Mage Errant 5 Preview

Attached is the first chapter of Mage Errant 5, the Siege of Skyhold. Extra-long short story next month!

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Hugh Stormward, once known as Hugh of Emblin, couldn’t breathe.

“Should I get the healer?” Talia asked him.

Hugh shook his head between coughs, and let Talia and Godrick help him over to a nearby fallen log.

The coughing finally subsided after another minute or two. Hugh took shallow, gentle breaths to avoid aggravating his lungs.

He gingerly felt his side, but he didn’t seem to have recracked any of his ribs this time. He’d already done that three times during coughing fits— even with magical healing, it would be a while before his broken ribs were fully healed.

Sabae offered him a waterskin, and he gratefully sipped from it.

While he got his breath back, Hugh took a moment to look around the valley.

They’d been in this little sheltered valley in the Skyreach Range for several weeks while Hugh recovered from his injuries, but he’d only gotten permission from Grennan, the Librarian Errant healer, to join his friends in exploring it a couple days ago. If Hugh had been healthy, he probably could have covered the width of the valley in half a day.

As it was, it had taken him nearly an hour to cover the short distance to the lake, even with his friends’ help.

The little sealed-off valley reminded him a bit of Emblin, in some ways. The trees were mostly pine and cedar, and though the birds were different than Emblin’s, they were oddly comforting, after so much time spent in the desert, at sea, or in the jungle. 

Even with all the reasons Hugh had to hate Emblin, he did miss its alpine forests at times. He’d spent most of his time wandering them after his parents and sister had died, avoiding his extended family. 

“Are yeh goin’ ta be alright ta walk back ta the cave?” Godrick asked.

Hugh shrugged, not wanting to worry about it just yet. He glanced back at the cave, where he could see Kanderon conferring with several of her Librarians Errant. Not that cave really described it adequately. When they’d moved down into this valley from their prior location, Kanderon, Artur, and Godrick had used their magic to carve it out of solid stone in less than a day. It had grand halls large enough to fit the barn-sized sphinx, balconies for all the rooms, and even clear quartz windows Kanderon had recrystallized from the greenschist of the mountain. 

Across the rest of the mountainside, the greenschist just looked like any other stone, with only a faint green tint, but it had been polished until the stone of the cave was a green nearly vibrant enough for jewelery. The polished, faintly oily-looking stone was a stunning sight. 

The Librarians Errant had even filled the rooms with furniture taken from their storage tattoos. Not for the first time, Hugh wondered how much space the tattoos actually contained. 

The immense sphinx was immensely busy dealing with the aftermath of the return of Imperial Ithos, but every time Hugh left the cave, Kanderon somehow ended up in a position where she could keep an eye on him. It had been weeks since Hugh was wounded during the battle over the lost city, and Kanderon had barely let him out of her sight since.

Part of Hugh resented being coddled, but another part found it oddly comforting. He honestly couldn’t take care of himself at the moment— he still spent most of his time sleeping.

When Hugh was feeling better, he let Talia and Godrick help him back up again, and the four of them set out towards the lake again. 

“Any word from Kanderon on when Alustin will be back?” Sabae asked him. 

Hugh shook his head. Alustin had left almost a week ago on a scouting expedition to watch for Havathi activity in the mountains near them. Hugh found it a little strange that someone with a farseeing affinity would need to personally visit places, but scrying and counter-scrying was, apparently, a complex game of cat and mouse, and a seer changing their location could help them peer through magical defenses.

Hugh was growing to appreciate his spellbook’s anti-scrying abilities more as he learned about scrying. Its blanket denial of scrying was incredibly rare— even Kanderon didn’t have a mobile defense against seers like his spellbook.

Speaking of which…

Hugh reached out mentally, calling Mackerel to him. He struggled not to chuckle at the name. Talia had chosen it, and despite the repeated efforts by Kanderon and Sabae, the spellbook now refused to answer to anything else. 

He heard a loud cracking noise in the distance, followed by the noise of splintering wood and falling debris.

As usual, Hugh found it best to not try and imagine what sort of nonsense Mackerel was up to. His sanity tended to do much better that way.

When they reached the lake a couple minutes later, Hugh gratefully sank down on a conveniently sized boulder on the lakeshore. Talia settled down next to him, while Godrick and Sabae started taking their shoes off.

They weren’t planning to go swimming or have fun, though. The two of them had been training compulsively ever since the battle for Imperial Ithos. Sabae was trying to figure out some new technique that she’d thought of during the battle, while Godrick…

Godrick seemed to blame himself for Hugh’s injury.

Mackerel arrived a moment later, settling down on the boulder with a theatrically innocent look. Hugh carefully moved one of Sabae’s books— some dry treatise on political philosophy— away from the spellbook.

Hugh glanced back at the cave and frowned.

“What’s wrong?” Talia asked.

Hugh picked up Mackerel, flipping the green crystal spellbook open to a random page, and began tracing his finger across it, pushing just a little mana into the pages. The crystalline structure shifted inside the page, forming color flaws in the shapes of letters.

It took half an hour to walk down here, Hugh wrote. It should have taken a third of that.

“You’ll be back to normal soon enough,” Talia said. “Proper healing takes time.”

She reached out and took Hugh’s hand. He gave her a frustrated look, but nodded. 

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When they returned to the cave, Hugh had to put up with the indignity of being carried. The walk uphill quickly proved too much for him, and Godrick had scooped him up like a child. 

Of course, Godrick was big enough that Hugh basically was child-sized to him, so it wasn’t exactly hard. 

Partially out of gratitude and partially out of spite, Hugh used a levitation cantrip to lower his weight down to almost nothing, but that had led to even greater indignities, with his friends gently tossing him around like a ball. 

Hugh barely restrained himself from laughing, not wanting to cough more. That failed when Talia hefted him into the air with one hand and started flexing her muscles.

The resulting coughing fit was almost worth it, to his mind.

When they arrived back at the cave, they found that Alustin had returned.

What’s more, he was wounded.

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“At least two full flights,” Alustin said. “A mix of Sacred Swordsmen and battlemages riding them, and even a few regular soldiers.”

“Hold still,” Grennan said.

The healer gently shoved the paper mage back down onto the stone slab outside the cave as he tended to a sword wound on Alustin’s leg. It didn’t look too deep, but Hugh still felt a little queasy looking at it.

He quickly turned his attention back to the ward surrounding the slab, and keeping the crowd of Librarians Errant at least fifteen feet away from the stone slab, which Kanderon had constructed in a hurry with her magic when she returned.

The ward appeared to be… some sort of toxin ward? He’d never seen anything exactly like it before. Its construction was fairly normal— just chalk on stone— but it had a lot more redundancies than he expected from a ward this well drawn.

He couldn’t help but think the ward seemed familiar, somehow.

Hugh waved to get Kanderon and Alustin’s attention, then pointed to the ward.

“Hello, Hugh!” Alustin called cheerfully. “Good to see you finally up and about!” 

“I still think he should be in bed,” Kanderon muttered. Of course, a mutter from the barn-sized sphinx was as loud as a shout from anyone else.

Hugh pointed at the ward again.

“I had a bit of a run-in with some Havathi,” Alustin said. “I was, uh… forced to use a contingency device Kanderon gives to the Librarians Errant.”

“Call it what it is,” Grennan snapped. “It’s an airborne alchemical toxin, and I still object to its use.”

By the expressions on the faces of the Librarians Errant standing around, this was an old and well-trodden argument. 

“Skyhold alchemists developed the contingency device out of research into the toxins that render the southern polar regions inimical to most life, in a failed exploration effort,” Alustin said to Hugh and the other apprentices. “Librarians Errant are given dangerous alchemical treatments for years to render us resistant to the toxin, but it’s still best to avoid getting it on the skin or inhaling it. I’ll need to stay behind this ward until Grennan can confirm there aren’t any traces left on or inside me. We especially want to keep it away from you, given the state of your lungs, Hugh.”

“How bad is it?” Sabae asked. She had something of a shocked look on her face, and Hugh didn’t blame her— 

“You heard me say how many Havathi it killed just now, right?” Alustin asked. 

The group nodded.

“All that in just a few minutes after exposure. If I were to activate it inside a city, it could probably kill thousands.”

“Why didn’t you use it in Ithos?” Talia asked.

Alustin raised a brow at that. “For one thing, the four of you and Artur were there, and none of you have developed an immunity to it. For another, Ithos is upstream of Zophor, and almost certainly would have gotten into the river, and I have no idea if his water filtration systems would have been able to keep the toxin out of his citizen’s drinking water. Or, for that matter, what it would have done to the wildlife of the river.”

“Ah’m properly appreciative,” Artur said, from the other side of the circle.

Kanderon cleared her throat. “If we’re done sharing Librarian Errant secrets with the apprentices, can we get on with the debrief?” 

Alustin nodded. “The Havathi are out in force. There’s at least an army’s worth of scouts and mages working through the eastern Skyreach range, both on foot and in the air. It’s almost certainly the largest mobilization of Havathi forces outside their territory since the last war.”

“How far are they from the valley?” Kanderon asked. She shot Hugh a glance as she did so. If he didn’t know better, he’d swear that it was a worried one.

“We’ve got at least a week before we have to either leave or fight,” Alustin said. “The Havathi are going for a slow, methodical approach. When they do get closer, however, they’re certainly not going to miss the valley.”

“We should consider returning to Skyhold,” one of the Librarians Errant suggested. Hugh didn’t recognize him, but he’d only been introduced to about half the mages there.

Kanderon shook her head. “I want Hugh as healthy as possible before we move.”

“With all due apologies to Hugh, there are more important concerns at the moment,” the Librarian said. “The Skyhold Council’s messages are getting more and more frantic. It’s only a matter of time before Havath formally declares war, and you need to be there to help keep things under control.”

Kanderon gave the man a flat look. “We’ll be back to Skyhold long before any significant Havathi forces arrive. There are clear procedures for preparing Skyhold for war, they merely need follow them.”

“It would go more smoothly if you were there,” Alustin pointed out from inside the ward.

“I’m no general,” Kanderon said. “Headmaster Tarik and other members of the council have far more skill and knowledge at that sort of preparation.”

“Wars are won and lost on morale, not by simply killing all your enemies,” another Librarian said. “If you’re there, it will do wonders for Skyhold’s morale.”

The sphinx snorted loudly at that. “Killing all my enemies has worked for me often enough in the past.”

Kanderon started debriefing Alustin in-depth. Hugh followed his friends into the cave as the small crowd dispersed, and tried to ignore all the significant looks he was getting from the Librarians Errant.

This wasn’t the first time this argument had happened in the last couple weeks. As far as he could tell, the Librarians Errant were right that Kanderon should be heading back to Skyhold in haste. She was absolutely needed at Skyhold, both to help prepare its defenses and raise morale.

The only reason for her to stay was Hugh. 

He wasn’t sure whether he was more comforted or unnerved by that.