The Spellmonger Series: Book 02 - Warmage Read online

  Warmage

  Book 2 Of the Spellmonger Series

  By Terry Mancour

  Copyright 2012 © Terry Mancour

  As always, special thanks to my beautiful wife,

  Laurin Council Mancour

  The Alshari Wilderlands

  Dedication:

  To my brothers,

  Chester L Matthew Mancour

  And

  Andrew Luke Mancour

  Kin, Comrades, Allies, Friends, Alibis,

  All that brothers should be,

  and so much more than I could ask for.

  Chapter One:

  The Slaughter at Grimly Wood

  Grimly Wood, Late Summer

  I surveyed the battlefield at Grimly Wood from horseback, looking out over the heads of the formations of infantry and the clusters of light cavalry, hearing the sounds of a thousand suits of armor rattle and hundreds of horses complaining about their burdens. I looked toward the distant line of the foe, barely visible in the mists and shadows that haunted this dour little land, and I had but one thought:

  I really had to pee.

  I should have gone earlier, I knew, but I was too worried about the battle to take the time. That was understandable: it was the first battle in which I was in command of the Ducal forces, and I was as nervous as a virgin on her wedding night. I had gotten little sleep the night before, and when I was awakened by my trusty servant an hour before dawn to hear scouting reports, I was still too busy to tend to my personal needs as messengers came and went and decisions had to be made. I’d managed to eat couple of camp biscuits with a rasher of bacon washed down with a big mug of weak beer but that was as much food as I’d managed – and now that beer was haunting me in an increasingly uncomfortable fashion.

  I should have gone before I donned my armor, because once you put it on there’s no easy way to pee without removing a good portion of it. I had even stopped when that last chain skirt was being strapped around my waist and almost went, but then Captain Rogo had come with important news about the scouts, and I postponed it again.

  By the time I mounted Traveler, I realized I was in dire straits.

  I should know better. I’m not just some petty lordling elevated to command through favoritism or accident of birth. I was a trained warrior, a master wizard, and a veteran warmage of the bloody Farisan Campaign – not to mention a survivor of the hopeless Siege of Boval Vale.

  I knew I was risking certain distraction and possible illness, a condition the healers call “belly rot” – what happens when a man’s intestines or bladder is full when he sustains a wound to the lower abdomen. One of the first things they teach you in Basic Infantry Training (which, despite my magical profession I had been obliged to endure) is to “lighten your load” before you step onto the battlefield.

  This was a particularly important battlefield, too, and a particularly important battle. It wasn’t a decisive engagement, really, but a sustained skirmish which we were almost certain to win. But what happened on this battlefield and how would set the course for the many, many battles to come, I knew. This was the first time that the encroaching gurvani were being faced with a foe who not only expected them, but who knew what they were dealing with.

  This lightning-fast campaign was but the opening salvo between two titanic powers: on our side was the massed professional military aristocracy of the Five Duchies, stout warriors with bright swords and snorting steeds and the favor of the gods (or so we told ourselves).

  On the other was the gurvani horde of thousands – hundreds of thousands, actually. Gurvani were known as the Mountain Folk in some places, scrugs in others, but they were usually known as goblins – ‘gurvani’ was the name they called themselves. The average specimen stood four to five feet tall, covered in black hair, with a face like a terrier crossed with a pig. They’re as smart as most human beings. They use iron and practice warfare. They have a tribal culture that sticks to the mountains or remote valleys. Ordinarily gurvani were peaceful, or at least not warlike. Their warrior societies spar with each other to solve inter-tribal disputes. A few tribes raid human settlements to steal chickens or a pig or a bushel of potatoes, but for close to two hundred years even that was rare.

  Until now. Now they were led by a kind of super-shaman. The ancient undead head of a defiant shaman who led the last major war between my folk and theirs, to be more precise.

  His name had been Shereul, when he was alive. Two centuries before he had led the last major organized resistance to human settlement of the northwest of the rustic Duchy of Alshar, where it abutted the Minden Range. He had lost several battles against the Alshari knights and their shining lances, and sued for peace. . At a truce meeting between him and the knights, he had been betrayed and slain in the sacred valley of his people, so that we could settle their lands. To add insult to injury, they chopped off his head and put it on a pike while they systematically cleared out the sacred valley of the goblins by slaughtering everyone in sight. Since then, the gurvani had been dispossessed from their sacred valley and their sacred caves and Shereul wasn’t very happy about that

  Now he was just called the Old God by the goblins (we called him, more accurately, the Dead God) and he wasn’t just undead – which would have been interesting enough, thaumaturgically speaking. He was also encased in a perfect sphere of a peculiar kind of green amber, known to scholars as Irionite. It’s absolutely rare, a translucent stone that shimmers like an emerald in the sunlight and is lighter in your hand than you’d expect. It’s magically potent – actually, that’s an understatement. It’s magically profound. A tiny shard a centimeter wide can give most magi almost unlimited power. I’ve got a perfect sphere of it three centimeters wide, which makes me an extremely formidable warmage.

  But irionite not only animated Shereul’s thoughts, the huge mass of the stuff encapsulated his entire brain, giving the Dead God truly divine levels of magical power. How powerful? Just his existence is enough to threaten the nature of Reality itself in his proximity. Using that power he had secretly raised an army of almost a million gurvani back in the depths of the Minden Range and then launched a genocidal war on us.

  I guess I shouldn’t leave that part out. It’s pretty important. It’s why I was here, about to slaughter a bunch of hairy goblins at a misty, rocky little fief in northern Alshar called Grimly Wood. It was late summer, now, almost autumn, and as I sat on my horse and tried to distract myself from my over-full bladder with reflections of my life and its purpose, I couldn’t help but realize that it had been an eventful summer. Hells, it had been an eventful year.

  The previous autumn I was a spellmonger in a quiet mountain village called Minden’s Hall, in a peaceful little valley stuffed full of happy peasants and contented cows, far to the west. I was doing a pretty good job of curing warts and casting love spells and making hens lay more prodigiously, while trying to forget about my service in arms, when the Dead God decided the time was right to launch his very inconvenient genocidal horde of goblins on an unsuspecting humanity – and he picked Minden’s Hall for the honor of first slaughter.

  And the first item on their agenda was the conquest of the blind valley of Boval Vale in which I was living. It had once belonged to them, had some deep religious significance to them, and was also the perfect staging area for a wider war against the scourge of humanity in the Five Duchies.

  Shereul wasn’t just relying on his magical innate power and half a million goblins pouring in from secret mountain caverns to conquer us; he had also given to an elite corps of magic-using gurvani shamans shards of irionite chipped from his sphere. Each one made the shaman the match of any warmage. Luckily their
skills were crude. But their enthusiasm and the sheer power of the stones left the control of Boval Vale never in doubt. The local lord, who had some inkling that his generously large castle would someday have to defend against vindictive goblins his ancestors had betrayed, conned me into staying to protect the villagers and defend his indefensible fief from the inevitable conquest.

  I fought like hell those few desperate weeks. I won my own little chunk of Irionite, endured a siege, and met some magical Tree Folk (non-humans, like the gurvani. Unlike the gurvani, they generally don’t want to kill us), found a girlfriend, knocked her up, founded an elite unit of irionite-augmented warmagi, led numerous covert missions to harass our besiegers, led a peasant’s revolt against the rightful lord of the Vale, and ended up saving almost everyone using a powerful spell through a mystical tear in the fabric of the universe fueled by a four-hour long session of magically powerful sex. With my ex-girlfriend.

  Of course, I couldn’t escape through a portal that I was holding open, so I got stranded at the castle with my warmagi comrades and only narrowly escaped with my life, mostly because the Tree Folk figured I needed to warn the Five Duchies about what we were about to get pounded with.

  And that’s how I spent my summer. As I said, it was eventful.

  Ishi’s tits, I had to pee.

  Things had been almost calm since the great escape from Boval Vale. No one tried to kill me, I just travelled a lot. After we warmagi regrouped and celebrated the unlikely fact that we were still alive, we all agreed that the invasion deserved the utmost attention from those in power, and we needed to start pushing the Dukes of Alshar and nearby Castal to raise a defense of the realm. I split them up and sent them on various missions, and then I made my way back to where I had sent the rest of the villagers, the grounds of the magical school I (and my ex-girlfriend) had attended. What a spell had done in the blink of an eye had taken two weeks by horse.

  By the time I got there, the refugees from Boval Vale had all been relocated to a ducal castle fifty miles up-river, and after thoroughly debriefing my old masters at the academy, warning them of the imminent danger and showing off my new witchstone (that’s what the peasants call Irionite), I had to spend another seven days on a barge up-river to make a similar report to the Authorities, namely His Grace, the Duke of Castal, who was spending his summer at his cool riverside northern palace, Wilderhall.

  I arrived just in time to be summoned to a full Ducal council to explain the situation to Duke Rard of Castal, who was suddenly coping with a full-blown invasion on his frontier when he had planned to be hawking and fishing and hunting. Duke Lenguin of Alshar – where Boval Vale sent its tribute and pledged its fealty – had received two other Alshari warmagi from my unit to warn him. Duke Lenguin, who was likewise in his summer palace at picturesque Vorone, had a reputation as a connoisseur of fine wines and had an excellent knowledge of hunting hawks, but he had never been to war.

  I was born in Castal, myself, so I went to the Duke of Castal not only because Castal was the next Duchy that would have to contend with the invasion, but because by all accounts Rard IV was a wise, just, and responsible leader of men while his brother-in-law Lenguin was . . . not.

  That being said, it still took a while to convince Duke Rard and his ruling council that I knew what I was talking about, and even longer before he appreciated the magnitude of the threat, and even longer for him to grant the resources and troops necessary to face the threat. The Dead God and his furry minions weren’t just another goblin uprising you could throw some local knights at, after all. They were employing battlefield magics that no baronial court mage or common warmagi could hope to counter.

  The Duchy needed me and my newly-augmented warmagi, they just had to see it. They were reluctant, especially when I named my price, but in the end they came around, after over a week of me playing at intrigue and court politics. Then there had been problems with the Magical Censorate, and an irate meeting with the Censor General, who wasn’t at all happy about recent developments and expressed that displeasure with a warrant for my head, but in the end, after many things were decided and many secrets were revealed, I prevailed.

  Now I had in my war chest a warrant and commission naming me Special Marshal of Castal, and another one from Alshar, and over three-thousand men to lead into bravely into battle. I had been ordered to conduct an expeditionary raid into the vanguard of the invasion of northern Alshar to see . . . well, to see if the horde had any chance of being defeated. A force of three thousand troops wasn’t enough to even make a dent in the legions that were marauding across Alshar, but that wasn’t our purpose. I was here to make it look like Duke Rard of Castal was Doing Something, instead of sitting back and waiting to see if the incompetent Alshari could handle it alone.

  Lucky me. Three weeks later, here I was, on horseback, in the field, bravely leading my men into battle while trying hard not to think about how badly I had to pee.

  Our force had moved out from our staging area at the village of Cleston, the last one in Castal, and had marched northwest as far and as fast as we could. We stuck to the Great Western Road at first, but soon after crossing the marker that delineated where Castal stopped and Alshar began, we moved off the road and headed out over-country. The roads were getting too clogged with fleeing civilians, anyway, and for lack of anything more productive to do the Alshari Duke at Vorone was drafting every man he could get his hands on. I badly wanted to avoid getting sucked into another round of court politics, so we avoided an unpleasant diplomatic incident and ranged northwest through the scenic Alshari Wilderlands.

  The further from the road we went, the more we saw signs of the invasion – peasant refugees on the road or crossing fields, nervous merchants moving stock to more easterly locations, priests relocating to sister temples across the river. The local lordlings were shutting themselves in their castles and sending what men they could spare to Vorone. I’m sure we looked like just another column of mercenaries.

  We had crossed through two little fiefs without incident, and as far as the tiny lordship known as Grimly Wood (comprised of about twenty square miles of scrub forest, discouraged fields and rocky hills in the bosom of the Wilderlands) before we encountered the first direct evidence of the invasion: smoke on the horizon in three or four places.

  Soon after that we had a couple of skirmishes between our scouts and theirs. I was pretty certain we’d hit the tip of the spear of their invasion. Or one of them. The scant dispatches that had reached Wilderhall before I left indicated that there were at least three and possibly as many as five columns of goblins marching from Boval now, each legion comprised of upward of ten thousand. Each seemed to have a different task, but all were bent on looting, raiding, and killing along the way. Their stated aim was to kill every human in their path: men, women, and children.

  I tried not to dwell on that. Needing to pee helped.

  Grimly Wood was nearly deserted, because your average peasant has a lick of common sense and went elsewhere at the first sign of trouble. The decrepit motte-and-bailey Castle of Grimly Wood (home and seat of House Grimly, the head of which, Sir Geston of Grimly, was still holding forth – because your average petty noble doesn’t have a lick of common sense) was fortified and ready to receive our people if the battle turned into a rout. I didn’t think that was a likely possibility.

  I had taken counsel the night before last, using my arcane powers to scout ahead and measure the strength of our foe. I had a pretty good idea of the enemy’s composition. Warmagic is good for that. We were in luck, in that it seemed to be an outlier of a larger force. There were roughly seven hundred lightly-armed goblins in the dense woods of Grimly Wood, more of a marauding mob than an infantry unit.

  They had found their way into the thickest part of the wood at dawn. It was a stand of trees too twisted to be timbered. They probably liked it because it was dank and dark and foreboding, choked into shadow by neglect and overgrowth. It’s not that they have bad taste. Goblins are noc
turnal, and prefer such places to sleep during the heat of the bright day. Plus they have the advantage of being largely cavalry-proof. Goblins don’t ride horses. And horses don’t like goblins.

  But I didn’t let their defensive position worry me. If there was ever going to be an easy victory, it would be here. We had the advantage in almost every way. We couldn’t lose. So the previous night when I realized we could strike and be victorious, I called a quick council, hammered out a simple battle plan, ordered the men readied, the castle prepared, and certain magical defenses and preparations made.

  So here I was. Ready to attack.

  And I really had to pee.

  “Marshal Spellmonger!” one of the mercenaries called to me – Ancient Fargal, if I recalled correctly, from the Orphan’s Band of light infantry – a big, lumbering hulk of a man built more for plate armor than a bowman’s jack. He spoke in a wide Wilderland drawl. “Scouts report most of the furry bastards are in loose formation now, at the north end of the wood. Lots of spears. Some have hung back deeper in the wood, though, milord.”

  “The spears are for the horses,” I nodded. “Probably looted them across Alshar. But I doubt they really know how to use them yet. Gurvani use javelins, not thrusting spears, and certainly not pikes. Behind and above them you can expect the shaman and chief, where they can direct the battle in safety,” I decided out loud. “Expect to see a bodyguard of about ten for each of them.”

  “I’ll alert the men, milord,” he promised.

  That shaman had me almost worried. I’d seen him during my field-scrying, or at least glimpsed the spark of his shard of irionite. The Dead God had been giving out robin egg-sized chunks of irionite to the goblin shamans like it was candy in preparation for the war, and while they were undoubtedly potent devices, the shamans themselves were very limited in the kinds of spells they could cast. Irionite gave you power, but it didn’t give you the imagination or the technical tools to use it effectively. It’s a matter of sophistication. Technically speaking, we human, Imperially-trained warmagi were miles ahead of them in technique. It might prove to be one of our only real advantages.