Steel And Flame (Book 1) (52 page)

“And I’m telling
you
, boy, that you’ll never
get that far without even mastering the basics.  You don’t build a house on the
sand, you reinforce the foundation first!  How can you expect to perform
advanced workings when you haven’t so much as completed the first
step
of the apprentice techniques?  You still can’t use your magesight with ease!”

“I can see with it well enough to stay away from those
damned lines of yours!  If you think I’m going near one of those demon things,
then your head is the one addled!”

“Learn this shield working and it won’t happen!”

“I don’t have to worry about having another headache
like that anyway, since I’m never going close to those bastards ever again! 
Just teach me something useful like I’ve been telling you to, damn it!”

Tollaf finally lost his temper completely.  Marik felt
a hard, invisible rod strike his ankles, sweeping his feet from under him.  He
crashed against the long table in the workroom on his way to the floor.

The chief mage regained his control and sat on his
stool.  “And here I’ve been promising myself I wouldn’t do that.  Damn it,
boy!  I’ve had about enough of you!”

Marik sat up amid still fluttering papers but declined
to stand, seeing no reason to give the old bastard a second free shot at him. 
“I only agreed to this because the commander said learning scrying spells would
be enough.”

“You can’t use those workings yet because they need a
great deal of power to make them work.  And you can’t handle raw power because
you can’t get near enough to a line to draw from it.  And you can’t get near a
line because you can’t shield yourself yet.  So stop yapping and do what I
say!”

“How can I trust you?  You seem to enjoy playing
dirty.”

“Oh, by the gods!  A child could have thrown up a
shield to stop that.  Are you so proud of being capable of less that a mere
child?”

“I’m not a mage, old man!  I keep telling you that!”

“As long as you keep telling yourself that, you never
will be.  That’s the only thing holding you down.”

Marik started to speak, then changed his mind.  A
vicious kick from where he sat launched a toppled bucket across the floor. 
After its crash faded, he shook his head.  Sourly, he spat out, “Ah, who gives
a damn anymore?  Show me whatever you want.”

“It’s simple, except you’ve never formed energy
before, so it will be difficult for you.  Add in your thick head, and you might
be able to do it by spring.”

“You can skip the commentary.”

Tollaf’s brow beetled before he continued.  “The way
magic works with the mage talent is not overly difficult.  It is the simplest
of the various talents.  You can craft a wide variety of workings once you
learn the basics.  You don’t need to memorize spells or chants or diagrams or
anything like that for this talent.”

“
This
talent?”

“I’ll tell you about the others at a later date. 
Concentrate on your own for today.  You know about the magesight since you’ve
seen with it.  When you see with the magesight, you’re not using your eyes,
you’re seeing with your mind, using the extrasensory perception the mage talent
grants you.  You can also reach out with your mind and ‘grasp’ the energy you
can see.  It feels like using your hands the same way the sight feels like
using your eyes.

“Different mages have the gift in stronger
quantities.  I think working with the lines is the best you can do.  Don’t ever
attempt to draw power from a knot or you’ll kill yourself.”

“Drawing power?  I can’t even touch it!”

“Don’t jump ahead!  Think of a mage as being one of
four strength levels,” Tollaf commanded, raising a hand with four fingers
extended obviously.  "He can be weak, and only capable of using his own
energies.  He can still perform a variety of basic workings, but doing too much
at once is exhausting.

“Or two, he can draw on the diffusion to augment his
strength, but the level of his workings won’t change much.  He’ll just be able
to do more of them.”

“The diffusion?”  Marik was lost, as he tended to be
about ten words after the chief mage started explaining anything.  The old man
too often assumed that everyone knew as much as he did.

Tollaf stopped to take a deep breath.  “If you’d put
serious effort into your work, you’d know what I was talking about.  Your magesight
still hasn’t developed that far along.  Once it does, you’ll see more, like you
did with the auras.  The diffusion is the energy bleed off once it’s separated
from its generator.  It fills the air before settling down and collecting in
the lines.  Once you can see the diffusion, you’ll be seeing the true face of
the etheric plane.  It looks like a purple mist covering everything and filling
all the air.”

He glared at Marik, challenging the apprentice to
interrupt with a snide comment.  When Marik remained silent, he continued. 
“Now that we’re clear on that, the third type, like you, can draw on the lines
of energy scattered everywhere.  You can use them in your workings instead of
exhausting your own strength.  You can handle more advanced workings too, since
your magical ability is that much more developed.  Last is the type of mage who
can tap into the knots formed where two lines meet each other.  They are very
difficult to handle, so don’t ever try it.

“A mage’s power works by absorbing etheric energy and
making it his own.  Taming the energy happens automatically when the mage takes
the power into himself, but your talent can only handle so much.  You haven’t
been gifted with enough talent to safely absorb the knot energies.  They would
absorb you instead.”

“I suppose I followed some of that.”

“Will wonders never cease?”

Marik scowled.  “But how am I supposed to absorb
energy that I can’t touch?”

“With the shields that you’re going to practice.  You
erect shields to protect yourself from the raw power, and when you bring the
new energy through them and into yourself, the shields transmute it, change
it.  It sooths the wildness from the energy and matches its signature to your
own.  Once it’s your own, you can use it for your workings.”

“That’s complicated.”

“It only seems that way because you haven’t done it. 
There are many types of shields you can create, each for different purposes. 
I’m going to teach you several to protect you and others from different combat
magics, and you
will
learn them.”  Tollaf’s expression set in stone with
this last comment.  “Today we’ll do the easiest, a simple shield to protect
against wild energies.  Knowing you, it’ll be simpler to show you the tricky
way again, like with the sight. 
This
time, don’t you gods damned move
until I
tell
you to!”

Tollaf yanked Marik off the floor by his tunic.  He
positioned his grumbling apprentice on the stool, then placed his hands on
Marik’s temples.

“Are you relaxed?  Then open your magesight.  I want
you to watch what I’m doing and feel it at the same time.”

The sensation felt incredibly peculiar.  Marik could
never have adequately described it to anyone.  He remembered the puppet shows
performed by the traveling troupes who occasionally passed through
Tattersfield.  His arms seemed attached to strings like those carved wooden
dolls manipulated from above by their masters.

He tried to put the strangeness from his mind and
concentrate on what the old man did.  Tollaf had been accurate to call this
‘the hands of his mind’ because he would have sworn he
was
using his
hands.  Marik felt his ghostly hands reach into an invisible pocket and grasp,
as a potter might take clay from his basket to thump down on his wheel. 
Incredible as it sounded, his hands reached inside his own body, rooting
around, looking for whatever Tollaf wanted.

The hands found what they sought, took hold and
pulled. With his magesight Marik saw the white, pure energy he had seen within
the flower and the other men he’d looked at.  He understood Tollaf had drawn
out Marik’s raw energy.  His hands molded it, like the potter with his clay. 
They shaped it into a convex half-dome, a giant buckler shield hovering before
him.  The last act his unseen hands performed tied lines from the shield to the
hidden source within him.

Tollaf pulled his hands from Marik’s head.  “Always
remember to tie the shield to your core.  Otherwise the first blow it takes
will send it flying away like a tiddlywink.  And, if you’re working with a
line, always set up surge protections just in case.”

“Huh?”  Marik wobbled as he examined his chest,
expecting to find a gaping hole.

“Don’t worry about that either.  Once you get used to
it, it doesn’t feel so much like having your guts ripped out.”

“You have this nasty habit of not warning me about
these things.”

“No, you have a nasty habit of not wanting to listen
to me. We’ll get into surges when you’re ready to work on a line.  You can
spend the rest of the day practicing the new shield.”

“I think I need a few moments of fresh air.”

“You just want to go out and run around with that iron
toothpick of yours!  You need to be practicing your lessons!”

“I’ve told you a hundred times, old man!  I’m not a
mage.  I’m a fighter!”

“Spend half the amount of time on this as you do on
that and you won’t be so far behind where you ought to be!  You told Torrance
you’d train as a mage!”

“Yes, and I never agreed to stop training as a
fighter!”

“Well, until you’re done with your training, don’t
think you can go anywhere else!  You can’t ship out half-trained as a fighter, and
there’s no way I’m sending out a half-assed idiot like you until you can stand
on your own.  Keep that in mind as the winter fades away.”

“You think I’ll stay around here with
you
while
the Ninth marches out?”

“If you want to stay in the Kings…
you bet!”

Marik stomped away to the training area, hoping to run
into a real fighter he could face to work off his aggressions.  What had he
done to deserve this?  He had never wanted much from his life.

When he reached the shacks and the gully in the Second
Training Area he found a lieutenant in the midst of a surprise challenge.  With
him were two clerks, dutifully taking notes for the man while he tested
everyone who happened to be on the field.

He had never met him, but then the only lieutenants
Marik knew on sight and by name were Earnell and Piccary.  That left only
fourteen others in the band.  Apparently the officer knew him, though.  The
lieutenant let him go without a challenge once he finished with everyone else. 
Torrance must have passed the word not to bother Marik while under Tollaf’s
care.

Truly irritated now, Marik hacked seven straw training
dummies to fragments before returning to the Tower.

Tollaf spent the day working on a trinket at the
worktable.  Wisps of energy drifted off the metal pieces when Marik glanced at
it with his magesight as Tollaf poked at it.  He wished to know nothing about
it.  Instead he sat as far from the old man as he could and still be in the
room.  Marik spent half his time trying to feel energies with his mental hands,
yet succeeding only in knocking things over with his real ones, and the other
half brooding.

Finally, having reached his limit, he hurled a pewter
tankard across the room.  “You know, I didn’t join up with the Kings for this!”

“You only wanted to be a fighter, right?  Bold and
glorious, brave and proud?”

“That sounds good, but no, not really.  How in the
lowest hell did I end up in here?”

Tollaf glanced from his work as he had not at the
tankard’s crash or his disparaging remark.  “Commander Torrance said something
about you looking for your father.”

“It’s why I came to Kingshome in the first place!”

“Is that why you’re so hot on the scrying spells?”

Marik had been about to erupt in a further rage of
fury when his anger and the strength it gave him suddenly flowed away like
water.

“What else am I going to do?  I spent my first summer
asking questions all over the northern kingdom, and I hardly got to one out of
a hundred places he might have been through.  All I have is a direction.”

Tollaf watched him for a long moment, then swiveled on
his stool so he faced Marik completely.

“Look now, boy.  I don’t usually bribe people to get
things done, but I’ll make you a deal.”

“What?”  Marik was pure suspicion.

“I’ve had piles of work building up because of all my
time you’re consuming.  Here’s my deal.  You settle down and put in a real
effort on the lessons and drills you need to finish for the commander, and I’ll
work on your search myself when I have spare time.”

“Doing what?”

“Scrying is not my specialty, but I can manage to in a
pinch.  And there are other things I can do, maybe.  Strings I
could
pull. 
If I try finding out about your father, will you put in serious effort?”

Marik pondered Tollaf’s words carefully.  “Can you
actually discover anything?”