A few hours after dark, Michael retired to his room on the inn’s top floor. He climbed out his balcony and up to the roof carrying a change of clothing and several enchanted rings in a small pack. This was his first experiment with transformation with specific directions from Morgan. The spell was a two-step process, reducing your mass to that of your transformation target and then changing your shape. Naturally, you didn’t actually become the animal; you were still a human with the look of the target animal.
The transformation took only seconds and Michael found it easy. It seemed to come so naturally that he knew he could do it in the future in an instant with the spell become a Ki. He grasped the pouch in his right claw and jumped from the roof. He flapped his powerful wings and soared into the night sky. He cast night surgery to improve his sight and detect all manna to begin his search.
He saw that Kate’s manna was hidden by the ring he’d given her as he flew toward the Gray Mountains traveling much faster than a horse at full gallop. While he found numerous fire mage signs, it was two hours later that he saw his first healer manna in a remote uninhabited valley deep in the mountains. The healer was a man sleeping by a small fire far from any other humans. He circled the camp looking for other life signs before landing and transforming. After returning to his own form, he put on his sandals and black shirt and pants and quietly entered the camp. As he got close he realized the sleeping healer was Sir John of the Red Marshes, older brother of his best friend James who he had rescued at Northport and who was now recuperating at Rock Point.
He shook the sleeper. “John, it’s Michael. I’ve come to help.”
John roused and cast night surgery to see Michael more clearly. He sat up and hugged Michael, “Thank you Father God. I thought I was the last of us in all of Hearthshire Province. Come my friend what news have you of others of our guild do you know if Jim lives?”
“Jim is alive but will need time to recover from what the church did to him in Northport. He and many others are in a safe place, and I can help you get there. Lord Guild Master Hampton is there and leading the effort to rebuild.”
“Michael, I’m not sure I’m worthy to join them or even to remain a healer. I killed two knight protectors to escape, something a real healer would never do. You’re the first person I’ve even seen in the past month. I’ve lived by hunting and fishing and eating wild greens up here in the mountains, but I’m not fit company for the gentle souls of the guild.”
“These are unique times, John. I haven’t killed directly, but my actions have led to deaths. You’re a healer as long as you know our spells and are willing to help people with them. To defend yourself has never been murder.”
“The knight protectors can find us even at a distance; that’s why I’ve hidden thousands of paces from the nearest settlement. Those two I killed tracked me for eight days.”
Michael handed John a ruby and gold ring and explained, “These rings come from the Black Sand Beach Naiads. As long as you never take this one off, no knight protector can track you by your manna. This second ring is enchanted by the naiad spell transparency. If you slip it on, you’ll disappear from sight. It does not hide you from other senses like sound and smell, but I’ve used it many time to avoid the priests and knight protectors. The naiads are our allies, if you reach Black Sand Beach, they will protect you and help get you to safety.”
“Father God, these magic rings will make all the difference. I didn’t expect to survive the winter, but now I can travel among men if I’m careful. I still don’t think I’m fit company for other healers right now and don’t really want to go to a refuge where I’m not needed. Is there somewhere I can go to heal people without committing suicide in the process? I’ll go wherever I’m needed most.”
“I’ve been hoping to find someone willing to help the people of Swamp Ford. High Priest Carson of Snowport allowed all of his healers to escape. The church demoted him to the small temple at Swamp Ford, the worst place in Glastamear to live if you have no healers to cure swamp sickness and dropsy.”
“I’ll do it. We own him if he helped that many healers escape, but how do I get there.”
“Kate is hiding in the Village of Iron Pick in the mountains above Peter’s Smithy. I have given her rings like these and the villagers are trying to keep her safe. If you can make your way there, I’ll leave supplies for you. You’ll need to clean up and get some proper aristocratic clothing. With your highborn accent and the proper clothing and a couple of classy horses, no one is likely to challenge you. From Iron Pick you can make your way to Swamp Ford and contact High Priest Carson. He knows me as the merchant Michael Son-of-William.”
Michael stayed and visited with John until dawn was near. He walked down the valley until he could not be seen, and put his clothing in the pouch, transformed into a Great Ki Eagle and flew back to the inn at Peter’s Smithy landing on the roof. Back in his room he put the sleep late notice on his door and slept for six hours. He had found flying exhausting.
He ate a large lunch before paying off his bill at the inn. He shopped at the market, buying the finest clothing he could in such a small town. He bought another riding horse and the finest tack he could buy to go with it. The gear might not be the most current style among the gentry, but commoners wouldn’t know the difference. He stocked up on dried food for John’s five-day ride to Swamp Ford and added some delicacies since John’s diet had been so limited while he was in the mountains. He would leave one of his two packhorses for John.
That afternoon he rode up to Iron Pick and explained to Kate that John would be coming for the horses and supplies. Kate was glad for a chance to help. After leaving Iron Pick, Michael traveled east until midnight where he made camp in a dense grove of pine, protecting his camp and horses with a stone dome spell. After everything was secure, he resumed his Great Ki Eagle shape and few over the forest and fields west of town.
Chapter 34
An hour after Michael began his search, he detected the two weak healer manna signs and four strong fire mage manna signs. As he neared the location, it was still quite dark, but his night surgery spell allowed him to see two young girls with healer manna high in the branches of an ancient oak. The four fire mages surrounded the tree; each in turn cast fire balls past the top of the tree in what appeared to be an effort to scare the youngsters into coming down rather than harm them.
Michael used mage thought-talk to determine what was happening from the girls. They were sisters, Isabelle who was twelve and Anna who was thirteen. They were from the nearby village of Azure Falls. The knight protectors had broken into their house and abducted them, saying they were to become healer priests. Their parents had resisted because they knew that the healers were being killed all over Glastamear. The knights had set the house on fire and killed both parents with their swords as they came out of the inferno. When the abductors made camp the following night, the girls had fled to the highest part of the oak tree where the branches were too small to support the weight of an armored knight.
The girls knew almost nothing of magic and did not seem surprised that Michael was a healer who had taken the form of a Giant Ki Eagle or that he could talk directly into their heads. The Village of Azure Falls had been too small to have its own healer, and the girls had never seen magic until the fireballs of the knights.
He cast a powerful quench fire manna spell, one he had learned from Obert but never used. The fireballs stopped immediately. He landed on a stout branch and asked the girls to climb on his back through mage thought-talk; they scampered onto his back and held his feathers. He cast dwarfish strength so that he could easily carry both of them and leaped into the sky, gaining altitude fast enough to avoid the arrows of the baffled knight protectors. He used the healer spell calm soul to lower their fear of flying and headed back to his camp.
At his camp he let the girls dismount and asked them to wait while he changed forms. He went behind some bushes, resumed his normal form, dressed in the clothes from his pack, and
returned to the camp where he built a fire to cook some breakfast for the frightened girls. He saw they were shivering from the cold night air and cast winter blanket to warm the whole area of the camp. They sat and talked for an hour about what had happened. The girls were afraid to return to their village and wanted to learn more about healing magic, so Michael offered to help them get to a safe place where they could become apprentice healers.
Young village girls would not normally wear any type of ring, much less the gold ones he had enchanted to hide manna. He took out two small gold chains and pulled copper from the nearby soil coating them to hide the gold. After enchanting them, he explained to the girls that they must wear them every minute until they reached a location safe from the knight protectors. They clearly understood the risks after seen knight protectors kill their parents, and they promised to never take them off.
Michael decided that the safest way to get them to Black Sand Beach was to find the nearest dwarfish travel room. Thinking of the map he’d memorized, he realized that in the foothills two days north of his current location was a barrow that had once belonged to fairies who departed with the elves two millennia earlier. Near that ancient barrow was another travel room.
After they had all rested, Michael, Isabelle, and Anna set off for the travel room, the girls both riding Michael’s packhorse. Their travel through the scenic countryside would have been fun except for the recent tragedy the girls had suffered. In spite of the loss and their fear, the girls never ran out of questions for Michael and they rode side-by-side along an ancient stone road.
They wanted to know if he’d ever been any other animal besides an eagle; he had not. They wanted to know how he’d escaped the knight protectors who killed almost every healer in Hearthshire Province; he explained the help of the Naiads of Black Sand Beach. They wanted to know why they were going toward the mountains and not toward the sea where the naiads could help; he explained the dwarfish travel rooms. On and on the questions came. It was more talk than Michael had engaged in since the death of his mentor William. He loved it.
On the morning of the third day they stood over the location of the travel room. A pack of huge Cloud Mountain wolves had followed until Michael used mage thought-talk to direct them to a stag with a broken leg. The uninhabited woods seemed to have many dangers so he cast stone dome to protect the girls and horses while he began to use excavate to make a ramp leading down to the travel room. Two dwarfish statues guarded the entrance like all the other travel rooms. He traveled to Black Sand Beach to check that everything was safe before bringing the girls through, and found it was a long way from safe.
He immediately detected a huge number of fire mages, perhaps two hundred. He could tell their fire magic had been completely suppressed by submerge manna casted by the naiads, but that didn’t make knight protectors harmless. All of them carried two-handed swords and double reflex bows.
Michael used his fairy magic to become an unsubstantial form and drifted by through a ventilation hole he’d left in the tunnel. He saw massive changes in the beach. The knights and priests had set up three catapults and were lobbing stones at the reef. They had used a dozen wagons to bring in the stones and other supplies. The knight protectors had already demolished the top of the tower where he had stayed while visiting the naiads. Fortunately, they seemed to be completely unaware of the shelter he had prepared for the healers now that their manna was hidden and the entrance to their shelter concealed.
The healers should have plenty of food for another month, but he worried that the catapults were doing damage to the naiads’ home. He was furious that they were trying to kill his allies, and he returned to his normal form ready to do battle. He longed to charge into the fire mages with his elfish sword and cut them down. Somehow he controlled his temper thinking of what William would have wanted him to do; certainly his mentor would never have wanted a slaughter.
Michael remembered something that the fairy leader Morgan had said. She had commented that his manna was so strong he could assume any form, even a dragon. As a dragon protected by a stone armor spell, there was nothing the fire mages could do to hurt him. He decided that his priority was to destroy their catapults to stop their effort to hurt his allies. He had only seen one dragon in his life, a black one flying many miles away, but that sighting and the many illustrations of dragons he’d seen in books and paintings were enough.
Michael transformed into an enormous black dragon, thee hundred times the size of a Giant Ki. He soon realized that even with a massive wingspan, dragons could only fly by using the techniques that fairies used to reduce their own weight. He adjusted his weight and took off from the cliff, screeching his anger and shooting fire from his throat.
He cast stone armor and dwarfish strength and dove straight down to the nearest catapult, scattering the knights who were working it and grasping it in his talons. He scorched knights as he flew to instill fear before he lifted the catapult high into the sky and dropped it into the sea far offshore. He returned and did the same to the other two, each time sending a hundred knight protectors scattering while blasting fire at them to scare them away from the beach.
By the third time, four score of them had organized into a squad of archers. They loosed volleys of eighty arrows each time he was near. All of the arrows rebounded from his stone armor without his even feeling their impact. He destroyed the third catapult. Michael flew low over the archers buffeting them with his powerful wings and screeching in anger. The blasts of air from his wings knocked them tumbling across the sandy beach; the fire from his throat scorched them. They ran in panic.
Next he destroyed their wagons and scattered their horses. Soon the vast majority of the knight protectors and priests had retreated from the beach into the adjacent swamp. They were running directly into the greater danger of the Great Black Thicket. He didn’t want to kill any of them; the swamp animals would certainly try, especially since their fire magic had been suppressed and they couldn’t easily detect the danger. They would be unable to detect life forms with magic or use fireballs to kill them. He circled the beach blowing fire over their heads to encourage their retreat and several times landing to throw groups of knight protectors around to increase their terror. Soon the Black Sand Beach was empty except for remnants of their camp, broken wagons and a few panicky horses.
He flew low over the swamps screeching his anger while blowing fire and continued to patrol the beach diving at anyone who tried to return. Finally he landed on the remnant of the naiads’ guest tower and surveyed the scene. He realized that he was running low on the manna needed to keep his huge form powered.
He transformed back into his normal self and looked through the tower for the clothes he had left there. He found the chest of treasure and a chest with clothes. He dressed and used dwarfish spells to reform the tower, cladding it in black steel so that any future attempt to knock it down with a catapult would fail.
Once he was finished, he swam to the beach where Obert and three other naiads were inspecting the camp’s remains. “Obert, I’m sincerely sorry if those humans brought harm to you and your people.”
Obert smiled and said, “I think it will be a long time before any of them return. It seems you have learned things that even I didn’t think were possible. I congratulate you on driving them off without killing any of them. That is what a real dragon would have done although I doubt they realize that. A few naiads were slightly injured when they first started with the catapults, but after that we just went deeper.”
Michael asked, “Are the healers all still in the rooms I constructed? Did any of them see what happened?”
“They have no windows and none were outside when you arrived. I used mage thought-talk to warn them when the fire mages arrived three days ago. Do you ask because you want to keep your power a secret?”
“Yes.”
“They will not hear about it from us Michael, but the story will be known to every human in Glastamear before winter. A dragon attac
k is the best story in centuries, and there is no way it won’t grow in the retelling. I think it will be five hundred years before any fire mages return to Black Sand Beach.”
Michael replied, “All the church will know is that a black dragon didn’t want them to bother the Naiads of Black Sand Beach. It doesn’t need to involve a simple healer like me.”
Obert nodded in agreement. “We don’t know how to lie, but we do keep secrets through silence.”
“I have two young girls, just beginning to show healer manna that I need to bring through to the beach refuge. I’ve left them longer than I intended already. I’ll speak with you again tomorrow to see if there is anything I can do to repay the kindness of our naiad cousins.
Chapter 35
Michael returned through the travel room and found both girls sleeping on the pallets he’d left for them. Black Dash was restlessly pacing along one side of the stone dome spell, and Michael used mage thought-talk to determine what was disturbing him. Black Dash could hear wolves. There was a pack of eight enormous wolves probing the Stone Dome spell trying to find a way through to the horses and girls. He reached out to them through thought-talk but found only anger and hunger. They would not be easily deterred.
Michael knew he could face them with his elf sword shielded by a stone armor spell, but he was exhausted from his recent dragon transformation. He decided to try and sleep for a few hours; the current protection of the dome would last at least twelve more hours.
It was the smell of food that awakened him. It was not long after dawn, and Isabelle had made a fire where she was cooking oat porridge with dried blueberries and walnuts, food she had found in his packs. Anna was using water from the small spring to clean herself. Black Dash was still pacing anxiously because the hungry wolf pack was testing the perimeter. The dome spell enclosed a spring and a pool of water that overflowed to form a small stream. Michael saw one of the wolves digging in the soft soil of the stream trying to get under the dome. Of course, Michael had left an opening for the water to get out. He had also left part of the top of the dome open for ventilation. The rest of the pack had gathered behind the digging wolf, and they would soon be through.
The Pogrom of Mages: The Healers of Glastamear: Volume One Page 16
