Read Bloodletting Part 1: The Affinities Cycle Book 1 Online
Authors: Mark Ryan
Chapter 10
Malthius Reynolds
Five of them, sir, not far to the west.” Gerard pointed at the setting sun. The veteran guardsman looked haggard from the constant use of his spirit affinity to bolster the soldiers.
“Go,” Reynolds motioned towards the east. The other soldiers broke into a gallop, Mikkels at the lead as they left the road, following the overhang along one of the first wide tiers that descended into Rocmire. He hollered to Gerard as they spurred their horses to follow. “Are you alright?”
“I’ll be fine, sir,” Gerard shouted over the thundering hooves. “It’s not using my Geist Affinity that wears me down, but the constant sorting of echoes. It’s hard to explain how much life there really is here …”
“As long as you can help Tarn handle some healing if needed.”
Gerard saluted loosely, bouncing in his saddle. “No one’s dying today if I can help it, Sergeant.” He frowned. “They’re running!”
Reynolds spurred his horse faster. The others parted to let him pass and he quickly caught up to Mikkels. He shouted orders over his shoulder. “I want Gerard, Wallemur, Derek, and Tarn dampening. Don’t get too close. If any of you go down, we’ll have to contend with the full strength of their spirit and earth magic.”
“Already dampening, sir,” Tarn cried.
Reynolds looked back at Wallemur, who gave him a quick nod. They rounded a corner in the overhang that opened into a clearing.
“There they are!” The vanguard shouted.
“Ride them down,” Reynolds commanded. The order was relayed up the chain of riders, a rising cry that spoke to the riders’ outrage at what had been done.
The orocs stopped to stand their ground, with the Drayston men only a hundred paces away and closing fast. Four of them, those closest, slapped their hands to the earth and chanted. Reynolds, knowing what was coming, gave a shrill whistle. With only two soldiers capable of damping their abilities, the orocs had simply overpowered the humans. Jagged spikes erupted from the ground below the first rider.
The Drayston unit was ready. Both Vorten soldiers used their control of air to create gales between the horses’ legs while the Gravitons dispersed the density of the spikes, lightening them till they were just loosely packed dirt. The Magnuses grabbed the iron in the dirt, forcing it to repel itself. As the horses galloped forward, spikes exploded in puffs of dust. Reynolds grinned.
Bestial fury filled the air as a basso roar rang out through the trees. A small, sword-wielding figure covered in mud and leaves leapt from the overhang above the orocs. The sergeant instinctively used his Tempest affinity. A rare affinity, and often of low magnitude in humans, it enhanced his perception of time. Everything around him slowed down.
The screaming dropped to a lower pitch and he made out the shape of a young man beneath the dirt and leaves. Light blurred as time slowed. Reynolds swung his left leg over his horse’s head and dropped to the ground, rolling away. Straining, Reynolds eased the horse back into standard time flow so the additional speed of snapping out of fast time wouldn’t break its legs. He came to his feet in a fluid motion, drawing his sword as he sprinted forward.
The oroc to the rear looked up. In the air above him, the boy was falling, screaming as he flew through the air. A sword was raised over his head. The oroc raised its stone club to block the incoming blow, swinging its other hand in a wide arc to swat the boy out of the air. Even with the added force of his drop, the boy’s attack couldn’t possibly overpower the strength of an oroc or its Tecton crafted weapon. The boy would die before Reynolds or his men could do anything.
Reynolds looked for any way to save the boy, which looked impossible. Tempest magic was unstable. The longer one affected time, the stronger the normal flow of events would fight to synchronize. If anything, Reynolds might be able to distract the oroc, but he didn’t have much time beyond that.
Reynolds ducked and rolled between two spikes, swing his sword as he regained his feet. He released the hilt at the arc of his swing’s force. The sword snapped out of Reynolds’ Tempest time and shot forward. Reynolds lost his grip on time. It snapped back, whiplashing for a brief moment, making everything around him move insanely fast. The sword burst into flame, a meteor hurtling towards the oroc’s back. But it still wasn’t fast enough.
The boy brought his sword down in a grand arc. It met the oroc’s Tecton-crafted stone club. The sergeant’s eyes widened as the club shattered, rocky shards flying in all directions. The oroc’s mad swat hit the boy as the sword shattered the club, sending him flying. Sword spun one way while boy flew the other. Before the oroc could finish the job, Reynolds’ sword pierced its back, the fiery blade slamming through its body leaving a gaping hole. The boy slammed into the ground as the oroc fell, spurting midnight blue blood.
Combat erupted as he reached the boy and turned him over. Mud and blood caked him, both his and the nearly black oroc blood. At least several major bones broken, and the blood soaked the rags wrapped around his waist—a wound he must’ve sustained earlier, likely during the massacre of his village. He lived, though just, and thankfully had fallen unconscious or he would’ve been in agonizing pain.
An inhuman scream drew the sergeant’s attention back to his men. His men were working carefully as paired teams, four men per oroc. Magic flew through the air. Humans, on the whole, were weaker as individuals than the other races. Rather than the more spectacular magic that sundered earth and changed the shape of the battlefield, his men tended towards using their magic to personally enhance combat.
Reynolds didn’t stop to watch. Retriggering his Tempest affinity, time slowed around him and he sprinted forward again. Fire spewed in slow motion above him as he ducked between two of the orocs. Drawn out speech and yelling filled the air. He had learned long ago to ignore it. Elements clashed around him as the orocs fell.
Reynolds grabbed his sword, now sheathed in the ground, and spun around over the boy as he released his hold on accelerated time. The orocs were mostly done for. He knelt, checking for a pulse. Somehow, the boy was alive.
“Wallemur, Gerard, get over here,” he shouted. Geist healing proved most effective when administered immediately after injury. If applied fast enough, it could sometimes erase any evidence of an injury altogether. But neither of his men possessed strong spirit affinities, and he wasn’t sure if they could save the boy.
Reynolds suspected that the injured young man at his feet was a survivor of the Jaegen attack. Keeping him alive was a necessity. This close to Rocmire he knew they couldn’t catch up to the main force of orocs, which meant that there was no other way to find out what had happened if they lost this kid.
He looked back down at bleeding, broken boy, seeing just how young he was. Too young to have seen anything like this, much less experienced it. “Hang in there, lad.”
***
Chapter 11
Petrius Alma
Injured mortally, the child shouldn’t have survived the journey back to Drayston. As he pondered this miracle, Petrius Alma washed the filth from his hands in a basin near the door to the castle infirmary. Mud and blood had been cleared from the room, all from this miracle boy. The cloying stench of rot was dispersing through the air, leftovers from the surgery concluded just minutes before.
When he had arrived at the infirmary, the child had been covered in filth. Though the battlefield Geists had tried to heal him, there were limits to their abilities. They had done what they could, stopping his bleeding and putting his bones back in the right places. Alma sighed as the warm water ran soaked into his skin, relaxing his hands.
The problem with battlefield medicine was that a trained soldier was trying to administer it. Teaching one person to both kill and to heal just didn’t work very well. In Alma’s experience they ended up good at neither job. In the case of this boy, they hadn’t cleaned the wound well enough. When the patient was dragged in, he had been afire with fever and infection was well set in. The bones in his back … even on the battlefield they should have had the sense to work with Tectons to adjust the calcium in the bones, Gravitons to change the density, Tiduses to manipulate the water in the muscles.
He shook his head. A surgical team was trained to work together, these boys weren’t. It wasn’t their fault, and they tried. They cared. But this boy … there had to be something special about him. Alma had served as the chief surgeon for Lord Calhein Drayston for two decades and had never seen anyone survive wounds like this. He didn’t relish the prospect of telling the sergeant. Reynolds had ridden the whole way from the oroc engagement with the young man cradled in his arms, the two battlefield medics tending the boy as they went.
Tarn, one of the two Geists in the unit, had correctly diagnosed the boy’s back as an old injury. A nasty one, too. The scarring around it had, oddly, kept his upper spine bound together, but his lower spine didn’t have the same strength. Several vertebrae had been crushed, an injury far beyond the guardsmens’ healing skills. Alma had spent most of the night trying to repair the ruined bones. Rein, Alma’s assistant, was still with the boy. The rest of his surgical team, exhausted, had already retired.
He shook the water from his hands and took a cloth from a nearby shelf as he left the isolation room. As a Tidus, Rein’s water affinity could amplify the recovery process. Alma muffled a sigh by wiping the cloth over his face, scouring sweat away. At least he wouldn’t be here all night.
Sergeant Reynolds waited for him on a bench just outside the entrance. His fingers were busy weaving thick straws into a symbol representing the Aspect Tachondrus, the parent aspect of the Tempest. Alma looked more closely. It looked more like Aspect Emascodeus. So, the boy was a Graviton. Alma rubbed his eyes. Thankfully they were still good for detail work, but age was a harsh mistress, slowly robbing him of his senses.
“Well?” Reynolds asked, without looking up from his weaving. His light brown hair stuck out in all directions, and dried mud caked spots on his face. He’d been waiting for word on the boy’s condition since their return, refusing to leave.
Alma patted the remaining water from his neck and ran fingers through his silvering hair. “He has the Aspects’ favor—that much is certain. His life is in their hands now, though.” He wrapped the towel around his neck, holding on to each end as he surveyed the castle courtyard. “I’ve mended everything I can. He has an old wound that probably saved his life, but it’s also interfering with my healing. The wound in his side was already festering when he got here. The infection is as clean as we can get it, but even without the other injuries, that may be enough to kill him. Both of his ankles were broken, and his ribs were cracked. His skull is even chipped. I’m not sure I can find a point of the boy that hasn’t been damaged.”
Alma breathed in deeply. The breeze coming from the castle’s courtyard was crisp. Smells of the fall harvest carried on the air, punctured by the meaty aromas of roasted rocboar. There was a crisp edge to the air, also, a chill that warned of winter just around the corner. “Whatever pain he likely had before will be far worse now. Of course, that won’t matter much. Even if he lives, he’ll never walk again. The most concerning thing to me, though … there has been a compulsion placed on him.”
Reynolds finished the weave and set it on the bench to his left. Alma sat on his right. “A compulsion. Were you able to lift it?”
“We were not. It was placed by someone far stronger than I.” Alma frowned. There were no mages in the Drayston Castle stronger than him, and maybe a dozen total on all of the Drayston family lands.
Reynolds glanced sideways at Alma. “That surprises me. Was it the work of an Archmage?”
“If it wasn’t, it’s close enough as to not matter.”
Reynolds stretched his back, digging his palms against his knees and pushing. A stifled yawn escaped his lips. “I don’t like that. It’s bad enough that we have an entire village sacked. An unknown Archmage on our lands …”
“I’m more interested in his physical injuries, Malthius. Whatever was done I cannot undo. Physically, though, he should have been dead long before you found him. How he fought an oroc I do not understand.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” the sergeant said, a faraway look in his eyes.
“A fall from that height could’ve easily killed him. It may yet.”
“He didn’t fall, he jumped.”
Alma glanced at the Sergeant in disbelief.
“He jumped from at least thirty five feet high, onto a damned oroc,” Reynolds said. “I thought for sure he’d die. Aspects only know where he got the sword, but he shattered an oroc club with it. I’ve heard of full-grown men barely able to lift one.”
“From that height,” Alma said, “a Graviton can put a considerable amount of weight into a weapon. Even an oroc’s armored hide can’t hold up to that.”
“It shattered the oroc’s stone club first. Without shattering the blade. I am well familiar with the capabilities of a Graviton, Petrius, and this was beyond them.”
Alma fell silent, pondering. Perhaps the club had been flawed? Yet orocs weren’t known to make mistakes when molding earth. Quite the opposite.
“Ever heard of a child with that kind of strength?” Reynolds asked.
“No. And even if his affinity matured years earlier than anyone I’ve ever known, there must be another explanation.”
Reynolds stared into the dark courtyard. “He tracked the raiding party almost all the way to the Rocmire, after he’d been wounded.”
“Revenge can be a powerful motivator.” Alma frowned, disliking unknowns. Flesh, blood, bone; he understood these and mended them. The heart and mind belonged to Mentak and Empirious, and he left those affinities to the Psions and Pathos. “You should get some sleep, Sergeant. I’ll send for you when …
if
he takes a turn for the worse.”
Reynolds rose to leave, but handed the Graviton weaving to Alma first. “Will you see that he gets it?”
“You have my word.”
***