Wizard (The Key to Magic) (2 page)

But that realization did not mean that he must not try.

He walked to the low parapet and leaned out to examine the narrow, shadowy street below. At one time, he would have let himself down the brick side of the building via
that
convenient window sill to reach the iron-railed balcony that lay just a few armlengths further down, then dropped to the wide stone ledge an armlength below the balcony, and finally climbed down the hand and foot holds of the projecting quoin that framed a large sealed doorway to the left.

Now, he just took a casual step off as he cast enchantments. Instead of the smooth decent that he anticipated, he dropped a full armlength and then was brought up short as the spells surged. He had failed to consider the state of his clothing and it was quite evident as he did so now that his ragged garments were problematic as Vessels. His much bedraggled brigandine, scored and split by flying metal in the battle, was uncooperative, but he managed to infuse it with a fairly strong -- though insufficient -- set of modulations. The heavy cloth of his trousers took the strain of a weak lifting spell reasonably well, but the cotton of his shirt rebelled, popping threads and straining seams. While the combined spells supported his weight and he was confident that he would be able to make short hops, any sustained flight would be ill advised. Until he found a sizable object of stout wood -- plank or even a barrel would do, though he thought that he would hold out for a cart or something larger -- he would be restricted to walking.

Once on the ground, he picked a direction that he thought would get him to the edge of the village soonest and cat-footed it -- reveling still in having his own admittedly tender feet back -- by shuttered windows and bolted doors.

Surveilling the background ether was now as natural to him as being conscious of his own skin, and he observed, without taking particular note of, the ethereal sound-colors -- which he had come to think of as
presences
-- of the inhabitants of the buildings along the way. A few were in motion, giving the impression of having a drink or visiting the garderobe or perhaps peeking out of shutters at a stranger wandering the street in the middle of the night, but most were stationary and he judged them asleep. Certainly none of them -- if any actually observed his furtive passage -- chose to set up a clamor.

Satisfied that the village would not immediately turn out against him, he concentrated on covering ground. As he moved along the brick promenade on the left side of the street, he half-heartedly looked about for a few planks, buckets, or lengths of firewood to filch. It would have been more productive to stop and take the time to slip down one of the side alleys where such might more readily be found, but the sleeping village clearly presented no threat and he felt moved to indulge in the nearly forgotten enjoyment of a simple stroll.

One worry did begin to nag at him after a bit though -- something was missing from the ethereal miasma through which he passed and that lack made him feel
odd
.

At length, he realized what that missing element was.

The tie of the Blood Oath, for a very long time an ever present and unmistakable irritant, was absent.

He could no longer feel the flux modulations of his subjects, those thousands upon thousands who had spilled their blood in the dust of the earth and proclaimed him their king.

The shock of the insight made him miss a step, breaking his stride, but after a disconcerted pause, he resumed his pace. Unbidden, a number of possible explanations flitted through his mind, all of them vexing for one reason or another, but rather than dwell on these unpleasant thoughts, he decided to focus on escaping the village. He could try to sort out some meaning from this change later.

He did, however, increase his speed to a trot.

When he came to the first cross street, he slowed, but detected nothing untoward, either with magic or with his normal senses, and dashed through it quickly. He passed the second, this one little more than an alley, also without incident, but as he approached the third, a wide, main thoroughfare, he felt a strong shock pass through the background ether. Responding by reflex, he darted into the first cover he saw, a door deeply inset into a blank brick facade to his left. Pressed hard into the leading corner so that he could only be seen by someone standing directly in front of the opening, he studied the complex sound-colors that had caused the shock. The residues of the spells faded in a few seconds, but he sensed enough of them to know that they were not natural occurrences.

A skitter of a stone on pavement drew his attention back to the physical realm. Peeking one eye around the lip of the frame, he saw three large
things
-- monstrosities not seen even in his nightmares -- sweep out from the right hand branch of the thoroughfare and take station to effectively block the intersection. Larger and bulkier than a Gaaelfharenii, but more or less man-shaped, each had shells of overlapping plates, angular protuberances on the torso and arms, and irregularly placed spikes on the rear of its head. None of the hulks gave off any sound and none could be seen clearly. By dint of some unidentified glamour, all mimicked the colors of the buildings and streets around them. A gentle delving showed that the plates were composed of metal and substances that were not metal, but it was not the entrails of beasts that he discovered underneath, but rather the familiar flesh and bone of men.

For no more than a second or two, Mar envisioned himself bolting back along the street and dodging into the first opening that he ran across to find a way up to the rooftops. At an earlier point in his life, that was exactly what he would have done. Now, he just waited, continuing to delve the mechanisms -- the monstrosities were plainly artifice and not transformed flesh like the Bhrekxa that had attacked him above Mhajhkaei -- and began to work through combinations to adapt his lifting and driving spells. The metallic portions did not reflect the pure sound-colors of steel, iron, copper, or brass, but he did discover elements of some of those modulations and as far as he could tell the monstrosities' shells would respond to his enchantments.

Sound emerged from the centermost monstrosity, echoed along the street, and registered belatedly to Mar's ears as a voice. Roughened and sounding slightly
off
, the voice was a man's, was insistent, and was clearly enunciating a command, but the words were in a language that Mar did not understand.

As he considered how to react, devices mounted to the ends of the arms of the two adjacent monstrosities swung to point squarely at his hiding place, causing him to guess that the things had cast spells to locate him. The obvious implication was that the devices were weapons, perhaps flinging projectiles in a similar fashion to the Brotherhood's magic driven catapults.

Making a flash decision, he dealt with the threat, casting flux modulations to imbue the mechanisms with lift and hurl all three backwards. The growling-carnelian smashed the monstrosities into and through the red brick wall of a building on the back corner of the intersection, sending up a great racket and a cloud of dust.

Without waiting to see what became of them, he sprinted across the street, enchanted his brigandine again, and sailed in spits and spurts up two storeys of clapboard to the roof. When he landed, he took off at a dead run, making as little noise as possible. As the roofs changed level, he went up or down as necessary, and when he came to a street or boulevard, he vaulted across with the aid of magic.

Disturbances in the background ether informed him immediately that a pursuit, a dozen or more of the monstrosities trailing in a semi-circle, had taken up. They remained behind buildings out of his direct line of sight, but their complex spells made their locations as clear to him as if he were standing next to them. As all of them maintained at least a hundred armlengths interval, he left them unmolested.

As he ran, for the first time he began to feel uncertainty. It was clear enough that these were not posers like the Phaelle'n, but true magicians. The sophistication and consistency of their spells showed that they did not use a hodgepodge of salvaged ancient magic. Whenever he was, it had to be somewhen in the age that Waleck had spoken of, that fantastic time when magic ruled the entire world. That meant that he had to have plunged deep into the past, millennia before the Empire had come into existence.

His instinctive preemptive attack had probably been an error. These magicians might simply be the local constabulary and while perhaps only suspicious before, they now definitely had cause to bring him to heel.

Regardless, he needed freedom of action to accomplish his task and would do whatever necessary to make sure that he was not caught.

Still pursued but not yet confronted, he reached a pigeon spike-topped parapet. Below it lay a broader back alley that sliced off to the left and might allow him to double back against his pursuit. To sight and to magic, the alley was clear, but directly across from him on the facing rooftop were more of the monstrosities and something else that was hidden behind a glamour that he could not penetrate.

A ball of ethereal flame snapped into existence and blasted towards Mar. Almost immediately, he read the modulation of the highly energetic mass of sound-color and dissipated it. Before the hidden magician could cast another, Mar leapt down into the alley, easing his fall with a reinforced enchantment.

Monstrosities flooded the alley from his right, covering ground with wide, sailing strides. He bowled them over as a mass, then pivoted to drive another clutch before him with magic driven wind, opening a hole in their line that he instantly charged through.

All about him, the monstrosities opened fire, casting blazing bolts of multi-colored light whose cores possessed charges of grunting-persimmon. Deflecting these with a complementary howling-puce, he slowed as his magic required greater concentration, but continued forward, knowing that escape required that he break out of the cordon that the monstrosities were trying to close.

Before he had gone more than half a dozen steps, shockwaves crashed through the background ether as incredibly dense masses of flux plummeted from above, dropping directly on top of him.

Hastily cast layers of contrary flux, the spell an amalgam of an air shell and an adapted glamour, shielded him from the effects, both ethereal and physical, of the ensuing blasts, but the fire and light that flared outside his defenses dazzled his eyes and for a moment or two he was blind to his surroundings. Unaffected, his ethereal sense warned him of the sudden charge of the monstrosities. Blinking in an attempt to clear his vision and feeling his head begin to spin, he nevertheless managed to enchant all that approached and hurl them back.

With a sense of impending panic, he realized that if he did not leave quickly, his attackers would soon be able to concentrate sufficient numbers to trap him with physical bulk alone. He needed to get back to the open rooftops. Striving for a near overload that would catapult him into the air, he had started to infuse his brigandine when he sensed a sudden, shocking stir in the ether behind him.

He made to spin about, but did not complete the motion.

TWO

2170 by the Common Reckoning

(3211 Before the Founding of the Empire)

Dhiloeckmyur
Province

Beltr studied the unconscious man.

On his orders, the enforcement team soldiers had restrained the perpetrator with ethereally neutral steel manacles, binding his hands and feet behind his back and cinching the bindings together with an equally magically impervious cable. As a further precaution, they had also strapped an inert black hood over his head. Beltr had no restraining spells in his repertoire and summoning the aide of another sorcerer was something that he scrupulously avoided. Ambition was endemic among Compliance Officers and he had not achieved his current position by providing ammunition to his rivals.

By outward appearance, the perpetrator was young, between the ages of twenty and twenty-five. This had surprised Beltr. What little he knew of wizardry had given him the impression that mastering the discipline took most of a lifetime.

The perpetrator's stature and build fell well within the normal ranges. His facial features and hair color were likewise unremarkable. He had no readily identifiable scars or other distinguishing markings.

His attire, however, was more than passing strange. Trousers and shirt were cut simply from rough natural cloth and vest from thick leather. Decorated with hexagonal steel studs, the sleeveless vest was of a style that Beltr had not previously seen and was possessed of a number of buckles and straps that clearly had been added to make it into a harness. All three items were dirty, scorched, ripped, and holed. Bare feet extended from the ragged and shortened ends of his trousers. If Beltr had not known better, he would have thought the man to be some impoverished vagrant wandered in from the backwoods.

But the magic that he had thrown about proved the captive a very powerful sorcerer and that alone condemned him as an enemy of the Faction.

Beltr was sorely tempted to order the offender put down on the spot. Possible wizardry notwithstanding, his flagrant use of unregistered and unrestrained sorcery merited summary execution. Beltr's superiors would certainly not question that decision; elimination of potentially subversive threats was a normal and expected part of his duties.

With the faceplate of his helmet open as he monitored the comm phases, Enforcement Officer Nhilsi spoke up from just a few paces away.

"Sir, the Rep-Rec team has extracted EO Dlygm and he has been ported to hospital. The techs indicate that his armor is a total loss. None of the Vessel hardware can be salvaged. Also, they report that it does not respond to standard port or levitation spells. They recommend annihilation in place."

"Was any data recovered from his onboard recorders?"

"No, sir. Everything is gone. While he can't confirm it here in the field, the senior tech believes that the armor suffered an ethereal overload on the order of more than one thousand times rated capacity."