Arm Of Galemar (Book 2) (80 page)

With these two major demands on his time already, he
hardly needed any further distractions to pull him away from his personal
training program.  Yet a third diversion had arrived two days previous.  This
new drain was both the last thing he wanted and that which he thought about
beyond any other.  A note arrived from Kerwin stating that his new business
partner had arrived.

Ilona must surely know Kerwin had informed Marik of
her arrival.  If he failed to show up immediately and welcome her heartily to
the southern kingdom, she would undoubtedly question his apparent lack of
enthusiasm regarding her.  Irregardless of it being late afternoon when
Kerwin’s note arrived, Marik had set off along the road to the
inn-under-construction.  It would be a long walk back in the dark and the
cold.  Not that an excuse like that would likely soften her tongue if he put it
off until the next morning.

Truth be told, he would have gone anyway even if she
had not been possessed of a firebrand temper.

Kerwin’s inn, still unnamed, sat roughly two
candlemarks walking time to the west.  The lands around were well forested, if
sporadically.  No farmers tilled the lands.  No towns occupied it, the nearest
village being three miles south.  Except for the Southern Road with its
plentiful traffic, the place was completely isolated.

Marik knew Kerwin had wanted to purchase the land from
the baron through whose domain this stretch of road ran.  The land still belonged
to the baron.  Kerwin had bitterly recounted that meeting one evening shortly
before exiting Kingshome.  Apparently the baron, whose name Marik could never
remember, held low opinions of commoners in general, and mercenaries in
particular.  It mattered not that the land lay almost on the border separating
his lands from the Crimson Kings’.  He would be dead and rotting before he
handed over one single shred more than what the mercenaries had already conned
away from the crown.

Somehow Kerwin had walked away with permission to
construct the inn, but only because he needed to pay property taxes each season
to the baron of an amount the gambler grumbled darkly over without revealing.

The framework came into view while Marik walked under
a fading sky.  Kerwin’s hired refugees had so far constructed an impressive
skeleton in the fragmented woods.  Great lumber piles were scattered everywhere
under canvas tarps.  Barrels, crates and hand wagons littered the ground
surrounding the intricate latticework of wooden bones.

Men were laboring on the far side.  Marik wound his
way through the phantom walls to where Kerwin and several others held thick
beams in place while their partners hammered large nails through T-shaped metal
plates.  No one noticed him at first while he took the opportunity to glance
around.

He had always known Kerwin to be ambitious, but this…

The gambler had attempted to describe his vision. 
Either he did a poor job or Marik’s preconceived mental imagery had clouded
it.  This ‘inn’ would rival the command building in size.  Its common room
alone, assuming it filled the majority of the ground floor, would comfortably
hold over two-hundred men!

Kerwin at last noticed him and, with a broad smile,
directed him to a clear area beneath the tree line.  Several tents were pitched
in no formation.  A large one, or large by the standards of a man who had spent
an entire season stuffed into a coin pouch with three other mercenaries, sat
quite a distance off from the others.  Landon reclined at his ease nearby,
propped against a crate stack.

They greeted each other as blood brothers.  The archer
never said so during the brief conversation, yet Marik suspected he rested
where he did for the purpose of keeping his eye on the lady’s tent.  Or to be
precise, to keep an eye on any hired hands who wandered near.  Marik made a
silent promise to find a way to thank Landon later.

Inside he found Ilona.  He was unsure what to expect. 
Finding her shuffling through massive paper piles had not been one of the
scenarios he imagined.  Nor was her response anywhere along the lines of the
expected.

“What are you doing here?  I’m still unpacking all
this.”  She carefully laid aside two stacks, keeping them separate.

“Uh…well, Kerwin said you arrived today, so I thought
I’d come see you.”

She watched him through lidded eyes from where she
sat.  Marik had an uncomfortable impression she might be peeling his comment
apart and examining the simple statement from multiple angles.

“What’s all this?” he asked with a gesture at the
papers.  She always made him nervous when she acted like that.  Best to change
the subject.

“Records for the lands surrounding this place.  I
stopped in Spirratta on the way to get copies of everything I need from the
city’s census office.”

Marik crouched to finger one jumbled pile.  “They gave
you their records?  And what’s all this for anyway?  I can’t believe it would
take an entire single sheet to list the name of every person living nearby.”

Ilona scowled at him, and it made him happy to see she
remained the same woman he’d fallen in love with in Thoenar.  “They didn’t give
me anything!  You know how much this cost me?”  She snorted and returned to
sorting through the various piles.  “Of course you don’t,” she muttered.  “And
for your information, I need this to start the publicity campaign for the
Standing Spell’s new branch!”

“Need what?  People will find out when they start
trickling in, once Kerwin opens.”

She cast him a glance to wither plant life.  “I’m not
interested in local farm boys.  I need to start spreading the word along the
Southern Road, and through as many merchant establishments as possible.  And I
need all this,” she waved a handful of papers at him, “to plan it right!  The
Spell is not a backwoods whorehouse, and I refuse to allow word of it to spread
in a fashion that will paint it so!  Our reputation will
remain
what it
should be!  Sex is the least service of a true gentleman’s establishment.”

He spent most of that evening listening to her plans. 
An astonishing degree of complexity existed in what, to him, had seemed a
simple matter.  Her talk of the different grades in financial prosperity among
various merchant houses in the larger towns nearby opened his eyes to fresh
insights.  Intricate webs of social structure he had never given thought to ran
beneath even the simplest village.  Everything interacted with everything else
in ways too convoluted for him to follow beyond the first three or four turns.

Marik nearly gave up trying to understand her deeper
strategies after ten minutes of struggling for comprehension while she
explained.  She started with a well-to-do merchant house in Driftbanks, the
largest town within five day’s journey, which also sat on the Spine River’s
shore.  Ilona pointed at dozens of papers, showing him how these merchants
collaborated with certain portage businesses, which were also the primary
haulers used between other profitable merchants.  If she spoke in the right
manner in the right places, word would filter along this invisible spider’s web
to wealthy men, through their hirelings, over to different gossip routes and
trickle up to the local lords.  After many tangled bends, he thought the newest
path she followed took her news back through the merchant house she had started
at, but maybe he was mistaken.

Though he always tried to dampen her enthusiasm for
discussing his magecraft by proclaiming personal ineptitude, he refused to be
stunned by her complex barrage.  Or, failing that, he refused to show it.  His
inability to unweave her tangled social blueprints made him feel a drooling
fool.  That she appeared to follow these hidden lines between people with ease
stung his pride, and he meant to at least look like he understood her as she
continued.

Late in the night she suddenly abandoned her focused
work in favor of playful attempts to unwind after a long journey.  He had
entertained such hopes during the long walk, but the tent hardly provided the
level of privacy he preferred.  His bashful concerns regarding the hired hands
wandering outside the canvas walls only amused her, fueling her desires rather
than banking them.

Before becoming lost in a world of crystalline brown
through which pulsed an enshrouding cloak of primeval heat, he spared a moment
to wonder why his embarrassment should always entertain her so greatly.

He left at dawn to return to Kingshome.  While he
walked, he realized she had apparently noticed no difference at all in him as a
result of his strength training.  Or had not noticed it to the extent of
thinking it worth commenting upon.

So today he stood in the rain with his sword. 
Yesterday he had worked his body to the collapsing point under his drills. 
Twice the thick branches had flown down the blade and off the end when the
knots worked loose from the constant motion.

Marik had started today with the expectation of
working until mid-afternoon, whereupon he would return to a certain roadside
point roughly two candlemarks walking distance away.  He allowed his mind to
wander while he worked.  It was mostly content with remembrances of Ilona, but his
mind surprised him by also wandering to other areas and discovering unfamiliar
territory in what he had thought to be well-plotted land.

Perhaps Ilona’s elaborate mapping of social structures
had inspired his brain to reconsider matters that seemed relatively simple. 
Whatever brought these thoughts about, Marik stood pondering his new idea as
the rain pelted his body.

Tollaf’s constant haranguing annoyed Marik to no end. 
In spite of that, the teachings the old man graced him with had proven useful,
if in a different manner than the chief mage intended.  Magesight and
channeling.  These were the two most basic skills of the beginning apprentice. 
They were the meat of mage workings, so Marik had assumed once mastered there
remained little for him to learn henceforth beyond specific workings.

Apparently not.  Dual channeling was as integral to
the intermediate apprentice as plain channeling to the beginner.

Not so different from channeling at all, it still felt
as though he were restarting his apprenticeship.  The closest comparison he
could draw in his mind was the instance during the first winter while he
trained to advance to a C Class warrior.  He had practiced his swings and
slashes, mastered precise blows and smashes.  Marik had believed his skill first-rate
until his first challenge by a lieutenant.  That man’s casual comment to work
on combining his attacks into continuous series had opened an entire volume of
advanced technique that must be mastered before Marik could be considered
average.

So did Tollaf intend to work him on the mage version
of combination attacks.  This came in the form of dual channeling, which, as
the old man had explained at great length, was an essential necessity for any
mage spending time on battlefields, and also unavoidable if one hoped to pull
off certain advanced workings.

Marik rebelled at first, explaining for the
eighty-seventh time that he held no interest at all in becoming a battle mage. 
Scrying would be the only area in which he would devote effort to learn the various
workings.  Tollaf, predictably, cared little for that.

His tirade concerning apprentices who thought they
knew more of the world than their masters lasted nearly three marks, only
ending when he happened to touch on his conversation with Celerity during
Marik’s return home.  This brought the one-sided dialog around to an issue
Marik had actually been meaning to bring up.

“She is the head of the royal enclave!” Tollaf flung
at him, his words exasperated.  “Her concerns are beyond the petty troubles of a
blockhead like you!”

“She told me she’d pass on any news they uncovered to
you.  And you promised me you’d attempt to scrye out father long ago!  I’d say
this falls under that deal.”

“
I’d
say that since you have failed utterly to
work at your apprenticeship, any agreement we had is voided!”

In the end, he finally admitted that Celerity had
passed on no developments in the search for Rail.  If the best scryers in
kingdom were unable to locate him through their workings, what could he, a
struggling apprentice, possibly accomplish?  It forced him to reevaluate his
entire reason for using his mage talent.

Tollaf did not care one whit about his doubts.  Marik
could rot in the decomposing sludge of his own worries all he wanted as long as
he started working on his apprenticeship’s next phase.

Dual channeling.  As the name implied, it simply meant
opening and operating separate channels simultaneously.  But magic, much like
life as Marik continuously learned, was never that simple.  At least not
magecraft.

He could have wielded his first sword with either one
hand or two, depending on his need.  His current, larger sword always required
both hands unless he had his strength working in place.  Dual channeling could
be compared to taking one hand off his hilt so he could use it for other
purposes while the first still fought.  The dual channels simply allowed a mage
to perform multiple workings at once.

Marik had thought this nothing new until Tollaf drew
the distinctions clear.  Layering shields did not fall under this category. 
His shields were created one-by-one, no matter how fast he might be able to do
so, and then sandwiched together.  Doing this combined the channel for each
into one single feed of etheric energy from him that maintained them all. 
Shields required very little energy once created, needing only enough to
prevent them from collapsing or to repair damage minimal enough that the shield
had survived.