Majutsu-shi no Chikara Ch. 05

"Faster, mules." she heard a voice of command drawing closer. "Kamakshi-Chief has made the Shaman's trade, and I am bored of this task."

"Yes, chief-kin."

They raced by her, their long, loping strides not a sprint -- yet faster than Thikkit could hope to travel without a horse... or a magical trinket. Hissing soothingly to herself, she crept from her hasty burrow and followed the painfully obvious trail of the orks before rain made it impossible to see anything. The misty gray fog of morning found Thikkit shambling tiredly onward toward South-wold, no closer than half the distance, even if the orks might already have arrived. The rain stopped shortly after sunrise, in the Willow Wood, and Thikkit took time to quiet her grumbling belly with several handfuls of scavenged grubs and worms. They were nowhere near satisfying, but it would have to wait until after she reported to the Wizard Saran before she would find a proper meal.

Thikkit's sense of smell warned her of the orks' return long before she heard them... before she could see them, and luckily well before they would have otherwise seen her. They jogged below her impromptu hiding place, halfway up a young maple covered in creeping vines that forsook the cold of winter, with sacks or barrels balanced on their shoulders. Two were carrying goats that bleated pitiably with each jostling step. The kobold sneered disdain at such abuse of warm meat... before long, the goats would suffocate, their insides crushed on orkish shoulders -- the meat souring unpleasantly. Easier than tethering and dragging the beasts, for certain -- but far simpler to slit their throats and bleed the carcasses before transporting them to the Sidero camp. Snorting a dismissal at them, Thikkit thought better than to offer them advice on preparing and hauling capric-flesh... instead, slithering to the ground and resuming her journey north.

Unpleasantly damp, Thikkit took a moment near the headwaters of a spring to drink and rest in the half-sleep her kind used. To her excitement, a host of woodland creatures frequented this place, and her predatory stench seemed unfamiliar to them. Only just able to snatch-up a small fawn, Thikkit startled its mother and many of the nearby animals away. When a stag came forward, Thikkit twisted the fawn's neck violently and hissed angrily at the seasoned buck.

Staring with its animal eyes, the stag stamped its hooves in complaint and did not back away. Instead, it reared and angled its antlers at her. Thikkit darted away, but not without her prize. Disappearing up into a tree, Thikkit used a claw to rip a messy opening in the belly of her catch -- eating the warm, squishy organs first before flaying skin and tearing into the lean, stringy muscles of its limbs.

Once the blood began spattering the grass and rotted leaves below, the stag bugled angrily and began stalking away... its efforts for naught. As the sun passed its zenith, Thikkit had rested enough to continue, and a belly full of warm cervine viscera to keep her hunger sated for a few days.

Mindful of the sunlight in the trees, Thikkit kept away from large clearings and continued her steady pace north. At times, she could just see the edge of the forest, and she resisted the temptation of moving through the open grasslands... her scales were suited to the plains (her cloak was not) but the open plains were no place for a solitary kobold. The Willow Wood had not been home to goblins, orks, or kobolds in more than half a century -- its proximity to South-wold playing a heavy hand in that. The only true denizens of any imminent threat were the boars that occasionally took to rooting-out truffles in the shade of the trees. Such territorial pigs were known to Thikkit, and she thought herself skilled enough to deal with such a threat -- but it kept her alert to any snuffling or grunting sounds she thought she heard.

...

Esmeray frowned at the small mirror, and the image playing across its silver surface. The Elemental was seated in his small shed, little more than an earth and thatch hovel, with two other people around a small fire pit.

"Such simplicity." she groused, having no taste for such privation and already chafing at the single night she'd spent traveling sleeplessly toward South-wold. If not for her magic, she might have already collapsed from exhaustion... or more dangerously: boredom.

"You called it humble, before." Nabid's mouth curled cruelly around his yellow, pointed teeth.

"I'd rather have sewer systems and city walls..." Esmeray tilted the mirror this way and that, sliding the image this way and that around inside the pool of metal. "Hot meals prepared by personal cooks, and servants..."

"Make them, then." Nabid stretched, though it felt no tension -- for it had no true bones or muscles. "Forge your own little city-tower of mindless servants."

"Wasteful in its own right." Esmeray shook her head, her silver-white locks tucked securely into a close-fitting hood. "Stay focused... I think this one, this boy -- he could be a problem."

There was a spark of magic and Esmeray smiled thinly.

"Well, maybe he won't be..." she watched as the Elemental rebuked his apprentice... then, a third apprentice appeared in the doorway and pull the younger man away.

The older woman had been in the dreamcasting -- a still image of a weathered woman of forty or fifty years... pleasing to the eye, and carrying the lines of her age as would anyone living a life on the plains near Renks Cairn. Esmeray had seen the lines of power around her, but it had been the air of authority that had eased her mind about the woman. Whoever she was, she was no fool and likely no true danger to the Tower. Moreover, she wasn't Esmeray Saran's intended target. Even if she was now under the tutelage of the Elemental -- anything she learned would stagnate and wither, once the Elemental was dead.

"How you going to get past the nymph?" Nabid picked a crimson scrap of its flesh loose from its foot, worn ragged and torn in places during the long march from Renks Cairn, popped the pinch of flesh between yellow, needle teeth and chewed the morsel thoughtfully. "Death spell?"

"Don't be stupid." Esmeray dismissed the images in the mirror and cast her gaze further afield, to the torch-lit shapes and smoke of South-wold at dusk. "I must strike the Elemental, and without fail... she is of no consequence."

"She scares you." Nabid's eyes grew large, and lit with a pale yellow humor to match his teeth. "I didn't think anything but the Tower scared you."

"Shut up." Esmeray's fingers twitched and Nabid became mute. The imp only stared, wondering if this was another of Saran's many games.

Turning her attention further south, the Wizard directed more magic into the mirror -- calling forth those spirits or fragmented pieces of the prevailing winds that eddied and swirled in lost places... and a new image slithered into being, like thin paints spilling across the mirror until the likeness of Thikkit appeared, hiding among the branches of a beech -- watching intently the passage of a rooting boar below. Dried blood and viscera trailed from the saurian jaws of the grasslands kobold, giving her a much fiercer mien than one might otherwise attribute to such a slight creature.

Drawing the focal distance of the spell further from the kobold, Esmeray espied branches racing around her in dizzying green... then hurtling down from the lip of the mirror, trees crowding closer and closer, growing smaller and smaller, until she felt she was miles above... looking down, instinctively clutching the edges of the mirror to keep herself from tumbling through it into the fatal height just on the other side, the Wizard could make out the relative position of Thikkit to South-wold's outermost fields. The spell became unruly, jockeyed-about so, and she cautiously turned it loose into the ether whence it came. Spent, the magic whipped away from the surface of the mirror and was gone -- leaving only the shining, silvery reflection of Esmeray's face looking up from a pool of blackening blue-gray sky, streaked with red and purple clouds of nightfall.

A bank of rain clouds rolled overhead, lazily casting a summery drizzle in all directions half-way to each horizon, swathing the plains in deepening shadows. Esmeray huffed quietly and pulled her traveling cloak close about her, drawing the stiff hood over the close-fit inner cowl restraining her silver hair; shielding herself from the cool, wet misting. The kobold was easily hours away -- a day, at most -- and Esmeray saw no profit in hastening their meeting, when she could continue to study her target (and his protector) for weaknesses. Thikkit would come, as Nabid had said.

The Wizard groaned a venomous complaint, feeling about the vast, gaping wounds in her memories for some shred, some iota of the past between today and a day twenty-odd years gone. Nothing. Less, perhaps, as she could almost see the lines of the hex barring the way forward -- sinking like a whirlpool through the space where a memory should be and devouring it with bottomless appetite. It sickened and twisted, wrenched and malformed against her mind -- threatening, always threatening, to takeother memories if only given the chance.

Her first efforts to curb this monstrosity within her mind had met with abysmal failure -- the construct snapping and sparking violently and shoving her away with unbelievable force, such that she actually fainted... a dangerous thing at any time, but it had been in those last hours within the confines of her apartments within Central Tower. Nabid had woken her, urgent, bade her stand and move onward with her plan -- whatever it may be.

Esmeray had left herself clues aplenty, and the Tower had not seen fit to strip her of her memoirs... those mnemonic enchantments that filled her mind, great tomes within the halls of her memory. Now, those halls bore ill-shaped, glass-less windows, destroyed walls and buttresses into oblivion... she was certain that her magical archives felt the draft. The memories devoured... or kept far out of reach in someother mind... she had instead built walls around the spell, to keep it from advancing further into her mind. A bit like trying to fence-in water, as the memories felt disconnected from one another, and all around she felt surrounded by the great nothingness that was left behind... older memories shouting back at her from across a decades-wide ravine that collapsed the distance between them to less than a handspan as Esmeray dashed hither and to, still searching for some key or clue other than the archives.

Saran drew magic forth, calling it into the mirror again to spy upon the Elemental. One eye watching the silver reflection of events only a half-league away, the other eye poring over the countless pages of her own notes still shackled to her mind. She let a pained sigh through her lips and huddled to the ground, secure in the camouflage of her magical cloak. Nabid stood to her right, watching her with unblinking black orbs. The rain intensified briefly, but could not muster enough to even muddy the single road in the area before the clouds broke apart to the last vanishing ray of the setting sun.

...

When torchlight from South-wold finally hovered into view through the darkness of the Willow Wood, Thikkit was so relieved that she nearly stepped into a gully at full run. Fear and fatigue played dueling battle-cries through her limbs, sending her chatter-toothed through the ink-black confines of the forest closer and closer to the human settlement. Trepidation gathered around her, closer than the shadows concealing her from watchful human eyes... those human eyes that seemed to ever want to blind themselves by staring longingly into fires for want of sunrise.

Tonight, however, the moon neared full and its zenith -- the daylight colours of camouflage meant nothing. Thikkit stole silently through the outer fields, leaving shallow footprints until she found the hard-packed road north of the huddled structures. Further out, moonlight washed other buildings in stony hues, while the tilled soil looked like coals, and the grasses swayed like a sea of ash stirring above a dying fire. For all the life of spring, South-wold looked sapped and dead. The light of candles glinting from windows added to the shadowy image of a town smoldering in the wake of the ork attack... Thikkit shivered, telling herself it was the cold and nothing more.

She wasn't certain how she knew where to meet with Wizard Saran, but she wascertain she'd found the place. Well outside the paltry orange halo of any torches or fires of humans, Thikkit shifted uneasily from foot to foot at the roadside. Two days in either direction: Renks Cairn, and the Sidero war camp... to reach either, one needed to know the way. Renks Cairn: one need but follow the road away from South-wold -- through grasslands, hills, and sprawling farmland that gave lie to South-wold's prosperity. The Sidero camp: south, into a trackless wilderness of game trails that only the clever or the brutish could pass with any speed. Once the Wizard Saran knew about the danger the orks posed to Renks Cairn, the Guild would send more Wizards to purge the threat... so Thikkit hoped.

Her own tribe had long ago been subverted by Renks Cairn, and now the only kobolds she knew where vassal scouts of Ser Majesty's Wardens... a company of Ser Majesty's army dedicated to protecting the wild borders and territories between cities often overlooked... Ser Majesty, indeed... the fledgling puppet of the Wizard's Guild that served as her advisory senate. Few found patronage with a Wizard... let alone a Wizard of the Tower. Thikkit's tongue flicked over her snout and she murmured warmly to herself, drawing her cloak close and clutching at its heat. Her eyes stared into the bright night, free of the cloistering shadow of tarp or tree.

"Been waiting on you." the high-pitched, whining voice of Saran's imp startled her -- springing from nowhere.

"Ssss..." Thikkit hissed politely, baring her teeth at the diminutive construct she loathed so very much.

"Whatever you say, scaly." Nabid turned blandly to the left and pointed into the tall grass. "She's just there."

Thikkit shuffled closer to the grass -- taller than her in places -- and bobbed her head with servile humility.

"Mistresss..." Thikkit let the sibilant noise trail longer, slavish, knowing the Wizard was not above fawning. Unlike so many other times before, the Wizard Saran very obviously was in no mood to be swayed, and the kobold found itself quickly resorting to grovelling wordless beneath her startlingly brilliant green eyes.

"Enough!" a piercing snarl beat out from the stabbing rise of Esmeray, punching holes in the gray-white blanket smothering the grassland, her face and hands cutting black glass apparitions floating bodiless amid the gently swaying stalks. Her silver hair shone snowy white in the moonlight, cowling her in a brilliant crown that only added to the ill humor and terrible ire shining from her eyes. Her robes, Thikkit now saw, vanished seamless into the surrounding foliage.

The kobold hissed and spluttered, a dying fire, pawing at the earth in supplication before the Wizard. Esmeray's eyes softened... only the gentle easing of her wispy brows alluded to a more relaxed composure of her otherwise unreadable face.

"What have you found?" she asked flatly, her voice sinking into Thikkit like a distant echo and lifting the saurian head to look her in the eyes.

"Yess, Mistresss." Thikkit looked away, then back to her employer, scattering thoughts darting faintly into her view as wild mice to a cat's patient prowling. Ambushing one, she offered it up.

"Ssidero devours itsself." Thikkit's hands worked stiffly in the dirt, then passed over one another to soothe her as her mind snapped-up another mouse. "They come from north -- from the high ice... they plot to kill their chief, the Shaman Kamakshi. Her daughters wish her ill, for she is sick with magic."

Thikkit chewed thoughtfully over these thoughts, hoping to catch another while the Wizard considered the news.

"They returned prisonerss -- they keep one, and they think it hass trapped their chief with magic. I found stolen goodss, but could not carry it all -- I bring thiss knife."

Holding forth the magical dagger, Thikkit averted her eyes again and her flat tongue slicked dryly over thin scaled lips as the Wizard regarded the blade with keen eyes. Esmeray knew the blade for what it was, and tucked a hand into her traveling robe to fetch-out a thin pair of fine kid-leather gloves. Inscribed with blue markings that shone with the barest reflection of moonlight, she pulled the skins over her hands and whispered a deep, falling word that clattered down a wooden staircase -- warding herself against the ensorcelled blade before touching the grip.

As the blade left Thikkit's hand, she was certain she heard the Wizard take and hold a breath.

Esmeray could feel the malevolence pouring from the blade -- seeking her heart. This simple knife -- no guard, no pommel butt to speak of, and only as wide in the blade as the handle itself -- was not a weapon of war, in the way one could regard a sword. This was an assassin's tool, fit only for thrusting between ribs, or into the soft, unguarded flesh of the throat. With no guard, the hand must be steady, for it would be easy to lose one's grip in the bleeding and struggling... no, this was a weapon of last resort, or of ambush.

How the tiny piece of steel had been shaped to hold the magic it contained was a mystery, even to Esmeray. She knew the academic notes of such a device, but the deeper secrets between metallurgy and the arcane were not her area of focus. Such power often came at a price, she knew, and the blade would likely strike true but once before it was spent... shattering or, with no small measure of luck, becoming little more than a simple knife with a bloody story in its blade.

Esmeray turned it, looking for a sign of its maker's mark. Either hidden beneath the bone and leather grip, or else neglected entirely specifically to baffle its provenance. She thought about studying the enchantment of the blade, to glean the identity of its arcane maker... but the matter was moot. The blade was here, and she had a use for it just as Billsby before her. Unlike the mercenary, she knewexactly the quarry she sought and had a firmer grasp of its capabilities. All the more reason for secrecy... surprise. Having given Thikkit and the blade too long consideration in the aching cold moonlight, Esmeray turned her eyes back at the kobold, her voice stiff.

"Did you find aught else?"

"Spoilss." Thikkit's head bobbed in deference, her eyes always looking just away from the shining emerald stars and their cold light. "Thikkit is weary and cannot bring more tribute, great Wizard."

"You have been a boon." Esmeray straightened, towering shoulders and head above the grass, above the kobold. "I will grant you capacity and salvage-right to take what you wish from the Sidero, if they live ere you return."

"Ser?"

"Their doom is coming." Esmeray waved a dismissive, gloved hand, eyes distant. "They will have no need for any of their more valuable possessions."

"The hostage?"

"Unimportant." Esmeray squared herself to the kobold, tilting her head to cast a glance up and down Thikkit's hunched body where she squatted at the road's edge. "Stand up straight, let me look at you."

Thikkit complied, her mouth growing slick with fear and her nostrils flaring with apprehension. The Wizard Saran blinked at her... twice... it was the longest time Thikkit had ever been scrutinized by a Wizard and she wished never to repeat the exercise. Unable to lift her gaze to meet the sorcerous sight of Esmeray, Thikkit's feet shifted restless, clawed fingers flexing and stretching in old habit.