Nasty Little Witchling

If the opera’s length and confusing story had severely affected my excitement for experiencing a setting often discussed in my books, then the mess before me well and truly killed all that remained.

I was crammed into a small nook on a cluttered stage, listening to some people struggle to hold back their tears and others softly beg for their lives with sharpened steel pointed at them.

“Mage boy, make sure our reviewer doesn’t let any bugs in on his way out,” the leader said.

“Sure…boss,” Jay said reluctantly. “Move it.”

The jar of dragon’s breath was handed back to the one with the crossbow. “Set this up once he’s gone.”

I ducked back into my nook when the boss turned around, his and Crossbow’s thumping footsteps on the wooden floors getting closer before one stopped and the other carried on past me.

“Well, Ghaven,” he said. “We’re here now, and with a few dozen hostages, every one of them a reason for the knights to burst in here. You owe me that explanation. Exactly how are we not about to get our asses handed to us with nothing to show for it?”

My first thought was that it was interesting that the person he was talking to shared a name with the guard from Tamil. That was until he spoke and found it was far more interesting because they were the same person.

“Now, now, Olyat. Is our steel, crossbows, roe, and resources insufficient for you to trust our commitment?”

The lack of response to that inquiry made the answer obvious.

“Sure, you held up your side. We chose the opera for its enchantments,” Ghaven said. “On top of the iron gates at the main entrances, there is a defensive field for every door and window. They will need to get through the physical defences, trivial for them, and then either drain or break the enchantments.”

Olyat scoffed. “Even we can do that. The knights and watch have a shit load more mages and iron than us, and the dragon’s breath traps can only be detonated once—if they even work.”

“Oh, they do. And you could do that because those enchantments were badly made with no fail safes, shut-off valves, and one-way inlays,” Ghaven said, sounding passionate. “They’ll need to quickly drain an entrance’s inlay if they want to activate the shut-off valves to that particular section.

“We have brought enough crystal, dragged along those mage kids, and have a captive audience to supply mana to the system so that shut-off doesn’t happen often. They could overpower the protection where it’s weakest in the walls, but I doubt they’ll authorise that kind of damage early on when there are perfectly good doors to try. Once they get a single breakthrough and pour in, convinced they found all the traps, we’ll be ready to cut off their escape and pounce.”

“Sounds like we’re just trapping ourselves in with a bunch of mages hopped up on thoughts of revenge,” Olyat said.

“That’s the hope. Get them so frustrated with our tricks and treachery that they don’t notice what’s sitting right above their heads.”

“There’s too many ways this could go to shit. Go show my idiots how to do the traps, can’t afford to heal them if they fuck up.”

“I do enjoy being useful,” Ghaven said, his footsteps going past my hiding place and out the door I came in through.

“Good,” Olyat said, raising his voice again as he returned to the stage. “If I hear one more whimper, I’m cutting out his tongue.”

I poked my head out to ensure Olyat was back onstage, looking over the audience. Going with Ghaven and finding out what he was up to sounded like a better way to get an idea of how to help, and if I was being honest, I wanted to be as far away from Olyat as possible.

The way he went from sounding deranged to then having a peaceful conversation with Ghaven and immediately returning to terrifying the hostages unnerved me.

I went back towards the doorway, crouched low to the ground, and peeked around to see if Ghaven had already turned the next corner. With a final look back at the frightened opera performers, I followed after him.

Getting to the stairway back up to the balcony I had come down gave me pause on where to go. The opera house took up the usual double row of buildings at the end of a street. So, according to the diagrams that littered the halls, two side entrances led to either street, and a main entrance sat at the top.

Yis and I had used one of the side entrances ahead to get in and up these stairs, which led to a landing that split to the balconies or up past a rope cordoning off the other direction.

From the sounds of slamming doors and talking coming from up ahead, Ghaven had stopped at the same side entrance. I carefully placed my boots on the floor so there was no chance of them squeaking against the polished wood and leaned around the next corner.

Before me were Ghaven, Jay, and Crossbow, and an iron gate screeching against its hinges as it was pushed closed just behind the double wooden doors. It crashed shut, and Crossbow started unwinding a spool of clear string.

“Pull the fishing line taught before you tie it off; slack makes it more visible and harder to trigger,” Ghaven said, standing over the man.

“There was a group of watch out there when I closed the doors,” Jay said. “We should hurry up and get the enchantments on. I doubt this little jar will stop them.”

“No one said anything about stopping them, boy,” Ghaven said. “The point is fear. They’ll ignore our warning of dragon’s breath since it’s pretty much a myth around here and charge right into it. Then boom, no one will want to end up as burn victims trying another entrance, therefore encouraged to go down the path they’ve already cleared.”

“That’s a good thing?” Crossbow asked, carefully placing the jar, now empty of liquid, onto a contraption the fishing line was tied to near the metal gate.

“You’ll know soon enough,” Ghaven said. “Concentrate on making sure to set the contingency properly. We don’t want them just picking up my boss’s hard-to-obtain explosive if they notice the tripwire.”

I pulled my head back around the corner as Jay turned to look up at Ghaven. “You work for the foreigner?”

“I suppose he does have a bit of an accent,” Ghaven asked. “I do.”

“Then do you know—

I flinched as a loud bang washed over us from the direction of the main entrance, cutting Jay off from the damning question he was probably about to ask.

“That was quick,” Ghaven said, unfazed and sounding like he was rifling inside a bag. “I need to go make sure that wasn’t self-inflicted. Take this detonating cord and go upstairs. There’s a room in the office wing with the nameplate ‘Dorothy,’ it should be unlocked with several indigo satin pillows inside. Pile up those pillows and stick the end of the cord into one, then unspool it over towards the stage. Don’t dare use mana anywhere near it, okay?”

“Yeah.” “What’s indigo?”

I had already started moving before the sound of approaching footsteps, dashing back to the staircase and swinging around the corner just before Ghaven turned the opposite way towards the main entrance.

Crossbow and Jay, following behind him and turning my way, had me retreating further up the stairs to the landing and then to the balcony when they started climbing the stairs. They went under the rope with the restricted sign just in time for me to duck back inside the staircase as two people came out of separate balcony doors and started talking to each other.

One went back inside, but the other came towards the stairs, and I was once again forced to skitter away. My heart raced, and I swung my head in each direction when I got to the bottom, quickly deciding to hide where the trap had just been set since that seemed less likely to be visited than the stage.

I was right in that the person turned towards the stage, and I was going to stay where I was until Jay and Crossbow came back down from what they were doing. I approached the see-through fishing line, careful to keep it within sight at all times as I knelt next to the jar.

There was nothing to figure out about it beyond what I’d gathered from them speaking: If someone stepped into the line, boom. Suppose someone picked up the jar, boom. And from how loud one sounded from across the building, it would be a large one.

Jay might have only been here to get Alister back from the watch, but I was still disappointed that the people I wanted to associate myself with would do something like this. I didn’t think they were law-abiding before, but stealing items felt far away from taking hostages and setting up traps for knights.

Ghaven being here, with people who didn’t necessarily like mages, was a weird twist considering his views on lessers back in Tamil. At the very least, he wasn’t being forthright with these people. Zara, who I assumed was the foreigner, was possibly also still hiding stuff from him, especially considering the fake accent he exhibited back in the hidden tower.

I kept working myself in circles, trying to piece together with whom each of them was lying or pretending for when Jay and Crossbow returned to the hallway.

They moved back toward the stage, and I walked out into the hallway after to find a thin red cord in their wake leading up the stairs. I followed it under the rope and to a hallway lined with doorways and nameplates in either direction.

The red cord led into the one Ghaven had mentioned, sticking out of a haphazard pile of blue pillows. I was at a loss for what any of it could mean before I saw some of the pillow stuffing where it had been ripped open for the cord.

The same fluffy cotton-like substance was inside, partially spilling out around the red cord. With shaking hands, I moved some out of the way to see the end of the cord, finding that it was made of two parts. The red part being a waxy coating covering a very thin piece of gold.

Without knowing precisely what any of this would do, but knowing it wasn’t good, I pulled out the cord. I half expected a loud bang to accompany it when picking it up using my weird mana, yet I was fine and now holding the end of the cord without a clue what to do with it or the pillows.

The plan sounded simple from what I understood: Make it difficult to get inside with the enchantments, iron gates, and traps. The knights then chose to go through an entrance they already cleared. Then mana travels through the gold to activate the pillows worth of dragon’s breath above the entrance, potentially sealing them inside.

What would happen after that was still fuzzy, but I imagined removing the cord spoiled the plan for this entrance. If the bang from before implied the knights were going there instead, then it wouldn’t matter…unless I made this one an even more accessible entrance for them.

The rest of the office consisted of pillowless sofas, a wardrobe, shelving with pictures and awards, and a cluttered desk. The window behind the desk had the curtains drawn, but a small opening in the centre let through a bright sliver of white light.

I pulled back the curtain to see mage orbs crowding the night sky, illuminating scattered raindrops, and shining upon watch members pushing back a crowd from the street where a third knight squad was dismounting to join two already there. The captains of those squads were crowding around and listening to Yis, whose lips moved like he was barking orders.

As I assumed, this room was directly above the side entrance Jay and Crossbow had been working on.

Other knights were talking to those who had been on the balcony and the man with the notepad full of demands. Mana began to flow into the hidden inlay around the windows, establishing the enchantment field over the window pane and surrounding wall. I froze with my mouth agape and slowly turned to the pillows, which luckily seemed not to care about that mana.

With the beginnings of a plan in mind, I dragged out the cord, moved it in the opposite direction when exiting the staircase and left it at the end where I assumed the turnoff for the stage would be. Next, I pinched the pillows in my fingers and carefully carried them away from the room and into the hallway next to the detonating cord.

There were eight pillows in total, and I left 6 of them in the new location with the cord stuck into one. I took the other two downstairs, dodging someone returning back to the balconies and slipped inside the small hallway leading to the now enchanted wooden entrance, iron gate, and trip wire.

I held my breath and gripped the pillows tightly as I stepped one boot over the trip wire so I was close enough to push a pillow through the bars of the gate and stretch out my arm close enough to drop the pillow near enough to the door so it did something but far enough away so the enchantment field didn’t make the dragon's breath do what it’s name implied.

Dragons hadn’t been seen much since iron-tipped arrows had been invited. However, stories of them and their stone-melting breath were still scattered throughout folklore and had a prominent description in every book on animals I’d gotten from the library.

I still held my breath as I moved my boot back over the wire and tucked the second pillow between the iron bars near the lock. All in hopes the jar would affect both of them and they would affect the obstructions.

After retreating back around the corner, I realised that besides stepping into the wire myself, I had nothing to activate it. Without another option, since I didn’t want to go all the way back up to the offices, I untied one of my boots and finally let out the breath I’d forgotten I was holding.

I drew my arm back like I was pulling the strings of a bow taut and let the boot fly, running back towards the stairs at the same time. I heard the boot bash into the gate, but no ear-ringing bang followed for a long while. Checking on it revealed the boot sitting next to the wire where it had fallen after hitting the gate.

Scared about how loud the sound had been, I pulled off my other boot and quickly threw it. Before getting back to the stairs this time, a bright flash of red and orange lit up the hallway in front of me, burning itself into the back of my eyelids.

The bang never came, and no other sound did either because I couldn’t hear anything at all as I stumbled on a shaking floor. I leaned against the staircase wall and looked back to pieces of rock still bouncing and clattering to a stop even near where I was. The wall exposed to the entrance was covered in rock and iron that had been embedded into the blackened stretch.

Compared to the spell used on me outside of Tamil, this was far more terrifying. I worried for the people outside who might have been showered in splinters from the wooden door. A shout of warning to Yis might have been a good idea in hindsight, but I hadn’t wanted him to occupy what I thought would be a very limited time to act. A small part of me also didn’t want him to think I was responsible for the damage to an establishment he liked.

My hearing didn’t work, and my eyes were still adjusting to the dim hallways, so when I sensed people coming from the stage and balconies, I bashed my shin on a few steps as I scrambled to the landing and under the rope before they came storming down.

I pressed myself against the wall rest, my eyes widening when I saw the pillows with three times the amount of dragon’s breath only twenty yards away from me. It was an extremely good motivator to get my legs moving fast down the hallway and back into the pillowless room.

The enchantment below the room wasn’t dissipating, but the iron gate no longer felt like it was on its hinges. The window’s inlay also still had mana flowing through it, yet that didn’t matter as I opened it and hung one leg outside, waving towards Yis while putting mana into my necklace with the other hand.

When that didn’t get his attention, I whistled or thought I did since I still couldn’t hear it. Regardless, that did get his and the knights’ attention, all looking fine amongst the small debris from the smashed doors lying on the ground or barely hanging on a single hinge.

He still looked to be shouting as he ran below me, his arms held out as if to catch me. That hadn’t been the intention, though I trusted him to get me down safer than my current attempt at magic would be. I pulled my other leg over the ledge, and he worriedly glanced towards the wide-open entrance with knights moving ahead of him with shields deployed. I didn't want him standing in the open while I worked up the courage to jump, so I let myself tip forward.

The brief rush of air and stomach lurching to my throat was hurridly ended by two arms hitting my side and ribs.

Yis was talking directly into my face, but I had to point at my ears and say I couldn’t hear him louder than I probably needed to. He and I moved to the side as two squads of knights lined each side of the doorway with the enchantment still blocking them. The inlay had been exposed by the blast, and the end of a pair of iron tongs with very large handles had been placed around the thick piece of gold, a knight at each handle pushing them inwards to crush the inlay.

Mana and iron bolts flew out of the hallway and into the third squad’s combined mana shield layered onto steel ones.

The efforts of the two knights and the mana in the inlay being dragged into the iron were enough to cut through, the enchantment filed over the doorway failing.

The third group moved forward into the cleared entrance to take the hits as the first and second squads followed behind, returning their own mix of mana arrows and iron bolts, their opponent's attacks petering off as more of them retreated around the corner.

Yis watched all of this with me still in his arms, and I pocked his cheek to get his attention.

“There’s going to be another one,” I said into the silence that still surrounded me.

His eyebrows knit together, and he opened his mouth to say something. He didn’t get the chance as the second floor of the area of the building behind him bulged outwards and scattered the inside of an office and most of the wall all over the street as a bubble of flame belched out behind it.

The watch had gladly cleared the area, but smaller chunks still bounced off the walls of the buildings opposite.

The knights were still at the first turn and had knelt down into a defensive position at the assumably deafening sound from outside.

“Tell them to go up to the balcony or around to the main entrance.”

Yis was looking away from me towards the gaping hole on the second floor so I smacked his cheek while pointing to the hunkered-down knights, and spoke louder incase his own hearing was ruined. “Tell them to go up to the balcony or around to the main entrance.”

Yis’ lips moved in a way that looked to be conveying all that to the knights, and he ended it with an apology towards me as he put me upright. I stood with my socks getting wet in the shallow puddles and watched as he rallied a group of armoured watch officers and healers over the chunks of rock to follow the knights that had split up to go in each direction.

One of the healers stopped near me to put his hand on my ears, his brows knitting in confusion when nothing happened after his spell. I pulled his arms off my head and pushed him towards the others, his hands coming away bloody.

I reached up to my own ears as I watched him go, blood coating them as I pulled them away.

Another squad of knights came running over from the direction of the main entrance, and I moved out of the way as they dove straight through the broken doorway.

I carried on walked back and almost tripped on a chunk of stone that was now on the road because of me. I didn’t want to know what else had happened because of me. I didn’t want to know if anyone had been close to the explosion, so I walked past the line of officers who were more focused on the building and keeping people out rather than me in.