The weight of magic, p.13
The Weight of Magic, page 13
part #1 of Restriction Series
“What happened?”
“Just relax,” his father said.
Torian lay there, his head throbbing, afraid to move. And yet, he could hear others around him. It came from the soft shuffling of footsteps, the sound of breathing, and an occasional whimper.
Was somebody hurt?
He opened his eyes, but everything remained dark. He couldn’t move.
When he rolled over to heave again, pain worked through him so horribly that he passed out once more.
Coming around this time was different than before. The pain was still there, and his head still throbbed, though it did so with less ferocity than it had the last time. At least now he felt as if he might be able to fight through it and move without vomiting. There was a bit of light, along with the same haze that he had seen before. He heard coughing nearby. He rolled his head to see who was sitting near him and immediately wished that he hadn’t due to the sharp pain that followed.
“Father?” Torian barely got the word out.
“Hush,” his father’s soft voice said from nearby. “We need to keep quiet.”
“Where are we?” The only thing that Torian could tell was that he was out in the open. Not in the cottage. The sunlight coming down was early morning sun, and there was a hint of a cool breeze that carried more of that hazy dust and ash on it. He would have detected none of that in the cottage. Why wouldn’t his father have brought him inside?
“We’re in Sarot.”
“What happened?”
He tried to keep his voice soft and quiet, wanting to mimic the concern that his father obviously had. It still felt as if he talked too loud, but that might only come from the pounding in his head that made it difficult for him to tell much of anything else.
“We were attacked,” his father said.
“By who?”
But Torian wasn’t even sure if he needed his father to answer. He had his suspicions. The wind coming out of the east carried with it the storm and the thunder. The haze of ash and dust. The shadow wolves.
It had to be Rusav.
They had never pushed this deep into Navarin.
Why now?
“Just try to rest,” his father said.
“Rest? How can I rest? Shouldn’t we be getting up and getting ready to fight?”
“The fight is over.”
How could the fight be over? He had seen the strange man dressed all in gray, using power—but no patterns. That was the starkest thing.
Torian remembered Willa and Gaspel and Heshian all standing within the school courtyard, all of them focusing on the power they possessed as the attack had come. Had they taken out that strange man?
“We won?”
“No, Torian. We did not win.”
At that, Torian tried to move, shifting so that he could sit up, but his father pressed his hand on his shoulder. He finally looked over and saw his father’s bruised and bloodied face. He had a gash that had been bandaged on his brow, and blood stained his hair, his cheeks, and even the collar of his brown shirt. There were other bloodstains on his clothing, which left Torian wondering how badly his father had been injured.
“Mother? Liana?”
His father didn’t answer.
“What happened to them?” Torian said the words louder than he probably should have, and his father pressed his hand on his shoulder again, keeping him from moving, which might’ve been a good thing.
“They gathered the women and the girls.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“What’s going to happen?”
“It’s war, Torian. I don’t know what will happen to us. Nothing good.” His voice trailed off at the end.
Torian shook his father’s hand off his chest, and he managed to sit up. They were in the middle of a clearing, but it was no clearing that he had ever seen in town. As he swept his gaze around him, Torian began to understand why that was. The clearing hadn’t been there before. Buildings all around them had collapsed, leaving the town strewn with debris and dust that added to the ash in the haze. And so much had been lost.
He looked around him, seeing others that had been gathered together. Men and boys from Sarot. He found himself looking for Jensen but didn’t see him. Those who were here looked like his father, all injured in some way.
Rusav didn’t want to capture those from Navarin. They had always wanted to destroy. To cleanse. That was what they claimed they needed to do to reclaim these lands for their own.
“Do you know what happened to Jensen and Jakob?”
“I haven’t seen Jakob, but they gathered any with sahir talent as well. We haven’t seen them.”
Torian licked his lips again. He had not been gathered away.
But he suspected Dary and Jensen had been.
What about the other students? What would they do with them?
“What’s going to happen now?”
“We wait. Hopefully, they do nothing more than install their leaders and move on.”
Torian could tell from his father’s voice that he didn’t think that would be likely. And neither did Torian. There were stories from the original war where Navarin had split off from Rusav and how brutal their soldiers had been. They had swept through populated areas, cutting down men, women, and children with ruthless efficiency. They had not hesitated to do so. Historians claimed they feared those people would eventually grow up to create a threat, so they intentionally cut them down to stop them from becoming a threat.
But all they had done was create an enemy.
Unfortunately, the enemy had not developed enough to resist.
Torian shifted in his seat, looking around him until he caught sight of a tall man dressed in all gray standing near the edge of the clearing. That was one of the Rusavian soldiers. He saw no sign of a weapon, but perhaps they didn’t need any as they obviously had enough power to form bindings that had quickly ravaged all of Sarot.
“Do you know what happened to the teachers at the school? Willa and the others?”
“We don’t know,” his father said.
“Vand. It’s time.”
His father turned and looked up at Walter, an older blacksmith who had a shop on the northern edge of town. “Are you sure about this?”
“We are mostly unguarded. We only have that one that we can see, so we need to make our move. If we wait too long, there’s no telling what they will do to our women.”
“What are you going to do?” Torian asked.
Walter turned his focus on Torian. “You studied at the school?”
Torian nodded.
“He’s not going to be a part of this,” Torian’s father said. “This is for men. He’s still a boy.”
“I’m almost of age,” Torian countered. He wasn’t sure why he felt the urge to combat his father when it came to this, though if his father was only trying to protect him, Torian wanted to make sure that he had a chance to let others know that he could take care of himself.
“We could use someone like him, Vand. Even a boy who’s nearly a man. Especially someone who’s trained in the school with sahir.”
For a moment, Torian thought that his father might allow him to help, but then he shook his head, waving to the others near him.
“Not him. I’ve lost so much. I’m not willing to keep losing.”
Torian started to argue, but his father shot him a warning look, and he decided against it. There would be no way for him to convince his father that he should be allowed to be a part of whatever it was that they intended to do.
His father went with Walter, and they moved to one side of the pile of debris, leaving Torian alone. His body ached, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as the throbbing in his head. That continued to pound, leaving him wishing that he had some way that he might be able to quiet the steady throbbing that lingered in his mind. It reminded him of the thunder that had been threatening the town for the better part of a week or more.
Thunder that brought the attack.
The town looked to be mostly destroyed. From where he sat, he couldn’t see much other than the clearing and some of the other townsfolk. The entire town couldn’t have been destroyed.
Could it?
There had been the explosions and the heaving of the ground. Torian had to admit that it was possible that much of what he’d known had been destroyed. He needed to know.
Getting to his feet took more effort than it should have. His knees felt as if they were swollen, and from the pain that flowed into his back as he moved, he suspected that he’d been bruised there as well. He turned in place, looking everywhere around him, and only then did he fully appreciate just how much destruction had befallen Sarot.
The town was left in shambles.
In the distance, he noticed one building still standing, though Torian couldn’t tell anything about it. From where he stood, he couldn’t even tell which building it was, only that it was intact. Mostly. The wall seemed to have cracked, which suggested that it was stone rather than wood, which also meant that the building was one of the older structures in town.
It seemed impossible that it had been damaged. The older buildings had dozens of runic markers placed over the years by people who had skills that had been lost over time. Those markers should have protected the buildings. What did it mean that they had not?
Did it mean that Willa and Gaspel and Heshian had all fallen?
Not Willa. The others were skilled, having trained in the university and reaching fifth-tier status, but Willa was an even higher level than that. It seemed impossible to him that anything could’ve happened to her. No. Far more likely was that they had escaped before the town had fallen. Hopefully, to regroup and prepare for an attack.
That was what he told himself as he continued to look around.
Only he wasn’t sure that was the case.
“You need to sit down,” his father said, returning from the meeting with Walter and several of the other men of the town. He placed a hand on Torian’s arm and guided him toward the center of the clearing.
Torian followed. Walter stood near the edge of the clearing, seemingly casual, but there was a tension to his posture. He moved his fingers in one of the primary patterns. Torian hadn’t even known that Walter had trained at school, but there were quite a few people throughout town who had some basic education and some knowledge of the primary patterns. It was learning anything more complicated than that which was rare.
“What’s going on?” Torian asked.
“Don’t worry about it,” his father said.
“Something is happening. I see Walter over there—”
“Don’t pay any attention to him.”
“But he said that he and some of the others were going to—”
“You need to just stay here.”
“Father?”
His father squeezed his shoulders, forcing Torian to look up and meet his eyes. “I don’t know what’s going to happen here. I wish I did. But Walter is right. We can’t wait too long, as we don’t know what the Rusavians are going to do to us.”
“What do you plan?” Torian suspected what his father intended, but his father wasn’t a fighter any more than Walter and some of the others were trained sahir. It would be better that they have Torian come with them. At least he could access the first tier, even if he couldn’t do much beyond that. And if they had separated him from the other sahir, then either they didn’t know that he could use those patterns, or they didn’t view him as much of a threat to do so. Possibly the latter.
“You just need to sit down and wait. This will hopefully be over soon, and then we can figure out what they did with the rest of our people.”
His father squeezed his shoulder before stepping away from him.
They were going to make their move, and soon.
Torian could see that they were planning something, even if he didn’t know what they thought they might be able to do. The thought of his father being a part of it worried him.
He started toward his father when he saw a pair of the men on the opposite side of the grounds starting to move. They darted toward the far side, moving quickly and seemingly making a point of ignoring the shouts from another one of the guards that Torian hadn’t seen.
Then Walter darted forward.
He moved quickly for a man his age, but even in that, he wasn’t quick. Still, it seemed to Torian that what he tried to do was to add to the patterns, even if he was only using some of the primary patterns.
That wasn’t enough.
The soldier turned toward Walter.
With a sweep of his hand, the man withdrew a slender metal rod and whipped it in Walter’s direction. A curved blade erupted from the end of the rod, whistling as it did. A blast of power slammed into Walter, sending him flying backward, where he landed awkwardly. His leg twisted behind him, and his head formed a strange angle.
Walter didn’t get up.
The soldier looked around as if daring anybody to challenge, but none did.
The two men on the far side of the grounds darted back, but another explosive blast seemed to come from nowhere, slamming into both of them at the same time, and they were thrown back, much like Walter. One of the men groaned, not nearly as injured as Walter, while the other man lay moaning softly.
Torian tensed, half expecting that others who had been involved in Walter’s planning might make a move, but no one else did. That was probably for the best.
Nobody approached Walter.
It was almost as if everybody around them decided that getting too close to him would make them complicit. Even Torian’s father backed away, heading closer to him and pausing.
“Aren’t you going to check on him?”
“There’s nothing I can do for him,” Torian’s father said.
“What do you mean? He’s just…”
But as Torian watched, he realized that his father wasn’t wrong. It wasn’t that Walter wasn’t getting up because he was hurt. Walter wasn’t getting up because he was dead.
And as he looked at the attackers, Torian couldn’t help but marvel at the kind of power that their weapons possessed. It was nothing like their sahir could do. What they could do was easy. Fast. Brutal.
What chance did they have against weapons like that?
Chapter 15
A WILLING TEACHER
The day stretched onward slowly. The longer that Torian was at the camp, aware of the dangers to him, the more that it seemed as if aspects of the camp began to expand. There were more and more people brought into it. And here, he had thought that everyone who had survived the initial attack had already been brought into the camp, but that didn’t seem to be the case.
After a while, Torian got to his feet and tested to make sure that he could move without falling and found that he could. His father stayed close to him, and every so often, he would glance over to make sure Torian was okay before heading off and talking with several of the other men, but always returning to Torian.
“What are you doing?”
His father looked around nervously. “Planning on how to get out of here.”
“Is that even safe?” Having seen what happened to Walter, Torian couldn’t imagine doing anything to face the same fate.
“We can’t stay captives,” he said. “We need to find your mother and sister.”
At the mention of them, Torian realized that he had barely thought about what had happened to them. They had been separated, and now he was left wondering what could have happened to them.
The sky was gray and overcast, matching his mood. There had been no further thunder, no rumbling, and nothing to suggest that they had a storm coming, but he worried that they would be caught out in the open if another one did come. In the time that they’d been here, there had been no sign of ravens or wolves.
“Did anybody see the man who destroyed most of town?” Torian asked when his father came back to him at one point. “I only ask because if he’s with the soldiers, we won’t be able to do anything. I’ve never felt anything like it.”
His father eyed him strangely. “There were dozens of those soldiers in town. They all worked together to destroy the town. It wasn’t just one.”
“But there was one who led them,” he said.
Torian was certain of it. He knew what he had seen, but in the time that he’d been awake, which admittedly was not that long, he had not seen any evidence of that man. Still, the memory came to him.
“He was dressed all in gray. And he used power unlike anything that I’ve ever seen before. More than even Willa.”
It was his eyes that had bothered him the most. There had been something hard and angry about them, but more than that, there had been a glowing intensity that had radiated something of a desire for destruction.
“Just rest. We’ll find our chance.”
Torian wasn’t willing to just rest. As his father spoke to some of the other men, he meandered around the clearing. He used it as an opportunity to check on several of the others, looking for other familiar faces. There was no sign of Jakob.
He and Cory had been outside of town when it had been attacked. Maybe they were safe. At least, that was what Torian told himself, even though he knew that it was unlikely that his friend would have been safe from any attack. They often traveled east, which meant that they may have encountered the soldiers sooner than they had.
A pile of debris with legs sprawled out caught his attention.
Torian looked around. None of the soldiers, and there was a pair of them nearby, paid any mind to his wanderings. It was difficult to tell where he was in town as most of the buildings had been destroyed, leaving it as little more than rubble without landmarks to follow. No one had bothered to check on the person buried beneath the rubble, though.
Torian crouched near the legs, then he started to move some stones. Some of them had runic markers traced into them. That wasn’t uncommon in the town, as quite a few stones had runic markers, but this one felt different and distinct. He moved a few more stones and sucked in a sharp breath. The muscular man buried beneath the rubble could be only one person.
“Gaspel?”
