The Mage's Grave: Mages of Martir Book #1 (2 page)

Probably not,
Darek thought.
The gods are greater than all of us, greater even than the Superior. Still, I do wonder what they wanted to talk with him about today. Did something happen that required them to request the Superior's aid?

Darek's thoughts were interrupted when someone pointed and shouted, “Hey, look! The Institute mages are here!”

The entire crowd of Academy students and teachers looked in the direction that that student was pointing. Just over the Walls—the massive ice barriers that separated the school from the rest of the Great Berg and were the final challenge that met all potential future Academy students—was a large red thing trailing smoke exhaust behind it that was too far away to make out at first. It was coming fast, however, and it would no doubt be easier to see very soon.

Then an ancient, deep voice called, “Students! I have received a message from the Institute mages informing me that they will be landing their ship in the sports field. We will go down to meet them there.”

Darek looked back toward the Arcanium and saw the Magical Superior himself standing on the top steps. As always, his gray skin, hairless head and face, and long wand—more like a staff, really—made him look as ancient as the gods themselves. The newest thing on him were his auburn robes, which were obviously freshly cleaned and scrubbed. Darek could even smell the scent of soap wafting on the wind from them.

The Magical Superior disappeared and then reappeared at the bottom of the steps in front of the students and faculty. He gestured for them to follow him and, before anyone could oblige, he was already on his way down to the sports field, walking with a quickness and lightness that Darek had never seen in the Superior's step before. That made Darek wonder why the Magical Superior was so eager to go down there and see the Institute mages.

Maybe he's trying to make up for being late,
Darek thought.

He had no time to ponder that mystery further, however, because the other mages, including Mom and Aorja, were already following the Magical Superior in the direction of the sports field, which was located on the western side of the school grounds down a slope behind the dorms. He quickly caught up with Mom and Aorja, but he kept his eyes on the red airship in the skies above, which was drawing closer and closer to the sports field every second.

By the time the North Academy mages had reached the edge of the sports field, the red airship was landing. The Magical Superior gestured for the Academy mages to stand back and wait until the airship had shut off, but that was fine by Darek because it gave him an opportunity to observe the first airship he ever saw in person.

It was shaped like a beetle, although it lacked the beetle's horn on the front. Four legs popped out of its underside to act as landing gear, while smoke and flame from behind it filled the air and obscured the engine. Words written in some language—probably Aqua, seeing as the Institute mages were aquarians, although not being an expert on aquarian languages, he could not be sure—were painted on the ship's side in big blue paint. The cockpit was like a beetle head, but the glass on it was tinted so darkly that it was impossible to see the pilot or anyone else who might have been sitting in there.

But what stood out the most to Darek was the sheer noisiness of the ship. In all his life, Darek had never heard anything quite as loud as the engine of that ship. It was like a thousand bombs were going off at once, multiple times, with a couple hundred gunshots added in for good measure. It was so loud that Darek couldn't even hear himself think, much less hear what anyone else was saying.

In fact, the ship was so loud that it honestly scared him. He stepped behind Mom and Aorja, neither of whom seemed to notice his fear (thankfully), and tried not to look scared at the airship's excessively loud engine. He just hoped that if anyone looked at him, they would not think he was afraid of what was probably a harmless machine (harmless from a distance, at least).

A few minutes after the airship touched the ground, the engine finally began to die down with a whine until eventually, it went completely silent. Darek still couldn't see whoever was inside the cockpit, but he thought he spotted some movement within, as though the pilot, whoever he or she was, was getting up.

Then, about a minute after the engine died down, a platform began to lower from the underside of the ship. It lowered slowly but surely, until the platform landed on the ground underneath the ship. There were about a dozen or so aquarians standing on that lift, but the underside of the airship was dark, making it difficult to tell from a distance what they looked like exactly. Once the lift touched the ground, however, the Institute mages walked out from the shadows of the ship's underside into the light of the sun.

Forgetting about his fear of the airship, and excited to see the guests, Darek pushed past Aorja and Mom and the other students until he got to the front of the welcome committee. When he did, he stopped and observed the Institute mages as closely as he could from his current position.

The Institute mages did not look much like mages to him. Instead of wearing mage robes, they wore skintight diving suits that didn't restrain their movements. Their diving suits were green and silver, which he figured were probably the colors of their school.

Another thing Darek noticed was how none of them seemed to have wands of any sort. That struck him as odd. All mages were supposed to use wands. While it was possible for a mage to use magic without a wand, wands helped a mage control and channel their magic, which was why very few went without them. That these Institute mages apparently had none of their own confused Darek more than anything, although he could not guess where they could keep their wands if they had had any.

Instead, Darek noticed what looked like bracelets, each one filled with a different colored stone, attached to the bodies of the Institute mages in various places. Some had the bracelets attached to their wrists, while a few had them on their ankles, and others in other parts of their body (such as the jellyfish-like mage who had his bracelet wrapped around his neck like a collar).

Maybe those stones are what they use to channel and control their magic?
Darek thought.
I should ask the Superior about that later. He'll probably know.

Then there were the Institute mages themselves. As a group, they looked far bigger and stronger than the Academy mages. In a one-on-one fight with no magic, Darek wasn't sure that he or any of the other Academy mages could even defeat the Institute mages. He found their inhuman faces—which resembled sea creatures ranging from goldfish to manta rays and everything in between—disturbing, despite the fact that none of these Institute mages appeared threatening or even unkind in any way.

Another thing he noticed about the Institute mages was that he couldn't sense their magical auras. That was strange. All mages gave off magical auras that could be sensed by other mages. Yet these Institute mages, apparently, either did not have magical auras at all or had somehow figured out a way to hide them from him and possibly the others as well. It made it difficult to gauge how powerful the Institute mages were, a fact which unsettled him.

At the head of the group was an older female aquarian, much older than the rest based on how bent over she was and how slowly she walked in comparison to the others. Her diving suit, too, was different, being much looser around her body and being colored a solid green rather than green and silver like the attire of her students. Her head was vaguely whale-like in appearance, although she was nowhere near as large as an actual whale. She did, however, have a piercing, intelligent look in her eyes, one that made Darek understand that he couldn't fool her even if he had been planning to. She had a small bracelet around her left wrist with a rainbow-colored stone set within it.

The Magical Superior spread his arms wide as the Institute mages approached. “Welcome, welcome, mages of the Undersea Institute. I am the Magical Superior, the headmaster of North Academy, and behind me is the entire North Academy student body and faculty, aside from a handful of sick students who could not recover in time to welcome your arrival, although rest assured that they would be here to welcome you just like the rest of us if they were feeling well.”

That reminded Darek of Jiku, causing him to look around the crowd for any sign of his old friend. Seeing no sign of Jiku's balding gray head anywhere, Darek turned his attention back to the Magical Superior, who had walked up to the leader of the Institute mages and kissed her hand in greeting, although she did not look very thrilled about it.

“My students and teachers,” said the Magical Superior, turning to face the Academy mages, “may I introduce you to the Grand Magus and Archmage of the Undersea Institute, the intelligent and powerful Yorak? She and I are old friends who have known each other for years, but I believe this is the first time she has visited this school as the head of another.”

All of the Academy mages bowed their heads at Yorak, which was a sign of respect usually reserved for the Superior himself. Yorak, to her credit, returned the head bow, which meant that she was perhaps not quite as unfriendly as she looked.

“Yes,” said Yorak. She spoke surprisingly clear Divina, lacking that odd gurgly accent that Darek had been told all aquarians who learned Divina as their second language had. “My students and I appreciate the welcome party and are eager to learn more about our human counterparts in order that the bonds between our schools may be—”

She stopped abruptly, even though no one had interrupted her. A frown appeared on her whale-ish lips as she looked up over the heads of the Academy students, her eyes on something behind them. The mage who stood at her side, a younger female with a goldfish-like head, was also staring up at whatever it was that caught their attention.

Puzzled, Darek followed Yorak's gaze and realized that she was staring up at the Third Dorm. His dormitory, actually, the one where he, Jiku, Aorja, and the other half dozen students who lived there slept at night and had their meals together and studied together.

“Yorak?” said the Magical Superior, his voice sounding a little concerned. “What do you see?”

“Nothing,” said Yorak. “But do you feel that?”

The Magical Superior went silent and seemed to be trying to feel whatever Yorak felt. Then his eyes widened and he said, “What is—”

And then—right in front of Darek's startled eyes—the roof of the Third Dorm exploded.

Chapter Two

“D
urima, come on” said Gujak's voice, echoing off the tall Walls. “We have to get moving. Master made it very clear that he wants us to complete the mission as quickly as we can, otherwise he'll be very angry, and you know what he does when he gets angry.”

Durima dug her claws into the icy rock that made up the Walls and grunted. She tried not to look over her shoulder at the hundreds of feet of rock that she had already scaled, as she knew she would get dizzy and if she got dizzy she would probably fall to her death, which would definitely anger Master.

So she focused on her partner, Gujak, who due to his light weight was far ahead of Durima. Looking more like a walking, talking tree than a katabans—also known as minor spirits that served the gods—Gujak was clinging to the Walls with his root-like fingers, looking down at her with an impatient expression on his face. He was only a couple dozen feet from the top of the Walls by now, but it was clear that he wasn't going to complete the treacherous climb until he was sure that Durima was right behind him.

It wasn't her fault that she wasn't as fast as he. Gujak was only a century old, but he acted half his age, whereas Durima was three centuries old, a veteran of the Katabans War, and still suffering from a stab wound in her right shoulder she had taken from an enemy during the War. Granted, the wound had healed, but every now and then pain in her shoulder would erupt, the pain so bad it sometimes immobilized her or made her flashback to the War.

Durima shook her head. Thinking about the War was guaranteed to bring back those old memories that she had done her best to ignore since the War's end twenty-four years ago. She had to focus on the present.

So she shouted at Gujak, “It will be fine. Master said he didn't expect us to complete the mission soon anyway. Just hold your horses. I'll be there eventually.”

Gujak frowned. “It sure would have been easier if we could have used something like that airship that flew by earlier to get up here, wouldn't it?”

Not understanding why Gujak chose to bring that up, Durima resumed climbing up the Walls, saying as she did so, “You mean that big, red noisy machine built by mortals? The one that was probably seen by every living thing in a fifty mile radius? Yeah, that would have been helpful for sneaking into the most heavily-fortified magical school in the world.”

“You know what I mean,” said Gujak. “And why are we climbing the Walls instead of using the ethereal to enter the school directly? That would have saved us hours of time, wouldn't it have?”

Durima finally caught up with Gujak and stopped to look at him. “Don't you remember? The mages have somehow blocked us katabans from using the ethereal to enter the school directly. I imagine only the gods can use it to enter, and since we aren't gods, we have to enter the old-fashioned way.”

“That's right,” said Gujak. “But how do you block the ethereal? I thought humans weren't even aware of it. Aside from that one Carnagian king, what's his name, Mal Lock or whatever?”

“I don't know,” said Durima, shaking her head. “You think I have time to keep track of all of those mortal kings and what they do or don't know about us? Anyway, we've almost reached the top. If we're in such a hurry, like you said, then we don't have time to sit around and talk.”

“You're right,” said Gujak. He looked back up at the top of the Walls, which were not very far away now. “Follow me.”

Gujak immediately resumed climbing, moving as nimbly across the icy, rock surface of the Walls as a mountain goat. Durima followed, although she had to move more slowly because a powerful gust of ice-cold wind blew through, which threatened to dislodge her due to her massive bulk.