When Dragons Rage

58

Kerrigan Reese was finding the Conservatory students very annoying. They sat there in their encampment, at the heart of the Aurolani siege force, casting spell after detection spell. Not only were their detection spells cast in the old, sloppy style he now detested, but they were painfully easy to deal with.

Once it had been reported that a third of the Aurolani army had moved northwest toward Nawal, Princess Alexia had marched her troops to the city ahead of them. While the cavalry formed a screening force in the direction of the enemy advance, the Zamsina Guards, a light infantry unit, hurried to Nawal. Kerrigan had traveled with them and had been afforded chambers in the local Caledo Academy.

He had been tempted to ignore the Aurolani spells, but a conversation he’d had with Princess Alexia reminded him of a job he had done for General Adrogans on the Okrannel campaign. Kerrigan had prepared lots of documents that purported to be from a unit traveling covertly through the Okrans countryside. When the enemy uncovered this cache of documents, they sent troops out to hunt for these phantom warriors.

Thus Kerrigan had been introduced to the concept of disinformation. It was patently obvious that if the Aurolani thought there were more troops in the city than there were, they would be slower to attack—and vice versa. An underreporting of troops might lure them into an ambush, and an overre-porting might even make them withdraw.

Kerrigan took some time to examine the Aurolani spells and realized they were looking to detect fires burning, swords, spears, arrows, and adults sorted by gender. Clearly each mage had been given a specific result to tabulate, and together they would provide a picture of just who and what was waiting inside the city.

Messing around with the results of every spell would have been difficult, so Kerrigan chose his targets carefully. He selected the best-cast spells with the tightest search templates, and those were the ones he played with. He examined them, learned the method of their reporting, and created two spells. One sought the reports and killed them; the other sought the reports and duplicated them.

Both spells worked well and validated Kerrigan’s thoughts about how masking spells might function to conceal something from a search spell. An old-style search spell. He also created a spell to seek out counterspells employed to detect the spells he cast to alter information. Those never produced results, which actually disappointed him, even though it meant the enemy had no idea they were being tricked.

But what annoyed him about the Conservatory mages was their dogged persistence in casting their spells. He hardly got a chance to work on his detection spell for a fragment of the DragonCrown, but late in the afternoon of the second day in Nawal, he thought he had it ready. Ignoring the search spells for a moment, he set himself, then cast his spell.

Kerrigan could not help but be pleased with himself. His spell melded a number of styles and aspects. It twisted and tangled like the organic weavings of elven magick, but before the tendrils thickened, they evaporated as might urZrethi magick. When they flashed into form again, they had the angularity of a human spell, but its sharp crusts burst as elven tendrils grew out through them.

He cast the spell toward the east and at the Aurolani camp. He’d planned to cast it toward Meredo, where he knew a fragment existed, but the distance would delay the report, and he was anxious to see if the spell worked. If the enemy had a fragment of the DragonCrown, he was sure to get a report quickly. He focused the casting to a narrow arc, which would, perforce, expand as it swept forward. He figured the rate of speed would be a mile a minute, with the rate slowing as the arc grew. At that rate, however, he’d have his report back from the Aurolani camp in seconds.

He waited.

Nothing.

Two minutes. Three. Time moved with incredible sloth. Four minutes and then five.

He frowned. He could imagine one of three results. First, there was no fragment of the DragonCrown in the enemy camp. Second—and he did not like this idea at all—there was a fragment, but a spell masking it had defeated his spell. Third, which he actually liked least of all, his spell just didn’t work.

It was this third possibility that he had to address first. He reworked the spell. Instead of searching for a fragment of the DragonCrown, he opted for something a bit more simple. He picked a target suggested by Princess Alexia and decided to search for arcanslata. He recalled telling her that they could only be detected when they were in use, but he knew that wasn’t entirely true. There would be a taint on them from the use of magick, but it would be hard to detect. Still, determined not to let that defeat him, he worked out the search parameters and blasted the spell out, directing it to the east and south.

If the Aurolani don’t have any, I know the crown prince and the king do.

Within seconds he got three reports of arcanslata. One was located in the Aurolani camp and the other two were within Nawal itself. The spell would take a while to get to the crown prince and to Caledo, so Kerrigan sat back and waited.

Before he got the heralds back from that spell, he got something else. It washed over Nawal heavy and hard, blasting into the city with the force of a torrential rainstorm. It even felt like a storm, with magickal energies roiling and boiling. It raked through his mind like the screech of talons on slate, then built to drive a flaming spike into his soul.

His hands went to his head and he spilled out of his chair as pain shot through his body. Even wracked as he was, he retained the presence of mind to identify the spell and prepare a counterspell. Fingers twitched, and his lips began to move as he started to defend himself.

An inkwell, heavy and full, smashed him in the face and shattered. The bony armor rose, preventing injury, but the black ink poured over him like blood. Snarling, he rolled to his knees and looked at Bok. “Why did you do that?”

The urZrethi held a boot ready to throw, while his other arm, elongated, was seeking the boot’s companion. “Soppit, soppit, soppit.”

Kerrigan’s hands went to his head again as the mage-storm shot lightning up his spine. His back bowed and he gasped for breath, then the spell released him and he flopped to the floor. He lay there limp for a moment, then found Bok squatting near his head.

The urZrethi dabbed at the ink with a corner of the blanket from Kerrigan’s cot. The mage wanted to push the foul-smelling creature away because he was still furious with him, but the tenderness of the gesture made it hard to sustain his anger. “Why, Bok?”

“Soppit.”

Kerrigan closed his eyes and shook his head. His mind slowly began to clear, and he started sorting things out. Someone in the enemy camp was a powerful sorcerer and had cast a wild spell toward the city, but it was a spell that would only have had an effect on magickers. While it was painful, distracting, and annoying, it really wasn’t designed to do any serious damage. In fact, it was a spell that was easy to defend against—a variation of a nuisance spell all students learned to use when sparring against other apprentices.

And since we are all used to detecting and defending against that spell, we recognized it and cast counterspells to deflect it. Kerrigan’s eyes shot open. “Help me up, Bok.”

The urZrethi lifted him, then crouched at his right shin, smiling up insanely.

Kerrigan nodded to him, then set his face and cast a spell. It swept through the area seeking the sort of reports that Conservatory spells sent back. The air was alive with them. Each one reported the presence of a sorcerer who had defended himself against that attack.

The Vilwanese Adept shook his head. “We were like children. He casts and we react, pinpointing how many mages there are in Nawal and giving him a good idea of just how powerful we are. I’d have done exactly that except for you, Bok. Thank you.”

“Bok bok.” The urZrethi bounced at Kerrigan’s side, then loped off to his corner and curled up in a pile of hides.

Kerrigan finished wiping up as much of the ink as he could, then washed his face and hands. All the while he mulled over the sensations from the spell. He probed its dimensions and got a sense of the sorcerer who had cast it. Because it was a simple spell, there was not that much creativity involved. Even so, there were distinctive dimensions to it; it had definitely been cast with a Conservatory taint.

There was something more, though. Beneath the veneer of Conservatory magick he found a solid Vilwan base. And, between them, almost so slight he missed it, there was something else. Had it not been so powerful he would have missed it. It formed a boundary between Vilwan and the Conservatory, marking a sharp and radical transformation. He’d not felt its like before.

On a hunch he rooted around in his things and came up with a wand—not the gift of the Bokas, but something far more ordinary. The Conservatory magician Wheele had said his master had given it to him specifically so it could be used to kill Orla, Kerrigan’s last tutor. Kerrigan carefully trickled a spell over it and almost effortlessly he discovered the same taint on the wand as had been on the annoyance spell.

He sat on the edge of his bed and felt his blood go cold. A sullanciri cast that spell. Neskartu, the one who had been Heslin. He’s out there, and he knows how many and how powerful are the sorcerers here in Nawal. He knows about everyone but me.

Kerrigan’s grip tightened on the wand as anger flared through him. Neskartu had enabled a half-trained magician to kill Orla, a fully trained Vilwanese warmage. The desire for revenge flashed through Kerrigan. His failure to save Orla, and the virulent nature of the spells that killed her, fueled that desire. What he wanted more than anything else was to tear Neskartu apart.

He smothered that thought shortly after it was born. He was no more suited to going to war with a sullanciri than he was to lifting a mountain. He was powerful, and the fact that Neskartu didn’t know he was present in Navval gave him a certain element of surprise, but even that didn’t come close to guaranteeing a victory. Nothing would—but not even to try would mean that those mages who did would be killed.

What to do was a problem Kerrigan wrestled with until he fell asleep. Neither awake, nor while dreaming, did he find a solution. And his sleep, which was fitful at best, ended abruptly. As he came awake and his blanket slid down the mound of his stomach, he sought that which had awakened him, hoping it was a solution to his problem.

It was not. Instead, it was another problem, and one that took his breath away. He threw off his blanket, pulled on his trousers and shirt, and went running through the tower. When he reached the door he realized he had no boots, but didn’t go back for them. He streaked through the streets, reaching the ducal palace, and was granted admission, despite the fact that it was midnight.

Huffing and puffing, he climbed tower stairs and pounded on the door to Alexia’s room. He got no response and pounded again. “Open up… it’s me, Kerrigan.” He leaned heavily against the door. “It’s important.”

The door jerked open and he stumbled inside. Peri steadied him. Alexia finished gathering a robe about herself and knotted the sash. Though she had clearly been sleeping, her violet eyes looked alert.

“What is it, Kerrigan?”

“I cast a spell before, trying to find pieces of the DragonCrown. I was testing it and cast it toward the Aurolani camp. It came up empty.”

“That’s good.” She frowned. “You should have told me this before.”

“No, no, you don’t understand.” He straightened up, drew a deep breath, and pointed east. “The spell actually worked. I found a fragment out there. It’s traveling in the open, no masking spells or anything. It’s in Sarengul. If Chytrine doesn’t already have her hands on it, she will very soon.”