Fires That Forge, page 21
part #1 of Lords of Order and Chaos Series
One night, somewhere in the black mass that was her fourth or fifth year on the island, she was practicing her hard-won education when she set her straw bedding ablaze. Fortunately, she was only permitted to empty her chamber pot twice a week and thus had what she needed to put the fire out quickly.
Sometime during year five she noticed one of the wizards puzzling over a journal. It was in the portion of the libraries designated for biographies. It was clear to her this wizard feared the person he was studying. The journal had been layered with dust and rarely saw use. It took her two months to steal what she needed to make a reasonable facsimile of the journal and another week to find the opportunity to replace it and sneak the original back to her hole beneath the tower.
She had mastered the fire spell and now read at night by the light of burning straw knowing that, if discovered, she would be tortured and killed. She read a compilation of entries by various observers who had made a vampire by the name of Slythorne the subject of their surveillance.
She learned Slythorne had been a noble, although his original name had not yet been discovered, prior to the Battles of Rending. This meant he was at least sixteen hundred years old and possibly older. He had been turned into a vampire to serve a warlock by the name of Lynneare. The journal spoke of his prowess with sword and dagger as well as with spell and charm. Several attempts were made to quantify Slythorne’s capabilities and limitations. Each of those attempts resulted in the death of an agent or a wizard of the Blue Tower himself. The journal documented several of his movements and theorized about a pattern of migration. The theories included a taste for a particular group of people or family, a nomadic wandering forced by some instinct of the species, and movement based on the changes of the seasons. Thus far, none of the proposed theories had been proven.
Dru memorized every line and detail of that journal. It gave her a grim satisfaction to know the mages of the Blue Tower feared this creature. Furthermore, if she could understand Slythorne’s skills and ways, she could someday make those wizards fear her.
She successfully replaced several other books in the archives of the Blue Tower with meaningless duplicates and thus committed a wealth of knowledge and power to memory. She began the practice of concealing runes on her ankle weight; spending weeks preparing exactly which spells and enchantments she would need. Of course, many of those would only be tested on that day, but that was a risk she must take.
The day came in her seventh year of slavery. She had practiced on nails, broken links of chain, and busted hinges for months. Now was her time. As she swept the stacks of scrolls and tomes on the ninth floor, she had long ago confirmed the outward appearance of the Blue Tower an illusion, she whispered words of fire into the shelves. Flames of blue and green leapt about and began to devour the loose pages with a voracious hunger.
If the wizard that stood nearby was caught unaware by the sudden fire; he was certainly surprised when he was clouted on the head with a twenty stone weight. She dropped the notes of the fire spell at his feet and shambled in her pretend infirmity, screaming ‘fire’ in her impaired voice.
As she moved, she twisted the mock bend of her left hand. Two wizards and their armored enforcers rushed past her in the hallway; one of them taking the time to shove her completely to the floor before continuing to the scene of chaos ahead. Two wizards and eight of their pet brutes were stunned to hear the door to the library slam behind them with magical force. The sounds of choked screams brought a smile to her cracked and split lips.
She had learned that the mages of the Blue Tower were paranoid about trespassers accessing their precious knowledge and had, therefore warded all the libraries against any form of teleportation. It prevented her from using a spell to escape the tower proper but had now likely caused the death of three of the monsters.
Dru continued to shuffle forward in her ingrained manner desperately wanting to sprint down the stone steps. At the sound of more guards in the stairwell, she fell to her knees holding the bleeding knot one of the other enforcers had been kind enough to give her before charging into the fire. Armored feet stomped past her without giving her a second look. Her invisibility was no spell but rather the result of years of neglect.
Three more floors down and she arrived in the kitchen. Dru grabbed a flour sack and stuffed it with bread, dried meat, and a wheel of cheese much to the horror of the poor souls who were literally chained to the stove. Once her pack was full, she grabbed a wine skin from the wall. Now she forced herself to her shuffling pace as she exited the kitchen.
Now bells and magical alarms rang throughout the Blue Tower. The slaves on every level of the tower were falling to their faces; prone before their masters. All the slaves; save one. Two more flights of stairs, for here the tower became square rather than a spiral, and she entered the sally port to the courtyard. Just beyond the first door she grabbed her other pack from its hiding place behind a pile of wood. This pack contained a carefully comprised set of tomes and scrolls.
She dashed into the courtyard only to have her heart break. Dru looked out to see fourteen bruisers and three mages waiting on her. Fourteen crossbow bolts flew with deadly accuracy. Her emaciated body would have been punctured many times over had it not been for her ball and chain, now only a fraction of its original burden thanks to an enchanted rune. A series of runes glowed on the iron ball and four of those bolts were redirected at the men that loosed them. Those four died. The other ten bolts burst into splinters as they passed within a few feet of her, or where they thought she was.
The ten fighters, no lilies here, dropped their crossbows and drew swords and clubs unphased by her use of magic. The wizards ripped the first of their stored spells at her; ensuring her destruction. The first enchanted attack, a bolt of lightning, cracked through the air with the sound of a thousand ships striking the rocks of some horrid shore. The bolt blinded many in the courtyard as it ran its heartbeat course toward her. Then, to the astonishment of Dru as well as those assailing her, the enchanted missile swirled in on itself as though it had encountered a vortex in midair. Another rune on Dru’s iron ball glowed as the energy from that attack was absorbed into a magical reservoir.
The second magical attack assaulted her in the form of vines coiling up from the dirt and sheer stone around her. As they grew, they sprouted razor sharp thorns with jagged edges. These murderous vines shot forward seizing her, or rather seizing her image. She had projected an image of herself several feet to the right of her actual location. The vines spun about each other viciously; knotting themselves into a bramble of jerking and writhing limbs.
The third spell that faced her was far less obtuse. Waves of mental commands washed over her mind and into her nerves. This very spell had rendered mighty warriors paralyzed and great beasts unable to move. However, those warriors and beasts had not spent over seven years sharpening their will. They had not spent seven years being starved and beaten. They had not spent seven years honing their hate.
The mental command to yield caused her step to falter but only briefly. Now it was her turn.
With a shout of arcane power and a complex gesture from her believed to be crippled left-hand, swords, wands, clubs, and axes bent and contorted. The weapons held by her captors were transformed into vipers of a most vindictive nature. Again, the screams of her tormentors filled her ears and brought a smile of satisfaction to her dry lips.
Another rune on her iron ball glowed and twelve images of her fled the courtyard in twelve different directions. Reinforcements were summoned by call and by spell. Warriors and wizards chased after the many images cutting through the vapor. In the midst of this chaos an additional blue robed and faceless mage walked from the tower.
Dru had made it almost a league from the steps of the Blue Tower when her ruse had been discovered. Now was the time for the most dangerous spell of all. She looked all around her, memorizing every detail, every rock, every scrub tree, every crack where the weather and the world had sundered the stone. Then she filed that memory away in a deep place in the back of her mental library under lock and key. Now, Dru focused her thoughts on a single memory; a memory she had sharpened into a crisp image in her mind. She whispered the word sectlartha and a mist of charged ether swarmed about her. Moments later she stood in her childhood bedroom; leagues and seas away from the Blue Tower and all the pain and punishment it held.
The room had been changed to a painting studio for some noble and there were canvases and paints strewn about amongst samples of halting calligraphy that made her eyes hurt. Dru did not care. She dropped on the mat, exhausted. She ate from her pack and drank deeply from the wine skin she’d stolen.
When she had gorged herself on meat, cheese and wine she took another look at her surroundings. Much had changed. No doubt the estate had been given to some shogun for his service to the Disputed Isles. However, the baseboard in this room had not changed. She pried the boards away to find her father’s hidden wealth still concealed within.
She pulled a large leather satchel from the space between the walls and wiped the dust of almost eight years from the clasp. Just looking at the symbol on the silver clasp made the betrayer surge in her throat. She felt the urge, the need, to weep at seeing her father’s name represented in the noble high letters of the Ussa language.
Dru, as she had done for the second part of her life, locked away everything human about herself and focused on what must be done now. She quickly checked the contents and was relieved to find the jade and silver dutifully waiting for her within. She was tired, so tired, but must move. Few could do it, but she had read the spells allowing one sorcerer to follow another’s magical trail. Now she must put more magical and physical barriers between herself and the Blue Tower.
She transferred her remaining food and her stolen books and scrolls to the satchel and placed the flour sacks in the hold-stone baseboard. She cleaned the room carefully, for she had plenty of practice at cleaning, and eliminated all trace that she or the satchel had ever been there. Then she slipped out the window to the ledge of the regal manor. The view of the green mountains and calm rivers of her home brought that betrayer to her throat once more.
Dru balanced on the ledge of the residence as she made her way around the balcony of the fourth floor. Once around to the west wall, a wall of stone twenty feet high and four feet thick at the top, she slipped down to land lightly atop it. She lay there silently, listening. When she was sure no guard’s suspicion had been aroused, she rose to a crouch and began running west.
Dru reached the edge of the estate where she planned to climb down the same wall she had scaled as a child, however exhaustion set in. She did not know how long she had slept. The only information she had was that it was a black and cloudy night; the only light she could find was the warm glow from the lanterns of her home.
It was not her home anymore. She had spent more of her knowing life in a hole under a tower than she had in that beautiful manor that lay behind her. Her heart craved to weep; to let go of so much loss and grief. Her iron will would not allow it.
Dru ate again, drank the last of the wine, and slipped down the wall into the dark forest beyond. She made her way to the river whose waters she had swam and fished as a child. She spoke a word through clenched teeth and the hated manacles around her ankles evaporated into a rusty cloud. Free from those chains, she bathed, washed the ragged gown she wore, and drank deeply from the clean cold waters.
She hung her clothing, such that it was, on a branch to dry, and focus on the next step. She had been foolish and weak to have waited this long. She took a piece of jade from the satchel and held it in one hand and the iron ball in the other. She sat cross legged at the edge of the river, closed her eyes, and opened her mind. Her thoughts traced a mental path along the runes remaining on the iron ball.
Dru layered the runes one atop the next. First, she imbued the piece of jade with the magical strength to hold the other enchantments. Then she began to transfer her prepared spells of protection and alteration. Finally, she made her body a conduit for the power from the wizard’s lightning bolt that had been absorbed by the iron ball. There were masters of the art who proclaimed no object so small could hold so much enchantment. Dru knew better. She understood that the only thing small was their imaginations. She had studied the nature of matter and knew there was limitless space and energy in the most insignificant stone or casual drop of water. It was in those vast planes between the structure of the jade that she stored the power she had collected.
Once the iron ball was nothing more than a clump of metal, she dropped it into the deepest part of the river. The flowing water would conceal its magical traces from searching spells of even the most advanced mages. That done, she ate and slept again.
Two days later, clad in servant’s clothing stolen from a drying line, she slipped into the back door of a spa in the city of Ashoguro. She found a steam room unused. She threw her borrowed clothing into the fireplace and made herself more comfortable than she had been in… She never remembered being this comfortable.
She awoke to a light touch on her shoulder. The young woman of the spa did not remember her coming and apologized profusely. She also inquired about the fact that Dru appeared to only possess a leather satchel and a towel; the towel belonging to the spa. Dru condescendingly explained that she decided she hated her new gown and would forgive the spa’s neglect. The payment of a jade piece bought clear understanding and a selection of gowns for her to choose from.
In the days that followed she posed as a diplomat from Stamdon, there to investigate potential commerce. She spent her time in a lavish inn diligently working to copy the books and scrolls she had stolen into a language of her own devising. Furthermore, she took time to curse each copy she made so that any prying eyes would not pry at anything afterward. Once copied, she burned every trace of the originals. She knew the wizards of the Blue Tower had not discovered those documents missing as yet because they had not tracked her through them, however there was no need to take unnecessary risks.
She had been careful to conceal her scars from chains and her emaciated form until now. She began traveling to different priests in different provinces, healing only a single wound or scar at a time.
Dru spent two months resting, gaining strength, and healing. She also spent that time dancing. She did not dance with joy or with a light heart. She danced the grueling dance of the Ussa people. A dance that bent and stretched the body and the mind. A dance that manipulated the limbs and soul of both the dancer and her adversary. Her mother had once called her a beautiful dancer. Now she became a dangerous one.
Dru tried her hand at many weapons as her dance refined. However, she discovered that she hated the weight of anything iron or steel in her hand or on her person. She began dancing with the staff and found it suited her well.
After months of healing and dancing, the time came for the next part of her plan. She began to spend silver piece after silver piece on bard and town crier alike. She traveled the coasts of the Disputed Isles talking with anyone with news. She searched for any trace or word of Slythorne. Months became years. She danced every day and studied her spells and enchantments at night. She had also transcribed the entire journal of Slythorne from memory, adding her own notes and observations.
Her journey, too much to recount here, took her six years and to every point of the known world. She had traveled through every city known, and many unknown. She lived the life of a lady and the life of a pirate. She posed as a servant girl and as a warlord. After years and leagues, she found the person she sought. She found him in Janisport.
Dru was drinking wine in a tavern listening to the tales and brags of a young man who claimed to be a king among the Slandik people of Janis. This young fool, Lucas was his name, was bound for the ruins of Nolcavanor and the riches it held. The wizards of the Blue Tower knew what Nolcavanor held and would not tread there for any riches imagined by man or champion.
She was leaning on her staff, carved of sectot wood and set with a certain jade piece at its top, and listening to this King Lucas’s stories when Slythorne appeared. He hadn’t teleported in, he hadn’t come in through either door, nor had he come down from the stairs. One moment he was not there. The next moment he was reclining comfortably at a nearby table with a goblet of wine in his hand.
He was just as she had imagined him. He was tall and clearly hailed from the race of Great Men. His hair was long and as dark as a black pearl and his eyes as clear and blue as the seas that claimed them. His strong boned and cleanly shaven jawline was stern in contrast to the easy smile that danced at the corners of his mouth. Although he appeared no older than perhaps thirty, his presence seemed to command respect for all about him.
He wore a black mercshyeld breastplate with matching bracers and greaves over charcoal silk pants and shirt. He wore an elegant long sword at his side with a matching dagger opposite it and a cape of black velvet. His skin was not tanned but he was not nearly as pale as she thought he might be. There were no outer signs of the reputed monster that lay within.
He sat near the fire and directed his attention to a young woman playing the violin near the center of the room. From time to time his eyelids would dip closed as he took in the beautiful notes of the somber tune.
Dru stood from her seat at Lucas’s table and walked to stand across from Slythorne without a word. She sat down across from him and turned her own attention to the dark and brooding music. They sat there, together, as the music continued for several long moments. It was a comfortable silence between them; as if they both understood that a mere whisper could shatter the enchantment of the tune.
When the music stopped, he told her that he was bound for Lavon by way of Degra. He told her they were beautiful cities. He stood and offered her his hand. She took it with a smile. That simple beginning spawned a romance that would last for another thirty-eight years.
They were together for two years before he agreed to turn her. He had concerns about her strong desire to possess the chains of his curse. She had proved herself a valuable ally and lover however, and he was loath to refuse her.
