Fire Angels

Chapter 13 Part 2 Karac and Tasha

Dion finds out more about Karac and Tasha's relationship.

Though the days were full of activity, it was a lonely time for me. I felt constrained to be careful with most of the people I saw during the day. Tomas's house had been returned to him after being commandeered by the Burning Light and Silva had taken the Holyhands children and Uncle Louie and moved back to it, so I lost her company. As for Tomas himself though he still lived at the White Tower, he obviously had a lot of other things on his mind. When we did have time to speak, he had a tiresome tendency to lecture me.

I missed Shad. I missed sharing my thoughts with him even more than I missed the feel of his warm body beside me at night.

I also regretted the bad terms on which Parrus and I had parted. It worried me that after enticing him to come into Moria with us, Tomas and I had abandoned him so thoughtlessly. To check that he was at least satisfactorily taken care of I went down to the barracks of the regiments of mages one afternoon. I admit the hope that we might achieve some kind of friendly reconciliation was also not a thousand miles from my mind.

Mages fought in a triangle shaped formation of about forty Mages called phalanxes. The mages inside the phalanx channeled their power into a power crystal held by the mage at the front who then directed the blasts of power at an object such as the wall of a fortress or a group of troops. The mages along the outside of the phalanx used the magic of protection to prevent those inside from being damaged by the missiles, magical blasts and arrows being shot at them. Phalanxes were most useful in sieges against fortresses, for the walls of fortresses generally have spells woven into their fabric and strengthened by the defending mages and these things need to be overcome before non-magical troops could enter.

When I arrived at the regimental barracks a practice session was going on. I could not tell if Parrus was among those practicing since everyone was wearing protective leather helmets. Fighting in phalanx requires enormous concentration and coordination. Though a good phalanx of mages can be devastating, the whole thing goes out of balance very easily. Watching them I could see clearly that the closest phalanx was a new formation. They were trying to blast some cabbages off a wall, but since the leading mage was getting no power at all out of his crystal, they had obviously not harmonized with each other properly yet. A commanding officer was running up and down the line with another crystal trying to find the source of the disharmony.

Further away two other phalanxes were running back and forth in front to a line of catapults, which shot small rocks at them. At the end of each run they would stop and blast cabbages off stands. Even though they failed to hit them about half the time, a commanding officer would shout at them and drive them back through the hail of small rocks. It looked exhausting but exciting. All around the air crackled with magic, not just from the phalanxes but from the mages filling the catapults and the commanding officers. I could have watched for hours.

"Come down to see the training, Enna Dion?" said a voice behind me. It was my old school mate Garthan Redona.

"I've never seen this kind of work before," I said. "It's wonderful. Is it very difficult?"

"They don't hit the cabbages to often, do they?" he said. "They're mostly raw recruits, Morian mages who have come out of the woodwork since we crossed the border. Not very well trained, most of them but there's some good raw talent among them. The Gallian mages are much more precise. These phalanxes you see here are about half Morian and half Gallian. They train better that way."

We stood and chatted for a while. I asked Garthan about conditions and rates of pay for the mages serving under him and was relieved to discover that Silva had been right. Belonging to regiment of Mages was an honor and, like most elite troops, they were very well treated. I was afraid Garthan was never going to leave me, but he wandered off eventually. He was the last man on earth I wanted to ask about Parrus' whereabouts. At school he had had an infallible nose for ferreting out secrets. He was obviously intimate with the Duke but if he didn't know about the situation with Parrus yet, I wasn't about to put him in the way of finding out.