Sky Rider

by Terry Mancour

  Sky Rider

  A Spellmonger Cadet Novel

  Number 3

  By Terry Mancour

  Copyright © December 2018

  Contents

  Chapter One………….…..The Forbidden Experiment

  Chapter Two ……………………… The Chewed Stick

  Chapter Three………..……The Mysterious Invitation

  Chapter Four………….…………The Unusual Lesson

  Chapter Five…………….……The Halls Of Carneduin

  Chapter Six…….…Revelations in the Hall of Memory

  Chapter Seven..The Confrontation Before The Flame

  Chapter Eight……………..…..The Path To The Knob

  Chapter Nine…………..……………..The Castle Folk

  Chapter Ten…………….………………….The Chasm

  Chapter Eleven………….………….The Thrill of Flight

  Chapter Twelve………….The Request Of A Favor

  Chapter Thirteen………….The Wounded Soldier

  Chapter Fourteen……………The Secret Revealed

  Chapter Fifteen………………….The Night Flight

  Chapter Sixteen…………………..The Old Enemy

  Chapter Seventeen……………..The Dragonslayer

  Epilogue…………………………..The Sky Riders

  Dedication

  To Emily, Alec and, Madison

  Three of the most talented young women I know.

  Chapter One

  The Forbidden Experiment

  Sevendor Castle looked like a tiny white rock from the sky, a mere toy, Dara reflected as she soared with her falcon overhead. The towers that seemed so impressively tall from the ground faded together into a single hulking shape when viewed from the clouds, and the town beyond the castle was a brief jumble of tile and thatch, quickly overlooked. All the places Dara knew and lived in were just a rough patchwork crouching between the ridges, and the buildings she thought of as prominent faded into part of the landscape. It was the serene peaks of the Uwarri range that stood out, from the air, not the habitats of men.

  Such perspectives fascinated Dara when she was riding behind Frightful’s eyes. She’d learned a lot about such things in the two years she’d been magically bilocating with her falcon, sharing her consciousness and perspective through an arcane link. Dara knew birds see the world differently than people – than all land-bound animals, actually, she corrected herself. Each animal she’d formed a magical rapport with had a unique perspective on the world. But Frightful’s vantage was different from them all.

  Falcons saw things in terms of movement. The scale of their vision was much different than Dara’s, or another terrestrial creature. Frightful was aware of what was going on around her in the air, something few land animals even considered, unless they were prey. She could sense air currents and was aware of variations in temperature and pressure that Dara couldn’t know without using magesight. She knew where the sun and moon were, even when they weren’t in the sky, and she could smell the presence of other birds, bats, nightwebs and other flying creatures upwind of her.

  With all of that going on, what was happening on the ground was really of secondary importance.

  Frightful was hungry, and wanted to hunt, but Dara overrode her bird’s instinct and ordered her to come back to the castle. Now wasn’t the time to hunt. That would be tomorrow. Right now, Dara wanted Frightful hungry, not sated, for the task she planned. While that irritated the bird, she was far more willing to obey Dara when her stomach was mostly empty.

  When she was certain that Frightful was responding to her order, she withdrew her consciousness from the link they shared. It was much easier to disengage from the bilocation, now. Once, that had been a difficult process, sorting out whose thoughts were whose as they separated. But at this point in her training Dara could enter and leave a rapport with Frightful as easily as sneezing.

  “She’ll be back in a moment,” Dara announced, as she opened her eyes. “She wanted to hunt, but I insisted.”

  The beautiful woman in the exotic-looking robe frowned, as she regarded the wizard’s apprentice.

  “Is that not cruel, to let your animal hunger?” Lady Ithalia asked. She was one of the three Emissaries from the non-human Alka Alon, magically transformed into a nearly-human guise, and she was more beautiful than any human woman Dara had ever seen. There were minor differences that told her out as distinct – the shape of her ears and eyes, the narrow point of her chin, the unnaturally pale tone of her skin, the metallic sheen of her hair – but she appeared to be a tall, slender woman. Dara found that ironic, considering that Lady Ithalia’s natural form was no taller than Dara’s waist.

  “No,” Dara dismissed. “Hunger is an important part of her training. The relationship between a bird and its falconer isn’t like that between a man and a dog,” she reported. “Birds are . . . different. Falconry is a relationship based on hunger. The falconer’s ability to sate the bird’s hunger is what allows her to train the bird to hunt. If we just fed them every time they were hungry, they’d be as useful as a chicken.”

  “No chicken flew that gracefully,” Ithalia said, nodding toward the clouds. Dara, herself, could not yet pick her bird out of the sky by sight, but the Alka Alon’s astonishingly beautiful form also included acute vision and hearing. Dara would have had to use magesight to see Frightful from the top of Master Minalan’s tower. “The way they attack the air and wheel on a wingtip is just sublime! How exhilarating it must be . . . and how terrifying!”

  “It was, at first,” Dara agreed, as she pulled her padded gauntlet over her arm. “And more than a little gross, if I linger while she feeds. But flying is amazing. Once you trust the bird to know how to fly, and just relax and observe, it’s mostly just fun!”

  “But you’re just sharing her experience,” Ithalia pointed out.

  “And directing it,” Dara pointed out. “Far more than a normal falconer. They rely on whistles and calls to communicate with their birds. Frightful responds to them, but she responds a lot better when I’m in her brain, nudging her along. Or nagging, if you want to hear her tell it,” she snorted.

  “Your bird thinks you’re a nag?” Ithalia asked, giggling involuntarily.

  “I’m a horrible nag,” Dara nodded, grinning. “I make her do things she doesn’t necessarily want to do. I wake her up when she wants to be asleep and hood her when interesting things happen. She can’t even fly away to escape me, the way a wayward falcon can slip away from its falconer. So she thinks I nag her. The truth is, she doesn’t pay attention to much, outside of her stomach. If I don’t repeat my instructions a few times, she sees a vole and loses focus.”

  “She seems pretty focused, now!” Ithalia noted, as Frightful dropped out of the sky with frightening speed. She went from being a speck among the clouds to being a distinct shape . . . and then very quickly grew larger with her speedy approach.

  “She’s showing off,” Dara snorted, as she held up her arm. Frightful soared across the valley below and crossed the castle’s outer wall before speeding at the castle . . . only to stop herself unerringly with a sudden unfurling of her wings. Dara quickly gave her a morsel as a reward while she shook her head. “She wanted you to see how fast she is.”

  “She knew I was watching?” Ithalia asked, surprised.

  “She picks up more than you’d think, if you can distract her away from her stomach,” Dara agreed, as she stroked her bird. “She knows when she’s being observed. Alka Alon smell differently than normal humans,” Dara explained. “She always seems more interested, when one of your folk are near.”

  “She’s a pretty bird,” Ithalia praised. “Do you think she’ll . . . mind? I mean, it might be disconcerting.�
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  “She’s surprisingly adaptable,” Dara assured her. “And very brave, even for a falcon. She won’t mind. I think,” she added, knowing that Frightful did, indeed, have a sense of retribution, when she felt slighted. The link they shared worked both ways. “She’ll forgive me,” she decided, even though she wasn’t certain of that. “If not, I’ll bribe her.”

  “You might want to put her on her perch, for this,” Ithalia cautioned, as she positioned herself in front of the bird. “Otherwise it might be . . . awkward.”

  Dara nodded, and gently set Frightful on the thick wooden perch she’d brought up to the roof of Minalan’s tower, wrapping the jesses around it. She was concerned that she might fly off, if she was too confused by the spell. She gave her a last reassuring caress and sent her a calming surge through their link.

  “All right,” Dara murmured, as she backed away. “Let’s try this.”

  Ithalia cleared her throat, took a deep breath . . . and stopped.

  “You realize that we’ve never done this before,” she said, warningly.

  “That’s why it’s an experiment,” Dara said. “Do it, before I lose my nerve.”

  Ithalia nodded and took another deep breath. This time, when she opened her mouth a beautiful, inhuman melody came forth. Her voice sounded like a bell. The melody was unearthly. The words were in Alka Alon, the mysterious language of the non-humans, so it might as well have been gibberish. Incredibly beautiful gibberish.

  Dara wasn’t just experiencing the unhuman aesthetic of the song; as Ithalia sang, she could feel magic coalesce around them like a warm wind. That was a lot easier to do here, in Sevendor, surrounded by magical snowstone, than it was anywhere else, and Dara had felt the thrill of power from arcane energies on a daily basis, since she’d discovered her magical Talent.

  But it was different, when an Alka Alon did magic. The flow of power was greater than she was used to, for one thing, even when her witchstone augmented that power tenfold. Songspells had a distinct feel to them that regular Imperial-style human magic did not. And in this instance, the focus of the power was through a series of transformative changes in key and melody that seemed to rip open the fabric of reality, in Dara’s mind as she observed with magesight.

  She watched with breathless fear and nervous anticipation as the field of magical power built up in a web around Frightful. It had been two years since she’d begun to study magic, and she still felt a thrill when she felt it being used nearby – and this spell used a tremendous amount of power, she could tell. Likely anyone with a shred of Talent could, if they were nearby and paying attention. The bird barely noticed, she was pleased to see. It was rare that an importasta animal was that sensitive to the arcane.

  Then the song rose in pitch and ended with a compelling trill that acted on the power the Alkan spellsinger had raised like a match to dry kindling. In an instant, Frightful gave a startled squawk . . . and was suddenly three times as large.

  The confused struggled to keep both of her now-enormous feet on the heavy wooden perch, and her wings flew out to help balance her as the thick wood strained under a weight it wasn’t designed to bear. For all of her careful struggles to balance, Frightful over-corrected, due to the much larger surface area of her new wings, and stumbled off the perch to the floor of the tower’s roof.

  “It worked!” Dara said, amazed, as she ran to check on her bird. She slipped back into the mental connection they shared like putting her hand into an old glove, and she was immediately assaulted by the thoughts of a confused and outraged falcon. It took a great deal of calming, both mentally and through gentle stroking and cooing, to calm Frightful down. The Alka Alon sorceress examined the result while Dara kept the bird from flying away in a panic.

  “She’s easily three times as large as she was,” Ithalia said, studying the falcon critically. “She does not seem any worse for the experience. This is a positive trial,” she pronounced. “She can be safely transformed without harm.”

  “She’s . . . huge!” Dara agreed, astonished, as she stepped back to look at her bird. Frightful’s face, once dainty, was now the size of her puppy, Cinder’s. Her sharp beak looked less like an annoying thorn and more like a dangerous instrument. “She’s confused as three hells, but she’s getting used to it,” Dara dutifully reported.

  “There is usually a period of a few days as you get used to the experience of a new body,” Ithalia confirmed, nodding. “Trust me, I know. There’s a lot to adjust to. A new center-of-gravity, new strength, new eyes. Her burden will be limited to an adjustment in scale, which is easier than what I endured after my first transformation. There is a lot to understanding a humani body. Hopefully, merely being larger will be easier for Frightful to contend with.”

  “Oh, she’ll be fine,” Dara dismissed. “She’s just startled. But she’s nowhere near large enough for me to ride.”

  “This is just the first trial of the experiment,” Lady Ithalia countered. “The next time we’ll go larger. This needs to be something we approach cautiously, lest we make a tragic mistake. For this trial, we just needed to prove that the transgenic enchantment would work on her, and that she could adapt to the new body. And that she didn’t suddenly grow three hands and a fish tail or something because I messed up the song,” the sorceress admitted. “I worked on the spell with my grandmother, and she’s really good at this sort of thing. But there’s always a risk . . .”

  “Oh, I know,” Dara agreed, stroking Frightful soothingly as the bird stretched her new wings to get the feel for them. “Master Minalan and the other wizards are always cautioning me about futzing my spells. Anything could happen. Tyndal and Rondal are always going on about their spectacular screw-ups, and even Gareth has had a mistake or two,” she said, referring to the young wizard who’d taken her under his wing as a tutor, when she ran into difficulty in her lessons.

  “Mistakes can always be made,” Ithalia agreed, gravely. Then she lightened. “Of course, some of the best songspells were discovered through making mistakes,” she pointed out.

  “Some of the best spells, too,” Dara said, loosening the jesses on Frightful’s legs. With her larger size, they were binding tightly enough to pain her. “But Master Min says that that’s no excuse for being sloppy with your spellcraft. ‘No need to court disaster to learn something, when disaster looms within every casting,’” she quoted.

  “This is far from disaster, Dara,” Ithalia assured her. “I’m going to sing a little diagnostic spell, to ensure that she’s in good health. And then I want you to fly her again. None of this is worth anything if she can’t fly.”

  Dara nodded and prepared to send Frightful back into the blue sky. She started pulling on her gauntlet, but realized that the falcon was almost as big as she was, in this form. She would no longer fit comfortably on her arm.

  But she had to prove she could fly in this larger form, Dara knew. The entire point of this project was to create giant falcons that could aid in the battle against the goblin invasion that threatened the west. In addition to tens of thousands of ugly little black-furred soldiers marching by night on the western baronies, the goblin’s wicked master – a fossilized undead goblin head encased in the most magical substance on Callidore – also had real dragons at his command.

  Dara had never believed in the legends of the great beast until she’d seen one. And helped to slay it. No legend could fully relate the sheer size, strength, and terror a dragon inspired, when you saw one in person. Now she understood just why Master Minalan, the foremost wizard in the kingdom, was so desperate to find a counter to the ferocious, giant beasts. The one she’d seen had toppled a castle thrice the size of Sevendor Castle in an hour, raking through the stonework like a bear tearing into a beehive.

  It had taken the combined effort of an army and every wizard on the battlefield to kill it. Herself, included. That had won her acclaim, riches, and even ennoblement – she was officially Lady Lenodara of Westwood, now, and had a scroll to prove it. But the Batt
le of Cambrian had also given her a healthy respect for the forces who were determined to tear apart humanity’s lands. Sheruel, the Dead God, had hundreds of thousands of goblins at his disposal. And more than one dragon.

  This project was designed to counter that. At this point, there was no real defense against the giant flying beasts. But the Alka Alon Emissaries had seen how adept Frightful had been as a living spy on the battlefield, and they’d also seen the fierce little bird hunt. They felt that the killer instinct that the bird of prey held was well-suited to the task of meeting the great flying worms in the sky. So the three emissaries had proposed to her master that they embark on this project to study how to make falcons bigger. A lot bigger.

  Big enough, they had proposed, for a human to ride upon.

  That idea had boggled Dara’s mind – and she had seen the wondrous things that magic could do. But the more she heard about it, and the more she considered the great danger, the more she was willing to risk her bird for the effort. And, she had to admit, risk herself.

  Because if the Alka Alon did succeed and transform Frightful into a form large enough, Dara would let no one else ride her. There was just too much they didn’t know about the process, or what unintended results would arise from the transformation. It wasn’t that she wanted to be the first to achieve such an historic magical feat – although she secretly thrilled at the idea. It was primarily because she didn’t want to endanger anyone else in the pursuit of the mad scheme. It was bad enough that she was willing to risk Frightful’s life. And her own.

  “All right,” Ithalia said with a sigh, as she ended her tune. “She seems hale enough. I have a starting point from which I can deduce the differences in her metabolism, after her flight. Have her fly around Lesgathael and back,” the Emissary suggested. “That should be a great enough distance to determine how efficient her new form is in flight.”

  Dara nodded, hoping that Frightful didn’t just plummet from the tower’s top and splat into the courtyard like a plucked chicken. She took a deep breath, freed the inadequate jesses from the even more inadequate perch, and sent the mental command to her bird to fly.