The Warden, page 4
Aelis ignored all that and drew her sword. When her fingers wrapped around the hilt, she could feel, instantly, the power gathering in the world around her.
Two syllables, and the night was briefly illuminated with the faint shimmer of her ward, radiating from the crosspiece of her sword, enveloping her.
A small ball of purple light came hurtling toward her.
Second Order Evocation at most, she thought. Might be in for a tingle.
She braced herself for the jarring clash of power against power, but there was none. The ball disintegrated as soon as it touched her ward. With spots dancing in her eyes, she traced the path of its flight by the faint shimmer it had left in the air. A shadowy outline, tall and thin, with a long staff in one hand, stood a few yards away.
Her mouth set in a hard line, Aelis shifted the sword to her right hand alone. Another ball of light formed out of the air and sped at her. She swept the sword in the air before her, pouring through the hilt the briefest of First Order Abjurations. The purple ball was swept away like so much dust before a broom.
The shadowed figure resolved into a man of later middle years, with a wild and tangled beard and a fringe of gray hair, wearing filthy brown robes. He called up another ball of light, but another sweep of Aelis’s sword dispelled it before it even left his hand.
By the time she’d closed to five yards, she flexed her left wrist and caught her wand as it fell into her hand. She raised it and spoke a syllable while tracing the tip of the wand through the air. For the briefest of moments, the glyph she’d traced hung there, bright green, a delicate latticework. It dissipated as the power in it fled toward the ragged-looking man.
He tumbled over backward, his staff falling from nerveless fingers as he hit the ground, dead asleep. Aelis ran forward and kicked it away from him. She was half certain it was just a length of wood, but there was no harm in being sure.
Then, sticking the wand through her belt and sliding the sword back into its sheath, she bent over, placed her hands on her knees, and tried to get her racing heart under control. For a moment, she felt like she might spew the spicy stuffed cabbage, roasted beets, turnips and potatoes, honey-nut cakes, and mint herbal tea all over the grass.
For the second time that day, she called to mind the presence of Professor Vosghez.
The racing heart, the sweating hand, the panting breath—they are all signs of weakness. They are caused by fear. Fear is a response to danger. The Abjurer does not know danger. The properly prepared and ever-vigilant Abjurer is the antithesis of danger. Thus, she cannot fear. Thus, her heart does not race. Her breath does not pant. Her palms do not sweat.
Slowly, as she focused not only on those words but on the techniques he’d later taught her—to control the breathing by inhaling through her mouth and exhaling through her nose, holding the breath in her throat for a moment, straightening her back—her breath came back under control and her heart rate settled to its normal pace.
That took only a few moments. The man she’d laid low with a Somnolence was snoring and twitching on the grass. She bent over to have a look at him. He was as thin and gnarled as driftwood, but tall enough that there was a lot of him. Aelis didn’t fancy carrying him back to the tower, and no one else was about, so she decided to engage him right there on the grassy verge of the road leading out of town.
She loosened her sword in its sheath, pulled her wand free from her belt, drew in the air with it again, then tapped it against the man’s forehead.
He woke with a start and would’ve surged to his feet, if he hadn’t, almost immediately, seen the green glowing point of her wand hovering before his face, heard the whisk of her sword drawn.
“Good evening,” she murmured, her voice just this side of sweet. “I am Warden Aelis de Lenti. You are the man who foolishly attacked an Abjurer of the Lyceum using the pathetic illusions of a first-year student who is destined never to graduate. I would like to know your name, and your purpose.”
The man hesitated, biting his lip. Aelis saw his eyes roll, as if he was casting about for an escape.
“I can compel your answer,” she added. “But I would prefer not to. It can be an unpleasant experience.”
The man blinked once, then sagged back against the grass. “I’m sorry, Warden,” he said, his voice reedy and pathetic to her ears. “My name is Dalius. Please, let us go to your tower and discuss our positions. I promise I will attempt no more magic.”
“I’m afraid a promise isn’t going to be good enough, Dalius,” Aelis said. Her wand dipped forward and flashed against his forehead as she released the Interdiction she’d called up.
He recoiled, tried crabwalking backward on his elbows. “What did you do, what did you…”
“I verified that you’d be performing no more magic for the next hour. Now, come,” she said, “and don’t try running. I don’t want to have to chase you.”
* * *
Seated in her tower under the light of her alchemy lamp, Dalius was a pathetic figure indeed. Tall, spindly, with a mud-stained peasant’s robe tattered at its hem and cuffs and his scraggly gray-and-brown beard, he looked like an aged beggar.
Do not allow yourself sympathy for this man. He attacked you, with magic. By law, you can put him to death.
“I’m sorry, Warden,” he was saying, for the sixth, or perhaps the seventh, time. “I don’t know … I just, I took it on myself t’watch over these folk, and I heard the word Necromancer, and I thought…”
“Did you hear the word Warden, hedge wizard? What did you think to accomplish by attacking me?”
Dalius sniffed and looked at her with brown eyes wide and liquid beneath wild brows. “I don’t know. I didn’t know, didn’t think women could be wardens.”
“By the Worldsoul, man, women have been wardens as long as there have been wardens. That’s ignorant nonsense.” The snap in her voice brought a low whine out of him, and he raised the heel of one hand to his forehead, rubbing hard.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I thought the folk here were in danger.”
“From what? And who are you to appoint yourself their guardian, at any rate?”
“I’m a … a practitioner, lady Warden, a fellow dabbler in the great arts, and I took it upon myself to look kindly over this village and its folk. We are comrades, of a sort. I’m sorry I didn’t realize that—”
“We are not fellows, hedge wizard, for I am no dabbler. And my appropriate title is Warden. Just. Warden,” Aelis said. She had been about to sit, but something in his whining tone, coupled with his appeal to their supposed comradeship, ignited new anger in her. She drew herself up to her full height—which was perhaps a bit above average, but not tall compared to a beanpole like Dalius. Thankfully he had shrunk down into the chair, and she loomed over him.
“I am a fully accorded Warden of the Lyceum. I am a graduate of three of its Colleges, Abjurer, Enchanter, and Necromancer in one, and we are no more colleagues than a gnat is colleague to an eagle simply because they both have wings.” She wasn’t shouting, but she felt her voice rising. “Luckily for you, you posed about as much danger to me as a gnat would to an eagle. What exactly were you trying to accomplish?”
“To … drive you away. The people are frightened of you, so if you left, perhaps I could occupy the tower, then. Be their guardian? Have a bit of respect.”
Dalius appeared on the verge of tears. Aelis snorted and whirled away from him.
“Drive me off with what, exactly? A construction of light and air that even a first-year student of Illusion would die of shame to have cast?” Dalius quailed in his seat.
Aelis let her hand fall to the hilt of her sword. “You know,” she said, “that by law, for having assaulted me, I’ve every right to kill you.”
That seemed to break him. Dalius began to weep, huge tears rolling down his cheeks, choking sobs pulled from his thin chest, globs of snot forming in the wide, hairy caverns of his nostrils.
Aelis took a half-step away, her anger leaking out of her like wine from a punctured skin. “I’m not going to kill you, hedge wizard. I’m not even going to hurt you. But I will warn you: never, ever cross me like that again.”
“Then what … what do you intend to do with me?” Dalius lifted his eyes hopefully, wiping the tears away with a gnarled hand.
The pathetic sight of a man older than her father looking at her like a kicked puppy nearly weakened Aelis’s resolve. But she kept her face as implacable as she could manage.
“I’m going to make use of you,” Aelis said. She held up a hand to stop whatever babble he’d been about to launch into. “No. Not magical use. If you think you’ve any objects of power, I want to look over them. But what I really want out of you, Dalius, is your knowledge of the people and places. What, in the area of Lone Pine, do I need to know about? And whom?”
* * *
Maybe I should’ve killed him, Aelis found herself thinking two hours later. She sat, pen in hand, writing desk on her lap, taking less and less meticulous notes as Dalius spun the local folklore and the exhaustive genealogies of all of Lone Pine’s leading families. The lines of drying ink began in her confident and controlled hand before gradually sloping down the page. Eventually one or two even became barely more than crooked scribbles.
“Now Agatha, y’see, I mean old Agatha, she’s the great-grandmother of the goodwoman Agatha of the village today, word is that her third daughter, that’d be our Agatha’s aunt Eugenia, she might not be her father’s daughter, if you take my meaning. Vicious gossip, that, but then where’d that red hair come from, eh? Not from old Lars, no madam, it didn’t indeed…”
“Dalius,” Aelis said, finishing a hasty doodle of one figure in robes stabbing a second, taller figure. “I think we can stop there for the night.” Shouldn’t have wasted the ink, she thought as she stood and set the desk down, then quickly slipped the parchments she’d made notes on inside it.
“Well, I’ve got lots of other good information, m’lady Warden. Old Dalius has lived here and watched this village for decades.”
“Then you knew my predecessor?”
“Barely. He wasn’t here long till the frontier claimed him. Dangerous place, m’lady. Dangerous indeed.”
“What about before him? The wartime Warden?”
That brought Dalius up short. “He was a hard man.”
“Did you know him at all? What were his talents, his—”
“I don’t like to talk about him,” Dalius snapped. “He was cruel, and the people feared him.”
“Fine, I’ll not ask any longer. I would like to know—tomorrow, not tonight—about any local landmarks, folktales, traditions, that sort of thing.”
“Ah, Dalius is yer man then, m’lady Warden…”
“Just Warden, Dalius. Or Aelis.”
The hedge wizard looked rather longingly at the walls of her tower and the chair he’d been sitting in.
“Off you go,” Aelis said, merciless. “Be well this night. If you wish to come speak with me again tomorrow, or the next night, come two hours after dinner.”
“I don’t eat dinner most nights,” Dalius said, pitifully. “The village folk, they used to trade me bread for charms, cheese for reading the weather, milk for keeping their sheep healthy, but now they’ve all forgotten about me.”
“If you come back tomorrow, when the moons are high and you see a light in this tower, I will have some bread to share. It might not be much, and it may just be bread. But it will be yours. I’ll get cheese if you tell me anything useful.”
That lit a fire in his eyes. “I’ll have the choicest bits of lore for you tomorrow, m’lady Warden Aelis,” he said, and fairly skipped down the short hall and out the door, his stick clacking loudly on the stone path all the way.
Aelis wished for a bottle of good wine. Better yet, a bottle of brandy or port. For Humphrey’s arms. For Miralla’s fingers twining into her hair. For wide, bustling streets and magic lamps floating above the crowd like tiny copies of Stregon’s blue moon. She’d always thought the light of the lamps made everyone it touched more beautiful, as if through the force of will and the application of art wizards had conquered night itself.
She looked up through the holes in the floor above her and the holes in the roof beyond, and was so overwhelmed by the curtain of stars that she felt like the smallest ember of a fire flickering distantly from the hearth, trying to will itself into burning on.
Then she realized that this metaphor extended into her burning Lone Pine down, and decided to give it up and go to bed. It was later than she’d expected; Dalius must’ve gone on even longer than she’d imagined.
5
THE WORK
Aelis woke early that morning, a character failing that the last year in the Lyceum had done a great deal to drub out of her. The folk I’m responsible for are early risers, she thought, then, only just repressing a shudder, added, I suppose that means I should be as well.
“Besides,” she muttered aloud as she stretched the kinks out of her back, “it’s not like there’s anything to do at night in this place anyway.”
Resolving to get something in the nature of bedding squared away later that day, Aelis changed into her work clothes, gathered and released a quick First Order Necromantic Pulse into her orrery, and went to seek work.
It was only once she was out the door that Aelis realized just how early it was; the two visible moons were still dominating the sky, with the sun only just beginning to compete.
She wandered down to the crossroads, twice passing flocks being led out to pasture. I assume it’s to pasture. I can’t really say for sure. Where else does one lead a flock? She shook the thoughts away and walked on, enjoying the slight briskness of the early morning air. The day’s heat would see to it, and the dew, soon enough.
When she neared the inn she was surprised to see a large figure bending down just in front of the back door, setting down what looked like a freshly killed and cleaned deer.
Only when she got closer, she realized it wasn’t a deer carcass; it was an elk, and the figure that straightened up after placing it on the ground was enormous. In fact, his size—she assumed it was a man, though she couldn’t see past a tangle of braided hair spilling out the sides of a hooded jerkin—had simply made the cow elk look, for a moment, like a deer carried by a normal-sized man.
The figure’s shrouded face turned toward her, as if he sensed he was being watched. Then he bent down and picked up a bulging sack with one hand and trotted away with long, ground-eating strides. In a few moments, he was up the hill and melting into the treeline.
He disappeared so completely and so quickly that Aelis halted in place, wondering if she’d just seen an apparition. Then the back door of the inn creaked open and Rus stuck his head outside.
“You took my words about early rising to heart, Warden,” he called out. In Aelis’s estimation, he was far too full of good cheer for the dark of the morning, but she resolved to let it rub off on her, and offered a nod as she drew closer.
“I thought I might as well see if there was work I could do,” she said. She looked back up at the treeline behind the inn, hesitated over the question she wanted to ask.
“You saw our Tun, eh?” Rus gestured to the elk that lay before him. “I’m going to have a job of butchering this. You must’ve scared him off.”
“Me? Scared him off?” Aelis snorted. “I’d sooner imagine I could scare off a mountain.”
“He’s a bit skittish. Traps, hunts, helps keep the village in meat and hides. We trade him bread, wine, the occasional tool. Come fair days, Martin and I sell furs for him and convert the coin into things he can use.”
“He trusts you to do that?” By now Aelis had come forward and the pungent animal smell of the enormous carcass rang in her nose.
“Says the silver is of no use to him,” Rus replied, with a shrug. “And what merchants come to Lone Pine don’t tend to bring gold, nor would he have aught to spend it on. We try to do right by him, because he does right by us.” Then he looked down at the elk. “Anything you could do to help with this?”
“There might be,” Aelis said. She squatted down, eyeing it for a moment. “If we could lever it up, I could get a ward under it and hold it in place. I might be able to walk it somewhere, but … I’m not too sure of that.” Then she straightened up. “If you’re prepared to help guide in the cutting of it a little, I can break it down awfully quickly.”
“Right here? In the back yard?”
“I can cut it into quarters,” Aelis said, “and I can do it fast.” She pursed her lips. “I might be able to get its spine out, too. Planning anything for the head?”
“Warden,” Rus said, his cheeks a bit pale, “I mean no disrespect, but I don’t know if I want … if I need to see … whatever sort of ritual you’re planning.”
Aelis sighed and drew the dagger from its place at her back. “It’s not a ritual, Rus, I assure you. It’s knowledge, and an Anatomist’s blade. That’s all.” She turned the dagger around in her hand. It was plain enough; a straight blade a bit over half a foot long, double edged, no quillons. But in the light, Aelis knew Rus would see that while the blade seemed to be simple steel, the edge and the point gleamed a dark black.
Rus didn’t look at it long. He shouldered open the swinging back door and yelled, “Martin! Bring out the biggest platter!”
Aelis rolled up her sleeves, bent down and seized one of the elk’s legs, pulled it taut, felt out the edges of the joint with her fingers, then traced around it with the tip of her knife, exerting only the slightest pressure.
The knife slid in with no resistance.
She drew it in a tight circle, then pulled.
The leg came away in her hand and she laid it carefully on the ground. The other three limbs joined it. Some blood leaked out here and there, but by and large the carcass had clearly been drained by the enormous hunter who had brought it.
