The Accidental Archmage - Book Five Edmund Batara (classic children's novels .TXT) 📖

“That was impressive. And thank you,” the mage said.

“It is a pleasure to serve, Master.”

“Do you have a name?” he asked.

The spirit took some time to answer.

“I apologize, Master. It has been too long since I was on a plane other than the ring. I believe I was called Curavali, or cyclone in one of the languages of Earth.”

“You appear to be not the ordinary sort of spirit. The energy you exude does not match any magical spell I know of,” observed Tyler.

“I was created as a gift to the lord Sarva by an ancient people, not of this world and now gone, their empire lost beneath the seas.”

“You now wish to return to the ring?” asked the mage.

“With your permission, Master, I would like to stay until the enchantment runs out. It had been a while since I walked in your reality,” answered the spirit.

“I wouldn’t call millennia a while,” smiled Tyler. “You have my permission. We still have a fire to put out.”

The fire appeared beyond the efforts of the two warriors to control it. The men had put out the small fires near the trees, but the main conflagration had grown. Watching its progress as individual flames reached out and joined together, Tyler could see the danger posed by fiery embers floating on the breeze and starting more fires in the woods.

The mage looked at Tyndur’s weapon, slung on the einherjar’s back. It still had some flames around the blade. He looked at the roaring fire again.

“Hey, Tyndur! Your axe is still aflame,” the mage shouted.

“It’s all right, sire. No telling if there’s a skulker left,” answered the warrior.

“Can you try using your will on the fire? Put it out,” said Tyler.

The einherjar gawked at Tyler as though the mage was losing his mind.

“Humor me. Treat the fire as if it came from your axe. And I am not going mad,” reassured the mage. The fire did come from your weapon.

Shaking his head, Tyndur faced the blaze. Habrok was on the other side, trying to make sure it didn’t spread to the trees. The einherjar stared at the roaring flames. After several seconds, the rest of the party could see a visible reduction in the intensity and size of the fire. The einherjar kept on concentrating until the conflagration was but the size of a small brushfire. Habrok immediately moved in and put it out with dirt.

“How did you know that was going to work?” asked the very puzzled einherjar.

“The fire was started from the flames coming from your weapon. It stood to reason that the energy of the magical fire was still in the blaze. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the power of the flames of your weapon also sustained the blaze. Probably made it bigger than it should be,” explained Tyler.

Tyndur gravely thought about what the mage said for a while.

“That does open a lot of possibilities, sire,” he finally commented.

“Why does that statement worry me?” commented Tyler uneasily as he walked along the trail. The spirit bull was waiting for them farther ahead, though its attention was not on them. It was busy looking at its surroundings. The rest of the party fell into their usual formation.

“A powerful spirit, that one,” Kobu told the mage as they walked toward the huge armored bull.

“I agree, but I doubt if anybody could create such a creature anymore. That particular form was the result of a magical spell created by an empire now lying beneath the sea,” replied Tyler.

“Lost wisdom. I doubt if it came from a civilization founded on Adar. It must be an extremely potent spell, one of the jealously guarded secrets of knowledgeable magical practitioners. Which was actually the problem – they held on too long to such arcana that when they died, knowledge of the spells died with them,” commented the exile.

“That was for the best – the spread of such dangerous lore could have endangered everybody, even the world itself. No telling if some mad genius would come up with a world-ending twist to one such spell,” replied Tyler.

“I guess you’re right, sire. And I believe it is time for the spirit to take its leave. It’s fading away.”

Tyler saw that the exile was right. The huge bull was slowly disappearing. It glanced at them and gave a final bow before it was gone.

“Polite fellow,” pointedly observed Habrok.

***

They walked the few miles down to the ridge above the flat terrain separating Hedmark from the Barrens. Unlike Scarburg, the area wasn’t a gap in the sense of a narrow channel between mountains. The land was a wide expanse by itself, with settlements serving double duty as redoubts. The fortress-town served as the final barricade against onslaughts from the Barren Lands. Hedmark itself was a relic of a more bloody and violent past, a time when humans were struggling to wrestle control of the land from the creatures who made it their own. The region of Namdalen didn’t include Hedmark initially, but the need to remove any threat coming from the Barrens demanded a narrowing of the open frontiers.

But the mage was unaware of the area’s turbulent past, though he was curious how such a force of undead was in the woods. From the way the revenants were organized and fought, they must have been one cohesive group when they were alive. Taking advantage of the relative safety of their present surroundings, a conclusion reinforced by the normalcy of the woods, the mage decided to ask the two companions from Skaney about the matter.

“Habrok, do you have any idea about why such a group of undead is in these woods? If there’s no rational explanation for it, then we’re heading into a trap, or somebody knows about our movements. Or it could be both,” said the mage.

“No idea, sire. I did my hunting work to the south and the east. Job pickings then were scarce in this region. Only the occasional foray