High Mage: Book Five Of The Spellmonger Series

by Terry Mancour

  Pentandra’s staff had sorted and organized these down to a few concise issues of policy to be discussed in council . . . but I still had to make the rounds to all three of the major Orders, shake hands, make introductions, and be seen being important in my silly hat. It was good for business.

  Luckily, at that point I was almost universally liked. The High Magi tended to be grateful for the opportunity, the Middle Magi were happy to be rid of the Censorate and delighted at the opportunity to be raised themselves, and Low Magi were just happy not to be fearing for their lives or a visit from the Censorate every day for simply practicing their trade. So wherever I went, I was hailed as a hero. It was nice.

  For a while.

  The footwizards were the rowdiest lot, unsurprisingly, so we scheduled their raucous meeting first. Most were openly vagabonds, itinerate magi who wandered mostly because the need for their cut-rate services was never great in any one area, or furtive underground wild magi who lived in the wilderness or wastelands.

  A whole coven of hedgewitches from Darly Wood had arrived, five women in tattered cloaks bearing baskets of herbs and mushrooms in token of their gratitude. Four of their number had been hunted down by the Censorate before the Bans were lifted. When I stopped and heard their story and listened to their tearful desire to be seen as respectable businesswomen, not parasites, I felt humbled.

  I met a father and son team, the boy no more than twelve, who had walked for eight months from the Castali Wilderlands to take their place proudly at council as authentic members of their craft. They made their living magically repairing gates and bridges and warding them against wear, and they had fled the Censorate every day of their lives.

  I was introduced to a woman from here in the city who had eked out a miserable existence doing magic for the beggars and paupers of Swamptown, the city’s slum, and doing so for the smallest of fees or free. This was the first time she had entered the city under her own name and profession.

  A hedgemage from Remere, an undocumented spellmonger from Wenshar, a footwizard who disguised himself as a barber, a village witch from the delta country in the south . . . these, I knew, were my professional peers as much as any High Mage. These were the people doing the work that needed to be done, in a small way. Most of them had an earnest desire to use their burdensome powers to help others.

  Nor were they all merely sparks and wild magi. A great many had sought out training or instruction on the sly, or had found books to teach them the rudiments of the art. There were plenty of former students at Alar, Inarion, and elsewhere who had not completed their formal studies, but who had practiced without the benefit of a license. There were even (I found out as the liquor flowed) clandestine covens of such former students, where they taught Imperial-style magic without a formal school.

  I was particularly interested in those. I’ve always liked footwizards, even though they were technically in competition with me as a spellmonger. That’s not a common perspective in my profession. A footwizard could come through a village and offer his services at half the rate, undermining a spellmonger’s bread and butter, the annual protection spells every sensible family invested in. For the footwizard it was quick coin as he was passing through. For the spellmonger it was half a year’s income evaporated.

  I suppose I was a warmage far longer than a spellmonger, and didn’t practice long enough to pick up professional biases, but I saw the footwizard’s order as being perhaps the most important of the three – and so I did my best to cultivate some relationships among them. That meant drinking. A lot.

  But by the time I was done, I had met everyone in the room (over three hundred) and I could even have named a dozen or two of the more important footwizards among them.

  The Middle Magi were far less raucous. In fact, most of them seemed pretty dour. Many were wary of the sudden changes in the way they did business, even as they were hopeful. Others openly resented one facet of the change or another, and a few saw them as designed to smite them, personally. More than one reminded me of Master Garkesku, in Boval Vale, before the invasion: petty, jealous of their hard-won prerogatives, and desperate for advancement.

  This was the legitimate professional class of magi we had inherited from the Censorate. Those who had made the journey to Castabriel had prospered in the last year or two, once the Censorate’s hand was out of their way, but that had led to hard-fought competition for existing business. While everyone agreed that they were doing more magic, they were making less money for it.

  A delegation of resident adepts from Remere had an elegant proposal to restrict professional magi to districts. A spellmonger would pay a fee to his local lord or burgher for the license, and then would post warnings at the bounds of the district he claimed.

  In the proposal if a footwizard or other magi cast spells within the bounds of that license, a simple fee would be owed to the spellmonger. It made each spellmonger their own Spellwarden, but it also gave the spellmongers an effective tool against itinerate footwizards. They would be less likely to undercut a spellmonger with a spell for a half-ounce of silver if the spellwarden’s fee was twice that.

  The Remerans had done a good job seeding the convocation with their plan before it ever convened, entertaining and instructing their fellows of the brilliance of their plan, with a few whores and a fair amount of wine. By the time they actually presented it to me, there was already strong support.

  While I could help protect the Middle Magi from the Low Magi, I could do little to protect them from Magelords and other High Magi. A mage with irionite could do a spell it took an ordinary spellmonger three days to do in a half hour, and charge half as much. Only a few High Magi were selling their spells on the open market, but where they did, it killed business and spoiled clients.

  The High Magi were splitting into two classes, I noted during the discussions. The first was the Magelord class, made up mostly of the warmagi who had been rewarded for service with ennoblement or who had re-claimed their forfeited titles. The second were those whom I’d bribed or who had been born common, and who saw a witchstone as a means to a fortune, not lands or titles.

  It was this latter class that was the problem. Most magelords simply weren’t considering coin in their ambitions. But magi like Pentandra’s cousin Planus had used their newfound power to aggressively outperform the un-augmented spellmongers in Remere.

  A partner in a prestigious firm of Imperial magi whose roots dated to the late Magocracy, Planus had more or less purchased his stone outright from me when the Order had needed cash. He was a stalwart fellow, for a crafty Remeran, and had even volunteered for the Battle of Cambrian where he had used his limited knowledge to good effect. But he wasn’t a magelord, he wasn’t a warmage. He was a Resident Adept, and he was getting rich on his magic.

  Planus had arrived the second day of the Convocation in regalia fit for an archmage. In the scant months since he’d acquired his stone, his firm had out-bid all of their competitors for lucrative contracts for upkeep on fortifications, bridges, canals, and other public structures in the Remeran river valley.

  He’d amassed a growing fortune doing it, too. Further, he had expanded his firm’s efforts as his mastery of his new power opened up spellcraft once thought merely theoretical. He also revealed to me, the first night of the High Magi’s Convocation, that he had been using his powers for profit in more mundane ways.

  “When I was in Gilmora last year, I realized the cotton harvest was likely going to be diminished,” he told me, over wine in my quarters that evening. “So I had my agents purchase as much cotton as was coming down the river . . . and hold it. Prices were low as some lords were trying to get whatever they could, after losing their lands to the goblins. But when the Cormeeran fleet came into port, forty percent of the cotton they purchased came from my warehouse . . . at a stunning profit. I made over a hundred and fifty thousand ounces of gold this year,” he said, with a satisfied grin. “That deal alone paid for the witchstone. I still use the price of co
tton in Barrowbell when I decide how much to charge at market.”

  I was stunned. Who knew there was that much money in cotton? But the weavers guilds of Cormeer needed cotton to produce the garments that were in such high demand in that sunny country, and Gilmoran cotton was the best. The magical connection with any number of wizards in Gilmora would give him the market price he needed to know at the docks. A lot more fortunes would be made once the array of tower mirrors was set up, I realized, and such valuable information would be available across the kingdom.

  Planus wasn’t the only one whose fortunes had expanded. My classmate Dex had elected to journey to Castabriel for the Convocation, now that he had been raised, and in the few short months since I’d gifted him with a stone he had become the most popular spellmonger in his barony. He’d arrived at Sevendor clothed like an artisan, but he arrived at the Tower of the Order in a carriage like a gentleman, and was sporting a brand new, richly embroidered doublet and fine cotton hose. He even had attendants, two apprentices who seemed as awed by their master’s connection to the Spellmonger as they were by the Tower itself.

  Master Thinradel, too, had pursued a career as a kind of wandering High Mage. He’d been the Ducal Court Mage of Alshar, a prestigious if impotent position, and had accepted a witchstone as a bribe as readily as his counterpart in Castal, Master Dunselen. But after the death of the Duke on the battlefield (well, just after being on the battlefield) had terminated his employment, Thinradel had taken to touring the baronies of western Castal and what was left of Alshar, selling his spells to interested nobles.

  “If I was a warmage, I’d been making real coin,” he confided in me, when I asked about his fortunes. “As it is I’ve done enchantments on a dozen baronial castles near the front in Gilmora and in the Alshari Wilderlands. I even made it back to Vorone for a while – a desolate place, now. Filled with refugees,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “But I did my part for king and country. I spent a month working with the Iron Ring, establishing and fortifying new strongholds along the frontier with the Penumbra. For free. I could afford it.”

  But then there were the handful of magelords, too, whose aspirations had caused them to ignore mere financial gains and were now building dynasties. The news of the moment did not revolve around my investiture as baron, as I would have suspected, but the actions of a young warmage I had trained the year before, Hanalif.

  Hanalif had taken his oath solemnly after I’d vetted him for character and skills, and he had then served for three full months in the Penumbra with Azar’s Megelini Knights. His term of service fulfilled, he’d returned to his ancestral home and challenged his younger brother, who had inherited with Hanalif’s forfeiture of nobility, to a duel over the inheritance. A younger brother had challenged him in kind, and when the last blow was struck Hanalif was a double fratricide . . . and the ruler of four domains. He had consolidated his control quickly and secured the lawful rights to the lands with proper Writs of Conquest, but he had also seriously concerned his lordly neighbors.

  To the magelords he was a minor culture hero. Even Wenek, magelord of the half-wild tribes of the Pearwoods, was appreciative of this Riverlord’s boldness.

  Of the hundred-and thirty-odd High Magi on the rolls, almost seventy showed up for the Convocation, including almost the entire Order of Hesia, the order of militant magi dedicated to the defenses and supply of the war effort. About half of the High Magi considered themselves magelords, and there was an unabashed sense that they should take whatever they could hold against their mundane neighbors.

  I was hardly the one to serve as champion for restraint. I had won three domains for service and five through conquest, all within a few years. I was a baron, now, the highest secular ranking of all the magi. While I didn’t have a stomach for conquest the way some of my peers did, I knew that my future would likely involve dealing with my remaining regional enemies militarily. I could promise to show restraint, myself, but once you are put in a position where you must fight to exist, promises such as those are easily forgotten.

  In some places, the rule of magi had brought unrestrained prosperity, as it had with the people of Sevendor and the Bontal Vales. Robinwing, in the central Riverlands, had prospered under its magelord, Forandal, as he had bought out the debt of his smallholders and reigned-in the power of the burghers in the town.

  But the Magelords, too, had some complaints, for all of their successes. The Censorate, it seems, had taken an interest in Kingdom politics. Their clandestine agents had been discovered assisting those who fought against magelords with coin, magic, and technical assistance. What they hoped to gain, I knew not – but they were becoming a consistent feature of such wars.

  Nor were their noble neighbors inclined to treat with them as peers, for all of their ennoblement. Four hundred years of antimage culture was not swept away with the Censorate. Too much of the nobility discovering Talent in a son or daughter was considered a curse, a waste of a good knight or future lady of the manor.

  That was particularly true of the Great Houses, the counts and barons who ran their domains like royal dynasties and swore allegiance and paid tribute directly to the King. A perfect example of this exclusion was Lord Dranus of Castal.

  Originally the oldest son to Ranus, Count of Moros, in northern Remere, Dranus was shipped off to Alar Academy when his rajira showed itself, with a stipend that evaporated upon his graduation – and a lecture never to return to Moros. His younger half-brothers had split up the County, leaving Dranus to eke out a living as a professional mage with little hope of better. That didn’t mean he wasn’t ambitious.

  Dranus had bided his time as a Principal Adept and court wizard for two decades, until the Bans were lifted. He had successfully petitioned for restoration of his nobility, and now he was a leading member of the Middle Magi’s council. But he aspired to more – much more. He was actively agitating for irionite, and rumor had it that he would do anything to get it. Dranus haunted the High Magi’s convocation like a hungry dog, pouncing on anyone who left the chambers as an opportunity to press his suit.

  Nor did he make any pretensions of what he wanted to do with it. He had heard of Hanalif, Dunselen, and my own conquests, and he wanted to reclaim his birthright. Only instead of a paltry few domains, he wanted the County his older brother possessed.

  The current Count Moros was a lukewarm supporter of the Kingdom at best. He had ruled his lands without much in the way of interference from the Duke of Remere, and he resented the presumptions of King Rard frequently and publically. Loudly enough, in fact, so that several of his key regional allies had fallen to a range of mysterious accidents and ailments. Count Moros shut up, it was said, but he was not happy.

  Dranus was not particularly in favor of the Crown, either, but he hated his brother more. An entire County represented political and temporal power matched only by the arcane power of irionite. Giving in to Dranus and handing him the means of his vengeance would be tantamount to starting a civil war in Remere. But it would also give me, personally, a powerful political ally, should Dranus prevail. And installing a magelord into a position that important would strike in the craw of the Queen, which I saw as a reasonable counter-move to her recent machinations.

  Dranus got his stone. The Order got fifty thousand ounces of gold and the promise of a hundred more within the year. He immediately hired four of his fellows, well-schooled in warmagic, for an eight-week term. I considered letting Planus know that the region’s famous barley may be in short supply this harvest.

  Dranus wasn’t the only one who got a stone. I had brought ten percent of the Alka Alon’s bounty of witchstones with me to Castabriel for distribution. Dranus was a strategic placement. Ten more stones went directly to warmagi the Order of Horka recommended for priority. The other nine . . . three went to the Order of Enchanters, three to the Order of Healers. And the last three I gave to Middle Magi spellmongers who were popular, powerful, and men of good character.

  There was a lot of disap
pointment at the announcements, of course, but also a lot of celebration. The Horkan Order feted the new High Warmagi on the eve of their training and deployment by renting out the Sword And Staff and depleting its stocks of alcohol.

  The smaller orders were just as jubilant, if not that raucous in their celebrations. But when as fellow gets a shard of irionite, he deserves to celebrate.

  I left the accounting to the expert coinbrothers the Order had hired, but I had just ensured a hefty haul. As tradition demanded, a fee was paid or promised by the recipients of each witchstone, adjusted by discipline.

  The medical order’s money fees were waived in lieu of six months service at the front. The enchanters’ fees were paid directly by the guild and later collected from the new High Mage. The five new Horkan and Hesian warmagi would serve for six months before entering into a three-month annual term of service. They were still expected to pay a money fee of fifty thousand ounces of gold in the next two years, or make other arrangements with the Order. So far most had made their payments on time, enriching the institution substantially.

  And myself. As head of the order, I got a cut of each fee, to the tune of five thousand ounces of gold. To give you some idea of the scale, that’s just over what it takes to run Sevendor domain for about a year. Twenty witchstones meant roughly a hundred thousand ounces of gold in my personal treasury . . . extra. And the fact that my treasury was made up of snowstone, literally more valuable than the gold it protected, gave me some perspective on just how wealthy I was.

  Nor did that include bribes and gifts. It seemed like every Magelord wanted to flaunt their wealth with an ostentatious gift to the Spellmonger, and some of them were pricy, like the sheaf of weirwood staves I got from Wenek, or the magnificent gilded set of rushes, a game I had missed dearly, which was a gift from Terleman (which meant it had likely been looted from some abandoned Gilmoran manor house, but I was glad to give the gorgeous set a home).