Here's another taste of the story that's currently intriguing me more than it should. I should be writing Spring Magicks. Oh the woes of the indie writer: trying to stick to the proper deadline. However ~~ Enjoy!
Brom sensed the attention
his questions had roused in the greatroom.
He had sensed magic in use, subtle and passive, but his ward hadn’t
flared, warning of magic in direct use against him. The magical aura faded as he told Faldo and
his four friends the story of the ground troll’s assault on Hardraste.
He told it as if he’d seen
it first-hand. He hadn’t. He’d been there that night, but he hadn’t see
the rocks being tumbled from below-ground.
His brother Sverr had freed him from that power-draining cell, and
together they had gone to find Corrie, the girl Sverr loved. Corrie, the bane wizard who had killed the
Prime Wizard Enstigorr. It had taken all
of them, Mannemous included, to kill her uncle Arne, the wizard who had killed
her father, his own brother.
He wasn’t going to get
the answer he wanted from Faldo and his friends. So he told them about the ground-troll, adding
bits from his imagination: a large
stony-colored arm reaching out of the earth to punch at the quarried stone that
formed the towers, boulders that flew through the air and crushed men rushing
to attack the troll, people screaming as they were buried in soil.
Brom paid for another
round of drinks. When he finished, he
left the tavern before them. He knew
Faldo already had planted an imaginary dagger in his back. They would follow him. He planned on it.
The chilly night closed
around him. A full moon gave hunters
enough light to find their prey. Few
torches lit the streets. Verdeneth might
be the capital of the richest province in the great valley, but lamplighters rarely
ventured onto backstreets and certainly not into allées. Brom tucked his hands in his jerkin pockets
and let power seep into his fingers. The
leather would hide the magical glow.
A scrape of a boot on
cobbles alerted him. He didn’t look
around but kept his pace even. Just
ahead would be the allée he had scoped out earlier. Marked by one of the few torches kept lit by
the lamplighters, it passed through to a series of back lanes that wound into
the depths of Verdeneth. He could lose
his pursuers in the maze of passageways, but he didn’t want to lose them. He wanted the Keirne. For all his lies, Faldo knew who had the magical
stone. Brom didn’t intend to leave
Verdeneth without it.
He turned into the allée
and heard the footsteps behind him speed up, losing quiet in exchange for haste. He still didn’t look around.
The walk between two
warehouses he had reckoned was so narrow that three men couldn’t walk
abreast. The tall walls had no
overlooking windows. The moonlight
didn’t reach directly into the allée, but with the torch it cast enough light
for predators after prey.
Brom grinned. Faldo would be misjudging who was predator
and who was prey just about now.
“Ho there! Stop.”
