Carstelan I’ll need your help.”

  She shuddered, slid her shoulder from beneath those fingers. “Me? Help you?” The words spat out like poison. “Get away from me, you dirty bludvoik!”

  After an icy moment she heard him trudge away.

  Once more she slumped against a wall. Walls were good. Why did that thing believe she could help stop a war? She closed her eyes. A minute of rest that was all she needed. Rest.

  Pascolli has died. What was she doing here?

  The noise, the groans, the cries melted into silence.

  * * * *

  “Ellinca?” Dayna knelt in front of her. “Wake up.” Softly, she rested her hand on Ellinca’s head. “You are tired, I know. Soon we go. You saw volcano?”

  “Volcano?” Ellinca shifted her sleep-sodden mind back. She had seen it when she had looked out from the platform – eight, ten miles away, with dark plumes of smoke lifting into the sky from two slumbering fumaroles. The distinctive and very distant geological curiosity of the country around Carstelan, there had been other things to worry about at the time.

  “That is where we go. Below it is city of Carstelan. We go tonight.”

  “Ah. We do?�
�� She frowned. “How?”

  “Hmmm. This not only attack by Imperator troops. We leave tonight. We go. See.” She pointed along the stone platform and beyond that to the gray sky where an airship cruised toward them.

  “You said I could trust you!”

  She felt Dayna’s hand press her shoulder. “You can. This safe. I promise on my father’s ghost.”

  She wrenched her gaze away from the airship. “You promise?”

  “Yus. Remember? I trust, you trust.”

  “I... Um...” She turned to look as the ponderous airship lumbered in on a long, curving turn.

  This ship must carry slaves.

  When the airship came to a stop side-on to the cavern the light from the torches lit up its belly. The hull was green, with many raised decorations – bumps and long swirls in gold and red. It reminded her of a decorated pig bladder, like the ones that could be bought at festivals, though this looked strangely like it was made of painted rock.

  “So you want me to get on board that?”

  “That? No! Not on airship. We go on those. Gliders.”

  “Oh.” She swallowed. “That might even be worse.”

  “Don’t worry, I champion glider.” Dayna grinned, spread her arms out like wings, then walked about pretending to fly, until she tripped and fell over a pile of sacks. “Oops!”

  “Uh-huh.” Ellinca pulled at her lower lip. “A champion? You’re sure?”

  Chapter 15

  The Courtyard

  “Here is knot to release your chest band.” Dayna patted it. “Don’t pull until we on ground. Very important!”

  Seen up close the kite-glider was a work of art. The framework of gleaming black twined cane and laminated timber had been embossed with tiny colorful sigils on many of the joins. The wing over her head stretched out fully three yards to either side. Made of black waterproofed material, doubtlessly for the purpose of camouflage, it was as glossy as a raven’s plumage. She just hoped it was as flight-worthy.

  Dayna began to give directions. “When we go!” She used her hand to illustrate them diving off the platform. Ellinca concentrated, not daring to miss a word.