The Sorcerer

In which I meet two sorcerers. One is a menacing, mysterious figure who seems to blend into the shadows; the other is Ghall.

Chapter IV: The Sorcerer

I concealed myself in the doorway to catch my breath. My heart pounded in my ears; I could scarcely see in the darkness; I panicked, and Ghall’s deep, sonorous voice echoing in the now sealed chamber didn’t help me. For a while, as Sir Gerrick and the sorcerer traded rambling introductions, I couldn’t think; I could scarcely force myself to breathe. As an exercise, I tried to make some sense of the war of words unfolding in the chamber; but all I could notice was the quality of the speakers’ voices. Ghall’s voice �" and it was Ghall, as he introduced himself �" was immensely loud, a terrifying baritone that simply dwarfed Gerrick’s small, nasal tenor, ringing throughout the corridor and making my ears ring. It occurred to me that Ghall’s voice couldn’t possibly be that loud; that he must be magically amplifying his voice. But why, I thought, would you amplify your voice to talk to someone right in front of you?

I realized that there was no good reason; and from that moment forth I could no longer take even Ghall seriously. When I peeked into the room again, Ghall was no longer a shadowy apparition, but a man; and not a fearful man, either, but a faintly ridiculous one, so lanky as to defy anatomy. His staff was not terrible but tacky, topped with a skull too poorly sculpted to frighten even a child. I had to consciously remind myself that he was a sorcerer more skilled than I.

The chamber itself was better designed �" slightly. Grotesque gargoyles ringed the room, all glaring inwards towards the centre, which was recessed slightly into the ground; but they were all of different shapes and sizes; I guessed they’d been pilfered from churches and courthouses and made to serve as Ghall’s twisted, dragon-themed décor. Distracting as they were, it wasn’t hard to take my eyes off them and focus on the tall, moving figures in the centre of the chamber: Ghall, wrapped in black robes, and Sir Gerrick, in shining armour. An archetypal struggle, I thought, made to order from the fairy tales.

Sir Gerrick and Ghall had already introduced themselves, it seemed; now they were establishing their motivations. “You come to take the princess, no doubt,” Ghall boomed.

“Indeed!” said Sir Gerrick. “And we shall liberate her, no matter what you cast upon us!”

“Fool!” Ghall bellowed; I rushed to cover my ears and didn’t quite make it in time. “You would take from me what is rightfully mine?!” I might have been more offended by such objectification of women if my ears weren’t ringing from his undue emphases.

“Her Highness does not belong to you!” retorted Bergin.

Ghall glared at the squire, less with fury than with something like contempt. “Silence, child! This is not your affair!”

“Oh, yes, it is!” was Bergin’s wittiest of replies. Ghall almost shouted something back, but he managed to stop himself.

“Either of you!” he barked. “Either of you presumes to oppose a master of the elements; a lord of the arcane; a king of darkness and shadows?!”

Sir Gerrick retreated a bit and raised his shield; Bergin simply grinned and flattered himself he’d beaten Ghall in an argument.

Ghall raised his staff above his head and, with its little skull tip, drew a glowing magic circle that hung in the air above him like an oversized halo. “Now you shall learn your folly!” he roared. “Ventus vertens…”

The sound of an incantation spurred my mind into action. Desperately I kept up with every word, watched the glowing runes gather within Ghall’s magic circle. He was preparing a simple evocation, not much far beyond my own means; a downdraft spell, to be precise, imbibing wind with fire and blowing the wind at his enemy. An added helix lent the spell direction and style �"

but it also, I realized in a flash of genius I wished I could have on every exam, made it easier to repulse. I scribbled my own runes in the air around me, breathed an incantation so fast my words slurred together �"

“…ventum igni; ventus fla!” finished Ghall, so loudly his voice echoed for a full ten seconds after he was done; and his spell commenced; and it was a great and terrible display, fire swirling around the tip of his staff like a serpent, or a dragon. In reality it was just a way of making the spell easier, I knew, for by using his magical staff as a conduit for his magic Ghall didn’t have to aim using runes; but it did look impressive. He lowered his staff and jabbed it like a spear towards Sir Gerrick, who knelt and dragged Bergin to the ground behind him so his warded shield could do its work. The burning snake shuttled through the air towards the knight �"

And then I rushed into the room and cast my own spell. It was, if I do say so myself, even more impressive than Ghall’s. A tiny white glow shot from the end of my wand. The serpent dissolved into a shower of embers, twinkling in the dark chamber like so many tiny stars.

Ghall stared at me in horror. His face was astonishingly ugly; too tall and thin, wrinkled, and covered with hairs left after mangled attempts at shaving. I forced myself to meet his bulbous yellow eyes in spite of how they bulged from his head.

“And who are you?” he snarled. I didn’t dignify him with an answer. Instead I drew a series of runes around me, a simple set to prepare for combat spells.

Ghall was galled but not deterred by my silence. He examined me for a while; and I forced myself to bear it, though I should rather be so inspected by one of the mercenaries outside. “A student magician,” he sneered, eyeing the bands on my hat. “Scarcely learned in the basics of evocation! And not a whit of true magic to your name �" no sorcery.” His pride surprised me; usually the mages argued their superiority to the sorcerers, not the other way around; though the mages had just as much evidence for their claims as Ghall did for his.

Ghall summoned his own combat runes without moving his staff. I suppose he meant to show that he could draw runes without using his staff, as I needed my wand to draw mine. I took stock of other differences: his runes were big, glowed bright, and were full of sharp angles; these were the Gwendian runes used in sorcery. Mine were small, unassuming, blue runes from the Ilitran tradition, full of intricate curves, bent for elemental magic. The power differential wasn’t as great as I had expected; though I still didn’t relish a confrontation with Ghall, I was hardly hopeless with Sir Gerrick by my side. In fact, if the knight took the lead, I almost thought we could win.

Then Ghall raised his staff; the runes around him organized into a circle around him; and he said, “Dracones petrae, membra sinuate!”

The runes flew, dissolved into streaks of scarlet light, and swirled into an elegant circle; Bergin was hypnotized, Sir Gerrick wary. I was horrified �" I had a terrible suspicion I knew where the crimson streaks were bound as they whirled in a farther and farther radius. At last they vanished, and for a second, all seemed safe. Then a single red Gwendian rune appeared on the forehead of each gargoyle around the room.

I knew what manner of spell this was, so when each gargoyle synchronously spread its wings, I didn’t react; but Bergin nearly jumped out of his skin.

The gargoyles took flight �" but since they were small and the ceiling was low, it wasn’t a terribly impressive sight. Still, arrayed around Ghall like a little army, they were frightening enough, with their aquiline snouts and exaggerated fangs. They were at least enough to tip the scales �" there were eight gargoyles, plus Ghall; we three couldn’t take on so many opponents and win. My thoughts turned to escape. Ghall summoned another set of runes; I hoped they wouldn’t have so momentous an effect as the first set, but I had no desire to take the risk. I would have to cast the first spell; and if escape was my goal, I suddenly had a very good idea what that spell would have to be.

I backed away from Ghall until I was beside Sir Gerrick. “When I cast my spell,” I whispered, “cover your ears, close your eyes, then run and find the princess. I’ll find a way out.”

Sir Gerrick nodded slightly. “Good luck.”

Ghall raised his staff and advanced slightly. His gargoyles hopped to follow him like sparrows hunting for food. “You consider it beneath you,” he said, “to learn real magic! You came here hoping for some glory, some fame, a bit of fun going on an adventure! Perhaps you want to be popular with the popular boys on campus, while you sneer at the geniuses labouring where you can’t see!” I restrained a smile, though his characterization couldn’t be more wrong if he thought I was a boy. Instead I let him keep ranting and whispered a few words of power. His grip on his staff was still tight; his guard wasn’t low enough for me to succeed. “You don’t appreciate the art of magic; you wouldn’t know true artistry if it smacked you in the face! You don’t know the joy of diving into a spell, of losing yourself in true beauty, the beauty of intricate spellwork, the most sublime of natural forces! You only see the beauty on the surface; perhaps the beauty of an athlete’s face! Your life, your campus life, is �" ”

I decided I’d brooked enough baseless misrepresentation. “Clama!” I shouted, and ran. Gerrick’s sabatons clanged as he tore off �" thank goodness; my plan had a chance. I scrunched my eyes shut and covered my ears, but I still saw the flash and heard the deafening bang.

I learned my first spell when I was fourteen, in a private magic academy in the city of Stelbourne. The instructors there quite accurately reasoned that young mages learning new spells were likely to get themselves into trouble, and that their first order of business as teachers, therefore, was to teach the students how to help themselves. To that end they taught us a simple spell that could serve as a distress signal in case we were lost or injured. It required only the most basic wandwork and a single word for an incantation �" clama. The effect was duly simple �" a bright flash of light; a crack; followed by a jet of sparks hurled out of the wand and a shrill wail not dissimilar to a woman’s scream.

Clama was meant to draw as much attention to its caster as possible, by sending up a signal flare and creating a loud noise that was hard to ignore. But inside a dim, closed chamber, I reasoned, it could achieve the opposite effect. It did. Ghall staggered for a few moments, blinded by the light. His enchanted minions, bereft of magical orders, stood stock-still as well. Sir Gerrick and Bergin pelted out of the chamber, taking a hard left down a corridor across the room.

I took a split-second to consider my position. I wouldn’t have time to undo the seal the way I’d entered; Ghall and his forces would only be incapacitated for a few seconds. Instead, therefore, I raced after the warriors; but where they’d turned left, I turned right, so sharply that I nearly tripped; and I hurtled into the shadows.

The hall I’d entered contained sparse torches, but for the most part it was terrifically dark, for the walls seemed to suck what light there was into the cracks among the dull black stones they comprised. After a minute or so’s running, it gave way to a spiral staircase, curved so slightly and so steeply I was sure it ran along the inner wall of the tower. Though going up was hardly my objective, I had nowhere else to go, so I started up the staircase, running at first, but reduced by exertion to a hurried walk after a pitifully short time. The stairs in turn gave way to small, round floors, typically a central room with labyrinthine adjoining hallways; these, in turn, gave way to more stairs; and through them all, torches and gargoyles mounted on the walls burned me with their stares. Every torch was an eye, every statue a golem out for blood. The relentless sameness of it all burned away what little hope of direction I had; and I found myself going far higher in the tower than I should have liked.

Constantly I thought; or rather, I felt; that something was stalking me through the darkness. This was not an entirely irrational fear. Ghall would have, by now, sent his gargoyle minions out into the halls to hunt us down. Perhaps he himself stalked the stairwells, staff in hand, his hideous face twisted with wrath. Yet I never found positive proof of my stalker, only half-heard shuffling and shifting shadows; none of the bombast that would accompany one of Ghall’s golems. I was imagining things, I was sure; but my surety didn’t stop me from starting at every unaccounted noise.

To calm myself, I forced my mind onto a rational subject: that of escape. I could not wander the tower aimlessly for long. The gargoyles, guided by the tower’s builder, would find me with ease; and while I could probably defeat them one by one, I was in no mind to take a risk I didn’t have to.

On the third floor, or perhaps the fourth, I reached an intersection of four directions. I paused to consider which way to go; and in that moment, I heard a shuffle of fabric against stone. I whirled to face it �" but I beheld nothing but shadows. And yet I heard something like a footstep echo across the walls; or did I? At this point I realized I had to collect myself; so for a few seconds, I rested against the wall and caught my breath. You’re imagining things, Allicis, I told myself. There’s nothing here for you; there are no sounds or scrapes; there’s nothing after you.

Of course �" as soon as I thought that, I heard a very definite sound of stone scraping against stone, and of rhythmic wingbeats, from around the corner behind me. I froze for a moment; at the last second I flung myself left and hid, still and silent. A faint crimson glow washed over me, then faded as the gargoyle continued on its purposeful flight. When I could no longer hear its wingbeats, I dashed in the other direction �" apparently not a moment too soon, for I faintly heard it returning as I passed the open intersection.

The gargoyles, I now saw, searched with purpose. No doubt they were methodically checking every hall and staircase. It was an inefficient method at first glance; but since Bergin, Sir Gerrick, and I were wandering aimlessly, it would no doubt prove effective with time. The gap in knowledge was too wide to overcome. Scientia potentia est, I thought; I felt vindicated in spite of myself. The consideration helped spur my reason, and so, I reasoned, if the knowledge gap was too big to broach, I had to make it smaller. I could use magic to create a rudimentary map of the whole first floor. That should suffice, I thought.

Taking care to conceal myself in a recess in the wall (more proof of Ghall’s abysmal architecture, I thought), I cast my spell. Among drawing the runes, whispering the incantation, and fumbling with the catalytic potion I drew out of my robe, the process took a terrifyingly long time; but besides something that sounded terribly like a footstep, I was undisturbed; and even that footstep, I decided, must have been a product of my panicked imagination. The map took a few seconds to materialize; it was a pretty effect, the blue lines of light spreading throughout a magic circle as if written by an invisible cartographer �" but all I could think was that every second a gargoyle could fall upon me; or worse, Ghall himself. I glanced over the map and my heart sank. There was only one exit, and that was the way I’d come in.

Terror overtook me. I had to leave, or something would materialize from the darkness. With a sweep of my wand I banished my map; I swiftly gathered my robes and emerged from my hiding place �"

and stared into the pale face of a girl in the darkness. I nearly fainted.

“How did you do that?” the girl inquired. She was taller than I, but visibly younger, with straight black hair and clear eyes. Had I met her on campus I might not have feared conversation with her, but here she wore a dark cloak, too similar to Ghall’s; she seemed an extension of the shadows, a black shape as much a part of the tower as the stones in the walls.

She stared seriously at me for several seconds. Some answer had to come. “Do what?” I ventured.

“That spell just now, with the lines, and the map.”

“What, charta compone cum undis revertentibus?”

“Probably. I can’t do that; even Dad can’t, let alone with the weaker runes.”

“Er �" who is your father, exactly?”

“Oh, right. Ghall.”

This was Ghall’s daughter. My terror gave way to despair, blended with mild horror that Ghall had reproduced.

“His real name’s Creith,” the girl continued, “but lately if I call him that I’ll lose a meal. I’m Coranth, by the way, Coranth Cadharan.”

This girl seemed pleased enough to talk to me; she was sixteen or seventeen, perhaps, not old enough for independence but old enough to wish for it. Certainly she didn’t paint Ghall �" Creith �" as a very good father. I may, I thought wildly, have found an ally against Ghall even within his own headquarters. Having lived through a very quiet adolescence, I was of no mind to stake my life on teenaged rebelliousness; but if nothing else, every second I entertained Coranth was a second in which I wasn’t dying. I introduced myself in return, though my voice still shook.

“Allicis.” Coranth paused and closed her eyes. “Okay. Got it. So. Allicis. That spell. I get the preliminary runes, but the rest of it I don’t get. How do you cast it?”

“You �" can cast, then?”

“Oh, yes. I’m almost as good as Dad �" better, at some things.” At this point more bad news could not even dismay me. “But you’re practically in a different category. All this time you’ve been casting spells I’ve never seen �" and I think I can follow that, er, flashy-bangy one, but the other two I have no idea. They were gorgeous. You’ve got to teach me.”

We were still cast in shadows; and however disarming the girl’s dialogue may have been, I knew that Ghall’s stone minions still hunted me. I was nowhere near composed enough to give a straightforward magic lesson in the middle of a manhunt. Luckily Coranth was swiftly distracted. “How did you get here, anyway?” she asked, suddenly arching a suspicious eyebrow. “What are you doing with someone like Dad anyway?”

I floundered, for a few moments, for some auspicious lie, something that wouldn’t set me against her and her own flesh and blood. But under such stress, I could not produce even the wildest of tales. Under Coranth’s gaze, I was left with no choice but to tell the truth; so I told it, in halts and starts, exaggerating my unwillingness to join the quest a bit but otherwise too stressed to lie. I gripped my wand tighter, ready to cast some emergency defensive spells if need be.

Coranth was quiet and serious throughout my explanation. Her expression was stony; there was nothing to reveal what she might be feeling as I outlined my opposition to her father, save perhaps a knitting of the brows that could be construed as thoughtful. Even when I stumbled to the end of my story, she didn’t move; and for several silent seconds I hung between terror and awkwardness.

Finally, she said, “The princess. That’s Merowyn, right?”

I nodded, dumbfounded.

“She was saying she wanted to get out,” she said pensively. “Tell you what �" teach me some of those spells, and I’ll help you.”

It was all I could do to keep my jaw from dropping.

If Coranth was sincere, this was an offer I couldn’t refuse; and I had reason enough to think she was sincere. If she wasn’t, of course, she would lead me straight to her father and that would be the end of me. But Coranth had boasted of her magical ability, and I didn’t perceive she’d made an empty threat; I was exhausted, scared, and in no condition to fight a skilled sorceress. She hadn’t left me much of a choice. I acquiesced.

Coranth beamed. “All right �" let’s go see Merowyn.”

And I followed her into the darkness.

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