Tide of Magic: Chapter One

Tide of Magic: Chapter One (Complete)

Wherein Enid d'Tancreville becomes Justifiably Wroth

Blood gushed through a smoking hole in her uncle's coat, just to the left of the third button below his collar. The spell-lock ball that produced that hole was proof that the murderous thirst for blood the Theocracy inspired among the common folk found ample purchase among the nobility as well. Marquise Enid d'Tancreville was infinitely more concerned with the severity of the wound than its political significance, however, and pressed her hand against it to staunch the flow of blood which came in pulses so strong she would have deemed them farcical were this scene playing out on stage rather than in one of the tangled alleys near Arden's Dolorous Gate. A cantrip to ease his pain came to her lips without a pause for thought while her fingers coaxed her uncle's aging flesh to re-knit itself. While not a healer by trade, she had gathered enough knowledge of the gentle art at the Institute to stabilize any but the most grievously wounded.

Despite her best efforts, however, her uncle's skin cooled perceptibly under her fingers and the large, black pool spreading beneath him obviously had more to do with the ebb of his blood flow than her healing arts. His cool, intelligent eyes clouded from summer blue to sodden fall as she watched and did not react at all when one of her tears fell heavily on his cheek to pool in the crease of his lower lid.

          Comte Emile Artovengese d'Erbonne, her mother's eldest brother and one of the greatest living authorities on sorcerous theory was dead. Enid lowered his head gently to the blood-slick cobbles of the filth-choked alley and stood. She was distantly surprised at the apparently incongruous stillness and intensity of her rage. This man had been her earliest mentor in the sorcerous arts, her guide through the treacherous and duplicity laden tracks of the Golden City's high society, and finally a self-sacrificing savior bent on delivering her from the all devouring maw of revolutionary Arden. It was through his devices that the majority of her disposable wealth had been spirited out of Arden and safely loaded aboard a merchant vessel bound for the Spice Colonies, a vessel they'd intended to join that evening. Now, thanks to the untimely intervention of unwonted mortality, he was reduced to a source of deferred anguish and added to the list of injuries for which Enid would someday see the Theocrats pay.

          Flickering orange torchlight and the sudden gabble of excited voices from the far end of the alley drew her attention away from the fallen form of her uncle. The vanguard of the revolutionary mob pursuing her came into view around one of the alley's crazed corners and let out a bloodthirsty halloo of discovery that would have made any pack of wolves proud.

          After their vocal exultation, the lead element of the mob, perhaps a dozen ragged looking common men and women, straggled to a halt. Enid suspected they would keep their distance until the rest of the mob arrived. Then, bolstered by the encouraging presence of another two or three dozen of their kind, they would screw their courage to the sticking point and descend upon her. Although the mob was, for the most part, armed with the most rudimentary of improvised weaponry, she had no doubt that their sheer numbers would suffice to overcome the hastily prepared dweomers of protection woven into her plain, brown traveling cloak. Besides, there was still the matter of the turn-coat noble - there had been no time to cast any protections against spell-lock fire into their cloaks as she and her uncle hurriedly fled his hotel on Way of Roses. So - where was this traitor and his spell-lock now?

          She opened her mind and sought for him - it had been a man's face she'd seen momentarily limned in the cyan flash of a pistol. It took only a moment's concentration to find him. Alone in a crowd of commoners he stood out to her like a beacon in the night. Her uncle's murderer lacked any protective dweomers at all, she noticed, which may have been an indication of his arrogant confidence in the power of the mob or, more likely, an indication that he was all but ignorant of the sorcerous arts. This came as no surprise to Enid; her experience had established that most noble followers of the Theocratic movement were either profoundly limited in natural sorcerous abilities or purposefully and obdurately ignorant of the higher arts.                    

          Whatever its cause, Enid was gratified by his defenselessness. She gave her perception its head and sensed the spell-lock pistol in his hand, recharged and ready to fire. She felt the ripple of potential as his finger tightened on the weapon's trigger and bent her will towards the ball in its barrel. Cold, concentrated rage seemed to amplify her ability, so that only a minute amount of effort was required to drastically increase the sympathetic bond between the spell-lock and ball. Her attention moved with frightening precision from this task to reach out in all directions for sylphs, salamanders, and shadowy umbrae amenable to her purpose.

          The mob's angry cries drew her back to the physical moment. Their jeers and savage, incoherent challenges redoubled in volume as the nobleman stepped into their front rank. His blood was immediately recognizable, towering as he did over the commoners in whose favor he'd betrayed his own kind. She watched his face twist into a spiteful grin of triumph as he took in the sight of her standing over her fallen uncle. He obviously mistook her rather vacant expression and lack of flight as proof that shock and tragedy had robbed her of the will to flee - to live. He raised the pistol to shoulder level and aimed down the length of its elegantly tapered barrel, grinning wolfishly as the rabble shouted its approval of his murderous intent. The grin widened as he locked eyes with Enid and then faltered. She saw his lips move in a curse that was lost in the raucous noise of the mob as he hastily jerked the trigger back.

          His form was so poor that she doubted if the ball would have struck true even if it had exited the barrel, but that point was moot, as it remained stubbornly lodged in place, bound by a sympathetic attachment encouraged and greatly magnified by Enid's sorcerous art.

          The spell-lock exploded with a tremendous noise and a blinding, cyan flash that consumed the nobleman's hand and a good portion of his forearm. The deafening report stunned the crowd into a short-lived silence that soon turned into frantic screams as the flames of their torches leaped high into the pitchy black reaches of the alley's upper shadows and began to dance with a disturbing and malevolent life of their own.     The flames squirmed and darted down the torch shafts and found purchase in the filthy sleeves and grimy flesh of the wretches that held them. Even those who threw their torches to the ground at the first sign of animation were not spared - the salamander inspired flames raced along invisible lines of sympathy to find the hands of those that had borne them.

          In the passage of a heartbeat the alley was choked with panic stricken, flaming forms. Some fled down the alley, away from Enid, their horror wracked brains frozen on the hope that they might escape their agony if they put enough distance between themselves and its author. Others turned to their companions for deliverance, often locking them in a desperate embrace which offered no salvation and visited the same fate on those they hoped would save them. Some rushed towards Enid herself, either to beg her mercy or in an attempt to strike her down before the flames consumed them. These were stopped in their tracks by the silent winds that circled her, lifting her raven locks in soft waves while mercilessly hurling back any who came too near her. 

          A second heartbeat's passage found all but a few of Enid's persecutors writhing out their last moments amid the alley's piles of offal and debris. Those fortunate few untouched by the elemental flames, mostly at the back of the mob, threw away their torches and turned to flee from the sudden hell that had consumed their comrades. They rushed screaming into a darkness made almost tangible by the conflagration behind them. After a few steps their cries of general terror rose in pitch to become howls of immediate and personal horror.   Tendrils of shadow slithered from the stinking darkness to caress them with the feathery, mind-breaking touch of atavistic fear. The umbrae insinuated themselves between their victims and the faintest glimmer of light, wrapping them in a stygian cloak so thick that it left no purchase for rational thought, no space in their benighted souls for hope. Loathsome fears that haunted the dark corners of their mind, assiduously banished since childhood and left to fester, found themselves free to roam free and unhindered, crushing sanity and stopping hearts in their wake.

          Judging by the shrieks of those taken by the shadows, Enid reckoned the flames an easier passage from life - and resented the fact that the fire had been the main engine of her vengeance against her uncle's murderers.

          As the last of the mob succumbed to fire and shadow, Enid walked purposefully down the alley, the sylphs that swirled protectively about her stirring up ashes and the foul smell of burning flesh - none of which they allowed to come within proximity of the ward they mindlessly adored. When she reached the fallen noble, collapsed around the ruin of his right arm and sobbing softly to himself, she stopped and allowed her mind to move effortlessly through formulations that would have disgusted and appalled her only an hour ago. Now they seemed insufficient by half.

          In the near distance she could hear the hue and cry being raised. Soon another pack of Theocratic murderers would descend upon her, drawn by the reports of the earlier chase, the noise of the confrontation, and the flickering fire-light of the opportunistic salamanders still idly chewing away at the buildings bordering the alley now that the bodies of the torchbearers were reduced to ash.       In her heightened state, Enid could feel the brooding hatred of the massed commoners who made the tangled, claustrophobic slums near Dolorous Gate their home. A part of her empathized with the wretched urban poor and their lives of near starvation, subjugation, and abject poverty, understood the underlying cause for their hatred, and was shamed that the callous attitudes of her own kind were greatly responsible for its vehemence. That kinder, more sympathetic part of her was not ascendant at the moment, however, and her nobler feelings were sublimated to an outraged passion for retribution.

          If the salamanders hunger yet, she thought, then let them feed.

          She raised her arms and loosed her will, sending most of her coterie of sylphs radiating outward in a stiff breeze, each carrying fiery seeds in the form of dozens of hungry salamanders. New cries of panic and alarm replaced the Theocratic hunting calls as fires quickly spread in all directions, instantly finding purchase in the ancient, smoke-dried timbers of tenements and ramshackle rows of townhouses. Fire bells rang out, followed shortly by the tolling of chapel bells, as a false dawn spread over the western edge of this, the least gilded quarter of the Golden City.

          A more immediate alertness returned to Enid's gaze as she released the elementals from the dominion of her will and left them to their own ends. Arden could be consumed whole, for all she cared at that moment. Its golden age was at an end and she doubted that its lost glory could ever be restored. Better that it should be consumed in a cleansing inferno than continue to rot under the cancerous regime of the Theocratic Republic - but that would not happen, not tonight at least. Without the impetus of her wrath to guide them, the elementals would quickly lose interest in the destructive tasks to which she'd set them. Soon other mages, loyal to the Theocracy or simply motivated by humanity, would descend upon the quarter and the few salamanders remaining would be banished or put to work reversing the spread of their handiwork.

          Arden would not burn entirely to the ground tonight, but a sizable portion of it would serve as her uncle's pyre.

          “Merciful Redeemer, do not leave me here to burn!”

          Enid looked down at her uncle's murderer lying maimed at her feet. He was clad in the sort of earth colored, adornment-free clothing adopted by the Theocracy's supporters and those who wished to avoid casual denouncement to the feared Confessors. Gone were the days of hair colored by dweomer to match the shifting colors of a fine coat or gown and held in fantastical arrangements by minor magics. Embroidered images no longer capered and flowed around cuffs or hems. Jewelry, if worn at all, hung flat and lifeless on a chain against the breast rather than orbiting like a glittering satellite around the sun, their owner. If the Theocracy had given her no other reason, she would have despised the Theocracy for robbing her world of so much of its color, grace, and visual drama.

          “Please,” her would-be killer groaned again, raising what was left of his ravaged right arm in supplication. All around them the flames soared higher, searching the heavens with fingers of orange and blue. Only a few protective sylphs circling her kept the flames from devouring them both. “Please do not leave me to burn.”

          “There is nothing farther from my mind, sir. I would not dream of leaving you to the flames.” Enid smiled and extended her will to push the flames back in all directions, leaving them in a pool of flickering shadow at the center of a crown of fire. He began to thank her for her mercy, but the words strangled in his throat as the shadows descended on him with all their dark savagery.

          The screams of his passing, rising shrill and broken above the roar of flames and surrounding chaos followed as she made her way through the twisting, smoke choked maze of the Dolorous Quarter.

          She prayed there would be no significant resistance at the postern gate her uncle had chosen as their means of escaping the walls of Arden. A few shadows lingered about her, obscuring her from casual view, but she lacked the energy or focus to attempt any more ambitious use of sorcery. If there was trouble at the gate, she would be forced to rely on the sword and dagger concealed beneath her faded green cloak. Her eyes narrowed at the thought. She was no stranger to the orchestrated artifice of the duel, the practice of which was one of the first noble traditions outlawed when the Theocracy came into power, but the long traditions governing such affairs Ardainne dictated that they rarely ended in serious injury or death. She had never taken a blade in hand with the intent of doing anyone to death and she wondered if she had the will to do so. As she pondered the issue, a sizable portion of Arden burned behind her.