Elal bellowed with rage.“You common street rat of a bastard wizard!I know it’s you doing that.”He reached up and tore out the mechanical eye, ripping it from his skull and eliciting a gout of blood.Jadren hadn’t expected that move—and he had to admit it was impressive for the sheer brutality.Talk about drama.
Seliah made a gagging sound, her magic dimming a little.“Don’t look,” he told her.“That’s what he wants.Intimidation factor.”
“It’s working,” she replied weakly, but staring steadfastly at the ground.
“You’ll pay for this,” Piers Elal roared.“Where is my daughter?”
Well, now that was odd.Surely he knew Alise couldn’t be far away?Or maybe he didn’t know.All he had to go on was the broken-down Harahel carriage back near the border.Alise and Cillian were hidden from sight, inside the El-Adrel carriage which, come to think of it, looked the same coming or going.For once he blessed the El-Adrel historic obsession with symmetrical design.It could look like he and Seliah had been travelingtoElal.Also, Piers apparently hadn’t sent any spirit spies to check out the interior of the carriage.Hopefully that was because he couldn’t divert his intention from the barely tame spirits holding him aloft.
“You’re looking for Nic?”Jadren asked, deciding to go with being infuriating, as it was one of his strengths.“At House Phel, I imagine.”
“Don’t toy with me, boy,” Piers snarled.Very impressive with blood and other…thingsdripping down his face.Why wasn’t the pain unbearable?Maybe Jadren hadn’t had a bad enough feeling.“Alise.My heir.Where is she?”
Fortunately, playing dumb was also one of his strengths.“I thought she was with you.We were on our way to Elal for a cozy visit.Didn’t expect this kind of greeting.I’m honored.”
Piers Elal made an incoherent, choking cry of rage—or that could be the blood going down the inside of his sinuses—his magic amassing in the air.The familiar crumpled, clearly being tapped for the increased magic, and Jadren considered that maybe he’d miscalculated.He drew on Seliah’s magic, not at all sure what he planned to do with it, but wanting to be ready.He felt more than heard her sigh of relief.
Spirits appeared all around Piers and his wilting familiar, a nimbus of malevolence.Okay, so, that answered one question: whatever Elal had done to power his flying platform with spirits, they were bound there by previous magical work, which pretty much cemented the blood magic theory.Demons and djinn were supposed to be useful for that sort of thing, creating lasting, stable enchantments that outpowered anything else.Too bad you had to court pure evil that wanted to eviscerate wizards as much or more than they were inclined to serve.
Maybe that’s why plucking out his own mechanical eye didn’t seem to bother Piers very much.Having your guts chomped on by a demon likely hurt worse.
Jadren didn’t have the luxury of mulling over the riddle, however, as the array of half-manifested spirits dove for them with fully manifested weapons.All aiming for Seliah.
Smart.Piers probably knew something about Jadren’s ability to heal—and he certainly could safely assume Jadren needed his bonded familiar’s power to last through any kind of pitched duel.If Jadren could even figure out how to fight this kind of shit.He should have made Seliah wait in the carriage.
For funsies, he tried his dismantling power against the plummeting hoard.Yeah, as he’d thought: no such luck.They weren’t even substantial, much less organic.He drew Mr.Machete, the moonsilver weapon that had served him so well for so long.Good for non-magical fighting, for unskilled bozos like him.
He thrust Seliah behind him at the last moment—really all the moment he had—parrying some of the blows intended for her and absorbing the ones that got through.It hurt like a sonofabitch.He tried to replicate Elal’s crazed rage and apparent imperviousness to pain.But for all Jadren’s considerable experience with it, pain still felt really shitty.Seliah buried her face in his back, trembling with the need to fight, restrained by her obligation to feed him magic.
This wasn’t going to end well.“Are you out of your cursed mind?”he screamed at Lord Elal.“This is an unprovoked act of war.”
“You trespassed!”Elal shrieked.“And abducted my daughter.And—” His tirade abruptly cut off as he lunged for his familiar, who’d nearly fallen off the floating platform when she passed out.The spirits attacking Jadren and Seliah abruptly vanished, thank the dark arts.
Piers Elal crouched in his misty cloud, blood-streaked face contorted, shaking the poor girl who was at least blessedly out of it.“You’ll pay,” he shouted at Jadren.“You and all your wretched friends will pay for this.”
“You need better lines,” Jadren informed him, holding himself up through sheer force of will.“Let me know if you want to replace that eye.Should be still under warranty!”
Piers growled something incoherent, then spun in place, the mist rising to cover him and his familiar, then they all blended with the sky.Effectively invisible to the naked eye.Jadren, however, with a fix of his wizard senses on them this time, tracked the slight distortion of their presence.
And he made absolutely sure they were gone before he allowed himself to collapse.
~11~
Gabriel had beento Convocation Center only once before in his life—and that seemed like a lifetime ago.Or something that had happened to an entirely different person.
He’d been a young man.A funny thought to have, as he’d been an adult by Meresin standards, working his own fields and orchards, thinking seriously about starting a family.Also, that had been only a few years before.He felt so much older now, however.He’d barely recovered from the sudden onslaught of his wizardry, the recovery process taking up nearly a year of his life.From those first days of utter astonishment and, honestly, gut-watering terror at the discovery that the sudden deluge of rain and silver plating every surface came fromhim.
Those first few months, in truth, blended into a kaleidoscope of confusion and emotion in his blurry memories.He’d been exhausted and hungry from the years of drought.Then the rains poured on the baked soil caused flooding, drowning the few seedlings they’d managed to keep alive, uprooting trees in the orchard.The Dubglass River had overflowed its banks and cut a new channel for itself, washing away several homes.And the magic drain exhausted him further.Only when he ran out of magic and collapsed—and the rains suddenly ceased—had anyone put two and two together.
And the resulting math made him a stranger in the eyes of his own family.Not Seliah, though.She had begun to manifest as a familiar, though none of them knew that, but it would be a while before the worst effects of being unable to express her magic would make her truly crazy.She’d supported him at first, helped him do the necessary research, and gently, persistently told him their parents would come around.The Phel family had been magical once, so having a wizard son wasn’t that much of a stretch.
Still, by the time he’d made the journey on horseback, riding the trusty Vale to Convocation Center in order to file the paperwork to re-establish House Phel and find out what else he needed to know, he’d been weary in every fiber of his being.A stranger to himself, feeling supremely incapable of coping with this wrenching turn his life had taken, he’d been already overwhelmed when he reached the “big city.”
Having spent his life in the fields, orchards, and wetlands of Meresin, his younger, more naïve self had never seen so many people in one place.The buildings towered overhead, the streets an incomprehensible maze filled with speeding carriages that moved on their own, no horses in sight.He’d felt fully the country rube, gaping at every new sight, completely overwhelmed by it all.Those memories, more than any from all those times, stood out in his mind with crystal clarity.He vividly recalled his awe at seeing Convocation Central, the administration building that housed the councils that made up the government of the Convocation.
In reality, the high houses did pretty much as they pleased, held accountable primarily by their competitors for product, trademarks, and land: the other houses.But councils of representatives from those high houses passed ultimate judgement on issues brought to them, typically as presented by legal advisory committees.Convocation Academy, which housed the Convocation Archives as well as being responsible for the education of every certified wizard and familiar—excepting the wild cards that slipped through the net, like Gabriel and Seliah, and Jadren El-Adrel, though for different reasons in his case—was nearby, but on its own parklike grounds, not physically or officially attached to Convocation Central.
This time, entering the large conglomeration of housing, businesses, shops, restaurants, and theaters that made up the sprawling city center, Gabriel had a far better perspective.Convocation Center contained the largest population in all the Convocation, but he could better perceive the order of it now.And they rode in their own carriage, Vale back at House Phel.Being in the air-elemental powered carriage somehow put him at the same speed as everyone else.
