Chapter 14

The banging on the door penetrated his dreams until Aden woozily realized that the sounds were coming from nearby. He struggled to his feet, trying to work out the strange kinks in his neck from sleeping on the hard floor with his travel pack for a pillow.

He opened the door with sleep lidded eyes and a scowl on his face. “What?”

“Drop this trice-damned wizard thingie and let me in,” Ezza said. “I can’t reach through and ring your scrawny neck until you do.”

Aden executed the three-finger dance of phyzeec with the key that retracted the barrier without zapping himself. Without saying a word, he turned around and walked into the main hall without bothering to look behind him. The room seemed ever more off-kilter and his skivvies were unusually irritating on his inner thighs, as if he had slept in wet clothes and chafed himself all night. He bent over just enough to sniff for odor.

“What got into your pea-sized brain last night?” Ezza said, stomping forward to confront him.

“Eh?”

“You gutted one and toasted the other,” Ezza said. “Then you went and branded them. Nothing like announcing to the world there is a new wizard in town with a bad temper and a vicious attitude.”

“They were stalking me; I took care of the problem,” Aden said. “Let them cry innocent all they want and afterward, I’ll let them testify beneath a manifestation of Othnard’s double blade of truth and falsehood.”

“Othnard be damned,” Ezza said, throwing up his hands. “This is the governor’s town, and his word is the only word. If he says you attacked the innocent, that is all there is.”

Aden gave him a cold, hard stare. “I stand by my word and I am nobody’s fool.” Something more than the room was off, and Aden felt a cold chill run up his spine.

All of Aden’s skin began to itch. His mouth went dry and the mucus stuck to the back of his throat, threatening to choke him. His hands curled with anger that raced through his veins and returned as rage. Aden’s lips pulled back and his teeth were on edge. He conjured a blue ball of phyzeec in his claw, pouring power into it until it shifted from blue into indigo. His arm started shaking, as the ball of energy gave off sparks and bits of lightning. He held up the ball to Ezza’s face, ready to shove it into the man’s nose when he slammed it into the floor between their feet.

Aden was blind with searing colors burned across his retinas, but he could hear the incredible sound of phyzeec running amok across the floor and walls, even across the rafters above. He listened to it race down to the end of the room and return. Bracing himself for the inevitable while trying to keep his muscles loose and relaxed, the wave of phyzeec crashed into him and sucked through his skin into the gut of his stomach.

He let out a gasp like he had been kicked in the stomach as he fell slowly on his butt. His headache started again at both temples. Pressing his thumbs into the depressions on either side of his skull held the worst of the pain at bay.

“What is this place?” Ezza said with awe in his voice. “You said it was a school.”

Aden looked up. The glamours were ripped away and the walls shone with stone and metal. Racks of weapons lined the walls beneath the second-floor overhang on either side. Banners were unfurled in the rafters between panels of suspended stone. Across the entire floor were lines and symbols of unusually complicated symmetrical shapes. Lamps of phyzeec burned in scones and from two chandeliers.

“It is a school,” Aden said, getting his legs underneath himself and standing up. “I’ve only seen pictures of these places because they were banned in my land for centuries upon centuries before my time. This is a training room for battle mages. The stone and metal absorb strikes and stabs of phyzeec without bringing down the building. I count ten banners above. There were ten regiments here at some point.”

“This was an empty room,” Ezza said. “My eyes don’t lie.”

“They can be tricked by glamours though,” Aden said. He released his thumbs from his temples only far enough that if the pain surged, he could shove them back in place. He carefully lowered his arms.

“There are enough weapons in those racks to level the city, friend, and I don’t know what most of them are,” Aden said. “Downstairs must be the armory and the forges, where the real weapons are locked away.”

Ezza appeared to hesitate taking a step to his left. One of the intricate symbols began just to the side of his boot. He searched to and fro until he stepped up and to his right before turning around to face Aden. With his hands on his hips and a frown on his face, he opened his mouth to speak only to close it again without saying a word.

Aden felt nauseous as he catalogued the arms, none of which he had seen outside of illustrations in books. He did not want to go near the racks for fear that berserker madness would overtake his senses. These racks were worse than the gory illustrations in the ancient tomes. The chill from before returned and radiated down his limbs. Someone with a bit of insanity had designed, built and wielded these weapons. He turned back to face Ezza, “You claim I’m dangerous. You have no idea what wizardly danger is.

“You would chastise me over two stupid would-be muggers who don’t even have the sense to know when to lie and when not to lie,” Aden said with heat only to let it die with a sigh. “If I were a different man, both of my attackers, their families, their homes and their neighborhoods would be dust and ruin at this moment. First rack on my left, last weapon, will fell any building like a hot knife through butter with enough phyzeec behind it. If I was that man, I could walk out of here with that charged thunderstick and return within ten minutes to sit and eat my breakfast with nary a worry.”

Aden touched his skin and flexed his fingers, pleased but not surprised that the sensations that had been tormenting him had disappeared. The metallic taste of his own blood in his mouth reminded him that he had bitten his tongue. His bones felt dense though, as if they had turned to stone. “For what were these weapons?” he whispered. “Why?”

“What are these figures on the floor?” Ezza asked. “More wizardly magic?”

“Mandalas for centering one’s focus and for asserting calm and concentration,” Aden said. “They begin with a pattern of dots and then the practitioner draws a pattern to capture all of the dots within the lines of the mandala. Start from any point of any line and you should be able to return to that point after continuing through the entire drawing. There is nothing good or evil in them; you can step on them. If they are drawn with chalk as they should be, they fade away each day. If they stay, then who knows what or why.”