Spellscribed: Resurgence (16 page)

"This way at least, we have attained easy victories and minimal losses on both sides. More often than not, the villages and fortifications we encountered simply surrendered. Honestly, until you summoned those nightmares from the desert, we'd not lost many warriors at all." Tanya continued.

Endrance sighed, hanging his head. "I'm sorry." he said. "I didn't really have any options. I saw a chance and I took it. I tried to keep them away from others, but I didn't have perfect control like I do now."

"What changed?" Tanya asked.

Endrance took a drink of water from a waterskin Bridget had left next to the plates of food. "Well to start, I had only the most infinitesimal access to the power that fueled my spells, and any attempts at even forming a spell would cause the prison's magic to render me unconscious and siphon away any power I used. Not to mention I was slowly starving to death, since the Bastille couldn't sustain me like a pureblooded Mercanian." He shrugged. "I had a few things against me then. Oh, and I didn't have the powers of the queen until after I escaped."

"It sounds like you've had a hard time." Tanya replied.

Endrance shook his head. "It wasn't all bad." he said with half-hearted humor. "I had plenty of time to review my spell methods and compare them to the information gained from all the impressions. And to get a better understanding of Kaelob's massive amount of experiences."

"Kaelob?" Tanya asked, puzzled. "Your old master? I thought you said he was dead."

Endrance nodded. "Oh." he muttered. "You probably didn't know. He was the one who tricked me into the prison."

"What?" Tanya exclaimed, almost loud enough to wake Bridget, who grumbled and rolled to face away from them as she slept.

Endrance winced at the sudden loud noise. "Easy." he cautioned. "I kind of… completely fell for such an amazingly stupid and simple trick, I am embarrassed just admitting it."

Tanya just watched as he spoke, not replying. Endrance continued. "I thought he was dead, so when I saw he was alive, I didn't even question it. I had wanted someone, somebody that I knew and could trust. I didn't realize that I wanted it so badly that I didn't even think that it might be a trap, or even the possibility that he was an impostor. I even overlooked two people who would be impossible to fake in order to believe in him." The mage waved his hands in frustration. "I was monumentally stupid."

Tanya nodded. "Yes. Yes you were." she said, once he'd finally gone silent. "Very stupid."

Endrance's face became crestfallen. "Yeah." he said.

"Stupid for not getting us right away." Tanya continued. "And stupid for not being on guard when we'd just gotten back. I know we had spent time away from Valeria's clutches, but you had to know she'd move on you the moment that you came home."

"Yeah."

"So now we know that wizards are capable of being stupid." Tanya said. "Let's try not to do it again. I don't think I'm going to be so lucky the second time you get manipulated into a trap."

Endrance sighed again, leaning back against a wall and closing his eyes again. "I guess I don't have much else to say about it." he replied. "I just… deluded myself. I sure won't be doing that again."

"At least you had the chance to learn more about how to use your spells, and all that other stuff you mentioned." Tanya added. "But you must be tired."

"Yeah. Still am." Endrance replied. "So far, I've only had about eight hours of sleep in the last, what? Thirteen months? I'm a little behind."

Tanya nodded. "Go. There's space next to Bridget. I'll keep watch. And stay awake this time."

Endrance gave her a smile as he stood. "Thanks." he said. "The sand hornets will not be entering within fifty yards of me, but keep an eye out just in case there are people still about."

Tanya watched him slip over and lay down on his side next to Bridget. Unconsciously, Bridget's flesh and blood hand moved and pulled him closer to her. The two slept peacefully for the first time in months, and Tanya wouldn't let anything change that for the world.

She cast her eyes about the room, looking for their supplies. "Where the hells is my bow?" she asked, confused.

Endrance awoke some hours later, finally refreshed and rested. He found Bridget and Tanya arguing, but they had not noticed him yet.

"What do you mean, you left it?" Tanya exclaimed.

Bridget shook her head angrily. "Look, woman!" she shouted back in response. "It was either save you or the bow!"

"Then I wish you had saved the damn bow!" Tanya replied tossing her hands in the air. "Then at least there would be a weapon!"

"Then you'd be dead!"

"At least I wouldn't be useless!"

"I don't know what I'd do if either of you died." Endrance said quietly in the silence between their words. It took the two Draugnoa a few seconds to realize that they'd heard him.

"Good morning." Endrance said once they were looking at him.

"Afternoon." Bridget corrected.

Endrance stood. "Oh." he said. "That late? Well, we better get going."

Tanya looked to Bridget. "I didn't know we had plans already."

"Don't look at me." Bridget replied. "Never told me."

Endrance sighed. "I need to send the sand hornets away. So I need to take them back to the desert."

Bridget looked at him quizzically. "Can't you just tell them to leave?" she asked. "I mean, you did call them here and you didn't need to escort them then."

"They had a queen then." Endrance said, explaining as he looked through what supplies had been gathered. "What happened to all our stuff?"

"Eaten by sand hornets." Tanya griped, crossing her arms.

"Oh." Endrance replied. He stood, walked over to the furniture used to make the barricade and started picking through the pieces. "I guess I'll have to make do with what we have."

He pried out a long polished rod of wood. It looked like part of a bench's back rest. He touched one end of it to the ground, measuring the length and finding it just over six feet. He nodded, muttering to himself before he gave it a test swing.

"This is better than I could have hoped." Endrance declared. He tapped it on the stone and spoke a word of power.

"Figorosi!" he said, bending a small amount of power to his will. The piece of wood wriggled and shifted in his grip, making audible creaking sounds as it writhed. In seconds, the writhing stopped and he instead held an unstrung longbow. He turned to Tanya and held out the weapon.

"I hope this can handle your strength." he said. "I tried to make it as strong as possible, but I could only rearrange the material into the right shape, not make it something better."

Tanya took the bow, and dug through her belt pouch. "I'll make do." she said. "I think I have a backup bowstring in here."

Endrance dug through the pieces of wood, scavenged a handful of nails, the back bars of a chair, and tore open one of the couch cushions for the feathers. Using them as raw materials, he was able to bend them into a dozen arrows of questionable quality, but at the least, accurate function. He continued to scavenge until he found one last long piece he wanted.

"Figorosi!" Endrance held up the other piece of wood and it quickly shaped itself into a thin but serviceable staff. "Yes. This will have to do." Endrance said.

"All right, so I take it you can't make the sand hornets go back on their own." Bridget concluded.

Endrance shook his head. "Oh right." He remembered. "The hornets need someone to follow. They could come to me, but making them go back to where they were without someone actually there to call them back is impossible."

"Ah." Bridget muttered. "Well, at least we can get out of here. The armies should be converging on Ironsoul soon."

Endrance nodded, looking distracted. "Yeah. We should go soon." he said, looking around. "Can you feel that?" he asked.

The two Draugnoa glanced at each other. "No." they said in unison.

The mage started climbing over the barricade. "I'm going to investigate." he said, "Follow me when you're ready."

As Endrance dropped to the ground on the other side, Tanya stepped up to the wooden barrier. "Where are you going?" she asked.

"I feel something." he said. "I need to check it out. Don't worry, you're not going to lose me again. Just hurry up and get ready to go."

Endrance left the two Draugnoa and walked in a rush down the hall. He was in the palace, of that much he was sure. But there was so much about the building he had never gotten to explore, or even see the surface of. However, there was a tickle at the edge of his senses that he knew he had felt before. He followed the halls and found himself roughly in the back end of the palace. As he walked, signs of battle were evident, though surprisingly, there no sand hornets in that area. He sensed that they had not made it this far into the palace and lived. Any who had gone inside had joined the queen in her demise.

He slowed his walk as he quickly formed the power he needed to cast a spell, the spell formed almost the instant the word of power crossed his lips. Hundreds of tiny motes of light exploded from his hand as he opened it, creating a wide-spreading nimbus of gentle white lights that lazily orbited his head. As the lights touched the walls, they bounced off, sometimes striking and merging with others and forming slightly larger sources that followed him as he moved.

Endrance walked past a long dead corpse lying in a corner, curled up in a ball. He hesitated, turning back to the body. It was robed and Endrance wanted to take a closer look. If the palace was being occupied while he was imprisoned, why hadn't someone cleaned up the bodies?

Kneeling, Endrance could see that the body was mostly skeletal, and the robes appeared to be faded and worn. Endrance reached out to touch the body and froze. A glimmer of light reflecting off metal made him pause. He gingerly pulled out the back of the collar of the dead man's robes. Several enslavement spines glimmered down the skeletal mage's back. This man was once a servant of Valeria, however unwilling he had been.

Endrance stood, turning and continuing toward where he had sensed the strange feeling emanating. His senses ached with a familiarity, but he couldn’t remember where it had come from. Had it been something he had sensed long ago? It felt familiar and yet foreign to him all the same.

As he walked, he found the skeletons of several more men and women, all long dead. Checking their bodies, he found that they had died in battle with one another. Endrance grit his teeth and checked each one's back. It appeared that one side had been implanted with enslavement spikes. Overall, half a dozen of the thirty dead mages he had found in the palace had been implanted with spikes. There were more people affected by them than Endrance had thought possible. How much reach did Valeria have? Was this done before he had even returned from the elves?

"I see you still manage to make me wonder." Bridget said as she and Tanya approached. "How did you know this was here?"

Endrance shook his head, standing. "I didn't." he said, "But I think these were all mages, and I think they were fighting each other when they died."

"Looks like it." Tanya observed. "While Balator had been capturing territory, we found out there had been quite the civil war starting up since we had left for Elven territory so long ago. Dissidents and talk of rebellion started being heard in the different satraps. On top of that, the mages were starting to fight each other and even using their magic against whole communities. We just came into Ironsoul a few days before the fighting reached the capitol."

Endrance stared at her. "What?" he asked, his voice coming out harsher than he had intended.

Tanya looked at him with wide eyes, like he had suddenly pulled a weapon on her. "The mages…" she explained, concerned. "They had started infighting while we were gone. Killing each other off. Satrapies were talking about splitting from Ironsoul."

"From what I understand." Bridget followed up, "It started a few months after you left Ironsoul to travel to Salthimere. Then there were almost constant assassination attempts on the Archmagus. It seemed like the mages had just gone into a free-for-all, and didn't care about the effect that it had on the population."

"How did we not see any of that on the way back to the city?" Endrance asked.

Bridget shrugged. "We took the roads straight from the border to the capital. You, yourself said you wanted to bypass the Sunken Tower, since Valeria used it as a base of operation. The Archmagus was keeping order in the capitol until you showed up."

Endrance considered what he had been told. In the back of his mind, he queried the one source he knew would be able to answer. To the Draugnoa, it appeared as if he had suddenly winced and pinched the bridge of his nose as he went through a lightning fast mental debate to force the impression of Valeria to give up the answer.

Yes. That was one of my plans. It's easier to move when the watchmen are too busy checking their own backs. Talos was too perceptive to leave alone, so sending a constant stream of assassins was an effective strategy. Even if they failed, it would have a cumulative psychological effect on the man. It's even more effective when the assassins are his closest friends and companions, turned against him against their own wills.