Chapter 11: Daddy’s Home

  ++I must admit to having relied on others a great deal for the earliest stages of my life. It needles me to look back on that fact, infuriates me to confess it even now. At the end of the day, I am only human. I am only human now, and I was certainly only human then. Our kind is not without shortcomings. Only without limits.++

  - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, ‘The Great Lich’. 1,891 A.E

  Henry saw a fireball coming his way just in time to meet it with a blast of his own magic, aether. It didn’t do anything to block the projectile, but fire magic was inherently unstable and prone to detonation. His guess about this one proved right, and the moment it impacted something as solid as aether the spell matrix belched out searing flames in every direction. Even seeing it go off five paces ahead of him, he felt the hairs curling beneath his personal shielding.

  The magic missiles Henry shot back, to avoid having anything else curl, were rather less spectacular and fancy, but no less effective. They arced slightly through the air, woven with spell matrixes that gently guided them on hair-thin follicles of aether to strike their target more accurately. Each one saw an explosion of blood emerge where they hit the magician’s torso, and the man fell back as if he’d just been executed by firing squad. One down, how many left? Henry took another look at the fighting and felt his heart sink.

  He’d assumed earlier that Baron Vornholt had already engaged the magicians, and that assumption could not have been more wrong. The men had clearly been fighting each other before he arrived, and by the looks of things they were quickly abandoning their internal scuffle to turn their attention to the newly arrived attackers. Nothing like an external threat to put an end to internal conflict.

  This meant they were far more fractious and less cohesive than he’d feared, but it also meant that Henry was enjoying only half the numbers on his own side than he’d been planning to. He could still run away, of course.

  More magic missiles erupted from his hands. Odd, apparently he couldn’t still run away, was he having some kind of psychotic fit? It would be just his luck to have a mental breakdown now of all times.

  His new target was more prepared than the last, meeting the magic missiles with a shield spell that saw half detonating prematurely and sent the other deflecting out in all directions. Guiding them on aether rails would help the projectiles hit, nudge them slightly, but Henry couldn’t turn them round a corner just yet.

  The warriors ahead of him had fully engaged the enemy now, running around and firing guns or swinging swords as the air filled with powder-smoke. It was getting hard to see already with the detritus clouding everything, and Henry found himself approximating enemy positions by the feeling of mana around him. More magic missiles came his way, this time different. He didn’t have time to analyze their new spell matrix, just threw up another wall and hoped it wasn’t some barrier-killing effect.

  He was in luck, the shield held most of them back and let only a single one through. That missile struck his shoulder, detonating against the armour plates and flinging Henry off his feet. The one downside to armour made of aether was that it was almost entirely massless. This meant he could move in it easily enough—though drag force slowed him down at higher speeds—but it made him just as easy to fling around as would a naked man be.

  Henry flew several paces, then tumbled twice as many. He was almost flung out of the battlefield by the time he recovered his wits, though ahead he saw the same magician who’d just attacked him storming forwards. Lightning was crackling around the man’s fingers, giving Henry just enough warning before the bolt came to prepare; he conjured a solid sheet of aether and slowly expanded it, leaving the interior hollow. This hollow space held no air at all, a near perfect vacuum, and when the electricity struck it there was absolutely no matter for it to be conducted through. Some stray forks scorched Henry’s personal shielding behind the barrier, but most of the attack was dispersed.

  Lightning took time and mana to build up, but it was devastating when it hit. And devastating to the user when it missed, all that invested power wasted. Henry took his chance by dropping the barrier and retaliating with an attack of his own, a fireball this time. It was the classic spell, and angled as things were now, even if this one missed, it would sail past its target to hit more men behind him.

  That didn’t happen only because it detonated against the magician’s own shield, sending long cracks through the aether and drawing a cry of pain from him as what Henry thought were rather nasty burns sprouted up along his skin. The man was really not so much weaker than him, less skilled, certainly, but probably more experienced in actual combat to balance that out.

  He just hadn’t had the chance to prepare, hadn’t spent those few precious seconds sheathing himself in personal shielding. And for that, there was no compensating.

  Another volley of magic missiles flitted between them as Henry followed his first attack up, punching through the damaged shield while his enemy still reeled in pain. Much of the projectiles’ power was exhausted getting past the defence, but they still boasted enough force to knock the man off his feet and leave him bleeding. Henry moved forwards, saw the twitching magician and thought about killing him. Then he thought about the sight of that last man dying, and his guts seemed to fall out.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “Stay down,” he barked, weakly. He needn’t have bothered, the man looked like he was already losing consciousness of his own volition. Hopefully he wouldn’t wake up any time soon.

  The mansion was a big structure, and looked decently well-made, but few buildings were built with a magical battle in mind. Walls were collapsing and ceilings caving in, and Henry found a stab of panic running deep into his guts as he thought of the children still boxed in.

  “ISABEL!” he roared. “AGRIAN!?” If he could save them, then he’d have no more reason to be here—no more reason to be in the path of fire and lightning and force. He could take his students and flee, leave all the heroic idiots with him to die, and have nothing to explain to their father. It was a good plan, he thought. But it had a single, small issue.

  He couldn’t find either of the children anywhere, for the life of him. Not from out here. Which meant the only way he’d be stumbling onto them was if he made his way deeper into the mansion. Right into the heart of where the fighting was at its most fierce.

  A lot of risk now, for a few brief minutes, or moderate risk sustained over hours and days, waiting to see if he’d die here or be killed by the Baron’s rage? Henry cursed, and headed in to find the children.

  The air was hot and flooded with mana, with more than Henry had felt in years. He felt like he was standing in the presence of a Master magician, so dense was the magic flowing everywhere, and every breath made his lungs ache. After a few moments of pain he reluctantly wasted a precious sliver of his power just to cool down the oxygen before each breath, figuring that it would do him or the children no favors if he fell down from blistering lungs.

  “ISABEL!” Henry repeated as he stumbled around. It felt odd to be calling for the girl, rather than the boy, let alone a child of six when he knew there was a child of eleven out there. But Isabel’s language skills had always been just as advanced as her brother’s, perhaps more so. If either of his students heard and responded to him, Henry wagered it would be her. Assuming she could hear him, and was even still alive.

  Of course she is, they didn’t do all this just to kill her! His thoughts were interrupted shortly.

  Henry had been aware that he was in danger walking into the mansion, he realised only now just how strong that danger was. He was the sole magician on his own side, which made him a target for all the men on his enemy’s. Not even the kidnappers’ own magicians were heading his way, he was soon being pelted by pistol shots as a gang of their warriors caught sight of him and recognised magic at work.

  Aether cracked and pitted as the bullets struck it, like a barrier of hard stone. Stone would stop gunfire, at first, but even now he saw the damage adding up. Cursing, Henry hurled out another volley of magic missiles and watched as each of the men took one or two for himself, seeing them fall down bleeding and thrashing with wounds worse than he could possibly have inflicted, either with a blade or a gun of his own.

  The children distracted Henry before he could further study the damage he’d done. Isabel and Agrian were laying down in one corner of the room, the girl atop the boy and both of them huddled together under a wall of aether so thick, magical and hard that it could only have been mustered by both of them at once. His first thought was relief to have found them, his next was the urgency of getting them out.

  Henry’s shadow fell over the pair as he approached, and he saw Isabel turn over to look up at him.

  ***

  It was a pleasant surprise to be rescued so early into the conflict, I had been readying myself to leave traces of mana in our wake as we were inevitably snatched away, having accepted that help was unlikely to arrive at this mansion in time and falling back on the plan of simply letting them pursue us from it. But no, here help was.

  I briefly considered the possibility that Doctor Brown had been working with the kidnappers of course, but then thought back to his fight with them and decided that it would have been terribly stupid and unnecessary if he had been. No, he was loyal to my family—or at least to his own ends, which currently lined up with my family’s—and thus I could rely on him as a useful ally, at least for the time being.

  “Agrian,” I hissed. “The Doctor is here, we have the chance to flee. Drop our barriers now.” The boy beside me did not say anything, just trembled, hesitated for a few more moments of wasted mana, and finally obeyed as we let the aether crumble and exposed ourselves to open air. I felt disgustingly vulnerable without the barrier present, which was good motivation to hurry as I got up.

  The mansion shook around us as dust, then mortar, fell from the walls, making the very walk to our rescuer a dangerous one. “Make an aether shield over your head and hold it there,” I snapped at Agrian, doing just as I told him to so he would have a visual example. I was in no mood to be smashed in the head by a falling brick, such a death would be unacceptably ignominious.

  Unfortunately, it was also the least of the dangers. Doctor Brown was drawing a great deal of attention now that he was with us, and though I could see that the enemy magicians were hesitant to unleash their full power at him—likely due to the proximity of Agrian and myself—I could also see the charging of mana as more precise attacks were prepared. They would not hesitate once he started to get away, sooner risking our deaths than accepting our escape.

  We were less than halfway to the door when the first of the spells came. Not as powerful as they might have been, simple magic missiles designed to penetrate barriers but do little else. They met with Doctor Brown’s shield and tore it apart fast, then went to work on the layer of aether he’d wrapped his own body in. A single volley saw his defences crushed, and he fell to the ground as a bloody mess. Still moving, to my surprise, still breathing. I wondered how much longer that would continue.

  Not for more than a few moments; more attacks were already being prepared. I could have attempted to defend the Doctor myself, but I knew it was pointless. At my level of power, if I exerted myself fully, I would perhaps have stopped a single projectile, and more likely done nothing more than weaken it. Far more would have struck him unimpeded and halted his life as surely as a rat’s.

  It was fortunate for the Doctor, then, that my father chose that precise moment to arrive.