Tak

The War Wizard - Part 5

    They had a quick breakfast of bread and porridge, then hurried back to the wagon before Gal-Gowan came looking for them. "How long will it take us to get to, to wherever it is we're going?" Tak ventured to ask when he arrived.

     "The Plains of Marebo," replied the red wizard. "About three days. The enemy is already there, waiting for us."

     "Waiting for us?" asked Tak in confusion. "Maybe they'll come looking for us. Ambush us along the way..."

     Gal-Gowan laughed. "These are men, not shologs. Thieves and villains they may be, but they play by the rules. This'll be honest warfare, man against man. Facing each other fearlessly as the Gods intended. No cowardly snout tactics from Varl."

     "Oh," said Tak, bewildered by the idea of killing people 'by the rules'. "Good."

     "In the meantime, we must all practice our spells," the red wizard added, "and I must see you casting each of yours at least once before we arrive. I have to know that you're proficient in all of them, so that I know I can count on you to do your part. If you're weak in some area, I need to know now."

     Tak nodded, looking forward to seeing some of Gal-Gowan's spells. If Tak could cast spells like Fist of the Father and Felban's Finger of Fire, what kind of destruction could the red wizard inflict when he chose to do so? He was also curious to know what spells Barl knew. Barl was a couple of years older than him, so Tak expected him to be superior to him in the magical arts. He would be greatly surprised, the next day, when he learned that it was in fact he, Tak, who was the most powerful.

     The army was now arranging itself in ranks and files, and a team of men were hitching the oxen to Gal-Gowan's war home as well as to the dozen or so supply wagons that were scarcely smaller. A soldier in the uniform of the supply corps climbed up to sit in the wagon's driving seat and had the reins handed up to him by a colleague. An officer, bearing so many flags and pennants on his uniform that it looked as though a firm breeze would blow him away, marched up to stand below the doorway. "Ready to move out, Sir."

     Gal-Gowan appeared in the doorway and gazed out over the assembled army in satisfaction. "Very good, War Marshall. Move us out."

     "Yes, Sir!" The officer saluted and marched away, barking orders, and a few moments later the first regiments began to move. When the ranks ahead of them were on their way, the driver slapped the reins, the dozen oxen took up the slack in their harnesses and the wagon began to trundle forward.

☆☆☆

     Tak and Barl found to their mutual delight that they enjoyed each other's company a great deal and they ended up spending most of the journey chatting together and comparing spells. Discussing the relative merits of various ways of dealing out violent death. One thing Barl noticed almost immediately, though, while leafing through Tak's spellbook, was that he hadn't learned any defensive spells.

     "You've got some great attack spells here," he said, gazing enviously at Felban's Finger of Fire, "but what'll you do if someone casts a death spell at you?"

     "I don't know," admitted Tak. "I haven't really thought about it."

     "Well, you'd better start thinking about it," said the apprentice seriously. "This is a war we're going to, not a picnic." He picked up his own spellbook, turned the pages and handed it to Tak. "This is the best defensive spell I know, Maklar's Typhoon. Why not see if you can learn it before we arrive?"

     Tak thanked him and began studying it. He had to cast an Intellectus spell on it first, to enable his mind to read what were, at first, nothing more than meaningless squiggles. Intellectus was one of the oldest spells in existence, virtually unchanged from the very dawn of wizardry to Thomas Gown's day, and was one of the so called archaic spells. Spells such as reveal, cessation, firebolt and fireball, which were thought to have been created by the very first human wizards thousands of years before Tak's day. No-one had any idea who the very first wizards had been, or who they'd learned magic from. Even in Tak's day, the birth of wizardry was lost in myths and legends that not even the wisest sages could unravel.