Chapter 12: Strength Against Knowledge

  ++My early existence, by which I mean my first life born into that ancient tribe, informed much of my later years. This cannot be escaped, not by me and not by anyone else. The first experiences I had of family were painful ones; isolation, hatred, fear. Betrayal and death. They did not prepare me for the one I would feel later. My second childhood was not a true childhood, and yet it was closer to one than my first. This, too, left its marks.++

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

  My father did not arrive as a knight in shining armour, as much as he barged in like a large, hairless baboon that had been infected by some kind of progressive venereal disease which had recently started eating into its brain. His sole nod to civilisation or higher reasoning was that he did, in fact, maintain a grip on the hilt of his blade, rather than attacking the enemy with teeth and fingernails.

  He may not have been entirely ineffective even had he done that, and with sharpened steel in his hand I was finally able to see my father let loose in true combat. The training sessions I had observed did him no justice; he flitted around the mansion’s interior like he alone was surrounded by air, fighting men forced to move their own limbs through water. Magic hissed by him, rarely even coming within a yard of hitting, and before I could even react he had fallen upon the enemy.

  While he was busy reducing the number of functional limbs within our surrounding area by what had to be at least ten percent, I focused myself on more pragmatic courses of action than just gaping like Agrian the Younger was doing.

  “Come on,” I urged my brother, tugging at his arm and guiding the boy over to Doctor Brown’s body alongside me. “We need to leave, and we are bringing the Doctor.”

  Agrian was tall for his age, and strong for that, but he would not be dragging a grown adult’s body—not even one as wiry as the Doctor’s—using strength alone. He did not need to. We had both exhausted much of our mana, especially me, but with my assistance he was able to keep the body moving, lifting part of it off the ground as I shunted it towards the far door with bursts of force.

  The fight still erupting around us was instinctively frightening, but it was also keeping the two of us free from interference. Our father, by himself, seemed to be holding several magicians back at a time. The men Doctor Brown had arrived with were mostly dead now, but their sudden reinforcements, all charging in at a critical moment of distraction, were wreaking havoc upon our captors.

  Nobody had the time to worry about us, not compared to saving their own life.

  It was not a purely advantageous fact, either, because it meant that stray spells were flung through the air with far less control than they may otherwise have been. Agrian was nearly decapitated when a magic missile tore through the space above his head and struck a far wall, blasting through the brickwork like a battering ram and spraying pieces of it to rain down on us both. We were almost at the door, however. Almost safe.

  Then the room exploded, and Doctor Avens stormed through a newly-made hole in one of its far walls. The man was bleeding from his head, though I could not tell how bad his wound was, and had a wide, feral look in his eyes of the sort a cornered animal might take on. Two of the men my father had arrived with were lunging for him, but in one move he dispatched them both—magic missiles hurling through the air, tearing past them and then arcing back around on wafer-thin aetherial rails to thud into the backs of their necks. It was a particularly grizzly pair of deaths.

  What struck me more was when Avens’ eyes turned to Agrian and myself. His mana was drained and his body hurt, but I could tell at a glance that he would still have no difficulty at all in overpowering a pair of children.

  “You are coming with me,” the man growled. I raised my hand and hurled a magic missile, mimicking the trick I had seen Avens use to redirect his own projectiles mid-flight. He twisted aside from the blast and watched it soar past him, laughing.

  His laughter ended as it struck the side of my father’s head, failing to even draw blood but bringing his attention round to the source…and letting him see the threat to me.

  Agrian the Younger and I focused on dragging the Doctor free of the fighting, and did not bother to watch how our father performed against the magician. The moment Brown was out of the mansion, we shifted his body down beside one of its doors—where it would be shielded by a modestly thick wall—and began running. Agrian was hesitant to follow me of course, far more inclined to seek shelter with our father. It took more than a little coaxing to draw the boy after me.

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  “We should stay with father!” he whined, taking on that uniquely pitched note all children were born capable of mustering. The one that sent a shiver down the bones to hear it, like nails scraping against glass.

  “Father is fighting,” I told him. “He will fight better if we are not near him.” That was part of my motivation, the other was that we were still very much at risk of being smeared across the floor by a single stray spell.

  I had just won the boy over when another of the walls erupted outwards, and the things that flew through it rendered the whole thing irrelevant. Our father was sent flying by what I can only assume was quite a powerful magic missile. He halted his momentum by reaching out and actually punching into the dirt, grinding himself to a stop and digging a trench several times longer than he was tall in the process. By the time this was done, Doctor Avens stepped out of the mansion.

  He was more wounded than before, without a doubt, though had also managed to wreath himself in a personal shield similar to the enchantment made by Doctor Brown earlier. This one looked sturdier, however. No different to the naked eye, but glowing with far more power than Doctor Brown could have mustered when examined with my mana sight. I had no doubt it would stop these new, fire-spitting weapons known in the modern age as ‘guns’ just as Doctor Brown’s had. Them and more.

  Mana coiled around him like wisps of smoke above an unsteady fire, like serpents dancing in the sand, like ropes taut about a ship’s mast. My father lunged ahead, ignorant to all the magic awaiting him, and I saw lightning leap, not from Avens but from the skies overhead. A single bolt that registered to my vision only after it had already struck, wider than my arm and potent enough that I felt its impact as a concussive push of warm air. Soil rained down in a thousand droplets of molten sludge, and Baron Agrian Vornholt stumbled.

  But he did not fall.

  At first I attributed this to durability, but the man remained twisting with pain and ill-balance for just long enough that I was able to see the ugly, weeping burn left on one side of his body and catch the wisps of smoke hissing up from it. He must have been in agony, and certainly lacked the deadened nerves of a lich. Yet still he fought on.

  I struggled to comprehend how, and yet on he moved. Willpower was, obviously, something I had already become well-accustomed to, it is the measure of any magician, but this unrelenting certainty and unyielding fury seemed to stem from something else altogether.

  And it sent my father hurtling for Doctor Avens like he was a magic missile himself.

  The sword came down hard against Avens’ shield with a sound like some great bell tolling, flattening the grass around their feet. Cracks appeared in the aether, and a second blow came down to widen them before I could even register that fact. This time I felt my ears pop with the pressure of my father’s strength acting on air, and saw Doctor Avens actually leave the ground as he went hurtling back hard against the mansion’s wall. Brickwork held him, but only just. Chunks of it were broken free to fall and crumble after the impact.

  My father fell upon him just as a second bolt of lightning struck. The sword’s impact sounded out alongside the thunderclap, bright skylight illuminating a spurt of blood as it arced high and started raining down around them. Avens fell to a knee, both hands on his belly and personal shield crumbling around him. He looked up at my father just as he fell down himself.

  The world seemed to freeze.

  Baron Vornholt looked nothing like his former self, left weak and staggering by the his ugly burns. Blood wept from him and trickled down to stain his clothes and water the grass. Doctor Avens looked better, but not by much. Most of my father’s sword swing had been stopped by the shield, and only a bare fraction of its energy made contact with flesh. That fraction was enough to leave a savage wound, however, and I thought I saw bone peeking out for a moment, before welling blood hid it.

  Neither man should have been conscious, I had seen enough battle injuries by then to be certain of as much. That Doctor Avens’ eyes were still open showed me the depths of his greed, that my father’s were showed me the depths of something I did not, at that time, yet understand. I watched the two and studied their injuries, and knew that my father could not possibly be the one to prevail by recovering first.

  And then he did.

  I am not often surprised, but in that moment I could do nothing but stare as my father slowly forced his way up to his feet and glared down at Doctor Aven with eyes that seemed more like the heart of a bonfire. His face was illuminated by the flames now spilling out from all the mansion’s windows, and I could see the sword trembling in his hand. Trembling with eagerness and rage.

  “Was it worth it?” he asked. “Taking my children, trying to turn them into your lucky ticket? Was it worth it, taking my family for an easy target, trying to ruin our lives for your own gain? Was it worth it, declaring war on the Vornholt name for a shortcut up in the world? Don’t answer that. I already know it wasn’t.”

  He struck Avens with the flat of his sword, and the man’s head just ceased to be.

  Inside the mansion, there was plenty of combat still happening. I felt the spellwork as clearly as I heard its consequences, and knew that all of the magicians still left from among our captors were running out of mana. At best, they were working with half the power they had started with, and most were making do with less than half of even that. It did not matter how wounded my father was or how costly the fight had been, my rescuers had won.

  My father looked around before calling out with a voice so booming and strong that it made me briefly forget about his wounds.

  “We have killed your leader,” he roared. “All of you who surrender now will be spared. Any man I see casting when I enter that damned room, I’ll cut his fucking hands off and make him eat them!”

  A single moment passed, and then all at once the magic ceased. My father snorted, shook his head lightly, spat at his feet, and promptly collapsed.