Chapter 10: A Coward’s Strength

  ++If I have any real regret about my earliest actions—and I must admit, I have since recognised several errors my past self made shortly after rebirth—it is that I was unable to fully witness the battle in that mansion. The variety of magic and spell matrixes I would have been able to observe may well have shot my knowledge forwards by months, or even years.++

  - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, ‘The Great Lich’. 1,891 A.E

  There were several potential hiding places the children may have been stuffed into, following the trail their kidnappers had taken. Henry was, now, not the one who could narrow that down. His own ability to track their prey had disappeared with the residual mana, all he could do now was rely on Baron Vornholt’s more conventional senses.

  Though he had to admit, they were hardly lacking. He had heard the man was a former officer, a Colonel if he recalled correctly, stationed somewhere in Estia. If that was the case, it was hard to see where he’d picked up the navigational skills now carrying them so swiftly through a city. Henry had heard Estia was all desert and mud-huts.

  Whatever the reason, Vornholt led the group on faster than even even Henry himself had. He was like a bloodhound in how he moved, pausing only for the barest moments as he muttered to himself and worked through possibilities. Henry had always taken the Baron for dim-witted, as most of those without the gift of magic were. Now he was seeing that perhaps there was more to the man than he’d thought.

  More expertise, at least, if not more intelligence. And that expertise guided them through one potential hiding spot after another. The more they checked without stumbling onto the children, the more frantic became their journey to the next one.

  There were finite places to search, that much was certain. But there was finite time, too. Henry did not need to share his suspicions anymore, the Baron already saw clear as day that they were rapidly losing their chance to find his children. At last, he reached his limit.

  “Doctor Brown, you will take half of my men and search these locations,” he wrote even as he spoke, hand moving with the preternatural speed that Henry’s own digits would have torn themselves apart trying to match. “I will search the remaining ones. It may be too late anyway, and we will be risking much by dividing our strength, but I will not give up this chance.”

  Henry missed having options in his life, and he especially missed having unfettered access to Isabel’s lessons. He missed when the future meant publishing the first recorded account of Arwyna’s greatest magician prodigy, rather than being killed in front of that prodigy in a futile attempt to take her back from her kidnappers.

  And he missed being around people who were not intent on cutting his head off at the first sign that he would betray or fail them. But complaining about his situation would do nothing to save it, so he just swallowed his bitterness and pressed on.

  If nothing else, he wouldn’t be in danger for much longer. One way or the other.

  ***

  Punches were thrown, though none were especially impressive. As badly mangled as the chain of command had become, magicians were still magicians, and all of us are trained not to use magic without very serious cause. Calling on the arcane is, in our culture, the equivalent of drawing out a loaded gun and aiming it at the head of whoever you are speaking to.

  Which is certainly something we will do, when pushed, but currently the men here retained just enough semblance of order that they were still reluctant to do so. Insubordination can be turned into mutiny so easily, however. With the right push.

  I was still being watched by a few of the magicians and warriors, those who were less worried about the argument brewing. Agrian himself was taking the bulk of the stares however, having fallen somehow and apparently taken too many blows earlier to get himself up with the usual vigour.

  I just needed a moment, just one.

  “The girl is confused!” Avens snapped, looking clean my way as he said it. “You there, Vornholt girl, explain what you think you saw!”

  I did so, keeping my story exactly as it had been earlier.

  “She’s lying!” shrieked the man I had singled out, naturally the most panicked of them all.

  “Do not let him hurt me,” I told the group at large, looking frightened suddenly. The real argument here was about trust between each other, of course, for this haphazardly-attached magician’s pack were all increasingly convinced they were being sold out by their fellows.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  But throwing in the protective instincts adults seemed to feel when they saw a child scared and threatened never hurt. Sure enough, two of the men who had been less vocal up until now injected themselves in that moment. One of them had been among the ones eying me with supsicion. People were losing focus more.

  More bickering passed as Avens grew more and more tense, eventually resorting, at last, to casting out mana in a show of light and sparks, but no violence yet.

  “Whatever this is, we can resolve it later,” he growled. “Now, this instant, we are still within the clutches of our enemy. Who here wants to face down a warrior of the Third Order? I thought not. Now hurry!”

  It was rather an impressive display, though his ability to galvanize the men was no doubt aided by the force of his magic more than strength of personality. Even still, things were calming as the magicians headed for the stables at last, eying one another, shifting, all twitchy with the threat of imminent violence, but not yet dragged into it. A few more minutes and the carriages came, just as I had thought they would.

  And when they moved for the interior of the stables, their wheels falling and shattering in the pitfalls, chaos reigned.

  ***

  Henry groaned as he felt the mana wisping through the air. He’d been hoping nothing would come of this, desperately praying that the opportunity would pass him by and there’d be no spell-slinging tonight.

  But the best way to make something happen in life was to hope very hard that it didn’t.

  The best way to keep something from happening, on the other hand, was to be a lying bastard. In his moment of panic he’d forgotten a single, simple fact: he was the only one here who could sense mana. Certainly mana that distant, miles away, strong but made faint by the space between him and its source. Was that the surge of a magician channeling his powers for some exit? If so, it wouldn’t take long. Henry could delay his warning by a few minutes and guarantee the captors were gone by the time they got there.

  He had the lifeline he’d been waiting for.

  “I sensed mana, that way,” he told the group around him, because he actually was the stupidest man to ever live. “Hurry!” They took off at a sprint, slightly slower than before as the man who ended up carrying Henry proved far weaker than the Baron. Even still, they were making better time than if Henry had sprinted the whole way at his full speed.

  The mana grew weaker as they neared, which Henry thought at first meant that the enemy was already moving away faster than they were approaching, though it could just as easily have been simply time weakening the magic. A minute passed like that, with the creeping dread that they’d be too late and the guilt of feeling relieved about it. Then he felt another surge of magic, bigger and more powerful than the first, longer-lasting, more variable.

  Like a fight.

  It must have been Baron Vornholt finding them first!

  ***

  It took approximately five seconds after the first carriage’s wheel gave for the first spells to begin flying. Actually longer than I would have anticipated, given how laughably paranoid everyone present had become. I was not complaining however; five seconds was just barely enough time for me to bowl Agrian down with a blast of force and throw myself over his body to cover us both in the thickest aether I could sustain.

  One thousand vis is not a great amount of magic, by the standards of adults, and if any significant effort had been focused on breaking through my defence, it would have perished instantly. I was keenly aware of this, and more aware still that there was roughly a hundred times my own power exploding around us between all the magicians devolving into their panicked brawl. I needed help.

  “Agrian,” I growled. “You need to shield us. Do you remember how? An aether wall, we need an aether wall.”

  The boy was practically catatonic, not seeming to even hear what I was saying. I worried for a moment that I would be left talking to nothing but an unmoving, fear-frozen face for the duration of this conflict. Then all at once his eyes seemed to lock onto mine, and I saw comprehension flaring up within him.

  His magic was greater than mine in power, as I have said already, and I had never felt it from so close before. The push of his mana on the air actually had me reassured for a moment as it congealed into another layer for our defence. With the two of us putting all our strength into a single spell, it may well have been the equal of a grown magician. A weak one, at least. That would have to be enough.

  ***

  Henry realised that it wasn’t Vornholt here around the time one of the mansion’s outer walls exploded, bricks coming free—coming apart—and spraying through the air. He was already set down and running after the warriors by then, with one particularly big man shielding him from the shrapnel, but he still saw pieces of mortar ripping into the grass around him, tearing whole chunks out and scattering the dirt back.

  What would they do to my flesh if they hit? Best not to find out.

  Earlier, Henry had been ambushed by the enemy magician and hardly had a chance to defend himself. Now he was still a good twenty paces from the action and not yet a part of it. He paused, stopped running and focused on mana, carefully worked it into the spell matrix he knew so keenly—and aware that he was doing so at barely twice the speed Isabel could despite his decades of experience. No wonder these bastards had snatched her, one day that girl would wield the powers of a Demigod in truth.

  Unless she died in the fighting. Henry had to resist the urge to hurry as that thought occurred to him, he’d do the children no favors by rushing this and being forced to start the spell over. Aether formed around him, not in a single, rigid cocoon but rather in thousands of miniscule, interlocking plates. Ordinarily, making each one by hand, then adhering them together, would have taken the better part of an hour. That was what the spell matrix was for; carefully automating the whole process so that the cycle repeated hundreds of times a second, leaving Henry to do nothing but gently supply the power and play the magic over his body to ensure it covered all of him.

  Other magicians could make aether of different sorts, flexible enough to move as he did without impeding him, wrapped in a spell matrix that would keep it hovering just above his skin and have it suddenly harden on any sharp impacts. The best Henry could manage was the hovering over his skin.

  But damn it if that wasn’t usually enough. He advanced on the mansion, feeling like his heart would burst, and found himself praying for the first time in years.