The Sorcerer's Scourge (9 page)

““Nonsense. I copied exactly right out of the book. Do you know what your problem is? You follow the rules too much. You are too afraid to try anything new. You stick your nose in your book and recite what the pages show you over and over,” Ellyssa told him.

“It’s called practice. It’s called being responsible and safe!”

“It’s called being boring and predicatable. Now watch this!”

Ellyssa pulled power from the Source and fed it into the runes scrawled onto the wardrobe and the chalk-drawn sigils glowed in response. Ellyssa grabbed the handle of the closet and looked haughtily at her best friend.

“See, it was easy. Too the applied magic class!” Ellyssa proclaimed grandly and tugged open the door.

Thousands of gallons of water poured out of the closet as if a dam had burst. The raging torrent of water slammed into her and Roger then swept them out of the bedroom door and down the stairs. The conjured river hammered their young bodies against the unyielding stone walls at every turn. They wondered through their fear-filled minds if they were going to drown or be bashed to death first.

 Grick had just come up the stairs of the basement rooms after a boring night of catching rats. The keep was practically rat-free now and Grick thought it was probably a good idea to pick up a hobby as his night duties were becoming exceedingly dull. He was standing in the center of the grand hall when he heard the screams and what sounded like someone emptying a giant washtub down the stairs. His yellow eyes went round as he saw the wall of water rushing down the stairs, carrying along the master’s rotten apprentice and the boy with half his foot missing.

Without pausing to think, Grick lunged for the front doors and wrenched them open just as the flood of water hit him in the back and carried him, the two children, and several pieces of furniture outside. Still the water kept coming, pushing them down the avenues and between buildings—when they were lucky—and slamming them painfully into the sides of them when they were not.

The water flooded Ken’s forges and quenched the fires used to heat the metal. It poured into Peck’s stables and made a sodden mess of the stalls and the straw that covered their floors. Thankfully, Ellyssa had drawn the runes in chalk and the force of the water washed them away, returning the wardrobe back into an ordinary closet, and deposited them on the steps of the newly built stone church.

Grick coughed out a lungful of water and glared at the young wizard. “Oh yeah, the woods fairy gonna come for you tonight, for sure. Make you into the ugliest, smelliest goblin ever.”

Ellyssa looked at Roger as she coughed out the last bit of water from her lungs. “I think you may have been right about that rune.”

“You think?” Roger shouted at her.

Brother Thomas and his several of his novitiates stepped out of the door of the church to see what had made such a ruckus. He looked down at the two soaked children and the goblin at the bottom of the steps and shook his head in disapproval.

“Ellyssa, what have you done?”

“Why does everyone always assume it was me anytime something weird happens around here?” the girl asked indignantly. “I’m not the one that brings home dragons or runs around with wolves and steals food! I’m not the one that has assassins following them who then gets stabbed by a goblin who skulks around at night killing rats! But anytime something catches fire or floods the tower it’s all like, ‘Ellyssa, what have you done’. I swear, the next eclipse that happens everyone is going to say ‘Ellyssa, what have you done’, because apparently I’m responsible for everything up to and including celestial orbits!”

Brother Thomas patiently let the girl vent before speaking again. “Are you responsible for this?”

Ellyssa chewed her lip for several moments before responding. “There are a lot of factors involved, many of which could cast a wide dispersion of blame. I think we should just focus on the fact that no one was hurt and be grateful.”

“Ellyssa!” The young priest shouted at her.

“Fine, it was my fault! Are you happy?” Ellyssa shouted back then screamed as something lifted her up off the ground and into the air.

A huge water elemental, apparently furious at being pulled from its home, lifted the young mage from the ground and prepared to smash her small body against the stone steps of the church.

“Children, you must banish that creature!” Brother Thomas exclaimed to his three young Chosen of Solarian.

Banishing a creature back to its home plane was not something a normal novitiate would be expected to perform. However, this, like Azerick’s mage school, was no ordinary seminary. Brother Thomas’s students were pushed to learn and excel just as the wizard and martial students were. Even so, it would take all three working together and even then, Brother Thomas was extremely concerned.

Shawna, Angela, and Caleb began the complex ritual of banishment, but luckily, Roger was faster. Roger pulled wet piece of rock salt from his spell pouch and channeled the Source into it. Jumping to his feet, he lunged at the elemental, slammed the hand holding the halite against the water being, and released his spell.

The effect was instantaneous. The water under his hand froze solid and rapidly spread to the creature’s base and up towards the arm holding his friend several feet in the air. Roger continued to pour energy into the spell until the giant, watery hand holding Ellyssa froze solid. Roger knew he could not hold the powerful creature in stasis for long and prayed that the three Chosen could banish it quickly. Already the ice was melting as the monster’s will overcame his magic. Just as he was sure he was going to lose control, the water elemental lost all cohesion and vanished with a splash, dropping Ellyssa painfully onto the wet, muddy, and unyielding ground.

“You did it!” Brother Thomas cried out and hugged his three Chosen.

“You were saying something about no one getting hurt?” Roger panted from the exertion of his spell.

“You almost froze me to death!” Ellyssa accused, shivering heavily.

“Yeah…you’re welcome.”

“What is going on out here?” Azerick demanded as he, Rusty, and Allister ran up to them. “Is everyone all right?”

“Everyone seems fine,” Brother Thomas answered. “It seems that Ellyssa managed to conjure a water elemental. Fortunately, young Roger was able to slow it long enough for us to banish it. I assume that is where all of this water came from as well.”

Azerick looked down at whom he considered his adopted daughter and glared at the girl who was now looking extremely miserable sitting in a puddle near his feet. “What did you do?”

“I tried to make a permanent gate from my closet to the classroom,” she answered dolefully.

If she expected pity, she would find none here. “Do you realize what you have done?”

“I mixed up the astral rune with the water rune?” Ellyssa replied with a tiny smile in hopes of diffusing Azerick’s anger.

It did not work. Azerick shouted, “You could have hurt or even killed someone! You have probably destroyed your room, ruined the main hall, and from what I can see from the steam, destroyed Ken’s workshop! Whatever gave you the idea you could make something so complex and so dangerous? Where did you find out how to do it?”

“In your big book you keep downstairs in your laboratory,” Ellyssa squeaked out.

“I should have known better. I should have warded it or locked it up. I forbade you to read that book just for this reason!”

“You’re right!” Ellyssa shouted back, tired of everyone verbally assaulting her. “You should have known I would read it the moment you told me not to, so this is your fault too!”

Azerick’s fury was at a boil as he and his apprentice glared at each other. “You are grounded for two months. You will not leave the tower except to go to class, after you have cleaned out the stables, do whatever Ken needs you to do to fix his forges, mop out the downstairs, and do whatever else it takes to make this disaster look like it never happened.”

“Two months! That’s not fair! I’ll miss summer festival!”

“You want to know about fair? Go visit the nine graves of the children that died defending this keep and ask about fair! Imagine more gravestones belonging to the people you will inevitably kill from your foolish recklessness! What if Colleen had been downstairs with the twins and gotten swept away? It was only dumb luck, again, that prevented exactly that from happening this time.”

Azerick turned to Roger. “You were with her?”

Roger nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Then you are grounded for one month and will help with everything I have told Ellyssa to do.”

“Azerick, it’s not Roger’s fault! He tried to tell me not to, but I did it anyway!”

“You’re right. It is not his fault. Just like it is not the fault of most victims who get hurt from someone else’s selfish actions. You have shown me time and again that punishing you does little good. Maybe if someone close to you suffers for your actions you might actually learn something. Now go start on the hall.”

Ellyssa jumped to her feet and ran to the tower in tears as Roger followed more slowly. Azerick looked at the crowd that had gathered.

“I am sorry, everyone. I will do what I can to make sure something like this does not happen again.”

Azerick was so furious he did not know what to do so he simply began walking. Rusty fell into step beside him and waited until they were near the outside wall before speaking.

“You do know this is partly your fault, don’t you?”

Azerick came to a stop and turned on his friend. “How is this in any way my fault?”

“I warned you before you took off and picked a fight with the Black Tower that it was dangerous and irresponsible to shift all focus to applied magic and neglect magical history, particularly dealing with ethics. This is exactly what I feared would happen. I am just surprised it took this long and from only one student.”

“This is not about the curriculum! Ellyssa has always been stubborn and reckless.”

Rusty began ticking off his fingers. “Powerful for her age, willful, reckless, does what she wants despite practical wisdom or the advice of her closest friends. Now who does that remind you of?”

“This is different! I did what I thought best given some extreme circumstances. I was trying to protect the school and these children. She was trying to figure out a way to avoid stairs!” Azerick defended.

“She’s eleven! You were at least twenty when you turned a nobleman into a donkey for being rude when you could have easily just shut the door in his face!”

“He was not hurt. It was a temporary spell.”

“And you were certain of that when you cast it?”

Azerick paused and thought back to that day. He had practically grabbed a scroll at random since it was not a spell he actually knew. Transmogrification was not an area he delved into much.

“Reasonably,” he replied. “Fine. Return to teaching the ethical use of magic. Make it a major fundamental of the history lesson.”

“Thank you,” Rusty replied a bit haughtily.

“I really hate you sometimes. Do you know that?”

Rusty smiled. “Because you know I am right?”

“It certainly does not help.”

CHAPTER 4

“Say what you want about the watch captain’s intuition,” Samone remarked as she poured over a stack of papers, “but his records keeping skills are spot on.”

“I find that those with the least imagination are often highly organized,” Brother Charles responded. “Given his complete lack of theoretical flexibility, it is no surprise his orderliness borders on the obsessive.”