by Greg Curtis
Of course that was a difficult thing for a Fair Fielder to deal with. He never knew what to give away and what to sell, nor how much to charge. Now that Ry was back with him he planned on letting her deal with that part of life.
“None is required Elders. I am a knight of Hanor and it is my duty as well as my honour.”
“Nevertheless, we are grateful and we would show that gratitude to you in the way we best can. We offer you a gift of magic, if you would do us the honour of accepting it.”
A gift of magic? Sam had absolutely no idea what that might mean, but he knew enough to know it was obviously very important to the elves. So many elder spell casters didn't come together just to see one half elf for any small matter. Besides, he already knew he didn't want to annoy any more elders for at least a little while. They tended to be cranky.
“I would be honoured.” He bowed again.
“As would we. But first we must learn what it is we can give you.”
If anything the weight of all their eyes on him suddenly seemed to grow, and Sam felt himself being pressed down like a mouse under their gaze. Not for the first time he wondered just what exactly he had gotten himself into.
“And now my young soldier, we shall see what we shall see.” The Elder's words were nothing if not cryptic, unless perhaps they were threatening. But before Sam could even think to ask what he meant, his world went dark. Very dark.
Caught by surprise Sam spun around in his saddle, trying to see what had happened to the light. He soon realised however, that it wasn't just the light that was gone. So was everything else. He wasn't in his world. Nor was he even on his horse. Tyla was nowhere in sight.
It was impossible. Only a moment earlier he had been on a meandering path running through a green rolling section of the glorious country side that comprised the start of Fair Fields. Now – if the fields full of torches were any indication – he was standing in the middle of a dry and dusty flat plain. One made of loose dirt and by the looks of things, bits of ancient white bone. Here and there he could see larger pieces of bone, and skulls in the dirt. As for the sky, it was black. The sun had gone away and no moon or stars had arrived to take its place. The sight made him nervous and he felt a shiver run down his spine. What was happening?
It was night time. But darker than any true night. With no moon and no stars it was almost as though he was in some sort of giant cave. One where the only light he could see came from torches. All around as far as the eye could see were torches. Burning brands on wooden shafts standing maybe six feet high and extending for many leagues in every direction. How could that be? How could there be so many torches? If nothing else, who lit them and changed them when they burnt out?
But none of that mattered he realised suddenly when it came to him that this was a trap. He didn't understand that. The elders had said they were going to give him a gift of magic. And they hadn't seemed particularly upset with him. This time. And yet as more shivers travelled down his spine, he knew it was so.
Instinctively Sam reached for all the magic he could find nearby, and surprisingly found plenty. He could feel it in the black sky above but also in the ground under his feet. He could feel the fire flowing freely, and the living magic of the world and the creatures that lived upon it.
His feet? Sam looked down to see that he wasn't standing as he'd thought. Instead he was sitting on the saddle of a small rock, his feet touching the ground. How had he missed that? In fact he realised suddenly as he peered through the darkness, he was sitting on the only rock in the whole damn dead desert as far as he could see.
Standing up carefully, worried that he might sink into the dust, Sam began to explore his new world. First he walked over to the nearest torch some thirty yards in front of him. The ground crunched under his feet as the hard sand crust of the desert gave way, but it held and he sank no more than an inch. Clouds of fine dust puffed up with each step he took. That didn't bother him as much as the little particles of bone he could see in the dirt and which he knew his feet were sinking into.
Shortly he reached the torch and confirmed his worst fears as it let him see everything about the ground around it. The bones were human as he'd suspected, and by the looks of things, they were from at least half a dozen different people. But worse than that he realised they weren't all ancient, dried out bones. Some of them still had the remains of flesh on them. Dried out tendons and gristle that the scavengers had left behind.
This was a killing ground! That was the immediate thought that crossed his mind. Followed by the understanding that it was still in use. But why would the elders send him here? Was Ry wrong about them? Because despite her view that he was some sort of fire angel, the elders clearly didn't trust him that much. Still, this was a world away from not trusting him. Suddenly it seemed they had decided to get rid of him.
And it seemed they had been getting rid of problems like him for a long time.
On a hunch Sam bent down to study the crunchy sand under his feet. He scooped up a handful and let it slip through his fingers like rain. Sure enough it glittered as though it was beach sand with tiny pieces of shell mixed through. But this was no beach and mixed in with the sand was no shell. It was bone. Bone that had become almost powdered with age and dryness. This had been a killing ground for a long time. How long did it take for bone to powder? Surely hundreds, maybe thousands of years. And given its size Sam had to wonder just how many men had died here over the years. Thousands? Millions?
Could it be an underworld of some sort? The idea struck him suddenly, and it worried him. Not least because it made sense. It would be a perfect place to send an unruly wizard. And it looked much as one did in his imagination. But where it was didn't matter as much as where he wasn't. For he was no longer with Ry. And since he didn't know how he'd gotten here, or even where here was, he had no way of getting home.
But he had more immediate problems. Because if this was an underworld then that meant that somewhere nearby there were demons.
Sam started drawing all the fire he could find as fast as he knew how. He realised it was only a matter of time until whatever had killed the others came for him. Also, if this place was truly set aside for unruly wizards, fire alone might not be enough to protect him, and so he began trying to attune himself with the land. Normally that was something he never needed to do as he was always part of it. But wherever this was, it wasn't home, and he didn't feel a part of it.
Earth magic wasn't his most powerful weapon by any stretch of the imagination, but sometimes it could be his most useful. Over the years as he'd studied the fire and ice magic for combat, he'd practised the shapes for earth magic as well, finding it an invaluable tool for crossing terrain or entering strange places. With it he could build or level walls, create passages through solid rock, reshape the land itself so that it became liquid and then reform it to trap enemies, or even alter the structure of armour or weapons to make them stronger. While it wasn't strictly a combat magic he could use it to his advantage in a fight. And he suspected he was going to need everything he had to survive whatever was coming.
Reaching out with his thoughts, Sam soon had the feel of the land flowing through his blood. It felt like a slow deep pulse, and he allowed it to fill him. After a while he felt both the slow rhythms of the earth and the furious heat of fire balanced in harmony, like a two piece orchestra. Double base and flute perhaps.
He also had some limited ability with nature magic. He could use it to call and sometimes command creatures, or to make them feel friendlier towards him. Sometimes it helped him to see into a person's soul or to spot deception and malice. But that was as far as he'd ever got with it. Still, this seemed like the perfect time to find out all it could do. If nothing else, if the enemy came at him on horseback he could make the horses disobey their masters. Horses were quite easy to command. Did demons ride horses?
In time he added the last string to his magical arsenal, as he reached out for the life force of whatever creatures were near
by, though there were precious few. Deep in the soil he could feel the worms and a few insects going about their business. Further up in the sky he could feel small birds soaring, while a few more slept in trees some leagues away. But no larger creatures were nearby. Nevertheless, he let the song of life merge with the rest of the music pouring through him until finally he felt complete. Complete and strong.
That he knew, was as much as he could do. Others could also bend the will of water and air, and they had powerful weapons in them, but he had no affinity for those elements. To him they had no soul. Nor did he have the magic of the mind that illusionists seemed to live with. And though it would have been wondrous in this place, light was not his to command either. Still, what he did have was enough to make him a dangerous enemy to anything that dared approach, and for a while he could almost make himself believe that that would be enough. Enough to get him out of this strange place. That feeling however, didn't last long as the darkness and feeling of isolation of the place began to wear him down.
Knowing he was as ready as he could be, Sam decided it was time for him to leave this place. Though where he would be going to was unclear. He had no idea where he was, no idea of which direction to travel, and he couldn't sense any other place within this dark, threatening land. But neither could he stay in this one spot forever.
He decided to keep travelling in the same direction he had already started in when he had approached the first torch, and mentally he plotted out a course from one torch to the next. It was almost a straight line. Cautiously, he took his first step along the path he had set out for himself, and soon was heading towards the unknown.
The next torch he reached proved to be no different to the first. A single fire brand, it stood as high as his head from the ground, and burned brightly in the gloom. At its base he found more skulls, bleached bones and white powder mixed in with the dirt. Turning around briefly, he could see his footsteps in the dust, a sign of the fifty odd paces he'd walked in this strange place. But other than that there was no sign of anything different in front of him or behind. He had the horrible feeling that no matter how far he walked there might never be.
Carrying on he walked to the next torch and then on to the next one and the next, finding still more bones as he went. He found the sight of so many bones disturbing. It kept making him wonder just how many people had perished in this dark world. More he suspected, than he could count. He also found himself wondering about other things as he walked.
For instance who looked after the torches? It would take an army just to maintain them. There were surely hundreds if not thousands of torches surrounding him on all sides. And where were the stars? If it were truly night then surely he should be able to see the stars? Or was he inside some sort of gigantic cavern as he'd feared? If he was then it was a cavern large enough to contain a desert – and that didn't seem possible. And was this even part of his own world? Or had he somehow been sent directly to the underworld? Even though he had no memory of dying, he still couldn't shake that idea.
A full half hour of wandering went by like that as he kept trying to answer impossible questions, without any sign of change. He was almost becoming bored by this place. Suddenly a scream pierced the darkness. A woman's scream. It came from somewhere ahead of him, and without thinking he ran towards it, knowing only one thing; that he wasn't alone in this nightmare after all, but that if he didn't hurry he soon might be.
“Hanor!” Having run at least three hundred yards toward where he had heard the scream coming from, Sam still could not see the woman. Nor could he see an enemy. In fact he couldn't really see anything much past each torch, and he began to despair that he had run past the woman, or in the wrong direction.
Another scream though told him he was heading in the right direction after all, and the woman was still alive, whoever she was. Four more torches came and went, until Sam could suddenly hear other noises. Strange noises. He could hear the rustling of wings. They sounded a bit like bat wings, though if they were then they were very large. He could also hear a sound like the squeaks that rats made when they were excited. Again though it sounded very loud. No rat ever born could have the lung power needed to make these squeaks. And then there was the sound of the air parting rapidly as things flew through it, diving and swooping. Very large things.
“Fire bright.”
Realising that before he could do anything at all he needed to be able to see what he was facing, Sam uttered the childhood incantation he had been taught so many years before. On cue the entire area around him for hundreds of yards became brightly lit by the torches, their glow no longer yellow and orange, but white as they burnt so much hotter. What it revealed though, almost made him wish he had remained in the dark.
A woman was running towards him. She was a proper woman as his father would have described her. A lady perhaps. Well dressed, attractive, and obviously a lady of means. Just then though she was dishevelled, her dress ripped and torn, and blood leaked from a dozen or more cuts to her arms and face. Razor sharp slashes. That was bad enough, but behind her was what had caused the slashes, and they were far more worrying.
Imps was his first thought, because they looked like some of the artists' paintings of them in Fall Keep. But imps he had always thought of as small and ungainly. Not a true threat. These on the other hand looked deadly. Their leathery wings seemed to have some sort of serrated bones along the front, and their talons were covered with blood as they weaved and dived their way down onto the woman and ripped another piece out of her skin. But even worse than their appearance was their number. There had to be hundreds of the flying devils flitting through the sky.
Almost without thinking Sam launched a fire ball at the ones nearest the strange woman, and then watched as half a dozen of the flying creatures turned into orange explosions as they crashed down on the dirt behind her. It was enough he figured, to get the woman to safety, or to the relative safety of him. But even as he was congratulating himself on having saved the woman, a sudden sound and a tearing made itself known and he felt something sharp slice through his right cheek. He didn't even need to turn around to realise there were more of them behind him. He also discovered that their talons were sharp.
Without thought he flung another fire shape over his head, this time a chained fire lightning spell that cast its fire from one creature to the next, and was immediately rewarded by the sound of imps screaming as their bodies dropped to the ground. That accounted for at least a dozen more of them. But there were still plenty remaining.
By then the woman had reached him, and automatically he erected a fire shield around them both. A dome that sheltered them from attack. He thought it should provide them with some reasonable protection, and if necessary he could hold it all day and all night.
“Are you all right?”
He bent down to the woman who had fallen to her knees, worried about her injuries. That worry grew when she collapsed the rest of the way to the ground in front of him, her strength seemingly gone. In truth it didn't surprise him, as he had already noted the extreme pallor of her face and the terrible amount of blood she had lost. It was only luck and determination that had kept her going this far. He also realised that if he didn't fight well, they might soon both be dead. They might soon become more bones in the sand.
Imps he remembered from his days studying under Master Smythe, had magic of their own. The magic of confounding. They could wear down any spell or enchantment over time, and that most definitely included his fire shield. It was pity really as the fire shield was one of his most useful defences. Now though it seemed that he couldn't afford to keep using it or any other defensive spell, as the effort involved in holding the spell active would sooner or later exhaust him, leaving the imps free to attack. His only option was to attack and destroy the imps before he ran out of strength.
Leaving the fire spell unattended – it would continue to hold for a while longer – he readied his attack, an ice crystal barrage. It was a good att
acking spell for this particular enemy. Speaking the incantation to focus his thoughts he froze the water vapour in the air around him into thousands of tiny ice shards, and spun them crazily around his head as though he were the centre of a tornado. As time went by and the fire shield lasted longer than he expected even without his effort, he kept increasing the power of the ice crystal spell, adding ever more ice crystals to the rapidly spinning mix and increasing the speed with which they spun.
It was a heady feeling, shaping and holding the spell in the midst of his fire shield. Ice and fire were two sides of the same magic, but they always had to be kept separate. But it was no more difficult than many other spell combinations he'd tried. His only problem was the surprising amount of time the fire shield was holding. He could feel the imps' power as they eroded away the bonds of the shape and with hundreds of them working together in harmony he'd expected the spell to fail much earlier. Perhaps they weren't as strong as he'd thought, or maybe that was a sign of the advances he'd made in the previous weeks as his shapes had become more solid.
