036 – Preparation

***

I had made a dangerous rival in Zambulon. He blamed me for all his troubles and failures. The worst part was that I would have preferred for him to succeed. Had he won Hwilla’s favor, he would have freed me from her obsessive love. If he had gained a promotion, it would mean one less senior disciple in my way. My role as his foil was accidental.

Zambulon might stab me in the back, but not the front. He would try to do so without being blamed for it. I needed a plan to counter any of his attacks, up to and including killing him first. I hated the idea, and would only use it as a last resort, but waiting around to get murdered was worse. This was self defense.

Office politics were much more stressful when swords were involved.

Fightmaster Putrizio had given me a reprieve of a few weeks. The other disciples had left the dorms and moved down to the lower ranked training halls to teach classes to the novices. That gave me the Hall of Discipline all to myself. I could finally meditate in silence. With no one to observe me, I could go to my hidden workshop without fear of being followed. It gave me free time to work on my other issues.

Malisent wanted to fight the golem.

I crossed the narrow bridge to her isolated turret, alert for devil-birds in the skies above. She left the door to her private apartment unlocked. Inside, the giant cauldron sat in the middle of her living room. I shivered at the sight of it.

Malisent’s new home was, in a way, the exact opposite of Veylien’s. Veylien had created a bubble of luxury to insulate herself from the reality of life in the citadel. She draped her walls in tapestries, covered the floors with rugs, and installed stained glass windows to block the view of the valley outside. Malisent, on the other hand, had left her home almost bare. It was minimalist to the point of austerity. There wasn’t a rug or a cushion to be found. What furniture she had was of high quality, black lacquered wood, hepatizon, and antique lusterware.

I knocked on the side of the cauldron to announce myself. As much as this artifact now disgusted me, I needed to study it more. Its draining affect could be reproduced in other contexts and give clues on how to power modern arrays.

“Strythe.” Malisent emerged from her boudoir with her hair unshackled from its restraints. Her wild curls swirled around her. She wore a robe of black fur and no shoes. Only a mage would walk bare footed across this cold floor. The mountain winds made her apartment almost freezing. “So then, do you have a plan for capturing our golem?”

“I have an inkling of the beginning of an idea. It’s not worth calling a plan yet. And it might not work at all.”

“Let’s hear it,” she said.

“When you witches abandoned me down in the lower levels, I discovered that the golem was unwilling to enter the shorter side tunnels. Hiding there, I avoided getting smashed. My suspicion is that it didn’t want to damage its long horns by bumping into the ceiling. That’s also a likely reason that it never leaves the labyrinth; the exit is too low. The golem’s horns must be fragile, a weak point.”

“Will breaking the horns hurt it?”

“I don’t know. They’re made from the same crystal as its core, so they may have a real function. Smashing them might neutralize or weaken it.”

“Or it might anger the guardian and release it from the labyrinth.”

“Yes. That’s a possibility.”

“Is that all you’ve got?”

“I’ve considered methods to attack it without getting killed in the process. You aren’t going to like my idea. The only good way to fight it is to work with the other witches. All three of you will have to cooperate to take it down.”

“That’s no good. I want to take all the credit.”

“You’ll get some credit for putting it together, right? This isn’t the sort of task that you and I can finish by ourselves. Good teamwork is severely lacking among the Void Phantoms, but it’s the only thing that can solve a problem this big.” I set down a rolled scroll that contained my preliminary sketches.

“I’ll consider it.” She said placed her hand on the side of the giant cauldron. “Now. It’s time for your next session in the cold prison.”

“What? There’s no way I’m getting inside that thing again. I almost died the other day.”

“Don’t be so dramatic. You were only a little mana starved. And the cauldron taught you a good lesson. Your fire is cooler now.”

“I won’t get in this thing until it has an internal release installed. It needs safety features.”

“It wouldn’t make a very good prison that way. Don’t worry. I’ll stay right here. I won’t go anywhere without letting you out first.”

She wouldn’t take no for an answer. Malisent shoved me in the cauldron. The heavy lid closed over top of me. When the seal completed, the array activated and began to drain my power.

“Since you had to spend so long inside last time, you’ll only need three or four more sessions,” she shouted in through the vent. This was pure sadism at this point. She put me in here for her own entertainment.

I crouched in the cauldron and looked out the horizontal air slits to check on the hourglass. The sands trickled down slowly. Malisent went back into her bedroom. I saw her briefly as she crossed the open doorway. She had little furniture, but did have an impressive number of wardrobes and cabinets in her room. Black apparel spilled out of the open drawers. She pulled out a gossamer article of clothing, nearly transparent and fringed with lace. So Zvidsi also made her things like that too. Malisent shuffled out of her fur robes.

This was a trap.

She would definitely catch me spying on her. Then she would either stab me, threaten to stab me, use my crime as an excuse to assign me more frivolous errands, or mercilessly mock me for peeping. She might do all of those in turn. Her sharp senses could spot my eyes glittering at the air vents, so I closed them tightly and curled up inside the pot.

Our raft ride down the Spitpoison and camping trip at the haunted settlement had given me plenty of opportunity to ogle her in a state of undress. Refreshing my memory was not worth the cost. I tried to think about other things. Meditate on nothingness.

This time in the cauldron, I possessed a greater reserve of mana. Instead of cooling my fire, I tried to resist by increasing the heat. That only fed more power into the array and increased the draining effect. The more I burned, the more it chilled. Resisting only made it worse.

I settled in for another long, unpleasant imprisonment.

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***

Korkso, chief of the Goadsmen, approved my plan for enlisting the goblin tribe to our cause, although he voiced skepticism about how well it might work. Goblins were unruly and unfocused. They loved stealing and hated hard work.

I traveled down the mountain to where the workers constructed the new river docks. They enclosed an area with a high fence to keep wolf monsters away from the mules, and they built some rough shacks for storing supplies. It didn’t take long before goblins started skulking around looking for unattended items to swipe.

Convincing the workers took more effort than getting Chief Korkso to agree. They wanted to shoot their crossbows at the little green monsters. The only way to overcome this strong hatred was to match it with something they hated even worse: going into the valley. The dark woods and bubbling swamps hid all sorts of dangers. None of the workers willingly left the safety of the docks or the trail up to the citadel. Using the goblins as scouts and gatherers had more appeal than skewering them with bolts, although not much.

The workers agreed to set up an isolated booth, far from the other supplies, where they could trade with the goblins. If I could arrange such a thing, that was. Several times, I went out to the edge of the fence where goblins were sighted and yelled out for their goblin diplomat.

“Nimblesto, you scamp! Get over here already.”

A red cap popped up over the top of the fence and a tiny face scowled at me.

“Why human yell?”

“Because I want to talk with you. The humans in the citadel need things from the valley. We’re willing to trade with your tribe for them.”

“Goblins no trade. Goblins sneak, steal, run. Goblins best. Humans worst.”

“Yeah, well, if you keep that up, the humans will use you for target practice. You can get more stuff by trading us for items from the valley. Gather the things we need, and we’ll give you something in exchange.”

“What thing?”

I took out a long string of beads. It included round glass beads and clay beads in various shapes with colorful glazes—exactly the kind of thing goblins loved. I tossed it over the fence. On the other side, the goblins hissed at each other as they fought over the flashing objects.

“We can also give you supplies that are actually useful. Metal fishing hooks, arrowheads, knives, matches. The items you can’t make yourselves.”

“Give treasure,” Nimblesto demanded and banged his hands on the top of the fence. He was mad the others claimed all the beads before he could grab any.

“I’m all out. You’ll have to trade for them at the booth.”

I had made some signs that goblins could understand. Each sign had nailed to it one of the items the citadel wanted, along with a number of dots representing the payment in trinkets. No literacy or common language was required. This equals that. They could drop off the goods and a trader at the booth would hand over the beads.

The workers knew of a dozen or so useful things found in the valley. There was a gourd filled with latex that could be turned to rubber, spines from a trap plant that made better pens than goose quills, a blue moss used for tanning animal skins, creeping vines with strong fibers for making ropes, wasp nests that could be boiled down and strained into a clear varnish, seed pods that released oil when pressed, worms that produced a powerful acid. And there were other resources waiting to be discovered.

The tiny goblins could not provide huge amounts of these materials. But their help would fill a few gaps in the Void Cult’s strained supply lines. The tribe needed food too much to trade it away, and many of the plants they could digest were toxic to humans, so it didn’t help our own food situation. My main goal was to convince the cult not to exterminate the goblins, by making them slightly less annoying. Trade would ideally let the two groups coexist.

“If you want to earn some treasure, Nimblesto, then I might have other jobs for you at the citadel. Jobs more up your alley, like sneaking and stealing.”

“Nimblesto best. Nimblesto sneak humans. Humans blind, deaf, stupid.”

Magi easily sensed each other’s inner fires and those of magical monsters. But a monster like Nimblesto had almost no presence. He could sneak undetected in places I couldn’t go. And our first adventure in the citadel proved a goblin thief was worth more as an ally than most people would assume. If I had to worry about rivalries and other intrigues, I wanted every possible trick at my disposal.

***

Fightmaster Putrizio met with me in the Hall of Discipline. After a few more sessions in the that horrible cauldron and several days of exercises, I could adjust the level of my fire at will. The crazy training he put me through actually worked.

“You’ve made excellent progress, disciple. Your control is very stiff for a beginner and your fire on the hot side, but it’s not the crippling affliction we feared it to be. Everyone has their own unique foibles and fortes; yours may be a hot but constant fire.” Putrizio sat at his desk as I demonstrated my new ability, increasing and decreasing the intensity of my fire. “A normal set of exercises should suffice from here, with no more need of weird artifacts.”

“Do you often use artifacts in training?” I asked.

“On occasion. Most swordsmen run into obstacles along their path—although it usually happens at the later stages, not to those newly enkindled. To break through an obstacle, people resort to all sorts of extreme methods: isolation, old artifacts, exotic drugs, visits to mystic sites, self flagellation, eating monster flesh, or even stranger things. One shudders to imagine what dark deeds our Lord Hrolzek performed to attain such heights of necromantic power.”

For once, Putrizio stuck around to teach me some new exercises. He had hastily punished the others without stopping to consider that doing so left no senior disciple to instruct me. I was the only one in the Hall of Discipline. So he was forced to give me short lessons every day.

“Fightmaster, are there any new lessons for projection I should know?”

“Ah. Yes. Your premature fascination with projection. Now that you can build your mana, I can demonstrate a few more for you. However, don’t overdo it. Projection burns a great deal of mana.

“First, you must understand that projection is divided into three separate branches: extension, radiation, and emission. The first you are already familiar with. It is the simplest to achieve and the easiest to maintain for long periods of time. Extending your inner fire out of your body is the basis for many techniques. The most common set of those involve extending a stream of fire up the blade of your sword—or in your case, that silly lamp-on-a-stick you carry. But extension has countless uses. Observe.”

Putrizio drew his sword and placed it on his desk. Then, from over two meters away, he extended a long whip of fire from one hand and snagged it by the hilt. He yanked the sword toward him and snatched it out of the air with his other hand. This was an excellent way for a disarmed swordsman to regain their weapon.

“The second branch is radiation. Your inner fire gives off energy the way a material fire gives off light and heat. That energy can be used for a limited range of techniques. Techniques which befuddle the senses or the mind fall into this branch. Since radiation flows out in all directions, it can affect a wide area and large group of people.”

I had already seen an example of this in Malisent’s fearful gaze. She frightened off two dozen pirate-hunters with her glowing eyes and the heat from her fire. Her magic didn’t require hitting them with her sword or directly touching them with her fire. It was the magic of a strong aura or presence.

“The third branch is emission. Techniques in this branch are the most difficult to master. You must break off a small piece of your inner fire and cast it outward. This flame can only fly a short distance before burning away. But emitting a flame allows for magical attacks at a range. Many styles use sword strikes that send out bolts of energy. Attacking at range burns through mana very quickly, so it is used to compliment normal fighting, not replace it. I shall demonstrate the first lesson in emission.”

Putrizio snapped his fingers at a nearby candle, and the wick burst into flames. Malisent had used that same trick to light our campfires while we traveled together. Igniting fires was a handy ability to have on a camping trip.

“Wouldn’t it be much easier to buy a crossbow?” I asked.

“Forget about those commoner weapons, Strythe. Emission techniques can mix into your regular swordplay without sheathing your blade. They give tactical choices. They can strike a fleeing enemy in the back. They can force an opponent to move from an advantageous position. They can deflect other projectiles. But they are not meant to be used from a castle parapet or out in the woods hunting rabbits. Leave the crossbows to the soldiers and hunters.”

I had learned to ask Putrizio annoying questions at the end of class. When I asked earlier, he assigned me more grueling work to do. It seemed to me that using a proper tool would be more effective than practicing for years to launch magic from a sword tip. But the world was filled with swordsmaniacs who would never be swayed by logic.

My training in swordcraft continued.