Guild Mage: Apprentice

No sooner had the riders from each army returned to their lines than the crown siege engines began once again. Trebuchets hurled stones against the wall that spanned the pass into the valley, and the very steps themselves shivered beneath Liv's boots as she climbed up to the ramparts.

At the first impact, she swayed on her feet, overcome by a sudden rush of vertigo. For a moment, Liv felt like she couldn't catch her breath, and that she might actually fall. Ghveris caught her by the shoulders in his enormous gauntlets, and steadied her.

"Too long in the places dead of mana," the Antrian told her, not in the halting Lucanian he'd been practicing, but in his archaic and accented Vakansa.

Another crash of stone upon stone, and the shouts from above spurred Liv on. She took three deep breaths, then rushed up the rest of the way to the top of the wall, with Ghveris at her heels. The rest of the negotiators - if one could truly call that abortive parley a negotiation - had already reached Henry's command post. As Liv approached, she caught sight of Rose raising her hand to an incoming chunk of rock, though there was so much noise she couldn't catch any precise incantation.

The tumbling boulder, launched by some enemy trebuchet, dissolved into a fine rain of sand, which caused the Elden archers and Whitehill crossbowman in its path to raise their arms and shield their eyes. When the grit had settled, however, they were still alive, and that section of the wall remained undamaged. Liv hurried over to join the knot of people gathered around Henry and Julianne.

" - too much to hope they would have actually given an inch, I suppose," Henry said. "Kazimir, are the trebuchet crews ready to use your special loads?"

Master Grenfell nodded, and raised his voice to answer over the cacophony that surrounded them all. "Ready at your command, my lord."

"Launch." Henry raised his right hand, extended his first two fingers, and cut his entire forearm forward through the air. As a signal, it left something to be desired - particularly as, seated in his wheeled chair, Baron Henry was somewhat low to the ground, and not visible to most of the soldiers on the wall.

However, two of his knights immediately moved to pass the command, one dashing in each direction. There was a short delay while the orders were communicated, and the crews prepared their siege engines. Then, with four shouts - one from each machine's crew - the great wooden arms were flung forward, and shot launched.

Rather than a single large boulder, Liv saw, the northern catapults flung smaller stones, each perhaps the size of a melon, and every one colored white. She guessed that the smaller ammunition might reach a greater distance, behind the enemy lines, perhaps, but also assumed that it would be less damaging... until she listened to the shiver from Aluth, stirring within her.

"Are those all mana stones?" she asked.

Henry nodded. "Everything that we didn't grind down into powder for the wards," he explained, though it was clear that all his attention was on the long arc through the air.

"Weeks of work," Grenfell said. "Each stone enchanted with a contingent spell..."

Once again, panes of mana flickered into existence before the crown army - this time four, instead of five. Each one flared directly in the path of a load of mana stone projectiles, and Liv leaned forward to see what happened. The mana shields must have caught most of the stones, but not all, for when the contingent enchantments triggered, fire erupted not only along the flickering blue rectangles, but beneath as well, among the crown soldiers.

Men screamed as they caught fire, threw themselves onto the ground, and rolled in the spring mud in an attempt to save their own lives. The mana shields might have stopped stones from crushing a man's head, but they didn't actually catch or hold anything, and so all the enchanted rocks simply slid down to the ground, spewing arcs of flame in every direction as they fell.

Soldiers backed away in a panic, clearing great circles around each impact, and deforming the enemy formation. Commanders struggled with the reins of their mounts, attempting with mixed results to calm their fire-panicked horses.

"How many times can we do that?" Liv asked.

"Only twice, I'm afraid," Henry told her. "We've just hurled four thousand gold crowns at our enemies. It must be the most expensive shot in the history of the world. But if we don't survive this war, it will only enrich Benedict's coffers."

Rather than follow that first launch with another, Henry chose to hold the other half of the enchanted mana stone for a crisis, and the siege engines switched to normal loads. Once the fires among the enemy lines had finally been extinguished, and the bodies of dead and dying crown men were carried away, the besieging forces reformed their lines.

In the meanwhile, a great flock of birds began to circle over the battle. It was Arjun who noticed them first, but soon the numbers were so great that it was impossible to ignore the flock. Liv had expected her friend to stay with the healers, but he'd pointed out that someone needed to be near the commanders in the event they were wounded.

"Rusting Sherards," Rose cursed, watching the wheeling formation high above them. "Can we do anything about that?"

"Most people can't use a spell at that distance," Liv judged. Particularly those who'd never deliberately trained their authority. She glanced over to Keri. "Mountain Home troops have one of the best long ranged attack spells I've ever seen."

"We could catch them as they come down," he decided, after thinking it over for a moment. "But that is a lot of small, individual targets. I doubt we can take even half of them, if they decide to dive."

"Get all of your men up here, then," Henry said. "They'll likely do better than a volley from our crossbows. Who do we think is doing this?"

"The most obvious choices would either be the dowager queen," Sidonie answered, "though I don't know whether she'd come north from the capital. She's quite old. Or, Merek Sherard - he was following Genevieve Arundell around at least as far back as the conclave at Coral Bay. It's also possible that his father, Baron Castor, has come with their troops."

"It makes sense they'd be the first snakes to raise their heads up," Julianne grumbled. "They've always hated me."

"Then they've made themselves our first targets," Henry said. "There. That's where they'll be, surrounded by their loyal knights." He pointed down at the enemy lines, where the Sherard banners could be picked out easily. "They seem hesitant to actually approach the walls. Lets show them they aren't any safer hanging back. Would you do me the honor, my love?"

Julianne nodded, and drew her wand of bone. One of the two Stormwands, she'd named it, when she first showed it to Liv years ago. The Vædic sigils engraved into the bone were inlaid with gold and silver, and Princess Milisant carried its match. The duchess raised the wand to the sky, and clouds began to gather overhead, roiling in a great mass that quickly turned from white to gray, dimming the light of the spring morning.

What caught Liv's attention, however, was a familiar sensation. When she'd first seen her adoptive mother draw that wand, during the Day of Blood, or later when training on the beach at Freeport, she'd never yet laid eyes on the corpse of one of the old gods. Since that time, she'd seen two: one at the Well of Bones, and one at the Tomb of Celris. True, Julianne had wielded the wand during their brief assault on the Foundry Rift, but Liv had the sense now that she had not drawn upon its full power at the time.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

There were mana focusing sigils there, graven on the pale length of bone, that Liv recognized, and enchantments as well that incorporated both Luc and Ve, the word of storms. But none of that could explain the chaotic surge of mana that welled up from within the bone. It was exactly like the feeling of standing next to Costia's corpse, and to Liv, it was an immediate relief. Her lingering dizziness faded, and her headache eased.

The bone of a dead god, Julianne had told her once. The femur of Sivis, Vædic Lord of Storms, taken from his corpse by his own daughter, Mirriam herself. Now, at Julianne's urging, some remnant of that ancient power had awakened.

It was clear that Bennet - or perhaps his advisors - had seen what was happening, because two things happened simultaneously. First, the crown forces began marching forward across the open ground between their lines and the wall. It was not the knights that came, but a great swelling wave of levies: young men, chiefly, from all across Lucania, who would have been better served by plowing their fields for the spring sowing.

Instead, they carried pikes, with a front rank of great wooden shields, little more than planks hammered together with a crosspiece to support them in a great rectangle, to guard the front of the advance from the crossbows on the wall. Behind that front line, Liv saw men carrying three great rams, with metal heads, and dragging four siege towers using lengths of thick rope upon which they hauled, heaving and straining forward as the wheels stuck in the mud.

Secondly, the flock of birds which had been wheeling overhead swooped down upon the wall in a great mass.

Over two hundred men and women of House Bælris, who had been rushing up the stone steps and onto the ramparts, skidded to a halt, kneeling where they'd found themselves and raising their arms, waiting for a signal. Liv caught sight of Keri and his cousin Sohvis standing within arm's reach of each other, their anger with each other put aside in the moment. Sohvis had drawn a sword, and held it high, while Keri had set the butt of his great spear against his boot, and leveled the blade at the oncoming rush of birds as if they were a charging formation of horsemen.

The birds came low, and despite their officers shouting at them to focus their fire on the advance of the crown forces, many of the Whitehill guards turned their crossbows into the flock, snapping off isolated shots that had no visible effect.

Liv would have already given the order, if she'd been in Keri's place - he held until the very moment the birds were upon them and then shouted in a voice that rang up and down the wall.

"Savelet Aiveh Fleia o'Mae!" Sohvis' sword dropped, and the Eld from Mountain Home shouted the words as one, in a chorus with their commanders. Over two hundred bars of light connected their raised hands with the incoming flock of birds, and the light was so bright that Liv had to not only close her eyes, but lift her arm to shield her face. Even at a distance, the wave of hot air that bellowed back towards the command group reminded her of the high desert in Varuna.

By the time Liv had managed to blink away the darkness in her vision, and actually see what had happened, the length of the wall was littered with the corpses of birds, scores of them lying blackened and burnt, piled upon one another, sometimes with a smoking wing still twitching. She recognized the shapes of red-tailed hawks, ospreys that fished in the river, night-hunting owls, and gyrfalcons, all strewn about in smoking piles.

And yet, for every bird that had been brought down by the massed magic of Mountain Home, it seemed another had skirted the edge of the attack, perhaps beating their wings to rise above or swooping below. There must have been a thousand in that great flock, and now hundreds of survivors were assaulting the soldiers on the wall.

Liv saw one woman scream as a crow ducked its beak into the slit of her helm, emerging with an eye. The crow fluttered its wings, tossed its head back, and gulped the eye down, then shuddered when a crossbow bolt took it in the breast.

A swirl of wings continued on along the wall straight toward them, as if the birds themselves were an arrow loosed from a crossbow aimed directly at Henry and Julianne. Liv drew her wand, but it was Ghveris who stepped forward.

The steel panel on the Antrian war-machine's shoulder popped open, and the moment those rotating barrels emerged, they began cracking out shots as quick as rolling thunder. Smoke rose from the barrels as they turned, and birds began to fall, clipped from the air from the tiny projectiles launched by the Beast of Iuronnath. Ghveris set his legs in a wide stance, and rotated his torso back and forth, sweeping the attack back and forth across the oncoming flock.

By the time the last few birds straggled forward, leaving a line of corpses behind them, the ancient war-machine simply extended his left forearm, where a Vædic inscription flared to life. The last half-dozen birds flung themselves straight into the blue pane of a mana shield, broke their necks, and fell to the ground.

"Save your own strength," Ghveris rumbled, turning back to Liv and meeting her eyes. "I will defend you until you are needed."

Thunder rolled, and stormwinds began to rise. Liv risked a glance up to see that the sky was now entirely dark, lit only by flickers of light from within the clouds. She was tempted to reach up with Cel, and take hold of the ice crystals she knew would be there, far above them. She could help Julianne build the storm into something utterly unnatural and terrifying, she was certain of it.

And yet.

Genevieve Arundell had not shown herself. Liv clenched her fingers around the hilt of her wand, and waited.

It was the screams from the crown forces below that drew her attention back from the storm - they'd reached the first of the desiccation wards. As the enemy soldiers marched over the buried lines of powdered mana stone, the word of the Summerset family, Ters, took hold of them.

A dozen men, at least, cried out in agony as every drop of moisture was wrung from their flesh. Liv had seen Matthew practice using the word to dry meat on many occasions, though he'd never been talented with it, and she could picture exactly what was happening to them. The skin would shrivel and tighten. She tried to imagine how it must feel for your very eyes to dry out, and shuddered. In the space of heartbeats, every soldier who crossed the ward died of thirst, and fell to the ground, still.

That brought the advance to a halt. Not all at once, as might happen when a baron gave an order to their troops, but in a milling, frightened mass, as half-trained villagers pulled back from fear. And in that moment of hesitation, Julianne Loredan called down the lightning.

A half dozen forked spears stabbed down from the dark clouds at once, nearly all of them touching the ground in or near the group of Sherard banners that Baron Henry had picked out as a target. Fountains of dirt exploded upward, looking like nothing so much as water flung up by a great stone being dropped into the Aspen River. Horses reared up and threw their riders, and the bodies of men and women were flung in every direction, their armor providing not even a hint of protection from the lightning.

Julianne stood, arm stretched up, the tip of her wand pointed at the sky, whispering to herself and to the storm, and with every incantation more bolts fell among the crown army, just as bright as the Elden volley of spells from before. The thunder was a constant, now, the sound nearly drowning out the screams of the enemy who fell beneath her magic.

"They've broken the wards," Baron Henry shouted over the storm. And indeed, mounted knights had ridden forward to spur the march on. The riders took the lead, to show the levies there was no more danger from buried spells, and once again the surge toward the walls began. Liv didn't blame the people trapped down there: in their place, she would have also likely chosen storming the walls over cowering from the constant lightning strikes.

But the knights and the levies must not have been alone down there, for in the next moment spells began to rise up from the base of the wall.

A jagged storm of silver shards ripped up between the gap in the merlons of the crenellated wall. An Elden archer had just nocked an arrow to his bowstring, and the silver surrounded him like a swarm of bees. He screamed, and when the pieces of metal passed, every part of him that was not completely encased in armor had been flayed to the bone. Chunks of meat were spread out around him, and a puddle of blood spread from his fallen body.

A dozen feet away, one of the women who wore the colors of the Corbetts simply stood up straight, dropped her weapons, climbed between two merlons, and stepped off the wall. She didn't even scream as she fell, as if she were in some sort of trance.

Knives of shining blue mana rose up from the base of the wall, where one of the rams was already being positioned before the gate. Liv caught sight of her cousin, Miina, stepping forward, and the power of Dā, the word of time, ground the wood of the siege engine away to dust, leaving only a rusted metal head to fall on the ground.

Then, Miina screamed, jerking back from the edge of the wall with a gaping wound open across her neck. There was no sign of an arrow, or a weapon, and Liv recognized the word of power instantly: Vela, the word of wounding.