A surfeit of wizards 14

 

Chapter 14

 

We actually managed a few days quiet holiday, and returned to routine lessons for our apprentices, before the Tower delivered a message.

It was from Clovo; and said simply, “Castamir, help! It was demons behind the Goblin king and we need you. The letter should guide you on the ley lines.”

And for that, we could not take the children; but I had sorely felt the lack of Chessina in banishing the Succubus in Lady Sheyla, so I sent a message to Florisin to beg him to back up Rosie in caring for them, and set off on the rug of travel. I was glad of its warming charms and wind deflection; it was snowing in earnest. Having a lavatory, not having to stop and pee in the snow was also very nice; and Chessina kindly refrained from giggling at me for not having known about it.

She did smirk a bit.

I felt such an idiot.

 

We arrived at the war camp, which was a fortress, though some of the troops were under canvas – and nicely warded with warming charms, I was glad to see. We landed by the obvious command tent.

“Castamir! Chessina! Thank you for coming so quickly!” said Clovo, bouncing out. “I heard Harmon had secret ways and paths using ley lines, and I hoped he had passed it on.”

“He passed on enough that I was able to use his notes,” I said.

“Good, good. Come with me,” said Clovo.

He took us to a marquee in which there were a number of shocked and wounded goblins, being tended by the healers.

Clovo led us over to a young man whose olive skin was suffused with russet of anger and upset.

“Castamir, Chessina, this is Prince Gerd,” he said. “His father, the high king, has been under demonic influence.”

“We will have to kill him,” said the youth, who spoke our language passably.

“On no account,” I said. “If his soul passes to the demon involved, then it will increase his power. Our current solution is to turn those influenced by demons into asses, since they have long lives, and the demonic link is broken over time in the animal thoughts.”

He brightened.

“I do not want to be a parricide,” he said, “But it is my responsibility as his son to do something.”

“That’s why Clovo sent for us; to help,” I said. “We’ve had demons interfering in our kingdom, too, and it’s all down to a prophecy they have.”

“That’s new,” said Clovo.

“Yes, I wrote to Dragovar about it, but if there’s large enough scale interference here to need us, then you also have a need to know.”

“That’s all we need,” said Clovo in disgust.

“How many are we talking about, and what sort?” asked Chessina.

“You must understand that our shaman has been in the habit of using less demons,” said Gerd.

“As many people do,” I said. “Nobody lays blame on your shaman for minimal interaction with useful malodorous runts.”

“A good name for them,” said Gerd, with a fleeting smile. “I loathe them, but they are strong. But two years ago, we had a visit from an elven envoy; he was very handsome for an elf, and charismatic.”

“Prydythaur!” I hissed.

“Aye, that was the name,” said Gerd. “He fought my father’s champions and bested them, so we listened. And he gave us a name to call on….”

I put my hand over his mouth.

“My apologies, but the demon involved can hear if his name is spoken,” I said. “You read?”

“Yes, our own script and yours.”

I wrote down ‘Parekschey’ and his eyes widened.

“That’s it,” he said.

“Great,” I said. “Pointy-teeth’s boss. Tell me how it happened.”

“Well, Prydythaur left us,” said Gerd. “I don’t know what happened to him.”

“He tried to foment war between the elves, Ezustry, the Dwarves, and anyone else he could,” I said. “He was a half-demon, and my journeyman here dealt with him for me whilst I handled the demonic fire he set. We’ve both been killing quite a few demons lately.”

Gerd bowed low, and spoke in his own tongue.

“Hear me, my people! This human woman killed Prydythaur; and she is subordinate to this Towermaster! Let her be named ‘Champion’ and accorded the rights of a warrior woman.”

Well, that should stop them irritating Chessina by making assumptions.

Gerd turned back to us.

“Our shaman raised this… demon… and he held us mesmerised as he planned for my father to unite the tribes. Which he did, but the… what did you call them? Malodorous runts? They were used to enforce his will. My father was no king, but a puppet for that vile creature!”

“Any incubi or succubi, or larger more intelligent demons besides the runts?” I asked.

“No.”

“And how many runts?” asked Chessina, again. She does not like repeating herself.

“Two dozen,” said Gerd.

I looked at Chessina and we heaved a sigh of relief.

“No problems then,” I said.

I didn’t realise then, and it took Clovo telling me later that this casual assumption that two dozen less demons and one demon lord were no problem won us no little respect.

Prydythaur had intended using hundreds of demons to overthrow Ezustry.

This, then, was a diversion; maybe Parekschey had not yet even heard of Prydythaur’s death. 

“We need to get rid of him quickly or he’ll catch on and we’ll be snowed under by the little buggers,” I said.

“Clovo has war wizards; and if they survived despite their lessons, they must be good,” said Chessina. “If they can keep the runts occupied long enough to banish their principal, we can deal with them at leisure.”

It was as a plan. Not the best, perhaps, but workable.

And that, really, is what counts.

Just because I’m writing my memoirs doesn’t make this a novel, where the author has time to mess about making up genius ideas. We had what we had, and no plan survives a meeting with the enemy anyway.

 

I was not about to mention that I have never fought demons in an open field of battle. Or expressed my concerns that we had to find Parekschey. And that, of course, was going to be the trick.

“So, is your shaman a willing confederate of the demon, or is he regretting ever having heard his name?” I asked.

“He’s dead; he annoyed Pa…the demon,” said Gerd.

“How confused was the battle? Do they know you were taken or surrendered?” I asked.

“A knot of us were isolated, and I believe it was on purpose to get the dissenters killed,” said Gerd.

“Will the rank and file of your troops be glad to see you back?” I asked.

“Probably… oh, you want me to guide you by pretending to work my way back whilst you lurk unseen to follow me,” said Gerd.

“I was considering assuming your appearance with a mix of spells and potions, to go in your stead,” I said.

“You couldn’t pronounce the password,” he said.

That probably wasn’t just an excuse to come along, Goblins are Fae who made it; they did their own hybridisation with a mixture of Orks and vegetation. Orks have pronounced jaws and fangs, and though goblins don’t have heavy jawbones and have only slightly enlarged canines, their tongues are hung slightly differently to human tongues making their language hard for humans, and ours equally for them. They come out as slightly sibilant, which is why, allied to their green tinge, from the use of plant merging, they are treated with suspicion, in the way most people treat snakes.

There is only one venomous snake in Ezustry, and that’s the viper. Which comes in two forms, the common viper, which is only dangerous to pets and children, and the marsh viper, which has enough venom to kill a man. It’s also the only poisonous snake in Ezustry; you can eat any of the others without harm, though I doubt they taste nice.

You did know the difference between poisonous and venomous, didn’t you?

Anyway, the marsh viper is about the same colour as a goblin, an olive green. It does goblins no favours. They are quite aggressive, but will negotiate.  I’ve heard of intermarriages in the marcher lands with humans settling there, and any human mate is treated with the same protectiveness as is the rest of the tribe. It’s elves that goblins really hate, because elves will not acknowledge goblins as Fae, and they both like the same sort of territory.

That, then, was the plan; Gerd would lead us to the command group, whilst the less demons were kept occupied by an onslaught by the war wizards.

 

We set off. Chessina and I were under various spells to mask scent and sound as well as being invisible. A spell which only works well when you are moving slowly, or not at all; otherwise it makes for a distortion like heat haze in front of whatever is behind you.

It should work, though; so long as we walked in Gerd’s footsteps. Being invisible is also hard when there are visible footprints in the snow suddenly appearing.

So why was I disquieted?

 

I’d have been a lot more disquieted if I had known that our little girl, Shareen, had awoken in the night whilst we were planning, screaming and refusing to talk to anyone.

Harmana, bless the child, had the air of command still, and she demanded that Florisin raise the war wards, and showed him the runestone to do so. She also demanded that all the village be brought within the tower.

It took Silavara’s help to accomplish this; but she took one look at Shareen, and obeyed Harmana’s wishes.

One of the things the war-wards does is to make the village look desolate and decayed, but this illusion is a trifle spoiled if there are peasants going about their daily rounds. And bless the tower, the ground floor grows accommodations which look like homely peasant rooms so that the villagers feel more at home.

I could feel the Tower reacting, and reached out to it.

“Trouble,” I said, grimly, to Chessina.  “Harmana gave Florisin permission to raise the war wards.”

“Let’s deal with this and go home,” she said.

Gerd had no trouble finding his people; and the picket he came across was very happy to see him. He seemed popular.

Chessina shuddered as we moved on.

“I feel summoning,” she said.

Too right she felt summoning.

Three war-demons erupted in front of us, and there was a peal of malicious laughter.

“Have fun, Towermaster! I foresaw your coming, and I’m going to go deal with those you hold dear!”

We both felt a powerful demon flying away.

“Well, crap,” said Chessina.

I thought that was a master class in understatement.

“He won’t get into the Tower,” I said.

It would take more even than a Demon Prince to do that.

Meanwhile, we had a problem.

Well, actually, we had three problems.

And I was going to use the power of the Tower because I had about ten minutes before Parekschey got to it.

Lightning was out; so were fire-based spells. Shit, I was short of offensive spells outside of those.  Meanwhile, I put up globes of protection.

“The dragon simulation, Castamir!” Chessina reminded me. “I’ll ‘rock’ them, and you scour them to death.”

They were fire demons, with ruddy great wings, and fiery breath.  I hit each in turn with the scour cantrip on the eyes, thoroughly overpowered, which gave me breathing time to adapt Chessina’s ‘rock’ attack by making a snowball, enlarging it, and using featherlight to throw at one ghastly fiery maw, cancelling the featherlight to make it resume the momentum of the foot-across snowball I had made it be. It might not have the weight of a rock but it hammered into the back of the demon’s throat, and involuntarily it swallowed.

Ever eaten an ice-based sweet on a hot day, and guzzled it so fast you got belly ache?  Well, that snowball ought to be doing a proper job on its recipient.

Chessina got a lucky hit on one, which was reeling from a rock to the head, and I pulled on the tower to raise an ice golem to grapple the third.

This was a mess, and please do not use our improvisation to run a battle.

Whilst mine was still choking on ice, his resistance was down a little, and I cast featherlight  on him. There was a rather nice cliff behind him, and a frozen waterfall. I cast move and when well on his way, I noticed that I did not need to negate anything as he managed to negate both. However, he was already in motion, and getting rid of the featherlight restored all his momentum. He slammed into the frozen waterfall, and dislodged all the icicles around the top which powered their way down towards him according to the laws of nature.

He was hurt enough to take himself off.

Chessina’s was getting himself back together, and the other was still wrestling with my melting but valiant ice golem. There was a lot of steam.

I screamed as the fire whip of the golemed one hit me on the arm, despite my globe of protection. But I suddenly remembered!

Dragovar had taught us Frost Ray! I screamed about to Chessina.

I overpowered mine at Chessina’s demon as she hit it with all she had.

It was enough. Frost warred with fire, and the demon’s body started to fall apart. With a terrible cry he crashed to the ground, and broke into myriad pieces before crumbling and disappearing.

Chessina was staggering, light-headed from the spell; and I used it once more as my golem finally melted to nothing.

I hit it in the chest.

Chessina, bless her, was still in there and struggling; and as mine fought the damage my spell had done, she summoned all the fallen icicles with  featherlight so that when it cancelled, they slammed into the last demon standing like spears of an angry ice god. He fell, the ichor oozing and freezing. Gerd was being held by two guards, the king behind him.

“I have had it with you idiots who summon demons!” I growled. He brayed as I cast the spell on him. “Release Gerd, and the rest of you, surrender,” I said. “I am starting to become irritable.”

They surrendered as a mass, and gazed on me with fearful eyes. 

That was all over now, and we marched them in. I carried Chessina, who had passed out with her last efforts.

 

“The fucking demon is a seer,” I complained to Clovo. “He summoned three fiery war-demons and sodded off to try to attack the Tower.”

“You two defeated… not the nine-foot tall, winged fyrteufel?”

“Is that what they’re called?” I said, indifferently. “That fits the description.”

“Why are you even alive?” demanded Clovo.

“Why? Because one of them ran away and the others died,” I said. “That was a bloody nuisance.”

“Thank you for dealing with that extraordinary menace, Towermaster,” said Clovo. “Go and have your arm seen to. Is Chessina…”

“Exhausted,” I said. “And I need to get back…”

“Not with an open wound,” said Beretrulle.

I submitted to the ministrations of the healers; the globe had absorbed most of it, I had a nasty burn on my upper arm and across my shoulder blade where it had curled round, and I was just starting to notice it.

And then I passed out too.