Guild Mage: Apprentice

By the time Liv made it back to the barracks where the journeymen had been housed — delivered first to the gates of the fortress by Vivek Sharma, and then led through the halls by a helpful guard — it was growing late. When she stepped into the room, she saw that everyone was engaged in their own preparations.

Wren sat cross legged on the floor, a bottle of oil, a rag, and a whetstone all to hand, caring for her knives. Brom and Wyman sat near her, Brom caring for his hammer and the shield he'd brought from Coral Bay, which was now rather more worn and chipped than it had been when he arrived. Wyman seemed to have obtained one of the odd clubs of the ksatriya, flanged with wicked-looking metal protrusions.

Most of the others were studying spellbooks, and Elenda even had a pot of ink on the floor next to her bed, into which she occasionally dipped a quill, and then made a note in the open book on her lap. Thora must have found a place to wash clothing, and taken it upon herself to care for the entire group, as she was folding and sorting a great pile of clothing, most of which was certainly not anything Liv owned.

On each of the journeymen's hands, a ring had been returned to one finger, and Liv saw that her own guild ring, pearl, and golden bracelet, chains, and rings had been placed in a pile on her pillow.

"What'd the priest have to say?" Isabel asked, looking up from her own spellbook.

"He took me down to a garden in the city," Liv said, "where there was a statue of Sitia, and we talked for a while. It was half a warning, and half encouragement, I think." She thought for a long moment about how much to say. "He said that most of the barons, and what have you, weren't going to take what's happening seriously. That they'd ignore things like the Day of Blood for as long as they could, because it's easier to pretend that nothing is happening than to make changes."

"Nothing useful, then," Wyman grumbled. "Gods, I can't wait to get out of this place. It's too hot, and I can't stand the food. If it hadn't been for the chance to make journeyman right away, I'd never have come."

"We're here now," Isabel reminded him. "And we aren't leaving until we've finished our job."

"Which should be soon, right?" Anne said. "Isabel told us the eruption's subsiding. You think once we help them take the landing, we can leave? Or will they need help at the other rifts, too?"

"I don't know," Liv said. "But I have something to do once we take the landing." She looked over to Isabel, to see whether or not their appointed leader had told the rest of the team yet.

"I wanted to wait until you got back," Isabel explained. "It's your plan. Go ahead, Liv."

She nodded, walked over to her bed, and sat down on the mattress. While she was speaking, Liv began to pry off her boots: after all the walking she'd done, her feet were aching. "Once we've taken the landing, and General Mishra feels they can hold it, I'm going down into the shaft," she began. "Wren and Arjun are coming with me, the general is sending a few volunteers, and — Isabel, do you still intend to come?"

The other girl nodded her head. "I do. Elenda, you'll be in charge while we're gone."

"Wait a moment," Wyman said. "Why do you want to go down there? It's dangerous - I mean, this whole place is dangerous, but we've only been dealing with shoals. You go down there, you're going into the depths. You know what all the professors say, that's how you get killed."

"I need to go," Liv said, "Because we don't understand what Ractia's doing."

"The gods are dead," Wyman argued. "You actually believe one of 'em's come back? The king and the barons all seem to think it's a load of rusting scrap. Don't you think if there was anything to it, the great council would have done something?"

"I know she's back," Liv said. "I've seen her." She resisted the urge to glance in Wren's direction; she wasn't going to out the woman's secrets without her consent.

"Blood and shadows," Wyman scoffed. "It's just a bunch of Eldish nonsense. Whatever you think you saw, girl, it wasn't a goddess."

Liv took a deep breath, then let it out, just like Master Grenfell had taught her years ago. How many times had she used his lessons to calm herself, before she could do something stupid? Probably not as many times as she should have, but she wanted to thank him all the same, the next time they saw each other.

"You don't have to believe it," she said, finally. "But I know what I saw, and I know what I have to do. You're not obligated to come with me."

"You couldn't drag me down there on a chain," Wyman said, shaking his head. "You're insane, and whoever goes with you is suicidal." He tossed his rag aside, picked up his shield, and stomped over to his bunk, where he hung the shield from the wooden frame, and then hauled himself up onto the mattress.

"You want a few more?" Brom asked, sharing a glance with Hamon.

"No," Isabel said. "We'll have a solid front line in the soldiers that Commander Jagan brings."

"I don't trust him," Wren broke in.

"Because he was arguing with the general?" Isabel asked.

Wren nodded. "We should keep an eye on him," she said.

"That's not a bad idea," Liv agreed. "We should also get some sleep," she suggested. "Whatever happens, tomorrow is going to be a long day. It won't do anyone any good to stay up with nerves, and be exhausted before we even begin."

Despite her words, Liv could hear conversation continue for some time. That was fine: she wasn't in charge, after all. For her own part, she stripped down to her shift, wrapped herself in the clean sheets on her bed, closed her eyes, and drifted off to sleep.

☙

Liv woke when their morning meal was delivered. She crawled out of bed to join Thora in laying out the dishes on the floor, and was pleased to see that, in addition to the kind of flatbread that was becoming quite familiar to her, there was a dish of cooked potatoes in a kind of reddish-brown gravy. While it was spicier than the sorts of potato recipes she was used to, at least it was somewhat familiar.

In the end, however, she was only able to make herself eat a few bites of food before she gave up and took a fresh shift to the bathing room. It was the only place she could get a bit of privacy to change - if not from the female Dakruiman soldiers who shared the facilities, then at least from the male journeymen she shared a room with. The water helped her to shake off the last traces of sleep, as well, and by the time she was getting out Isabel, Anne and Elenda had come in to change.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

The process of marshalling the troops for a final assault took some time. Liv had limited experience, but she'd seen how long it took Baron Henry to get a mere twenty knights and his own guards organized, when an eruption happened at Whitehill — and General Mishra was dealing with a contingent larger by an order of magnitude. Still, the ksatriya were clearly disciplined and well trained, and by mid-morning, everyone was prepared. Liv waited with the other mages, before the closed door that would open onto a corridor. At the end of the hall, she knew, was the fourth gate, where she'd left a wall of ice. General Mishra had told her that it was melted, and that his men had replaced it with a barricade.

"Are you prepared?" Mishra asked, striding over to Liv and the other journeymen with Commander Jagan, as well as Vivek Sharma, at his side. Trailing in their wake came Chandrika Tiwari, who immediately attached herself to Arjun's side.

"We are," Isabel said, speaking for the group. "Liv will clear the way, and we'll move in to reinforce the lines of soldiers to either side. We know what to do."

Liv stretched out the fingers of her left hand, one by one, letting the links of golden chain slide along her fingers. Her wand was back up in the barracks with Thora: there was no one else to trust it with. Elenda had offered Liv her driftwood wand again, but Liv had refused. She could cast without a wand, if she needed to. Liv knew that she would feel badly if something ended up happening to Elenda because she'd loaned hers out.

Sharma stepped up to Liv, rested his hand on her shoulder, and roused her from her own thoughts. "May I?" he asked, and she nodded.

"Sedēs Æn'Te," the old man murmured, and Liv did her best to relax as his Authority washed over her. Rather than feeling oppressive, like an invading army battering down her walls, she thought of a fresh rain in late flood season, the kind that left a wonderful smell of wet earth and new life when it had passed, and the sun returned.

All of Liv's anxiety, her worries, everything that had been bundled up like a weight on her back, quietly pressing her down, was lifted. Her mind cleared of doubts she hadn't even realized she'd been entertaining, and she felt lighter. She couldn't help but smile. "Thank you," she said, and the old man nodded. He released her shoulder, stepped back, and took his place at the general's side.

"I'm ready," Liv told them all.

The general shouted orders to his men, and they opened the door. The noise of fighting immediately echoed down the hallway, and Liv saw that what the general had told her about: the ksatriyas had brought in portable barricades of wood, and placed them just behind the broken gate itself. It was clear that what the general had said was correct: there was no way that workers would be able to hang a new portcullis and gate while the fighting continued.

The wave of corpses broke upon the men defending the barricades, who laid about themselves with hammers and clubs, smashing bones with every blow. Liv took a moment to set it all in her mind, the way the corridor and the broken gate were arranged, and then she strode forward, with Wren shadowing her, and a troop of fresh soldiers following behind.

"Celent'he Dvo Kveim o'Mae," Liv began her incantations, thrusting her arms out before her as she came, shaping the intent in her mind, and taking her time to build the ice the way her father had taught her, adamant and solid as steel. Frost cracked out along the stone floor in the wake of her steps, and around her the breaths of the soldiers puffed out in visible clouds as the temperature of the corridor dropped.

The men at the barricade must have been warned, been given orders, for they dived aside, abandoning the temporary barricade as Liv approached. For just a moment, there was nothing between her and the oncoming horde of dead. She saw the skulls of men, rotting flesh and clumps of hair still attached; the bloated corpses of the funny little creatures that had scampered across the roofs of the city, stealing food, and their dead ancestors now climbed just as nimbly over the barricade and into the hallway. Was that the spine of a serpent of some kind, slithering?

With barely twenty feet between her and the rush of bodies, Liv's magic thrust forward violently. Two great walls of ice, angled to come together at the center of the hallway, like some giant arrowhead, pushed forward, crushing the barricade into splinters of wood and grinding the bones of the risen dead. General Mishra had asked her to be the head of his spear, so Liv had decided to do exactly that.

Pushed forward by her intent, to the very limit of her Authority, the walls swept out onto the landing, clearing the way as they passed, and Liv ran forward to keep up. The last thing she wanted to do was allow the moving ice to slow when it reached the limit of her control, or worse, to stop. Instead, she pushed ahead, leaving the soldiers behind her to follow and protect her back.

To either side, Liv caught glimpses of the landing, a great work of carved stone, hewn from the very sides of the shaft itself. The entire space was swarming with the dead, but her wedge of ice parted the mass of bodies like a shovel sinking into freshly turned loam. If the dead could have screamed in pain, she was certain the shaft would have filled with their wails.

She left half-broken bodies behind her, ground skulls beneath sheets of moving ice, and she kept moving until the walls finally reached the end of the landing. Liv didn't even see the crenellated wall that rimmed the landing: in fact, her ice smashed directly through it, and then the very tip of her wedge extended off into the deep void of the Well of Bones. Liv's boots scrambled on icy-stone, but she managed to stop her momentum before she reached the lip of broken stone. Rather than risk overbalancing the walls to her sides, Liv used some of the waste heat she'd built up to melt the jutting, frozen protrusions away, leaving two angled, frozen walls extending back from the unguarded abyss along the stone landing, halfway back to the gate.

Now that there was nothing between herself and the Well of Bones, Liv could not help but look down. The darkness seemed endless, and there was no doubt that she was on the edge of the depths now, leaving the shoals behind. The pressure of the mana was immense, and Liv, with one part of her attention, she breathed it in and out again, adjusting her body so that the wild mana wouldn't ravage her flesh.

With the other portion of herself, Liv resisted the urge to simply step over the edge.

It was madness, she knew: however far down the shaft descended, there was no way a person could possibly survive the fall. And yet, there was something fascinating about the idea. A sort of release - to simply throw oneself off, to step into the nothing, and somehow be free of all constraints, all the concerns of solid ground, and just close your eyes and fall.

Liv shivered, but not from the cold.

She turned away from the shaft, and stalked back between her walls to see how the ksatriya were faring. They'd formed two lines of shield walls, stretching from where her barriers of ice stopped, all the way back to the wall of stone into which the broken gate was set. Behind the front line on each side, a second line of men with spears, and a third of women with bows, fought with well-practiced coordination.

The corpses threw themselves against the shield wall, and somehow the ksatriya's held under that immense weight; they even swung back, with hammers and clubs in their off-hands. The spears pushed back, and arrows of fire arced overhead, falling into the crowd. Strong men threw clay pots over the fighting, and they must have been filled with oil, because the combination of breaking pots and fire arrows set entire sections of the horde aflame.

Behind them, the journeymen took up position, ready to place shields of blue and gold, coherent mana wherever the lines of ksatriya wavered. The first two, Liv saw, were Elenda to the right, and Brom to the left.

For the moment, it seemed like there was nothing for Liv to do: the Dakruiman soldiers seemed to have things well in hand. In spite of herself, her eyes turned back to the bottomless abyss.

Screams from the right flank snapped Liv out of her trance, and she spun about to see an immense shape crashing through the line. The hairs on the back of her neck, on her forearms, stood on end.

The immense, rotting hulk of a hastim charged forward with unstoppable momentum, tossing its great head back and forth. As Liv watched, it impaled a man on one of its tusks: he screamed at first, then only twitched as the blood swelled up from the hole in his torso, spraying in every direction as the creature came on.

It was in among the archers, now, and wheeled to run straight at Liv. Elenda scrambled back away from the monster as it came on, and Liv raised her hands as the stink of carrion flesh hit her like a wall to the face.

Liv dropped to one knee, pressed her hand to the stone of the landing, and let Cel loose. Her intent swept forward, no time for an incantation but the magic coming silently just as it had beneath the reef at Coral Bay, and a sheet of slick ice glazed the stone, smooth enough to skate on.

The undead beast slipped, fell, and was carried forward by its own momentum, sliding straight toward the abyss. Liv watched it come on, then leapt aside at the last moment. She had the dim awareness of Wren dissolving into blood, and hoped that no one had seen, but then she had no more time to think about that.

Elenda Fisher screamed, her pale skin and honey-rich hair picked out against the darkness of the abyss as the sliding hastim carcass carried her along with it, out over the lip of the frozen landing into the vast, empty darkness of the Well of Bones.