by Damien Lake
“Are you deaf? I said I didn’t see it!”
“You didn’t go down far enough. Hurry before I die of boredom.”
It took Marik longer this time to clear his mind and open the sight. Since he knew what it meant now, he examined the auras of the vale and the animals within. He picked out birds hidden in the trees with astonishing ease, their blue auras separate from the trees’ green, as if they were torches in the night. Blue sparks flitting in every direction revealed entire unnoticed insect armies, startling him. For the first time he understood how many creatures lived in a relatively small area. There were no red auras in the vale.
All right, enough fooling around. Time to get down to it. Marik studied the valley floor, seeing nothing except the green aura of the grass. Nothing at all. What was the old man talking about?
As he wondered this, he realized with a start there really was nothing to see! Including the ground that surely must lay beneath the grass. Interesting. He narrowed his eyes, or he imagined narrowing the eyes behind his real pair, and looked closer.
The effect dizzied him. He felt like he had jumped over the drop to land with his face pressed to the ground. If he had not felt the hard stump beneath him, he would swear he’d flown forward to more closely inspect the object of his curiosity.
The ground and dirt still remained of course, but thin, like a mist. In the real world he would pass right through and fall forever if he were unwise enough to trust his weight to it.
A distant object shimmered far below. He squinted, straining to make it out, having forgotten already what would result from his desire to see clearly. Marik suddenly found himself falling through this vapory ground.
Except he did not fall, not exactly. He slowed when he drew closer to the shimmering object and stopped altogether mere feet from it. No doubt what it must be. The line, naturally.
From Tollaf’s descriptions, Marik had expected a kind of river, or at minimum a stream; a wide, flat flowing surface. Those words failed to accurately describe it. He could call it an energy stream all he wanted, except the word ‘line’ precisely described what he saw.
Shaped like a rope, long and cylindrical, it measured three inches diameter. It came from the northwest and flowed to the southeast, unlike true water after all. But then, why should it flatten out down here where gravity seemed an option rather than an unbreakable rule?
Marik could see movement within it as pure energy flowed past. It flowed sluggishly, though it definitely moved. Not in an absolute straight line either, yet staying true to its course.
He drifted closer with a thought. Marik could feel a sensation of heat radiating from it. It burned as a campfire, if with less heat, and Marik sensed danger, though in a manageable amount. Tollaf said Marik would learn to handle these energies only after further instruction prepared him for such. While he experienced these sensations and watched the line, he accepted the old man’s words.
Marik thought he had grown accustomed to this strange method of movement. With a thought, he ‘shut’ his magesight off. Immediately he snapped backward into his body at an insane speed. He opened his eyes, nearly falling off the stump a second time while he rocked from an unseen blow.
“Now what? Haven’t you had enough of that? Or are you so eager to visit the chirurgeons again?”
“Oh, shove it, old man,” Marik mumbled through a massive headache that crashed down on him all at once. He massaged his forehead.
“What’s wrong? You get too close to the line? Looks like you have an exposure headache.”
“If you knew about this,” Marik demanded through gritted teeth, “why the hells didn’t you mention it?”
“Because you never listen to me anyway, so why waste my breath? And I understand you now. You’re the type who only learns by experiencing things the hard way. After your head clears tomorrow, you’ll have learned not to get so close to raw power without shielding yourself first.” The old bastard grinned!
“You know, one of these days, I’m going to kill you.”
“I don’t remember ever being so disrespectful to my master when I was an apprentice.”
“That’s probably because there was no such thing as an older person when you were that young. I’m going back.”
They left the vale and returned to the town, separating without further comment. Marik rested on his cot to regain his wind before retrieving his sword from the closet. No one else occupied the barracks at the moment so he would be practicing alone unless he found a willing sparing partner in the training areas. Time to start working on his muscles, even if he still remained too battered to work on his technique.
His head continued pounding, and he vowed no training dummy would escape his blade. Since they would all represent Tollaf, it was unlikely that any would.
* * * * *
“Look old man, I’ve told you already the only sort of spells I have any interest in at all are these scrying ones I keep hearing about. The ones that let you find things from far away.”
“And I’m telling you, boy, that you’ll never get that far without even mastering the basics. You don’t build a house on the sand, you reinforce the foundation first! How can you expect to perform advanced workings when you haven’t so much as completed the first step of the apprentice techniques? You still can’t use your magesight with ease!”
“I can see with it well enough to stay away from those damned lines of yours! If you think I’m going near one of those demon things, then your head is the one addled!”
“Learn this shield working and it won’t happen!”
“I don’t have to worry about having another headache like that anyway, since I’m never going close to those bastards ever again! Just teach me something useful like I’ve been telling you to, damn it!”
Tollaf finally lost his temper completely. Marik felt a hard, invisible rod strike his ankles, sweeping his feet from under him. He crashed against the long table in the workroom on his way to the floor.
The chief mage regained his control and sat on his stool. “And here I’ve been promising myself I wouldn’t do that. Damn it, boy! I’ve had about enough of you!”
Marik sat up amid still fluttering papers but declined to stand, seeing no reason to give the old bastard a second free shot at him. “I only agreed to this because the commander said learning scrying spells would be enough.”
“You can’t use those workings yet because they need a great deal of power to make them work. And you can’t handle raw power because you can’t get near enough to a line to draw from it. And you can’t get near a line because you can’t shield yourself yet. So stop yapping and do what I say!”
“How can I trust you? You seem to enjoy playing dirty.”
“Oh, by the gods! A child could have thrown up a shield to stop that. Are you so proud of being capable of less that a mere child?”
“I’m not a mage, old man! I keep telling you that!”
“As long as you keep telling yourself that, you never will be. That’s the only thing holding you down.”
Marik started to speak, then changed his mind. A vicious kick from where he sat launched a toppled bucket across the floor. After its crash faded, he shook his head. Sourly, he spat out, “Ah, who gives a damn anymore? Show me whatever you want.”
“It’s simple, except you’ve never formed energy before, so it will be difficult for you. Add in your thick head, and you might be able to do it by spring.”
“You can skip the commentary.”
Tollaf’s brow beetled before he continued. “The way magic works with the mage talent is not overly difficult. It is the simplest of the various talents. You can craft a wide variety of workings once you learn the basics. You don’t need to memorize spells or chants or diagrams or anything like that for this talent.”
“This talent?”
“I’ll tell you about the others at a later date. Concentrate on your own for today. You know about the magesight since you’ve seen with it. When you see with t
he magesight, you’re not using your eyes, you’re seeing with your mind, using the extrasensory perception the mage talent grants you. You can also reach out with your mind and ‘grasp’ the energy you can see. It feels like using your hands the same way the sight feels like using your eyes.
“Different mages have the gift in stronger quantities. I think working with the lines is the best you can do. Don’t ever attempt to draw power from a knot or you’ll kill yourself.”
“Drawing power? I can’t even touch it!”
“Don’t jump ahead! Think of a mage as being one of four strength levels,” Tollaf commanded, raising a hand with four fingers extended obviously. "He can be weak, and only capable of using his own energies. He can still perform a variety of basic workings, but doing too much at once is exhausting.
“Or two, he can draw on the diffusion to augment his strength, but the level of his workings won’t change much. He’ll just be able to do more of them.”
“The diffusion?” Marik was lost, as he tended to be about ten words after the chief mage started explaining anything. The old man too often assumed that everyone knew as much as he did.
Tollaf stopped to take a deep breath. “If you’d put serious effort into your work, you’d know what I was talking about. Your magesight still hasn’t developed that far along. Once it does, you’ll see more, like you did with the auras. The diffusion is the energy bleed off once it’s separated from its generator. It fills the air before settling down and collecting in the lines. Once you can see the diffusion, you’ll be seeing the true face of the etheric plane. It looks like a purple mist covering everything and filling all the air.”
He glared at Marik, challenging the apprentice to interrupt with a snide comment. When Marik remained silent, he continued. “Now that we’re clear on that, the third type, like you, can draw on the lines of energy scattered everywhere. You can use them in your workings instead of exhausting your own strength. You can handle more advanced workings too, since your magical ability is that much more developed. Last is the type of mage who can tap into the knots formed where two lines meet each other. They are very difficult to handle, so don’t ever try it.
“A mage’s power works by absorbing etheric energy and making it his own. Taming the energy happens automatically when the mage takes the power into himself, but your talent can only handle so much. You haven’t been gifted with enough talent to safely absorb the knot energies. They would absorb you instead.”
“I suppose I followed some of that.”
“Will wonders never cease?”
Marik scowled. “But how am I supposed to absorb energy that I can’t touch?”
“With the shields that you’re going to practice. You erect shields to protect yourself from the raw power, and when you bring the new energy through them and into yourself, the shields transmute it, change it. It sooths the wildness from the energy and matches its signature to your own. Once it’s your own, you can use it for your workings.”
“That’s complicated.”
“It only seems that way because you haven’t done it. There are many types of shields you can create, each for different purposes. I’m going to teach you several to protect you and others from different combat magics, and you will learn them.” Tollaf’s expression set in stone with this last comment. “Today we’ll do the easiest, a simple shield to protect against wild energies. Knowing you, it’ll be simpler to show you the tricky way again, like with the sight. This time, don’t you gods damned move until I tell you to!”
Tollaf yanked Marik off the floor by his tunic. He positioned his grumbling apprentice on the stool, then placed his hands on Marik’s temples.
“Are you relaxed? Then open your magesight. I want you to watch what I’m doing and feel it at the same time.”
The sensation felt incredibly peculiar. Marik could never have adequately described it to anyone. He remembered the puppet shows performed by the traveling troupes who occasionally passed through Tattersfield. His arms seemed attached to strings like those carved wooden dolls manipulated from above by their masters.
He tried to put the strangeness from his mind and concentrate on what the old man did. Tollaf had been accurate to call this ‘the hands of his mind’ because he would have sworn he was using his hands. Marik felt his ghostly hands reach into an invisible pocket and grasp, as a potter might take clay from his basket to thump down on his wheel. Incredible as it sounded, his hands reached inside his own body, rooting around, looking for whatever Tollaf wanted.
The hands found what they sought, took hold and pulled. With his magesight Marik saw the white, pure energy he had seen within the flower and the other men he’d looked at. He understood Tollaf had drawn out Marik’s raw energy. His hands molded it, like the potter with his clay. They shaped it into a convex half-dome, a giant buckler shield hovering before him. The last act his unseen hands performed tied lines from the shield to the hidden source within him.
Tollaf pulled his hands from Marik’s head. “Always remember to tie the shield to your core. Otherwise the first blow it takes will send it flying away like a tiddlywink. And, if you’re working with a line, always set up surge protections just in case.”
“Huh?” Marik wobbled as he examined his chest, expecting to find a gaping hole.
“Don’t worry about that either. Once you get used to it, it doesn’t feel so much like having your guts ripped out.”
“You have this nasty habit of not warning me about these things.”
“No, you have a nasty habit of not wanting to listen to me. We’ll get into surges when you’re ready to work on a line. You can spend the rest of the day practicing the new shield.”
“I think I need a few moments of fresh air.”
“You just want to go out and run around with that iron toothpick of yours! You need to be practicing your lessons!”
“I’ve told you a hundred times, old man! I’m not a mage. I’m a fighter!”
“Spend half the amount of time on this as you do on that and you won’t be so far behind where you ought to be! You told Torrance you’d train as a mage!”
“Yes, and I never agreed to stop training as a fighter!”
“Well, until you’re done with your training, don’t think you can go anywhere else! You can’t ship out half-trained as a fighter, and there’s no way I’m sending out a half-assed idiot like you until you can stand on your own. Keep that in mind as the winter fades away.”
“You think I’ll stay around here with you while the Ninth marches out?”
“If you want to stay in the Kings…you bet!”
Marik stomped away to the training area, hoping to run into a real fighter he could face to work off his aggressions. What had he done to deserve this? He had never wanted much from his life.
When he reached the shacks and the gully in the Second Training Area he found a lieutenant in the midst of a surprise challenge. With him were two clerks, dutifully taking notes for the man while he tested everyone who happened to be on the field.
He had never met him, but then the only lieutenants Marik knew on sight and by name were Earnell and Piccary. That left only fourteen others in the band. Apparently the officer knew him, though. The lieutenant let him go without a challenge once he finished with everyone else. Torrance must have passed the word not to bother Marik while under Tollaf’s care.
Truly irritated now, Marik hacked seven straw training dummies to fragments before returning to the Tower.
Tollaf spent the day working on a trinket at the worktable. Wisps of energy drifted off the metal pieces when Marik glanced at it with his magesight as Tollaf poked at it. He wished to know nothing about it. Instead he sat as far from the old man as he could and still be in the room. Marik spent half his time trying to feel energies with his mental hands, yet succeeding only in knocking things over with his real ones, and the other half brooding.
Finally, having reached his limit, he hurled a pewter tankard across the room. “You know, I
didn’t join up with the Kings for this!”
“You only wanted to be a fighter, right? Bold and glorious, brave and proud?”
“That sounds good, but no, not really. How in the lowest hell did I end up in here?”
Tollaf glanced from his work as he had not at the tankard’s crash or his disparaging remark. “Commander Torrance said something about you looking for your father.”
“It’s why I came to Kingshome in the first place!”
“Is that why you’re so hot on the scrying spells?”
Marik had been about to erupt in a further rage of fury when his anger and the strength it gave him suddenly flowed away like water.
“What else am I going to do? I spent my first summer asking questions all over the northern kingdom, and I hardly got to one out of a hundred places he might have been through. All I have is a direction.”
Tollaf watched him for a long moment, then swiveled on his stool so he faced Marik completely.
“Look now, boy. I don’t usually bribe people to get things done, but I’ll make you a deal.”
“What?” Marik was pure suspicion.
“I’ve had piles of work building up because of all my time you’re consuming. Here’s my deal. You settle down and put in a real effort on the lessons and drills you need to finish for the commander, and I’ll work on your search myself when I have spare time.”
“Doing what?”
“Scrying is not my specialty, but I can manage to in a pinch. And there are other things I can do, maybe. Strings I could pull. If I try finding out about your father, will you put in serious effort?”
Marik pondered Tollaf’s words carefully. “Can you actually discover anything?”
“I don’t know,” Tollaf replied honestly. “If you have good information or an object connected with him, I’ll have a better than average chance. But,” he said, becoming stern, “I won’t even bother if you don’t!”
A good chance for a lead. Hells, probably his only chance at all.
“All right, old man. If you aren’t talking out your hind quarters, I can go along with that.”
