Ilbei Spadebreaker and the Harpy's Wild (2 page)

“You already saw that I could not.”

It was true. Jasper had tried that first. “Well, maybe if’n ya put yer back into it this time. Use yer legs.”

“I’ll get him, Sarge,” said the mountainous Kaige. He was coming up the riverbank, having made short work of extricating himself only a few spans downstream. He snatched up the spindly Jasper and lugged him under one arm like an ale keg to the water’s edge, where he then cleared the distance to the raft in what was little more than an energetic stride. He dumped the dripping wizard at the feet of the other two already aboard, then turned back to Ilbei with a shrug. “See.”

Ilbei looked downstream to where another raft was already tiny in the distance. He blew out a long breath that inflated his cheeks like white-whiskered balloons. It was going to be a long mission, he could tell.

“C’mon, Sarge,” called Hams, the one man among the group near Ilbei’s age. “The wizard is aboard well enough. If we let the others get too far ahead, they’re gonna blame me for dinner being late.”

As Ilbei donned his armor and weapons again, he watched his squad untangling themselves from the knot of their amusement, preparing to get underway. He wondered if they might be the rattiest batch of misfits he’d gotten in all his ninety-some years serving Her Majesty. It seemed like the most powerful woman on planet Prosperion ought to be able to conscript a sharper lot than this. With a grumble and a curse sent to Anvilwrath for what had to be a great heavenly joke, Ilbei pulled up the stake and leapt onto the raft.

Chapter 2

I
lbei let Hams work the rudder, as Hams knew the river and Ilbei did not. Ilbei had never been down the Desertborn River before. The army had brought him south because there was trouble in Three Tents. Three Tents was a small network of foothill mining camps near the Softwater River, a place where Ilbei Spadebreaker would be well suited to address problems that might arise. And they likely would, as a band of highway robbers led by a man known as Ergo the Skewer had found Three Tents and the strings of private claims along its local waterways. The bandits preyed on the miners for the copper they dug and the pittances of gold dust they occasionally came across—which by all reports would not even fill a teaspoon over the course of a year.

At first, the miners had come together and attempted to run the brigands off, but the Skewer was too clever to be caught, and worse, too brutal to be dealt with directly—the heads of three miners were found mounted on pikes a week after the vigilantes made their first, and only, brave head-on attempt. The locals had set traps after, but those failed as well and, worse, brought further violence. In fear for their lives and the meager livings they scraped out of those brush-covered hills, the miners had been forced to go to the garrison to ask for the army’s help.

Ilbei was called down from the north to lead the mission because mining was in his blood. It was his past, his present (albeit reduced to a hobby when he got leave), and likely his future—when he decided to retire from the army someday. He’d grown up in a mining camp, and while he’d never been to Three Tents before, he knew it wouldn’t be much different than the camps he’d grown up around. The fact that some gang of thieves would fall upon the kindly sorts that took up such simple, honest lives rankled him. So, when the assignment came up, Ilbei made no objections at all.

Besides, one job was as good as another in Her Majesty’s army, as long as the pay came steady. If he could do a bit of good for good people, that was all the more reward, although, he was getting older now. Sometimes he felt like neither was enough to keep him at it much longer. At a hundred and fifteen years old, it might be time to retire from army life. Maybe go find a river or some nice ravine to mine on his own. Spend the last six decades of his life in peace. Maybe eight or nine decades if he dug up enough gold to pay them fancy magic doctors to keep his old carcass alive. Magickless folks like him,
blanks
as they were called, rarely made it past two centuries on Prosperion, but that was still a lot of time. It was also still a long way off, and he had work to do. He suspected the dragon’s share of that work would be spent dealing with his new sorcerer.

As if to prove that very thing, Jasper sat upon a corner of the raft, naked as the day he was born, his wet robes set aside and not the least bit of modesty or embarrassment evident. He held a small hand mirror and moved it about with twitching motions, maneuvering it as best he could that he might see down his back and around his pasty pale backside. Ilbei thought the odd fellow might throw out his neck, he was contorting himself so urgently. And of course the rest of the lads, barely having caught their breath from laughing at Jasper’s attempts to board, were now once more tortured with hilarity as the ghostly white wizard twisted and pried, peering anxiously about with his mirror as if looking for a spider crawling on him somewhere.

“There’s one,” goaded Ferster Meggins, a seasoned soldier in his early middle years, a man with a promising gift for both the bow and the small battle-axe, if Ilbei’s glimpse of him practicing the other day was any evidence.

“Where?” Jasper shrieked as he said it, his eyes so wide Ilbei could see the whites all the way around the irises. The frantic wizard leapt up and spun in a circle like a dog chasing its tail, leading each revolution with the mirror hooked around and trying to catch a view of his entire backside. After two full circuits, Jasper looked back to Meggins pleadingly. “Where?”

“I think it’s gone and run into your butt crack there,” Meggins said. He pointed helpfully toward Jasper’s rump and nodded with a most serious look upon his face. “Likely hiding under Jimmy and his traveling bags.”

This gave poor Jasper pause, as he had to stop and work through the slang, his eyes once more flung wide. He reached down and lifted up his privates, horrified, his skinny legs bowed outward in a diamond shape as he bent and peered beneath, dreading what he might find.

This spectacle set the rest to new heights of hysteria, and even Hams had a hard time holding it back. Ilbei had to resist the urge to throw himself into the water and swim for shore. He could tell General Hanswicket that he’d fallen in and gotten tangled in some roots for a time, and by the time he got out, the rest of them were too far off to catch.

Instead, he asked, “Dragon’s teeth, son, what are ya lookin fer?”

Jasper looked up at him as if he were missing the most obvious thing in the world. “Leeches, of course. What else would I be looking for?”

“Leeches?”

“Yes, leeches. Leeches frequent bodies of water in this part of Kurr, especially this time of year, and, in particular, the species known as the ‘concubine’s pin,’ which, while small, can extract nearly a pint of blood in under an hour. They’ve got both heat and magical resistance, making surgery the only way to remove them.”

“Oh no,” Meggins said, sounding terribly concerned. “They don’t have any surgeons down here. Sarge will have to carve them out with his old dagger. But he’ll do it if you need him to. Won’t you, Sarge?”

Jasper gasped, fixing Ilbei with a shame-on-you sort of look. “Do you have any idea how unsanitary that is?”

Well, the three of them, Kaige, Meggins, and Hams, got to laughing so hard they all might have tumbled off the raft had not Ilbei silenced them with the whip crack of his voice. Funny as it might be, they were too much on the poor young wizard already, even if he didn’t recognize the joke at his expense.

“Listen here, Private,” he said to Jasper once the others were down to rumbling snorts and sniggering. “There ain’t no ‘concubine’s pins’ in this here river. It’s movin too fast fer that sort to make a home, so ya can stop watchin yer hammock swingin in that mirror of yers. Worst you’ll get down here is the regular sorta leeches, and they’re big enough to see and easy enough to set off with a hot stick. Moreover, ya ain’t got none of em on ya neither, so suit up and quit yer worryin afore ya spin yerself right off the damn raft and set these others after ya fer laughin.”

“Well, I beg to differ,” the young mage pressed in a tutelary tone. “But there are two varieties of concubine’s pin leeches that thrive perfectly well in fast-moving streams, the spotted blue concubine’s pin and the ice knife variety. Surely you are familiar with those, and if you must know—”

“Well I don’t must know, and there ain’t no leeches. None in there …,” Ilbei pointed to the water rushing by, “and none on yer shinin white behind.” Again he pointed, this time at Jasper’s posterior. There was something in that firm, no-nonsense jab that threatened violence if his orders weren’t followed straight away. “Now get dressed. There ain’t nobody wants to stare at ya standin around in yer all natural the whole way downstream.”

“Well, why should they stare? The human physique is perfectly natural, and given that everyone on this raft is—” Ilbei’s eyebrows dropped with the speed of a guillotine blade, and Jasper wisely cut himself off.

Ilbei turned and fixed the rest of them with the razor’s edge of that glare, the slice of its authority beheading the body of their remnant laughter so quickly they seemed to choke on the very blood of it. “That’s right,” he said, seeing them fall to. “I got no patience fer the rest of ya, neither. Quit nippin this here feller’s heels. Won’t be one of ya what ain’t ripe for pickin on somewhere down the line, and I can’t be draggin a gaggle a’ hyenas through the brush out there, gigglin our whereabouts to the Skewer like silly girls. So stow it and keep it stowed.”

There were a few mumbles of acquiescence, to which the broad-shouldered sergeant shouted back for good measure, “What’s that?”

“Yes, Sergeant Spadebreaker,” came the chorus of replies.

The young magician was slow about getting his robes back on, picking through them and clearly still looking for leeches, but Ilbei let him do it so long as he was getting dressed. He felt sorry for the youngster. A real momma’s boy that one, and it was going to be hard-going for him for a while. Ilbei had broken in more than a few raw young mages in his time, and the soft ones were far more common than not.

The nobles got their magic-gifted kids run through the War Academy in Crown City, so they came out officers most of the time. It was the same with the merchant class, though usually through lesser institutions. Only the poorer sorts and the blanks, the magickless commoners, sent their magician children through the enlisted ranks, like Jasper there. The worst of these were the first-generation sorcerers, kids born to blank parents and the first in the family line to have the gift of magic at all. Those families had no experience to draw on, and they were the worst at spoiling their young wizards, making them soft and whiny. It didn’t even matter how strong—or weak—the young one’s magic was. A family of blanks that birthed a child with magic for the first time in the bloodline, even with power as low as A- or B-rank, would pamper that child just the same as if they’d birthed a Z-ranked wizard into the highest class of nobility. By the time Ilbei got them, they were nearly worthless: full of expectations and demands, with no work ethic and no common sense. Ilbei sometimes felt like the army’s higher-ups picked on him in that regard, because he could swear he got more momma’s boys and daddy’s girls than anyone else ever did.

He hadn’t gotten round to asking this new one, poor skinny Jasper, what his magical rank or ranks were, much less how many of the eight schools of magic he might have access to. Jasper was essentially a total mystery. They’d all but dumped the lad on Ilbei at the last minute, as he and the others set out from the garrison. All Ilbei really knew about Jasper was that the magician spent nearly half his boot camp back and forth between the pillory and the stockade. And, frankly, after barely a half day with the lad, Ilbei could well imagine how the young wizard might set a drill sergeant off.

Some answers in regard to Jasper’s magical abilities revealed themselves shortly after, however, as the young wizard opened a large trunk that had been put aboard the raft with his other gear. From a compartment within, he removed a scroll. He unfurled it and read it under his breath as he leaned over his wet robes, which he’d piled in his lap. There came a flash and a wisp of smoke that smelled like cinnamon, and then Jasper got up and pulled on the robes, which were now as dry as the day they’d been made. By this feat, Ilbei knew that Jasper was an enchanter at the very least.

Ilbei was glad of that fact, for enchanters could read scrolls from any magic school. Ilbei smiled privately behind the gray, tangled cover of his mustache. Even if the gangly Jasper wasn’t a healer in his own right, he could still read healing scrolls, which was the next best thing—assuming he was strong enough to read the useful ones. Ilbei wanted to ask him, but if he couldn’t, Ilbei didn’t want to embarrass him in front of the others. The lad had had enough of that as it was. There’d be time to find out later. Hopefully, not under duress.

Chapter 3

T
he river ran smoothly all day and into the night, the few tributaries that emptied into it bringing little water this late in the season, but enough to keep the main channel deep and moving along. By the time the sun was rising on the second day of the voyage, Ilbei, at the tiller now, could see the woods that would swallow them up by noon.

“Get us some trout fer breakfast, Hams. Time enough fer salt pork and hardtack to come.”

Old Hams was already fishing through his gear for his line and hooks before Ilbei had finished speaking.

Ilbei watched the tree line for a while, enjoying the quiet and the morning chill. The pleasant gurgling of the water beneath the raft reminded him of murmuring patrons in a gambling hall, just the right levels for a crowd that hasn’t gotten too boozy to be fun anymore. Ilbei loved mornings like this. They gave his soul time to contemplate the day before his mind went to work and his mouth had to start barking out orders.