His friend stood mutely with a hand aimed toward him, and the butt of his long rod planted in the dirt, watching the man in black clothes and white apron squirm on the ground. When he recovered enough to move further, a tangle of roots shot up from the ground and wrapped themselves around his feet. He let out a cry of fright. Stacy moved closer, getting the distinct feeling that this was far too easy.
The hair was similar, the clothing was similar, but the face was not. She let out a disappointed sigh, her arms swinging ever so slightly as she came to a stop. “It’s not him.”
The heads of Vincent’s two guards immediately snapped over to her. “What?” The mustached one asked in confusion. His friend responded only with an angry frown.
Stacy heard the others coming up behind her. The voice of the cerebist woman echoed hers when she arrived, having also noticed the discrepancy. “She’s right. It’s not him.”
The two of them still didn’t seem to believe it. “Clyde must have evaded us,” Stacy said again. “This man’s a decoy.”
The botanical mage let his temper get away and rushed toward the imposter laying on the ground, kicking him furiously. “You rancid cur!” He screamed. As his blue robed friend pulled him back, he kicked once more, sending dirt and tiny rocks at the man on the ground who was struggling to breathe.
Stacy heard more footsteps. The seer approached last. “What’s happening?” His young voice asked.
The mustached man was so mad he could hardly speak, and was still being restrained by his friend. “You let him get away! That’s what’s happened!”
“What? How can that be?”
Stacy turned to look at him. “Clyde switched places with this man,” she explained. “He must have done it after he went in the brothel.”
“How?”
The cerebist woman spoke next. “Were you watching him the entire time when he went in?”
The seer thought back. “Well…no, I just saw him open the door and that was it.”
“Well now he’s gone,” the Elf complained. “Nice work, kid.” A sad look of shame came over the seer’s features.
“Why don’t we question him,” Stacy suggested, “see what he knows.”
“An excellent idea,” the botanical mage agreed, pulling himself free after his friend’s hold loosened. He pulled the knife from his belt and approached with a vicious sneer that revealed his teeth.
The man on the ground was holding his head where it bled from his injury and suddenly looked up in fright. “Wait! Wait! Wait! I don’t know anything! I was only paid to do this! Whatever he did, I’m not a part of it!” He looked around at them as though for the first time. “What! Wizards!” The botanical mage stepped closer with the knife, and the imposter regarded him with true terror. “Stay away from me!” He screamed, trying desperately to inch his body away while his feet were still root-bound.
Stacy put a hand on the plant mage’s shoulder. “Hold on, let’s hear what he has to say.”
“Tell us what you know,” the mage growled.
“I don’t know anything!” The other screamed.
The mage idly inspected the blade of his knife between his thumb and first finger; the man on the ground began taking panicked breaths. “You know something,” he insisted, then stopped playing with it and looked at him with unrestrained fury. “Now tell us before I strip the flesh from your bones, and make you watch while I do it!”
“I told you I don’t know anything!”
Stacy calmly folded her arms and turned her head toward the mage. “Don’t hurt him. If he’s a member of the cult, that won’t get us anywhere. He’ll just resist it until he dies. Their fanaticism knows no limits. He’ll see himself as some sort of heroic martyr.”
“Then he’ll just have to become a martyr.”
“Please!” The imposter begged loudly. “The man I talked to only told me that the magistrate’s troops were after him! He said that as soon as they realized I wasn’t him, they’d let me go! Please! I don’t know anything about a cult! I only did it for the money!”
“That man was our Grandmaster’s assassin,” he replied grimly. “You took money from the wrong criminal this time.”
“We’ll just have to kill him and look for this Clyde’s trail elsewhere,” his friend added.
“What! I don’t want to die!” The man on the ground cried in fear.
“He might know where the real one went,” the Elf argued. “We can’t kill him yet.”
Stacy became lost in thought, thinking back to where Clyde had eluded them. She tried hard to discern what his true destination might have been. Memories of her last encounter and where he had gone flashed through her mind. She knew that the cult had left that site behind and could have reestablished themselves almost anywhere else by now, but one other piece of information she had come into contact with nagged her to think otherwise. Would that one bit of knowledge be enough to find him though?
She was too preoccupied to pay much attention to the ideas that the Elf and the atmomancer were passing back and forth. It seemed that the former was in favor of letting him live, the seer and the cerebist quickly joining his side, but the latter was still in favor of killing the imposter who had just wasted their time and led them astray. “…if Stacy is correct, and he’s not going to tell us anything no matter what, what choice do we have? We can’t chance letting an enemy go.”
Stacy looked up. “Wait. I think I might know where the real Clyde went.”
“How?” The red robed Elf asked in confusion.
Stacy seriously regarded each for a moment. “Whomever Clyde serves has their seat of power somewhere to the north. I suggest we use our seer and try to pick up his trail north of the city.”
“How could you possibly know that?” The cerebist woman asked. They all suddenly looked at her as though she might be a potential traitor.
“From a discussion with Master Anthony…look, it’s not important now. We need to get moving before he gets too far away.” They still looked at her incredulously. Stacy let out a sigh of aggravation and addressed the cerebist. “Ask your master to talk to him if you don’t believe me.”
The blonde cerebist woman closed her eyes for a long minute. The others looked on at her and waited in earnest for what she might say. Finally, her eyelids came open and she responded, “I told them our situation. They think it’s a good idea.”
“Good,” the botanical mage announced, reaching down at the throat of the imposter while brandishing the knife in the other hand, “then we don’t need him anymore.”
“No! No! Please don’t! I don’t want to die!” He pleaded desperately, trying to scoot himself further away though the roots and the hand at his shirt’s collar held him in place.
“No!” The cerebist shouted.
“Don’t kill him!” The seer added almost instantly.
Stacy couldn’t believe how naïve they were being. “We can’t trust him,” she said. “He could just as easily be one of them. He might even try to kill us later. Or tell them that we’re coming. Do you have any idea what these people are capable of?” The other two stared back. The seer, dumbfounded, said nothing while the cerebist moved her mouth but had no answer.
The botanical mage stood and regarded them each without emotion. Then he looked toward his friend in blue robes as though some sort of silent communication were taking place. The other nodded his head.
Scratching part of his mustache on the right of his upper lip, he took a few steps back toward Stacy and turned around once he was standing at her side. The roots suddenly unfurled from around the man’s legs and burrowed themselves in the ground once more. “Alright, you’re free to go,”-he pointed with his knife behind the imposter, toward the west-“start running in that direction and don’t turn back.” Stacy looked on at him in shock, thinking this was a bad idea.
The man came to his feet and dusted himself off. “But there’s nothing down there,” he complained, “just wild land all the way to the lake.”
“I swear by the gods if you don’t go right now, I am going to kill you!” The other took off as fast as he could, bolting down the distant rise. The mage sheathed his knife.
“This is madness!” Stacy exclaimed, turning to the mage. “How can you just let him go!”
The mage ignored her and instead turned to his friend. “There, I think that’s far enough.”
The fair haired atmomancer whose blue robes were still covered in the large prickly disgusting seeds lifted his iron rod and pointed it at the imposter running in the distance. A thick intense stream of lightning flashed brightly through the night air and struck the man with a loud thunderclap, lifting him in the air and setting a small part of his clothes on fire. The gelatinous liquid of his eyes splattered the bush leaves around him. All was silent as his body hit the ground.
“The crows and foxes should be able to eat that before anyone cares,” the mustached man remarked, drawing his thumb and finger across his chin in thought, “and at least this time they’ll get a cooked meal.”
“You’re sick!” The novice seer screamed in horror. “He was just paid to distract us! He didn’t deserve to die! You killed an innocent man!”
The atmomancer with the iron rod was not so convinced of that. “Innocent?” He scoffed. “Hardly.”
“He didn’t deserve to die!”
The plant mage turned and regarded the boy with a look of disgust as though he were hopeless. “And you don’t think he was lying?”
“But there was no way to know! He could have been telling the truth!”
“You’re right, there was no way to know. That’s why we couldn’t let him live.” He walked past to start leading the way for the others but stopped and looked at him once more. “Next time don’t lose track, and people won’t die.”
The seer seemed to understand; lapses in his observation were bound to have severe consequences. While the other walked off, the seer looked away, down and to the side. His jaw clenched. Consternation, shame, remorse, and frustration covered his face at the same time, but he said nothing in reply. He knew it was his own fault. Before Stacy started out, she watched the cerebist woman put a hand on his shoulder to console him.
It took them quite some time to re-enter the city of Gadrale, or so it seemed. For speed’s sake, they asked the seer to extend his awareness far fewer times and always in a sweep to the north, always to the north. They kept a wary eye open once more in the ramshackle part of town and chose this time to take a wide detour around the ring of prostitutes surrounding the area of the brothel. A detour that would take them north.
Just outside the city, on a main road leading north, they stopped once more to have the seer try to extend his awareness and find their prey. To Stacy, it appeared as though he were trying harder, looking further, out of necessity and from a silent pressure exuded by the others who had already witnessed him fail and jeopardize the success of the mission. After several long moments, he finally came out of his trance.
“I saw…”-he shook his head-“…nevermind, it won’t help us.”
The mage with the seeds looked at him hard and stressed each word. “What. Did. You. See?”
“If he went north, he went too far, I didn’t see him. Only a vision.”
“What was in it?” The cerebist woman asked.
“Nothing…” he let out a small breath while averting his gaze, “…it was stupid.”
“Just tell us,” Stacy insisted.
“I saw myself.”
“What?” The mage asked sharply.
“I saw myself trying to run back this way, only I couldn’t get any closer. I think it means that if I go that way, I won’t be returning for quite some time.”
“That has to be where he went,” Stacy concluded. “We should follow this road.”
“Now wait just a minute,” the Elf protested. “What if the boy is wrong again? There could be nothing down there. It could just feel like it’s taking forever on the way back, or it could be like something from a dream, or maybe he doesn’t want to go back. It’s been a long night. I say we just admit the obvious to ourselves-that we lost him-and go home.”
Stacy eyed him with a frown. “Do you really want to return and tell everyone that we let the Grandmaster’s assassin fool us and escape.” She was almost certain this was the right direction. “Especially when we still had a chance to find him again?”
The plant mage with the scar across his jaw looked from one of them to the other, considering. “Let’s run,”-he turned and pointed-“all the way past the edge of those farms. Then we’ll go down it for a few more hours and have our seer take another look around.” It was quite a distance. Stacy was not looking forward to it but still wanted to see if she was right. “If he doesn’t detect anything, we’ll turn back.”
At first, things went quickly and they covered a lot of ground. Then it became too exhausting and everyone was becoming too winded to keep up such a quick pace. Vincent’s two guards reduced their speed so they wouldn’t leave the others behind. Stacy’s lungs burned and she was covered in sweat. After they slowed, they walked on for several hours in the dark.
The moon and the stars shone down on them, and the landscape had changed. They had at last left behind the city and any of its outlying farms. In its place all around them was wild grassland with a scattering of a few pine trees.
Later on, it became a road through a forest at night, a dark road in which the shadows danced between thin shafts of moonlight. The sweet, fresh smell of evergreen needles filled the air. The Elf produced a small flame that led the way, much as Rick had the other time, only he complained much more about how this wasn’t going to work and that they should just go home. Their leader, the man with the scar, silenced him by repeating that they couldn’t return without first making a reasonable effort. Failing to even attempt this would be the same as if they had let him go, and would destroy their credibility within the keep forever.
Once again, they had their seer project himself toward places unseen, and painstakingly waited for him to reveal what he could. After a time, the Elf in red robes became impatient. “I told you this was a waste of time.”
“Wait!” The seer burst out suddenly. Stacy’s head darted toward him along with everyone else’s. “I see something moving.” He then corrected it to, “or at least something has been. Several plants are swaying from being disturbed.”
“Follow it,” The botanical mage ordered. The young man remained still, scrunching his eyes while trying to do as told.
“You can see that well when it’s this dark?” The cerebist woman asked.
“The vision sees many things,” he replied quickly with his eyes closed.
“Yeah, just not always what we want,” the Elf remarked snidely.
A moment later, the seer spoke again. “It’s getting too far away, my view is fading, we have to get closer.”
“Come on, let’s hurry,” the plant mage said.
They ran a good distance down the road and had him try again. His breathing was still ragged from the run while he stood with his eyes closed. Several more moments passed while he probed ahead. “It’s Clyde!”
“Are you sure?” The Elf asked skeptically.
“Yes! It has to be!”
“Then let’s stay on him,” the botanical mage asserted.
With that, they continued down the road, stopping periodically to check on his progress. They were all cautious, yet the mood of the company had changed. The cerebist woman and the Elf made idle conversation while the seer strolled dutifully along, anxious to not let the others down. The mood of their leader, the botanical mage also seemed to improve. To pass the time, he talked with his friend and made a few jokes that Stacy didn’t pay enough attention to. The man with the iron rod still wore the strange seeds, laughed with him, and made some comment, then the mage would tell him something wasn’t the worst of it and go on from there.
Among them, Stacy was perhaps the most reserved, even more so than the seer.
She kept her eyes peeled and stared hard into the dark woods that surrounded them, looking for any sign of movement, barely hearing the others talking. This was only a scouting mission, yet she knew that danger awaited. Their foe was clever and had already proven it once this night. After what she had been through before, she simply couldn’t let herself go the way they had. The way they were.
“Would you all be quiet!” She nearly shouted when she could stand it no more. “We shouldn’t underestimate Clyde. Look what happened the last time. Did it ever occur to you that he might try something else on us and that he’s just waiting for us to become overconfident? How do we know this road isn’t being watched?”
Her words sobered them up and they remained silent once again. She was glad because it allowed her to listen for any sounds that might reveal a presence. A few moments later, she quietly called for the others to stop and asked the seer to check on him again. He did and was able to verify Clyde’s position, quite some distance north off the road, having left it after it made an abrupt turn west.
It was a long night. After going north and leaving the road to pursue him into the forested wilderness, they walked for miles. They went around thick stands of spruce, firs, and underbrush of every kind. The Elf’s small flame was the only thing that kept them from tripping when they stepped over logs, around rocks, and tried to avoid having their clothes snagged by greedy branches. Or stepping in deer droppings.
Clyde took them much further and deeper into the forest than she thought he would have. They trudged along wordlessly until she felt that it was time to observe him once more and asked the seer to do that. The young man leaned on his staff, his troubled, closed-eye visage revealed by the dim glow of the fire speck. Stacy watched him and waited.
Suddenly, he shook and convulsed where he stood. The others voiced concern and moved closer. At last he opened his eyes and let out a frightened breath, shaking as though to try to get whatever he saw off of himself.
Storm of Prophecy, Book I: Dark Awakening Page 32
