by Greg Curtis
“How's it going?” She asked Reginald quietly, not wanting to be heard by those up front.
“I've seen condemned men walk to the gallows with greater enthusiasm!” He answered her just as quietly.
Dariya didn't quite know how to respond to that, so she held her tongue. But she had to admit, it was more or less what she'd expected. Clearly, he didn't want to join the Order. And why would he? Baen not only didn't feel the calling, he also had a comfortable life elsewhere. And he had no interest in taking up arms or training. He was going to be a problem. But in time she thought, this nightmare would end. The Fae would go home, and he could be released from his service. Things would return to normal.
At least he hadn't had far to come, she thought. Helmsford was only twenty leagues from Cedar Heights. A good day’s ride, or perhaps a couple of hours on that machine of his. No doubt he would hate being told he had to ride a horse – she wondered if he even could. She'd never considered the matter. But he was going to have to learn. Horses could go places that his wheeler couldn't. She kept that thought to herself though. He would learn their requirements in time. For the moment the Head of the Order was busy setting out what the wizard's duties and responsibilities would be – clearly none of which met with Baen's approval.
“You do know Sir,” Baen suddenly interrupted him, “that the moment you find and hang the Duke, all of this ends? The Fae will be satisfied and will go home and things can return to how they were. I can go back to my store.”
“Presumably.” Master Thyman answered him, a little taken aback by the interruption. People didn't interrupt him – ever.
“Then wouldn't it be wiser if I located him for you instead of wasting my time with all this other stuff?”
Dariya's jaw dropped. He could do that?! The very thing she'd hoped for?! The King had his men out scouring the entire realm in search of his uncle. As yet no one had located him. There hadn't even been a sighting. But Baen thought he could find him?! Master Thyman was just as doubtful as he asked the wizard exactly the same questions.
“Probably. It shouldn't be too hard,” Baen answered him casually. “So why don't I do that? Save ourselves all the trouble?”
“That … would … be … useful,” Master Thyman admitted hesitantly, his long white beard fluttering strangely.
“Good! Then I'll do that.” The wizard reached into his pocket and pulled out a small silver object and handed it to the Master. “This will allow us to speak over great distances. Simply wear it each evening and you'll hear my voice when I speak into my own ring.”
“It's Monday, and I'll speak to you tomorrow evening. I’m hopeful that I will have tracked down the Duke by the end of the week.”
With that he abruptly turned on his heels and marched right past the two of them, and then on out of the hall, despite not having been released by the Master. A moment later she and the others rushed out of the hall after him.
“You can't go alone!” She called after him as she hurried down the steps. “It's dangerous and you haven't even begun your training in weapons!”
His answer wasn't what she expected. He simply unbuttoned his long coat, pulled out a pair of pistols from holsters on his legs, and fired them in the blink of an eye at a couple of archery targets that had been set up for the training. One of them his bullet simply tore the entire bullseye out of. The other exploded, spraying debris in all directions and causing people all around to call out in shock. Apparently, she was wrong about him not being a marksman.
“With the Lady's blessings I think I'll be alright,” he answered her as he returned his pistols to their holsters.
And then, while she was still standing there, staring in shock at the targets, he swung his leg over the still smoking wheeler, clicked a lever and was off. Racing out of the courtyard at full speed while the huge rubber wheels of his machine squealed angrily and dirt flew.
“You did see that?” She turned to Reginald after the wizard was gone, a little worried that she was imagining things.
“I did,” he answered her, never taking his eyes off the targets. “I'm just not sure I believe it.”
Neither did she. She'd seen him at the border, his enchanted grass somehow reaching up and grabbing people. Pulling them down, hard. Breaking their bones. Causing their guns to explode. He'd even had a tree swat somebody. That had been shocking. But as he himself had said, he'd had time to prepare. And there had been Fae to help him. But this was way past that! He was deadly with a gun and for some reason that worried her even more than all the rest.
She shook her head. It just wasn't right. Wizards weren't supposed to be real. They were just something made up by the Bards to spin a pretty tale. And they certainly weren't supposed to be dangerous! They were just supposed to be people with a few tricks. Weren't they?!
Chapter Sixteen
It was late when Baen finally arrived at the ruins of Castle Alldrake. Far too late for him to begin work. But that was alright. It was already ten days since the disastrous battle. A few more hours would not make much difference. He could set up camp for the night and make himself comfortable. In the morning he would start work, and he would hunt down the Duke. It might take a few days, depending on how far the man had run, but he would hunt him, and then the soldiers could catch him and kill him. It was a simple plan.
Then again, he reminded himself as he saw Castle Alldrake in the distance, a pile of rubble barely even visible in the moonlight, the first plan to kill him had been simple too. The Duke had been prepared for the attack by the army. It would not be wise to under-estimate the man. He had magic after all.
At least he knew that the Duke's ghosts – the restless souls – posed him no danger. For two reasons. Firstly he had wards against them. They would not be able to climb into his soul and release their fear. But there was a second, more important reason they wouldn't pose him any risk. The priests had blessed the land where they had been killed. The restless souls were anchored to their bodies, escaping them only for short periods of time. They would return to them in time and then move on to their final rest. Most of them had likely already departed this world.
But it was a truly horrid crime that the Duke had committed. Nyri had told him most of the details of what had happened. The criers and newspapers had filled in the rest. Apparently, the Duke had taken his victims from the nearby village of Landsfall. A small town that had once been home to some three thousand souls but which was now completely empty. Every man, woman and child had been taken from it. Marched out of their homes and work, and locked away in an underground cavern. The belief was that the Duke had left them in the darkened cavern for several days or more, cold frightened and hungry, branded them with an arcane enchantment that prevented their souls from moving on, and then finally killed them. They had been blown to bits. By the Lady that must have been a horror for them! And according to the Fae, they must have been told from the start that they were going to be killed. After all, it would have helped foster the despair in their hearts that he needed to prevent them from finding their eternal rest.
That when he thought about the cruelty of the act, left him in disbelief – how could the Duke do that? How could any man? Did he simply not care about other people? Or was he driven to it by some other, darker need? Was he even human? And what was this magic that he had? Dariya hadn't said. She hadn't really known. Only that as a child she had listened to him boasting of his power. But whatever it was, it troubled him.
Baen also had to wonder how growing up with such a creature in her life had affected Dariya. The Lady only knew that he had an entire menagerie full of half crazed relatives to deal with. But none of them were like that. He also had never lived with the truly crazy ones.
As he set about preparing his camp for the night Baen let those questions roll around in his thoughts. Naturally he had no answer. He couldn't get one without actually speaking to the man, and he had no intention of doing that. But maybe someone should when they caught him. Or not. Maybe with a m
an like that the only thing to do was hang him straight away. He was simply too dangerous to interrogate.
Either way he decided as he finally got around to eating his dinner, the man had to be caught as soon as possible. Before he did something worse. It was too late at night for him to go off chasing the man – if nothing else he could take a nasty fall stumbling around in the dark.
But, he decided, that didn't mean he couldn't start the hunt! And despite it not being what he'd intended to do, he was ready.
Once he'd finished his meal and put the dishes away after scraping them clean, he set about his preparations.
It was a complex enchantment he'd decided on. A complex spell coupled with a complex circle that he had to draw on the grass. It would take all his concentration, because any lapse while he was casting could be potentially life threatening. It was why he should really be doing this in the morning after a good night’s sleep when he was more alert. But he felt the need to begin. Luckily, he had prepared himself for these complex spells long ago. He should be able to cast it. And really, he told himself, it wasn't that difficult. In reality it was half a dozen spells held together by the magic of the rune he'd drawn on the ground. Like a paragraph of many sentences. He knew all of the words and sentences. It was only a matter of holding the entire paragraph together in his thoughts while he worked, that made it hard.
Once the circle was finished and he was confident that every symbol was perfectly drawn, Baen took his place at the head of the three-pointed star inside it. And then he turned to his left and started invoking the past.
This part of the spell wasn't particularly difficult or dangerous. It was a simple enchantment called forgotten light. Magic that looked back into the past, then brought it up as an image so that you could watch a particular event unfold again. He already knew that Dariya had fought her uncle not far from where he was sitting, and that she had done so just after the ghosts had attacked. So he wound the time back ten days to the night of the attack and then started hunting for her. It took a little time to find her, as she had been some distance from the rest. But he found her in time. After that it was only a short while before he saw the start of the attack by the ghosts and then got to see the Duke coming for Dariya.
Baen watched as their battle was waged, curious as to how the Duke fought it. What magic he used. But then things took an unexpected turn as a woman strode into the battle from out of nowhere and took a spinning magical blade intended for Dariya, and he suddenly realised that things had just become complicated. He saw the shock and pain in Dariya's eyes as the woman fell, and the similarity in their faces. And he knew instantly who she was. He'd seen images of her in the papers. This had been Dariya’s mother, Amberley the Wicked. And she had stepped in front of a blade being thrown by her brother and lover to save her daughter!
“Sweet shite!” There were no words to describe how wrong that all was! It made all the problems he had with his family seem like nothing. Baen bent his head in prayer for a moment, thinking about just how terrible that must have been for Dariya. And how carefully she'd hid this from everyone. The image of the past flickered a little bit as his concentration was shaken.
What he was supposed to do with the knowledge, he wondered? Because clearly if Dariya had kept this from the rest of her Order, she didn't want it known. But was that the right thing to do? Or did he need to tell someone? Because surely something like this had to be eating at her very soul. No matter how well she hid it.
When he'd seen her at the outpost she'd looked calm. Certainly she hadn’t mentioned it. But then he'd only seen her for a few short moments, and he hadn't paid her a lot of attention. His thoughts had only been on himself and how he could most quickly end his advisory role to the Order. He had thought only about what he wanted. He hadn’t considered the wants or needs of anyone else. Seeing this left him feeling incredibly ashamed.
In time though he pulled his thoughts away from those things and back to the spell. It was what was important now. And so he returned to the image of the Duke and followed him as he ran away from Dariya, into the jungle, still trying to put his hair out as he ran. The man had to be in terrible pain. And yet somehow, despite being an old man, he kept running as he screamed and didn't fall down. He even stopped screaming. Obviously he was tougher than he looked. And because of that he got away when others would have fallen.
After ten or so minutes the Duke dealt with his injuries by covering his burns with dirt. It was damp and cold, the two things the man would most desperately want. It also stuck to his skin, helping to soothe the pain.
Baen stopped the image from running forward after that and just left it as it was. He was satisfied that he had the quarry firmly fixed in his spell. It was time to call the hunter.
The “hunter” in this case was a huge, heavily scarred, razorback boar. He called it to him from out of the ether and it appeared in the third point of the star to his right. Baen rested for a moment after it arrived – summoning was not his strongest magic – and let it grow accustomed to its new environment. He needed to give the animal the time to do so. The calmer the boar was, the easier it would be for him to lay his commands on it. And the less likely it would be to attack him!
Meanwhile he studied his hunter. Other people would have called a bloodhound, but he had decided against that. Bloodhounds bayed as they ran, letting their quarry know that he was being chased. They were also smaller and weaker. They could be easily killed. He'd needed something tougher. And boars had good noses. They had to, to hunt truffles and roots under the ground. And while it might not be able to run for days like a hound, it was fast enough.
Despite his worries the boar quietened down quite quickly. But even when it was calm, it wasn't completely still. It snuffled and grunted, shaking its head about constantly and spraying saliva as it did so, while it started digging at the ground. Occasionally it even squealed excitedly for good measure. But that didn't matter as long as it was calm.
Baen reached into the Boar’s mind, so he could share with it the smell of its quarry. Bringing the smell of the Duke through the spell along with his image was easy enough – or it would have been had he not been concentrating on holding so many other spells in his head at the same time. Still, he managed it, and then he even cast the last spell on the boar, making it think that that smell was food. Specifically sweet carrots which it loved.
By then he had half a dozen or more spells operating, and the sweat was starting to pepper his brow while his head throbbed. This was the problem with these complex constructions of magic. They required so much effort to maintain. And he'd never practised this one.
But he held it together and watched as the boar breathed deeply of the man's musk, learning his scent and that the scent represented food. He then reinforced a feeling of hunger in the boar, although truthfully the last wasn’t hard. Boars had voracious appetites.
Finally, when he judged that his hunter was ready, he let the spell go and released the boar. It took off with an angry squeal as it suddenly discovered it was near a man and it didn't trust men. But it didn't run far. Just far enough to be safe from him among the trees, before it stopped and started scenting the air.
Shortly after that it was off again, hunting its quarry, and he knew a sense of satisfaction as it trotted away to the spot where the Duke had rested and covered his wounds with dirt. The place where the ten day old scent was strongest.
Baen let a smile find his face. He'd done it! There had been no drama, no danger. Everything had worked just as he'd needed it to, and the boar was off and on its way.
Unfortunately working so many spells had been hard work and his head was throbbing. Still, it was good to push himself he thought as he filled another mug with the tea. Exercise for the mind.
In the morning he'd give chase, sticking to the trails and roads as best he could, while it hunted the Duke. He imagined that in a few days the boar would have tracked down its quarry. The spell was fairly reliable and the boar would not
be put off its hunt.
The real problem he had to deal with had nothing to do with the boar. It was what he should tell Master Thyman about Dariya. The man ought to know what had happened, but at the same time Dariya had a right and probably a desperate desire for privacy. Whatever choice he made was going to be a betrayal of someone.
He sighed a little as he sipped his tea and willed the pain in his head to go away. Life was not meant to be easy as the Lady had taught them. It was meant to be lived.
Chapter Seventeen
Was her uncle really in there, Dariya wondered? In whatever “there” was? Dariya stared at the structure built into the cliff. It wasn't a cave exactly but nor was it a fortress. Perhaps it was something of both. Or neither. She didn't know. And as far as she knew, nobody else did either. They hadn't even known that this place existed until the wizard had found it.
She needed to know more about it. She also wanted to know more about the condition of her uncle. Had he been sufficiently hurt that taking him would be easy? Or was he likely to pose a significant threat? Unfortunately, instead of providing her with the answers she sought the wizard was petting some damned wild boar and feeding it all their supplies! The man really was touched! But then so was his entire family from what she knew.
