by Damien Lake
Marik smoldered but, with effort, kept most of it from his tongue. “It came in two stages.”
“It was one of the more advanced spells of the magician’s art then.”
“The first part came along the link between me and my shields. The second activated once it rebounded off one of my shields and failed to kill me. He said it feeds on the target’s energy through his existing channels before taking form to attack. That’s why it was so strong when it took the new shape.”
Tollaf raised an eyebrow. “Taking on airs, are we?”
“I had a channel open to gather in energy from the diffusion!”
Tollaf exploded. “You flaming idiot! You always erect a shield on your draw channels to prevent backwashes and surges! I know I’ve taught you that much! No wonder there’s not a drop of energy for miles around!”
“I was busy building so many damned shields around that damned magician—“
“That’s no excuse!” Tollaf overrode. “Putting a surge shield on a inward channel the second you open one has to be second nature! It works both ways and would have prevented the spell from sucking up all the energy within your reach. You’re lucky you weren’t drawing from a line then or everything south of here for miles would be a smoking crater!”
“I won in the end, didn’t I?”
“No, you didn’t, you stupid ass!” the old man shouted, angrier than Marik could ever remember. “One of the soldiers knocked down your foe! If that soldier hadn’t, your enemy’s next move would have been to splatter your guts across all the Reaches!” Tollaf glared harder than ever before, which would have been impressive if Marik were not the target of the old man’s scorn. “I guess the gods do smile on fools and halfwits.”
“The spell was aimed at my location once the second part activated, not at me personally,” Marik continued, wanting to move Tollaf past the moment. “That’s why I hurled myself downward when the last of my shields went. The wave might have been thirty feet tall, but the bottom of it was level with me. It worked since the spell kept crashing overhead after I jumped. It’s a good thing I wasn’t on level ground during the fight.”
Tollaf shook his head in wonder. “I hope you know why you’re still alive, because I sure don’t.”
“I’m not cut out for this. I’ve told you that a hundred times. Are you ready to believe me?”
“On the contrary,” Tollaf countered, forcing his temper down, “I think you are very well ‘cut out for it’, as you put it. You still should be dead, but you managed to use your extremely limited library of workings to accomplish your goal.”
Marik gaped, astounded. “You just sat there and told me I did everything wrong!”
“I pointed out your stupid screw ups! You should have known better about the surge shield, but your original concept worked out. I told you that surrounding the magician in your own shields wasn’t what I would have done. It’s unheard of! Nobody I know would have done that. That’s why it worked!”
“What are you talking about?”
“He didn’t sense them, did he?”
“He said he didn’t. When we talked to him, he said he has warning spells he casts every morning that alert him to incoming attacks. Except he never sensed me at all.”
“That’s because you didn’t attack him. The shields were a passive working, not threatening or aggressive, and so didn’t trigger his warning spells. In fact, if you had built the original shielding sphere tighter and smaller, that first spell of his might have finished the job there and then.”
It’s a good thing I didn’t give into temptation and attack him anyway when he was running for his components. “I was worried he might sense them if they came too close to him.”
“Perhaps. But magicians usually can’t sense etheric energy unless they cast specific spells for it.”
“Unless they have multiple talents. What’s a magician plus a mage? An enchanter?”
“Keep what you did in mind. On the battlefield, people expect you to attack them and shield yourself. Surprise is always a valuable asset in a fight.”
“Yeah.” Marik segued into his primary concern. “Since everyone’s moving south and regrouping, you won’t need me to play mage anymore.”
“You can’t add much,” the old man agreed. “There’s enough of us to handle whatever comes up, and I haven’t taught you how to work in a group yet.”
“Then I’ll go rejoin my squad.” He turned to leave.
“Wait! I have new exercises I want you to work on during the trip!”
“Save it! If we survive the battle at the Hollister, I might reconsider. I already have enough to think about!”
Marik ducked through the tent flap and kicked his friends out of his way. “Don’t you people have anything else to do?”
“Spanked again!” Dietrik laughed. “How can a master and his apprentice dislike each other so?”
“Because they never chose each other. What are you doing?”
Kerwin looked up from several paper bits he sorted through. “Just checking to see who guessed right about what you two would fight over this time.” Marik lashed a foot out from his seat and sent the scraps flying. “Hey!”
“Earn your coin like an honest man. Anybody know when we’re riding out?”
Dietrik answered. “Day after tomorrow. We get to ride south through the Reaches to the first of the Nolier supply bases, collect everyone and keep heading south.”
Landon spoke up. “Word around the camp is the Noliers are pulling back to the bridge to face us off there. They still hold the bridge’s facilities. Pushing them back across to their side might prove difficult.”
“The entire Galemaran army will be there for the last battle.”
“That doesn’t matter. You saw what a difference the simple earthworks make. A fortified curtain wall with barbicans will be a hundred times worse. Especially when backed by the entire Nolier army.”
“It’ll be siege warfare, won’t it,” asked Marik.
“If the king or the knight-marshal decide they want this over before winter, they might try taking it in a charge. Having the kingdom army situated on one border for seasons might make the other borders feel playful.”
“Aren’t the other borders neutral with us, if not friendly? The east has been the hot border for the last few years.”
“Situations change, especially if the kingdom you’re neutral with suddenly seems weaker.”
Marik shrugged it off. “I’m not overly worried about it.”
The next day, Marik reconsidered that. Messengers from the west rode in to deliver dispatches to the officers and trade gossip with the cooks once they finished with their official duties. He heard the rumors later as he snatched as much lunch as the cooks would permit.
Refugees had suddenly started swarming across the western border from Tullainia. Apparently the fighting over there had escalated beyond a conflict between high-lords, and people were running before an all-out war. Nobody knew any solid details of exactly what was going on over there. The sudden influx of terrified peasants meant governmental nightmares.
Trouble to the east. Trouble to the west. Maybe the fact that fighting was now his livelihood gave him new perspectives but there seemed to be a significant increase in conflict lately.
He managed to avoid Tollaf until they decamped and took pride in the accomplishment. Marik planned to enjoy the ride south, which promised to be relatively ambush-free. Especially with so much of the underbrush converted to ash. The Noliers wanted to flee, not engage in hostile contact.
Kerwin ran new bets on the likeliest course of action the officers would order once they reached the Hollister, Edwin and Hayden discussed the differences in their shooting styles, and Dietrik hummed while he worked the whetstone over his dagger during the ride. It gladdened Marik to be with them…yet his thoughts kept drifting to that arrogant scout Colbey, and especially to that strange talent of his.
He believed the man had tried to explain what he did in his
own manner, though the words made little sense at first. Marik suspected Colbey might not know himself just what he did. The method of visualizing and the manipulated aura together must be the key.
If he could figure out how to duplicate the trick, it would come in very handy. In battle, the biggest problem had always been the rapid weariness that built when facing multiple opponents. Colbey had shown no signs at all of growing tired during their run, and if Marik could do that too, he could take his fighting skills to the next level.
The key had to be the reshaping of the aura. He needed to start with that. Auras were the natural bleed off of life energy into the etheric. If he could manipulate the mass diffusion, which is what that energy eventually became, shouldn’t he also be able to manipulate his aura?
Marik rode through the charred trees, letting his horse follow the others, lost in picking apart this particular mystery. This particular onion.
* * * * *
Questions of what the knight-marshal might do disappeared when messengers from the king caught up with him. The combined forest forces in the Green Reaches left the trees and rejoined the main force two days ride from their destination.
A day from the Hollister Bridge, while the kingdom forces took over an empty valley to set camp for the evening, couriers pounded in on exhausted horses. They reported directly to the knight-marshal’s tent and stayed inside all night. When morning dawned, the Galemaran army’s leader emerged to announce his second-in-command would be taking over operations until his return.
He rode away with the couriers on fresh horses. Everyone soon knew that the king had urgently recalled the knight-marshal to help handle a new crisis.
“Told you,” Landon said after they learned about it.
“Told me what?” Marik responded.
“Hey, Kerwin! I’ll bet the knight-marshal was called back to Thoenar to handle the situation on the western border.”
“Odds?” Kerwin asked as he came over.
“Say, two to one?”
Kerwin thought it over for a moment. “I’ll pass. What else could it be after all?”
Marik interrupted. “Why the sudden urgency? The refugees might be annoying, but the fighting is in Tullainia!”
Dietrik replied while the other two argued odds. “The situation might be worse than that, if it escalated without control. There might be a serious danger of it spilling across the border and into Galemar.”
“And the knight-marshal is going to hold them back with his bare hands, is he? What men does he have if he needs them?”
“I think the king probably wants to have the man around to analyze the reports coming in and help make sense of things.”
“Maybe,” Marik allowed.
“And after all, we’ve pushed the Noliers back to the bridge. A siege isn’t that complicated a business to run. The knight-marshal can afford to leave it to his subordinates.”
“I have a bad feeling I can’t seem to shake.”
At noon, they came within sight of the bridge. The gorge it spanned formed the border between Galemar and Nolier. Marik wondered if he agreed with Landon’s assessment on the difficulties of taking this place. He had envisioned a sprawling fortification as large as a village with massive walls that would require a hundred-thousand men to storm.
The Nolier side matched his vision, but the Galemarans had built their side less grandiose, if still impressive. A massive stone tower formed the majority of the construction. The tower was rectangular with the wide end facing across the gorge. It rose six floors tall and eighty feet wide if an inch. Built right on the edge, a pair of ten-foot wide tunnels allowed access to the bridge through the structure’s center.
A twenty-foot stone curtain wall surrounded the tower and nearby buildings on three sides, built right to the cliff face. Though still a significant distance away, Marik could hear the sounds from the Tenpencia churning sixty feet below. Lining the tower top and the wall, and running back and forth along the bridge, were Noliers.
The Galemarans spread out. They set their camp at three times the range of the longest bow.
Marik, studying the tower, said to Landon, “I’m not so sure we need a long siege after all. With the number of men we have, it wouldn’t take that long to storm this side of the bridge.”
“You’re starting to think like those officers,” Landon replied. “You charge that wall and in the first candlemark you’ll have two-thousand dead men at the base.”
“I wasn’t thinking of an all out charge. The specialists we have can pull off surprising feats, I’m sure. At the least, all these mages could confuse things for them.”
“Which their own mages would counter. Really, I thought you of all people would know that.”
“It depends on exactly what they do. Still, I think this end might be takeable, and with the other border heating up, the officers might not want to wait through a drawn-out siege. The other side though…”
Marik looked across the bridge to the Nolier border garrison, which closely resembled the stronghold he had pictured in his mind.
“We could have the entire fortress surrounded, and I think they would still hold us off. Attacking straight across the bridge…not a chance!”
Whatever the new Galemaran commander decided to do, he held off on doing it the first day. Once the men were camped in a broad crescent arcing around the Hollister Tower, he established watches and lookouts. The provision wagons began arriving, being slower than the men. They started organizing meals.
Edwin came over to find Hayden and Landon. “The officers are putting together hunting parties. Either of you interested?”
Landon said he would stay behind. Hayden followed Edwin away. Marik asked, “How long will it take to hunt the woods around us bare?”
“Not long, unless they’re careful,” Landon answered. “It’s mostly to supplement the food we already have. Don’t expect any fresh meat yourself though.”
“Oh?”
“I expect the nobles will be taking their share first. I doubt they’ll leave much for us commoners.”
“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, knowing Balfourth.”
“The new commander is probably only organizing this to keep them happy and quiet while we camp here.”
That night, Marik sat in his tent while the others diced or traded rumors. He ignored their distractions as he studied himself with his magesight. During the ride he’d thought of one or two possibilities that might allow him to manipulate his aura the way Colbey had.
He had grown convinced the scout must be unconsciously manipulating his own energies through visualization techniques. Careful visualizing differed very little from manipulating etheric energies, once a person mastered the trick to it. Now he groped for the energies in his aura around his arm the way he did with the mass diffusion.
Marik sensed it beneath his mental hands yet could secure no firm grip. It felt like holding a live fish, scaly, slimy, slipping through fingers unless held a different way.
Thoughts of fish in his mind, Marik decided this problem should be approached in the same manner. He needed to find a different way to grasp his aura’s energy. After experimenting for a further mark, he finally seemed to have found one that might work. Gathering etheric energy was mostly a matter of visualizing himself doing so and letting his talent duplicate the act. To discover a new way to manipulate energy, therefore, meant thinking in a different manner.
He decided to try. Marik opened his channels as when gathering energy from the mass diffusion. The moment he touched his physical hand with his mental one, he knew something had gone disastrously wrong. Rather than grasping the energies in his aura, his channel drained the energy away! His aura’s glow around his hand dimmed quickly. Ice flowed through his veins as precious life drained away.
I’m dying! The thought abruptly burst forth through the intense fear threatening to drown him.
At the same time, the drained energy passing through his shield re-incorporated itself with h
is personal stores. The feeling of strength in his reserves grew while the weakness in his limb intensified. Marik desperately tried to close the channel, to stop siphoning his own life energy, but it defied him! It had taken on its own will. His control deteriorated further as he panicked, eroding under the relentless beating of his terror.
Energy and heat from his torso flowed through the loop. Soon energy that had already been siphoned off once drained through the channel anew. Marik’s vision faded. The figures in the tent with him blurred into dark silhouettes. In a desperate panic he erected every shield he knew between himself and his own channel.
An eruption of colorful darkness exploded inside his head. He fell over on his bedroll, out cold.
* * * * *
The next morning, Marik rolled over with a moan. He sought for the fragmented shards of his memory. Outside the tent the morning sun covered the camp in a warm dawnlight fleece. His friends had left already.
After memories gradually returned, he opened his eyes and studied his body, searching for damage. He felt weak. His aura’s glow shone thinner than usual but otherwise he had emerged unharmed. What had gone wrong?
Marik considered asking Tollaf before other memories returned. The old man had once told him of harvesters who stole power by draining their victims dry. He thought he now understood the concept far better.
He could also imagine what the old bastard would have to say if Marik admitted this little stunt. After the errors in his conflict with the magician, giving Tollaf a brand new opportunity to have a go at him ranked low in his priority list.
Food might help him recover his strength. He crawled into the bright light. The early warmth promised a hot day ahead. Marik scratched his face as he yawned, forgoing the morning shave until after he ate.
He mulled his actions during the wait for the cooks to feed the men ahead in line. Obviously he had been off in his thinking. Reexamining every inch of his reasoning, he failed to identify any obvious faults. His logic still made sense.
The probing of his aura had caused nothing drastic to happen, so the problem must lay in the channel he had opened. He needed to open one whenever he reached out his mental hands to gather in energies or to perform a working. Power flowed along them as he directed. Thinking on these specifics, he suddenly realized what the fault must be.
