Summoner: Book 1: The Novice (5 page)

The men in the tavern raised their voices in scorn as the door slammed behind him in his haste to leave. Laughter soon followed and the merrymaking began once again.

‘Come on,’ Fletcher said to Rotherham, his mind reeling with relief. ‘I’ll make you a bed in our forge. You won’t be safe anywhere else tonight.’

8

Fletcher opened his eyes and immediately regretted it. The light that cut through his open window was glaringly bright. He sat up, shivering, and stumbled to close it, his breath pluming in the chill air. He must have left the window open in his drunken state.

He blinked in the dark room, but could not see the soldier, only the pile of furs he had given him stacked in the corner. With a growing fear, Fletcher pushed his way outside and saw that Rotherham’s mule was gone; there was no sign of him anywhere.

‘Finally awake, are you?’ asked Berdon from behind him, his voice tinged with disapproval. He was standing by the forge with his arms crossed and a bemused look upon his face.

Fletcher nodded, unable to speak as he felt the first wave of nausea hit him. He was never going to drink again.

‘The soldier filled me in on last night’s events before he left. I can’t say I approve of fighting, nor the rather too literal close shave you had. But I’m glad you gave that little upstart a seeing to,’ Berdon said with a rueful smile. He tousled Fletcher’s hair in rough affection, making his head shake dizzily. Fletcher retched and sprinted outside, before emptying the contents of his stomach on the cobbles.

‘Serves you right! Let that be a lesson to you,’ Berdon called, chuckling at Fletcher’s misfortune. ‘Just wait until you try hard liquor. You’ll wish you feel the way you do now the morning after that experience.’

Fletcher groaned and tried to cough the bitter taste of acid from the back of his throat, then tottered back into the forge. He gathered up the furs that had constituted Rotherham’s makeshift bed and slumped on to the cot in his room.

‘I think it’s all out now,’ he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘Aye, you’ve left a nice meal for the rats outside,’ Berdon called from the forge. ‘I’ll fry you up some pork sausages and collect some ice-cold water from the well.’

Fletcher felt ill at the thought of food, but decided it would do him some good. He rolled over to go back to sleep and lay in the comforting warmth of the fresh furs for a while. The sizzle of frying sausages began and he shifted, trying to get comfortable.

There was something under him, digging into his side. He reached down and pulled it up to where he could see it.

A sack had been left amongst Rotherham’s furs, with a piece of parchment affixed to the outside. Fletcher tore it from its purchase and squinted at the near illegible scrawl.

The soldier had not been lying when he said he didn’t know his letters, but Fletcher understood it well enough. The wily old man had slipped away in the morning, but had left Fletcher a gift in lieu of a farewell. Fletcher didn’t mind. He was sure he would see Rotherham soon, although he was not exactly sure what he would do with a gremlin’s loincloth, if that was what he had been left with.

He pulled the drawstring of the sack open and his hand felt something hard and oblong. It couldn’t be . . . could it? He shook the contents of the sack out and gasped with disbelief, clutching the object with both hands. It was the summoner’s book!

He stroked the soft brown leather, tracing his fingers along the pentacle etched on the front. Strange symbols dotted the corners of the star, each one more alien than the last. He flicked through the pages, finding every inch filled with finely scribbled handwriting, broken intermittently with sketches of symbols and strange creatures that Fletcher could not recognise. The book was as thick as an iron ingot and weighed about the same as well. It would take months to go through it all.

The sound of Berdon plating up the food reached his ears, and he rushed to hide the book under the furs.

Berdon brought the sausages in and laid them on the bed with exaggerated care. Fletcher could see they were perfectly browned on all sides and seasoned with rock salt and ground peppercorns.

‘Get this down you. You’ll feel better soon.’ Berdon gave him a sympathetic smile and walked out of the room, closing the door behind him.

Despite the delicious smell that filled the room, Fletcher ignored the food and uncovered the book once again.

A single page slid out from the very back of the volume, the paper made from a strange, leathery fabric, different from the rest. Fletcher opened it at the place where it came from and read the words inscribed in the book there.

The last few words were an untidy scrawl, as if the writer had been in a hurry. It was clearly a diary of some sort. Fletcher flicked to the front to see if there was a name and indeed there was; inscribed in golden letters were the words
The Journal of James Baker
.

Fletcher recognised the common surname. The man must have been one of the few commoners who had the ability to summon, an occurrence discovered purely by chance when a nosy stable boy had read something he was not supposed to and summoned a demon by accident. With that revelation, most boys and girls of around Fletcher’s age from the big cities were now tested for the tiny trace of summoning ability required to control a demon. But Pelt was too small and secluded to warrant a visit from the Inquisition.

He inspected the loose sheet, pulling a face as he realised what the material was made from. Barbaric runes scarred it, with the summoner’s neat handwriting below spelling out their pronunciation phonetically.

Fletcher grinned and began to eat his sausages, savouring every slice. It was hard to keep his eyes from straying back to the grisly page. He knew what he was going to be trying his hand at tonight . . .

9

Fletcher was not sure why he had bothered sneaking to the graveyard. It was not like anything was going to happen, after all. For one thing, he knew that most commoners found to be adepts exhibited small signs of special abilities even before they were discovered, like the ability to move small objects or even generate a spark. He was pretty sure that the closest to a special ability he had was a talent for rolling his tongue.

It was exciting nonetheless and perhaps, once he had read the incantation, he would be able to sell it on his next trip to the elven front, with no regrets at not having tried it. He would find Rotherham and split the profits with him, of course. After all, it had been a generous gift and, if anything, it had been Fletcher who was in his debt and not the other way around.

He sat on a broken tombstone and laid the book on an old tree stump a few feet away. He had been of two minds as to whether he should leave the book at home or take it with him. Didric and his goons might have broken in when he was away, or mugged him if they caught him on the way to the graveyard. In the end he had brought it, if only because he was loathe to let it out of his sight.

The scroll was leathery in his palm, and Fletcher realised with a flash of horror that the symbols must have been carved into the victim’s flesh to scar over, before skinning him alive. He shuddered at the gruesome thought and tried to hold it with as few fingers as possible. The surface was surprisingly dry and dusty.

The words on the scroll were nothing more than a list of syllables, more of a musical
do re mi
than any kind of orc language. Then again, he wasn’t even sure what language summoning used; perhaps the orcs had translated what he was about to read into their own writings from another language entirely. On top of that, James Baker had written that this demon had already been captured by a shaman and somehow ‘gifted’. Who knew what that entailed? Still, he would read the words and then get back to his warm bed, happy in the knowledge that he had tried.

‘
Di rah go mai lo fa lo go rah lo
 . . .’

He began to speak, feeling slightly ridiculous and glad nobody was watching him, except for, perhaps, the ghosts of people long dead.

The words flowed from his tongue as if he knew them by heart, and he could not stop even if he wanted to, so great was the draw to speak them loud and clear. A heady, drunken feeling suffused his body like a warm cloak, yet instead of the haze that beer brought on, he felt a perfect clarity, like staring into the placid waters of a mountain lake. In Fletcher’s mind, the words were more of a mystic equation, each one repeating, in varying cycles, that were almost melodious in their utterance.

‘
Fai lo so nei di roh
 . . .’

The words droned on and on relentlessly, until at last he came to the endmost line. As the final words were uttered, he felt his mind shift in a way he recognised, that split-second feeling of razor sharpness that he experienced in the moment of his arrow’s release, yet twice what he had ever felt then. It was both familiar and alien to experience the world in such a way. Colours became vivid and almost iridescent. The small winter flowers that grew among the graves seemed to glow with ethereal light, so bright were they in his vision.

As his heart thundered in his chest he felt a tugging at his mind, at first tentative, then insistent and so powerful he fell from his perch to his knees.

When he lifted his head he saw the cover of the book glimmer. His eyes widened as the lines of the pentacle glowed, the star within a circle shimmering with purple radiance. Then, as if it had been there all along, a blue orb of light appeared a few inches above it. It was at first the pinprick of a firefly, then the size of a small boulder in the space of a few seconds. It hovered there, so bright that Fletcher averted his eyes, then covered them with his hands as the radiance intensified to a burning ball as bright as the sun. A roaring like the stoked flames of Berdon’s forge clamoured in his ears, sending waves of pain into his skull.

After what seemed like hours, it stopped. In the sudden darkness and silence, Fletcher thought he was dead. He kneeled with his forehead in the soft earth, breathing in great sobbing breaths of its grassy scent to convince himself he was still there, though the air was now tinged with a sulphurous odour he did not recognise. It was only the sound of a soft chirp that caused him to lift his head.

A demon crouched on a small hillock in the grass two feet from the book, sitting back on its hind legs. Its tail lashed behind it like that of a feral cat, and its claws gripped the remains of something black and shiny, an insect-like imp of some kind from the other world. It gnawed at it like a squirrel on a nut, crunching into the beetle demon’s carapace.

The creature was about the size of a ferret, with a similarly lithe body and limbs long enough that it would be able to lope with the grace of a mountain wolf rather than scuttle like a lizard. Its smooth skin was a deep burgundy, like a fine wine. The eyes were large and round like those of an owl, fiercely intelligent and the colour of raw amber. To Fletcher’s surprise, it had no teeth to speak of, but the snout ended sharply, almost like a river turtle’s beak. It used it to snap up the last of the beetle, before turning the focus of its gaze on to him.

Fletcher blanched and scrambled backwards, pressing his back into the broken gravestone. In turn, the creature screeched and scampered behind the stump, bounding sinuously as its tail switched back and forth. Fletcher noticed a sharp spike on the end of it, like a slim arrow-head carved from deer bone. The graveyard was silent, not even a breeze breaking the hush that had settled over Fletcher’s world like a blanket.

The yellow sphere of its eye peeked suspiciously over the lip of the stump. When their eyes met, he sensed something strange on the edge of his consciousness, a distinct otherness that seemed connected to him somehow. He felt an intense curiosity that was overpowering in its insistence, even as he was suffused with his own desire to flee. He sucked in another deep, sobbing breath and prepared to run.

Suddenly, the demon darted over the stump in a languid leap and on to Fletcher’s heaving chest. It peered up at him, cocking its head to one side as if examining his face. He held his breath as it chittered incomprehensibly then patted him with a foreleg.

Fletcher sat there, frozen.

Again the creature trilled at him. Then, to Fletcher’s horror, it continued its climb, each claw digging through the fabric of his shirt. It wrapped itself around his neck like a snake, the leathery skin of its belly smooth and warm. The tail whipped past his face, then continued to encircle his nape. Fletcher could feel hot breath by his ear and knew that it would throttle him in that instant, a painful death that Didric had already tried to impart on him. At least they wouldn’t have to cart his body very far for burial, he thought morbidly. As the grip began to tighten, Fletcher closed his eyes, praying it would be quick.