Warrior Mage (Book 1) (2 page)

“Applicants,” the proctor called, his voice magically amplified. “Ready yourselves.”

Yanko and Tam Tam crept to the edge, making the floating platform wobble. Gold Hawk rose into the air. He might be able to levitate up the tail, but the rest of the course involved ducking and climbing through bones and supports, as well as dodging attacks.

“Begin,” the proctor announced at the same time as he flung a firecracker into the air. It exploded in fiery blue and red sparkles, drawing cheers from the nearby ships.

Yanko barely noticed it. He had leaped for the tail as soon as the proctor spoke. Tam Tam jumped immediately after him and landed just behind him on the bone bridge, jostling him as they nearly dropped onto the same vertebra. Yanko didn’t know if it was accidental or intentional, but he did not let it slow him. He charged up the ancient bone knobs, hoping to make it to the top before his competitors caught up with him.

One of the wind vortexes that had been hovering at the surface of the water rose, and wind battered Yanko, nearly blasting him from his perch. Then one of the bones grew so slippery, his cloth shoe slid off it. His leg pitched over the side, and he almost followed, but he contorted his body and flailed his arms, catching the tail before he fell. Tam Tam leaped over him, taking the lead.

Growling, Yanko raced the rest of the way to the top, then slid down a rope that bucked and swayed, as if it, too, was the victim of a nearby whirlwind. He struggled to use his body weight to make it swing out the way he needed to in order to reach a platform hovering under the skeleton’s hipbones. But it was too far.

Though he hated to pause, he slowed down enough to summon his concentration. He corralled some of the wind gusting across the harbor, trying to keep it away from the temperamental vortexes that someone was controlling, then gave himself a great push in the back even as he leaped from the rope. As he flew through the air, wondering if he would reach the platform, he glimpsed a black fin protruding from the water underneath him. A shark? He had been joking earlier; they shouldn’t truly be in the shallow water of the harbor.

Fortunately, he made it to the platform, landing on all fours. That was a good thing, since it tipped precariously, almost hurling him into the water. He scrambled for the center, expecting it to stabilize, but it tipped in the opposite direction. Suspicious, he checked the students responsible for making this difficult. Not surprisingly, one with her raven hair in long braids was focused on him. Yanko had to steady himself enough to leap for another rope, this one dangling more than ten feet away, but with the platform rocking and bucking, he would be lucky not to end up hurled out to the deck of one of those ships.

He wished he were on land, so he could call up a swarm of bees to harry her, but the air was devoid of insects. Even the seagulls had left the area. Shooed away by one of the proctors? Yanko was doubtlessly one of the few who had studied the earth sciences and could commune with animals, but maybe they knew that. Or maybe he was wasting time thinking about this. Indeed, Tam Tam had alighted on his platform.

A gust of wind slammed into him, knocking him into the water. At least Yanko wasn’t the only one being picked on. Gripping the edge of his rocking perch with both hands, he focused on the platform underneath the braided woman. Hers was, alas, attached to the sea floor with bamboo poles. He ran his senses down them, searching for a weakness. If he could distract her, she would not be able to harass him until she recovered.

The bamboo appeared secure, sunken into concrete anchors at the bottom, but myriad sea life touched his awareness. Having grown up in a village in the mountains, he hadn’t been to the coast often, and he had only tried to communicate with a fish once. It had been an alien experience, more akin to dealing with reptiles than mammals, but he reached out to some of the bigger ones near the platform supports and tried to implant the idea that it would be delightfully fun to leap out of the water and fly over that platform...

Most of the fish ignored him—or he was simply ineffective at conveying the idea of fun to them—but two small silver ones flew out of the water, one smacking the woman in the face. It wasn’t a great attack, but it was enough. It startled her, and she squealed. Yanko’s platform stopped rocking.

He didn’t hesitate. He took a running start and flung himself toward the rope. Tam Tam had already dealt with his obstacle and was on an adjacent rope.

As Yanko scrambled up, he glimpsed a blaze of light behind him. Gold Hawk had also reached the platform, and he had chosen a more direct way of dealing with his tormentor. A swirling ball of fire flew through the air toward the handsome woman opposing him. It splashed on an invisible barrier several feet away from her, the flames dispersing and disappearing, but the applicants watching from the beach and the crowds of spectators on the docks and ships burst into an enthusiastic rendition of the appreciation song.

Yanko would have rolled his eyes at the overemphasis people put on the thermal sciences, but he had reached the bottom of the rib cage and was too busy climbing. He scampered through, leaping from bone to bone, until the hair on the back of his neck stood up. An attack was coming. He tried to face it and raise his own defenses—not certain if they would be nearly enough against a fifth-year student—but his heel slipped as he pivoted. He might have recovered, but a ball of fire was hurtling through the air toward him. There was no time to regather the concentration needed, not when he was busy flailing for balance. Yanko let himself slip off the bone, dropping and catching it with his hands on the way down. The flames poured through the rib cage, not stopping as they roared toward him, the heat of the fire scorching the air. This was not an illusion.

Since he had fallen, he wasn’t in the fireball’s path, but it seared his fingers as it blasted through the skeleton, and he gasped in pain. Tears sprang to his eyes, and he wanted nothing more than to let go, to fall into the water and cool his hands. But he would lose a minute, if not more, swimming to the platform and repeating the climb. Even though his skin blistered, he managed to pull himself back up. A good choice, since he glimpsed that black shark fin gliding through the water underneath him.

Back in the race, Yanko leaped from rib to rib, but he knew the braided woman must be readying another attack for him. Apparently, his fish-to-the-cheek tactic had not impressed her.

His hands burned so much that he didn’t know if he could concentrate on forming a barrier to deflect whatever she threw at him next. Better to distract her again. He doubted a fish would catch her by surprise twice, but as he reached the top of the rib cage and struggled to climb one of the bones up to the shoulder blades, he caught sight of that fin again. He also caught sight of the woman with her hand outstretched toward him.

Food!
he cried into the shark’s mind at the same time as he flung an image of the woman on the platform at it. This time, Yanko didn’t try to cajole; he tried to command. He wouldn’t know if it had worked until the shark reached the platform, and he felt uncomfortable trying to convince an animal to kill another person, but that fireball could have burned him into cinders. Everything seemed fair and acceptable in this portion of the contest.

Ignoring the pain in his fingers, Yanko pulled himself up atop the shoulder. His instincts cried out at him again, those instincts honed over years of study to feel the telltale crackle of power in the air, the promise that someone had him targeted with the sciences. He stopped, focused his mind, and called forth the air around him, compacting it into a barrier.

He was almost too slow. The second fireball blasted fully into him, its heat scorching his cheeks. But enough of a barrier had formed to deflect the attack. Flames sizzled around him, and his clothes might have caught fire had they not been so wet, but this time, he did not receive any burns. Before the flames had fully dissipated, he resumed his sprint, aiming for the top of the spine and the skull. The finish platform with flags waving at the corners floated in the water beyond it.

A startled cry came from below and behind him. The shark leaped from the water, arcing straight at the woman. She flung herself to the side to avoid it, but there wasn’t enough platform to catch her. Her hip struck the edge, and she bounced into the water.

At the base of the skull, Yanko hesitated. The shark had plunged back into the water on the other side, and it could turn in an instant to attack her. But Gold Hawk and Tam Tam were both on the shoulder blades, running toward him.

Praying to the badger goddess to protect the woman, Yanko sprinted up the skull. In a few seconds, he would finish, and he could help her if the test proctors did not handle it. Though he worried he was making the wrong decision, that she would be horribly maimed or worse, he ran across the flat lizard head and leaped off the edge, calling the wind again to push him out to the platform so he wouldn’t have to swim. He had not checked, but he would be shocked if there was only
one
shark down there.

Even with the help of the wind, he barely made it to the edge of the platform. At the last instant, as he realized how far he had dropped and how fast he was going, he wished he had aimed for the water after all. He hit the bamboo platform hard. He turned the landing into a roll, trying to spread out the impact as he had been taught when falling in combat, but gravity was a hard master to thwart. He was hurtled across the bamboo, battered as badly as sugar cane going through a press, and his breath flew out of his lungs. He came to a stop, his entire body hurting, inches shy of falling off the far end of the platform. He couldn’t manage to breathe, but he saw the flags overhead and knew he had finished the course.

“Eight minutes and forty-seven seconds,” the timekeeper stationed on the corner of the platform said blandly, as if he watched such spectacles every day.

Remembering the braided woman, Yanko forced himself into a sitting position. Gold Hawk landed lightly on the center of the platform, glared balefully at him, then looked to the timekeeper.

“Eight minutes and fifty-five seconds,” the man announced.

Yanko took some satisfaction from the fact that Gold Hawk’s fine robes were soaking and torn, but he didn’t spare the other man more than a glance, looking instead back out to the course. Under the rib cage, the braided woman was still alive. Either through her own power or another mage’s, she levitated in the air, her hair and robe dripping. No less than three shark fins circled in the water below her. As she floated back to her spot on the platform, she glared over at Yanko.

He sighed and wiped the water off his face. Another person who would never want to be friends with him.

Tam Tam came down a moment later, his landing as awkward as Yanko’s, maybe more so. If Yanko hadn’t reached out to catch him, Tam Tam would have rolled off the platform and into the water. The entire side of his face was burned, with blisters scorching his chin.

“Nine minutes and twenty-seven seconds,” the timekeeper announced. “You may return to the beach. You’ll find out later if you made it through this round, based on the times the others earn.”

Yanko could have swum to the beach, but he was glad an oarsman came out to pick them up in a dinghy. After seeing all those sharks, he was not eager to dangle his body in the water. He had known these tests would be difficult, but he hadn’t realized they would be life-threatening.

His father and Uncle Mishnal were waiting on the beach when Yanko came ashore. He walked toward them, trying to judge the expressions on their faces. His time had not been as good as he had thought it might be when he first saw the course, but it had been well under the cut-off. And he didn’t think he had embarrassed himself too badly, given the circumstances.

When he came face-to-face with them, Yanko pressed his palms together in front of his chest, ignoring the pain that came from touching his fingers, and bowed his head. “Honored Uncle, Father.”

Neither brother was known for his smile, but Mishnal clasped him on the shoulder and gave him a nod of approval. Yanko allowed a ribbon of relief to flutter through him. He hadn’t known his uncle well until he had come to work in the mines six months earlier, for “hardening,” as his father had called it, but Mishnal had proven to be an honorable and fair man, despite his perpetual scowl. He had even praised Yanko on occasion, something his father had not done for a long time.

Now, his father was tugging at his black mustachios as he looked back and forth from the timekeeper to the nearest proctor. “Eight forty-seven, was it? I hope that’ll be good enough. They were harder on you than the others, don’t you think so, Mish?”

Yanko lowered his hands—he wanted nothing more than to run and find the healer who had attended the wounds some had received during the combat round—but he hadn’t been dismissed yet. Even though his father seemed more interested in talking to his brother than his son.

“They were hard on him,” Mishnal said. “We didn’t expect anything different.”

“No, I know. The journey is such a difficult one. I don’t know if he...” Finally his father looked directly at Yanko, but it was only to survey him and shake his head doubtfully. “It is a great challenge. Too much for him maybe. I wish Falcon...” He shook his head again, not saying the words.

He didn’t have to. Yanko looked away, blinking so moisture wouldn’t form in his eyes. His older brother had always been Father’s favorite, the one most like him, the one he understood. But like Father and Uncle Mishnal, Falcon had never shown an aptitude for the mental sciences. Yanko was the one who had inherited their mother’s talent, whether he wanted anything from her or not.

“I will find the healer, Yanko,” his father said. “Prepare yourself for the last test. The others will find this the easiest part of the exam, but I never could convince you to spend enough time studying the thermal sciences. You always wanted to be out in the woods, playing in the dirt. And those poems—” He cleared his throat and spat. “A warrior mage doesn’t write poems. A warrior mage is the one poems are written
about
, great ballads that become legend.” Father groaned and walked away.