Astara cursed herself. All morning she’d been trailing the three men who had been accompanying the Countess of Roses. She’d been careful while in sight of them, shifting her appearance slightly when she could. It was bad enough that the old Raszan had his head on a swivel, but even so she knew how to stay hidden. Except, of course, that she hadn’t had time to wash the smell of the strange foul-smelling fluid from her clothing after spilling only a small amount of it onto herself while inspecting their vehicles.
She’d managed to slip into the stable where the five strange-wheeled contraptions rested. She’d found a red container made from some kind of material she’d never seen before that had some of the strange fluid inside. Not knowing what it was, she decided to take some of it in a vial, but spilled it onto herself.
She’d thought little of it until one of the three men stopped and sniffed the air. Gasoline, he’d called it. Astara was smarter than that. She should have known better. Still, the man seemed to dismiss it, so Astara was safe for now. Nonetheless, she would have to bathe and change her clothes before leaving Arronay.
She found it curious that the Countess and the girl with the bright red hair had left on their own that morning, but she knew the instrument that the Duke required was in the possession of one of the men, so she decided to trail the two of them instead. She stayed close enough to hear snippets of their conversation, but not so close as to arouse suspicion.
As they watched the show by the other Light Mage, Astara felt on edge. Light Magic was easily sensed by other Light Mages, and she was certain that Ghern Lex had sensed her. Thankfully, he’d said nothing of it. As long as it wasn’t interfering with his foolish children’s tale, he would choose to ignore it.
Thankfully, it was also easy to hide in the crowd with a glamour over herself. She could look like anyone. Man, woman, child. She could even, if need be, appear as nothing, although that level of Light Magic required much in the way of concentration. Any unnecessary movement would have to be compensated for. But as a person, all she had to focus on was changing her face, hair and clothing. It was far easier.
But now she risked being smelled. The crowd might cover sounds she might make. But smells, particularly unique ones such as the foul scent of the gasoline risked arousing suspicion. She would have to keep her distance and only watch.
Still, she had gathered much in the way of useful information just from the loose gums of the three men. The location of their home in the Disputed Lands not the least among them. And, curiously, some indication that they might have some knowledge of something of immense value: the sword of Rasshauer Flenn.
Normally Astara paid little heed to legends. Too often she found a story told over time would change in such a way that it would cease resembling the true tale. After a thousand years, the truth might be long buried. But the casual way with which they spoke made her wonder. Were they in possession of some knowledge about the sword, or were they perhaps in possession of the sword itself?
Either option interested Astara. A relic like the sword of Flenn would make her rich beyond her wildest dreams. She would never have to take another job. She could buy an estate in Rasza or Vector and retire. That alone was enough to keep her interested. Astara’s love of money knew no bounds.
She was raised in wealth. Her family was important in Halen. The name of Indetae was one that demanded respect from most, and terror from others. But it was a name for the men. Astara had been raised in the traditional fashion of the women in her family. Gowns, balls and silly hobbies like breeding dogs and brewing ale, while her brothers were more given to the martial practices. Fighting, joining the Knights of Perron. Certainly they were known for being merchants, but her family’s merchant activities came second to their tradition. Indetae men were expected to serve the royal family while expanding the interests of their namesake, while Indetae women were all too often to be married off to secure business or political dealings, often into loveless homes.
Astara cared little for matters of love. Love was fleeting, and romance was a lie told to young girls to make them serve men in hopes to receive praise. An Indetae woman was only good for producing children, and Astara was too smart for that. Praise was little more than an attempt to manipulate her. And the only good parts of love were found in sex. Astara learned from when she was young that sex, enjoyable as it was, was a tool she could use to manipulate men. Certainly she had her own tastes when it came to matters of flesh, but in the end, it was one of the best tools she’d had.
She was a teenager when she manifested Light Magic. She’d managed to keep it a secret from her family for three years. She used it to spy on her brothers, on her father. She used it to learn many of the martial techniques that had been passed on to them, and she practices in secret. Then, one day, she’d learned the secret of her family. The Indetae’s wealth, the respect they’d garnered for generations did not come from their success as merchants. Rather, from their ability to keep secrets. To bury their true history through private dealings, royal favours and in some cases, outright assassinations.
Astara wanted to be a part of that more than anything. So, she trained in secret until she felt herself ready, all the while allowing her family to decide her destiny for her. Then, she confronted her father with all she knew, and demanded the same rights her brothers had. She wanted to be a part of it all.
Her father refused, then finalised the details of her marriage to the fat young son of a Baron in western Halen.
That very night, she left her family home, never to return. In part because she refused to be party to her own imprisonment, and in part because she managed to steal a good third of the gold in the family treasury.
She never stayed in the same place for long after that, and her travels had taken her all across the Pactlands. She learned to hone her skills, she trained under different masters, and eventually made her own name.
Astara. In the old tongue, it meant a dark caress. She found it fitting, as she could easily slit a man’s throat with little more than a gentle touch of a sharp blade after just having embraced him, and partly ironic since a Light Mage, by definition, was not generally associated with darkness. Astara became who she was meant to be, and the more she pursued her own destiny, the more the name of Kaelin Indetae faded away.
But it was all a means to an end. Her work was her means, but her end was meant to be spending her days well into old age surrounded by wealth, privilege and an endless supply of men and women with which to satisfy her physical needs until such time as she found it boring. She would not be beholden to a Pact written a thousand years before she was born, nor would she be imprisoned by the whims of foolish men who thought her to be little else than a subservient tool to be used as currency to curry favour with other foolish men.
She thought back to her meeting the night before with Duke Izon and frowned. She didn't like the man in the least. Beneath his artificial decorum in public, he was brash and rude. A fake. He was also a wanton lecher and had propositioned Astara more than once, but Astara was no whore, and she made sure he understood that. She would do many things for money, but she would only sleep with those she chose to.
Finally, the three men left the Light Mage’s tent and Astara followed at a distance, changing her appearance once more. She began to stroll merrily, looking to all the world like a girl just enjoying her time in the warm Summer's sun.
She watched them as they conferred outside the tent, and then started to walk back the way they came. They were leaving. Astara quickly walked up a set of stairs and observed them from a bridge that spanned the length of the main avenue while they walked beneath. The direction they were heading betrayed their destination. It was nearly noon, and it seemed they were returning to Ableton Hall.
The travellers from another world would soon leave Arronay for Cilasia. That only gave her a small amount of time to bathe, change her clothes and cover the smell of gasoline. Less than an hour, she assumed. She needed to act fast. As the three men walked out of sight, Astara sprung into action.
----------------------------------------
“All right, are you ready?” Boomer asked.
Lily nodded as the sweat beading on her forehead rolled down her cheeks. “I'm ready,” she said.
“Arie?” Boomer asked.
Arie nodded. She looked every bit as intense as Lily.
“Okay,” Boomer said, then stepped out from between the two. “Go!”
Lily opened with a short volley of small bolts of electricity, and sent it streaming towards Arie, who leaped out of the way and conjured a large shield of loose sand to spring forth from the ground, effectively absorbing the electricity. She stabbed her force into the ground, causing it to roll and shake, throwing Lily off balance. It caused Lily’s next volley to go wild, dissipating in the air somewhere over Arie's head. Lily barely had time to deflect the large stone that was careening toward her head, shocking it with a strong volt of electricity and shattering it into pieces.
Arie got to her feet again, and summoned forth a number of small clumps of earth from the ground, each hovering around her as she readied herself for Lily's next attack. Lily shot three of them out of the air and moved in.
“No, no. What are you doing?” Boomer asked, but it was too late. Lily placed her hands on Arie's stomach, and let her power loose, a controlled release that merely caused Arie to yell out in shock, but her retaliation was swift. The first stone came out of nowhere, striking Lily hard in the back, causing her to twist around in shock. The second stone struck her in the chin, throwing her to the ground and knocking the sense out of her. Arie hit the ground soon after.
“You’re not a grappler,” Boomer said as Lily stared at the sky from her back. “You can't just run in like that.” He offered her a hand to help her up. “Your powers are only useful at a range, when you're up close like that, you leave yourself open to all sorts of attacks.”
“I couldn’t get past her defences,” Lily complained.
“Then you go around her defences. Think outside the box.”
“There’s time to think?” Lily asked. She brushed the dirt off of her clothes.
“Arie’s not a trained War Mage,” Boomer said. “But your opponents tomorrow are.”
Arie winced as she pulled up her shirt to inspect her stomach. She had a bright red burn on it. “She hit me pretty hard,” she said. “A little more power and she could have knocked me right out.”
Boomer waved Marie over. She had been sitting on the sidelines with the others while they sparred. She quickly placed her hands on Arie’s stomach, and a warm glow emerged from them as the wound began to disappear.
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“But instead you gave her a bloody chin,” Boomer said. “Lily, you can’t rush in like that against the sort of brute force an Earth Mage brings to the table. You need to keep your distance and move quickly.”
“Fine, let’s go again,” Lily said.
“I think you should–”
“I said, let’s go again,” Lily repeated.
Boomer sighed. He’d known Lily long enough to see her stubborn side. He respected that she never really backed down from a challenge, but sometimes it was to her detriment. Still, he knew better than to challenge her himself. He’d never hear the end of it.
“I need a break,” Arie said, rubbing her stomach. “But Boomer isn’t wrong. I left the Academies before coming under the Raptor’s Wings. They have a year of training in using magic in battle. We don’t have the luxury of fighting by instinct. Theirs is going to be superior. We need to use our heads.”
Lily seemed to deflate a little at that. Since they’d found out who their opponents would be, Lily had been adamant about training. But there was no point in training to the point of exhaustion. They only had a day until they were to join the War Mages in the dance.
Lily was going to be facing Garth, an Earth Mage. Raine would be up against a Water Mage, while Misty would be up against another Lightning Mage. They had a little more than twenty-four hours to develop their strategies.
“Fine,” Lily said. “Misty, you’re up.”
“Your chin is bleeding,” Misty replied.
Lily reached up to her chin and pulled her hand away, looking at the blood. She walked over to Marie. Marie only looked at her with a raised eyebrow, then signed at her.
“What’s the matter?”
“She says you’re not being smart,” Boomer said.
“I’m trying to make sure we’re all ready,” Lily replied.
Marie signed some more.
“She says there are better ways to skin a cat.”
“Why would we wish to skin a cat?” Arie asked.
“No, it’s… nobody’s skinning any cats, it’s just a saying,” he said. “And she’s right. You’re working hard, but you’re not working smart.” He looked over to Misty. “Misty, how you feeling about tomorrow?”
“Freaked out,” Misty replied.
“Because you can get hurt, right?”
“I’m up against a dude who can hit me with lightning bolts and all I have is wind,” she said. “You could say that.”
Boomer nodded, then walked over to his duffle bag and unzipped it. “Come here and take a look at this,” he said.
Misty obliged, and looked into the duffle bag. Her expression shifted toward confusion, and then a look of realization dawned on her. She turned back to Boomer.
“How are you feeling now?” he asked.
“A little better,” she said. “But I’m going to look ridiculous.”
“Better to look weird and have an advantage than vice versa.”
“What’s in there?” Lily asked.
Misty reached into the duffle bag and pulled out the contents. A pair of rubber boots, along with a set of rubber gloves.
“Can’t be electrocuted without a place for the electricity to go, right?”
“Shit,” Lily said. “Yeah. Yeah, that might work.”
“I don’t understand,” Arie said.
“Rubber isn’t conductive,” Lily said. “If she gets hit with a lightning bolt, it’s got nowhere to go. It might sting a bit, but it won’t kill her.”
“I still have to fight off a War Mage using wind,” she said.
“Count your blessings,” Raine added. “I’m fighting a Water Mage. With fire. That’s not an easy task. Anything in that bag of tricks for me?”
“No,” Boomer said. “The real trick isn’t a pair of rubber boots. It’s using what we know and they don’t.”
“Like what?”
“Like a basic grade twelve education,” Boomer said.
“Dude, I’m in grade eleven,” Raine pointed out.
“Right,” he said. “But you also understand how fire works on a chemical level. I’ve been watching you guys for the past few days, and what I’ve noticed is that the Foundations of Magic here in the Pactlands are poorly named.” He looked to Lily. “You said it yourself. It’s not lightning you control, it’s ions. Electrons. Subatomic particles.” He looked over to Misty. “Is it really Air Magic, or would it be more accurate to call it Gas Magic?” He looked back at Raine. “I’m not even entirely convinced it’s just Fire you control. This all comes in the form of basic scientific education for most of us. Something the War Mages never received. Believe it or not, I think we have the advantage.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Lily said.
“They think you’re just Feral Mages. No training, no discipline. And maybe they’re right to a point. But that means they’re going to underestimate you. They may have experience using the magic, but you understand the forces they wield with a greater depth than they do. The other day, Lily and Misty practiced combining their powers and created something new that Arie had never seen before. I think we’ve been limiting ourselves. I don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface of what can actually be done with these powers.”
The Mages present all looked at one another.
Georgia Wallace gingerly raised her hand. “I… uhh… I noticed something,” she said. “About my magic.”
“We’re all ears,” Boomer said.
“It’s not just water,” she said. “I didn’t know if I should say anything, but the other day I spilled some bleach. I could control that as well. Then there’s… something else.”
“Something else?”
She turned a curious shade of red. “Well, blood,” she said. “I can control blood.”
“Blood?” Arie exclaimed. “That should not be possible. In the Academies, there was a school of thought that it might have been possible, but attempts to do so led nowhere. Are you certain?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, at first it didn’t want to work, but then I tried to focus on only controlling the plasma. It only fails when I attempt to control the whole thing. It’s like the cells negate the power, but the cells are carried by the plasma.”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Boomer said.
“Great,” Raine said. “But she’s not up for the duel.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Boomer said. “Okay, for the rest of the day, no more sparring. We use our heads. Try new things. Experiment. But we work together. Talk. If something doesn’t work, we try again a different way. Who’s in?”
----------------------------------------
“I tell you, whoever thought of this was a damn genius,” Andy said, clicking through the various camera feeds on Boone's office computer.
“Believe it or not, it was Brad's kid. Alex,” Boone replied. “Kid's a genius with computers. Says he'll have a fully-fledged world-wide web interface going by this time next week.”
“You mean town-wide web, don't you?” Andy asked. When the cable truck had arrived at Kamper's Korner that morning, announcing that he was installing a broadband connection to Andy's trailer, he didn't know what to make of it at first, considering he didn't even have a computer. But a few hours later, the camera server had been set up, all the feeds routed through the computer and then sent through the makeshift computer network to Boone's computer. Anyone connected to the network could scroll through the feeds, provided they had the right software. The cameras they’d been strategically placing in the wooded areas surrounding the town’s border were now accessible by any computer connected to the network in town, if they knew how.
“There’s that damn wyvern again,” Andy said, watching the lumbering beast walk down a worn game trail. “At least it's staying clear of the town.” He flipped the feed a few more times and then loaded up a multi-camera view.
A moment later, the fax machine began to ring. It printed out a few sheets of paper. Andy took a look. “It’s report from Stephens,” he said. Ansel Stephens had been working out of the offices of the Ladysmith Maritime Society running scouting missions along the coast. “Monster sightings,” Andy said. “Weird fish. He’s convinced that pod of Orca came from our side of the universe, but they seem to be doing okay. Wait.” He narrowed his eyes at a particular line on the paper. “He says a couple of his boys almost capsized about seven clicks out by something big surfacing under the boat. Almost knocked them right over, but they never saw what did it.”
“A whale?” Boone offered.
“Normally I'd say sure, but in this place, who knows? Could be the damn Loch Ness Monster, or worse.”
“Well, it didn't eat any of them,” he said. “So I wouldn't sweat it right now. Why not ask that local guy? Ashe?”
“He's already got too many things on his plate. The committee's working him to the bone. They've got him writing up a bestiary for the Disputed Lands, a list of medicines and herbs found locally, drawing maps of villages and areas of note within the Disputed Lands, and on top of all that, he's trying to unlock the secret of gasoline in his spare time.”
“Is he having any luck with that?” Boone inquired.
Andy shrugged. “You ask me, it's just not going to work. There's too much machinery involved in refining oil back home, why would it be any different here? I suppose it's still worth a shot, and they gave him all the access he wants to the chemistry lab at the high school. I hear he's been spending all of his free time there. They even gave him a little laptop so that he could type his notes in. He loves that thing. Treats it like a baby.”
Boone laughed. “He's actually figured out how to use the thing?”
“Apparently he figured out how to load up the word processor. That's about the extent of his abilities, but he's an amazing artist. He drew up a picture of that wyvern. It was like looking at the real thing. Hell, even that Roston guy's been working closely with the Farmer's Association, trading seed and livestock back and forth. We've got a lot of crops they just don't have, like corn and potatoes, and our cattle are a good deal bigger than theirs. They're already talking about breeding them together.”
“Would that even work?” Boone asked.
Andy shrugged. “How am I supposed to know? I just work here.” He laughed. “I suppose we'll find out soon enough.”
“I hope so,” he said. “So how are the kids doing?”
“Kids? You mean Boomer and our ace in the hole?”
“Yeah, those two.”
“Well, I've got one spending pretty much every waking moment with the Halish dudes,” he said. “Haven't seen much of them today, but I hear they've taken it upon themselves to make sure he can hold a sword properly before it's go time. Boomer's taken it upon himself to deal with the this thing with the War Mages.”
“Odd,” Boone said. “He’s not a Mage, but he’s in tight with the Magic Society.”
“You ask me, I think he’s sweet on that local girl. Arie,” Andy said. “Plus he’s no dummy. He may not have any magic like the others, but he’s got a head for it.”
Boone looked as though he were about to respond, but his eyes went up to the monitor in front of them. “Christ,” he said. “Andy, look.”
Andy turned towards the monitor and watched it for a moment. It took him a second to see it, but when he did, his jaw dropped.
“Shit,” Andy said. “That's all we need.” He turned to Boone. “We've got to get Keltz in here.”
Boone nodded, and then headed for the phone while Andy kept watching the feed. On the screen, one of the cameras just over the ridge was picking up something unexpected. About a half-dozen bodies, slowly moving into the area. There was no mistaking the uniform.
The Vectorans had returned.