Majutsu-shi no Chikara loosely translates to "Sorcerer's Power"
CHAPTER FIVE: Spring Flood
"How long do we have, Nabid?" Esmeray Saran climbed stiffly from her bed, her crotch still ablaze after the Beast's treatment of her. She shuddered at the thought of having to mend more serious injuries, had he not stopped when he did.
"Midnight in two hours, if the bells are true." Nabid sneered at her, spindly limbs bending awkwardly while pacing atop her now-misshapen mattress. "Everything you bade me prepare is in motion."
"Good..." Emseray frowned thoughtfully.
"And you remember none of it." Nabid crossed thin arms over a slender, boneless chest and hateful red eyes narrowed at the Wizard.
"Nothing." Esmeray admitted, drawing a healing pattern in the air and catching the sound of it near the middle of her mouth and spitting it delicately through her teeth. The searing ache became a dull throb before fading into a recent memory. "What am I missing?"
"Depends what you remember last..."
"Telling you the day I remember last will only slow us down -- give me highlights of my decision to leave the Tower." the Wizard stretched, enjoying the warmth coursing through her mended flesh as she did so. "We'll have time to catch up on the road."
"Right." the imp's chest puffed-up importantly as the pacing stopped, clasping those jagged claws behind narrow, sexless hips. "The Guild decided that the Elemental's fumbling magic and failing mind must be dealt-with, nigh eighteen days ago. Death, as you would expect of any rogue or mad Wizard... but the Tower put it to vote, and you opposed. The Beast, too, for what it matters."
Esmeray nodded thoughtfully, trying to recall this information -- no scrap of memory forthcoming.
"So, your contingencies are in motion; arrangements to move your assets from the Tower and the Guild. Most of it will be moving today... you were vague as to
where
we are moving and haven't told me your reasoning, so there's that -- but you knew this was going to be a one-way trip. You went up to the Tower, this morning, knowing that you would either be an exile or a corpse."
"Or both?" Esmeray's glittering emerald eyes met the opal-black pits of the imp's eyes.
"Yes, most likely both. Whatever curses you carry will kill you, if you are not able to satisfy them."
"Sooner than later, where the Elemental is concerned." Emseray looked at the floor and took a deep, cleansing breath. She swept her brilliant white robes up from the floor and pulled them over her shoulders.
"Tricky, that..." Nabid's head cocked to one side. "Do you still have the dreamcasting?"
"Enlighten me." Esmeray set about arranging her traveling belongings inside a folding satchel with arcane engravings.
"Acolyte Mowbray brought it to you, this morning." Nabid gestured toward her, but made no other movement. "You knew the attack in South-wold had happened, and that Billsby -- the assassin -- was likely dead, but you coaxed from Mowbray that Billsby didn't die in the attack, and you would likely be implicated by someone else within the Guild or the Tower. I assume that's why all this nonsense of selling-off artwork and mobilizing your laboratories."
She turned her thoughts inward, searching for a mnemonic spell still clinging to her. There were dozens. The longer she focused, the more she became aware-of.
"Twenty-three years?" Esmeray's eyes widened in disbelief.
"Shock later, thinky-bits now." Nabid grumbled at her and moving close to jab at her leg with a tiny claw. With a resigned sigh, Emseray nodded.
"Did I send anyone to investigate South-wold or these orks?" Esmeray's mind was devouring information from the expanding archives of her mental library. Missing memories became replaced by careful recordings, like stories told in another voice or from a long-lost journal of childhood.
"No and yes." Nabid gestured with each claw, responding to each portion of her query. "You don't have many agents loyal solely to you, since joining the Guild -- so the one asset you have: you sent to check out this Sidero tribe. She should be able to meet with you by the time you're in or near South-wold."
"Tell me about this asset." Emseray scooped her satchel onto her shoulder and made a final tour of her now-barren apartments.
...
Thikkit kept low in the grass, her scaled skin blending seamlessly into the long greening grass and yellowed seedpods of wild grain outside the Sidero camp. Her speckled yellow-green eyes, polished stone orbs with vertical slashes of black from top to bottom, stared unblinking through the tall grass -- lost in the shadows of late afternoon.
The raiding party had returned with captives that morning, and her day had passed in quiet observation of the camp. The orks did what orks do -- drink, fight, fuck, eat, and make a foul mess of everything they touch. Thikkit noted that the chieftain's yurt, a creature whose name carried for this tribe as much fear as worship, was the cleanest place in the whole of their camp. It was too large, for the size of the tribe, by more than double what was needed. Scores of tents, which could have each held two-dozen mules or lower-ranking orks and their seed slaves, sat empty... a deterrent perhaps, to smaller scavenger parties of kobolds, goblins, or other orks -- but Thikkit saw the trouble they must go through to maintain such appearances. Hours spent, each day, for a dozen mules to tend, arrange, and repair each square tent. Thikkit estimated their total number to be less than seven score... or ten score... she wasn't especially good with counting, and so many of these orks were the mush-shaped mules that all seemed to look like mongrels, half-breeds -- swaddled in stinking furs or coarse hair arranged in tangled patches unevenly about their bodies like long-haired dog pelts -- only to shed those skins and reveal the swollen limbs and twisted cages of bony ribs possessed by such warm-bloods... and put more mismatched pieces of other dead skin and fur on themselves, uglier than before - if such a thing were possible.
They lacked the simple beauty and sophistication of bone or shell, and the more luxurious trappings of what civilized races called textiles... hemp, cotton, and silk, for example. Thikkit hissed softly to herself, daydreaming of wearing silk again when she returned to the Wizard's side.
How Ser had known about the attack wasn't made clear to Thikkit, and the scaly spy knew better than to ask. What mattered was: Thikkit had arrived the morning the war party had left. She had seen where they stowed the bulk of their stolen spoils, and where they had put their human captives. Thikkit did not understand the ork use of breeding slaves; her own experience taught her that living meat did not spoil as quickly as dead -- and humans were indeed a tasty meat.
She ventured closer, hidden in the shadows of grass and tents as the sun slanted over the horizon and left all in twilight. With the stabbing glare of the sun over her shoulder, she did not fear the night-eyes of orks catching sight of her as she crawled into their perimeter and under the flap of an abandoned tent.
