In one week her charges had changed remarkably. They were properly attired for the day's march, their robes adjusted for maximum cooling and minimum interference with the light packs they had learned to carry. In their packs were water bottles, travel rations, and rain protection. The latter they would need shortly for the storm that had passed over them the night before had left a remnant of rain-swollen clouds behind it.
Their self-defense weapons of choice were available for instant use, but comfortably slung for the long day's hike ahead. The likelihood of their using them was remote with the Sorcerer Guard there to protect them, and they were still well in Delmathia. But Aetria made them carry the weapons because they would have to do so once they reached the army. They were learning to take care of themselves and their equipment.
More importantly, she heard friendly banter between teammates instead of the whining and complaining she had heard for three days straight. It was hard to judge accurately, but there was a spring in their movements. They didn't seem as exhausted and tired as she had seen them. Perhaps the conditioning was taking effect.
"Good morning, Novices!"
"Good morning, Ma'am,” chorused the response.
"Today we are changing our routine. We are now on the border with Hermania, and will be turning north at this point. You will be glad to hear that this morning we will be riding in the transport wagons instead of marching."
The cheers that greeted her announcement were loud and long. She let them carry on for a few more moments, and then raised her arm in the silence gesture used by the reconnaissance troops that she had taught them. They quickly quieted.
"You will not want to hear that, with no notice, we will make foot marches day or night."
The groans were equally as heartfelt as the cheers, but of shorter duration.
"The army moves with little or no notice, so you must learn to be ready at all times. You have demonstrated your ability to route march, and it appears I have not damaged you physically by the exercise.” The laughter was new; perhaps she was being too easy on them.
"We have been making better time on foot than we would have in transport wagons, and are slightly ahead of schedule. For this reason, I believe we can make better use of the time we have by conducting classes in the transport as we move forward. I don't want you all to think I am feeling sorry for you and am afraid you will melt in a little rain!
"To ensure your time is fully occupied, I will be rotating between the two wagons. Sorcerer Meloses and Novice Verdilan will alternate lectures in the transport I have vacated. We have a lot of material to cover, so pay attention. This is not the time to relax and let your mind wander."
Aetria looked directly at Novice Recanlin. He blushed and looked down, avoiding her eyes. She didn't want to embarrass the young man, but she felt she had to make a point.
"Last night, Novice Recanlin wandered off his post. It is his wont to move around when meditating. That may be acceptable back at Inhestia, but no longer. There are two very serious things wrong with his behavior last night. The first is that it could, and would, lead to his death.
"The second and worst is that it could lead to the destruction of his fellow sorcerers and the army troops they are supporting. If you think the guard duty you are doing now has no value, you are wrong. If it does nothing else, it should impress upon you the realization that actions you are expressly responsible for can directly impact your fellow sorcerers, the Order, and the people you have been trained to serve with your sorcerer talents.
"Your attention must be on what you are doing on watch and not on anything else. It is not the time to review your life or do meditations. Speaking of meditations, find a physical expression that works in the environment you find yourself in. Obviously, Novice Recanlin will have to learn a new meditation exercise, one that saves him getting his throat cut."
Someone shoved Recanlin from behind, and he stumbled out of formation. Numerous barbed comments were made, but Aetria sensed the others were trying to be supportive and understanding of their wayward fellow Novice. After a moment, his Aggressor mates pulled him back into their ranks as if forgiving him his transgressions. The Novices’ attention returned to Aetria.
"Novice Recanlin is being held accountable for his mistake. This is part of good discipline and order the army must have. His punishment will be to stand double duty from now until we reach the regiment."
A moan of sympathy whispered from within the company, but Aetria continued. “You haven't heard the worst yet. Because we are near the enemy, effective immediately, we are doubling up on the manning of our watches. You will now stand your post with another sorcerer. Furthermore, no one will exit the camp unless accompanied by another sorcerer and with my express permission to do so."
Judging from the angry expressions on their faces, Aetria knew she had gotten their attention.
"Get used to it, Novices. That is the way of life on the front lines. You may be loved in your villages, but on the battlefield everyone fears you. You are a target to all, friend and foe alike. Your existence depends on your knowledge, skills, and the friend covering your back.
"Save your questions for now. They will be answered during the day's rolling classrooms, so listen up and pay attention. Aggressors and Illusionists load into the forward wagon, Healers and Provisioners in the wagon behind. We are leaving in one hour. Dismissed."
* * * *
Working her way forward through the maze of Novice legs, Aetria found her Illusionists all seated on the right side bench and the Aggressors seated on the left side bench. The benches were built into the side of the wagon, so the two different branches of sorcerers sat looking at each other.
She doubted they would ever mingle like Provisioners and Healers. It wasn't that they disliked each other having lived together for four or five years at Inhestia, but because their philosophies of life were so different. So it had always been.
Illusionists’ magic was disguise, camouflage, and mirage creation. Coming into its own in this long war, their magic was in great demand. In the centuries before, during a time when peace had been the norm, their numbers had been small. They were artists, providers of show and display, or hiding and understating. If a lord wanted a ceremony or festival to be impressive, he hired an Illusionist. If he wanted to be left alone in seclusion, he hired one also. Merchants hired them to improve their wares, while the village leaders hired them to expose the merchants’ wiles. Although bound by rules of the Order, Illusionists were not rigidly bound to obey the king's laws.
Aetria had entered Inhestia intending to be what her merchant father had wanted, an enhancer of his trade. She soon discovered her interest lay in the true arts and wanted to be a renowned artist. But war was all she had known so far.
Aggressors’ magic was fire, lightning, exploding flame, poisons, thunder, and crushing forces. Before the Sorcerer War, their skills had been much in demand by feuding nobles. When the Aggressors tired of working for ambitious warmongers and realized they had the strength to take on that mission themselves, a new era had begun. Aggressors were the primary cause of the Sorcerer War two centuries earlier.
During the recovery of the world from the aftermath of that war, it came to be understood Aggressor sorcerers were not going to disappear and neither were any of the sorcerers who had used magic Power to advance themselves. A new use for their skills would have to be found.
Aetria sat on the front seat behind the driver and signaled Lieutenant Nemos to start the caravan moving forward. The wagon's covers were up to protect them from the threatening rain, but they would also block any cooling breeze. Drowsiness was going to be a problem. The wagon jerked forward and she saved herself from tumbling back into the sea of legs.
Turning her attention to the Novices, she asked, “What is the First Law of Spell Warfare?"
Holding onto the sides, the Novices chorused, with a decided lilt of boredom, “Don't use the Power to kill."
"Wrong!” Aetria's rebuke shock
ed the Novices. Several protested.
"I did not ask for the First Law of Power Use, which you answered correctly, albeit with no enthusiasm I might add, but I'll excuse you since you are no longer students. What is the First Law of Spell Warfare?"
Jalista, one of the Illusionists, spoke out quickly. “The use of spells in war has been forbidden for the past two hundred years since the Sorcerer War. We were not allowed to even talk about it, Sorceress. You yourself told me that once in class."
"You are correct. The horrors inflicted upon sorcerer and non-sorcerer alike by the War were deliberately suppressed by our Order. That included any reference to the use of spells. Our teaching was focused on our code of honor, the rules we live by, and a determination not to repeat the mistakes of the past.
"Unfortunately, this narrow focus has caused us to have to rediscover the lessons learned by the sorcerers of that period. We don't know a lot about these sorcerers, but we know they usually acted alone, or in very close family groups. There was no willingness to share the spells learned by the individual sorcerer as it meant they could be used against you.
"The very powerful magi who ruled the world were essentially alone. They had no governing Council, common training, or code of honor. Their spells often died with them since there was no sharing, no writing down of the lore, no training of the young until just before death of the elder."
"How could anyone live in a world without trust?” Jalista asked.
Aetria gave her a tight smile. “They couldn't live in the world trusting anyone, except for their own family, and they had better watch them closely. The magi removed themselves from the non-sorcerers, setting their clans apart in the physical sense, and creating levels of status in the world with the non-sorcerer being the lowest.
"They married within their own families, fearful of the common people. Distrust turned to hatred. Hatred caused fighting between sorcerer and non-sorcerer which led to more hatred and distrust in a vicious cycle. That is why the Order insists on drawing its people from the common people. The people are the Order. It is not an adversarial relationship anymore. You can hate and kill people who consider themselves above you and believe you are to be used to serve them. It is hard to hate a father, brother, sister, or mother who also serves the Order and the people."
Novice Tracilus, one of the two male Illusionists, had a penchant for putting everything into neat little packages. “In other words, Sorceress, what we know about those who came before us is the opposite of what we know about ourselves."
"You are correct, Novice Tracilus. Where the forefathers once hungered after wealth, control, and ultimately power, now the Order avoids influencing the world, accepts only enough money in payment for our services to meet the needs of the Order, and exercises control only over ourselves. Up until now.
"Now we are dealing with a world that has forced our Order to do what our first Law forbids us—to kill with Power. Which leads us back to my original question. Novice Recanlin, would you like to share what Commander Pleates has taught you about spell warfare?"
Recanlin looked side-to-side amongst his peers and then sheepishly back at her. “The Adept has not taught us anything about spell warfare. Umm, he said you could be trusted to teach us that. He has been busy teaching, well, how to do other things."
Determined not to show her annoyance, Aetria said calmly, “I am honored he has entrusted that portion of your training to me. I was afraid this would be repetition for you all. Fine, Novice Fernonia, as an Aggressor, how would you fight a battle using your skills?"
The young woman in question was the most beautiful of the dozen women Novices in the Company, probably in all of Inhestia for that matter. Even Aetria felt a twinge of jealousy towards her. Fernonia was used to being the center of attention, and very forward.
If she wasn't such a bitch, thought Aetria, she would be the heart breaker of Delmathia. Then again, she wouldn't be much of an Aggressor either.
"That's a simple question, Ma'am, easy to answer. I would gather my friends here together, we would walk up to the enemy troops, bury them under an avalanche of fireballs, and send in our troops to clean up the remains."
Her “friends” hooted a round of cheers for Fernonia's answer.
Aetria gave her a smile of her own, albeit a little tight-lipped. “Very interesting, Fernonia. You have just described the first battle sorcerers fought between Delmathia and Hermania. The Hermanians were the first to use sorcerers. They hired several dozen Aggressors, waited until the two armies were about to engage, and moved their sorcerers forward through the front lines into the face of our troops. They proceeded as you described. The carnage was horrible.
"Our troops broke and ran, having lost hundreds in the first few moments of the battle. We lost nearly a thousand men by the day's end, a quarter of our southern lands, and the morale of our army was in a shambles."
She was not surprised the Novices knew so little of the war. She realized her description of the losses to their army had shaken both sets of Novices. The news of how the war was progressing came only in battles lost or won. Very few veterans had returned from the war to tell what they had seen. Most of the ones she knew, like her, did not want to talk about it. She continued.
"Our forces fell back to the fortified town of Kramornon. A panicked call went out to our Lodges to send sorcerers, but help was too long in coming. The local Lodge managed to bring five Aggressors inside the walls before the Hermanian army arrived outside.
"The Hermanians marched their Aggressors forward. They were now being used for the purpose of invoking fear, and the Delmathians in the town watched as the Hermanians sent a group of six sorcerers to cut off the southern entrance to the town. The remaining twenty or so marched to the northern entrance and advanced on the town. They stopped outside of bow range and commenced a fierce fireball attack on the barricades. Here they learned the basis of the Third Law of Spell Warfare, ‘Use of spells against fortifications is of limited value.’”
"What happened to the first two laws?” Fernonia asked.
"I'm coming to that. The Delmathians took casualties, but not unlike what they had experienced under siege tactics. The Delmathian army, seeing their troops were holding, sent a squadron of the Kelrossian Lancers out the back gate and into the forest to the east. The Hermanian sorcerers at the back gate began to take them under fire. Our sorcerers rushed out and engaged them in return. The fight was rapid and over very quickly. Each side annihilated the other. They had just learned the Second Law of Spell Warfare, ‘Engaging like spells is costly.'
"While the non-sorcerers cheered the efforts of their sorcerers, the loser was the Order. The army may think it is an acceptable tactic, but the Order does not. Fighting it out, face to face, against similar sorcerers costs lives."
The rain that had been threatening chose this moment to fall in a heavy shower. The driver reached behind him and dropped the front curtain. Out the rear of the wagon, Aetria saw the following wagon rig their curtain as well. Their driver cocooned himself in his rain cloak and stoically stared back at her through the pouring rain. She continued her narration.
"While the two sorcerer groups were killing each other, the Delmathians sent a company of infantry pouring out the northern gate at the Hermanian main sorcerer group. How they managed to get them to do that remains a mystery since none of them survived. The Hermanians calmly blasted them out of existence and learned the Fourth Law of Spell Warfare, ‘There is a limit to the Power that can be expended.’ When the Kelrossian Lancers charged out of the trees into the Hermanian sorcerers, the Aggressors were not able to mount much of an attack, as they were depleted of energy. They died to a man, learning the First Law of Spell Warfare, ‘Never, ever, leave your sorcerers unprotected.’ You will never find a Hermanian Sorcerer unit that isn't heavily protected, to this day."
Tracilus said, “I think you are trying to tell us that Spell Warfare has evolved over the bodies of our people, and that it is to be taken seriously."
"Excellent summation, Novice Tracilus. Both sides learned very quickly from their mistakes. The Delmathian army could not take advantage of their defeat of the Hermanian Sorcerers, as our troops were still decimated by the previous battle. Both sides withdrew from each other, but the Hermanians still held our southern lands."
Jalista waved for attention and Aetria nodded at her. “Why did Hermania attack us in the first place? I know they are relatively poor, and they have stricter beliefs than we do, but is that a reason for war?"
"Just why they wanted to conquer us, nobody I know has come up with a sensible reason. Gold, maybe?” Aetria said. “Until the war broke out, I always felt the Hermanians were a very reasonable people to deal with. My father is a merchant and said they were very fair in their businesses. They are very strict in their laws.
"Whatever the reason, their attack created a far greater problem than ever experienced before because they abandoned the First Law of Spell Use. Whatever prohibitions the Hermanian non-sorcerers had had against the use of sorcerers in warfare since the Sorcerer War seemed to be overturned by their desire to conquer Delmathia.
"Soon every army began to recruit sorcerers as fast as they could. The Order had to make some very hard decisions very fast. Without sorcerer help, the Delmathians would be defeated in very rapid order. The Order would then fall under Hermanian rule, and our Orders do not agree on many things. They decided to support the war and join the army. The Council met with the king and made the offer of support—with certain restrictions."
Novice Fernonia looked puzzled and chimed in with a question. “It didn't look like we had much of a choice in joining, so why did the Order think we could set up any kind of restrictions?"
"While the use of sorcerers was not new to the army, the use of Aggressor spells was. For many years, the Council had approved the hiring of Healers and Provisioners to accompany regimental units whose commanders were willing to pay the hiring fee. The army at that time was made up of regimental units raised by towns, noble families, or merchants wanting to move up in society by purchasing favor from the king. Some regimental commanders wisely took advantage of the gold available to them to purchase the services of sorcerers rather than expend it on fancy uniforms or expensive weaponry.
Wild Sorceress Page 4
