Fortress Draconis (23 page)

He knew his tutors were manipulating him. They would show him new spells, teach him new techniques, then punish him by making him practice foundational elements.

And because this bored him, he turned more willingly and attentively to the new material they were teaching him.

Or so they thought.

Kerrigan had seen, very early on, that he had two types of tutors. The first type just cared about achievement; they had been given a goal. He never knew what it was until after he’d hit it, because that tutor would be gone and a new one would have appeared. These types of tutors were easy . to manipulate. He could show some promise, suffer a series of setbacks, then rise up and do well before plateauing again. Their happiness and frustration would rise and fall with the tides. Since these tutors clearly wanted to be done with him, he could punish them by making it seem as if they would be stuck with him for an eternity.

The second type of tutor concerned himself with precision. These made up, by and large, the tutors he’d had in the last seven years. Often they were not human at all, and clearly doubtful that he could master the magicks they were showing him. Despite his being a tenth the age of some of the eldest human mages, and a tinier fraction of the age of his nonhuman teachers, he did work his way through their magicks. Most could not believe this, so they made him do things over and over again. For them he became obsessively precise—he had no choice. Orla might have ordered him to perform a healing spell while on one knee, but Magister Phyreynol would have punished him for a week for doing that.

Pleasing this latter group of Magisters was not as difficult as he would have thought. Kerrigan reveled in order and precision. He preferred peace and calm, didn’t want any distractions. It allowed him to feel and experience the nature of the magick he was weaving. For him, that felt like hearing music carried on the wind. He could feel other great magicks out there, but couldn’t quite catch enough hints to capture them.

Early on he found another tool for manipulating his tutors. Food. He insisted they take their meals with him. If they refused he became sulky and balky until they did. Then he would request all sorts of things, quickly discerning what they liked and what they hated. Since they ate the same food he did at their shared meals, simply by choosing what he would and would not eat he punished and rewarded them. He especially enjoyed fattening up the lean ones.

Kerrigan thought about Orla as he sat in a corner of the kitchen on a stout stool. All around him Magisters, Adepts, and Apprentices labored hard, dragging about huge sacks of flour, mixing things in mammoth bowls, feeding wood into fires to heat stoves. He wondered why they were not using magick to do things, the way they would have normally, then realized they were husbanding their magickal strength for other tasks.

Orla, he knew, would have been pleased that he’d made that observation, but she would want more. “Why?” was a question she seemed to ask incessantly. She asked him to think about things more deeply than anyone else ever had, and she demanded of him tasks that never would have occurred to his other tutors.

As he munched his black bread, Kerrigan wondered why everyone was holding back on magick. It certainly seemed true that physical strength and nonmagickal means accomplished the intended goals. It might take longer for bread to be mixed, for it to rise, and for it to bake than without magick, but it got done. The small loaf in his hand had been burned on one end, which he’d not seen before, but it still tasted good and seemed to fill his tummy.

He shrugged, fairly certain it was some command come down from the Grand Magister, for reasons known only to him. Most things he didn’t understand were explained that way, and he found that explanation comforting. Whenever he asked a tutorwhy he was supposed to do one thing or another, that was always the reply.

Save with Orla.She’d always ask him to puzzle out a reason. He’d do his best and she’d accept what he said. Still, he did sense some disappointment there. She clearly expected him to have another answer. Since his answers to her were not wrong, though, Kerrigan found it beyond him to puzzle out what else she wanted him to say.

He finished his bread—excepting the burned heel that he tossed to a dog—and washed it down with watered ale. It tasted horrible, but he drank it anyway. He carried the cup to a washing-up bucket that was on his way to the door and dropped it in. The Apprentice who had her arms up to the elbows in steaming soapy water gave him a glare. He let his nostrils flare at her, then continued blithely out of the kitchen.

Kerrigan shielded his eyes against the sun for a moment, then set off down a winding pathway toward the small port. As the pathway dipped behind forested hills, he lost sight of the ocean and the ships. Despite that, the stream of people moving inland made his course easy to pick out.

Vilwan had always been his home, and while he did not often venture out of the tower complex in which he lived and was schooled, he still felt comfortable with his surroundings. The vegetation on the hillsides, while quite thick and lush, lay in a rainbow patchwork. The color was by no means uniform, since scarlet plants bore blue berries or silver flowers and so forth, but the reactions of the travelers led Kerrigan to believe such things were exotic.

Exotic is exactly what he found the travelers to be. They both amused and scared him. They dressed in an absolute riot of colors, and in many layers. They even sported trousers—he scarcely saw a robe among them—and many wore swords and daggers and carried bows and quivers full of arrows. Scars puckered flesh, yellowed and crooked teeth filled smiles, and the way some of them smelled! Kerrigan felt sure he could have found his way to the port just by following his nose.

The travelers spread throughout the island. Each type of magick had its own tower complex, with the Magisters’ tower being at the center of the island. Kerrigan lived there, and tutors came to him, rather than his going to their towers to learn. Excepting those Apprentices given menial chores to perform as punishment, he seldom saw people his own age on Vilwan, and fewer still magickers of his rank.

While the procession of people onto the island had been surprising and interesting, their motion provided a general sense of order. The port itself had been given over to chaos. Ships rode uneasily at anchor, rising and falling with waves. Apprentices clustered around, laughing and shouting. Sailors called back to them, then some Adept would send the Apprentices up the gangway to help unload the ship.

Into this maelstrom of activity Kerrigan strode at his own pace. He marveled at everything, trying to memorize it all. He wanted his own record of it so he could compare it with the official history. In those pages he’d read so much, but little of it had come alive for him. Here he was seeing more than he’d ever seen before, and luxuriated in its complexity.

The sights, the sounds, the smells, the words, the accents, it all pounded into him. He rose to greet each wave of it, smiling in spite of himself. He caught glances by Adepts, saw them nod to one another. He assumed they might be talking about him, but couldn’t imagine why. Here, on the docks, he felt like everyone else.

“You, how about some help?”

Kerrigan blinked his green eyes and turned to the sound of the voice. There, at the railing of a ship, stood an elf. A bulging sack hung from one hand. On the gangway below, Apprentices and young men from aboard the ship streamed like ants, hauling the sacks to a wagon.

“Did you mean m-me?” Kerrigan’s voice quivered, but not out of nervousness. The elf looked unlike any of his el-ven tutors, for tattoos covered him, and his white hair rose from a center stripe. It took Kerrigan a moment to identify him as a Vorquelf—not because he did not know what they were, but because he’d never seen one before. The sight made him smile.

The Vorquelf nodded. “Yes, you.”

“I would be happy to help.” Kerrigan tugged the sleeves on his brown robe back. He flexed his fingers, extended his open hands, and began to weave a spell. As he had done with the book, he intended to float the sack from the ship to the cart. Gauging the distance and the item’s weight were tricky, but the way it swayed effortlessly in the Vorquelf’s grip told him it could not be very heavy.

He set himself to cast the spell, closing his eyes for a moment to compose himself, then opened his eyes again. He looked for his target, but couldn’t see it. He saw others lifting their faces skyward and he aped them. He wondered what it was they were looking at because he couldn’t see anything. The sky had been blotted out.

Half a heartbeat later, the fifty-pound sack of flour slammed into his chest. The impact lifted him off his feet and dumped him hard onto his back. Stars exploded before > his eyes as his head smacked the ground. He bounced once, then felt a suffocating weight pressing on his chest. In a flash of anger he cast the spell he’d been readying, launching the sack of flour into the air, but he found he still couldn’t breathe.

An Adept he didn’t know dropped to a knee beside him. He tried to slip his arms around Kerrigan’s waist, to arch his back, but his grip slipped. “He’s too big, I need help.”

Kerrigan kicked his legs in panic as breath burned in his lungs. He wanted to scream because his head and his back hurt, but his paralyzed lungs left him silent. Tears coursed down his face, at first from the pain, then from the laughter he heard. Through tears he saw blurred figures contorted in hilarity, telling and retelling what they’d seen.

Suddenly the Vorquelf filled his vision and straddled him. Kerrigan felt fingers dig into the fleshiness of his back. The Vorquelf lifted him, and cool air rushed into his lungs.

The mage exhaled as the Vorquelf let him down. Three more times the Vorquelf helped him breathe, then dragged his hands from beneath Kerrigan.

He stood tall above him. “Wonder you can breathe at all.”

Kerrigan’s face reddened immediately. He rolled on his right side to get himself up, but before he could even get a knee under him, someone else knocked into him. Kerrigan rolled away a few feet, barely had time to make sense of the shouts of “Look out” ringing through the crowd, then looked back toward where he had lain.

The flour sack landed with a heavy thump and exploded into a white cloud that slapped him hard. Kerrigan shook his head and snorted flour out of his nose. It had filled his mouth with a pasty film. He clawed it out of his eyes, then opened them as he staggered to his feet.

All around him Apprentices, Adepts, sailors, and soldiers pointed and laughed. He looked down and found himself dusted tan from the curve of his belly up, then over his arms. Those parts of himself he couldn’t see he assumed were likewise coated. His face immediately burned and he wished the flour had filled his ears, so he could be deafened to the laughter.

Laughter pilloried him. Panic blossomed as his face burned beneath the flour coat. To be diminished, bullied, badgered, and threatened he’d learned to deal with, but ridicule, he had no defense against that. Alone, hurt, and mortified, he didn’t know what to do. He could think of nothing, so he reacted without thinking at all.

For the first time in his life, Kerrigan Reese ran.

f’trla entered the Magister of Combats’ round tower cham-I Iber, but did not descend the single step to the sunken‘tJ disk in the center. All around that disk, shelves had been fitted to the walls and filled with books, scrolls, maps, weapons, bones, and other artifacts of war. Opposite the door she entered through lay a balcony, and the Magister stood there, his hands clasped at his back, watching the sea to the north.

The room would have been easy to mistake for a general’s home, and not just from the items found in it. The stark and spare furnishings had nothing mystical about them, nor were they at all refined. The hardwood chairs would not encourage lingering. The cot set near the balcony had been made up, but covered only with sheets and a thin wool blanket. The drawers on one of the shelves must have held the Magister’s clothes, but there were few enough of them to suggest his money did not go to filling out his wardrobe.

The Magister himselfdid wear the grey robes of a senior sorcerer, though he was not a slave to fashion—such as it was on Vilwan. Instead, he stripped his robe down to his waist and tied the arms there as if a belt. Despite his being partially silhouetted, she could see light scars and darker tattoos on his back and shoulders.

Those shoulders had once been powerful, as had the Magister himself. In his younger days he’d had the physique of a warrior—though slender enough for it to have been an elven warrior. His head, which he shaved daily, had once been sown with long black hair that had been braided into a plait much like hers.

She cleared her voice. “You sent for me, Magister.”

He waited a moment before he turned and moved back into his chamber. He seemed to age with each inch he came into the room. The imperfections that the sunlight had hidden came into easy focus. The tall, proud man she had known in her youth had shrunk, as if the weight of his responsibilities and the power he could wield had compressed him. She could still feel his power, and see it in smoldering brown eyes—reinforcing why it was foolish to judge a mage by his physical form.

“You are aware, Orla, of the forthcoming invasion. Chytrine wishes to do with Vilwan what she did with Vorquellyn over a century ago.” His voice remained even, though age cracked it in a few places. “Tomorrow, or the next day, the peace of this island will be shattered.”

She nodded slowly. “I question the wisdom of her assault on Vilwan.”

The Magister of Combats held a hand up to forestall further comment. “Wise or not, it is a fact. We know she made a probing attack against a town in Alcida. There she lost more troops than she expected, and used a dragon to exact her revenge. She has grown more powerful in the last quarter century, perhaps more arrogant as well. She is coming and we will face her.”

Orla lifted her chin. “What do you want me to do?”

The Magister of Combats smiled at her, for a heartbeat peeling back the years to a time when they had stood side by side, holding off Aurolani forces in Okrannel. “I need to inquire after the boy.”