Guild Mage: Apprentice

37. The Laughing Carp

"It’s alright," the innkeeper, Giles, said. Liv had turned at the sound of glass breaking, and now she saw him reaching for a cloth to wrap his hand. "Just a small cut."

Drops of blood lifted off his skin, spinning around each other as they rose through the air. Then, they merged together into a dark, liquid blob, which hovered over the bar. "What in the name of the trinity," someone in the crowd near Liv exclaimed. The gathered blood somehow turned toward them, looking for all the world like a disembodied eye, rolling in an invisible socket as it searched the room. All the while, more drops of blood flew up from the open cut on Giles’ hand, joining the blob with soft smacking sounds upon impact.

"Magic," Giles gasped, his face pale.

The orb of blood shot downward to the bar, where it scooped up the shattered pieces of glass from the wine bottle that the innkeeper had broken. Then, it thinned into a kind of lash, swiped across the man’s neck, and opened the flesh beneath his chin from ear to ear using the sharp, broken edges. Giles tried to say something, then choked as a cascade of blood poured out of his opened neck and soaked his shirt and vest.

Around Liv, the crowd that had been dancing and drinking moments before screamed. Some of them ran for the door, and others to the back of the common room, but Matthew drew his sword. In the years since their adventure to the Sign of the Terrapin, he’d taken to carrying a rapier instead of the broader arming sword he’d worn that night.

Liv didn’t see how a sword was going to do much good against whatever was happening, so she stepped between the bar and the remaining customers. The position of the orb meant they would have to get by the growing mass of blood to get to the door. With every spurt from Giles’ neck, the blood flew through the air up into the shivering orb, which pulsed and swelled.

"Get behind me," Liv told the panicked people. She lifted her staff, gripped it in both hands, and got to work. She’d known an eruption would come, sooner or later: and this time she was old enough not to hide inside Castle Whitehill.

"Celevet Aen Kveis," she intoned, drawing mana up from inside her to wake the word of power. While Matthew edged toward the pulsing globe of blood, she walled off the entirety of the back of the common room, sealing everyone but the two of them behind an Icewall six inches thick. Liv hoped it would be enough. Mentally, she kept a tally. Normally, that spell would have cost her only three rings of mana, but she also didn’t usually create a barrier so large. Call it four, which left her with twelve rings of mana - plus what was in the stone she wore on her finger.

Giles was well and truly dead by this point, his body a shrivelled and pale husk, and he finally toppled over. The blood was a swirling thing, enough to fill a large bucket or pail, maybe two. The broken glass shards occasionally glittered at the edges of the orb as it floated out from above the bar, into the center of the common room.

"Let’s see what this does," Matthew said, and slashed at it with his rapier. The blade moved through the mass of blood easily, without meeting any resistance. The globe didn’t give so much as a shudder of pain, but it did wind a tendril of scarlet fluid, sparkling with fragments of glass, up Matthew’s sword. He tried to flick it off, but as it slithered up closer to the hilt and his hand, he was forced to drop the weapon and back away.

"You need to use magic," Liv said. "You wouldn’t stab the river, would you? Try Ters." From what she’d read about his family’s word of power, it seemed perfect for this situation.

"I’m not very good with that," Matthew said. By that point, he’d made it back to where Liv stood with her back against the wall. "Why don’t you freeze it, instead."

Liv looked over to the table she’d been sitting at. Her spellbook was sitting there, halfway across the room. "I’m not sure I even have the right words to affect blood," she admitted.

"Well you’d better look!" Matthew dived out of the way as a lash of blood shot out from the orb, knocking aside two chairs and breaking the floor where he’d just been standing. "I think I made it angry."

"Keep it from paying attention to me, then," Liv shouted back, taking her skirt in her left hand and running for the table. The red orb, whatever sort of monster it was, seemed capable of paying attention to more than one thing at a time, for it grew a second tendril and lashed out at her. Liv shoved a table into its path, grabbed her book, and then scampered back to her wall.

Matthew, in the meanwhile, began throwing chairs at the thing. She couldn’t see how that was going to kill it, but for the moment it turned both crimson lashes to breaking every piece of furniture hurled in its direction. Liv put her back to the ice and began flipping through pages furiously.

She was certain that the original set of words and charts Master Jurian had given her had not contained the Vædic word for blood. She’d copied down every spell to be found in the diary of Semhis Thorn-Killer, practically looting the book for pieces that could be used in her own invocations. Liv also had notes she’d taken when working on spell construction with Master Grenfell. Between all of that, Liv suspected that she had a better compilation of Vædic grammar and vocabulary than anyone else in Whitehill, with the sole exception of her teacher. Unfortunately, that meant there were still a lot of gaps.

A chair crashed through one of the paned windows set into the Laughing Carp’s outer walls, sending shards of glass flying in every direction. Liv flinched back instinctively, losing her place. The red orb drifted over to the broken glass, scooping it up. The lashes that swirled around the mass of blood now contained nearly as much glass as liquid.

"Stop giving it ways to hurt us!" Liv shouted at Matthew. "And don’t let it get into the street!"

Matthew ran forward and scooped up his discarded rapier, though she didn’t see what good it was going to do him. He lunged forward and swiped at the orb once, twice, three times, with none of the slashes having any discernable effect. When he was fully extended, however, both whips of blood swept toward him, one from each side. Matthew managed to duck one, but the other struck him across the back, and he cried out in pain.

Blood bloomed in a stripe along the back of Matthew’s shirt, where the orb had whipped him. Drops of it fell to the floor, then rose again, flying through the air into the pulsing mass. Liv looked over to the bar, where the corpse’s feet could be seen sticking out across the floor. Whatever this monster was, it had sucked out every drop of the poor man’s blood, consuming him utterly until he was shrivelled and dry. Now it was going to start on Matthew.

The thought sent a sudden rush of anger through Liv, and she gripped her staff in both hands. He might be frustrating; he might even be an idiot, charging that thing with nothing but a sword when he should be using magic. He’d practically ignored her in favor of every silly town girl who threw herself at him for months, but there was no way that Liv was going to let him die. At the very least, she owed it to his mother.

"Celent’he Trei Scelim’o’Mae," Liv intoned, letting her mana flood through the core of her staff. The sigils lit, and three glistening shards of ice appeared in front of her, coalescing from the air itself. Matthew was scrambling backward, away from the orb, useless sword still clutched in his hand. Liv let the shards fly.

One took the mass of the blood dead center, another deflected the lash whistling through the air toward Matthew, and the last went wide, hitting the wall of the inn and shattering. Where the blades of ice had impacted the monstrous thing, frost coated the wet blood. It was the closest thing to a wound that Liv had seen yet; perhaps if she could hit it with enough shards, she could kill the thing by freezing it.

It spun away from Matthew, whipping both lashes in Liv’s direction, and she didn’t have any time to think. Instead, she ran for the broken window, leaping up onto the last standing table. The whistle of the lashes cutting through the air told her how close they’d come, and she tucked her arms, rolling across the table and then out the window into the streets of the Lower Banks. Somehow, Liv managed to land on her feet, and not cut herself in the pile of broken glass outside the window.

Three more rings, Liv counted in her mind. That left her with nine to use, though emptying her body of mana entirely was a recipe for exhaustion. She was pretty sure she could keep herself from passing out, but she also couldn’t afford to slow down, because the pulsing mass of blood had followed her out the window.

The crowd gathered in the street outside the Laughing Carp pulled back in fear as the monster emerged from the inn. Liv could have run, if she was willing to leave all of these people in danger. Instead, she set her back to them and raised her staff. Would it be better to put everything she had into one casting? Throw as many shards at the thing as she could, and hope that put it down? Or leave herself room for another spell or two?

A third lash extended from the hovering orb of blood, reaching down to scoop up the broken glass outside the window of the inn. Liv tried to imagine how much larger this monster would grow once it had sucked up the blood from all the people in the street: it would be enormous. The sun was nearly down, and something about how the blood glistened darkly nudged a memory that Liv hadn’t thought about in years.

The thief, Wren - the one who’d pulled her out of the ice, and then stolen from the old baron’s collection. Liv remembered her at the window: her body, her clothing, even that statue all turned dark, glistening wetly in the light of the moon and the stars. Like blood. And Master Grenfell had said the name of the statue was…

"Ractia," Liv muttered, her thoughts whirling faster than a bird’s wings. "Feminine, singular, nominative case. Change it to locative… Celet Aiveh Ractae!"

The magic roared up from inside her, blazing white out of the sigils along the length of her staff, and Liv thrust the polished aspenwood forward, jamming it right into the approaching mass of blood. Where the tip of the staff struck, a wave of frost spread out, crackling through the orb and then beyond, down the lengths of each tendril.

The lashes of blood were frozen in the very act of striking at her, one curled up above Liv’s head, the others coming in from either side. For a moment, the sphere twitched, and Liv worried that what she’d done wouldn’t be enough. She doubted she had another spell like that in her. Then, with a cracking sound, the orb froze through. It hung in front of her for just a moment, then fell to the ground, shattering on the cobblestone street.

Exhausted, Liv set the butt of her staff on the ground, so that she could lean on it, and closed her eyes. She was shaking, and it was all she could do to remain upright.

"Liv, are you alright?" Matthew burst out through the door, sword in hand, shirt soaked in blood.

"I’m fine," she said, opening her eyes. Around her, the crowd was murmuring. "You’re going to need torches," Liv told them, raising her voice. "I made a wall of ice in there, to protect everyone. You’re going to have to melt them out."

"We’ll see to it, m’lady, Lord Matthew," one of the men in the crowd called.

"We need to get back up to the castle," Matthew said. "If there’s been an eruption, Father will need us."

Liv looked up to the darkening sky, searching for a mass of stonebats. "This isn’t like last time," she said. "But you’re right."

They untied the horses, and Matthew swung up easily into Boulder’s saddle. Liv had borrowed Master Kazimir’s gelding, Ember, and she was glad of it. She had no wish to deal with the awkwardness of sharing a saddle with Matthew. She ran back into the Laughing Carp, grabbed her spellbook, and then got a hand up onto Ember’s back from one of the men in the crowd. Then, she followed Matthew through the streets of the Lower Banks, heading uphill for the castle.

?

"Is it an eruption?" Matthew asked, when they reached the gate. They swung down out of their saddles, handing their reins off to the guards.

"Your father’s in the great hall, m’lord," one of the guards told him. "He’s waiting for you both there."

"What about Lady Julianne?" Liv asked, following Matthew across the courtyard. His back was soaked in blood.

"Out in the streets," the man called back, and Liv frowned. Something about this wasn’t right. Matthew couldn’t possibly remember, but she did, and this didn’t feel like the last eruption.

Baron Henry was waiting in the great hall with half a dozen of his knights, along with the new castle chirurgeon, Mistress Trafford. "Matthew, good," the baron called. "Come over here, you and Liv both. We need anyone who can use magic."

"What’s happening?" Matthew asked. "An eruption?"

"No, something worse," his father answered. "We would have seen the flare of the eruption from here, and there was nothing. We have reports from all over town: a monster of blood at the butcher shop, another one that burst out of a mansion on the Hill."

"That sounds exactly like what we fought at the Laughing Carp," Liv said. "The innkeep cut his hand on a broken wine bottle, and the blood all gathered up into a kind of ball, floating in the air."

"That matches what we’ve been told," Henry said, with a sharp nod. "Master Grenfell has gone to deal with the one on the Hill, and Julianne to the butcher’s shop. No one has been able to hurt either of them with any kind of normal weapon."

"It was like my blade did nothing," Matthew agreed.

Baron Henry narrowed his eyes. "Why in the name of the gods did you use your sword, boy?" he asked. "Blood is liquid. Dry it out and it clots, then crumbles."

Matthew shrugged and looked away from his father. "Liv got it," he said.

"It turns out these monsters freeze as easily as anything else." Liv turned to Mistress Trafford. "And before we get any further, Matthew needs his back seen to. The one we fought scooped up a lot of broken glass and used it against us, and he’s been bleeding the entire way back."

Amelia Trafford was quite a bit younger than Aldo Cushing had been, even in Liv’s earliest memories. Her hair was pulled back in a bun the color of warm, polished wood, but her eyes were gray as stone, and just as hard as the old chirurgeon’s had been when presented with the foolishness of his patients. "Come along upstairs, then," she ordered. "I need to see whether there’s any glass stuck in the wound."

"I’ll come after we know every one of these monsters has been stopped," Matthew protested.

"You’ll go now," Baron Henry interrupted. "And that’s the end of it. Apprentice Brodbeck will remain with me." With a scowl, Matthew followed Mistress Trafford out of the hall.

"Yes, m’lord," Liv said, taking the chirurgeon’s empty seat at the baron’s side. He watched her sit, and raised his eyebrows. "Everyone who would normally sit here is somewhere else," she explained. "And I assume you want someone else who can cast spells ready to go at a moment’s notice."

"You are correct," Henry said. "Thank you for getting my son out of there in one piece, and nipping that foolishness before it grew. Not using his magic." The baron snorted.

"I know he’s had a hard time with it," Liv said, "but I didn’t realize it was this bad."

"They’ll beat this nonsense out of his head at Coral Bay," Baron Henry said. "Whatever it is."

Liv waited with the baron while runners came and went. She snacked on jerky she and Emma had smoked from mana-beast venison. So far as she could tell from listening to the reports, no further monsters had been found inside the town itself. Half a bell after arriving, she was ordered into the fields west of Whitehill, where a farmer’s wife had killed a chicken for the evening meal. By the time word made its way back to the castle, a mass of blood said to be the size of a horse was rampaging from one farmstead to the next, slaughtering livestock as it went.

"I’ll take Master Grenfell’s horse again," Liv said, rising as soon as the messenger had stopped talking.

"I’d send half a dozen men with you," Henry muttered, "but they wouldn’t do any good. Come back as soon as you’ve finished. If these monsters are cropping up everywhere blood is spilled, it’s going to be a long night indeed."