The Last Garrison (Dungeons & Dragons Novel) (22 page)

The two men stood for another long moment. “When the boy returns, Sten, I will go with him to see about the old man.”

Sten nodded. “Thank you, Mikal.”

Nergei was at a loss for what he should be doing, and had been since returning to Haven to find the Old Stargazer locked in the highest rooms of the tower, unwilling to come out and unwilling to allow Nergei entrance. At first he had wandered the structure’s
other rooms, unsure where he fit into the plan the mercenaries were putting into place. He was no good with a blade or a bow, and not as strong as many of the others for manual labor. He would gladly do his share, had in fact tried to before his usual shunning by the other boys his age took effect. He’d tried to go to Luzhon, but she was with Magla, had stayed at the elf’s side since meeting her in the city, and there was no room for Nergei there, despite their bettered relationship, earned through their travels to the city. And who else would take him? Not Padlur, who was outside the city with his father, scouting the woods alongside Ekho, and certainly not Kohel, who supervised the building efforts with his father and the other council members.

Not that Nergei would go to Kohel in any case. Not then and not ever.

It was a knock at the front door of the observatory that woke Nergei from his self-pity, and also alarmed him. In the years he had been living in the observatory, no one had ever lifted the heavy bronze knocker and let it fall against the thick oak of the door, yet there it was, steady and rhythmic, not impolite but insistent.

Long before, when Nergei was just a boy—just a smaller boy—then the Old Stargazer had forbid him to open the door, to let anyone in.

“Your doom might be at the door,” said the Old Stargazer. “And how will you know to recognize it?”

As a child, Nergei had not known how to answer it, and while he still did not, he was at least no longer scared of such simple rhetorical tricks. And anyway, there was enough trouble outside that opening or not opening a door could hardly be the worst of it.

When Nergei swung open the heavy wood of the door, he found Mikal standing outside, his finery concealed beneath a cruder winter coat borrowed from one of the villagers. It hadn’t been cold when they’d left the city, and it wasn’t supposed to still be winter upon the mountain, and so the company had failed to prepare for it. It had done them no favors with the villagers, either. What good were a bunch of mercenaries who couldn’t even come ready for the weather?

Mikal stepped past Nergei, into the darkened entryway. “Nergei, is your master available? I’d hoped to see him when we first arrived here, to discuss how I might combine my skills with his in the battle, but since he hasn’t appeared I thought it best to just trek up here myself.”

Nergei shook his head. “He’s here, but locked away, up in the tower. He hasn’t been down since we returned.”

“His magics upon the mountain were most impressive. I’ve some skill at illusions myself, and even so
fell for quite a few of his. What do you think he has planned for the kenku? An old man such as himself should be quite the advantage, and better than whatever cheap arcana the kenku practice. He is an old man, yes? You recognize the distinction?”

“I believe so. He is in communion with another as the source of his power. Beholden to older creatures.”

“Precisely. So, he has spoken to you of his plans? He has told you how he intends to enter the fray against the kenku?”

Nergei denied knowing anything, which was true, but left out his most persistent worry: He did not believe the Old Stargazer would join in the fight.

His master had been withdrawn always, keeping himself apart from Haven and even from Nergei—especially from Nergei, maybe, wondered the boy, in his innermost voice—but his reclusiveness had worsened over the years, and seemed absolute. When Nergei snuck up to the door outside the looking room at the top of the tower, he pressed his ear against that door—stone there, not wood—and what he heard inside was unintelligible speech, magic perhaps but also maybe madness, and in a voice that was his master’s and also not his master’s, also something or someone more.

Whatever his master was wrestling with, he would not emerge until he had finished. If ever.

That was the real reason the mercenaries were there, but he did not know if he should tell them, did not know what he could tell if he felt like he should.

And so Mikal had walked around the first floor of the observatory, walking faster than Nergei so that the boy could not tell the wizard that he was not welcome without an invitation, that no one just entered the observatory as he had. Finally Nergei’s nervousness receded—the wizard’s constant smile and cheerful banter were infectious, especially to someone as worried as he—and he began to try to answer the half-elf’s questions regarding this leather-bound book or that one, this star map, those sextants and their origins. The half-elf’s curiosity seemed inexhaustible, and while Nergei did not know the answers to all the questions he was asked he still knew more than he thought he might.

“The old man has taught you about these things?”

“A few,” said Nergei. “He tells me what I need to know. If he demands a book, I have to know which one he wants, so he taught me to read. If he demands an implement of some sort, I have to know which one. Sometimes he will lose the name for something, though, and when that happens, he will tell me what he wants by telling me what he wants to do. So, he
sat me down and told me what many of the things in here are for.”

Nergei was quiet for a moment, but Mikal said nothing, knowing that it would prompt more from the boy. He knew the young man had more to say.

“If he needs herbs for his potions, he needs me to go get them. So he has given me books of the local plants and made me memorize them.”

“So he has taught you some of his skills?” asked Mikal. “He has trained you with your own abilities?”

“Oh, no,” said Nergei. “He has only taught me how to act as his servant. Nothing more.”

Nergei seemed certain of it, but Mikal thought differently. He was convinced that the old man was, in fact, training the boy in arcana, but he masked it, convinced the boy he was merely a servant. There was more going on. Mikal was also aware that the source of the impediments to Nergei fully controlling, fully grasping his power was in the observatory. The old man was keeping them sealed within him.

Nergei absently picked up a magnifying glass that his master used with his many maps and held it over one nearby. “It is here,” he said. “The thing is here, in this cluster. That’s what he says.”

To Mikal, it looked like just another grouping of stars. But there was the seat of the Old Stargazer’s
formidable magic. He took note of it and wondered: What lives there?

When the tour of the first floor was finished—and after Nergei protested at great length against the possibility of continuing on to the second—then Mikal told Nergei that he would show him something instead, and bid him follow him out of the tower.

Nergei did not know what Mikal wanted with him, but anything was better than rotting with patience in the observatory. Still, he did not expect to be taken to the offal pit behind the abattoir, where the butchers threw the unusable parts of the goats that had been brought to slaughter.

At first, he did not know what he was supposed to be looking at, but it did not take long.

There, on the edge of the pit, he saw what Mikhal had brought him to see—the body of the kenku he had killed, that he had set ablaze with the magical fire he had summoned just once and had never been able to summon again, despite attempts he would have admitted to no one, not even his master.

The kenku’s body was badly decomposed, matted with flies and worse, its flesh already past the bloating and into the collapse that follows. Its beak looked even bigger, with its face receded, and both of its eyes were
long missing. Stripped of its clothes and its weapons, and with its limbs defleshed toward bone, it was harder to identify for what it was, but it was also even more obvious how it had died. Whereas the marks of an arrow or two might be gone by then—unless the arrowheads had nicked or shattered bones on the way through the body—there was no misreading the burned bones of the kenku’s chest, its hips and legs.

That didn’t mean Nergei had to admit anything. “Why did you bring me here, Mikal? I’ve already seen this, and when there was more of it to see.”

“Kohel told me that he killed the kenku, with his bow. That he killed this one, and that Padlur killed at least one, and that you and Luzhon did nothing.”

“That’s what happened. That’s what we all said happened.”

“Not you. You were unconscious when you returned. ‘Overcome,’ I believe is what Kohel said. Making sport of you around the campfire on the way here.”

“Yes.” Nergei’s face burned as he tried to lie. “With fear, maybe. Or excitement. I am not like the other boys.”

“No,” said Mikal, turning Nergei’s body to face his. “You’re not, and in more ways than those you already know. I was right with what I said in the city. You do have some magic in you, and you let it out to save your friends. To save Luzhon. So why haven’t you told any of the others what you can do?”

“Because I can’t do it again, okay? I’m not a wizard. It was a freak accident, a mistake, and I’m sorry it ever happened.”

Nergei put his back to the half-elf, slumped his shoulders. Mikal waited before speaking again. He remembered being young. He remembered that he, too, had fought against his acumen with magic when it had first manifest. He had lived far away from the fey side of his family, among humans in a village much like Haven. And they were a superstitious lot. But he had his half-sister. He had Magla and her family to help guide him. He was bright and studious, and when they would visit, they would bring him books on magic. They would show him simple tricks, simple ways to access supernatural power. And each trick opened up a path to more powerful ones. Each book explained to him where the magic was within the world and within himself. That allowed what he was to grow naturally. Grow and learn and thrive. Magic needed freedom to prosper. The boy’s, though, was bound.

Mikal saw it. Nergei was one of those very special practitioners of the magic arts who had access without the burden of study. He could control it with his will. He could bring things into being by coaxing power from the earth, coaxing fire from his belly. He could convince the power to act as he desired because they
spoke the same language naturally. Mikal had worked to learn it from books. The boy was born with it. But the old man—and Mikal saw the familiar weave of the old man’s magic in the boy as he saw it in the spells around Haven—had chained it within him. And he had set up snares to keep others from freeing it easily. Mikal would need time to help the boy release his power. He did not have time. Not yet.

“This was not an accident,” he said, pointing to the body of the kenku. “There are only a few who can call on the arcane even a little, and you are one of them. But I’ll say nothing of this to anyone else. There is no time to train you, even if your master would give me leave to try. I merely wanted you to know that I knew, and also to ask you for your help.”