The Spellmonger Series: Book 02 - Warmage

by Terry Mancour

There was a moment of silence as the council strove to absorb that. The Duke drummed his fingers in thought, his big gold signet ring banging annoyingly on the highly-polished wood of the table. But one doesn’t interrupt a Duke in thought. Finally, he cleared his throat.

  “I need to think on this,” he admitted. “To me, under the circumstances, the Spellmonger’s advice is sound. With an army on the move against us, and a flood of refugees between, we have little choice but to raise the banners and take the field.

  “However, the rest of what you propose – easing the Bans, and destroying the protections we’ve had against magic for centuries seems . . . rash. I will not make this decision lightly, and I understand we don’t have a lot of time. But I need rest, and time to reflect, and I need more counsel. I will send for the Censor General at Tarrematon, and bid him ride here at all speed.”

  Sago looked like he was swallowing a sharp rock. “Your Grace, that will take days – days we do not have! The enemy marches as we speak –“

  “I do not mean to sit idly by, Lord Marshal,” nodded Rard, tiredly. “While we await His Excellency’s arrival, I want to summon our bannermen.”

  “In the Wilderlands?” Sago asked, troubled.

  “No,” Rard said, “Duchy-wide. Every peasant at the butts, every squire in armor, every knight ready to ride. We need to mobilize our forces, regardless of whatever action we decide to take. We’ll send word to all Ducal castles to begin laying in provision, and we will begin fortifying the Riverlands and the Wilderlands immediately. The southern baronies can concentrate their efforts on bringing in a big harvest – for now. Tell me; are these goblins familiar with boats?”

  The question took me by surprise. I hadn’t even thought about it. “No, Your Grace, they are a people of the mountains. The gurvani tribes of the Farisian peninsula stay deep in the forests or in the high ground – they don’t like water, as a rule.”

  “Then the river will be our final defense,” he said, nodding. “If they make it as far as the Riverlands, that may be where we can stop them.”

  Lord Angrial looked like he was having a fit. “Your Grace! That would abandon almost all of northern Alshar to the foe!”

  “Aye, and a third of my lands west of the great river!” Rard snarled. “Hundreds of thousands of people! Dozens of fiefs! But two thirds of a Duchy is better than none – and you can tell my esteemed cousin, Duke Lenguin, that a third of a Duchy is better than none, too! He should see to the defense of Vorone and leave me to guard the way to Castal!”

  Angrial was about to retort, then he saw Duke Rard’s face and thought better of it. “As you command, Your Grace,” he said, meekly.

  “I’m weary,” he sighed. “My lady and I will retire for the evening, and I will think about this. I mayhap take counsel with each of you individually. But I will not make a final decision until the Grand Censor can advise me.”

  I tensed at the sound of the name – any sane mage does. But it was his right as Duke to consult with whom he wished, and he would have been remiss in his duties had he not done so. Rard stood, and we all stood in respect as he took the Duchess by the hand and led her away. As he was leaving, he nodded to one of Wilderhall’s many castellans. “And see that Master Spellmonger has appropriate quarters – where is he now?”

  “The Tower of Honor, Your Grace,” the castellan said, smoothly.

  The Duke grunted. “Move him to the River Tower. I want him close at hand.”

  “As you command, Your Grace,” the gold-liveried castellan said, bowing. He waited respectfully as the rest of the Council filed from the room, muttering amongst themselves at the lateness of the hour, and then the little man bowed to me. “My lord, if you will accompany me, I shall show you to more appropriate lodgings. My name is Harren. If you have any needs during your stay, I shall be happy to take care of them.”

  I couldn’t help it – I yawned. “My apologies, Harren, I’ve been talking for hours, now. Yes, lead the way – and when I’m settled, I need a plate, a cup, and a pillow, and all will be right with the world.”

  “As you command, Master Spellmonger,” he said, bowing again. “If my lord will follow me . . . “

  I got the feeling that if I’d asked for three dancing girls, a pair of silver scissors, a lute, and a pure white goat, he’d be thrilled at the challenge.

  And if I wasn’t so damn tired, I might have considered asking for those things, just to see if he could do it.

  Chapter Five:

  The Battle Of The Lantern

  Barony of Green Hill, Late Summer

  That evening, just before dusk, two hundred well-mounted sergeants and men-at-arms rode for Honeyhall by the normal route, a glorified cattle trail that connected the two small fiefs. It ran along the ridge of the Hill for about two miles before ending up on the east bank of the Anfal River, where it turned north in earnest.

  They were bait: the gurvani expected to get some horses to ride out, so that’s exactly what we gave them. Based on where their scouts were, and some truly inspired scrying from Curmor, I was able to guess where the troop would be ambushed.

  I was only off by about five hundred yards.

  I’d sent Mavone with them, to act as warmage and keep them from blundering into any magical ambushes along the way. By that time he’d also managed to receive the communication spell from Penny, so I was able to keep in very close contact with him mind-to-mind as they wound their way north along the river.

  If everything goes according to plan, he thought to me that night, then when we reach this next bend in the creek, we should see the first signs of – yep, there it is, a couple of sling-stones from the western side of the river. One of the horses is hurt. Not badly, he added.

  They’re just trying to goad you, I responded. They won’t hit you so hard that you’ll turn back.

  I know, Captain, it’s just annoying.

  Patience, Mavone, I cautioned. If you don’t take their bait, they’ll just offer you tastier bait.

  Ten minutes later I was borne out when Mavone’s company spotted a trio of scouts on a western hill-top. Soon after, they saw a few eyes in the twilight from the north. Mavone didn’t rise to charge either one, and kept his course, as planned.

  They hit the cavalry just after the bend, right around where I figured they would. It was one of only three places in miles where they could be expected to cross the river without trouble. And our horses were very exposed at that ford. Just as the first of the column made it across, a flight of arrows raggedly tore through the trees and fell on our men.

  Mavone was busy for the next few minutes – even though the men had a battle-seasoned knight as commander, and knew to expect an attack, the horses didn’t. They got very excited from the screams of pain by both animal and man, and the unfamiliar odor of gurvani, and for a few minutes they were very difficult to control.

  There were some hectic moments, and for a while I lost contact with him and began to expect the worst. But he reported again twenty minutes later, after the first skirmishers had been driven off. He’d had to use a soothing charm on the mounts to keep them from bolting with their riders during the attack, and cautioned me to do the same. After that, he was too busy to talk, because their main force began pursuit in earnest.

  Three thousand goblins is a lot for anyone to deal with, especially in broken country. The gurvani troops were the primitive tribal sort, mere skirmishers – light infantry with loin cloths and war hammers or maces. Although I noted that evening that there were more and more captured swords in furry little hands and metal armor on their bodies. They were learning the ways we fought and were adapting. Quickly.

  That didn’t bode well.

  Mavone and the other commanders got their men in a good defensive formation once they retreated back across the ford in darkness. They drew back slowly, sending a few shafts into the gloom in response as a third of the troop screened the other two-thirds in orderly retreat. The goblins eagerly pressed the advantage, virtually pouring across t
he ford in a hail of arrows, stones and javelins, screaming wildly as they pursued the horses. Mavone held discipline, keeping the men in good order; they had gone maybe a quarter of a mile past the stream, just out of bowshot from the gurvani, when Mavone gave the signal. It was time to counterattack.

  First, Captain Rogo had his five-hundred strong archery unit unleash four quick volleys into the mob’s southern flanks. The mobile archers from Nirod were impressive, riding in at a charge, braking and dismounting, and assembling to launch organized volleys in mere minutes. They were also undetectable, because I am far, far better at wardsheilding than any of those bone-rattling idiots on the other side.

  The goblins were taken by surprise in a hail of three-foot long iron-tipped feathered death. Dozens of angry gurvani came squealing and screaming through the forests and thickets, their limbs punctured by arrows, while others lay impaled unmoving on the forest floor. The uninjured gurvani began moving through underbrush no man could have managed, and they did it as easily as I could wade through a stream.

  But they weren’t that fast. Redshaft’s men continued their fire until he ordered them to withdraw. After four flights the archers stopped, re-mounted, and moved east in support of Mavone’s cavalry, who were preparing to charge their pursuers. Along the way a few of them stopped to fire from the saddle at the gurvani pickets and skirmishers who were pursuing them. I don’t know how they shot in the dark and managed to hit anything without magic, but they knew their trade. They lost only four men in the encounter, and were able to form up just south of Mavone.

  And moving out of the way let my mercenary cavalry charge from the south. Kaddel got a chance to show what his Hellriders could do, after I dropped the screen I held over them and let them advance.

  I got to lead that charge. It was very exciting.

  I say “charge,” but in actuality we very carefully made our way through the brush and fields and groves in the dim light of the moon, moving as quickly as they could while staying in contact with their comrades. We were able to move a little easier than the archers, because I’d been able to augment the vision of both the men and the horses.

  It’s a very weak form of magesight, one that causes the slightest light to shine as if it were a flame, making everything seem as illuminated as it was at twilight. Not enough to read by, perhaps, but enough to see to ride by. And with the power of the stone, I was able to cast it over the entire troop at once. It didn’t last long, but it kept us from stumbling into traps or deadfalls or knots of hidden goblins.

  When our vanguard encountered the edges of the gurvani mob, I had Captain Kaddel form up his Hellriders again, out of bowshot, and then we charged in earnest: a sprint to build up speed and then a crash through a wall of screaming, bloody wet hair. The Captain knew his business, as well – instead of a wide-ranging assault on their front – which was ragged and constantly changing – he ordered the cavalry to charge in waves of twenty or so, fanning out to menace the entire horde.

  I led him into the seething mass of fur and hate, a warwand in one hand and Slasher in the other. Fighting them from horseback was a lot different than fighting them on foot – I found out very quickly that I had to ride pretty low in the saddle to reach their skinny little necks. I soon returned the sword to my back and picked up a spear – that was a lot more effective.

  For ten hellish minutes, I hacked and slashed and thrust and blasted, leaving a wide trail of hairy black corpses in my wake. When I finally slowed, and faced an inevitable lull in battle, I consulted my mapping spells and learned that we had accomplished our goal.

  As I did my part with wand and mageblade and spear, the Hellriders would have done fine without me. With lance and sword they expertly stomped their warhorses through the gurvani infantry, leaving behind mangled black corpses and hoof prints filled with blood and hair. The war cries of the men in armor and the rearing horses that towered above them were too much for these skirmishers. Especially when I added a couple of loud but harmless cantrips to the mix during the last charge. That pushed the goblins back toward the ford, and got them good and bunched up.

  The gurvani were now massed on this side of the river, their backs to it. While they technically held the ford, they couldn’t move across it in retreat before we would be on them. Yet they didn’t want to move forward against our horsemen, that was slaughter. They were pressed on two sides by cavalry. I figured it was time for their shamans to step up and show us who was boss.

  I wasn’t disappointed. The rocks started falling on us about then.

  It was one of the most basic of spells, throwing rocks. A Talented mage can wrap his mind around the elemental nature of a rock, imbue it with energy, and even direct it to a certain extent. Our first year working with such spells we learned the careful preparation, the symbols our minds needed to access to turn our well-honed wills and our innate ability to channel power into a spell that would move a two-inch stone twenty feet across a room as if it had been thrown.

  Some people were better at this than others. Some got good enough to use it as a weapon, and dirt-clod fights in the gardens at my school were viscous. But you could rarely get the things to move fast enough to do serious damage.

  Before irionite, that is. With irionite, if you were a good enough warmage, you could get a rock up to the speed to do lethal damage. Terleman, my lieutenant in the Order, had developed specialized spells around that feat.

  The shamans were doing essentially the same spell, they were just doing it on a much larger scale. Green Hill country abounds with rocks, and soon stones the sizes of dogs were raining down on us from above. They weren’t aimed, so much as flung randomly into the night. But they were flung with incredible power, and they did plenty of damage before I was able to arrange a counter-spell. That decreased the number of rocks that hit their targets, but it kept me very busy for a while.

  Damn it, Min, are those archers in position yet? Mavone thought at me, furiously. My men are itching for another glorious charge, but if we go too soon we’ll get butchered . . .

  Haven’t you ‘talked’ to Curmor? I shot back as I tried to counter the flying rocks. He was supposed to be with them! A nearby squire went down with a bloody forehead, so I wasn’t doing as well as I’d like. There was a long pause.

  Yes, he says Redshaft has arrived at the high ground and is getting set up now, he said, finally, as I gave up on stopping the rocks and started riding toward the hazy “lines” between us and the goblins. I halted when I saw hundreds of them – two thousand, at least – holding a high bank of the river and a good portion of the valley it ran through, down to the ford. Two-thousand goblins wasn’t the most I’d seen in one place, but it’s still a whole lot of goblins.

  They were all wound up, too, banging maces against shields and banging war drums and chanting in their guttural tongue. They moved in waves, as hundreds of them shifted their feet in rhythm to the drums, just like at Grimly Wood. Their archers fired off blindly into the darkness, or at targets far beyond their range, but the single shots weren’t doing much damage, not nearly as much as the rocks.

  The two shamans took turns screaming and using their witchstones to fling more and more rocks against us as their infantry searched the ground for more. They had smaller knots of skirmishers in advance of the rest of the horde, hewing trees and logs into makeshift barriers against cavalry. Like I said, they were learning.

  But while their shamans were powerful, they were unsophisticated. It takes a lot of energy to move a rock – inertia is as powerful as a spell. It takes a whole lot less energy to envision and manifest a globe off magical force in the air, and then excite the atomi within by pouring in the right kind of energy.

  The technique is known as siconedica, in Old Imperial. It’s one of the first things you learn, after how to control your own mind. Imagine a point. Imagine a second point. Now imagine a line between them. Next, imagine a third point, connect it, etc. What you end up with is a plane of magical force, one with no mass to speak
of and one that exists entirely by your will and Talent. You usually start off making triangles and squares, changing their colors, floating them impressively around the room.

  They have no mass. They have no real substance. They are there purely as an expression of a mage’s will. But that’s not to say they aren’t really there: you can make them do things. Apply one type of action to it, and it becomes as solid as a tea cup. Apply a different one, and it becomes a filter, one that will, say, let clean water through but keep out sediment. Or let in oxygen but keep out hydrogen. Imbue it with enough energy and the gasses inside begin to glow: magelight.

  It’s as simple a spell as moving a rock, and I’d done it plenty on a small scale.

  I was doing it on a much larger scale, now. I took my stone out to improve the flow of power and clutched it in my hand as the universe was broken to my will. A sphere began glowing faintly above the center of the horde. Then it glowed much brighter, igniting with the force of a sudden explosion, as I poured energy into it. It wasn’t an offensive spell – it wasn’t designed to do anything but float forty feet over their heads and get brighter. And brighter. And brighter.

  The two shamans involved in the ambush quickly turned their attention to my spellcraft. They were two more country-bumpkins, I was relieved to see, smeared with paint, antlers, and feathers. The rocks had stopped as they turned their attention to more pressing matters. One was handling the defensive magic – mostly trying to shield their troops’ eyes from the glaring light – and the other was throwing blasting spells at our lines as quickly as he could to try to stop me.

  And they were deadly. Four knights and two squires were killed as they rushed against the gurvani, thanks to a well-tossed bag of magic that turned into a column of green fire fifteen feet wide – I had no idea what it was, but when they walked through it they aged and withered and died with their horses, all in the span of seconds. Several archers had arrows reverse in mid-air and come back to them, sometimes to deadly effect. Twice I saw squads of cavalry regroup for a charge, and then start to head off in the other direction at a furious pace – misdirection magic. I’d have to remember that one.