01 - The Price of Talent (33 page)

“If you say so…” I said with a little trepidation.

              So with that I turned and faced the archery targets. I picked the one at the end closest to me for convenience sake. Then I drew on the power around me, letting it fill me. I started feeling that heavy headed pressure I used to get before my headaches, a sign that indicated that I was full of unspent power. Then I concentrated on the target, and the feeling of heat, focusing on the bull’s-eye. Then I released the power. Fire burst forth from the bull’s-eye and quickly spread to the rest of the target.

“Ok, so the target’s on fire now…” I said. “Should we, uh, do something about that?”

“Now Tyr, I want you to quench the fire, draw its power out of the target and use it to attack the next target.”

“Uh, do you want me to light that target on fire?’ I asked.

“No, this time use lightning,” he said.

“Ok…” I said, gaining a little confidence.

              So, I started to draw on the heat of the fire. At first it was easy, what had become a bonfire quickly became a choked smoky mess. Unfortunately, I started feeling like my head was full to bursting and there was still more to draw on.

“I see your grimace,” said Claudius. “Start making a connection between you and the next target. If you start focusing the energy while you draw it from the other target, you don’t need to keep it all contained in you. It’s a good way to avoid that headache I can see from your expression is building.”

              Drawing and casting at the same time was surprisingly difficult. It’s a lot like thinking about two things at once. Your mind wants to jump from one to the other. Unfortunately, with magic, when you lose concentration, you lose the connection. So, with care I continued to draw on the heat of the fire while also forming the connection between me and the next target. Instead of thinking about heat, I thought about that crackling, prickling electric sensation. Soon, my hair was standing on end. Just as the fire was going out completely on the first target, I switched all my attention to the second and released the electric charge around me.

              There was suddenly a loud crack, and I was briefly blinded. By the time I had blinked the after images out of my eyes, and the ringing in my ears had stopped, I saw Claudius smiling. Then I looked at the target… Well, what was left of the target. The straw was everywhere and singed. The actual cloth that the target was painted on was split in half down the middle, with the frayed seam burnt. What was left of the straw stuffing was adorning nearby targets or floating down out of the air.

“Very good Tyr,” said Claudius. “I actually felt the hairs on my head, what’s left of them anyway, stand up before you released that bolt.”

“Uh, thank you sir…” I said, still a little disoriented from the lightning.

“Now, I want you to try to hit the third target with an icicle,” said Claudius. “I want you to hit the bull’s-eye. I know you have some archery training, so let’s see how accurate you can be with an arrow of ice propelled by telekinesis.”

              Fortunately, I managed to clear my head in time to hear all that. Not knowing what else to do, I started to draw in more power. This took a few seconds longer than previously as the lightning had left me surprisingly drained. But once done, I started to draw the water out of the air with telekinesis. It took me a couple of minutes to create an icicle the length of an arrow. Once done I aimed it at the target and started building the force needed to launch it at the target. While doing this I realized I was aimed directly at the bull’s-eye, which means I would hit bellow the bull’s-eye once it was fired off. Just as in archery, you need to adjust for gravity and distance. Once done I released the energy and fired off the icicle. My estimates were pretty good as I hit on the line between the bull’s-eye and the nearest ring.

“Again, good job Tyr,” said Claudius. “I see your skills are improving.”

“Thanks sir,” I said, more than a little excited that I managed everything so well.

“Now, I have other duties to attend in the castle,” said Claudius. “But I want you to continue to practice this over this afternoon. I want you to focus on honing your control with fire and lightning. Try only scorching the targets, instead of obliterating them. With ice, you need to practice your speed. An icicle isn’t all that practical a projectile if it takes you too long to make them.”

              When he was done explaining, he left and walked back into the castle. Since that left me alone in the practice field, though likely not unobserved, I had little choice but to continue to practice. The afternoon passed quickly. I managed to only destroy a couple of more targets. Not surprisingly, lightning was the hardest to control. Once you make the connection, the power tries to blast through you and into your target, draining you of all your reserves. This is very disorienting if you don’t exert a lot of control. Fire, as usual for me, was the easiest. It came naturally to me and I was quickly able to hit the target with concentrated bursts of flame that I squelched before the whole target was ablaze. As Claudius had pointed out, my work with ice was taking far too much time and needed more practice. Still, it was a start. It was not long ago I couldn’t manage lightning or ice at all.

              So with the job well done, at least in my opinion, and the sun setting, I headed back towards the mess for some dinner.

Chapter 19.

              The next few weeks passed quickly. My days were spent training, both with the new inquisitor initiates and by myself. Typically my mornings were spent with the initiates, and the afternoons were spent with Claudius training me privately. I had very little interaction with the few initiates who, like Meredith, showed considerably more magical talent. My evenings were technically free, though I split my time between training with my sword in the yard, exploring the library, and hanging out with Meredith after her classes and hospital duties were over.

              The library was on the right side of the main entryway to the castle, if you were facing the entrance from the inside. It took up the whole first floor of that wing, above which the general student classrooms were. Because I was getting private tutoring from Claudius, I had not spent much time on this second story. I did take a walk down the second floor hallway one evening, just out of curiosity, but it was a little underwhelming. I don’t know what I was expecting to find, but empty rooms filled with desks and chairs, with a slate board on one wall, where presumably the teacher wrote out important facts with chalk, was not it. Mostly, it looked like a larger version of the town clerk’s office near where I grew up.

              The library itself was quite large. It had what seemed like thousands of books stacked tightly on tall shelves. Meredith let me know that there were many basements below where more controversial books were kept. However, since nobody here quite trusted me, this was an area of the library that was strictly off limits to me. That might explain why Claudius just described them as storage, because functionally that’s exactly what they were, but also because I think he didn’t want me to get too curious about them. Still, the official library was quite interesting. There were whole sections on history, science, philosophy and art. Of course, these were all the official histories and sanctioned scholarly work, so everything matched official church doctrine. I could see why the allure of the library basements was hard for Ross to ignore, with every book towing the line on church doctrine, it made you curious about what information they were concealing. Still, what information was available seemed to fit with the history that Ross had told me those many months ago. The only real difference being that the official versions made everything seem inevitable and had the army of mages yielding to the superior might of the high priest’s armies, instead of the more desperate struggle that Ross said actually took place.

              My evenings with Meredith started mostly as a way for her to decompress after stressful days in the hospital treating the sick and injured from Sudchester and the surrounding area. For me, they were one of my very few opportunities to socialize with someone without either Claudius or Alfieri acting as chaperone. Also, I had found that the other initiates, even the inquisitor initiates I worked with every day, were none too anxious to get to know me. Apparently my pre-capture exploits were well known, and few people were all that anxious to get to know someone they thought of as a murderer. That I had only killed in self-defense did nothing to dispel rumors or cleanse me of my bad reputation. Fortunately, Meredith knew the truth, and had seen the true nature of the church power when the inquisitors had arrested me, and later herself and her father.

              After some time though, our meetings also became planning sessions for our escape. The biggest problem that we had encountered is that there seemed to be no record of her father’s detention, at least not in any parts of the castle that we had access to. This lack of information only deepened Meredith’s concern and her resolve to escape with me. A secondary problem was that I was no good at mental magic. Claudius had captured me fairly easily simply by hitting me with his knockout spell. As Meredith explained it, the technique involved hitting parts of the brain with energy, overwhelming it, and causing the person to lose consciousness. She said it was similar to what happens when you get physically knocked out, just without the long term negative effects that can occur when the brain receives physical trauma. The spell was frequently used as a form of anesthetic at the hospital when surgery was necessary. Just knock the person out and keep periodically blasting his or her brain with energy until he or she was ready to start the healing and recuperation process.

              Because escaping meant having to avoid getting knocked out again, Meredith spent many evenings trying to teach me how to resist the spell. The actual process involves sensing the power, recognizing its pattern, and pushing back against it. Unfortunately, my abilities in this regard were woefully inadequate. Meredith had no problem brushing past my defenses and knocking me out. The best I could do was keep myself from passing out entirely, I still would lose my balance and barely keep my consciousness. And even then, when subjected to the spell repeatedly, my defenses would fail and I would lose consciousness. At first we tried to do this facing each other from a standing position. A couple of nasty falls later and we decided it would be better if I practiced fighting the spell while sitting on my bed. It took a long time before I graduated from there to a chair. Even then, the first time I tried to defend myself from the spell, I practically fell over. Since these sessions were done in my room to avoid prying eyes, my sword got to watch the whole thing. He thought it was hilarious. Of course, instead of practice, he thought of it as my falling over for his amusement. The side benefit of this is that he had become quite enamored with Meredith. Anyone that could knock me out that easily was ok in his book.

              My evenings spent practicing with my sword were more rewarding. These were usually the evenings that Meredith had night shift at the hospital and I didn’t feel like exploring the library. There was something about the fading twilight and an empty practice yard that drew me into practicing my sword work. As the summer had faded into fall. The evening air had taken on a crisper, cooler quality. This made a bit of physical exertion pleasant, instead of when I had to engage in it during the heat of the day when practicing with Alfieri and the initiate inquisitors, or with Claudius during my private tutoring sessions.

              My practices would start with running through the forms and exercises that I had been taught by Devlin as a means of warm up. Then I would focus on learning new skills with the sword. I found out early that the sword flew best while spinning like a big buzz saw. My other discovery was that the sword worked surprisingly well as a wand. It made focusing lighting strikes easier, in much the same way that Claudius’s wand could. Adding lightning to my strikes gave them a bit of an explosive quality. This was caused by the energy discharging as it came near to the targets. I could also make the sword white hot, causing it to burn through the target when I hit it. On a normal sword, this would quickly cause the blade to deform, as white hot metal becomes more malleable, which is why blacksmiths heat metal to this temperature before working on it. But because my sword was magic, it retained its strength and rigidity despite the amount of heat focused in the blade. I could also make the blade ice cold, but I had not found a practical use for that yet.

              My time with the initiate inquisitors presented me with a more varied set of activities. Alfieri needed to teach them a wide array of skills and, while he did not like me personally, he found me quite useful in training the inquisitors. Frequently he would have me hide somewhere within the castle and grounds and have me periodically channel some magical energy. He would then send out his pupils to find me. Sometimes it took them longer than others. The inquisitor initiates had the most trouble finding me during the times when priest initiates were practicing magic in their classes. The false signals created a sort of interference and made it hard for them and their medallions to discern a single magic user. Other times he would have me spar with them, under very close supervision, and tell me to use one type of magic to aid my attacks or another. The idea was to get them used to dealing with someone who may have learned on their own how to put their magic to use. This had the side benefit of teaching me which techniques confounded them the most. Also, it gave me a chance to try and maintain my mental focus while also defending myself with a weapon. Or, since it was sparring, a wooden stave. I found that it was too difficult to try and make snowballs to throw at them (snowballs, not icicles, because if they did hit an initiate they were less likely to get impaled by a snowball). It took too much time and energy to make a snowball for it to be useful during a fight. Lighting their staves on fire worked like a charm though; well, until an initiate burned a finger and Alfieri put a stop to that. I also enjoyed using telekinesis to trip them, move their guard out of the way of my strikes, or send them flying. I could even use it to disarm my opponent, if they weren’t expecting it and I had drawn enough energy. Still, the initiates were clever and they were developing strategies to deal with my skills. The most effective technique was just to overwhelm me with numbers. I could fight off one or two, and maybe trip a third with telekinesis, but four or five coming at me at once was too much usually.

              All of this presented quite a few practical issues for any future escape attempts. Unfortunately, we had no idea where Meredith’s father was being held, and had been able to find no records of his capture. As winter was approaching we would need warm gear for long treks through the cold and we only had access to the church supplied monk and nurse attire. Then there was the issue that, while I could defend myself, I could be overwhelmed by numbers and Claudius could knock me out quite easily. Lastly, and most importantly, we did not have any real plan of escape. So, no plan, no destination and inadequate gear made our intended escape a difficult proposition.

              One evening in early fall, when Meredith dropped by after rounds at the hospital, I decided to voice my concerns.

“And then the same farmer was back with his stitched up arm infected again. So I asked him, ‘have you been changing the dressing and keeping it clean like I asked?’ and he had the gall to say ‘yes’ despite the fact that he showed up with the same dressing I put on it a week earlier!’” Meredith said, mid-rant about one of the patients she had seen that day. “I swear, I can’t wait to get out of here, find my father and get away from all these idiots. My patients back home were never this dumb.”

“Meredith, sorry for interrupting, but I was wondering if you had any more thoughts on how we are going to escape?” I asked. “Because I have and it doesn’t seem like we have very many practical options. We don’t have the proper gear, we don’t know where your father is, and we don’t know where we will go even if we find him.”

“Ok, fine, if you don’t want to hear about my day anymore… I have been doing some thinking on the subject,” she replied. “I have been doing some digging, and apparently they keep files on all the students they house and train here at Caer Sud. If we could get access to these files, we may be able to find out what happened to my father, and possibly even your friends; you know, the gang of bandits you were living with.”

“Well, that sounds like a promising lead. Where are these records located?” I asked.

“Uh, well, this is why I haven’t brought it up yet. I don’t know.” She responded.

“Well, that does pose a problem,” I said. “What about the issue of getting the gear we will need to escape during the winter?”

“Oh, that’s fairly easy,” she replied. “The castle has quite a lot of storerooms with gear for inquisitors to go on patrols. My thought is we just borrow some of these supplies before we leave.”

“And where are these supply rooms?” I asked.

“In the main castle somewhere,” said Meredith. “Probably near where the guards are housed.”

“So, in some room in the basement of the castle?” I asked. “That’s what we know?”

“Yeah, pretty much,” she said. “Back when you were being housed in the dungeon, I used to be allowed through there all the time. The guards were always quite friendly.”

“I’ll bet they were…” I said, remembering how not friendly they were to me.

              To be more charitable, they weren’t friendly, in that they made no attempt to be friendly towards me. But they didn’t do anything to make my stay any more unpleasant either. But given my temperament at the time, I was not likely to view them all that charitably. After all, I had spent quite some time locked in a cold stone room in the basement, and they were the people whose job it was to keep me there.

“I bet if I talk to one or two of them they’ll lead me to the storerooms and I’ll be able to leave with what we need,” she said.

“And how were you planning on doing that?” I asked.

“Oh, by asking one of the younger men to join me in the storeroom,” She said. “They’re usually the ones most eager to help me when I’ve visited people there before. You’d think they’d have never seen a girl before by how they react when I’m around. There are plenty of girls in both the inquisitors and the guard though.”