The Channeler

by William Kline

  Several of the students were picking themselves up off the ground and taking their seats from where they had risen. Tommy sat down, feeling his cheeks flush with embarrassment – not only that he had been the first one to cry out, but that he had tried to stop the demonstration and failed spectacularly. Tommy noticed Mary wiping some tears out of her eyes as she rose; apparently the demonstration had shaken the poor girl. Maybe she felt much more loyalty to Micah than Tommy had originally guessed, to be so scared for his life that she had started crying.

  “Seriously, calm down everyone, everything is fine,” Micah continued to try to soothe the class. “Now, think about what just happened. Tommy, I saw you start to cast a spell. Good eyes and reflexes. You, too, Mary.” Tommy felt his face flushing again, and hated himself for it. He was embarrassed that he had failed, and it seemed that Mary had failed equally badly. Tommy gave her a commiserating glance and a wink. However, Micah was still speaking. “But, as you can see, there wasn’t enough time, was there? You were too surprised, off guard, and not prepared enough to possibly avert the attack.” Micah picked up the mushroomed bullet off the table and tossed it in his hand. “And, within the confines of our school, luckily, you don’t have to. There are no hidden assassins lurking in the halls of the school. But I want to be very, very clear to each and every one of you. Once you leave the school, it’s a different world. There are people out there who want to hurt you, simply because of who and what you are. You must be on your guard at all times when outside the school, and being on your guard means learning how to shield yourself, to protect yourself fully, all the time, no matter what else might be on your mind. So, lets begin.”

  Micah launched into an extended description of the shield, and how it worked. He explained creating the magical sheath that would protect them, keeping both arcane and mundane attacks from harming them. By the end of the class, Micah had them walking through the steps to establish the shield, and Tommy tried to listen with interest. He tried and failed repeatedly to create the shield, but he was distracted – he constantly felt like there were eyes on him, and every time he looked up, he found Mary glancing away, right in the act of turning her head away from where she’d been staring at him. It unnerved Tommy and prevented him from concentrating. What could he have done to spark her anger so, Tommy wondered? Was it because he, too, had tried and failed to stop the ‘assassin’? Or was it because Micah had given Tommy credit for it first, and Mary second? Whatever the reason, Tommy was extremely grateful when Micah pronounced that they’d tried enough for the day and dismissed the class.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  It was a little over a week later that Tommy found himself in a small, almost claustrophobic room. The room had a high ceiling and was very long – probably almost thirty feet long – but barely wide enough to accommodate Tommy’s shoulders. When the door closed behind him, Tommy felt a little trapped, a sensation further complicated by a waist-high barrier with a table on top that was just a few feet down the room. All in all, the room reminded Tommy of a police firing range that he’d seen in the movies. It was a fairly accurate analogy, since firing practice was basically why Tommy was here.

  There was a large stone sphere sitting on a pedestal down at the other end of the room. Surrounding the sphere was a strong magical shield, like the one Micah had spent the last week drilling them on over and over again. This shield was so strong Tommy could almost see it with his vision unenchanted – it created a small ripple in the air, almost like heat rising off of the stone. Once Tommy cast the spell to enhance his vision, however, he could see it quite plainly – the effect was so strong it glowed to his magical sight, although he could not determine what was causing the shield or where it was being cast from. Certainly, it was being created by someone very powerful. Regardless of who was making it, Tommy was here to knock it down.

  They’d just begun learning different kinds of attack spells, and now the class was getting its first opportunity to test them out. Each of his fellow classmates was in a similar room, faced with a similar shielded stone sphere. Their goal was to break down the shield and have a spell affect the stone sphere. Micah had told them that, at first, they’d be lucky to nudge the sphere enough to make it roll off its place on the pedestal, but that, with enough practice, eventually they would be able to shatter the sphere completely. Then, Micah had said, they’d be ready to move on. Tommy was determined to do well on his first try – he didn’t think he’d be able to break the stone, but maybe he could crack it just a little.

  “Get ready…” Micah’s voice crackled from a speaker in the ceiling, causing Tommy to jump in surprise. He hadn’t noticed the speaker before, and somehow it seemed odd to him that, in a place so full of magic, Micah would resort to using something as mundane as electric speakers.

  “Begin!” Micah said again over the speakers.

  It took Tommy a moment to recover from his initial surprise and gather his thoughts, but once he did, he set to attacking the sphere with gusto.

  Tommy started out by using the electrical arc spell that he’d learned in the testing just over a week ago. He cast the spell and shot the bolt at the sphere five or six times before pausing. The spell took Tommy a little while to cast, and it was not having an appreciable effect; The shield was too strong, and Tommy felt immediately like he was trying to chip away at a mountain with a toothpick. After a brief consideration, Tommy decided to try a different tactic, and he summoned a small but intense blaze of fire around the sphere, figuring that, instead of casting a spell over and over again, he could cast one spell that would wear down the shield over time. Peering down the range at his handiwork, Tommy frowned. It looked like the shield was repairing itself and replacing lost energy over time; the damage from his fire spell was not even keeping up with the repairs on the shield, and he was quickly losing what little ground he’d gained with the electricity spells.

  Frustrated, Tommy poured more and more energy into the fire spell. The flames grew brighter and more intense, and as he flooded the spell with even more magical energy, he saw the shield begin to start weakening ever so gradually. At least now, he was beating the repairs, and he would eventually wear the shield down.

  But Tommy knew that he couldn’t keep this pace up forever. He felt the energy draining through his body, and knew that he’d collapse from exhaustion long before his fire spell broke through the shield. He decided to help it along a bit, and used a fairly simple spell to pull water out of the air, freeze it, and slam the ice shards into the sphere. This turned out to be a mistake, however – the cold and water sapped energy from his fire spell, and Tommy almost lost control of both of them. Quickly, he abandoned the ice tactic.

  Frowning, Tommy regarded the sphere and its surrounding shield. The fire spell he’d cast was very bright, both with magical energy to his enchanted sight, and with the more mundane brightness that any fire generates, and it made his eyes water a bit trying to look past it. Gritting his teeth, Tommy tried to pour his full strength into the fire spell. The blaze intensified for a brief moment, and then vanished with brief thud of displaced, super-heated air. Tommy grunted in surprise – he hadn’t expected that to happen, but he thought he understood why. He’d just put too much energy into the spell, and it hadn’t been designed to handle the problems that arose when he gave it that much energy. The spell had, essentially, collapsed under its own weight. Tommy thought he could see a way that he could modify the spell so it could get hotter, but he had no time to try to figure it out now. Modifications like that would take him hours to work out, and the shield was once again repairing itself.

  For the next twenty minutes, Tommy tried everything he could think of. He hit the sphere with arcs of electricity, smashed it with ice, burned it with fire, and pummeled it with blasts of pure energy. Nothing he tried made any kind of significant progress, and for a brief moment, Tommy considered vaulting over the desk and beating on the thing with his bare hands. He even tried pulling chunks of rock out of the walls of
the range, so that he could smash them into the sphere, but the walls must have been shielded somehow – none of his spells affected the walls, floor, or ceiling at all. In fact, Tommy peered at the pedestal – his fire had been so hot that it should have at least scorched the rock, but the stone remained unblemished and whole, and showed no sign of Tommy’s attack. So much, then, for his idea to damage the pedestal so that it became uneven and let the sphere just roll off of it.

  Tommy sighed and had just started to steel himself to launch another attack on the shield when Micah’s voice crackled again over the speakers. “Time’s up everyone – leave your room and we’ll meet in the common area.”

  Tommy left his room with a heavy heart – he thought he would at least be able to touch the sphere, but he hadn’t even come close. He wondered who or what had been powering the shield that it was so tough to breech. Out in the larger room that connected all the small firing-range type rooms that the rest of his classmates had been in, Tommy saw that he wasn’t the only one who was frustrated. By the look on Ryan’s face, he was ready to spit thunderbolts with frustration, and the rest of the class displayed signs of varying levels of anger and fatigue.

  Micah, however, grinned at the assembled students. “Not as easy as you thought, it is?” The instructor chuckled for a moment before continuing in a more serious tone. “This lesson was to prove a point. A strong, well maintained shield can deflect even the strongest attack. The shields you encountered were not created by any kind of senior mage at the school. They were created by the next class of students ahead of you.” Tommy blanched at this. There was a chance that Mae had been powering the shield that he’d failed to breach, and he was suddenly afraid that she had seen his abysmal failure. Micah, however, was continuing. “It is easier to defend because you do not need to absorb the full energy of the attack – you only need to deflect or absorb what would actually hit your body.” Seeing the confusion on the classes faces, Micah gave an example. “Think of a large explosion next to a brick wall. The wall does not need to contain the explosion. It does not absorb all the energy. The wall only needs to resist the portion of the explosion that hits it – the rest of it goes harmlessly in other directions.”

  There were some nods from the assembled students at that. Tommy thought he got it, but was too tired to really comprehend.

  “What you should take away from the lesson is this – you will never, ever win a fight by defending. But it is far, far easier to defend than it is to attack. When faced by a superior opponent, in a fight you know you cannot win, you will find it far easier to protect yourself than to try to overcome your foe. Protect yourself. Flee. Call for help. Focus your energy on defense and do whatever you can to get away, to get out of the situation. There’s no shame in living to fight another day.” Micah paused, and then continued with a wry grin. “The old adage has lied to you – the best defense is not always a good offense.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Tommy was still tired from his ordeal with attacking the shielded stone when he made it to his physical fitness class. He was attacking a wooden dummy with a real, albeit dulled, metal sword. Normally, the students fought each other with padded wooden weapons, but during the last several weeks, Lord Kalish had set them to practice with the metal ones. The difference was not something Tommy cared for – the metal sword was much heavier, and quickly tired his arm after he’d been swinging it for even a short while. Further, when he struck the dummy, it send a jarring sensation up his arm and into his shoulder. In short order, Tommy found himself struggling to lift the sword on Lord Kalish’s command to strike, and letting the weight of the sword hit the dummy instead of putting any of his own force behind it. Glancing to his left and right, everyone else seemed to be having a similar problem. Only Ryan continued to strike his target with any sort of vigor, and he seemed to be taking out his earlier frustration on the wooden dummy. Tommy shuddered for a moment and felt glad that they weren’t fighting each other today. He had no desire to be bruised and battered on top of the other problems he was facing.

  "Halt!" Lord Kalish called to the class unexpectedly. There was still quite a bit of time left in the class, and it was very unusual that he would end early. "Halt, weapons down!" he called again, then, "Gather round, class."

  The students moved to form a semicircle around Kalish, taking off gloves and removing helmets as they went. Tommy actually let the point of his sword drag on the ground for a few brief steps before he caught himself; Lord Kalish was very unforgiving to students who mistreated their weapons, even the mock weapons they were using today.

  "Today, Lord Kalish has a question for you," he began. "The question is this. Suppose that a man tells you he is your friend forever, and that he would fight and die with you. Is he your friend?"

  Several members of the class exchanged glances, while others looked puzzled. Lord Kalish sighed and began again. "You know Lord Kalish. If Lord Kalish said to you, 'I am your friend, I will protect you', would you believe Lord Kalish?"

  The answer seemed obvious to Tommy, and he said, "Yes" with several other members of the class. The whole thing smacked to Tommy of some sort of test. Maybe a test of loyalty. To Tommy's surprise, however, there was also a resounding "NO!" from a couple members of the class - both Ryan and James in particular. Tommy looked at them in surprise, expecting a reaction out of Lord Kalish.

  But the instructor only smiled. "Very good answers from everyone." Now the class looked very puzzled, and glanced at each other in confusion again. Lord Kalish turned to address Sam, who was standing near Tommy. "You spoke yes. Why did you speak so?"

  Sam shifted nervously on his feet and scratched his chin for a moment before answering. "Well, I guess if you said you were my friend and would protect me, it would be pretty obvious pretty soon if you were lying, right?"

  "Just so. And you, Mister Thorton. You spoke no, why did you speak so?"

  James looked exhausted. He always did, these days. But his voice was clear and strong when he spoke. "Uh, I don't know you at all. I mean, we have class together, but I don't really know you. Why would you say you are my friend when we don't know each other? Obviously, you want me to think you are my friend so I'll let my guard down around you."

  "Well said," Lord Kalish replied, "But instead of let your guard down, say instead that I want you to trust me, yes?"

  James thought about that for a moment, then nodded in agreement.

  Lord Kalish continued. "So. Those who spoke yes, do you know Lord Kalish?" The students who had spoken up shrugged, or shook their heads. "You know some about Lord Kalish, but you do not know all, to be sure, yes? If Lord Kalish was your friend... he would not have to tell you so, yes? You would know Lord Kalish was your friend, because you would know the heart of Lord Kalish." Many of the members of the class who had said yes looked abashed at being wrong.

  But Lord Kalish was not done. "To those who spoke no. You are suspicious of Lord Kalish, yes? You do not know what is in his heart. Yet, perhaps, Lord Kalish shows you his heart with his statement of friendship, yes? You can accept Lord Kalish's offer of friendship without closing your eyes with trust. So long as your eyes are open, you lose nothing by accepting, but should you spurn Lord Kalish, you will surely make an enemy of him, yes?"

  The arms instructor paused there and stood for several long moments regarding the class. Finally, Tommy stuck his hand in the air, and Lord Kalish acknowledged him.

  "So... who was right?" Tommy asked.

  Lord Kalish grinned, as if this was exactly the question he wanted to here.

  "All were right," he said, "All were wrong. The answer depends on what is in Lord Kalish's heart when he speaks, and since Lord Kalish does not open his heart to you, none will ever know the truth."

  Ryan interjected from the far side of the circle. "So what was the point of this, then?"

  "The point," Lord Kalish lectured, "is that you must look past the words that a man says. If you wish to know the truth of a man, then you must k
now his heart. If you do not know the heart of the man, then you do not know the truth of him. Look to what a man does, not what he says, and you will know his heart." The entire speech was given as an answer to Ryan, and as a lecture to the class, but Lord Kalish's eyes rested on Tommy the entire time he spoke, and Tommy couldn't help but feel that the entire lesson was intended for him, and him alone.

  "No more teaching for today. Class is dismissed," Lord Kalish said, breaking the silence and turning away from Tommy. Why had Lord Kalish stared so intently at him? Tommy had never been so grateful to head the changing rooms.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  The days trickled by and settled into a sort of a routine. Micah had them practicing shielding themselves in every class – the only lesson he would teach, apart from how to protect themselves, was the frequent and repetitive lecture on how vitally important it was that they learn to create a strong and enduring barrier around their body. One day, he even brought a bucket of rocks to the class and threw them at the students while they shielded themselves. If the students flinched or lost control of the shield, the rocks hit them in the head.

  “The point of this,” Micah lectured that day, “Is that you gain faith in your protections. Do not flinch from the rocks. Do not fear that they will hit you, and they won’t. Have faith in your shield, stand and face the attack, and allow it to hit you and be absorbed.”

  It was over a week of repetitive shield practice later that Micah began the class by telling them to gather their things. “We’re taking a little walk. Come with me, everyone.”

  Micah led them through the halls and into an outdoor area. Tommy recognized it – it was a huge, sand-filled pit that Lord Kalish often used to have them duel each other. “You must learn to fight on uneven ground, yes? You must not plan on only fighting on flat stone,” Lord Kalish had told them the first time they used to pit. Tommy didn’t care for it – the shifting sand fatigued his muscles much quicker than even ground, and even worse, the sand seemed to get everywhere – in his shoes, in his clothes, in his hair – he’d even found sand in his EARS after a particularly rough session.