“Help! Help!”
The boy’s cries rang through the empty streets, and the giant bear raced toward the sound. Riding on Korak the silverpaw bear’s broad back, the ancient magician clung to the thick fur with all his strength.
This was Charlot, the master arcanist. He wore a crimson robe. Bound to his back was a tall copper staff that glinted in the sun. Bringing up the rear were Siyabros, a juvenile timber wolf and Lak, a fiend wearing the form of a coal-black war dog.
The two canines coursed at full speed to try and keep up with the enormous bear. Heedless of the danger, Korak charged into the town square, where a mob had gathered.
The bear dug his paws into the thick mud of the square, plowing deep grooves as he ground to a stop. Even as he clung to Korak’s fur with all his might, Charlot was nearly flung forward into the howling crowd.
To the master arcanist’s ailing eyes, the crowd seemed like a flock of indistinct birds, scattering from the bear’s arrival. He could see clearly to a distance of only seven paces.
At the center of the square were two pillories. To the right, the prisoner had long red hair covering their face. To the left was Sylas, the Terhaljatani boy who’d cried for help. A white streak ran up the center of his mop of curly black hair.
Beneath the pair, a great deal of wood and brush had been piled. Just at the edge of what Charlot could see clearly, a man clad in yellow held a smoking torch. There could be no doubt as to his intent.
“STOP THIS INSTANT!” Charlot demanded, whipping the copper staff from its bindings. Seven feet tall, the staff shone as if newly forged. At its top, two elaborate serpents wound around a metal eye with an iris of thirty-three fire rubies. The pupil was a fire opal the size of a crabapple. The magnificent staff had a name: Flaccaro.
“SAVAGES! SUPERSTITIOUS SWINE! BACK I SAY!” Charlot roared. Many of the villagers were in full flight already, terrified by the arrival of the enormous bear and the bizarre stranger who rode upon him.
The priest in his gaudy yellow robe stood his ground, and a smattering of men armed with spears were with him. A few others remained, most simply frozen in fear.
“Korak! Stay!” Charlot ordered, and he dismounted the bear, sinking half a foot into the mud. The spearmen leveled their weapons at him, but he strode through the muck as if they were of no consequence. Charlot’s eyes blazed with fury, and the timber wolf was at his heels. Young Siyabros had not yet learned the meaning of “Stay.”
“You there! Drop that torch, I say! What is the meaning of this?!” Charlot demanded, scanning the spearmen for some sign of authority.
To his regret, he saw all their eyes turning to the priest, whose yellow robe marked him as a follower of Ayrah, the so called Truestar. A fraud of a god, fit for fools and fanatics. This priest was both. He clutched the torch and narrowed his eyes in defiance. There would be blood.
“Attack!” howled the priest. One spearman gave a battle cry and charged forward with his weapon leveled at Charlot. Perhaps the man expected the old magician to turn and run, but Charlot never budged. In those ancient eyes, there was no fear, only incredulity.
After a few steps, the would be-hero noticed the other militiamen were not following him. The silverpaw bear reared up behind Charlot, standing twenty feet tall. The spearman never slowed, but he did make a course correction, veering hard to the left and charging right out of the square.
At Charlot’s side, Lak snorted with canine contempt, and there were a few nervous laughs from the townspeople watching at the fringes. Charlot did not laugh with them. The man had chosen wisely. The Billibee Militia were not soldiers. The spears they carried would be no more than pinpricks against Korak’s thick hide. The remaining militiamen looked from the penny priest with his gaudy yellow robe and his sputtering torch to the master arcanist with his rich red robe and magnificent staff. There was hope in that hesitation. Perhaps violence could be avoided.
“Attack him! There’s the head witch!” the priest cried again, waving his torch. But, this time, there were no takers.
“Ignore that charlatan! Back away, and you will not be harmed! I will take these two and leave Billibee and never return! Don’t die for his false god!”
For an instant, they held there in the balance. The men, afraid and unsure. The pilloried children, clapped in their crude prisons. The bear, rumbling a low growl that shook the earth. It all hinged on the priest. Charlot prayed he was only a fraud, fleecing these backward rubes. His mind wheeled with ideas to diffuse the situation.
“Look at me!” Charlot commanded. “Light!” he beseeched Flaccaro, and the staff blazed as bright as the sun. The men threw their hands before their eyes and the war dog yelped in pain. “I am no pretender!”
Yet, the priest was not dazzled as he ought to be. Dimly, Charlot recalled the sun cult had some sort of initiation where they were meant to stare into the sun until it “revealed its mysteries.” The fool priest might be even blinder than he was.
“For Ayrah!” the priest howled, and he drew back and threw his torch at the pyre. Charlot began to speak the words to snuff it, but Lak was faster. Like a black bolt, Lak shot through the air and batted down the torch, sending it spiraling into the muck, where it extinguished with a hiss.
Something in that hiss, the smell of squelched flame brought Charlot back to another village that had burned long ago. Suddenly, his nose was full of memories of blackened timber and ashes, the stink of scorched flesh rising from headless bodies.
If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
A fury built, greater than any he’d felt in years. All the softness slid out of the world, and he saw the priest in perfect focus, the weak chin mired in fat, the sagging jowls, the idiot gleam in his eyes. Fear was beginning to steal over the priest’s features, far too late to do him any good.
Charlot clenched his fist and pointed it at the man who’d tried to set two children ablaze. At once, he flung his fingers wide and invoked a word of great power.
The effect was instantaneous. There was a sickening crack, and the priest’s head jolted to one side as if he’d been brained with a club. Another wicked crack followed the next. The flesh beneath his eye bulged, and he bleated in pain.
The eruptions spread across his face, rippling across his body one after the other at a pace that grew faster and faster. The man screamed in terror, and his teeth popped like a string of firecrackers, bloody shards spraying from his mouth. He fell into the muck and spasmed. His outline jolted with each retort.
The spell died, and the man died with it. His body settled into the muck with a pink slurry of blood and pulverized flesh oozing from his mouth, looking horrendously deflated.
The spear dropped from the closest militiaman’s hands, and he raised his hands in surrender. “Whu-whu-what have you done to him? he stuttered.
“His bones exploded,” Charlot explained. His voice was distant and grave. One of the militia staggered away to vomit. The ruins of the priest were awful to behold, and most averted their eyes.
“Look upon him!” Charlot thundered. “This spineless wretch tried to burn those children alive! And you were prepared to let him! I ought to do the same to you!”
There was a great clatter of falling spears. To a man, the Billibee Militia dropped their arms and fled. Lak turned her head up to him, and he could see her eagerness to pursue, but he dismissed the notion with a sharp swipe of his hand.
He scanned the square for more threats, but the sudden clarity had fled as swiftly as it had come, and he could make out nothing. He looked out at the blurred outlines of the tawdry buildings, and his blood was up. He had the urge to set them all ablaze, to show these murderous rubes a true inferno! For an instant, the thought flickered between idea and action, but from behind him, he heard the boy cry out.
“Master!”
He shook his head, willing the dark thoughts to recede and turned back to the pillories. Siyabros the wolf snuffled at the base of the pyre, his pale blue eyes on the struggling youths. No doubt he thought they were something good to eat. Korak, too, lumbered over to the shapeless corpse, tilting his head for permission to eat the remains of the priest.
“Yes, yes, eat him, Korak. Not you, Siyabros! Back!”
The wolf perked up his head. He knew his name. When he saw Korak set in on the priest’s corpse, he was over in a flash. Soon, there would be nothing left.
From the sheath at his belt, Charlot drew Vitserpadag, the peerless dagger. The all-permeating edge cut effortlessly through the ropes lashing the pillories together, and Charlot set both captives free.
On his finger, the single ensorcelled strand of hair tied around his finger writhed wildly. The strand managed to work itself free from its knot and shot through the air, back to the head it had fallen from. Sylas blinked with surprise, and Charlot’s own eyebrows rose. He hadn’t anticipated the spell of homing to do that. Perhaps he’d found a cure for baldness, if one were willing to cast a spell a hundred thousand times.
“Young Sylas! You can’t imagine the trouble I had finding you!” Charlot said, and despite the grim scene, he couldn’t help but grin.
“Master! I failed you! I didn’t get the Forever Flame!” Sylas fell to his knees in the muck and dropped his head low. He was an odd-looking youth with his eyes slightly too far apart. Each was ringed with purple bruises for he'd been beaten. Beneath the swelling, Sylas’s left iris was green and the right was brown, and he had a broad shock of white hair running down the center of his head. He spoke Terhaljatani, the dying tongue of a ruined land a thousand leagues away.
“Pah! Arise this instant. An apprentice of the master arcanist kneels before no one. My plans have changed. I no longer require the Forever Flame. How did you manage to get captured? Who is this one?”
“She saved me! Three men set upon me as I tried to procure a canoe. She burst from the brush, drove them back! But then a whole pack of them ran us down. We were overcome!
Charlot blinked at that. How in the hell had the girl driven back three men? She was, if anything, younger than Sylas. Freed of her bonds, she stood clutching her shoulders, her hair still in her eyes.
Charlot’s eyes narrowed. The girl was a problem. These people were afraid now, but later, they would be angry. They would remember the way he’d made them feel small, and they would seek to prove otherwise. The girl would be in great danger if she remained here. He could not see her clearly. He moved closer, his steps burping in the mud.
“Girl, you must come with us. You cannot remain here,” he said, dropping his voice.
He saw now the shabby condition of her clothes, her hair filthy and tangled. He knew at once she did not understand the Norta he spoke, and he rattled off languages, looking for a sign of recognition. She squinted when he spoke Aranic, and then reached up to brush her hair away from her eyes. She looked at him, a great wariness in her movements.
When he saw her eyes, Charlot felt a lurch in his chest. From far in the past, a hand had reached out to clutch his heart. Her eyes were so dark they were nearly black, fringed with rings of golden brown. Now, he knew what she spoke.
“Girl, you must come with me,” Charlot said, speaking the Tonipatrua dialect of Aranic, so distant from its mother tongue it was nearly another language. At once, her strange eyes gleamed with understanding, and his heart thundered with revelation.
“You have nothing to fear. I knew your great, great, great grandmother,” Charlot said, doing a swift bit of guesswork at the girl’s age. He saw her face scrunch with disbelief.
“Her name was Rhian,” Charlot said, and her suspicion turned to shock. “I am Charlot. The boy is Sylas. The bear is Korak, the wolf is Siyabros, the black dog is Lak. Whose daughter are you?”
“I am Shaharzarat,” the girl said. Though she was filthy and clad in rags, she said it with pride. Charlot was surprised. He hadn’t expected her to have her own name at such a young age. Tonipatrua names were earned not given. Another enigma. Again, he felt the finger of the Laughing Star pressing down upon them all.
“Stars fall from the sky. A Tonipatrua and a Terhaljatani, you two could scarcely be farther from your homes. We have much to discuss. Korak!”
The three beasts had made short work of the fallen priest. There was nothing left but shreds of the once-yellow robe. The bear trotted over, tilting his head as he inspected the two youths with his slightly-askew glance.
“Down!” Charlot commanded, and the bear dropped. Charlot climbed onto his broad back. He motioned for the youths to join him, and after a moment’s hesitation, both climbed up onto the broad back of the massive bear. Charlot nodded in approval. They were braver than he. It had taken the old archmage far longer to work up the nerve to climb atop the silverpaw.
“Onward, Korak! Let us quit this dismal burg!” Charlot cried, and his motley pack marched out of Billibee, hoping never to return.