Disciple of War (Art of the Adept Book 4)

by Michael G. Manning

  He had felt it coming a second before it actually began, as the enemy gathered their turyn to attack. In the past, he had primarily been aware of turyn visually, but lately he had started to realize that all his senses were involved to some degree. Though he lacked a direct line of sight to the sorcerers hiding behind the merlons, his skin prickled as they gathered in turyn from their elementals. When the flames came down, he spread his arms and stretched out with his will.

  There were other wills guiding the flames, but they weren’t worth mentioning. He took the flames from them with the same ease a parent might take a dangerous object from a toddler. Initially, he had meant to turn the fire back against its creators, but as the moment arrived Will realized how great the strain of absorbing so much power would be. Deeper down, he felt instinctively that there was an easier way.

  The ram boomed against the gate. Without fully claiming the fiery turyn, Will converted it, augmenting the pounding of the ram, amplifying the heavy sound as it crashed against the gate. The sound exploded around the men so loudly that some of them lost their grip and fell to the ground, clutching their ears.

  On the walls, the effect was similar, as some of the defenders fell to their knees in pain and terror. Will realized he’d made a mistake, but he understood what it was, and his next attempt would be better.

  Several minutes passed, and the ram made no noticeable progress against the massive gates, but eventually the enemy sorcerers regained their nerve and tried again, and this time Will was fully prepared. Once again, he repurposed their power, but he made sure it remained focused on the gate, preventing it from spreading back toward the soldiers manning the ram.

  The vibrations ran through the gate and the surrounding stone walls, hammering into the defenders like a physical thing. Men screamed, blood running from their eyes and ears. Some were so badly stunned that they fell from the walls, while others deserted their posts and ran for safer places, unable to hear the cries of their commanders or their companions.

  A shout went up from the Terabinians, and Will saw that a split had appeared in one of the massive beams that comprised the gates of Maldon. His eyes widened at that. Taking the gate hadn’t really been his plan, nor had he expected that sound could have so much of a physical effect.

  Unfortunately, he didn’t think the defending magic users would be giving him any more free turyn to play with. It seemed that most of them had deserted the defense of the gates. Which was a shame, because Will doubted that their makeshift battering ram would have any real effect. Its sole purpose was to provide a noisy diversion. Without his supplemental sonic attacks, it was unlikely to finish the job.

  A runner arrived, and Will focused his attention on the man. “How goes it in the hole?”

  “Lieutenant Bug sends word that his team is getting close. Fifteen minutes more and they should be through. Their elementals are opening a way through the stone now.”

  “What about Janice and Emory?”

  “Their situation is similar, though they may take slightly longer. The bedrock they encountered is seamless granite. Apparently, it’s more difficult for the elementals to shift.”

  “Tell Bug not to wait for them. When he’s ready, he can open the way. I doubt the enemy has taken any notice of them. If they do get bottled up, it will just provide an additional distraction for the other team.”

  “Yes, sir,” replied the messenger, leaving at a run.

  “Looks like we still have at least thirty minutes to kill here,” Will muttered to himself. He’d have rather been with one of the two entry teams, but as part of his promise to Laina and ultimately to Selene, he had opted for the safer position with the decoy gate forces.

  Of course, it wasn’t truly safe. Not as safe as his wife would have liked. Someone still might drop a rock on his head when he wasn’t looking, but it was as safe as he was willing to accept. The ram continued to beat fruitlessly against the gate, and without active enemies guarding it, Will had nothing to do.

  In fact, he was a little bored, if such a thing were possible in the midst of a battle. He kept staring at the gate, his mind drifting as his eyes studied the split his sound attack had created. Something tickled the back of his mind, and he started walking forward.

  When he had reached the sorcerers defending the soldiers, he spoke to one of them. “Move your force-wall closer to the gate.” He pointed. “I’m going to be standing right there, next to where the ram is striking. Make sure no one splatters my brains onto the roadway.”

  With that said, he made his way up to stand beside the head of the ram. The men were still swinging it back and forth, and with each strike he could feel the force of the blow thrumming through the heavy wood of the gates of Maldon. Reaching up, he put his hand on the surface and closed his eyes, letting the vibrations resonate through his flesh.

  He had an innate talent with sound. That had become ever more apparent with each passing day, and though no one had every truly explained it to him, he knew that sound was nothing more than vibrations. Slowly, Will began drawing in turyn, not with the intent of storing it for a large spell working, but rather to feed it into a slow, steady piece of wild magic.

  At first, he simply felt the thud of the ram and copied it, increasing it, but he could feel the innate elasticity of the wood sapping the energy. It took more and more turyn to increase the vibration, and he could tell intuitively that the drain would become far too much to sustain long before he reached a level that could damage the structure of the gate. So instead, he listened—not with his ears, but with his body and its special way of feeling turyn that went beyond simple sight.

  A certain portion of the ram’s vibration didn’t dissipate as quickly as the rest. At a specific frequency, like a musical note, it lingered, humming through the wood. It would have been useless for music of course, for the note was too low for his ears to detect, but he could feel it in his chest. Will copied it and began using his turyn to amplify it.

  Initially he only succeeded in completely dampening the resonance. The vibration he introduced was similar, but its timing was off by just enough that it canceled out its twin, resulting in a profound and almost startling silence. Will made note of it for future exploration, then corrected his mistake. By tuning the resonance up and down slightly, he eventually matched the exact frequency that the gate seemed to hold onto.

  He knew when he had it because the energy immediately ramped up and the wood slowly began to visibly shiver. Interesting, he thought. I wonder how far this could go? First increasing his turyn absorption, Will then began adding more energy into the wild magic.

  The gate drank it in, and its shivering gradually transformed into a frenetic shaking that seemed as though it might cause the wood to literally rip itself free of the stone and iron that framed it. Dust rained down around him, and the walls of the gatehouse began to groan with a strange sound he had never heard in stone before.

  The soldiers holding the ram had stopped their work, too fascinated by what he was doing, but Will was suddenly taken by the realization that what he was doing might be dangerous to everyone in the vicinity. Turning his head, he voiced an order, “You men should withdraw a short distance. I’m not sure what—”

  Will never finished his sentence, as the massive ironbound gate chose that moment to explode, sending sharp flinders of wood in every direction at high speed. Men died and blood ran thick as the front ranks of soldiers manning the ram were impaled by hundreds of spear-like splinters. Will himself, being directly in front of the gate, took the worst of it, and only the fact that he’d been using an iron-body transformation prevented his instantaneous demise.

  He found himself lying supine a few feet from where he’d been standing. Staring upward, he could see that nothing remained of the gate, and the stone arch above it had been grievously damaged. A massive crack had formed where some of the stone had been blown away, and it spread rapidly along the stone ceiling within the gatehouse. From the corner of his eye, he could see sim
ilar cracks in the walls where large chunks of stone had been ripped free.

  Looks like the whole thing might collapse in on itself, the spectator in the back of his head observed quietly. At the same time, he realized he was going to be beneath some portion of that collapsing structure. This might not be the best place for resting, he thought.

  In slow motion, the gatehouse that guarded the main entrance to the city of Maldon shuddered and slipped, falling inward, and despite his best intentions and its seeming slowness, Will found himself utterly unable to move in time.

  “Fuck.” His final remark slipped out as he used the only spell that might save him, a force-dome. He watched as a truly immense slab of stone blocks that remained stubbornly cemented together fell directly on it, then felt his spell fail under the strain. There was a moment’s pain, and then the world went black.

  Surprisingly, his eyes opened again a moment later, though Will wasn’t sure if he’d gone unconscious and reawakened, or whether he’d merely closed his eyes before the sky had been blotted out. He tried to lift a hand to check his head and see if it had been cracked open, only to discover that he was pinned. There was almost no light, but a tiny amount found him through cracks in the stone detritus, enough to see once he’d adjusted his vision.

  The coughing started a few seconds later as he inhaled some of the cloud of dust that hung around him. I’ve been buried alive. How silly. Will would have laughed if his lungs hadn’t already been fully occupied with trying to clear themselves.

  Eventually the dust settled, as did his coughing fits, and in the meantime, he was able to ascertain that he still retained both arms and both legs. Experimentally, he wiggled his fingers and toes just to be sure. A chilling thought came to him then. What if I’m just imagining it? He’d heard that sometimes people still felt their legs after losing them.

  He pushed that thought aside, deciding that he felt both too much and not enough pain for that to be the case. He wasn’t sure if his logic was sound, but he wasn’t going to question it.

  The arm that he had thought was pinned, wasn’t—at least not exactly. There was space on his left side, and by shifting his body that way he was able to move his arm. Will couldn’t be certain, but it seemed that the stone slab that had impacted his force-dome had split in half, forming a small triangular shelter above him after his spell failed. He couldn’t even begin to imagine the odds. He knew he’d been incredibly lucky.

  Rolling his head to one side, he addressed a piece of dusty stone that had been lying close to his cheek. “So long as neither of us tell Selene about this, I might survive to a ripe old age.”

  The stone didn’t answer.

  “That’s the spirit,” said Will encouragingly. “As long as we’re discussing it, you should probably avoid mentioning this to my sister too. She has a bad temper.”

  Again, it didn’t reply, but Will could somehow sense its doubt. Not regarding what he’d said, but more about the fact that it could answer at all. It thought he was losing his mind. “Go to hell,” he muttered sourly. “I’ve lived through worse than this. In fact, I’ve even been buried alive before, now that I think about it. That’s why I learned the grave-digging spell.”

  He stared stupidly at the stone for a moment, then a sound emerged from his lips. “Ooh!” He struggled to keep from giggling, lest Mister Stone take it as a further sign he wasn’t quite in his right mind. Instead he crooned happily to himself, “By the Mother and her great holy tits, William Cartwright, you are a fucking clever lad!” It was a swear he’d learned years before, from his old army buddy, Dave, but he’d never felt right using it until then.

  Smiling, he told the stone, “Wait until I tell Selene about this. She’ll be so proud.”

  Thankfully, the stone reminded him that that was precisely what he wasn’t to do.

  “Right! She’d kill me,” he agreed. “Don’t tell her about the swearing either. She wouldn’t approve.” He was wasting time.

  Starting small, he used the grave-digging spell to excavate a space beneath him while packing the excavated earth into cracks and crevices to the sides and toward his feet. There was a surprising amount of space, and after a few repetitions of the process Will found himself relatively free in a pocket beneath the collapsed building. The volume around him now was approximately enough to hold him two or maybe three times over. It wasn’t ideal for digging, but it was doable.

  Continuing to move the earth, he gradually displaced himself deeper and sideways simultaneously. He would have rather gone directly to the side, but he was afraid he might displace the support for the stone above him and be suddenly be crushed if it came down on top of him.

  He could dimly hear men yelling aboveground, so Will tuned his hearing to help alleviate his boredom. After a while, he could understand the voices of those close by and one in particular stood out as familiar to him. It was that of Mark Nerrow.

  “Over the top, you bastards! Don’t waste your chance!”

  In his mind, Will could almost see his father standing heroically on the field as he shouted the words. He’s the kind of leader they would prefer, thought Will. I just hope he remembers to let the Darrowans surrender. From what he could tell, men were clambering over the collapsed gatehouse to enter the city.

  Combine that with the fact that they should also be entering from the two tunnels they had dug on either side of the city, and the battle for Maldon might as well be over. The city garrison would have no realistic hope of retaining control once the soldiers of Terabinia were inside the walls.

  It worked, he thought smugly. And I didn’t even need to blow myself up, that was just a bonus. He continued making his way through the ground, imagining himself as a wizardly mole.

  Above ground, things were growing quieter, but Mark Nerrow remained, interrogating those who had survived the gatehouse disaster. “Where was he? Damn it! Snap out of it! There, or over there? Be specific!” Moments later, he was yelling orders to more men. “We have to move these stones!”

  The baron didn’t react well when one of them told him that it was impossible for Will to have survived. “That’s hundreds of tons of stone, Sub-marshal, no one could be alive under that.”

  “Shut your damned mouth! I’d know if he was dead!”

  Minutes passed while men and elementals sifted through the stone debris, but predictably, no sign of Will’s body was found. He eventually emerged from the earth twenty feet away, and the light of the sun was welcome on his cheeks, even as muddled and diffuse as it was in the fog. Once again, he readjusted his vision to optimize it for the mist. Close by, he could see men working over the pile of rubble while Mark Nerrow tried to supervise. Coordination was difficult, since none of them could see one another once they got more than four feet away.

  Messengers ran in now and then, looking for the sub-marshal to report the latest news and carry his orders to the various units. Will walked closer as the last of them ran off on the latest errand.

  His father stood alone, hidden by the fog, and in his moment of solitude, Will saw the man’s shoulder’s bow and his hands reach up to cover his face. The older man’s body shook slightly, though no sound emerged. Surely, he isn’t… Will shook his head to clear it. No, that can’t be.

  Moving through the mist, he stepped up beside the man and asked, “What happened?”

  The sub-marshal jerked, straightening his stance and quickly squaring his shoulders. “We’re trying to ascertain where—” He froze in place, then stared at his son’s dirt-covered face. “Marduke’s ass! I thought you were dead!”

  “If I had a coin for every time someone told me that,” mumbled Will. He was relieved to see that his father’s cheeks were still dry, but as he looked at the man he saw the tears beginning to well in them. “It’s all right. The stones formed an arch over me.”

  His father blinked, then wiped his face with one sleeve. “You’re either the luckiest, or the dumbest bastard I’ve ever known.” Stepping in, the older man gingerly probed
Will’s skull with his fingers, trying to discern whether his skull had been cracked.

  “Guilty on all three counts,” said Will.

  “Three?”

  “I’m dumb, lucky, and a bastard.”

  His father winced. “I didn’t mean to say it like that.” A second later he added, “There’s a few scratches on your scalp, but they’re minor. You might not even get a lump. How do you feel?”

  “Filthy,” Will admitted. “Tunneling is dirty work.” For a moment, he thought of the rock, even as it occurred to him that perhaps he’d hit his head hard enough to knock his wits loose. “Let’s finish this battle.”

  “You need to rest. Let me handle the remainder.”

  He started to argue, but then he noticed the world swaying ever so slightly. “I’ll sit down, but I expect to be kept informed of everything. In fact, you can stay with me. I won’t interfere unless I disagree with you.”

  “Fine. First thing though, can you do something about this fog? It was wonderful for the first part of this, but it’s going to lead to confusion and more dying if the men can’t see while they take control of the streets,” suggested the sub-marshal.

  “Yeah, but I’ll need to be alone for a while.”

  His father frowned. “It’s warlockry, isn’t it?”

  “No, but I doubt I can convince you of the difference. I didn’t have to pay anything. Tailtiu is helping me of her own accord.”

  “She’s the fae woman you mentioned dealing with before?”

  He nodded. “My aunt to be precise.”

  “We need to have a long talk about this someday soon. Why do you want to be alone? Afraid I won’t approve of your bargaining?” Suspicion was thick in his father’s tone.

  Will shook his head. “No, not that. She’s dangerous, and although she’s willing to help me, she’s rather unstable. I’d rather not push my luck by tempting her.”