What I'm Writing Now

Dagger Meets Wizard ~ 

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.”