God of Magic 3 Read online

  I wasn’t sure how long it was, a few seconds, a few minutes, before the ogre’s cries of anguish subsided and his body curled into the fetal position. Almost as soon as he went still, the flames began to subside, and when Emeline stepped forward and raised a trembling hand, the last of the fire was extinguished, and all that was left was the ogre’s charred corpse, a few tendrils of dark smoke, and the stench of burnt flesh.

  Huddled on the floor like it was, the ogre’s body seemed to me to be smaller than he’d been in life. I tried to fix on that observation and not on the way the ogre’s burned skin had cracked and flaked away from the underlying tissue in several places to expose the pale bone beneath, or the way his eyes dripped down his cheek like two runny eggs melted in their sockets.

  As I looked away from the ogre’s body, I met Emeline’s gaze. The panthera mage’s green eyes were wide, and she trembled where she stood, her hand still stretched out toward the smoking mass of flesh on the floor.

  I moved over to her, careful to step around the shards of glass. As I placed myself between her and the ogre, I put my hands on both of her arms to steady her.

  “Hey,” I whispered, “are you okay?”

  She drew in a shaky breath, then smiled.

  “I did it,” she said quietly, as though she could barely believe it herself. “I actually did it. I passed.”

  “You did it,” I confirmed with a smile of my own. “You slew the ogre. That was the hardest part.”

  I sensed Urim and Sulla behind me, and I knew the orcs must be anxious to see what sort of trophies they could claim from the fallen ogre’s body, so I pulled Emeline aside and guided her toward one of the armchairs that had survived the battle. Merlin, back in puca form, followed and rubbed up against Emeline’s leg.

  “I’m okay,” the dark-haired mage insisted, but she reached out to steady herself on the back of the chair, anyway. “We still need to find the books.”

  There was a pop before the wet sound of tearing flesh filled the air as Sulla and Urim twisted off one of the ogre’s charred arms behind us.

  “We can loot and dismember after we’ve found those texts,” I said sternly as I threw the orc pirate a look. “Keep looking.”

  “Aye, aye,” Urim replied as he swung the ogre’s detached arm up so that its twisted fingers met his forehead in a salute. Sulla smacked him playfully between the shoulder blades, and the pair laughed heartily as they dropped the arm and returned to the shelves to search for the books.

  Maruk, Lavinia, and Lena joined them while Aerin picked her way through the debris over to Emeline and me.

  “You’re not hurt, are you?” the healer asked, her brow furrowed. When Emeline shook her head no, Aerin turned to me. “Gabriel, I saw it hit you.”

  I touched my jaw where the ogre had clipped me. I’d forgotten about it until Aerin brought it up, but as I pressed it, I could tell that a bruise was beginning to form.

  “Here, let me,” Aerin offered in a gentle voice, and as she reached up to cup the side of my face lightly in her hand, I glimpsed the pale golden light of her mana and heard the soft chime of bells. As soon as the elf’s fingers brushed over my skin, the pain in my jaw evaporated, and I knew from having seen Aerin work before that there wouldn’t even be a spot of discoloration to show for the injury.

  As she was about to pull away, I caught Aerin’s wrist and held her hand in place against my cheek. She blinked in confusion, but as I leaned in to kiss her, I felt her smile against my mouth before she returned the kiss.

  “You know, you don’t have to get knocked around by an ogre to get me to kiss you,” Aerin teased when we broke apart. “You can just ask.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I replied with a smile.

  “Hey, the author we’re looking for!” Lena called from over by one of the shelves across the room. “It was Corcan, was it not?”

  “That’s right,” I told her. “Did you find them?”

  Lena stood up on her tiptoes and pulled two thick volumes down from the shelf, then brought them over to us.

  “They got a little burnt,” she said as she brushed at the old spines where a few specks from flying embers had burnt the faded leather. “But I think they’re okay. It’s too bad the leather was not treated with some sort of flame resistant material...” The alchemist’s eyes lit up. “Something like that would be easy to make, you’d just need salamander saliva and a binding agent, perhaps an oil, and then you could coat all of your books in it to make them flame-proof.”

  “That’s not bad,” Aerin mused. “Lots of mages and collectors would be interested in something like that, but we could expand our market a bit and make a fortune selling fireproofing armor polish to the rest of the guilds, too. Emeline, you could help us with the marketing for that. It’d look much more impressive if we had a mage involved instead of just waving a torch around.”

  “She just killed an ogre, Aerin,” I teased as I took the books from Lena and passed them to Emeline. “Let her catch her breath before you start recruiting her.”

  Emeline gave a shy laugh and clutched the books to her chest. “You’d really want me to help you? I mean, I know I can be kind of clumsy.”

  “Of course!” Aerin replied enthusiastically. “That’s even better, that way it won’t look too staged. We just need to figure out who we’re going to set on fire. Probably--“

  “Don’t even finish that sentence, Aerin,” Maruk warned. “I absolutely draw the line at being set on fire.”

  Aerin blew out a breath. “Oh, come on, Maruk, you’re the best one for the job.”

  “By which you mean I’m the tallest, and therefore attract the most attention when you’re doing your little displays in the market,” Maruk muttered. “Have Lavinia do it, I’m sure the public will find her just as interesting.”

  “Oh, no,” Lavinia cut in, “No way am I going to be the mascot for Aerin’s fireproof armor polish.”

  “The thing is, Maruk, Lavinia just doesn’t have your natural charm or flair for the dramatic,” Aerin argued. “You know how to draw the crowds and keep their attention! It’s an art, really.”

  “I dare say you could get everyone’s attention no matter who it is you set on fire,” Maruk replied with a frown.

  “We can figure out the marketing later,” I said with a chuckle. “We still need to deliver Yvaine her ring and turn in the bounty for these books so Emeline can pass her final exam, and we should check out the loot around here before we go.”

  The prospect of loot proved to be a sufficient distraction from their friendly argument, and the group broke up in search of valuables. While Sulla and Urim set to dismembering the ogre’s corpse and arguing over pieces of its skeleton, I took a final pass at the shelves for any books I could use, and I was glad to find a small notebook filled with handwritten spells.

  Like most of these sort of books, which was to say, the illegal ones, it was small, and the author’s handwriting was smudged in places, but a quick perusal was enough to assure me of its value to me. There were a few diagrams that looked like they pertained to illusion magic and several other illustrations that depicted the way mana traveled through the body. The latter seemed to relate specifically to blood magic, but I thought there might still be something that could aid a manipulator like me and slipped the little book into my pack.

  Lena picked through an assortment of unusual-looking plants that the ogre had had growing in a windowsill and packed them carefully among her own belongings. When she noticed me watching her, she smiled.

  “These are rare herbs,” she informed me. “I should be able to make some wonderful potions with them.”

  “Check this out,” Lavinia called from across the room, and she turned with her fists up to show off a set of dark leather wristguards that she’d taken from a display mount.

  “They’ve got some orcish writing on them,” the ladona woman went on. “Bet they’re enchanted or something.”

  Maruk took the archer’s wrist and turned it
so he could read the etching on the wristguards.

  “Oh, yes, these are the closest orcs have to jewelry,” he explained, “and it says here that these will make the wearer smell of dragon sweat and boar musk.” He frowned and sniffed the air. “I think they’re working.”

  Lavinia snatched her hand back. “It does not say that!“

  “No,” Maruk relented with a grin. “They’re not enchanted, but they were the childhood bracers of Graguhm the Flayer, apparently. I suppose that’s why they can even fit you.”

  “Ah, too bad,” Sulla put in. “Dragon sweat and boar musk is a good combination. We bathe in it for celebrations and special occasions.”

  “What sort of things do orcs celebrate?” Lavinia asked.

  “Oh, you know, regular life milestones,” Urim replied. “When you come of age, when you get married, when you lead your first raid and slaughter everyone in your rival’s village, things like that.”

  By the time we’d finished scouring the ogre’s keep, everyone was leaving with something. Maruk was delighted to discover that not only did the ogre share his taste in fashion but that several items in the ogre’s wardrobe could fit him. In addition to a new pair of gloves, he took a fine woolen coat that Aerin said had been enchanted, and a few tests revealed that the fabric couldn’t be cut by any of our metal blades.

  Aerin had taken a small purse for herself that had the unique magical property of being able to hold much more in volume than its size would suggest. What was more, it was lined with the same fabric as Maruk’s coat, which meant it couldn’t be cut or torn open. The elf had also managed to sniff out a fair amount of gold and silver coins that we agreed to split with Sulla and Urim, and we all left richer and better supplied than we’d come.

  With the actual work behind us and the prospects of rest and rewards ahead, we were all in good moods as we met up with Rezo again and started on the road back to Yvaine’s estate. With the smell of well-done ogre still clogging my nostrils, I opted to take the first stretch on foot to get some fresh air, and Emeline joined me. She hadn’t been very keen on taking anything for herself from the ogre’s keep at first, but she’d relented when she discovered a few editions of a particular adventure serial, and she flipped through one of the books as we walked behind the carriage.

  “I haven’t read this one yet,” she said. “They went out of print ages ago. I used to go down to the bookshop every week to see if any merchants had brought by used copies, but no one ever had.”

  “That was a lucky find,” I remarked.

  “Maybe it was fate,” Emeline replied with a smile. “You took some books, too, didn’t you? What did you get?”

  “Oh, just a spell book,” I answered casually and hoped the mage woman wouldn’t ask me to elaborate.

  Emeline didn’t ask what kind of spell book, but her silence then was of little comfort to me. The air between us felt slightly charged, tense. I had half a mind to try to bring up another topic, to ask Emeline about her favorite foods or what sort of music she liked, anything but magic, but before I could speak, Emeline turned to me.

  “Back at the keep, I saw you create that clone,” she said bluntly. “At the swamp, too. Then I thought it was water magic, or maybe a type of light magic. That’s rare, but I’ve heard about mages who could do that, play tricks with shadows, and you’d said you practiced a lot of different things.”

  She paused and looked away, but I said nothing. She hadn’t actually accused me of being a manipulator yet, and I wasn’t about to admit it on the chance that she might still have reasoned through to another explanation, as slim as that chance was.

  Still, dread twisted in my gut.

  So far, I’d tried to be careful about how I used my magic around Emeline. I’d tried to be subtle, to take advantage of crowds and the chaos of battle. I’d planned to claim my mana blade was simply enchanted and excuse the illusions as clever tricks of light magic, as Emeline herself had suggested. All the same, I’d known since the beginning that this couldn’t last, not with Emeline fighting alongside us, and I’d been waiting for this moment.

  “But back at the keep, you were preventing the ogre from shapeshifting, weren’t you?” Emeline asked finally.

  “Yes,” I answered honestly.

  “Controlling another creature’s magic like that is something only manipulators can do.” Emeline’s eyes didn’t leave my face.

  Before, when I’d played out this conversation in my head, I’d come up with arguments as to why Emeline should keep my secret, appeals to logic and compassion, whatever I could think of, but now they all seemed ridiculous. How could I hope to undo a lifetime of the Mage Academy’s conditioning in a single conversation? How could I challenge the centuries-old rhetoric of the powers that be and come out on top?

  So instead, I simply asked, “Are you going to tell them?”

  Emeline frowned, and her eyes flicked down to the ground as her jaw worked. My heart hammered as I watched her and waited for her response, and though it was only a few seconds, it felt like an eternity before the panthera mage shook her head.

  “You helped me recover those books and slay the ogre so that I could complete my training,” she said at length. “No one else in that tower would have done that for me. It would be pretty awful to repay you by turning you in... and well, you don’t seem like an evil sorcerer hell-bent on enslaving the rest of the magical world.”

  “I’m not,” I told her. “I’m just trying to survive here and help my guild succeed.”

  “I know,” Emeline said then, much to my surprise. “I can see how much you care for them all. You’re a good person.” She dropped her gaze and fiddled with the hem of her cloak.

  “I never really believed all those things the Mage Academy teaches about manipulators,” she continued in a quieter voice. “I mean, you’re not even allowed to say things like that back at the university, but it never seemed right to blame everyone for what a few mages did hundreds of years ago. Besides, you can’t help being a manipulator, it’s not as if you’re a blood--” She snapped her mouth shut suddenly. Her face had gone pale.

  “A blood mage?” I finished.

  I’d learned that while there was some room for versatility, mages were typically born with one of three inclinations toward either healing, elemental magic, or mana manipulation. Of course, the Mage Academy had spent the last century systematically eradicating anyone in the latter category, but Emeline was right. I couldn’t help being a manipulator any more than she could help being an elemental mage, but some magic was different. Necromancy. Blood magic.

  No one was born a blood mage, and it was a truly dark path to choose.

  Though it wasn’t something I had the appetite to study in earnest, even in a strictly academic sense, I’d gleaned a little about blood magic from books and scrolls that we’d recovered from rogue mages that the guild had hunted down. Blood supplemented a mage’s mana and allowed them to cast significantly stronger spells than other mages, spells which almost invariably were meant to harm another living thing or even attempt to control them physically. It wasn’t the sort of thing anyone picked up as a casual hobby.

  Emeline didn’t look at me and didn’t confirm that that was what she’d been about to say, but it was easy enough to guess. Based on the ashen pallor of her face and the almost determined way that she now fidgeted with her cloak, I guessed the horrors of blood magic had not been skimmed over in her lessons at the university.

  “I just meant, it’s more like--“

  She broke off again and pursed her lips for a few moments as she collected her thoughts. “Well, it’s like they treat me and my brother, kind of, because we’re panthera. They don’t all say it, but I see the way they look at us and whisper when we pass. I know that’s not exactly what you’re going through, I just mean... well, I kind of get it, about being different, and having people judge you before they get to know you. I won’t tell anyone you’re a manipulator.”

  “Thank you,” I replied quie
tly with a rush of relief.

  Silence stretched between us again, but this time it was the peaceful sort of quiet that exists between friends. I felt lighter now that I’d been able to be open with Emeline about who I was, and I was relieved, of course, that she wasn’t afraid of me and that she wouldn’t turn me in.

  “When do you think we’ll get back to Yvaine’s... uh...” Emeline frowned. “I want to say castle, but I’m not sure that’s right.”

  I laughed. “I think it’s technically a chateau.”

  “Right, that,” Emeline replied with a smile.

  “I’d guess in another hour,” I answered as I tried to visualize the route in my mind. “If you want to know for sure, Lavinia has the map, but Rezo probably knows, too.”

  “I don’t think either of them would be very happy with me if I made them stop the carriage so I could ask when we’d get back,” she said with a shy chuckle.

  “Probably not,” I admitted.

  Emeline and I spent the next hour chatting. She told me stories about her classes and friends at Ovrista’s Mage Academy, and I told her about my life. She was particularly interested in learning about my former job as a computer programmer, which I found somewhat challenging to explain to someone with no concept of what a computer was. It made for a pleasant conversation nonetheless, and any lingering apprehension I had over my confession to Emeline had evaporated by the time we reached Yvaine’s home again.

  Emeline was sweet, and a talented mage, not to mention beautiful. I knew she wanted to join a guild after she graduated, and I decided that once we turned in the texts to the Mage Academy, thus fulfilling our bounty and marking the completion of Emeline’s final exam, I would ask her to join us.

  Chapter 12

  When we arrived at Yvaine’s estate that evening, we looked like quite a different party than the one that had set out to retrieve a ring and defeat an ogre just a few days ago. We were scruffy, travel-worn, and in the pirate orcs’ cases, covered in old blood stains, but Yvaine was the picture of courtesy when she received us into her home again.