Guild Mage: Apprentice-Chapter 119. Hammer and Knives

Wren couldn’t help but let her mouth hang open, just a bit, as she watched Liv ride off on a bird conjured from raw magic. She was pretty certain the girl had no idea just how ridiculous she was; and, to be fair, Liv had been relatively restrained all through the winter at Coral Bay. But just like when they’d encountered the massive stone-bat beneath Bald Peak, the moment you put the kid’s back up against a wall, she turned into a raging animal.

Karis frightened Wren.

The thing was over a thousand years old, built by the hand of a dead god, and enchanted with fearsome spells. If the Antrian had ever come after Wren, she probably would have flown away as fast and as far as she could get, rather than fight. But somehow, in spite of all that, Wren would not have bet a single coin on the old war-machine’s victory over a single half-Elden girl.

Wren pulled a stoppered glass vial of chicken blood from her belt, tossed it back with a grimace - cold, stale blood never tasted good - and then took flight in her bat form, winging out across the bay toward the platform of Chi that Jurian fought from. She didn’t have a great way of signalling to him that she was a friend, and not an enemy, so she climbed up above him, rather than angle straight for the disk of blue magic, and then shifted back into her human form, letting herself fall down from a height of more than a dozen feet above.

“Jurian!” Wren called, the moment she had a human throat again, and he glanced up once. The disk he was standing on widened, and she landed heavily on it only a pace from him. An instant later, a flight of crossbow bolts, fired by Manfred’s rear line and the surviving mercenaries, shattered against a mana-shield, which flickered into existence around both Wren and Jurian.

“I was wondering where you were,” the archmagus said. “Caught outside the shields?”

Wren nodded, drew an arrow, and fitted it to her bow. She didn’t bother loosing, however: she wouldn’t, until Jurian dropped the bubble of blue power that protected them. “I was watching the mercenaries,” she explained. “I’m guessing you’ve already recognized a few of them below.”

“Mmm,” Jurian grunted. “They saw a chance and took it. Smart. If they’d tried this during a king tide, we would have had a lot more power to throw into the fight. Still, they’ve revealed themselves now. We can arrest anyone who doesn’t flee, including their merchant backer and the captain who brought them in, if he ever comes back to port. We can learn a lot from questioning them. What I’m more concerned with, at the moment,” he said, “is that I see soldiers of ice down on the beach, along with my nightmares. And unless I miss my guess, that was Apprentice Brodbeck riding some sort of conjured bird across the bay, despite my very clear instructions for her to remain inside the school’s defenses.”

“She’s gone to stop them from getting whatever’s in the ruins,” Wren explained. “Liv figured you’d be too distracted dealing with this lot on the beach.”

“I suppose she isn’t wrong,” Jurian said, though his face looked no less severe. “I’m going to have her scrubbing toilets for a month when this is all over. Aluthet Demia.” He extended his staff, and a shimmering globe of mana swelled up to surround the fighting on the beach, trapping the enormous wyrm as well as the soldiers. Simultaneously, the bubble around the two of them faded.

“Can you actually beat them all?” Wren asked.

“I’m certainly going to try,” Jurian said. “If Caspian were with me this would already be over.” He reached out a hand, as if twisting something that Wren could not see, and spikes of striated blue and gold magic extruded from the inner wall of the dome he’d placed around the battlefield, pointing inward at the people fighting for their lives. Then, the barrier began to constrict, moving dozens of magical spear tips closer and closer to those within.

Wren could see the moment those inside realized what kind of danger they were in. At first, the remaining mercenaries and the other armed men who’d come through the waystone were too occupied fending off the last of Jurian’s nightmare constructs, along with Liv’s handful of frozen soldiers. However, discipline and training were quickly winning out over the rather predictable attacks of the conjured attackers. Under Manfred’s command, a ring of polearms defended the crossbowmen who made up his second rank, and each volley dropped a target.

In fact, the last of the ice warriors was the first thing inside the constricting dome to be pierced by Jurian’s lances. It was caught, pinned on two lengths of shaped magic, leaving the soldier to twitch for a moment before crumbling into jagged chunks of ice and dust that sparkled like snow.

“Stand firm, men!” Manfred shouted, but his outer ring inched backward as the spear-tips came closer to them. The wyrm reared back, hissed, and spit venom at the encroaching barrier, to no effect. For a moment, Wren wondered if they would all simply be ground up into little more than a ball of flesh, bone, and broken shards of armor. How small of a dome could Jurian pull his magic into, after all?

“Get ready to shoot their mage,” Jurian murmured, and Wren nodded. He was clearly expecting something, and the two of them had tumbled about the training ground often enough that she respected his instincts.

Aariv shouted something from down below. Liv might have been able to parse the words, despite the cries of the soldiers and the crash of the waves, but then the girl had an ear for Vædic, and a uncanny tendency to not only pick up words she’d only heard once or twice, but then use them in her spells as if she’d known them for years.

The globe itself began to burn.

Wren hadn’t known you could set magic on fire, but then again mages made very little sense to her. She waited for a hole to be burned through the bubble, then took her shot. Unfortunately, Manfred caught her arrow on his shield before it could take Aariv in the throat.

“You!” the Lucanian soldier shouted up from the beach. “So you’re still alive after all, traitor! I wonder what your father will say when I bring him your pretty little head on a pike.”

“That one’s mine,” Wren grumbled.

“And I’ll take the mage,” Jurian agreed.

While the flames clearly would consume the archmage’s magic in time, they took time to do their work, and the soldiers had run out of room to back up. Men began to cry out as they were pierced by slowly moving spikes, sharp tips pressing through jack of plate as easily as unprotected flesh.

Aariv thrust his hands down toward the ground, and columns of fire roared out of his palms, the force of the explosion throwing the old man up and out through one of the holes that had been burned in the constricting globe. He didn’t fly so much as he tumbled into the waves with a great splash.

Jurian’s platform swung in toward the old man, and Wren decided that was where she would be getting off. She leapt down, tossing her bow aside, tucked her shoulder, and rolled across the muddy sandbar until she came to a halt near the burning globe of mana.

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Men were dying inside, but not nearly enough of them, and Manfred remained at the center of his formation with ranks of crossbowmen. Wren drew her daggers, and caught the man’s eyes for just a moment. The globe was nearly entirely burnt away, now, and the massive wyrm rushed out, ignoring the flames that licked at its scales as it made for the waystone. Wren saw a small group of Elden warriors riding it, making their escape.

“Loose!” the big man called, and a volley of crossbow bolts flew toward Wren. She let her physical form dissolve away into blood, and half a dozen bolts splashed through the liquid before she reformed. While they were reloading, Wren dashed in among them, through the heat of the last remnants of the burning globe.

She reached down to slit throats, ducked beneath a pike to slice a hamstring, jumped up onto the back of a mercenary with a grotesque mustache just long enough to tear his throat out with her fangs and gulp down hot blood from his jugular. When the crossbows fired again, she was blood, and the bolts meant for her sunk into her victim’s chest instead. The moment the soldiers tried to reload, Wren solidified among them, stabbing and slicing as she went.

Wren had been in her share of fights, over the course of a long life, but she’d always primarily been a hunter, not a soldier. She’d trained to take down prey in the jungle, not to kill men on a battlefield.

Until she’d come to Coral Bay, that is.

Sparring every morning with Jurian had taught her a lot about knifework. A lot of mean, nasty tricks that would leave men bleeding out on the ground, screaming in pain as they pissed themselves in the surf. She used every one of those tricks now. By the third time the Manfred called for a volley, only half a dozen crossbowmen remained; she let the shots splash through her, then fell upon a wounded man just long enough to drink and come back up, her face soaked in hot, fresh blood.

The men that could still run broke, staggering toward the column of light that marked the waystone. Wren let them go. Instead, she faced off against Manfred, and the two began to circle each other with the waves gently lapping at their heels. She was dimly aware of Jurian and Aariv throwing magic at each other, on the second sandbar, but she couldn’t afford to be distracted by worrying about him right at the moment.

“Not quite as easy as it was to hit Soltheris, is it?” Wren taunted the man. His red eyes narrowed, beneath his helm.

“I’d thought at first you were simply a coward,” Manfred growled. “Not everyone has the stomach for killing, and you wouldn’t be the first to desert at the sight of a few corpses. But no, you’ve actually sold out your own father, your own people, a goddess herself. What did they offer you?”

“Nothing,” Wren said, stepping in, only to be met by the swing of a warhammer, which forced her to leap back out of range. “I just realized I was on the wrong side. We didn’t bring her back to start a war.”

“You say it as if war is a bad thing!” Manfred advanced, with wide, measured swings of his hammer, any one of which would cave in Wren’s head or break a limb. He kept his shield up, ready to ward off an assault from one of her daggers, and there was no room for Wren to get inside the man’s guard. “War pays men like me. In coin, in loot, in women. Peace only puts rust on my sword. Makes men soft, with nothing to do but drink their days away and grow a gut.”

Wren didn’t see any other option. She let herself stumble on the sand, giving the man an opening to come down with an overhand swing. Instead of crushing her skull, it splashed through blood, and she reformed right up close against the man’s chest, stabbing at the gaps in his armor with both hands.

Manfred roared in pain, then dropped his shield and warhammer to wrap wren up in his arms, crushing her against his jack of plate with all the force of an avalanche falling on her back. Wren screamed as the air was forced out of her lungs; her arms were pinned to her sides, and her daggers fell out of her hands. She’d been using blood faster than she could drain it from the fallen, but she realized that if she didn’t get free, she would die.

Wren splashed down Manfred’s armor, leaving him with empty arms, and reformed on the sand a half dozen feet away. She’d lost her daggers, her bow had been carried up onto the shore by the incoming tide, and when she sucked in a breath, she felt a stabbing pain in her side.

The mercenary took his time, retrieving his warhammer before he stalked over to her. Wren glanced over to the second sandbar, where Jurian and Aariv were flinging fire and coruscating shapes of blue-gold mana back and forth between them in ever more fanciful designs. There would be no help there. She looked to where the breakers crashed against the reef, and thought she could make out the hulking form of the Antrian war-machine crouched atop the coral. Wren reached out her hands, searching for anything she could find, and came up with nothing but a rock. It would have to do.

Thunder rumbled across the sky, and Wren couldn’t help but smile.

“What?” Manfred asked, looming above her.

“That’s your war machine dying,” Wren told him.

“Impossible,” the mercenary objected, and then a jagged bolt of lightning fell down from the sky, striking the reef. The brightness of the explosion was nearly blinding, but Wren had already closed her eyes, and for her it was only a flash against her tightly clenched lids.

She came up with the rock in hand while Manfred was still blinking, and bashed him in the helm once, twice, three times with all her strength, riding the shocked mercenary to the sand as he tripped over his own feet and fell backward. Wren threw herself on his chest, took the rock in both hands, and slammed it down on his helm again. The metal was dented and deformed, and blood ran down inside it, getting in the man’s eyes.

With a roar, he threw Wren aside, and she tumbled over the wet sand. She was exhausted, ached all over, and could hardly breathe for the pain in her side. Wren tried to roll over and get her feet under her, but it was too much, and she finally just lay on the sand, with the warm water teasing at her wet hair, pulling the strands back and forth. When she finally opened her eyes, and lifted her head, she saw Manfred, warhammer retrieved, fleeing into the waystone, after his men. She took a bit of comfort in the fact that he was staggering back and forth as he ran: maybe she’d cracked his skull.

Wren rolled over onto her side, so that she could get a glimpse of Jurian. As she watched, Aariv lit up his hands with columns of fire again, sending a cloud of steam rolling over the archmage, and used the force to propel himself toward the waystone. If Wren had her bow, she could have shot him down right then, but instead the old man from the east disappeared into the waystone, as well.

Jurian splashed over to her, his shoulders slumped from exhaustion, and reached down a hand. Wren reached up and took it, allowing herself to be hoisted to her feet. Together, the two of them clutched each other for balance.

“I don’t see anyone out at the reef,” he gasped.

Wren felt a cold spike of fear in her belly; it wasn’t until that moment she was able to admit just how much she’d come to care about the girl, over the past few months. Liv was something like a little sister: often obnoxious, always overconfident, and frequently in trouble due to her own foolishness, but there was no way she was going to let anything happen to the girl if she could do anything about it.

“The entrance to the rift,” Wren said, gritting her teeth against the pain in her side.

“I can feel the mana,” Jurian confirmed, nodding after a moment. “One of them must have opened it, and now it's leaking out almost as badly as if there was an eruption. I’m going in after them. You get up onto the beach and rest.”

“Old man,” Wren panted, “If you think I’m letting you go after her alone, you’re already losing your wits.” She staggered over to the sand where one of her daggers hadn’t been carried off yet, and scooped it up.

Jurian nodded. “Alright. Come on then.” He ripped off his outer robes, leaving himself bare-chested in only breeches and boots, and tore a strip of cloth off so that he could tie his staff onto his back.

Together, the two of them waded out to the second sandbar. When it came time to swim to the third, Wren almost didn’t make it: the pain in her ribs made it hard for her to use her left arm. Jurian ended up catching her with one arm around her chest, and dragging her with him.

“It’s under the water,” Wren shouted, over the crashing of the waves, once they were treading water within reach of the coral. She could see a blackened and blasted place just above the waves where Liv’s lightning must have come down.

Jurian ducked under the waves, and was gone for a long moment. When his head broke the surface again, he told her, “I see it. Let me get hold of you.” It was dark now: the light from the waystone had faded.

They both dove, and Jurian pulled Wren by the arm down, down between two banks of coral, into the darkness. Ahead, she could see faintly glowing blue lights, the only thing that broke up the gloom. With one final tug, the two of them fell out of the water onto a metal floor, at the beginning of a long corridor leading down into the ruins.

“It’s just like at the mountain,” Wren said.

“Can you lead us to them?” Jurian asked, and Wren nodded. Though she was exhausted, she climbed to her feet and stepped forward.