God of Magic 4 Read online

  Chapter 1

  The sun shone high overhead, unobstructed by even the wispiest of clouds as we walked along the side of the wide dirt road. All around us as far as the eye could see were gently rolling hills, farmlands and pastures for sheep and cattle, broken up into neat sections by hedges and copses of trees. It was unusually warm for so late in the year, and with the extra weight from the loot we had to carry back, we were all sweating. Still, that could hardly dampen the Shadow Foxes’ moods right now.

  We’d just recovered a good bounty. A pack of goblins had been harassing some of the sheep in the area, and the farmers had contacted our guild specifically to get rid of them. It wasn’t one of the more prestigious missions, sure, but it meant a lot that they’d actually sought us out in particular, and they had paid us well once we’d gotten rid of the goblins. In addition to paying the hundred and twenty silver pieces that we’d charged, the farmers had shown their appreciation with a basket of sweet apples and a few jugs of homemade cider. We’d also recovered several pieces of gold and silver jewelry from the goblins’ den, trinkets and ornaments that the creatures had stolen throughout the years. Aerin would have no trouble selling them when we returned to Ovrista.

  As Maruk took a bite from one of the apples, Merlin leapt down from his usual perch on my shoulders and clambered up the orc’s leg and onto his shoulder.

  “Aww,” Maruk said with a smile, “look how friendly he’s being. How do you do, Merlin?”

  Maruk reached up with his free hand to pet the puca, but Merlin slithered out from beneath the orc’s large green hand, climbed down his other arm, and stole the apple out of his hand before Maruk could even realize what was going on.

  The puca stuffed the apple in his mouth and jumped to the ground, where he bounded a few yards ahead before he finished off the apple in three enormous bites.

  “Why, you little thief!” Maruk spluttered. “And here I thought we were friends.”

  “It doesn’t have friends,” Lavinia replied matter-of-factly. “Just victims.”

  “You cut me deep, Merlin,” Maruk told the puca, his lips pulled down into an exaggerated frown around his tusks. “Perhaps you ought to have gone with my cousins, you’d have made an excellent pirate.”

  “There are plenty more apples,” Aerin said.

  “It’s not about the apple so much as the betrayal,” Maruk told the redheaded elf. He threw a pointed look at Merlin as the puca swept his gray tongue over his whiskers.

  “I think he’s still upset about that little jacket you made him wear,” Lena proposed.

  Merlin chattered as he trotted alongside us as if to confirm Lena’s suspicion, and Maruk looked even more crestfallen than before.

  “He doesn’t like to be restrained,” I said.

  “We must suffer for beauty, sometimes, Merlin,” Maruk lectured.

  “You’d know all about that, wouldn't you, Maruk?” Lavinia teased, and the orc gave her a light shove.

  “Since when do you take Merlin’s side?” the orc demanded.

  Lavinia held up her hands. “Hey, I’m not on anyone’s side.”

  “Hey, look,” Emeline interrupted suddenly. The panthera mage squinted up at the road ahead. “Is that a person up there?”

  I followed her gaze. Beneath the shade of a young aspen tree about twenty yards ahead, a cloaked figure was sitting hunched over on the side of the road. Whoever it was had their hood pulled up and their patched cloak wrapped completely around them, and they almost looked more like a pile of old rags than a person, but even from here, I could see the light of their mana glowing in their chest.

  “We should see if they need help,” I said and I quickened my pace as I led the group forward.

  As we approached, the figure suddenly leapt up like a startled rabbit and tried to run, but their legs caught in the folds of his long cloak, and they crashed back to the ground without having gotten more than a few steps. Their chest heaved with panicked breaths as they cowered in the grassy ditch along the roadside, but even as I stood before them, it was impossible to see their face beneath the shadow of their drooping hood. I imagined it couldn’t have been very comfortable to be so bundled up with the weather as warm as it was, and I wondered why the stranger had chosen to dress like this. Even the hand that clutched the cloak around his neck was covered by a frayed old glove with the fingers cut out.

  “Are you alright?” I asked gently, wary of accidentally startling him again. It was difficult to resist the urge to peer beneath the hood into the stranger’s face, but he kept his head angled downward.

  “If you need food or something, we can help you,” I went on when the stranger didn’t respond.

  The stranger lifted his head then, and I saw that bandages covered the top part of his face. There was only a small gap for his eyes and mouth, and the little strips of exposed skin were bright red and puckered like he’d been severely burned. He was trembling violently, and he hadn’t moved again even to pick himself up from his sprawled position in the grass, as if he feared he’d face retaliation even for that. At first, I thought we’d simply surprised him, but I now realized he seemed genuinely afraid of us.

  “We don’t mean you any harm,” I assured him. I supposed that while our party wasn’t out of place within the walls of Ovrista, suddenly seeing a guild that consisted of three mages, an alchemist, a fierce-looking ladona archer, and a seven-foot-tall orc warrior might put a person on edge out here.

  The man still didn’t answer. He seemed to be trying to catch his breath, and his fingers were curled tightly around his cloak. Like his face, they appeared to have been burned and hastily bandaged.

  “Are you hurt?” I asked as I crouched down on the road. “We can help, my friend is a healer.”

  I glanced over to Aerin and nodded slightly at the man. She’d be able to heal even severe burns with ease.

  As Aerin came over and knelt next to me, the man’s pale blue eyes flicked nervously between us, but at last, he seemed to find his voice.

  “I have no money,” he said. His voice was reedy and slightly breathless.

  “That’s okay,” I said quickly before Aerin could try to start bartering. “We just want to help.”

  The man’s gaze flitted over to the rest of the guild who waited behind us, and his brow furrowed.

  “You’re travelers?” he asked.

  “We’re a guild,” Aerin replied. “The Shadow Foxes.” She spoke slowly, and I detected the hint of suspicion in her tone, but when I tried to catch her eye, she kept her gaze focused on the man before us.

  “Oh.” The man shifted slightly and pulled himself to his knees. When he spoke again, his tone was tinged with awe. “A guild, all the way out here, imagine that.”

  “You’d better let me take a look at those burns,” Aerin pressed. “The fresher the wound, the better I can heal it.”

  The man seemed not to have heard her.

  “Usually it’s just farmers out here,” he said. “Poor farmers.”

  “Do you need help or not?” Aerin asked, and I was surprised by her uncharacteristic abruptness.

  “Aerin,” Maruk said sternly.

  “If you’d prefer, I might have a salve that can help,” Lena offered.

  The man didn’t answer right away, and he glanced between us as though he was trying to make up his mind.

  Suddenly, Aerin stood.

  “We should go,” she said as she tugged on my hand. “He doesn’t need our help.” The healer met my questioning gaze with a firm look of her own, and my stomach tightened as I stood, too. Aerin could read auras, so if she had a reason to be suspicious of this man, I was going to trust her judgment.

  “Wait!” the man cried, and he half-stood as well. “Don’t go!”

  “Wha
t are you doing out here?” Lavinia demanded. The ranger already had her hand on her bow, but I wasn’t sure if she’d picked up on Aerin’s suspicion or if her actions were motivated by her own general distrust of strangers.

  “I - I was attacked,” the man answered hesitantly.

  “Who attacked you?” I asked.

  “Bandits,” the man answered in a voice barely above a whisper. “Not the usual kind. These were dressed in strange uniforms, and they had jars of smoke and fire--”

  Suddenly, the man leapt to his feet and pulled his other hand out of his cloak. I just had time to register the smoke bomb in his hand and pull Aerin with me back a step before he smashed the glass on the ground. Dark purple smoke billowed up at our feet with a cloyingly sweet smell.

  I dragged Aerin back further, but we’d both gotten a noseful of the smoke, and I could feel it beginning to fog my head.

  More glass smashed around us in a circle and eight clouds of the dark smoke bloomed. The others drew their weapons while Merlin darted between us with panicked chattering.

  “Don’t breathe in the smoke!” I warned as I pulled the edge of my cloak up to cover my nose and mouth and backed up toward the others.

  We were penned in a circle about thirty feet in diameter by the clouds, and as the smoke drifted away, eight figures stood in the place of the clouds, including the stranger we’d first encountered. In the space of a few seconds, he’d undergone an impressive transformation. His tattered cloak and bandages were gone, and he wore instead light armor, scarlet with gold embroidery in the design of a phoenix across the chest. The other bandits were similarly dressed, and they all wore shining bronze masks that resembled the faces of birds, though the man we’d first encountered was set apart by the red and purple feather affixed to his mask.

  I made a quick note of the bandits’ assortment of daggers and bows, and I realized with surprise that two of the eight were mages. In my experience, when a mage turned to a life of crime, he would usually sequester himself in a tower somewhere and try to raise the dead or weave curses.

  “For form’s sake, we’ll give you the opportunity now to drop your weapons and surrender,” the leader said. His voice was stronger now, distinctly more confident than his reedy tones from before. His mouth stretched into a lopsided smirk. “But I’m guessing you’ll want to fight it out, hmm?”

  “You got that right, asshole,” Lavinia growled, and she loosed the arrow that she had nocked.

  The arrow should have gone straight through the man’s throat, but at the last moment, he vanished in another puff of smoke.

  I heard a chuckle from the tree above, and we all craned our necks up to where the bandit leader was now perched among the branches.

  “You’ll have to be a little faster than that, dear,” he taunted. His swept his bright blue eyes over our party and his own people around us. “Well, you heard them, boys, they want a fight!”

  That was the only signal the others needed.

  I turned to the mage nearest to me and stopped the spell he’d been about to cast with a curl of my fist. He just had time to look surprised and let out an abrupt cough before I drew my dagger and drove the mana blade into his chest. He shuddered as his nerves lit up with an explosive burst of mana, and his eyes rolled back in his head as he fell to the dirt. I let him drop as I whirled to face the next opponent.

  Since manipulators weren’t supposed to exist, I had the additional advantage of surprise when battling other mages, but it quickly became clear that these bandits were seasoned fighters in their own right, and the rest of this fight wasn’t going to be as easy as that first blow.

  The second mage was my target, but I couldn’t pick him out in the frenzy before me. Clouds of smoke filled the air as the bandits smashed more vials against the ground and evaded the attacks of my guild members. Their flashy red armor suddenly seemed more appropriate, since they almost looked like circus performers by the way they leapt around.

  Even in such close quarters, the bandits nimbly avoided nearly everything from Aerin’s axe to Emeline’s fireballs, and trying to track them was like trying to keep an eye on one red ball out of seven that a juggler was tossing around.

  Maruk’s mana flared as he swept his larger shield out at the legs of one of the bandits in a move that would have knocked even an ogre off its feet, but the bandit vaulted off the orc’s shield and over his shoulders to land behind him. Before Maruk could regain his balance, the bandit shoved him forward, and the orc crashed to the ground.

  I moved to intercept the bandit just as Maruk rolled to his side and kicked the red-clad rogue squarely in the gut. For all the bandits’ agility, even this one hadn’t expected Maruk to counter like that, and Maruk’s foot sent him flying back.

  The orc was on his feet again in a moment, so I left him to finish off his opponent as I searched for the second mage again. I focused on the bandits’ mana, and then I saw him, a dozen feet away with Emeline.

  Emeline’s mana was bright, but she couldn’t cast her spell. The other mage had both arms raised toward her, and ice flooded my veins. He couldn’t be a manipulator. I hadn’t even been here for a year and I’d had more close calls with the Mage Academy than I was comfortable with. There was no way someone who’d lived here their whole life could have hidden their magic for so long.

  As I raised my hand toward him, though, I realized that his mana was the silver-white of an air mage, not like my mana, which was bright blue. At the same moment, I saw Emeline reach up toward her throat, and what the bandit mage was doing finally registered to me. As he moved his hands, almost like a potter shaping a lump of clay, he was creating a vacuum around Emeline. It wasn’t that she couldn’t cast, it was that even magical fire required oxygen to burn.

  I closed my hand into a fist and the air mage’s body jolted as I interrupted his mana. His eyes went wide, and he stumbled back, but a second later, a jet of flame arched through the air and hit him in the chest. The magical fire burst forth and enveloped the mage’s entire body in less than a second, and he barely had time to scream before he curled in on himself like a roasted autumn maple leaf.

  Emeline shot me a grateful look, and I nodded back to her before I turned back to the rest of the fight.

  Two bandits lay dead with arrows in their eye sockets, and even as I turned, Aerin planted her axe into the back of another that had been trying to dodge one of Lena’s own smoke bombs.

  There were two left. Maruk, Lavinia, and Merlin in the form of a large black dog were attempting to corner the bandit who had attacked Maruk earlier, but the leader was nowhere to be seen.

  At that moment, a smoke bomb exploded at my feet, and I felt a sharp pain on my left side, just beneath my ribs, as thick purple smoke clouded my vision.

  I heard Aerin call my name as I reached around and grabbed the bandit leader by the mask with my right hand.

  The bandit leader snarled as he clawed at my wrist, but I had my fingers stuck through his mask’s eyeholes and I wasn’t about to let go. I wrenched my right arm back as I pulled the bandit leader around in front of me and plunged my mana blade into his gut. His body twitched violently as every nerve lit up bright blue, and then he went limp. My fingers were still curled around his mask, and it came away as his body fell back into the dirt with a soft thump.

  “Gabriel!” Aerin was at my side in a second, and I winced as she pressed her hand against the deep cut in my side. A moment later, though, her mana flowed through my body like liquid sunshine, and I was comforted by the gentle chiming of bells as she healed me.

  “Thanks, Aerin,” I breathed as the redheaded elf finished healing me, and she pressed a kiss to my cheek before she went to tend to the others’ injuries as well.

  When I looked around, I saw that Maruk and Lavinia had taken care of the last bandit. Where minutes ago the road had been empty, it was now covered in scarlet-clad corpses.

  That tended to happen when assholes tried to take on the Shadow Foxes.

  I examined t
he mask in my hand, and that was when I noticed that there was a small slip of paper stuck to the inside. It had been carefully folded and glued on, obviously on purpose, and I frowned. Then I noticed the faint glimmer of a protective enchantment around it, and my frown deepened. Why keep this here, on the inside of a mask instead of in a pocket? What could it be that it needed a protective enchantment?

  I dispelled the enchantment, and very carefully, I pried the paper loose and unfolded it. As I read what was written on it in looping cursive, my stomach twisted.

  “Guys, look at this,” I said as I walked toward them. Lena looked up as she passed a potion bottle to Maruk, and Emeline came up to look over my shoulder at the paper. Aerin was healing a cut on Lavinia’s arm, but something about the graveness in my tone caused even the healer to pause in the middle of her work.

  “Those are all seals of noble houses in Ovrista,” Emeline noted. “Why would a bandit all the way out here have something like that?”

  “Look here,” I said, and I pointed to the name scrawled at the top. “The Firebirds. I guess that’s what these guys called themselves. But I don’t know what this means.” I gestured to a series of symbols along the right side of the page that appeared to correspond to each of the houses on the left. It was clearly some sort of cipher, but I had no idea how to decode it. Not at a glance, anyway.

  Aerin finished healing Lavinia’s arm, and the two women came over to look as well. Maruk and Lena followed and all my friends crowded around me.

  “What strange symbols,” Maruk remarked as he peered down at the paper. “Any idea what it means?”

  “Well,” I said finally. “They’re thieves. I’d be willing to bet this is a list of places they wanted to rob. And look at this.” At the bottom of the page was a stamped symbol of a swan in deep blue ink, and next to it were what I guessed were the names of other bandit groups. Finally, there were more symbols from the cipher. A chill settled in my gut. “I don’t think they were planning on doing it all alone.”

  Chapter 2

  I continued to review the swan-stamped paper on the way back to Ovrista in an attempt to decipher the code, though my effort was somewhat complicated by the fact that I only understood the common speech of this realm, and anyone who’d gone to so much trouble to encrypt a message like this might very well have also made it so that the translation would be in one of the rarer languages, some obscure gnomish dialect or runic oldspeak. Still, I did what I could to match up specific symbols and try to form words as we walked.