Steel And Flame (Book 1) (50 page)

When Marik and his escorts entered the room, they
captured every fresh recruit’s attention.  Seeing a man wrapped in so many
bandages must seem an ill omen.  Edwin and Kerwin compounded the moment by
rushing to meet him, talking loudly to ensure they were overheard.

“About time you stopped lazing around over with the
chirurgeons!”

“Yeah!  Catch a little spell or two out on the job and
you think you have the right to sit around for months?”

“Oh, lay off, chums!  It’s his first time in full body
wraps!”

“Ain’t nothing the rest of us haven’t been through.”

“Yeah!  As the bards say, ‘been there, what’s next?’”

“Come on, mates!  We need to go out tonight and
celebrate our lad’s first survival!”

“Oh, I don’t think he’s ready to handle ale yet.  He
was puking up all that blood just a few days ago.”

“Well, he can bloody well try at least, can’t he? 
I’ll finish whatever he doesn’t.”

Many younger recruits looked spooked, their
expressions suggesting they might be entertaining second thoughts.  Marik, who
had remained silent through the entire charade, shook his head, thinking it a
cruel prank to play on the new boys, but trying not to laugh anyway.  The
sergeants threw their group a hard glance while they headed toward the waiting
party, especially Fraser, who stopped to hand Marik new keys.

“Your old ones didn’t survive,” he said simply, then
walked to the larger group.

Marik passed through the doors to his barracks,
hearing behind him the crinkles of unrolling paper and Dove calling, “Which
ones are in the First Unit?”

Soon they passed through the half wall separating the
two units and Marik stood before his cot and closet.  Edwin and Kerwin left to
find Landon while Dietrik sat on his cot to watch Marik.  Hayden laid down on
his, shutting his eyes.

Marik used his new keys.  He opened his closet to drop
the bottle filled with salve on the top shelf.  Inside he found nothing changed
except that his sword leaned against the back wall next to his father’s original,
and his dagger lay on a shelf.  His muscles protested when he pulled out his
sword.

“I kept meaning to tell you about that,” Dietrik said,
snapping his fingers.  “We found it on the ground where you’d been attacked. 
The scabbard and grip were burned away, but the sword was still in good
condition after I polished all the soot and grime off it.”

“You did that?”  He looked closely at the blade,
seeing the metal had become slightly duller than before.  “Thanks, Dietrik.”

“It kept me busy on the road.  Sennet sent over the
new scabbard and leather.  He says the loss definitely qualifies as ‘in the
line of duty’, so he won’t charge you a single coin for the replacement.”

Marik snorted.  “Huh.  Nice of him.”

“He also said to bring the blade over if you want. 
He’ll give it a real polish with his tools.  You know, make it all nice and
shiny again.”

“I don’t know.  Maybe I’ll leave it like this.  As a
history of me and the sword.”  He glanced back into the closet.  “What about my
mail?”

“No idea about that, mate.  When we got to you,
everything you’d been wearing was either ash or grime stuck to your skin.  The
mail was gone.”

“And not the sword?”

“I think your belt burned through and it fell away.”

“I was holding my dagger though.”

Dietrik shrugged to impart his incomprehension of the
matter.

At last he needed to face it.  Despite everything
Torrance had told him, he’d still clung to the hope that everyone was wrong. 
These last facts finally broke his resistance.  Maybe, by a lucky chance, he
had survived the spell cast at him where the others had not, but that would
never explain this.  If the fire could destroy his mail, his own flesh and
blood would never stand a chance.  Had the chainmail melted, the liquid iron
would have killed him as quickly.

The only possible saving grace was a latent talent for
magic within himself.  It had countered the spell, and somehow protected him
from a more physical death when his armor succumbed.

His steel dagger might have survived a temperature
capable of destroying iron mail, except they were not talking about a forge
fire.  The magical fire from the spell must surely have made a forge fire look
like a flickering flame atop a Spirratta lamppost.  It seemed whatever force
within him that had countered the hedge-wizard’s spell had done so enough to
prevent it from overcoming the steel.

“Are you well?”

“I was thinking about what Torrance said.”

“You’ve skipped over talked about it.”

Marik leaned forward so his head rested against his
closet door.  “I think…he’s probably right.”  He turned his head toward
Dietrik’s cot.  “I can see you do to.”

“Have you made your decision?”

He’d made this barracks building into his home, the
only home that had ever truly accepted him.  In a single year Marik had come to
love it.  “I think so.  I don’t want to leave everyone I’ve become close to.  I
don’t want to leave the Kings, and if that means putting up with whatever
Tollaf decides to put me through, I guess that’s the price.”

“About damned time,” Hayden muttered with his eyes
still closed.

Marik scowled.  “And what about you?  I thought you
didn’t trust magic users any further than me!”

Hayden opened his eyes.  “I don’t, but you’re not one
of them.  It doesn’t matter what a man can or can’t do.  A man decides to
become a mage, or a man decides to become a warrior.  You made your choice
already, and you’ll never be anything else in your core.”

“You think it’s that simple?”

“It is to me.  It is to you, too, though you don’t
know it yourself yet.”

“Well, time will tell then, won’t it?”

“Nothing else will,” Hayden replied while Fraser came
through the half wall with six new men carrying their packs.  After taking
names and revealing their fighter class, four of whom were D ranks, Fraser gave
them his lecture on who possessed authority to give them orders.  His brief
explanation on the band’s workings used nearly the exact words as the year
before.  Marik sat on his cot.

Empty bunks with their closets standing open had been
home to shieldmates the last time he’d seen them.  Casualties in the wars of men,
their belongings were swept away like leftover garbage.  Ashlin had been caught
in the rovers’ trap in the forest, Duain had been a victim of the
hedge-wizard.  Garret, a new man last year with Marik and Dietrik, had fallen
in the predawn battle against Fielo’s main forces, along with Starr.  Marik
struggled to remember the other two’s names.  They had been the solitary type.

Empty places where once there had been men.  Whose
closets would stand open this time next year?

Tired, he lay flat while Fraser told the new men to
find an empty cot to call home.  “If you lose your keys,” he said as he left,
“you’ll be charged by the band for the cost of replacing them.”

They spread out, filling the holes and testing their
new sleeping accommodations.  Across the way, two of the youngest recruits
claimed cots separated by Sloan’s and Edwin’s.  The two stored their belongings
then looked lost for what to do next, trying not to let their gaze stray near
Marik in his bandages.

“I think I saw the two of you from the wall.  I was
watching the testing,” Hayden told them, raising different memories in Marik’s
mind.  “What’s your handles?”

“I’m Kenley!  I’m from up by Thoenar!”

“Call me Knox,” the other offered.  “Is the sergeant
always like that?”

“Yeah.  His opening speech hasn’t changed at all in
the four years I’ve heard it.”

“He said to ask the rest of you our questions and
spend the day around the town.  Which should we do first?”

“How about I show you a few things?  I could do with a
walk.”

“You bet!” exclaimed Kenley from up by Thoenar. 
“That’d be great!”

Hayden left with the two new boys in tow and Dietrik
remarked, “Hmm, still a bit green and wet around the ears I should think.”

“I wonder if anyone said that about us when we left
with him last year,” Marik mused aloud before he drifted off to sleep.

I wonder if I sinned outrageously in a previous life.

Marik had been far from enthused to meet Tollaf in the
first place, and the chief mage nurtured much the same opinion of him.  Tollaf
turned out to be another cranky old man, as bad as the old clerk Janus.

He had first met the old mage in his workrooms within
the Tower.  Most rooms were filled with long tables covered in a welter of
refuse.  Tollaf’s stern admonishment not to touch the worktables had been
unnecessary since Marik felt no urgings to even look at the rickrack they
displayed.  Every room he peered into contained similar organized messes and he
saw why an entire building belonged to the mages who, before Marik’s awakening,
had consisted of six people.

Being the seventh remained an honor he would rather
have forgone.  Especially given his would-be mentor.

“You can’t even see!” the old man shouted at him. 
“How do you expect to perform the simplest workings?”

“Very badly,” Marik replied, showing no respect and
feeling no urge to.  Torrance may have forced him into this, but he would be
damned before he would accept it gracefully.  Marik still had his pride.  He
refused to be browbeaten by a weirdling old man with unnatural powers who had
probably never so much as
held
a sword.  “And I can see well enough to
know you have bits of lunch stuck in your beard.  I could have done without
seeing that, thank you!”

“If you could see, you whelp, you’d know what I was
talking about!  Now look closer and tell me what you see!”  Irritation clipped
the head mage’s words.

As instructed, Marik looked yet again at the object on
the table before him.  “A flower.  In a pot.”

“And?”

“And what?  What the hells else is there to see?”

“You’d know for yourself if you would just blasted
try!”

“Try what?  See, I’m looking at your ugly plant!  My
eyes are open, I’m staring right at it.  How does one ‘try’ any harder than
that?”

“Stop trying to do it with your eyes, nitwit!”

“Oh, yes, of course!  Why didn’t I see that?” asked
Marik in a droll voice.  He extended his hand to the plant, opening and closing
it like a quacking duck.  “Ah, it’s so much clearer now!  Wait a moment…no, my
hand says it’s still just a plant.”

Tollaf reddened, ready to bite stone.

“If you’d tell me
what
you want me to see,
maybe I’d see it, old man!”

“Don’t you waste my time, boy!  I have enough to keep
me busy as it is without having to waste all the day on young fools who don’t
listen.”

“Tell me something worth hearing, and I’ll listen to
it.”

Tollaf sighed.  “Let’s do this another way.  Look at
the pot.”

“Fine,” said Marik.  Tollaf stepped behind him.  He
felt the old man’s hands on his temples and demanded, “What are you doing?”

“Shut your mouth!  Did I tell you to change position? 
Look at the pot!  Try not to think about anything.  I’m sure you’re very good
at that.”

Marik bit back the comments he could have made and
decided to swim with the current for the moment.  Trying to think of nothing is
impossible since the act of concentrating on not thinking meant he
was
thinking about
not
thinking, making the entire exercise futile.  Still,
it helped clear the frustrations from Marik’s mind.  Perhaps he could tolerate
this foolishness longer than he’d thought.

It had begun two days earlier.  Tollaf’s greeting had
consisted of disparaging Marik for his reading skills, which were still very
poor by his standards, before pronouncing him utterly clueless, as he was
mystified by the simplest concepts that were obvious to anyone.  Marik had
responded that Torrance had assigned him a career as a mage and the old man
better learn to live with it, so he might as well shove his pretentious
snobbery.  This had not endeared him to the chief mage, but if he was going to
be trapped in this situation then Tollaf could damn well suffer too.  Thus
began the animosity between the cranky old fart and himself.  Not that he
cared, except Tollaf had the final say over everything Marik now did.

“This might feel strange.  Keep looking at the pot
until I say so.  Do you think you can handle that?”  Irritation laced the
words.

“Get on with it.”

What
might
feel strange?  Marik tried very hard not to think about it, and not only
because Tollaf had told him to.

He studied the flower.  It was hardly interesting,
being an ordinary yellow blossom with five leaves protruding from the stem. 
Sunlight brightened its colors, this being one of the few rooms in the Tower
with a window, and it stood out from the other drab detritus littering the
room.

Except, he suddenly realized, it was noon.  The sunlight
streaming through the window formed nearly vertical shafts.  It could never
have crossed this far into the workroom.

The flower existed separately from everything else,
growing brighter while he watched, yet illuminated by a different light.  Unlike
the sunlight that would merely have fallen upon it, this glow came from
within. 
Its yellow petals seemed strangely more yellow by the moment, and transparent
at the same time, as though he might be able to see through it.

No, he amended, not as if he could see through it. 
Like he could see inside it, at the delicate vein-work throughout the blossom’s
structure.  And the leaves seemed greener as well, yet less solid as he
watched.

The phenomenon continued to intensify.  Marik could
see all the veins in the plant and a white glowing
something
flowing
through them.  It might have been blood except flowers had no blood,
could
it be water then?
, being spread throughout the flower from the roots…which
he could also see now.  Inside the pot, the dirt had grown translucent, and
then he could barely see the flower itself at all.  Only the white glowing vein
network filled his vision while the glow shone brighter, threatening to draw
him in.  To absorb his being!

“What in the
hells
are you doing to me, old
man?” Marik shouted, forcing his gaze away.  He spun to glare at the man behind
him and knocked the chief mage’s hands from his temples.

“Aghh!” Tollaf shouted back, and clapped his hands to
his own head.  “Gods damn it!  I told you not to move until I told you to, you
amateur!”  Still cradling his head, he shuffled to the tall stool he usually
perched upon.

“Tell me what you did!”  Marik rubbed his eyes to help
the effect wear off.  The ghost flower solidified back into its proper state,
deciding to comport itself as an ordinary flower ought to.

Tollaf made no response.  Instead he clutched a
tankard filled with juice and sipped at it.  After a moment, he growled, “The
next time I tell you not to move, you’d better listen to me.  If you do that
again, I’ll make sure Torrance sends you flying through those gates with his
boot mark imbedded in your ass!”

Marik continued to glare at the old man, waiting for
answers.

“I shouldn’t have had to do that,” Tollaf continued. 
“You could have done it on your own well enough if you’d ever bothered to pay
attention.”

“Done what?  Given myself hallucinations?”

“No, you moron!  Seen the plant!  Seen it with your
sight!”

“That magesight you’ve been going on about?”

“What in blazes did you think I was talking about?”

“I didn’t know, since it didn’t make any sense!”

“Well, now you’ll know what I’m talking about, won’t
you?”

“No.  It still doesn’t make any sense.”

Tollaf ground his teeth.  “Look, you saw the flow of
energies within the flower, didn’t you?”

“Is that what all that was?  I guess so.”

“That’s what I mean when I tell you to use your
magesight!  You open your senses to see the etheric energies all around you.”

“So I guess that was this ether place you’ve been
talking about.”

“The ether is something else.”

Marik pounded the table.  “You’re not making sense!”

“Listen, damn it, and pay attention this time.  I’m
tired of repeating myself!”  Tollaf fortified his patience with a swallow of
juice.  “You have the mage talent, which draws on etheric energy.  This energy
is created by everything you can call ‘alive’.  Most of it is used by whatever
generated it, but there is always a bleed off.  The excess energies bleed off
into the etheric plane and gather.

“It acts mostly like water, collecting together and
flowing in a stream.  We call these rivers of energy ‘lines’.  When two or more
lines converge, they form a kind of ball.  These are called ‘knots’, but they
are rare.”

“Like rivers forming a pond?”

“Yes, for the most part.  Keep listening.  With the
mage talent, you can see this energy, as you have finally done yourself, and
manipulate it.  You saw with the magesight, or if it’s easier to understand,
with the mage version of your eyes.  You manipulate the energies with the mage
version of your hands, but you can’t do that until you can see it!”

Marik ground his teeth.  “You said it goes into some
other plane, but the plant is sitting here on your table.”

“I’ll explain that, and then I want you to spend the
rest of the day working!  Do you know anything about the ether at all?”

“No.”

Tollaf sighed.  “I could have guessed.  The etheric
plane is very close to our own.  I’ll get into other planes later but for now
lets stick to this one.  If our own physical plane is like the ground, then the
etheric plane is like the air.  Both coexist with each other and both occupy
the same space, but they are separate from one another.  The shape of the
ground affects the terrain of the air, and the objects in the air can affect
what happens to the ground.

“The etheric is not solid, like our physical plane. 
Its shape is determined
by
the physical plane.  They are separate yet
exist together simultaneously.  Like ingredients for bread.  Once all the flour
and water and the rest have been mixed together, it’s impossible to separate
them out individually.  The yeast and the flour all occupy the same space, even
though they are different.”

“That’s still confusing.”

“It will make sense once you see it all.  For now, go
study your flower and try to do it for yourself.  You can’t leave until you do
it at least once.”

*        *        *        *        *

“Are you having trouble?”  Tollaf seemed dangerously
close to displaying concern for his unlikely apprentice.

“I’m fine,” Marik snapped back.  “I thought you said a
mage could find these things from miles away.”

“Of course a mage could.  It’s too bad you’re not a
mage yet.  It could have spared us the walk.”

“Then allow me to apologize for my many shortcomings,”
Marik waspishly replied, not meaning it in the slightest.

“I’d rather you put as much effort into your work as
you do at irritating me.”

“Which one is likely to give me greater satisfaction
in the long run?”

“Up there,” the old mage pointed toward the trees
overlooking the horses’ vale.  At the bottom of Kingshome’s hill, the land rose
where it surrounded the sunken corral, making the valley appear deeper than it
truly was.  “That will do.  The shade will keep me from developing sunstroke
while I wait the day through for you.”

“I told you I’ve been practicing,” Marik grumbled,
irritated both by the need to do so and by the fact that he could.

He knew the commander expected him to make a genuine
effort, so he reluctantly practiced this ability to open his vision to the
magesight.  Since he had no intention of staying in the Tower any longer than
he must, he practiced around the town and in the barracks.  During meals, his
odd behavior had drawn comments.

“What are you looking at?”

“Nothing.”

“Then knock it off!”

“I can’t.”

“If you’re not staring at anything then quit it!”

“As soon as I see something, I will.”

“What?”

Many such conversations had taken place.  His friends
and unit mates knew it concerned whatever unfathomable training the officers
required of him.  They tolerated it without much comment.

Marik had improved his control over it, though the old
man remained unsatisfied.  Tollaf’s argument stated that if a child stopped as
soon as he learned to walk, he would never learn to run.  That same argument
appeared whenever Marik asserted he could read his way through most words now
if he worked at it, so should be allowed to quit the time-wasting exercises
Tollaf kept forcing on him.

Once they reached the trees, Marik needed to lean
against a trunk to catch his breath.  His body still mended.  This short hike
from the walls taxed him.