Fallen Magician (The Magician Rebellion) (6 page)

Gilkame looked back to a table full of Kenzai, his eyes plead for assistance. The six warriors sitting there looked to each other and stood up as one. Marian became keenly aware that all eyes in The Broken Arrow were now on them. There must be twenty men and women in the common room alone dressed in the traditional brown garb of the Kenzai. One of the men that stood up approached the newcomers flanked by the men who were sitting with them. He was a tall man with a muscular build and stood nearly a head taller than the sorcerer. His black hair was tied in a warrior’s tail and he sported a thin mustache. “I am Lieutenant Blaine. What is this about?” he asked with a reserved glare, looking Sane in the eye.

“
He wishes to see Bertran,” Gilkame told him emboldened by the lieutenant’s company.

“
I am Sane, the personal sorcerer of his royal highness, King Kale Aurel, investigating the… occurrence a few nights ago in the northern forest.” Sane pulled his cloak tightly around him. To some it may have looked like an unconscious attempt to put a barrier between the much larger Kenzai and himself, but Marian guessed that was not the truth. He was grabbing his staff or his grimoire and preparing to cast a spell should the larger man make a move to oppose him.

“
Sane, perhaps you should calm down,” Marian suggested evenly and put her hand gently on his arm, which had a distinctively unnatural chill.

It appeared that fate was with them, fore Lieutenant Blaine bowed his head in a short nod. “Of course, Sir Sane, an advance rider arrived not more than an hour ago bringing word that you would be here shortly.” To the dwarf he added, “Gilkame, since you are familiar with the Lady, would you show our guests to Bertran’s room?” The dwarf seemed about to object, but then thought better of it and cheerily agreed. The subtlety of the request was not lost on Marian. Lieutenant Blaine was asking the dwarf to probe them for information, wrongly thinking that Gilkame was someone that Marian trusted, and determine their intentions during the short trip from the common room to wherever Bertran was resting. That was fine with Marian. Dwarves were notorious for loving the sound of their own voices and she knew Gilkame Axebeard was no exception.

Before Gilkame could think of a question, they had left the common room and were headed to a flight of stairs that would lead to the second floor rooms when Marian, trying to sound very impressed, asked, “So the Kenzai Order was the one commissioning your inventions? That is some very high company you keep, Gilkame.”

“
The Kenzai Order?” Gilkame guffawed, “Hardly, my lady. I am working with the Kenzai to serve an even higher authority,” Gilkame’s chest puffed up with pride, “but I have said more than I should already. So what brings you here?”

The Kenzai Order operated in Aurelia without boundaries or allegiances to nobility. The only authority that had absolute dominion over them was the king. That was the reason that a handful of magicians like Sane and Byrn were allowed to operate freely in the kingdom without fear of the Kenzai and some, like Sane, even had their grudging respect.

“
Two of the rogue magicians escaped the attack on their home the other night and we are looking for clues to help find them. It seems that Bertran was the only survivor of that attack,” Marian told him trying to stick as close to the truth as possible. She gave him what she guessed would be enough information to satisfy his curiosity and sprinkled with enough truth that it would confirm things he already knew, but did not mention that they wanted to find the magicians so that they could save Byrn.

Gilkame nodded, but still regarded Sane wearily. “Bertran’s room is the second to last door on the left,” he told them, but continued to lead the way.

Just before they reached the door to Bertran’s room Sane stopped and put his hand on the dwarf’s shoulder. “You are here under the king’s orders?”

“
I never said that!” the dwarf bristled and shook Sane’s hand off of his shoulder.

“
Tell me,” Sane’s voice was commanding, but was somehow warming. It reminded Marian of her father’s voice when she was a little girl and she felt an urge to answer the sorcerer even though his question was not directed at her. Gilkame must have felt much the same way, because he answered Sane’s question without the slightest hesitation.

“
My orders come from the royal blood line, but not from the king himself.” Gilkame spoke plainly with no hint of emotion or inflection in his tone. Sane had ensorcelled the dwarf and nearly done the same to Marian without even trying. “It was Prince Janus who commissioned my works and bade me to come down here.”

The prince’s distaste for magicians was well known throughout the kingdom, but to think that someone of the royal bloodline could order something as heinous as the killing of innocent children... Marian banished the thought. Surely there must be another explanation.

“
Janus…” It was all Sane said as he considered the revelation. There was no surprise apparent on the magician’s face or in his voice. He seemed to accept the idea too readily for Marian’s liking and asked another question. “What was your mission?”

“
To find my missing control collar. It was a prototype and some wizards took it. They killed my nephew to get it. I can and have made more, but it cannot be left in the hands of wizards or else they might find a way to break its hold over them.”

“
A collar to control magicians as if we were common dogs?”

A brisk chill filled the hallway as Sane’s presence filled the hall.

“
Wizards.” Marian flinched at the word and half expected Sane to kill the short inventor in his current state of mind. Wizard was a common slur word for magicians harkening back to a time long ago when magicians ruled the whole world and held power enough to rival the very gods. The magicians of today’s age were a weak shadow of their former power, losing much knowledge in the millennia of fighting.

“
Not common dogs, but powerful, wild beasts, now placed under the total control of their masters. Each collar is paired with a rod. The bearer of the rod can command the wearer to do anything they want,” Gilkame explained. He was now cowering on the floor in the full grips of Sane’s enchantment. What terror was being inflicted on the dwarf to make him cower so, and reveal his secrets so readily?

“
Leave my sight now, dwarf,” Sane gritted his teeth, “and forget we had this conversation.” Saying nothing Gilkame eagerly did as he was told leaving the travelers alone outside Bertran’s door.

Marian breathed a sigh of relief. “I thought you were going to kill him.”

Without responding, Sane pushed open the door to Bertran’s room and entered. The room was sparsely decorated leaving the wooden décor largely uncluttered. A nightstand stood to the left of the door and small table was at the far right. There were three beds in the room each with a footlocker, but only one was occupied.

Bertran was lying on the nearest bed. His face was mostly hidden with a white cloth covering the burnt side. He rolled over to see who had entered his room. Seeing Sane standing before him, the assassin visibly tensed and began to cough with such ferocity that that his body trembled beneath the folds of the blanket that draped over him.

Sane pushed back his cloak revealing his short staff that was strapped to his side like a rapier. He pulled it free from its strap and pointed the top end at the assassin. “Bertran, I have questions,” Sane said darkly.

“
Ask what you will,” the assassin told him choosing his words with care, “and I will answer as best I can.” Bertran sat up so that his feet were on the floor, but his lap was still covered by the bed sheet. His face was covered with painful burn scars behind his mask, but otherwise he was without injury.

“
I know that you will,” Sane frowned. He leaned forward to make a physical connection with the assassin and enchant the man, but Bertran lunged for Sane revealing the knife he had been hiding under the blanket.

Sane fell backward and Bertran landed on top of the sorcerer. His knife flared with bright blue light as Bertran tried to stab into Sane’s chest, but the magician held Bertran’s blade at bay with a hastily constructed magical shield that had become second nature over the years.

Sane called forth a gust of wind from his staff and blew Bertran off of him, slamming the assassin into the far wall and knocking the wind out of him. Marian started to scream, but caught herself. Sane checked the dazed man. “Bertran is still conscious,” he told Marian. Touching the man’s shoulder, Sane commanded him in that strange tone he had used with Gilkame minutes earlier. “You are the only Kenzai to survive the bloodbath at the magician’s school. Tell me what happened from the beginning.”

Bertran shot daggers from his eyes, but was compelled to tell Sane and Marian all he knew. He told them of Gilkame’s special collar and how they used it to enslave the murderer, Mantellus Firekin, under orders from Prince Janus. Bertran told how they used Mantellus to find the Lion’s Landing magicians by drawing them out of hiding and how Bertran tracked them back to their home. He told of the battle with the magicians and how he personally killed their leader, Avelice Necros, before being seared by Byrn Lightfoot. He knew the knight-magician by name, since Byrn confessed his rank and title moments before he tried to kill Bertran. Then a raven-haired enchantress took the dying magician’s body after she forced Bertran’s men to kill each other.

Sane released his hold on Bertran and the assassin slumped against the wall. He stared up at the sorcerer with an accusing expression. “I will kill you for that!” Bertran spat on Sane’s tunic, but the magician did not act as if he cared, like the assassin was beneath his notice.

“
I should thank you, Bertran. You gave me a very special gift this day,” Sane sounded as if his mind was a million miles away pondering ideas that Marian could only guess at. “For three decades, I have served the crown faithfully. I have done nearly everything asked of me and even helped hunt down my own kind on many occasions- all in the hopes of showing that magicians could be trusted; that we were not monsters to be feared; that we were people.

“
And what do I have to show for it? Magicians are no freer now than they were when I was a boy. Instead, we are hunted in our very homes! Our prince, the man who will one day be king, hates our kind for the power we possess and seeks to turn us into weapons… or perhaps trophies to show his dominance over us!”

“
You deserve far worse,” Bertran chuckled as he struggled to get up without any success, “You and all of your kind deserve eradication.”

Sane swung his staff and hit Bertran squarely in the jaw with the blunt end of his staff.

“
That is enough, Sane,” Marian said sternly.

“
It is not enough!” Sane turned on her. “This man killed my sister! This man killed children! He tried to kill your son and if left alone, he will surely drag Byrn’s name through the dirt! Byrn Lightfoot would become a fugitive once again. Do you truly wish for me to show this slaughterer mercy?”

Marian was torn between her loyalty for her son and her desire to save a life. Finally, the ranger meekly told Sane, “I just do not want you to do something that you will come to regret. If you kill him, defenseless as he is, then you will be no better than him.”

For a moment the old sorcerer softened, but it was only a moment. He leveled his staff at Bertran and held him to the wall with it. “The time for regret has passed. I won’t try to pretty this up by claiming that I am doing this for justice. I seek vengeance for Avelice- nothing more.”

Sane pointed his open palm at the assassin and thick shards of ice grew in the air before his hand into large sickles in the span of a second before bursting forth and impaling Bertran so that his lifeless body was pinned to the inn’s wall. Marian screamed involuntarily and San glowered at her.

“
We should leave,” he said calmly as he walked out the door. “It won’t take those on the floor below us very long to figure out what just happened here and we still have to find Byrn.”

Byrn woke with a start. The echoes of death at the magic school still held him in their grip and it took him a minute to shake the sense of loss that overwhelmed him. Vague thoughts of Ashura’s fields came to mind, but he pushed them away.

He should be dead now. Kassani had come for him. She held him in her arms and ushered him to the underworld, but he was not dead and that sudden epiphany left him feeling guilty. Why did he live when everyone else died? It was not fair that he should have to carry on alone!