Steel And Flame (Book 1) (45 page)

Their prisoner soon unraveled the mystery.  He looked
rough, yet young for all that.  Marik doubted he could claim as many years as
himself.

A hedge-wizard led the little bandit group, one who
had discovered how to control his talent, then decided to take advantage of
it.  He had gathered other men of questionable morality and organized his band
near the border.  The advantage, as Dietrik had already surmised, was that if
they found themselves facing the authorities, they could duck across the border
to hide.

“I could have guessed most of that,” Hayden scowled. 
“Always on the border…”

“That hedge-wizard must have figured out a scrying
spell of some sort,” Landon mused.  “It explains why we can never find them. 
They always know where we are.”

Fraser responded decisively, “Then what we need is
speed.  We’ll give the horses a good rest and press hard the next time we find
them.”

He issued orders.  The two units returned to the
nearest village.

“Aren’t you more worried now?” Marik asked Hayden.

“About what?”

“We have to face a wizard!  Isn’t that enough to worry
about?”  He sounded appalled and fearful at the same time.

“A hedge-wizard, not a real one.”

“What’s the difference?”

“I suppose—no, wait a moment.”  Hayden organized his
thoughts.  “It’s like the difference between the you now and the you
yesterday.”

“What?”  Marik felt thoroughly lost.

“You’re pretty good with your sword now, aren’t you?”

“I think so.”

“How about the first time you picked it up?  I bet you
waved it around and tried a thing or two.”

“So?”

“So,” he went on, “what if nobody ever showed you the
real way to use it?  You’d just keep swinging it around, maybe figure out a
trick or two, but never really be good at it.”

“And that’s what this is?  A wizard just figuring
things out by himself?”

“Or some kind of magic user.  Thing is, most can only
work out how to pull off one or two spells, and that takes them a long time. 
If he’s figured out a scrying spell, odds are that’s all he knows.”

“So you’re not worried.”

“Not really, no.  If we can only
catch
them,
that ought to be the end of it all.”

Further information from their prisoner revealed the
hedge-wizard usually did his ‘seeking’ in the morning when they set out.  He
also let slip, when a Third Unit man twisted his thumb against the arrow wound,
where the group planned to camp the next day.

The Kings rested their horses and gave them extra
feed.  They spent the night preparing.

In the morning, they set out as they had been, walking
the horses in a different direction than the bandits were supposedly going. 
Once Fraser and Giles felt the hedge-wizard must have finished working his
witchery, the mercenaries turned east.  They rode with greater haste to a pond
at the base of the Cliffsdain Mountains near the Stygan Gulf.

The Cliffsdains stretched north to south down half the
kingdom, forming much of the border between Galemar and Nolier.  There at the
gulf the range continued straight into the water.  Far north at the Stygan’s
opposite end, mountains emerged from the water to form much of the border
between Olander and Gusturief.  Though probably the same range, the mountains
there were known in Traders Tongue as the Gemrocks.

They burst upon the bandits, who had stopped for the
day.  The rogues were slow to react before they finally attempted to flee on
half-saddled horses.  None were skilled warriors; the weak and timid were the
only opponents they could prevail against.

Those ill-mounted riders fled up a slope that became a
mountain canyon further on.  All were ridden down by the Kings.  Afterward, the
riderless horses stolen by the thieves milled freely on the mountain slope.

*        *        *        *        *

Fraser ordered the horses gathered so they could be
turned over to the nearest town that had been raided.  He also ordered the
nearest men, which included Marik, to check the canyon heights to ensure no
bandit had escaped that far.  After all, he had been fooled before and learned
to never assume a position was abandoned until verified with your own eyes.

Once again, Marik wandered deserted rocky ground,
expecting to find nothing and seeing exactly that.  This time he did not even
find broken laces or cracked arrow shafts.

Two men from the Third Unit also searched with him. 
He did not know them, though had seen them around the barracks all winter. 
Farther below where the steep grade lessened and the walls were less narrow,
Duain and Edwin waited, feeling no need to exert themselves on a climb to see
rocks and dead brush.  Several other Third Unit men loitered nearby.

Time to get out of here
, Marik thought, but then whimsically decided to take
one last look.  He drew his dagger, using it to clean beneath his fingernails
and turned back to a boulder cluster he had only peripherally glanced at the
first time.  It took him a moment to register the gaunt man in sweat stained
leathers with several pouches strapped around his waist.  Before Marik’s brain
fully woke, the man raised his hands.

Each hand held something.  He suddenly clapped them
together, mixing the two handfuls which puffed from his fists in a cloud of,
what seemed to be, ashes.

The gaunt man barked a word unlike any Marik had ever
heard.  It did not in fact sound like speech at all.  Marik’s spine turned to
ice.

Then the world shattered.  Unbelievable pain!  A white
hot, searing burn penetrated every pore, touching his very soul to fire. 
Reeking char invaded his nostrils.  His sight filled with a blazing sun
expanded to consume the entire sky, terrible and painful to behold yet
surrounding him, engulfing him, inescapable.  He fought to close his eyes, to
look away, but it was everywhere!  Marik wanted to scream, to shriek.  Opening
his mouth filled his lungs with burning mine gas that robbed him of breath.

Something within him tore loose.  Marik felt his body
rip apart while his heart exploded.  His body jerked uncontrollably as his
tendons spasmed.  Every nerve shrieked, destroying his brain in a furious
torrent as far greater agony welled from within.

In the midst of the endless torment, a darkness rushed
nearer from a great distance.  Marik knew it for death.  He reached for it,
yearned for it while the fragments of his mind teetered on insanity’s edge. 
With all his remaining will he stretched out for release from this searing
torture.

The sweet void of oblivion rose to swallow him.  It
blanketed him in unfeeling non-being…claiming him for its own.

*        *        *        *        *

“Screaming
shit!
” yelled Edwin when the
hedge-wizard decided he would be unable to hide after all, stepped out and
launched a horse-sized ball of white and blue fire into the three mercenaries. 
Edwin’s shout attracted attention from both below and above.

He pulled an arrow from the quiver at his back. 
Above, the gaunt hedge-wizard quickly reached into his pouches, withdrawing new
handfuls of spell components.  When Edwin loosed the shaft he mixed the two
components and chanted different words.

Air shimmered before the gaunt man an eye blink before
the arrow passed through.  Edwin’s shaft disintegrated in a puff of ash.  The
iron arrowhead tumbled harmlessly away.

Across the narrow canyon the shimmer spread,
separating the hedge-wizard from those below.  Anger shook Edwin’s fingers
while he nocked a new arrow.  He knew it would fare no better but he would
rather waste the arrow than walk through that shimmer himself.  Besides, other
men were arriving, summoned by the noise.  Better to show them than waste time
explaining.

As expected, the second arrow met the same fate as the
first.  He reached for another, furious at what had happened to the three men
above, especially Marik who’d been in his unit and begun to grow on him as a
friend.  Blinding wrath drove him to continue, hoping that
this
arrow
would find its mark.

The hedge-wizard descended to his shimmering wall.  He
again drew components from his pouches in preparation for further spell
casting.  Edwin tensed.

A ball of the same fire that had taken Marik flew with
unnatural speed, incinerating Duain beside him.

“Spread out!” shouted Sergeant Giles from below. 
“Spread out so he can’t get all of you at once!”

How about “Retreat so he can’t get any of you?”  I
like the sound of that better.
  But
Marik, and now Duain, kept Edwin drawing arrows.

Two more fireballs lanced downward, the first missing
when the man it sought nimbly dove aside, the second killing two men farther
below who were running closer in response to the shouting.

Giles screamed for men to fall back.  A moment later
Fraser repeated the order.  Edwin back-stepped down the slope, still firing
shafts into the strange barrier.

Fraser yelled for men to crawl up the mountainside and
circle behind the hedge-wizard.  A fireball incinerated a horse.

Edwin descended the slope.  He had nearly passed
beyond bow range when he noticed the gaunt man no longer stood alone.  A shadow
moved behind the shimmering barrier, twisted and inhuman.

A black specter of death slowly hunched its way down
the slope.  It shuffled, back bent like a drunk about to vomit.  The wraith
labored for every step but soon stumbled to the hedge-wizard, who remained
oblivious to the shade’s presence.  This dark figure fell in a heap behind the
gaunt man, who suddenly screamed and clawed at his back.

The veil shimmered no longer.  Edwin wasted no time
before running back up the slope.  In moments he had closed enough distance to
feel confident of the shot.  He pulled and released.

No disintegration this time.  The arrow planted itself
in the hedge-wizard’s torso.  Centerline kill.

The other mercenaries stopped fleeing.  Others ran
toward the bodies of those fallen.  Floroes made cursory inspections on the
bodies downhill.  They were corpses.  Dietrik grabbed him by the shoulder
shouting, “Forget them!  Check the others up top!”

Dietrik ran hard up the steeper slope, only pausing
long enough to kick the dead hedge-wizard’s head sharply before dropping beside
the specter’s body with Floroes.

“Bloody gods above, it
is
Marik!”  He took in
the sight; Marik’s clothes were blackened ash stuck to his charred skin, his
hair completely gone, all his flesh blistered, bleeding and raw.  Dietrik glanced
at the gaunt man.  “And that’s Marik’s own dagger in his back!”

Dietrik reclaimed his friend’s dagger.  In a fit of
rage he drew his rapier, plunging it through the hedge-wizard’s eye, rotating
and twisting the blade as violently as he could.

“Well?” he shouted at Floroes.

A peculiarity had caught the large man’s attention. 
He leaned his ear against Marik’s chest.  “Switch me, he’s still alive!  Don’t
ask me how.”  Listening closely, he added, “I don’t know how long he’ll stay
that way though.

“What the bloody hells do you mean you don’t know? 
You’re a cursed field chirurgeon, so chirurgeonate or whatever you bloody call
it already!”

“Look, Dietrik, I know you’re close friends, but the
best chirurgeons I know can’t help him like this.  He needs a genuine Healer. 
Or a priest!”

“Then we’ll find a gods damned priest!” Dietrik
shouted back, ignoring the contradiction inherent in his remark.  “All those
towns and villages around here, there has to be at least one decent priest! 
You,” Dietrik yelled at the men standing around.  “Ride out and find a priest! 
Go!”

They stood still for a moment, unsure.  Fraser decided
to reclaim command.  “Do it.  All of you over there, get your horses and spread
out to the nearest towns!  The rest of you, bring your cloaks over here.”

Everyone ran, glad to have clear orders during the
chaotic situation.  Fraser consulted with Floroes on the dangers of moving
Marik in his condition, then decided to risk it.  They carefully wrapped his
blistered body in the cloaks.  Dietrik, Edwin and Hayden bore Marik down the
slope to the pond.  There they doused him with its cool waters.  It was all
they could do for him at the moment.

Later, when sun neared setting, two mercenaries
returned with priests from local faiths.

*        *        *        *        *

General Adrian Ceylon paused outside the great hall to
adjust his uniform.  Since he already suspected what his king’s proclamations
would be, he needed to look his best.  One always presented a perfect image to
the court, lest the hungry sharks and wolverines and social plotters perceive
weaknesses.

The reception hall with its open ceiling, elaborate
indoor fountains and carved benches had already filled with the lesser
aristocracy, meaning the hall behind these massive double doors would be packed
with the topmost ranks.