‘So,’ Aneshti mused, ‘it’s not that you can’t think of new stuff.
If you see something that jogs your memory, you could have another genius idea.’
‘I guess.’
‘Hmm… Well, if you never have another idea again, you’ve changed Soken for the better.’
Orin stretched and grinned. ‘I think we can all agree to that.’
Chapter Three: The Right Hero
The White Castle, Soken, 12 th Menkarte 6022.
Kana raised her staff, pointing one end of it at a straw dummy some thirty paces away from her. It was already looking the worse for wear and she was planning to make it shabbier. She said
‘Firebolt,’ and an orange circle of magic appeared at the far end of her staff. She held it for a second, aiming, and then released the spell. A small ball of flame, a bit like a tiny meteor, shot from the circle – which then vanished – toward the dummy… and sailed past it to hit the earthen bank beyond it.
Kana frowned in frustration and prepared to launch another fireball. The spell’s name was Firebolt, but Kana thought of them as fireballs, like in fantasy games. Really, the explosive ones were more like the fireballs in games, and those came from a spell named Fireblast. It all sort of made sense. She was practising with Firebolt, however, because she did not want to destroy anything other than the dummy and she was skilled enough in casting Firebolt to launch weak ones forever. She could cast it just fine, but aiming it was another matter.
‘That will be enough for today, Kana,’ Master Battle Mage Hoeman said from behind her. ‘It’s getting late and it’s Menora. Put your staff away.’ With a bit of a flourish, Kana tucked her staff under her left armpit and turned, bowing to her instructor.
Hoeman grinned because he thought the way she bowed to him was cute. He was younger than many of the other Master Mages, likely because he was a battle mage, not a researcher. ‘You’ll be back in the classroom next week. You’ve been granted permission to learn a couple of… special combat spells.’
‘That sounds great, Master Hoeman,’ Kana responded, ‘but I still miss that target more often than I hit it. Don’t you think–’
‘At ten paces, you are acceptably accurate. The majority of combat situations will place you no more than ten paces from your enemy. Frequently, it will be less than seven. At this range, you can safely use Fireblast with sufficient power to make accuracy relatively irrelevant. You are good enough, Kana, though I won’t stop you practising when you get the chance. On Antora, I’ll be teaching you something different.’ He paused briefly. ‘You’ve
become a competent battle mage, Kana. Your time is wasted scribing scrolls. Next week, you’ll begin learning to cast spells capable of shattering armies.’
‘Well, that sounds… interesting.’
~~~
‘I’m not sure I want to learn to shatter armies,’ Kana said.
‘Those are really advanced combat spells,’ Aneshti replied, pausing in her consumption of the ubiquitous stew. ‘ Secret spells taught to trusted battle mages. You are so lucky.’
‘Where I come from, being able to commit mass murder isn’t really viewed as a good thing. I mean, I know that I would only be using this stuff to defend the castle, but it’s still kind of…’ Kana gave a little shudder. ‘I’m still not really sure I could use any of this in anger.’
‘If it’s use them or allow yourself, and a lot of other people, to be killed,’ Orin said, ‘you’ll use them. Soken is a fairly safe place most of the time and so long as you stay out of the dangerous areas. But there’s one of those dangerous places between here and the Alabethi Plains, also known as
“civilisation.” Skygge Forest is full of bad things. It’s crawling with arachine, and there are some tougher goblin tribes who make a home there. And you can’t go around it because you’ve got the mountains and then the Dvartim Hills on the north and west sides, and the Skygge Wetlands on the east. The wetlands are full of dracs who like nothing better than to chomp down on fresh human.’
‘I suppose, when you put it like that…’
‘Exactly. You see a lot of goblins coming at you, you rain fire down on them with a vengeance. They’re not very big or strong, but when there are twenty of them with clubs or stolen swords, they’ll cut you up with no problem at all. And they eat humans too.’
‘Does anything not?’
‘Elves,’ Aneshti said. ‘Elves won’t eat humans. Too stringy.’
‘Thanks.’
‘But,’ Orin went on, ‘goblins are cowards. There’s usually a bigger one, a hobgoblin, leading the tribe. Kill that one and a few of the others and whoever’s left will run for it. So, that’s why you blast goblins with Soansha’s wrath.’
‘Okay, so what about dracs? They’re like lizardmen, right?’
‘Good enough description. Those you have to slaughter. If you don’t do it to them, they’ll do it to you.’
‘Right. Safe world my ass.’
14 th Menkarte.
‘Pardon me for questioning your teaching method, Master Hoeman,’
Kana said, ‘but what are we doing out here?’ Here was a good thirty minutes’ walk outside the walls. The terrain around the White Castle was essentially mountainous. There was bare rock poking through shallow earth. Hardy-looking grass and a few very hardy-looking shrubs graced whatever soil they could find to root in. To the east and south, the mountains fell away into foothills and plains. The castle had a few satellite farms down on the plains, but Hoeman had taken Kana uphill, where no one lived and the vegetation was even more sparse.
‘I wanted you to see what you’ll be learning,’ Hoeman replied.
‘Letting this kind of spell off within the walls is frowned upon.’
‘Oh. Okay.’
‘Obviously, while we’re out here, I plan to find a quiet spot to seduce you, but that’s just a fringe benefit.’
Kana decided that he was joking. Hoeman had a sense of humour, which appeared to be somewhat rare among the senior teachers.
Most of them seemed to have encountered too many horrors from beyond space and time, or something like that. Maybe being a teacher just drained your ability to figure out what a joke was.
Hoeman laughed. Maybe it was because he was a battle mage rather than a researcher. ‘I hope it’s somewhere sheltered,’ she said.
‘That wind has some bite to it.’
‘Perhaps if you wore a longer skirt, you’d be warmer.’
‘If I was wearing a long skirt, I’d be tripping over it on this hike. Besides, if I get cold, I have a spell for that.’
Hoeman laughed, the sound bouncing off a nearby rockface and echoing back to them. ‘Of course you do.’ He paused and looked back. The walls of the castle were invisible behind an outcrop.
‘This spot should be suitable.’ Kana fought the urge to ask whether that was for the demonstration or the seduction. ‘Today, I’ll begin teaching you a spell we refer to as Fire Swarm. It’s an effective weapon for defending a gate or for frontline attack against a mass of opponents.’
‘Okay,’ Kana said. She had been thinking about it a lot since Hoeman had told her what he was going to teach her. She was still entirely unsure whether she could really use these spells on living things. She was also moderately sure that her opinion
would solidify rapidly if faced with a barbarian horde charging a gate she was defending.
Hoeman raised an arm, pointing it straight out in front of him.
His fingers were spread wide and pointing toward the sky and his eyes narrowed briefly. A casting circle appeared in the air in front of his palm. It was red, which tended to indicate a fire spell, and it grew rapidly from about fifteen centimetres to about a metre. ‘You can hold it as long as you need, but this is not like a traditional Firebolt. Watch carefully. Fire Swarm!’
At Hoeman’s command, a fan of fireballs erupted from the circle just before the circle itself collapsed with the spending of its energy. Fan did not quite do it justice;
swarm might have been a better word. Kana figured that the blazing balls of fire covered about a five-metre area before they snuffed themselves out about ten metres from Hoeman’s hand. Anything caught in that cone of disaster was going to be hurting. It was like a giant fireball shotgun!
‘That’s… kind of cool,’ Kana said. Actually, it looked like the spell would be really popular at firework parties. Not that anyone here seemed to have invented gunpowder or fireworks. The technology here was weird; Kana suspected that magic had taken the place of development in the more mundane sciences, but it was just a working theory.
‘It takes a lot of power. I’d be pushed to do both of these spells in swift succession without this.’ Hoeman shook his wrist, letting his sleeve slide away from a bracelet he was wearing.
Prominently displayed on the silver band was a large blue-green crystal which Kana immediately recognised as a powerstone, a receptacle for stored magical energy. ‘However, it’s easier if you don’t need such a wide spread and, as with Firebolt, you can vary the amount of energy in the individual bolts.’
‘I get it. If you need to stop people coming in through a gate, you can narrow it down and maybe add a bit more power toward damage. If you’re holding a corridor, you can make it even narrower.’
Hoeman smiled. ‘Precisely. Your tactical awareness is improving.
Now, the next one is definitely more of an open-area weapon. It’s very effective against massed opponents. However, it takes a lot of energy too. I won’t be generating anything like the maximum potential of the spell.’ He paused briefly, appearing to examine Kana rather closely. ‘With your talent, this could be enormously destructive.’ He turned, raising his hand again. The casting circle was about thirty centimetres across this time and it had more orange in its colouration. ‘Firebomb!’
What appeared to be a normal Firebolt burst from the circle and shot out to strike a large rock about thirty metres away.
Instantly, a red-orange sphere expanded out from the impact point
until it covered perhaps a twenty-metre radius. A second later, the sphere popped like a soap bubble and Kana was left looking at the aftermath.
The rock itself seemed largely unharmed; well, that was rock for you. Around it, however, was a black ring where the grass had been incinerated in an instant. Further out, toward the edge of the sphere, the heat had not been enough to reduce the grass to ash, but it had set fire to large patches of it. Beyond the circle of burning, the grass looked withered, and it would likely be burning soon enough as the fire spread.
‘Oh… wow,’ Kana said, eyes wide. ‘That was… That was kind of beautiful. I want to learn that one.’
Hoeman laughed again. ‘I’ve had that reaction before. The swarm first, then the bomb. And right now, you can put the fire out before it burns the entire mountain.’
Kana shook her head and started walking toward the rock Hoeman had blasted. Extinguishing fires was one of the earliest spells she had learned, and it would take her a second of concentration to put out the flames. ‘I get the boring job while you get to set off great big explosions. This spot might be sheltered, but there is no way I’m letting you seduce me now.’
Hoeman let out a sigh. ‘Such is the lot of the battle magic instructor.’
~~~
‘Master Hoeman’s nice on the eye,’ Aneshti said, ‘and not an old man. I’d have taken him up on the offer.’
‘Aneshti!’ Myshta squeaked.
‘Well, I would.’
Kana doubted it. Aneshti talked a good game, but she had never had a boyfriend as far as Kana was aware. ‘You’re just saying that because you’d be happy enough without clothes in that wind,’
Kana observed. Ice elves were resistant to cold; Aneshti had shifted into her spring wardrobe ahead of Sharassa, for example.
‘That wind is cold,’ Myshta agreed. ‘We’ll be getting warmer weather soon. I could live with some warmer days.’
‘It has been quite a bad winter,’ Orin agreed. ‘All over if you believe the reports coming up from the south. There was some snow in the Great Forest this year. It’s being seen as a foreshadowing of doom.’
Aneshti rolled her eyes. ‘Whatever happens, someone says it’s a foreshadowing of doom. Too cold, doom. Too hot, doom. Clouds blow south, doom. A chicken coughs at sunset–’
‘Doom?’ Kana asked.
‘Doom,’ Aneshti agreed. ‘Strangely, we rarely get doom, even though everyone’s always forecasting it.’
‘I didn’t say I believed it,’ Orin said.
‘I could certainly live without doom,’ Myshta said. ‘I’m sure doom puts a really bad crimp in your social life.’
‘Doom is to be avoided,’ Orin agreed.
‘I think we can all agree that doom would be a bad thing,’
Aneshti said.
‘Yeah,’ Kana said, ‘but eventually, someone predicting it is going to be right.’
‘Nothing really exciting has happened in two hundred years, Kana.
We live in peaceful times.’
Kana grimaced and then gave Aneshti a withering look. ‘That’s exactly the kind of thing that people say right before the giant monster awakes from its century-long sleep. Have you never heard of tempting fate?’
Aneshti grinned. ‘Don’t be silly. Fate doesn’t care what anyone says.’
‘This is all because you people don’t have movies. I’m going to have to invent Hollywood to stop you making mistakes like this.’
‘What’s a Hollywood?’ Aneshti, Myshta, and Orin chimed at once.
‘It’s the thing I’ll have to invent to stop you all falling into these obvious narrative traps!’
15 th Menkarte.
Spells were tricky things. What people thought of as the spell, the words and gestures associated with a casting, were just part of it, and a minor part at that. You had to understand what you were doing. You needed to learn the ‘physics’ of the magic sufficiently that, when you cast the spell, your mind shaped the magic correctly.
That was what Master Hoeman was teaching Kana when it happened.
Kana was not entirely sure what it was, but she knew that Hoeman had felt it too, because he stopped speaking in the middle of a sentence. It had felt like… being in a rollercoaster as it drops down a particularly sharp incline. Weightlessness. There was a weird pressure against Kana’s eardrums, and then the coaster rose up another slope and everything seemed to return to normal.
‘What was that?’ Kana asked.
‘Something caused a temporary depletion of the magic field,’
Hoeman said. ‘I’d imagine everyone in the castle felt it.
Possibly even the non-mages.’
‘It felt like I was falling.’
‘Mm. Remember the sensation. There are places in the world where the magical field is much weaker. You should be able to sense when you enter one. It will feel the same, more or less. That…
That particular experience was something special. I’ve felt it before…’
‘You have?’
‘On the day you were summoned here.’
Kana felt her stomach sink again. This time, it was a more natural feeling, but it still left her feeling cold. ‘Oh.’
~~~
By evening, the castle’s rumour mill had turned sufficiently that even Kana had managed to pick up on some of it. Myshta, however, was the best source of gossip available. She was quite happy to recount all she had heard at dinner.
‘The Master definitely summoned someone. An elf.’
‘You’re sure it’s an elf?’ Aneshti asked.
‘Pointed ears have been seen.’
‘That doesn’t mean it’s an elf,’ Kana said. ‘I’m from another world, so it stands to reason this new one is too. Having pointy ears may not mean “elf” where they come from.’
Myshta frowned. ‘I suppose that’s true, but I heard he’s definitely an elf. A vertagi, to be precise. Tall and handsome, too. Kind of regal. And he was dressed in golden arm
our and wearing two swords.’
‘Golden armour and two swords?’ Aneshti asked. ‘That sounds like the legends of Cadorian Dragonbane.’
‘I’m supposed to ask who that is now,’ Kana said, ‘but I’m going to guess and say that he’s an elven hero who used to slay dragons. The elves wiped out the true dragons thousands of years ago, right? So, this Cadorian guy is probably famous for killing some big-name true dragon.’
‘That’s… a pretty good guess.’
‘Narrative imperative. The Master said he summoned me to defeat some resurrected true dragon named Serpens, so a dragon slayer
just seems like the perfect fit. You said his name was Dragonbane, so…’
‘I have no idea what “narrative imperative” is, but… Cadorian was a holy warrior of Soansha during the Dragon Wars. He killed a dozen or so true dragons, including landing the final blow on Serpens.’
‘Sounds like the perfect man for the job then.’
‘Huh, yeah. Want to know the real kicker?’
Kana frowned. There was something even stranger about all this?
‘Go on.’
‘After defeating Serpens, Cadorian vanished on the way home. The legends say that he lies asleep somewhere, waiting for the time when he’s needed again.’
‘Or maybe the Master managed to pull him through time to now,’
Orin suggested.
‘I thought time travel was impossible,’ Kana objected. ‘“Even magic can’t do that” is what I was told.’
‘You can’t go back in time,’ Myshta replied. ‘What’s done is done. You can go forward in time. Faster than we already are going, I mean. But it’s a one-way trip. You can’t go forward, see what’s happened, and then go back to change it. You can use divination to predict the future, but that’s notoriously tricky.’
‘Huh. I wanted someone to go back and tell the Master not to summon me because it would be a waste of his time. And mine, obviously.’
‘And that’s why Soansha won’t allow travel into the past. Say you could. You get someone to send you back and you convince the Master not to summon you. But if you were never summoned, how did you go back to convince him. Or even know that you needed to.’
The Girl Who Dreamed of a Different World Page 7
