Sworn To Transfer (9 page)

M
iles away on the road to the home of the
kith
, the Weather Mage was riding at a breakneck pace on a stallion built for long distances. Beside him, astride a horse of similar merit, rode the person the Weather Mage internally referred to as “the Shadow Mage.” Externally whenever he addressed the mage, he called him “Master.” He did it reluctantly. But he had learned swiftly in the few days they’d been together that the man would tolerate nothing less than absolute subservience.

The Weather Mage was a man of pride as most mages were. The Shadow Mage had entrapped his mind with his magic and could control his actions with just a surge of his magic. It was humiliating and frustrating - rankling his pride like a dog with too many fleas. He constantly itched to throw off the yoke that hobbled him and had finally sought to revolt against the Shadow Mage one night. It had not gone well. As punishment the Shadow Mage had his dark, ink-like creatures carve into the skin of the Weather Mage’s back with claws made of shadows. They left his flesh torn and in bloody ruins, causing rivulets of blood to run down and his poor back to feel like it was on fire. After that he’d never talked back—not aloud. He couldn’t help his thoughts, and he suspected the Shadow Mage could hear them. But he never responded to them.

They rode at a hard pace toward the only destination that this road led directly to: the Forest of Ameles. With a shudder the Weather Mage thought of what lay there: inhuman creatures with the powers of mages, creatures that could talk and were sentient. It made him ill to think about it. He had no hope of escaping once there. The creatures would eat him alive if he left the Shadow Mage’s side; after all, every mage knew the number one rule when entering the Forest of Ameles. Safety in numbers.

Sighing, he bit his lip and hoped he could escape before the shadows inside of him erupted again. They were always there. A dark presence that invaded his magic and his mind. Occasionally the Shadow Mage would call upon the shadows to overtake his mind. Once he’d even ordered him asleep when he’d been preparing a spell. He had begged the man not to. When he slept, he was surrounded by the darkness of the shadows in his dreams. He did his best to stay awake at all times now, which was why his eyes still looked bloodshot and his appearance unkempt. Aside from the ungodly hours the Shadow Mage kept, the Weather Mage was afraid—he was afraid to fall asleep, fearing his dreams and fearing what he’d wake up to.

When they were twenty miles from the forest, the Shadow Mage pulled their horses to a stop at a fork in the road. The straight path would get them to the forest in less than a day. The branch off the road led somewhere else. Practically trembling with exhaustion, the Weather Mage lifted his head, pushing back dank hair from his forehead to read the sign on the road ahead. Carved into wood with an arrow pointing east were the words, “
Borden Village – ten miles
.”

The Shadow Mage threw back the hood that shrouded his face from view. He turned to the Weather Mage with cold glee in his eyes. “It’s time to go home, Marcus.” Those whispered words sent dread down the Weather Mage’s spine.

The Weather Mage licked his dried and cracked lips while apprehension filled him.

“To the Ameles Forest?” he choked out from a parched throat. They’d been riding for hours, and before that the Shadow Mage had kept him locked in a cellar with little substanance.

The Shadow Mage looked to the forest with an odd smile on this face.

“Things have already been set in motion there. Tonight we go to Borden.”

*****

H
ours later they reached the village of Borden and dusk had already fallen. The village looked like an ordinary one, with fewer than five hundred souls judging by the number of homes he could see. As children scampered under their horses and mothers shooed them home with admonishments, the Weather Mage felt like shouting, “Go! Run, save your families!” But he knew if he did anything of the sort, he would be worse off in the end. He wouldn’t have minded so much if the Shadow Mage killed him in retribution. But in the time spent with the silent, shrouded figure, he had realized that this wasn’t that type of man. A person who would make it a clean death. The Shadow Mage would torture the Weather Mage first and do it without a shred of regret.

And then the big butcher, his homespun apron of patches and canvas splotched with blood, spotted them. Heaving a big cleaver back to rest on his shoulder, he came out of his small, fly-covered shop.

“Well, I’ll be,” shouted the big butcher. “It’s you. Timmoris! You little scamp. Where ya been?”

Confused, the Weather Mage looked around. If he didn’t know any better, he’d think the butcher was referring to the Shadow Mage in such a congenial manner. As he stared, the Weather Mage noted with apprehension that the shadows on the underside of the buildings, in the shade of trees, and even behind people were moving independently. But none of the villagers seem to notice. Or if they did, they were attributing it to the clouds moving swiftly overhead.

The Weather Mage got down from his horse with a brittle smile.

The butcher let out a robust laugh as he slapped the Shadow Mage on the shoulder, “I knew you’d be back. Couldn’t stray too far from home. Not like your brother, the adventurer. No, not you.”

The man was practically crowing. The Weather Mage realized, in disbelief, that he was
mocking
the Shadow Mage.

“It’s certainly a pleasure to be back,” said the Shadow Mage quietly.

The only sign that he was upset was the moving shadows that had yet to distance themselves too far from their normal habitats and his glittering eyes.

“Well,” said the butcher, perhaps realizing he’d gone too far, “your home is gone. We razed it to plant land for the cattlefeed.”

Or perhaps not. The Shadow Mage’s hand gripped into a tight fist that was noticeable to all passing. A woman stepped forward. “Now, now, Glendon. You know this was neither the time nor the place to say all that.”

“He was bound to find out, trying to find a place to lay his head,” protested the butcher.

She rolled her eyes and snapped her rag at him. “Off with you.”

Putting a motherly hand on Timmoris’s shoulder, she said, “Timmoris, you and your friend can sleep at my inn tonight. We can talk about the land in the morning.”

“Of course,” said the Shadow Mage in an even tone.

Soon enough, two boys ran up to take their horses and they were installed in a small room with two cots, a basin with hot water, and a large tray filled with soup and bread. The Weather Mage watched the Shadow Mage carefully as he paced around the room. He was waiting for the explosion of darkness and wrath. Eventually he took the offered food and washed up after it was clear that the Shadow Mage wouldn’t speak.

The Shadow Mage turned back to him from where he was contemplating the dirt on the floor with a distasteful expression. “You should see your face. The fear, the trepidation. It’s there like lines written into your skin.”

The Weather Mage said nothing. What was there to say?

“You know,” the Shadow Mage said, considering, “they’ve always treated me this way. Even when my brother was here—
especially
when my brother was here. As something to pity.”

“What do you mean, Master?” he finally replied.

“Sleep,” the Shadow Mage said soothingly, “I’ll need you at peak strength for the morning.”

It sounded like a request, but with the push of his shadow magic, the Shadow Mage commanded it and the Weather Mage fell screaming into the darkness of his dreams. In the meantime, the Shadow Mage got to work as night fell and the lights in the village winked on one by one. He ordered his shadows to prepare the pyre.

*****

T
he next morning, the Weather Mage woke to the sound of a young girl’s scream. He scrambled up from where he lay on the floor. The Shadow Mage hadn’t bothered to make sure he was lying on the cot when he’d commanded him to sleep. Groaning he tried to ignore the soreness that came from laying on a hard, wooden floor all night. Without pause he went for the door to get outside. It was locked from the other side. Frustrated he banged on the door, “Open this door! I’m a Mage of the Emperor.”

Suddenly one of the people running by stopped in the hallway with a jangle of metal. “You’re out of luck mate. No one can open the door but the person with the key and that would be the other man you’re with.” The Weather Mage cursed and backed away. The door was solid oak – there was no way he was going through it. Turning around he looked for another way out of the room and spotted the small, dirty window.

“That’ll do,” said the Weather Mage. He grabbed a stool, stood on it and proceeded to squeeze his way out of the small frame after pushing the window pane out in the open air. Luckily they weren’t very far up from the ground. He called up his winds and dropped out of the window. The winds caught him in a soft landing on the ground behind the inn. For a moment he hesitated. He was free. No one knew he’d escaped. He could get away. But then the screaming started again and he couldn’t run away.

Looking around he spotted an alley going back towards the front of the inn. Hustling between the leaning walls of the homes surrounding the alley, he ignored the shit on the ground and made his way to the main road. Once there he paused to get his bearings. He didn’t see anything strange at first look.

Across the way a mother stood over a young girl while holding her firmly by the shoulders.

He could hear the mother saying, “Hush Beth! I told you not to listen to your brother’s tales again.”

The mother looked up at the Shadow Mage with the embarrassed look of a parent, “Forgive her, Sir. Her brother has been spinning long tales of the Necromancer again.” Giving her little girl a little shake she said tightly, “Isn’t that right Beth?”

The girl refused to look at the Shadow Mage. She turned to bury her head in her mother’s skirts but then she spotted him. The Weather Mage gave her what he thought was a reassuring smile as he said, “Now lass. What could be amiss? You’ve seen the Necromancer now?”

He was joking. She wasn’t. With a shaky finger and a tear tracked face she pointed at the Shadow Mage’s shadow. It was moving and walking around while the man stood still. The Weather Mage gulped and looked at his riding companion and jailer. Her mother tried to hush Beth again but this time she saw what had made the little girl scream. She clasped her hand to her face to halt her own scream as she, too, saw the moving shadow.

The butcher, whom the Weather Mage was beginning to see was never idle, said, “What’s going on here?” He had walked out of his shop with nothing but a pair of pants on. He looked like a battle-hardened warrior with skin gleaming in the morning as sweat and blood trickled down his muscled abdomen from a pig that he’d recently skinned. A man who could tear the Shadow Mage into pieces at the slightest provocation.

Grimacing when he saw who it was, the butcher said, “Timmoris, you and your weird childhood tricks. They’ve no place here. You’re a
man
now, as much as anyone like you could be.”

He looked over his shoulder at the gathered village men with a grin. They laughed in response. The Shadow Mage stood unmoving, still as a statue in the middle of the road.

“Now, get your dark creature away from the woman and apologize to the girl,” the butcher said with authority in his voice. As the little girl backed into her mother’s leg and the mother denied that an apology was needed, desperate just to go home, the butcher swaggered forward.

“Timmoris, don’t go all silent on me. We can’t have you scaring children, now,” the butcher said as he stepped in front of the Shadow Mage. With a smirk on his face he continued to taunt the Shadow Mage openly. Baiting him.

“Do we need to go somewhere, Timmy?” the butcher said in a whisper for Timmoris’s ears alone. “Are you going to wet yourself again?”

The Weather Mage watched in sick fascination. The Shadow Mage wasn’t like other mages. As far as he could tell, his magic levels didn’t spike when he was angry and his powers didn’t get away from him when he was threatened. A possible reason why these villagers didn’t know he was a mage.

The Shadow Mage lifted his head up from where he’d been staring at the ground with a deep intensity.  Whatever was in his eyes had the mother pick up her daughter and hurry quickly from the village square. Fear does that. The stupid butcher didn’t notice, and in the next second the shadows had converged. The first one went directly for the butcher. It was the Shadow Mage’s own shadow, and it molded the hand of its human shape into a spear. The butcher never knew it was behind him. It thrust its dark spear into his back and through his heart, and the butcher arched back in surprise.

He was dead in an instant, but in the moment just before the light left his eyes, the true Timmoris was standing before him. As the villagers ran away screaming, many were attacked by the shadows and hacked to pieces. Those were the lucky ones. The Shadow Mage continued killing indiscriminately, ordering his shadow legion to kill and dispose of the bodies into the large funeral pyre of stacked logs in the village center.

The Weather Mage watched silently as raging men, defiant women, and crying children fell under the mage’s advance until it stopped. Proudly, the Shadow Mage strode around in front of his new creation. On top of the stacked wood with the hacked limbs of victims blood dripped down in the harsh sunlight. The Weather Mage fought to keep his food in his stomach and turned away in the disgust.

“Now, now, my pet,” said the Shadow Mage, seeing the Weather Mage turn away. “That was only the beginning.”

The Weather Mage flinched, wondering what could possibly be worse. And then the shadows started converging. Each one pushing a human in front of them, all of the remaining villagers who had hidden wherever they could. There weren’t many.  The Weather Mage heard screams as they were dragged from their hiding places in lofts, cellars, behind buildings, and the surrounding fields. Finally they stood in a huddled mass before the dripping, unlit pyre.